OnlyIfItPleases Read online

  He got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, grabbing the snuggest one he had on the idea that Vanessa might appreciate it. Everything he needed for the demo was already in his car. He’d get a shower later, after they got back perhaps, and change into leathers. Maybe he could wear her out to the point where she took a nap while he did. He’d often made subs wait to build the anticipation, but the idea of Vanessa getting bored didn’t appeal to him, and he didn’t want to waste any moment of the weekend. Even if she wasn’t for him in the long run, he knew she was special.

  The shower was still running when he was done, so he grabbed a book and read until she got out. He had trouble concentrating. The image of her naked and wet kept going through his mind. He was tempted to open the door and watch. Or strip and take her in the shower. He resisted. It wouldn’t do to let her know how thoroughly she was in his head. It’d be better for both of them to create a little distance.

  The decision to use her as a demo bottom had been impetuous. He should have done more bondage with her first, so he had a better idea what she could and could not take before putting her in front of an audience. Now he just had to guess and have faith in her. He wasn’t too worried she’d bail on him. But would she communicate if something was going wrong? That he wasn’t entirely sure of, the way he would have been if he’d used a more experienced submissive like Carol.

  She came out of the shower with the big, fluffy blue towel he’d set aside for her wrapped tightly around her body. He didn’t appreciate the towel getting in the way of his view. He scanned her face. For some submissives, wearing the towel would be a challenge. For others, it would be a lack of thought or training. He didn’t know any Dominants who wouldn’t prefer their subs thoroughly dried and naked.

  “What now, Master Hart?” Her voice was level and he had a hard time reading it. He always considered himself to be very good at reading submissives, but not this time. She wasn’t being frosty or rebellious. She wasn’t being flirtatious either.

  He put his book on the nightstand and rose, reaching for the towel. She spun obediently after he tugged it, and when she was naked she returned to look at him with the same calm, masklike face she had before. Perhaps her cheeks were a little pinker. That was some progress. She embarrassed easily. That too, perhaps he should have explored further before announcing that she would be on display in his demonstration that evening, but he found her reaction delightful. It was nice to know he could get to her. Intellectually, he felt that people should be comfortable in their own, natural skin, without clothes getting in the way. But being able to make a girl squirm by undressing her was delicious too.

  “Display, Vanessa.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then assumed the position. He wasn’t certain, but he read it as her taking time to remember just how she was supposed to stand, rather than as considering refusing. He scanned her body, taking particular note of her shaved mound. He couldn’t resist covering it with his palm and feeling her smoothness. She moaned when he did so. Apparently she was feeling sensitive. He slid his hand farther, tickling her clit, then dipping his fingers into her pussy. She gasped. She was wet. Very wet. He hadn’t expected that from the levelness of her voice and the stone of her expression.

  “Enjoyed your shower, did you?” he asked.

  “Enjoying your touch, Master Hart.”

  He thrust his fingers deeper inside her and was rewarded with another gasp. Her knees bent for a moment, and he could see her struggle to maintain the position. He slipped his fingers back out and stroked their slick pads across her clit, and she moaned softly.

  “Don’t come, Vanessa.”

  She scrunched up her face but said, “Only if it pleases you, Master Hart.”

  “Good girl.” He wrapped his hand around her back to help steady her and finger-fucked her hard for several minutes. He could see her fighting it. He enjoyed her struggle. Sometimes I’m a sick fuck, aren’t I?

  Her voice was shaky when she said, “I’m close, Master. If it pleases you.”

  He pulled his fingers out. “It does please me.” He noticed she’d dropped his name. I should correct her. He wasn’t just any Master. And he wasn’t her Master. That will be some lucky bastard who gets to own this one. He wanted to indulge the fantasy that it was him. And besides, that close to coming, she might be excused a slip. He set his jaw. He knew better than to risk leading her on. “How do you address me?”

  “Master Hart, Sir. Um, Master Hart, Master Hart.” Her face was flushed.

