Model Release (The Art of Domination #1)

THE ART OF DOMINATION: MODEL
RELEASE

(A
DOMINATION AND SUBMISSION ROMANCE SERIAL)

by

Erika
Masten

Copyright
© 2014 Erika Masten

ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED

Erika
Masten

Contact:
[email protected]

Website:
http://erikamasten.com

Blog:
http://erikamasten.blogspot.com

Newsletter Sign-up:
http://eepurl.com/pTLx1

Published by Sticky Sweet Books. This book contains
material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties.
Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. Without
limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored on, or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of
both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual
persons or events are purely coincidental.

Warning: Explicit content. Intended for mature readers
only. All characters depicted herein are 18 years of age or older, and all
sexual activities are of a consensual nature.

This is a work of erotic fantasy. In real life, please
protect yourself and your lover by always practicing safe sex.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Art Of Domination: Model Release

Excerpt From Erika
Masten’s

At His Whim: His #1

Excerpt From Erika
Masten’s

The Ringmaster: Cirque de Plaisir

THE ART OF
DOMINATION: MODEL RELEASE

IVA

Someone once said that
the ability to foresee the consequences of one’s actions was the mark of a
profound person. Whoever that was, they weren’t talking about me—Iva Moreau—not
at any stage of my twenty-five years of life. After a few hard falls and some
painful collateral damage, I was trying to change that… but not today….

I’d been in such a
hurry that I darted out of my car without my coat, leaving me shivering in the
early winter chill as I walked, even when I quickened my pace with hard steps
that matched my mood. A mosaic of cracked pavement and piles of unexpectedly
upscale trash—from gourmet coffee cups and bright red sushi takeout boxes to
artsy (empty) bottles of expensive alcohol—set the scene and my nerves on edge
as I stalked up the street of rusty industrial goliaths to the warehouse oddly
named The Cathedral. My polished Oxford-style heels clunked on the worn
asphalt, the rain-slicked sidewalk, then the austere cement entryway. The dull
tap announced my approach with less anger than I’d have liked, more anxiety; I
wasn’t dressed for this and not prepared for it. Gray work slacks and a
lavender sweater set had no business in a hipster haven and wouldn’t encourage
anyone to take me seriously.

Pity that when I’d
gotten dressed this morning for another day of answering phones and filing for
the dean of the Art Department at Vandergriff I hadn’t anticipated a showdown
with some lecherous poseur of an artist trying to take advantage of my baby
sister. Tangling with one Moreau girl meant inviting the wrath of all of us.

I could have taken the
elevator up. It was oversized for freight, though, and had one of those sliding
screeching
retractable gates common
in older industrial buildings like this one. I bristled from tailbone to nape
at the unfamiliarity of it, the strange openness. From what I could see, the
whole building was like that, oversized and cavernous, with aged metal
squeaking and grating somewhere in the distance. A newly upscale address with a
touch of bohemian grit to make its occupants feel cool. To think I used to
daydream about living and working in this building, having my own artist’s loft
space. Now I snuck in up the absurdly narrow stairway that would never have
satisfied modern building standards.

The crumpled university
rag clutched in my fist told me I was looking for a photographer named Nolan
Beal. A quick Google check directed me to suite 700, the top floor. On the way,
I tried to ignore the sinus-clearing scent of paint, turpentine, photo
development and lithograph etching chemicals. Most people would have found it a
god-awful smell; I felt goose bumps prickling up high and stiff over every inch
of my light olive skin with unbearable excitement and anticipation. I could
have gotten high off not just the smell but the reflexive swell of creativity,
the thrill of
making art
.

Maybe that was why I
was breathing hard as I stepped out of the stark white stairwell into the
fourth floor passageway, to get a grip on my runaway pulse, to remind myself I
wasn’t scoping out a painter’s studio or admiring the architecture of this
renovated warehouse in the old downtown cum art district. But I couldn’t help
myself. Right there where I stood was urban redevelopment at its hippest,
coolest, most modern ironic. And I absolutely resented how much it appealed to
me.

A paint-dribbled wooden
floor forged a path down the corridor. Chill October light strafed the scuffed
grain from a tall, thin window framed by an anachronistic plaster arch. The
archways over the doors to the six studio spaces on that floor all had
different shapes and embellishments, but all were…. How would I have described
it? Industrial gothic. The architects for the redevelopment had certainly
earned their fee, transforming a derelict warehouse into living and workspace
for the creative class. It was whitewashed and high contrast, anachronistically
high concept as it dressed industrial space in ironically faux historical
shapes. I wasn’t sure I really “got it.” But it was both alien and alluring,
like someplace I knew I wasn’t supposed to be.

Someplace I knew I
wasn’t supposed to be…. Too reminiscent of places I’d already been, to no good
end. Places that smelled like this and looked like this and
felt
like this, if not quite so slick
and pretty. Places where the gritty touch hadn’t been a commercial affect.

But the
pretty
was… nice. Glossy. Exciting and
inviting. I could imagine doors and windows like those in a white-walled,
wooden-floored painter’s studio with my snapshots and color studies all taped
up along the archways and my oils and watercolors and charcoals arrayed over a
beaten up secondhand dining table next to my easel, off to one side of the bed
and my bookcases and my dad’s old reading chair. I could just feel it: the
silky slick paint between my fingers, my grip on a paintbrush, the ache in my
knees from standing at the easel too long, collapsing at the end of the day
into that chair with its saggy padding and once-coarse fabric worn smooth,
and….

