Red Hot Obsessions (174 page)

If she didn’t quit The Devilhouse at all, if she did just one more session, then another, and then another, she could finish her college degree and open her clinic.

Oh, so slippery the slope.

And yet, that triumphant moment after Park had left buoyed her up.

But the scene had been so demanding, and it seemed like it could have gone wrong at any moment, like when Park had refused to assume the submissive position and she had put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down to his knees.

She might screw this one up.

Her fears always showed on her face, so she scrunched her face up and then let it go, trying to release the conflict. She was supposed to be an actor, dang it.

She felt like she had mastered her expression, so she turned away from the whip cabinet to face him. “Okay. I can do it.”

“Excellent.” Wulf looked up at her, and his head tilted slightly. Rae couldn’t tell what changed in his expression, but an emotion rippled across his face and was gone before she could figure out what it was. He asked, “Have you been on the internet lately?”

Odd question.
“Not since I checked email a few hours ago. Why, has something happened?”

“No.” He smiled at her, but Rae thought his smile looked a little forced. “Not at all. The client this afternoon is Mr. Kyle San Jose. He’s been a client here for several years but has not progressed beyond the spank-and-wank phase. He’s almost vanilla. I can retrieve his file for you.”

Rae’s heart sank. She shouldn’t do this. She should leave now. “That would be great.”

Wulf frowned at his phone again. “This is Sonya’s third absence this week.”

“Maybe she’s really sick.”

“She had an article in the college newspaper this morning that must have been written last night. I believe she might have reached The Hairy Arse Boundary.”

Rae had never heard anyone say “arse” unless they were mocking a British accent. “And that is?”

His wry smile suggested that he was telling her another secret. “You can only view a limited number of hairy arses before you cannot stomach seeing another one, ever again. This upper limit is different for every girl, but when she reaches it, she retires almost immediately. Sonya will graduate soon, and I assume she has been prudent with her earnings. I must have a conversation with her.”

~~~~~

Lizzy in Love

Rae dodged into the spa-like Zen refuge of the Ladies’ Locker Room to freshen up before her appointment with Kyle San Jose and rounded the corner to the make-up area when she high-heeled-skidded to a stop in front of Lizzy and Georgie, her dorm suitemates. It was too late for Rae to grab one of the white, fluffy spa robes out of the stack to hide what she was wearing.

Hey, they might not even notice. The Devilhouse was full of girls wearing weird costumes.

“Um,” Rae said. “Hi.”

The girls’ heads—Lizzy the blond who came up to Rae’s chest and Georgie the brunette who stood near Rae’s shoulder—dipped and rose, surveying Rae from her made-up face to her black leather bustier and stiletto-heeled, thigh-high boots and back up to her face as the spa music tinkled in the air and the waterfall burbled. Rae waited for them to be pissed off at her.

Georgie asked,
“Rae?”

Her questioning tone was weird. Recognition shouldn’t be the problem. Rae looked down at her shiny boots and the polished wooden floor. Did she really look so different? “Yeah?”

Lizzy asked, “What are you wearing?”

Yeah, they had noticed.

Rae’s bustier and tight black skirt clung to her curves, and the outfit was a far piece from the jeans and square tee shirts she had worn to class when she had given up the prairie dress look after a week at college. She didn’t look anything like herself, not even to herself. “I got it from the costume closet.”

Georgie asked, “Rae, are you dressed like a Domme?”

Lizzy brightened and asked, “So you’re hired? So you can stay at school?”

Rae decided to answer Lizzy because that seemed like the answer that was the least likely to offend her friends. “Yeah. Um, that guy? Um, The Dom?” She had almost said
Wulf
because his name was so sweet on her tongue but she caught herself. “
The Dom
hired me. I signed the contract and nondisclosure agreement just now.”

She didn’t mention her misgivings. Georgie and Lizzy had taken a chance to introduce her to The Dom. If she turned down the position, it would be like throwing away all their effort.

Lizzy squealed and bounced like a pale, blond puppy, but Georgie’s brown eyes widened. “Did he hire you as a Domme?”

“Yeah. As a Domme.” She winced, waiting for Georgie’s reaction when confronted with Rae’s good luck.

Whenever something good happened to Rae—scoring high on her SATs, earning a slot in the honors program, being awarded the college scholarship—someone from her family or church was always there to put her in her place by pointing out how it was really a burden for her family and to make sure that Jesus took all the credit.

“That’s great! That’s great!” Lizzy chanted.

Georgie cocked her head to the side. Her wry smile soothed Rae. Georgie said, “You have to teach me how to be a Domme. I’ve been trying to work into that for six months, and I’ve gotten no traction.”

“I’m just figuring it out. I’m kind of in training,” Rae said.

“Who’s training you? Sonya?” Lizzy asked.

“No,” Rae said. “The Dom is.”

They both goggled at her, open-mouthed.

Georgie snapped her mouth closed and then asked, ‘The Dom is training you? The tall, blond guy you waltzed with at the party?”

“Um, yeah.” Rae’s foreboding crept back. “I didn’t know who he was at the party. I just kind of called him The Blond Hottie in my head.”

Lizzy’s wide-eyed astonishment faded into hurt.

Rae would have done anything to take her comment back, even though it was the truth. “Lizzy, I’m so sorry. I don’t know why he’s doing this. I think it’s just a casting decision, because I’m tall and stuff. I look the part of a Domme.”

Lizzy swallowed hard. “How is he training you?”

“He’s just telling me stuff. Like what to do in a session. What to say.”

Tears welled in Lizzy’s eyes. “Are you sleeping with him?”

Her hopeless tone broke Rae’s heart. Rae shouldn’t lie to her friend. Lizzy had seen Wulf first, had dated him first, had screwed him first, even though his “dates” were understood by all the girls at The Devilhouse to be extravagant one-night-stands.

Rae should back off because she was Lizzy’s friend.

“He just shows me what to do. How to use a riding crop. What to say. That sort of thing. I’m not anything special to him. Like Georgie said, he likes women, lots of women, and he’s nothing but a shiny shell. And I opted out of ‘the arrangement.’”

Even though all that was true, and yet Rae hoped that, maybe, after she finished the session with this Kyle San Jose, maybe she would see Wulf again.

Maybe like last weekend, in his office, on his desk.

But she shouldn’t.

Rae knew that this job and Wulf were wrong for her.

She would just have to work and save the money to go back to school later. Lots of people did that. She could figure it out.

Lizzy’s feelings were the final reason why Rae would have to extricate herself from this whatever-it-was with Wulf and quit this danged job.

