To Seek a Master Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Monica Belle

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Sexy daydreams are shy Laura’s only escape from the dull routines of her life. But with the arrival of an email ordering her to dress provocatively, she wonders if her secret fantasies about her colleagues are about to become true. Unable to resist the new and more daring instructions that arrive by email, she begins to slip deeper into dangerous water with several men. But when her controller finally reveals himself, she’s in for a shock and a far greater involvement in his illicit games. Because this powerful figure possesses an uncanny understanding of her most shameful and intense desire – to surrender to a master in every way.

  About the Author

  Monica Belle is an Oxbridge graduate and the author of several successful Black Lace novels, including Black Lipstick Kisses, Bound In Blue, Noble Vices, Office Perks, Pagan Heat, The Boss, The Choice, To Seek a Master, Valentina’s Rules, Wild By Nature and Wild In The Country.

  Also by Monica Belle:

  Noble Vices

  Valentina’s Rules

  Wild in the Country

  Wild By Nature

  Office Perks

  Pagan Heat

  Bound in Blue

  The Boss

  1

  LAURA SLIPPED INTO the window seat just in time to prevent the Devil from getting it first. He was one of the regular commuters, nicknamed for his neatly trimmed beard and the dash of white in his hair which, with an aquiline face and a smart dark suit, gave him a distinctly Satanic look. Others included Darcy, Mr Brown, the Grey Man, Miss Scarlett, Hovis Boy and the Tramp. All seven took the same trains each day, into Cambridge on the 7:55 and back on the 17:40, providing fuel for her imagination to stave off the boredom of commuting.

  She had no idea where any of them lived, or what they did, only at which stations they got on and off and a few personal habits that allowed her to invent fantasy lives for each. Darcy was the attractive one, tall, with an athletic build and an easy manner that suggested an appealing combination of humour and masculinity, perhaps appealing enough for her to have made an advance had the plain gold band on his ring finger not implied that somebody else had got him first.

  In her imagination there was no ring and one day the two of them would be alone in carriage. There would be no need for any of the social niceties and careful testing of each other’s defences so essential to real life. He would know she was willing and simply take her, calm and confident as he stripped her naked, had her kneel to take him in her mouth, lifted her onto his erection and had her, still cool and poised in his perfectly cut office suit as he brought her to heaven again and again.

  None of the others had Darcy’s allure. There was something stern about the Devil that she found intriguing but also disturbing in a way she didn’t fully understand, yet he was at least twice her age, so she preferred to think of him as the villain from one of the old-fashioned crime thrillers she liked to read, the sort of man Darcy would rescue her from before taking her as his reward.

  Mr Brown and the Grey Man made a pair, both middle-aged men of middle height, probably in middle management and middle everything else. Only in the way they dressed did they differ, the one in a scruffy brown suit that matched his thinning brown hair, the other plain and grey. Mr Brown, she liked to imagine, had a secret home life, perhaps attending wife-swapping parties where he would dress up in garishly colourful women’s underwear and watch the other couples having sex. The Grey Man she thought of as an automaton, or perhaps an android, built at one of the research companies in Cambridge and being road tested to see if anybody spotted him.

  Miss Scarlett was either a spy or the scheming mistress of some wealthy industrialist, depending on Laura’s mood, while the Tramp was an eccentric millionaire who would one day drop dead and leave her his entire fortune for smiling at him twice a day for the last four years. Hovis Boy was simply Hovis Boy, a spotty youth whose sole distinguishing characteristic was the sandwiches he carried in a plastic bread wrapper.

  Settling more comfortably into her seat, she spent a moment watching the lines of dark brick houses move past as the train gathered speed, before taking her book from her bag. It was one she’d found in a charity shop near work, a paperback published in the 1950s and full of the unashamedly red-blooded heroes and yielding heroines she enjoyed. It was called Taken to Turkey, and she had started it that morning, introducing herself to the beautiful Evangeline Tarrington, the superbly handsome Mark Frobisher and the wicked Lord Jasper Mauleverer. Just twenty pages in, and Evangeline had already been kidnapped by Lord Jasper, only for his car to be ambushed by Bulgarian bandits en route to Istanbul, a highly promising situation.

  The Bulgarian bandits were everything Laura could have hoped for, and kept her occupied all the way to King’s Lynn. As she walked from the station she was lost in a daydream, one in which she was Evangeline, but instead of being rescued in the nick of time by the gallant Mark Frobisher she was made the plaything of the bandit chief. Better still, the chief could have his wicked way with her, only for Frobisher to arrive a moment too late. The two men would fight it out as she lay naked and trembling in the furs beneath them, but when the Englishman finally triumphed he would be unable to resist, and instead of carrying her to safety would take his turn on top of her. Even better than that, Frobisher and the chief could turn out to be old friends from some earlier adventure, get thoroughly drunk on arrack and share her. She would kneel among the furs, naked, her bottom lifted to the chief’s thrusts as she sucked on her supposed rescuer’s erection, thoroughly used as they chatted casually of other girls they’d given the same undignified treatment.