  “Very good.” He lifted his fingers to his mouth and sucked them clean, enjoying the tangy, metallic taste. It was good to be able to taste her. He made a mental note to do it more directly at some point. “Go get your dress on.”

  Her jaw moved forward and for a moment he thought she was going to complain. But she simply bowed her head and murmured, “Only if it pleases you.” Then she walked out of the room toward the closet where her dress was.

  He watched her with lust, but stayed where he was. He knew he wouldn’t enjoy resisting sinking himself balls-deep into her wet pussy if he followed her while she was still naked. Oh honey. I’m going to make you scream my name. Later. For now, he’d give the curvy sub time to get dressed.

  He used the time to check his email. There was nothing about the deal for the site for his club. Maybe Cal and Cecilia were having as good a weekend as he was, but he doubted it. But they might be as busy. He shrugged and headed out.

  Vanessa lived a long way out. When she gave him the location, he realized they were in for a very long drive. It would take an hour to get to her place, which was closer to Annapolis than Baltimore, another hour to get back to his in the Inner Harbor, then half an hour to get to the party in Towson. And they’d have to eat dinner. It was a tight schedule.

  He was almost tempted to tell her wear the dress to the party. It wasn’t as if she’d be keeping it on long. But he was curious as to where she lived, and he wasn’t going to tell a woman she had to skimp on her appearance. He liked the way women got all dolled up and fussed about their clothes, especially for a BDSM event. Not so much if they were going camping. That seemed like a safe subject if he wanted to tone it down. “Do you like camping?” he asked as they pulled out onto the road.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you like camping?” he repeated.

  “That’s what I thought you said. It seemed out of the blue. I do like camping, I guess. Haven’t had much of a chance to do any. I live, well, pretty far out. There’s plenty of green, and when I want to be alone in the woods, I can pretty much just sit on my porch.”

  It painted a nice picture. Did she really live so isolated? It was hard to tell from a map. “You’d look lovely tied to a tree.”

  “Just as long as you don’t wrap the car around a tree, I’m happy.”

  He hadn’t taken his eyes off the road, and he was dead center in the middle of his lane. But he nodded. Making a sub nervous was a sublime pleasure, but that was nervous about a flogger or a cane, not of an auto accident. He drove out in quiet, keeping his lecherous thoughts to himself. She would look good tied to a tree. Naked, of course. Or suspended from the warehouse of his new club. Or tied to his bed. Or… There just wasn’t enough time in a weekend for all that he wanted to do to her. But into a weekend it would have to fit. A return engagement was just asking to get her heart involved, and he didn’t want to break her heart.

  So why break it? It was a ridiculous thought and he dismissed it. He was enjoying Vanessa more than he had any woman for a while, for the simple reason that her sense of submission was deeper. But he didn’t think he was in love with her. She was just, well, particularly suited to his temperament. The question was not so much about Vanessa as about his policy of never starting relationships with the women he played with.

  I’ll be busy next weekend anyway with setting up the club. That settled it for the moment at least. He chatted up Vanessa, keeping the discussion nonsexual. He discovered she worked in a pottery shop and was enthus
iastic about her work. That was good to hear. Sure, the primary purpose of a job was to pay the rent, but too many people worked at jobs that didn’t feed their soul. One of the things he liked about the construction business is that he felt he’d accomplished something every day. He’d felt that way when he was driving nails and wielding jackhammers, and he still felt that way now that his job consisting of going from site to site and giving directions and only occasionally rolling his shirtsleeves up. Slowly but surely, he built things that people would use for a long time to come.

  Vanessa’s house was even more isolated than he expected it to be. You could hardly see any homes from the road, just a mass of trees broken by the occasional gravel driveway. Only a small printed address on a mailbox by the side of the road identified her place. As he headed up the driveway—almost a private road, really—he expected to find a small rustic cottage at the end.