~~~~~

Kyle San Jose, and Yet Not Kyle San Jose

Rae waited outside the door to Play Room Five with her hand on the brass doorknob, steeling herself.

The door to Play Room Five was not a forbidding edifice of carved mahogany and designed to look like a door to Hell, like the other dungeon doors in The Devilhouse that Rae had seen. This six-panel door was painted white, and the waiting room had three recliners facing a wide-screen television on the wall, which was tuned to a college basketball game. The unassuming door projected the illusion that they had left The Devilhouse, but Rae knew better. No matter how much this door pretended to exist in the sane world, the sex-crazed madness of The Devilhouse was all around her. The insanity clung to her as tightly as the black leather bustier that girdled her ribs.

Rae turned the knob and opened the door.

The blue living room looked like Rae’s grandmother’s house, decorated in what had been fashionable in 1958. A blocky couch was slung low against the back wall. Brass stand lamps flanked it. The pleated lampshades glowed like white truncated triangles against the sky blue wall. A vanilla candle burned on a sideboard.

This play room reeked of normalcy, except for the shirtless, tubby man wearing a black leather hood, kneeling in the center of the low shag carpet. The eyeless mask only had one hole cut out, for his nose. He leaned to one side, favoring one of his knees. Ginger hair sprouted all over his body.

Sonya’s notes in his file detailed that, in general, Kyle San Jose liked to argue, made up excuses for everything, lied at every opportunity, but he didn’t like to be punished for it. He wasn’t a good little sub. He just wanted some girl to spank his ass and to be on his way.

His safe word was “Yes-yes-yes.”

Sonya had hand-written in the margin:
ODD
.

Yeah, well, all The Devilhouse’s clients were a little odd.

“Good afternoon,” she intoned as she stood above him.

He didn’t answer.

Rae selected a wooden paddle from the umbrella stand near the door. Three golf-sized umbrellas mixed in with the riding crops and thin paddles. Nice to know that she could borrow an umbrella from here in the rare case of desert rain.

The long wooden paddle looked like the one her grade school principal had had mounted on the wall above his desk, painted with the motto “The Good Old Days.” She whacked the paddle against her palm, testing it. The sturdy plank slapped instead of pounded. She could work with that.

She noticed Kyle San Jose fidgeting. “Sit still, sub.”

“I can’t. I have a knee problem. I can’t kneel like this.”

And the excuses started. His knees even rested on shag carpeting, a luxury that other subs did not enjoy. “I did not give you permission to speak.”

“You’re not my usual girl.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You haven’t worked here long, have you?”

“I didn’t give you permission to speak, sub.” She smacked him on the butt cheek with the paddle.

“Hey! Why did you do that!”

Rae glanced up at the white, drywall ceiling and found the black orb almost directly above her. Wulf might be watching her, or one of his ex-special forces security guys might be the one protecting her and looking down her cleavage. Waving was probably unprofessional, not that Kyle San Jose could see it through his eyeless mask.

