CHAPTER 1 - THE CONTRACT

 

The girls had arrived first, they always did, that was part of the arrangement, travelling together from the airport in a hired station wagon after flying in from half a dozen different directions. They shared in common only the Internet, which had brought them, and the men they were to meet, together.

Following the directions that Stephen had put in the e-mail arrangements for the week, they drove out to the secluded beach house. Its back was toward low hills and Pine woods, its front boldly looked out eastwards over the sparkling Atlantic. After carrying their belongings inside, they checked out the accommodation and made their selections from the dozen principal bedrooms the house boasted. There were at least three hours before the men might be expected, the gap designed to let them settle in and make such dispositions as they felt most comfortable with.

They didn't know the men's addresses, only e-mail or even if the names they used were their real ones or simply noms de guerre. Well, it didn't signify, not all theirs were their given names either and the girls kept their real identities and addresses secret, even from each other. They were all career girls in some way, business, the arts, law, even a relatively senior officer in the army. Perhaps young women would be a more politically correct description, for their ages ranged from twenty-one to a startlingly beautiful thirty-eight but, in the circumstances they had chosen for themselves, such pedantry was inappropriate.

What they shared with each other, and the men, was a need for occasional innovative, but totally non-committed, sex. Their careers were, for each of them, exacting and took up all their time and energy and there was no room for conventional relationships, with all their demands and obligations, but they were human males and females, in prime biological condition, and that biology would not be gainsaid.

They had found each other through a helpful website that provided facilities for like-minded people to hear each other's calling, then move out to form their own tight little group who could exchange confidences and ideas, finally setting up a rendezvous for meetings off their home turf.

The first one had been for a short weekend, six men staying in one motel, six women in another, nearby but separate. That had only been necessary once. After that, they booked six rooms in one place, but the girls got there first and called the shots. That was eighteen months ago and they'd met nearly every month since, including a full week's holiday by the sea and another in a mountain resort. This was the third full holiday and one of the men had come up with a secluded beach house in New England where they could roam freely and forget about the outside world.

The rooms selected to their satisfaction, they came together in the lounge to plan their strategy for the week. Carol brought with her the long sports holdall that she'd carried in amongst her other gear.

"What you got in there, Carol?" Pamela asked at once. "Booze, I hope, and perhaps a little dope."

"Yeah, nothing like a few lines of coke to get you in the mood," Kathy agreed. "I juice on that stuff."

"Scotch for me," Fiona put in. "Though I'd settle for bourbon at a pinch."

"Sorry, girls," Carol said. "No dope this time, no booze. But I've something else will put a sparkle in your eye."

"What's that, then?"

For answer, Carol heaved the bag up onto the low table between them, letting it drop heavily onto the teak top.

"Look for yourselves," she said, opening the bag with a dramatic flourish.

Five heads of all shades from blonde to the glossy black of Asia bent over the long slot.

"Jeeze! Carol." "You can't be serious!" "Oh my Gawd!" "Great Balls of Fire!" "Hey! Hang on a moment. We're all liberated ladies here."

If she'd hoped for a reaction, she was not disappointed, though it was not yet quite so committed as she intended it should be. The last remark had come from Julia, the eldest of the group, a woman used to authority and leadership, but content in the private retreat of their clandestine meetings to relax and let Carol, a couple of years her junior, take the lead.

"And don't we know it," Carol replied. "Isn't that why we come here? So that we can lay down the burden of being in charge for a while and relax like human females?"

"Guess so," Julia admitted. "But this ...?" She waved her hand vaguely over the bag and its contents.

"Now just think about it, everybody," Carol invited. "You only want the other because the sex doesn't last long enough for you. What I have here will spin it out all day, and all night too," she added with a grin.

It took her a while, they were very hesitant to start with, but gradually she won them round. When even Julia was convinced, there were no more doubts. They still had an hour to make their preparations before the men arrived.

The men were rather older, the youngest twenty-five, the eldest a fit and tanned forty; the women had ensured that the conventional balance of ages between the sexes would be kept. They came into the lounge to find no sign of the women, save a sheet of paper lying on the coffee table in the centre of the room, where they couldn't miss it, and a bowl containing six keys with numbered tags.

