Chapter 1

The phone rang. Cold calling? The caller display was blank. I shrugged and picked up. “Hello?”

“Jerry? Jonny.”

“Oh, Jonny! Good to hear your voice.” Johannes Schraeder was my contact with the shady organisation my great-uncle had been associated with. They – Jonny and his wife, Sue (never ‘Susie’), a doctor – had helped us sort out a problem with an old friend of Sally’s. We rescued Diane from durance vile, so to speak, and were then faced with an organisation which was more than we could deal with on our own. Diane was now happily married to Peter Starr, my solicitor.

“I hope you think so when I finish talking. I need a favour.”

“Well, I think Sally and I would be glad to help you out in any way we can.”

“Don’t commit yourself blind. Thanks largely to you, we’ve kicked over a hornet’s nest. The girls we rescued are okay, though still need support. But the deeper we go, the worse things get. Don’t worry about that – this is all over the place, but I think Cumbria is clean, at least for the moment. No, the problem is with our shortage of safe houses.”

“You need us to take some of your rescues?”

“Only one, just now. And not exactly a rescue. This one is a material witness. She came to us. We need to have her out of sight and safe until she can appear in court. The case she’s a part of is going to be dealt with officially.”

“I’ll have a word with Sally, but I doubt she’ll raise any objection.”

“Make sure she doesn’t feel obligated, Jerry.” He paused. “There’ll be some money – expenses – we don’t expect you to carry the cost of this. But, Jerry, I’d suggest you don’t show her everything you’ve got if you don’t have to. Your shooting range, for example. Those hidey-holes Sally showed us. Unless you actually need to conceal her. But we’d rather avoid that necessity.”

“Leave it with me, Jonny. I’ll get back to you after lunch, if that’s okay.”

“Um, I’ll ring you, Jerry, if you don’t mind. This number ... well, you can’t call it back.”

“Okay. Fine. Later, then, Jonny.”

I went out of my little study, through the kitchen. Sally was there, my Sally, doing things with vegetables and meat and herbs and spices. My mouth watered.

“I’m going to go and shoot one of those new Glocks, Sweetie.” We’d had them quite a while, but I was still getting used to the smaller, lighter, weapon. The Browning that Sally taught me to use is larger and heavier with a longer barrel, hence potentially more accurate, I suppose. There is a concealed, mostly underground, shooting range in the grounds of the property, with a wide selection of firearms, most of which are highly illegal in this country. They include weapons acquired by my great-uncle during the course of his career, plus three Glock 42 compact auto-loading hand-guns and some air-guns I bought which are legal. I spent an hour there on the Glocks, trying to get used to them and doing okay, then half an hour with an air-pistol. I think it’d be possible to be quite dangerous with that if one were accurate enough, and it’s good for sight-picture.

I cleared up, put things away, and went back to the house.

“There you are, Master. I was just going to come and call you.” Sally is my wife, my partner, my life, not my slave, but she likes to pretend I own her. I say ‘pretend’ – to Sally I think it is more real than the law. She wants to be owned, to be ordered. At least once a month she ‘needs’ to be punished. It would be more difficult for me if spanking her did not result in the most spectacular sex of our relationship – and, let me say, sex, making love, with Sally is always wonderful.

She is also an excellent cook. I salivated at the smells in the kitchen. “Let me clean up,” I said.

“You have time for that, Master.” She smiled at me, an almost predatory smile. “Do you need help, Master?”

I chuckled. “That depends on how much time we have before lunch is ready.”

Her face adopted a thoughtful expression. “I don’t think it’ll spoil before you’ve had a shower. I will wait before putting the pasta in. I will help you. Make sure you are properly clean.”

Let me clarify. Sally’s ‘help’ in the shower does not expedite getting clean. F’sure, I get clean, as does Sally, but the process is very thorough and soon I have an uncomfortably hard problem which Sally insists on taking care of. That doesn’t take long, however it’s tackled. On the occasion I’m thinking of, she turned away and leant against the shower wall, arching her back. She’s wet. Very wet, and not from the shower. I slid into her snug heat and reached to cup her perfect titties as I thrust. No. Not long at all.

Unfortunately, that process requires further cleaning up. Time. Sally pops a tampon in ‘to stop leaving drips on the floor’, and, both dry, I follow her, both of us still nude, to the kitchen. I never get tired of watching her – lithe, supple, alluring.

The spaghetti only took a few minutes before she was placing a heaped plate in front of me. Parmesan there. As she has, from time to time, she knelt next to my chair – her preferred position at mealtimes, though she knows I’d like her to eat at the table with me. I twirled spaghetti and sauce on my fork and popped the result in my mouth – delicious, as always. But then, loaded the fork again for Sally. Like the shower, this is not conducive to speed, but I suppose it’s good for our digestion. Red wine. Vino rosso, I suppose? Yes.

