Naughty Baby

Chapter One-1

Chapter One

Caught in the Act

I should have known by the crisp click of her heels against the bamboo corridor that it was LuAnn on the warpath—so imprinted in my memory, the solid sound of her approach would haunt me for months. But while that tap tap tapping noise still has the power to evoke every angered refrain that spewed from the woman’s red smudged mouth, it seems strange that on that day that tapping sound didn’t register in my brain cells until it was too late. I’d averted her wrath once before, just two months prior to my fateful reckoning, when she dropped into Tate’s office unannounced, wearing running shoes this time, so we had no advance warning at all. That day we were lucky. She breezed in so fast that she barely noticed that I was crawling on the floor, presumably to pick up a pile of scattered paperclips that Tate hastily threw against the carpet to cover up our crime. In truth I’d been half under his desk with my mouth covering his naked and very erect c**k. I came up with a handful of paperclips in my closed fist and a sincere apology. After casting me a suspicious glare, she brushed me off, announcing that she needed to speak with Tate in private. I was more than happy to oblige. Dodged a bullet, I thought then. But I wasn’t so lucky on the second occasion.

LuAnn threw open her husband’s heavy office door as if she knew what she’d see. There was no hiding the fact of our misbehavior. I was naked and Tate might as well have been. As I recall his pants were at his ankles as he stood behind me, leaning into my naked derriere with one hand squeezing the right ass cheek he’d so meticulously caned just minutes before. Damn, that hurt! But what a sweet hurt it was at the time, the kind that sets off sparks inside the brain, that flusters the senses, that suddenly shoots a spark cuntward, setting off another spectacular series of orgasmic highs. I’d grabbed the edges of the desk on either side, my knuckles white as I tried to handle the horrific tension. I loved every second of that last f**k. But suddenly the sound around me magnified in volume—the tapping heels, the shrieking voice, a door banging back against its hinges. Tate’s wife LuAnn is only five feet two, but she packs more b***h per pound than any woman on earth.

“And you thought I didn’t know!” This didn’t sound like the typical opening salvo in a war that had been in the strategic planning stages for months. The two parties had been staking their territories for as long as I could remember. I tried to stay above their game, wisely keeping my kinky affair with my boss carefully scripted to ‘safe’ days only. Okay, so we’d been getting a little lax in recent weeks. As for me, I got the feeling that I’d been set up; Tate was hoping to get caught, at least on a subjective level. Of course he wouldn’t easily give up a fine ‘piece of ass’ like mine. He loved me for my body: the slender thighs, and perky breasts and toned ass—key physical features in Tate’s book of female assets, although I certainly wasn’t the only female in Chicago with Tate’s ideal form.

Bailing out of the inevitable disaster would have been as simple as ending the affair the day before we were caught—just as we planned to do. We had to ‘lay low’, Tate had told me, while we sat huddled over greasy cheeseburgers in a grimy diner just south of town. Being in public with my boss meant dining in the dirtiest greasy spoons in the city. I agreed we’d cool it for awhile. But the next day, lured by a renewed sense of the verboten, we were back in his office playing risky s*x games. He said he couldn’t give me up. And why would he, when s*x was defined by him, according to him, on his turf, on his whim, in whatever way his imagination would allow. He had the perfect set-up for the s*x he craved, and it would be a big hassle to start over with a new female when he already had me trained.

On the surface, he had a rich trophy wife, the picture perfect family, and a successful advertising company. Underneath the happy façade of marriage and family, his life was in shambles. I knew it. His wife knew it. Even he knew it. It was only a matter of time before one of the three of us in this desperate trio called a halt to the affair. As one would predict, the scene was ugly, from its shocking inception, all the way through the horrid reckoning I was to face, and on to the bitterest of endings, it was ugly.

“What the f**k are you doing here, LuAnn?” Tate’s voice was laced with malice. The sudden shift left me breathless and in the mood to shrink to a few meager inches and crawl into the nearest hole.

Soon as Tate’s d**k slipped from my wet cunt, I split, snatching up strewn articles of clothing and exiting the room through the door on the far side. Once inside Gaines Bradley’s adjoining office, I leaned against the door listening to my life go down the drain as the quarrel between husband and wife escalated to Biblical proportions—I presume. I’m not completely sure how far they went; by the time LuAnn started cataloging my faults, I knew I was history. I had no need to hear the entire debacle go down. Her every word joined the toxic lump inside my belly. Humiliation, anger, total despair...