"So that's their game, this time?" Roger smiled. "Pick a room key, and see what you've got for Christmas?"

"Don't look like room keys to me," Peter commented, lifting one out to examine it. "More like padlocks, I'd say."

"Perhaps we'd better read the note before we jump to conclusions," Stephen suggested, picking up the single sheet of paper.

He read for a moment, his eyebrows lifting, then gave a small whistle of amazement. He passed the document on to Andy without commenting on the contents.

"I think we should none of us say anything until everyone has had a chance to read it," he said. "Then we can all decide together what to do about it."

One by one they read it through, it did not take long, and passed it on, their faces registering every shade of astonishment, usually mingled with lust. The message was short but succinct.

 

~ We, the undersigned, of our own free will, and without any coercion, offer ourselves totally and completely for a period of seven days, to be used and treated entirely as our Masters decide.

We promise to be absolutely obedient, truthful and submissive at all times and in all matters, including sex in any form, and may be punished at the discretion entirely of the Masters, for any perceived failure to give complete satisfaction. Since we have undertaken to serve for seven days, any plea to be released earlier is invalid, and automatically constitutes such a failure to please, and liable to penalty.

Such punishments may take any form, but corporal punishment is specifically included.

Our submission and fortitude may be tested by any means thought suitable, including pain, humiliation and restraints.

In accepting this submission, the Masters undertake to keep us safely, and to protect us from permanent injury or disfigurement, nor to ask us to do anything that would lay ourselves open to criminal charges. They are not under any other obligation to us.

 

CAROL- KATHY - PAMELA - FIONA - JULIA - BARBARA

 

When they had all finished, Lloyd said softly, "Holy Cow! I don't believe I'm seeing this."

The others looked equally struck sideways by the proposal.

"What do we do now?" Andy asked of no one in particular.

After his initial show of astonishment, Stephen had remained calm. Maybe age and experience were on his side.

"I suggest," he said quietly, "that we go and find the girls and see what state they're in. I think I can make a pretty good guess."

It didn't take them long to find them. There was one in each bedroom, naked, her wrists trapped in handcuffs, secured by a chain and a padlock to a hook above the bathroom door. Their feet were spread wide by broom handles, to which their ankles were fastened by nylon stockings. They made no acknowledgement of the men's presence as they entered one room after another, which was hardly surprising. Each girl was gagged with her own panties, held in her mouth with a stocking tied round her head. Similar means rendered her sightless, though two pairs of pants were needed under each stocking. As a finishing touch, each girl wore a Walkman stereo player hung about her neck, the headphones clamped over her ears, playing a continuous loop of tape on which 'white noise' cut out all other sounds around her. Deaf, blind and speechless, they waited helplessly for their master's will, the strain of their position showing in the braced calves supporting the reaching toes on which they stood, the bunched muscles of their thighs, the ridges of the stiffened spine and stressed shoulders. That was not all they displayed behind. Across each pair of clenched buttocks showed, red and angry, four thick, freshly pulsing, welts.

Not totally deprived of sensory perception though. Touch was still working, as Stephen demonstrated by laying his hand on the bare rounded belly of the first naked girl they discovered. She reacted violently, not from any lack of obedience, but from surprise, having lost all sense of time and space during the twenty minutes she had stood there, since they'd heard the first distant noise of the approaching car coming over the ridge a mile away and had fled to take up position. The relaxed convex belly shrank into muscled flatness, but there was little other movement and no sound possible for her.

It was Kathy's smooth stomach that had felt the touch and instinctively spasmed. As the flood of sensation overwhelmed her, nearly depriving her of consciousness in its intensity, she recognised the truth of what Carol had advised them. How this would be the route to a level of excitement and ecstasy that conventional sex could never quite approach, or in any way sustain.

Carol hadn't won her point without a lot of heart searching on the part of her hearers. They were all women with authority and responsibilities, used to having to direct and command others and it had taken nearly two hours before their basic intellectual honesty forced them to face the facts of their sexual needs and, one by one, accept the validity of her arguments, agreeing to bind themselves for the week in total submission to the men.