  That’s a mansion! The job Vanessa described wouldn’t let her afford what he saw in front of him. It was rustic enough…dark wooden panels rather than aluminum siding, but it sprawled way too much for the word cottage. And windows. It had huge windows, the kind he supposed you could have if you were so surrounded by woods there was never any notion of anyone else being able to peer in. There was room for a dozen cars in front of the garage, so he parked there. He walked around to open the door for her, his mind full of questions. The one he asked in the end was, “How long have you lived here?”

  “All my life,” she said.

  A thought crossed his mind. She looked as if she was in her thirties, but maybe she was a little younger. Still. “Your parents live here too?”

  “My parents are dead.” She said it with the flat voice of someone who’d said it all too many times.

  He didn’t want to put her through any more suffering. Still, one didn’t just ignore something like that. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Maybe they had Vanessa late in life, and were older than one would expect.

  “Auto accident five years ago,” she said shortly, answering his unspoken question. She led him to the front door and took a key from her purse. No wonder she was edgy about him paying attention to the road.

  He glanced around while she fiddled with it. The siding was in decent shape, he noticed. The yard and driveway were another matter. His car had been hit by a couple low branches on the way in, and weeds were growing up through the gravel. There was a patch of poison ivy between a couple of trees, and he didn’t like the look of one overhanging locust branch. In a few years, or a really bad storm, it could come down on the house. Vanessa didn’t strike him as a careless person.

  “Do you live alone?” he asked.

  She stopped twisting the key in the lock and stared at him. “That question freaks me out a bit.”

  He took a step back. “I can stay outside if you’d like me to. I was just wondering because this looks like it would be a lot for one person to take care of.”

  “Yeah. It’s a lot. I manage.” Her voice held frost in it, and then she sighed. “Hey, I’m sorry. This isn’t how I want to be spending our time. And if you’d wanted to do something nasty to me—I mean, nasty and nonconsensual, because that business of not letting me come is nasty enough—then you could have already. Yes, I live alone. I should probably take in boarders, but it’s really so far out it’s not convenient for most people, and I like my privacy.” She opened the door. “Come in. Sorry for all the plastic on the furniture, but I don’t use most of the house and I want to keep the stuff in good shape.”

  He walked in and the inside was even more spectacular than the outside. He kept walking, fascinated. Everything was modern; the place had been remodeled not more than ten years ago. The kitchen was huge, the fixtures all stainless steel. There were rooms full of furniture with plastic on them—a living room, another living room. He supposed that made the second one a sitting room? He built office buildings and occasionally houses for a living, but he’d never seen anything quite like it. Another room, he noticed, was entirely empty—not even any furniture left. He walked up to a glass wall and looked down on a squash court.

  There was thick dust on the plastic. Whoever had bought it all, presumably Vanessa’s parents, had a taste for dark reds and greens. The gothic shades and the dust, all made the place look like a haunted house. Although the plastic would be out of place in a haunted house.

  He turned around to see her staring at him, amused. “Enjoying the tour? All I really use is the kitchen and my bedroom. Which is upstairs.”

  “Do you play racquetball? Or squash?”

  “Racquetball, occasionally. Not so much since my friend Alicia moved out west.” She sighed. “That was nearly a year ago. I sometimes bash a ball against the wall to deal with frustrations, but it’s not the same.”

  There were other rooms level with the kitchen that would serve quite nicely as bedrooms without the inconvenience of stairs, he thought, but he followed her up. What he’d seen stuck with him though.

  One could run a hell of a play party in this house. He thought you could fit fifty, maybe a hundred people in while still having plenty of places to play. The little side rooms, now unused, would allow people some privacy. Crazy. He’d had parties in his own apartment, but he’d had to limit the guest list to a dozen.

  Her bedroom wasn’t particularly large, no bigger than the rooms downstairs. She must hang on to it for sentimental reasons. Maybe that’s why she keeps the house. She obviously couldn’t use or even maintain the whole thing. But it’s home, the connection to her parents, or her childhood. Probably the last thing she’d want is a crowd of kinksters in it.