A lousy night of self-recrimination lay ahead.

Tate called me the following morning. “The best I can give you is two weeks, official.” His voice lowered, as if he feared he was being overheard. “But I’ll add in another couple weeks on my own. It’ll have to be cash. Just one small thing, Claire.”

“What’s that?”

“LuAnn wants you to sign an exit agreement.”

“Exit agreement?”

“No big deal. But you need to come in. This afternoon, about three okay?”

Why did I think I was being railroaded?

Because I knew Tate, and I knew LuAnn.

“Sure.” What else was I going to say? Still in the process of picking my dropped jaw off my kitchen floor, I failed to come up with a suitable wisecrack. The blood drained from my face; in fact, at the time I thought it was completely draining from my body. As soon as the blood was gone, I’d slip to the floor like a broken marionette. I don’t think the reality hit until the moment my limp body hit the seat of the kitchen chair and folded forward, my sobbing eyes wetting the sleeves of my new chartreuse sweater.

I arrived at Larimer & Brittan wearing crisp black and white; strutting through the office in four inch ‘brandname’ shoes that clicked against the eco-friendly bamboo every bit as nastily as LuAnn’s size five stilettos had the day before. Despite the similarities, there was one huge difference between LuAnn and me. She had the power to hire, fire, move heaven and earth, and do whatever she damn well pleased in her husband’s place of work. My bold red ‘f**k me shoes’ could only carry me sexily into my inevitable fate. They had no power on the other side of Tate’s office door where the queen stood waiting for me to appear.

“Imagine, she actually came,” LuAnn remarked with snide disdain as she turned to see me enter in response to Tate’s terse ‘come in.’

He sat obediently behind his desk while she had the rest of the room to display her talents for mockery, artful putdowns and Nazi-style persecution—yes, the woman is really that mean-spirited. Then of course, she was the woman-scorned in this situation. I should have expected as much.

“You have two options, Ms. Lawrence.” I wondered how long she rehearsed the speech. “The document on the right…” she said, referring to the front of Tate’s desk where two crisply printed documents lay side by side, waiting for me. “…establishes your guilt in a scheme to defraud the company…”

“Guilt? Guilt! What the f**k are you talking about!” I snapped. I turned to Tate aghast.

The only thing he could offer me was a defeated shrug. Get a pair of balls, asshole! I would have blurted out, but I was too stunned to make my mouth fall in line with my brain.

He looked at me overtop the reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. Below him a stack of opened files. A ploy to look busy…too busy to fool with a matter as silly as the vendetta currently being played out, while I stood helplessly watching my life go down the drain. He did bother to answer, finally, his voice lowered, each word carefully chosen. “Let’s just say LuAnn’s a master at manipulating data to cast suspicion on you. I don’t know how she came up with her figures, but if you study them carefully, she’ll convince even you of your guilt.”

I stood back, mouth agape. “Suspicion of what? What are you talking about?”

Her smile was sly, while her eyes darted excitedly from me to Tate then back to me.

“That document will be shown to the board. After reviewing the evidence, they’ll unanimously decide to press charges, and you’ll be sent to jail. How sad for you, Claire.” She wasn’t sad at all. “But you do have a choice,” she arched one brow, her smirk so shrewd it seemed a bit cliché. She was proud of her revenge. “The document on the left is your resignation. It comes with a severance package of two weeks pay, half your vacation time, a month on the company medical policy, and,” this was the kicker, “a promise not to blackball you with future employers. Very generous. You sign that, the document on the right will disappear.”

As if I believed that.

My mind began shifting into gear after the long stall. “What’s the catch?”

She sneered at me, lifting her brows and breathing deep as she savored the moment of my demise with haughty triumph. “And what would make you think there’s a catch?” she uttered in a singsong that set my teeth on edge.

I didn’t answer. I knew she’d tell me and she did.