  Laura was smiling as she walked, oblivious to everything but the vivid fantasy in her head, so that it was only when she reached her flat did she realise that she’d left her smart leather bookmark on the train. It was only a company one, given out to all junior employees as a blanket Christmas present the year before, and she quickly put her irritation aside, along with her fantasy as she settled down to the mundane tasks of the evening. Smudge needed to be walked, and she had to eat something, if only beans on toast, while she’d also have to iron a fresh blouse for the morning.

  The last detail turned her mind back to work, something she did her best to avoid when not actually in the office. Given what EAS paid her, it was hardly reasonable for them to expect her to devote her free time as well as the regular nine to five, yet that seemed to be what was expected of her, especially by Mr Henderson. ‘Look smart,’ was one of his many watchwords, repeated at every opportunity and underlined with numerous remarks on her appearance and a clothing allowance on top of her PA’s salary. The clothing allowance at least was welcome, although she would have preferred to spend it on something other than designer suits and expensive blouses, at least occasionally.

  Laura bit her lip as she considered her boss. His comments had never crossed the line into anything that could be considered harassment, and yet the implica
tion that her looks were important to her job was clear. The little approving nods when she made a special effort with herself, the way he introduced her to clients as if showing off a trophy, even the way he’d positioned their desks so that she had to walk the full width of the office for every tiny thing, all of it suggested that a major part of her work was to look sexy.

  The worst part of it was that in different circumstances she wouldn’t have minded. He was tall, powerfully built and quite commanding, all features she liked in a man, so much so that when she had first joined EAS she had allowed herself to fantasise about being taken roughly over his desk. That was before she’d discovered he was married, while on closer acquaintance she had come to realise that there was something faintly sleazy about him, although she could never quite come to grips with what it was.

  As she finished the blouse she remembered her resolve not to allow work to intrude on her private time. They were visiting clients in the morning, a Peterborough firm who wanted to upgrade their ancient oil insulated switchgear to SF6 gas. Mr Henderson had stressed the importance of proper preparation, but then he always did and the situation with Evangeline Tarrington was far more interesting than any amount of switchgear.

  Now a little tired but feeling pleasantly lazy, Laura turned on her bath, pouring a liberal portion of oil into the stream from the hot tap so that she could already smell the hot jasmine scent as she went to her bedroom to undress. The little ritual of dealing with her clothes was soon complete and she turned back to her book, eager to discover how Mark managed to rescue Evangeline from the clutches of the bandits, as he inevitably would.

  He did, distracting the guards by exploding an old Mills Bomb he happened to have with him on the far side of their camp, rushing in to slit the chief’s tent at the back, extracting Evangeline and make good his escape before anybody even noticed. As he fled he carried her over his shoulder, a thoroughly undignified position that brought a smile to Laura’s face as she imagined herself as the heroine. It was much too early in the book for the couple to do more than share an uncertain kiss, but Laura read on, waiting for the subtle change in the sound of the running bathwater that would tell her it was full enough. To her surprise Mark Frobisher wasn’t making gallant remarks but seemed to be rather cross.

  ‘You little fool!’ Frobisher blustered angrily. ‘You might have got us both killed!’

  Evangeline’s pretty mouth fell open, too shocked by his unexpected wrath to respond. Frobisher shook his head, his expression setting in a determined scowl as he appeared to reach a decision. He sat down on the running board of the great Bentley.

  ‘Come here,’ he growled, commandingly.

  Evangeline obeyed, unable to do otherwise. Frobisher reached out, taking her gently but firmly by the wrist to pull her in to his body. Her maiden modesty welling strong in her bosom, Evangeline struggled against him, although her true desire was to yield. He was too strong for her in any event, pulling her close with ease, but not for the intimacy of a kiss. Rather, Evangeline found herself drawn forcibly down across his lap and, as her clothing was adjusted behind, her mouth had come open in astonished outrage. She was to be spanked.

  Laura’s mouth had also come open in astonishment and outrage. It was not at all what she’d been expecting. Normally the hero and heroine didn’t even kiss until the fourth or fifth chapter, while she had invariably had to fill in all the more juicy details for herself. Not this time.

  She read the piece again, and a third time, enjoying the little thrill of indignation the words gave her. That wasn’t how heroes behaved, not normally. They were supposed to be dashing and chivalrous, a little brusque perhaps, or strong and silent, but never the sort of raving pervert who’d get off on spanking a woman’s bottom. Then again, there was no suggestion that he was doing it for his enjoyment. On the contrary, Evangeline had deliberately eluded her chaperone, allowing Lord Jasper to kidnap her. Then she’d failed to escape during a drive of several hundred miles during which there had been several opportunities to contact the authorities.

  All this was pointed out to Evangeline while her bottom was smacked. There wasn’t the slightest hint that Mark was doing anything other than providing some badly needed discipline to a spoilt brat. There was nothing remotely sexual in his actions, except in that it meant he saw Evangeline’s bare bottom, certainly nothing perverse, but the same could not be said for the sharp thrill the scene gave Laura.