Tiramisu. She must have got that in Ambleside. Coffee, just the way I like it. I took my cup into the lounge, a towel on the sofa; Sally has never tolerated my helping in the kitchen.

She appeared and knelt next to me. Laid her head on my knee. I caressed her silky hair. We were silent together, but we were together.

“The phone call this morning...” I began, and stopped. “Sally,” I started again, and she lifted her head to look at me, concern in her eyes. “Look, I know you don’t like to think this, but this house, everything, is as much yours as mine...”

“Master? Is something wrong? Do you want me to go?”

“No! Oh, God, no! Sally, I love you. I don’t want to think about living without you. No. It’s just...” I sighed, “I don’t want you to do something you don’t like because you feel you have to. The call, it was from Jonny Schraeder.”

“Ah! And he wants you ... us ... to do something?”

“Yeah. You remember the girls who were rescued from the people who had Diane? How they were found places away from here?”

“Of course.”

“It seems that Jonny and his crew keep finding more, and they’re running out of safe houses to take them.”

“He wants us to take some? How many?”

“Only one, this time, at least.”

“That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Well, there was something in Jonny’s voice ... Look, darling, I want to make sure you’re quite happy to have this woman in the house, and I want you to promise that if there’s anything which bothers you, you’ll say.”

“I promise.”

“Good. And, Sally, that’s an order. You will tell me if there’s anything; anything, that worries you. Understand?”

“Yes, Master.”

“So ... Jonny’s going to give me a call sometime this afternoon, and I’ll tell him yes then, with the proviso that he promises to find somewhere else if she’s a problem. In the meantime, Slave, how dare you even think I’d want to get rid of you? Let alone deprive you of your share in the inheritance?”

She scrabbled away backwards, and crouched, face to the floor. “I’m sorry, Master!”

“I should think so! Get upstairs. Kneel on the edge of the bed for punishment.”

“Yes, Master!” And she scuttled upstairs, much too enthusiastically.

However, I had something new for her; a flogger, which is supposed to sting, redden and sensitise the skin, but not break the skin. I fetched it, in its velvet bag, from the bottom drawer of the desk in my study. Gave it a few experimental flicks – I had read the little handbook which came with it and practised the different ways of applying it, though not, of course, on a living subject.

Sally was facing away from me as I entered the room, so she didn’t see what I had in my hand. “Ten, Slave, to start with. Count the strokes.”

“Yes, Master.” I could hear disappointment in her voice. Ten strokes would be a minimum if I was using a paddle and she would be wanting more than that. Of course, if she wasn’t satisfied, she could always ‘forget’ to count a stroke.

I approached and laid the first stroke from her right. It produced a surprised “OH!”, followed by, “One, Master, thank you.”

I laid the second from the left, and alternated sides until the tenth. The last stroke I tried a trickier stroke, which flicked the tips of the leather tails against her pussy, which was blossoming open, moist, with the clitoris clearly in evidence. It may not have been a perfect stroke, but it worked; she squealed, and orgasmed. The spasm threw her forward onto her front, and she was still twitching.

“Slave!” Sally slowly pulled herself back into position.

“Sorry, Master. That was ten. Thank you.”

Her bottom – round, pink, her pussy glistening – could not be ignored and I buried my erection to the root in her pussy. A couple of thrusts and ... blow me, if she wasn’t coming again! I had to hold her hips firmly to keep her in place in order to not slip out.

I erupted, and it was all I could do to flop on to the bed. Sally and I dragged ourselves up the bed in order to cuddle and sleep.

The phone woke me, Sally’s wide eyes on mine – how long had she been awake? I grabbed the handset. Landline, no cell-phone signal here in the valley, cordless extensions in bedroom, study and kitchen. Speaker phone.

“Jerry? It’s Jonny. Have you had a word with Sally?”

“Yes, and she’s here with me, Jonny. It’s yes, providing we can ask for her to be taken somewhere else if we can’t cope with her.”

“Good. And, yes, if there are any problems you will have a number to call. I was going to talk to you about that, actually, if you were otherwise agreeable. This isn’t your regular abused, submissive victim. She’s going to be a material witness in a criminal action, if we get to court. We just aren’t sure of her. Here’s the thing. I want your permission to monitor your phone and broadband; aren’t you on satellite now?”

“Yes, we are.”

“Well, I, we, don’t care what you access on the net, but we want to know if she’s playing both sides of the fence, or if she’s scamming us, you know. Without cell coverage, we can be fairly sure of noticing if she has any unauthorised communications.”