“There is a codicil in the document which gives me permission to seek punitive restitution. It’s quite straightforward, and certainly nothing you haven’t been through before,” her tone darkened and she cast a brief but pointed glance at her husband. “Before you leave this office today, you’ll give yourself over to me for appropriate corporal punishment. Your duplicity, underhanded manipulation and disloyalty will not go unpunished.” She paused, noting my look of horror. “You blanch in horror at what I’m saying, but your arguments have no merit when you willingly relinquish yourself to Tate on his whim. He’s told me plenty about the sadomasochistic trysts you’ve enjoyed this past year. I’m only asking for a little action for myself. And, you’re quite right to assume this is not innocent experimentation. You’re going to walk away from here marked and bruised. You’ll live with the evidence of my power over you until those bruises finally fade and the marks disappear. Too bad your memory of this day will not fade as easily as the physical wounds. You’ll live with your disgrace for a long while. Just imagine…I’ll be on your brain, in your memory banks with my face burned onto your psyche. You’ll never escape me.”

She looked as if she might spit in my face, then she sighed deeply, “So, what will it be, Claire? Sign the document, take your punishment and get on with your life—such as it will be, or see if you can wiggle your way out of the accusations that are documented in my report?”

I felt as if I’d just landed in reality TV, its newest star in the game of pain and humiliation. “You don’t miss a trick, do you?” I wanted to be a million miles from that room, light years into the next millennium, or whatever dimension was waiting beyond our five tangible senses.

“You underestimated my influence in this situation,” she was proud to announce. She wanted to bury me in shame, but at least for one brief moment, I refused to allow her barbs to pile on. Maybe I was too numb to feel at all.

“And maybe you’ve underestimated me,” I came back in an attempt to sound indignant. “I suppose I was a fool to think I could get away from this place without looking this moment, and you, in the face. But now that we’re here, why don’t you just get it over with.”

“You’d like it to be that easy, wouldn’t you?” The sing-song voice was setting my nerves on edge. She shrugged and strolled toward the window with a dramatic flair, then turned back with her eyes moving from my feet to my face, greeting my perplexed expression with a single word. “Strip.”

I must have looked at her blankly because she quickly added, “I imagine that naked has been your customary attire here, so you should feel right at home.”

I shrugged her off and with an air of nonchalance that belied the fear running through my veins, I began removing my clothes.

There was little unique about the next half hour except for the fact that the cane was wielded by her vicious majesty and not the glowering man on the side of the room. I imagined him trying to justify to himself the debacle he was there to witness. That was apparently punishment enough for him. Of course, I wouldn’t know what prices LuAnn would extract from her cheating husband later. He actually looked annoyed. “Let’s get the f*****g thing over,” he would have blurted out if he’d had the courage.

Stripped of my clothes and my dignity, I went over the front of Tate’s desk as I had so many times for him. Seconds later, the b***h’s real fury began to fly.

I expected a simple strapping, paddling, caning, whipping sort of punishment, and that is exactly what I received. She bruised my ass in less than three minutes time with an erratically twisting leather strap that left welts as deep as the ones she laid on later with the cane. She saved the most tender flesh for that vile bamboo rod, delivering a series of painful cuts to the back of my upper thighs. I didn’t dare howl, but I wasn’t exactly silent either. When I got too noisy to suit her, she came on me, yanking my head back by the hair and pulling it far enough so she could slap my face. After that stinging smack, she squeezed my chin between her manicured nails and spewed more venom. “The more you protest, b***h, the more you inspire me. So keep it up, keep squawking, keep making your play for my sympathies. It’s really a delight to hear you whimper. Too bad there’s not a sympathetic bone in my body, none for you at least.” I expected that she’d shove me back down and get on with the business of ravaging my ass, instead, she swiveled to the left with my hair still clutched inside her fist and pushed forward with enough force to propel me over the back of the leather loveseat, which was on the window side of Tate’s desk. I tried to resist, but her hold on me was firm.

“You think I’m done with you? I’m just getting started.”

The positioning on the couch was no accident. If I looked up, my eyes landed squarely on Tate’s weary face. He’d given up the uncomfortable nearness of his desk, retreating to the farthest corner of the room where I suppose he assumed he could safely wait out my ordeal without getting involved. But LuAnn had no intention of letting her cheating husband off so easy. Nor would my suffering be as simple as a well-caned ass.