  The soft blues used in her room were a sharp contrast to the darker shades outside it. The queen-sized bed was feminine and frilly, and had a big off-white teddy bear on it that had probably been around for a while. Curiously, the bear had a leather studded cock ring around one its arms. He wondered if she knew what it was, or just thought of it as kinky bracelet. Hanging on the wall was a flat sculpture of a butterfly made of iron and about a foot wide.

  Like the kitchen, the bedroom was neat and dust-free. She did a good job of keeping up the parts of the house she used.

  “I like the bear. And the butterfly,” Hart said.

  “Oh. Thank you. I made the butterfly myself many years ago.”

  My very creative girl.

  Vanessa turned away. “I’ll just be a minute. Let me find something to wear for today and tomorrow—you said we were going to a ball game?” She opened her closet and started to go through the clothes that were hanging there.

  “Display, Vanessa.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him and hesitated for a moment. But she turned around to face him and adopted the position. He stepped forward and brushed his knuckle against her cheek, then traced her curves down her side. “Would it be an invasion of your privacy if I went through your clothes and decided what you’ll wear?”

  She pursed her lips as she considered. He waited. Her hands slipped from behind her neck and moved over her chest.

  “Display, sub,” he said sharply.

  “Crap.” She got herself back into position. They locked gazes for a moment. “You may pick out my clothes, Master Hart,” she said at last.

  “Oh, I wasn’t asking permission for that, only for going through them.”

  “May I make a few suggestions, Master Hart?”

  He considered. It was a deflection of what he’d asked for, but she wasn’t saying no. His goal was to make sure she had sexy clothing that would make her feel desirable and give him a good view. “You may.”

  “May I?” She nodded in the direction of her closet, still holding position. He’d given her permission to make suggestions, but she was still facing away from her clothes.

  “Yes.”

  She turned and took a short navy dress from its hanger. When she rotated back to him, holding it in front of her, he could see it was made of something stretchy and was very short. Even if it covered her magnificent breasts, it would sti
ll look sexy on her, emphasizing every curve. “For tonight?” she asked. She didn’t look entirely comfortable.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never worn this before. I got it—it was on sale, and I thought—but I’ve never had the guts. I think, maybe, with you, I could.”

  It was a strange thing to say, he thought, to someone she’d only really known for a day. She’d known Walt for quite a while. Yet he didn’t doubt it was heartfelt. “I’ll cherish you and protect you,” he promised.

  “You make me want to push myself.”

  He grinned. “Good.” Exactly what he wanted to be doing. But she was feeling something more, he suspected. Something he instinctively wanted. Something he really shouldn’t cultivate.

  “And you wanted something casual for tomorrow, for baseball?”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  She crossed to the chest of drawers by the other side of the room, and got out a pair of shorts, panties, a bra and a halter top, and put them out on the bed. She had to wade through a pile of T-shirts, most of which looked like they would be big on her, to find the halter, he noticed, which was at the bottom of the pile. She was still pushing herself. The shorts were cutoffs, and would show off her legs nicely. “Master Hart?” she asked.

  “Either no panties, or exchange the shorts for a miniskirt,” he said.

  “I don’t even think I have a miniskirt. Just some very short dresses I bought for clubs. Walt—”

  He pushed his fingers in her mouth again, hushing her.

  Hart said, “If you need to talk about him we can, but unless you need to vent, we can leave it. I’m sure he appreciated your short dresses. Any man with a pulse would.” He caressed her cheek, then smiled at her. “With legs like yours, you really would look lovely in a miniskirt.”

  “My thighs are too fat.”

  He pulled her over the bed and yanked up the hem of her dress. She shrieked, even before the first swat landed, deliberately low on her bottom. He then spanked her again, on the thighs, repeatedly.