  She was trying to push it from her mind as she hurried to the bath, which was now in danger of overflowing. Masculine confident men who knew what they wanted were one thing, but to be turned across a man’s knee and have her bottom smacked was so far beyond the boundaries of acceptable behaviour that she felt as if she was a traitor to her sex just for reading about it, while to surrender to the warm need between her thighs was unthinkable.

  It was also irresistible. From the moment she slid into the hot scented water she knew she was going to have to play with herself. The fantasies she’d deliberately allowed to build up in her head, her sense of gentle tiredness, the knowledge that nobody could catch her and nobody would ever know, all conspired to make her need too strong, and yet even as she allowed one hand to slip between her thighs and the other to one breast she was determined that whatever thoughts in her head at the moment of climax they would not involve having her bare bottom smacked as she was held down across a man’s lap.

  Evangeline had been bare bottomed too, of that Laura was certain. The words of Taken to Turkey were coy, but there could be no mistaking the implication of the expression ‘adjusted behind’. Mark Frobisher had bared Evangeline Tarrington’s bottom. Laura gave a shiver and her fingers began to work between the lips of her sex as she imagined how it would feel – the helplessness, the indignation, the shame – as her skirt was lifted up over her legs and around her hips, exposing the seat of her knickers to the man’s view, to the utter bastard’s view. No, that wasn’t fair, because she’d have deserved it, just as Evangeline had.

  In no way would that have lessened the awful feelings, and they would have grown ten times worse when the time came to have her knickers taken down, a hundred times worse, unbearable, and yet she’d be trapped, held helpless across a strong man’s knees, bare and wriggling and silly as her bottom was stripped for the final, intolerable outrage of being spanked.

  Laura’s back arched, her lips already parted in rising excitement, only for her to shake herself, forcing the disturbing thoughts from her head. It just wasn’t right, not to imagine herself being handled that way. Fifty years had passed since the book was written, fifty years in which women had fought free from the sort of crass, macho bullshit represented by the scene in the book. Yet even as she struggled to think of something more acceptable to her personal values a sneaky little voice was whispering to her, and it was only a fantasy after all, that really being taken from behind across the seat of a commuter train wasn’t so very much more dignified, and that nobody need know in any case.

  Again she began to massage her sex, trying to imagine how Darcy might treat her if they were ever in a carriage alone, one of her favourite fantasies. It was always much the same, his voice as he told her she was to be stripped, allowing no room for refusal, his hands on her body as he peeled off her clothes, the feel and taste of his cock in her mouth, the curt order to kneel on a seat and lift her bottom, not for spanking, but so that he could enter her from behind, no, not for spanking … not for spanking.

  Laura gave in, a low moan escaping her lips as she surrendered to what she really needed to think about. It didn’t even much matter who did it, just so long as he was big, and male, and took no nonsense as he levered her across his legs, stripped her bottom bare and spanked her. She cried out as she started to come, playing the same awful sequence over and over in her head, bent over, bared, and smacked. Her legs had come high and open, her hand was locked tight to her breast, squeezing so hard her nails had dug into her flesh, but she was unable to stop herself, her fingers working o
n the sensitive bud between her lips as peak after peak tore through her, stopping only when she could bear it no more.

  With that she collapsed back into the bath, her breath coming out in a long sigh of absolute satisfaction even as the inevitable feelings of shame welled up inside her, made worse by the fact that she knew full well it wouldn’t be the last time. Never before had she experienced an orgasm as intense.

  2

  LAURA STILL FELT guilty in the morning, but that did not dispel an underlying excitement for what she had discovered. For once she hurried, going through her morning ritual with considerably less care than Mr Henderson would have expected for such an important day, but his intrusion into her thoughts only bred resentment. She was his from nine in the morning until five in the evening, with an hour for lunch, and he had no right to expect her to waste what little precious time was left. That, or as much as was possible, she intended to devote to Taken to Turkey, largely in the hope that there would be another spanking scene, this time described in rather more detail.

  She was disappointed, although not entirely. Mark Frobisher had no sooner dealt with Evangeline’s bottom than he was neatly coshed from behind by Lord Jasper Mauleverer, who turned out to have watched the entire procedure. That was quite exciting for Laura, with the added humiliation of an audience, but Lord Jasper proved to be a pretty poor villain, enjoying the view and making a few intimate remarks to set Evangeline’s upper cheeks aflame as well as her lower ones, but completely failing to take proper advantage of her dishevelled state.

  He did force her to walk behind him on a string and with her hands tied behind her back as they returned to his car, but that was plainly necessary, as he’d already tied her up once when he first kidnapped her. Both scenes were good, but fell well short of the spanking, while the ensuing car chase through the Sredna Gora mountains provided no more than conventional thrills. Only when Mark Frobisher’s Bentley overheated did things start to look up, with Lord Jasper declaring that it was about time Evangeline paid for all the trouble she’d caused before giving a single laugh of unspeakable malevolence.