Over the back of the couch forced my body into a more strenuous bend, accentuating my ass cheeks, my quivering thighs and total vulnerability. Tapping her cane against my behind, she forced me to slide even further forward until my toes finally lifted off the floor. I grabbed hold of the front of the seat in order not to slide forward to the floor. Then I waited as the woman made up her mind what she’d do next. She began my second round of punishment with a dozen sharp smacks of a wooden paddle. As hard as these were, I worried that I’d never survive to see the finish. Following the paddle was a riding crop, delivering blows in a purposely erratic manner that had the tail whipping around my side and cutting into the most tender skin. Once she’d had her fill of that, a flogger laced my backside from my shoulders to the back of my knees. She practically had to climb over my ass to reach my shoulders with her weapon. Then with a suddenness that left me breathless, she pulled off of me and a second later I heard a dreadful whizzing sound, which was quickly followed by a searing heat burned into the scorched flesh of my ass.

I didn’t realize until that moment that my brief stint over the desk was just her way to warm me up, although she’d done nothing in that time to prepare me for the full force of her anger vented on my defenseless body.

It seemed for minutes at a time I’d zone out only to be awakened by the sudden and exhilarating pain of another vicious attack. My grunts and whelps were soon reduced to a constant, steady sobbing. By the time I realized that, I was unable to contain myself. She’d taken me down. There was nowhere left to go; no place, not even in the deep recesses of my own psyche was there a place where I could hide.

LuAnn stopped her attack abruptly, and only in the moment of calm that followed was I able to understand why she was so quick to quit the punishment. Having seen the drizzle of s*x juice sliding down my inner thigh, she had the satisfaction she needed. I could feel her gloating eyes as they stared directly between my legs. What triumph she must have felt realizing that she would get a whole lot more from me than she ever hoped. Her fondest dreams must have been realized in that moment.

I waited to hear the cackle, but a smoother, more melodious voice was there to greet me when I came to from a brief retreat into the realm of my inner world.

Was I making her horny? I wondered as I felt the palm of her hand graze my wounded behind. I could feel the welts as the touch of her hand released waves and waves of erotic heat. Soon, I was wiggling my p***y against the cushion enough for any eye to grasp what I was doing.

Thwack! Something struck my ass, I’m not sure what, but it was enough to make me howl.

“The pleasure is all mine today, harlot,” I heard her say. “I’m not done with you, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you get any satisfaction from my abuse of you. She backed me off the couch enough so that my feet could touch the floor again. Then she pulled me up, clamped my n*****s with clothespins, and pushed me back over the thick cushion. The pinched buds might have been bearable as they were, but with them pressed against the leather couch, pain was unavoidable—ceaseless, throbbing, unavoidable harm had come to me in the form of this lady viper. If the clothespins weren’t enough evidence of her sadistic character, then the thick black strapped-on dildo she shoved in my cunt was. I gazed back just before she entered me, shocked to see the leather crotch piece and the fat silicone prick. She seemed so comfortable as the witchy female Domme that I had to wonder, in my one split second of clarity, if f*****g females—or males—was a regular practice for her. My body should have seized up in panic at the sight of her, but my own arousal was already too engaged to stop. I could have come, I swear I would have—if it hadn’t been for those silly wooden clothespins grabbing at my n*****s.

“Please, this has to stop!” I shrieked. The pain practically punched me in the gut.

“Sure, slut, when it suits me,” was her reply.

Thankfully, the pain eased some and I could manage. LuAnn went on with her rape until she wore me out and I was about to collapse into a heap of tears. I felt her body stiffen behind me, and her mewling cry rose up beyond the noisy chaos in my mind.

She came?

I haven’t a clue, but I suppose she did.

Before I could quite get my bearings, Tate was hustling me out of the office, carrying my clothes in his hand and shoving them and me into Gaines’ empty office. My n*****s were numb from the terrific pinching, and when Tate quickly pulled them off, the blood rushing back into those closed capillaries nearly drove me to my knees.

That was the last time I saw LuAnn, the last time I saw Tate—although he was quick to follow up with the money he promised. He expended a little too much energy being utterly nice about the arrangements that had been made for my severance from the company. Wracked by guilt? In some far corner of his character I’m sure the incident rattled his sense of honor. He liked to think he was an honorable man. That last day should have been the end of his attempts to make something honorable of our regretful finish, however, in the days that followed, he was quite gracious to me whenever we spoke on the phone. I’m sure he adopted the attitude out of fear. LuAnn may have thought she’d triumphed in our battle, but she left a huge question mark roaming the world when I walked out that day. If I wanted to make things messy…

Yes, I might have ruined her, if I wanted to make things messy.

I preferred a clean break.