And
that
was enough of
that
, Iva
. My fingers sore and slow to respond after so long squeezed
around the wadded newspaper, I made a point of opening up my creased copy of
The Vandergriff Voice, delivered as usual to my desk little more than an hour ago.
Student staff always dedicated the last few pages of The VV to local events of
interest, from college band gigs to big concerts, fundraising marathons for
breast cancer survivors or special needs kids or environmental causes,
avant-garde indie film screenings or art exhibits.

The quarter-page advert
on page seventeen had made me slosh coffee over the stack of fall term student
evaluations on my desk. I’d barely heard or acknowledged the bellowing from
Mitsy, the round, overly made-up prune of an admin supervisor whose job it was
to caustically belittle all Art Department secretarial staff five to seven
times per day. Nothing could have broken my attention from the photograph
advertising the upcoming Amor Noir photographic exhibit at The Odyssey Modern,
the
gallery in town for any show
promising provocative or controversial contemporary art. There, in
seams-up-the-back stockings and a latticework garter belt of lacy black straps,
and facing a pristine white brick wall with arms secured above her head by gleaming
handcuffs, with the sleek curtain of her dark blond hair strategically arranged
to conceal most of her face, was my little sister.

Oh hell no. No way was
I letting some sleazy photographer lure my sister into submitting to
pretentious boudoir photos with a side of bondage to angst it up for the
critics. Yes, I’d tried to call Cherise’s number first to let her explain, to
scold her within an inch of her life, but she wasn’t picking up. I didn’t care
about Mitsy stamping her pudgy foot in her support hose and scowling at me from
behind her owlish glasses as I’d mumbled an excuse about a family emergency and
rushed out of the office. My mind had jumped to all kinds of lurid conclusions
about where Cheri was and what she was doing—about what the slimy Mr. Beal
might have been doing to her. I knew about these things.
By god did I know
.

That thought finally
rekindled the famous Moreau ire, and I stuffed the paper under my arm so I
could dig through my purse for a rubber band to tie up my long brown curls. First
step in fights with the Moreau girls: get the hair out of the way. Maybe I
wasn’t getting ready for a junior high fistfight, but if need be….

On the seventh floor,
the stairway door opened into a short corridor past that big elevator, leading
to an oversized entryway. I’d felt the throb of the club music—a strangely
compelling mixture of techno and danceable R&B—from nearly two floors down.
Here, it gushed through the gaping black-lacquered doors and careened down the
hall straight into me, thumping against my chest with a pronounced, insistent,
repeated beat that practically demanded access to my body. Even the empty Jack
Daniels and Cruzan Single Barrel bottles lined up on the floor along the walls
vibrated and rattled against one another at the force of the driving rhythm. I
fished my cell from my pants pocket and checked the time. Who partied like this
at 10:17 in the morning?

I waded upstream
through the driving music and into a loft space that took up the whole seventh
floor. What I’d mistaken for a party turned out to be the most hectic, unruly
photo shoot I had ever seen, a hot mess of bohemian chic debauchery polished to
a deliberately disarrayed GQ sheen. Stunningly good-looking people in
everything from street clothes to couture bondage lingerie strutted and mingled
and preened amidst equally attractive stylists and hair dressers, all
generating a lot of body heat even in the expansive white brick studio space.
Or was that warmth just the sudden flush I felt rising to my face?

Adrenaline-tinged anger
vibrated through me at a blood-and-bones level. I didn’t like the idea of my
baby sister in this pretty, busy chaos. I didn’t like the thought of her
hanging around these kinds of people—who were all about looks and
the scene
and parties at ten in the
morning—when she needed to concentrate on her sophomore year of college. I
didn’t like the hedonistic glamour that could leave a girl vulnerable to
lecherous posers who talked a good game and promised the world. I didn’t like…
that
I
liked it.

I liked it a lot.

My gaze roamed every
inch of the studio, unable to stop staring. At the continuous rolls of uncut
photographs and streamers of negatives that decorated the walls. At the piles
of celebrity rags and couture trade
mags
that lay in
artfully misaligned stacks, so much glossy clutter in corners and on low glass
coffee tables. At the long-limbed girls with porcelain-pale skin and shiny
lipstick who lounged along the wide window sills while flipping pages with
gracefully blasé gestures. Rolling metal racks of clothing parceled a large
section of the floor into a high fashion maze that, admittedly, part of me
would have loved exploring. In the midst of the scene, all manner of commercial
lights, either stilted up tall on metal stands or winched up at extreme angles
from the exposed pipes running along the ceiling, focused obsessively on a
strikingly plain eggshell muslin backdrop.

Shooting had apparently
paused while a little sylph of a brunette makeup artist, with eye pencils
tucked behind her ears and extra lip liners gripped between her fingers like
cigarettes, touched up the color on an already statuesque beauty wearing sky
high heels. The model had a distinctly Brazilian flare to her light eyes and
latte-tan complexion—the Gisele sort. Her tousled caramel blond hair coiled
dramatically atop her head in a messy 60’s-ish updo that recalled sirens like
Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, the overtly sensual retro glamour further
accentuated by thick black eyeliner in a cat eye. The model wriggled
uncomfortably for a moment in her black teddy, which might have been downright
modest had it not been made of tighter-than-skin latex. The only prop with her
on set was a waist-high pedestal in the shape of a Doric column.