Rae walked around the hooded man, stomping on the carpet so he could hear her. So that was why the dungeon play rooms were tiled, so that the sub could hear the clicking of high-heeled boots. That, and it was easier to hose down tile if needed. “What is your name, sub?”

“Foxhound.”

Another dog name. Interesting.

She paced around Kyle San Jose, stomping some more on the carpet. Brown hair curled out from under his hood on the scruff of his neck. Neck stubble met his weedy back hair. Rae was glad that she wasn’t going to see Kyle San Jose’s hairy arse. She just had to spank it over the leather pants that bound his pudgy hindquarters. “Stand, Foxhound.”

He lumbered to his feet.

The furniture in the living room didn’t include a proper spanking chair. Rae wondered how she was supposed to paddle him. She stomped around him again.

He said, “The other girl always leads me over to the chair to spank me.” The leather mask muffled his whiney voice. “Aren’t you going to do that?”

Wow, this one was mouthy.

Because she was a good seven inches taller than San Jose in her high-heeled boots, Rae bent down to whisper near where the hood covered his ear. “No. I’m going to make you wait for it.”

“I don’t
want
to wait for it,” he said. His tone turned ugly. “The other girl
never
makes me wait for it.”

Probably because Sonya wanted to get away from his nasty attitude as soon as possible. No wonder she hadn’t come in today.

Rae whispered near his leather-covered ear, “Wait.”

“Why are you
making
me wait? I don’t
want
to wait! I’m a
paying
customer here, and I don’t
want
to wait for my
spanking!”

His shrill tantrum was so ridiculous that Rae laughed at him. Her strong laugh rang like a bell from years of singing with the church choir.

San Jose stopped complaining, and his black, eyeless hood swiveled toward her. “Rae?”

She backed away. She didn’t know anyone named Kyle San Jose. She would have never agreed to the session if she had. “Who are you?”

The man pulled the black hood off his face.

Rae recognized the man’s round jaw and broken nose as the hood stretched, even before it popped free of his face. Years of rage and alcohol abuse had popped spidery blood vessels around his nose. Sweat darkened his orange hair.

Her cousin Jim Bob Mulligan was ten years older than she, had inherited a couple warehouses in Pirtleville, and was a deacon in her family’s church.

Why had the form said that his name was Kyle San Jose?

Making a run for the door would be useless.

His gloating smile was cruel. “Rae Stone. It’s been, what, three years since you left for college?”

Jim Bob grabbed her by the waist and dragged her against his flabby body. Even though she was taller, some of that height difference came from her high-heeled boots, and he outweighed Rae by a good fifty pounds. “What’re you doing in a whorehouse?”

Rae pushed back on his shoulders and answered before she thought about it. “I needed money.”

He leered at her from an inch above her boobs. “Your parents would be crushed if they found out. What’re you going to do for me so’s that I won’t tell ‘em?”

“Stop it, Jim Bob!” She wiggled, trying to push him off of her without starting a brawl.

He grabbed Rae’s shoulder, spun her, and slammed her against the wall.

She felt his hands pulling at her skirt, trying to hike it up on her hips.

Like hell she was going to let her jerk cousin rape her. She had grown up with four brothers and knew how to knock people around.

Rae pushed off the wall and jammed her elbow back, catching Jim Bob in the ribs.

She whipped around with her fist balled up ready to sock him, just in time to see Jim Bob’s surprised face spin away from her. Wulf’s expression was as calm as if he were about to sip tea as he punched Jim Bob’s lights out.

Jim Bob crumpled and flopped to the carpet. His limp dick flopped sideways because he had pulled it out of his pants.

Wulf shook his hand like he was flinging something nasty off his knuckles. His calm question was as even as if he were inquiring about her health after a sneeze. “Are you all right?”

“He knows.” Rae tugged her skirt down. Terrible fears spun in her head. “He’s my cousin Jim Bob Mulligan, and he knows about this.” Rae was undone. He would tell everyone about her and The Devilhouse. A sinner could be forgiven, but the temptress could never be redeemed. What use was it to go to college if she couldn’t go home?

Wulf stepped over her cousin’s unconscious body. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Why did it say his name was Kyle San Jose in his file?”

“Many of our clients use pseudonyms for their working files. Their real names are listed in the business files.”

“He’ll tell my parents. He’ll tell everyone. They’ll disown me.” Her life stretched in front of her, long and lonely and alone.

“I’ll make sure he won’t tell anyone.” Wulf cradled her face in his hand, and his touch was gentle. Blood ran down his pale hand and soaked into his white shirt cuff.

Rae wanted to sob but she held it together. “He’ll tell them all anyway, just to watch them get all upset. He likes scenes and chaos.”

Wulf smiled, and his calm smile was so ordinary that it scared her. “You can watch from the security booth, if you’d like.”

~~~~~