The sex had been the easiest to accept, that was what they had come here for and the idea of obedience very rapidly struck a chord with most, as, at Carol's urging, they had looked deeply and honestly into their own psyches and the state of their emotional lives; the constant strains and stresses they were subject to in their working lives and the freedom that total submission to another's will, paradoxically, conferred. If one was denied all free will, all decision making, if one need only do what was spelt out by another, there was no need to struggle any more. One just lay back in a warm sea and let the water carry one where it would.

The physical side was the last to be accepted. The requirement to allow corporal punishment. Modern thought had made the subject taboo, not only banishing the use of the cane from the schoolroom and home, but even the open discussion of the subject was effectively banned by the guardians of public thought, any questioning condemned instantly as deviant. Moreover, there was a gap of a generation or more between these women and those who had accepted the rod as a natural part of life, and their unfamiliarity bred fear.

"It's out of the question," Barbara had protested. "No one could expect women to take that sort of punishment. A cane on the bare bottom. It would cripple you!"

"Oh, darling," Fiona laughed, "don't be so naive. Do you really think our grandmothers went through life crippled and cowed? The cane was still used pretty widely in those days when they were at school and the paddle when they pledged to the best sororities in the Ivy League colleges they attended."

"Actually," Pamela supplied, "it still survives in some of the very upper crust schools and the top sororities still keep their paddles, though they are very discreet about it in these days of fundamentalist feminism."

She turned to the younger girl.

"Don't worry, Barbara, no one came to any harm from a good beating. A beating up, yes, but a beating is safe enough."

"It may be safe, but it still frightens me," the girl replied.

"She has a point," Julia admitted, "I've never been beaten either and I don't know if I could take it. What if we panicked and went hysterical when we felt it? The week would be ruined!"

"Why don't we try it then?" Kathy asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Just what I said. Let's try it. Let's each take down our pants and take, say, four across the bare bum."

There had been several shocked gasps and mutters of protest but Carol had picked up the reins of the discussion again.

"Kathy's got a point," she said. "If we take a few strokes each, we'll have some idea of what we're up against before we commit ourselves and we'd be inoculated to some extent against the shock when we first get it in earnest. There's another point, too," she went on. "So far we've only thought about it from our point of view. As usual for modern women, we're taking the men for granted. Now, admittedly, we've got good cause to think that men are always lustful and desire nothing more than to take control of us and use us as they please, but remember this, they've been conditioned, just as we have, to think that using physical force on a woman is wrong. They might have some difficulty in coming to terms with our offer, even thinking it's either an elaborate hoax, or a test of their credentials as 'new' men. If we don't want the week to end before it starts, in humiliating embarrassment and the end of all future outings, we need to convince them of our sincerity. What better way than to display some very genuine stripes on our backsides?"

And so it was agreed and Kathy had dropped her pants for four crisp cuts with a crop from Carol, then each of the others in turn taking their burning quartet, even Carol, who handed the crop to Kathy to receive her own allotment. There were red faces and moist eyes when they, very gingerly, resumed their seats afterwards, but no more doubts about corporal punishment and they had drawn up and signed the pact together, then taken thought about how best to present it to the men. Kathy's presence here, suspended painfully and erotically against the door frame, was the result.

Lost in her little world of pure sensation, the white noise swirling round her head, like the sound of an enormous shell pressed against her ear, a distant magic sea of fearful promise, and frightening potential, Kathy was awakened from half dreams filled with sexual desire and seasoned with the pain of her stressful suspension by the touch of the hand on her belly.

The shock nearly sent her crazy and she squirmed against the hand as it stroked across her stomach, then feathered through the tight curls at her crotch, the fingertips just entering the pouting slit of her vulva. A hot flush swept over her as she felt the slickness of herself, as the digits were wiped on her inner thigh, to add to the stickiness, of which she was only too aware already, trickling a tacky path down the inside of her leg. The hand withdrew, leaving her bereft, an aching hollowness in her groin, and the sea of sensory deprivation closed over her again. Though she could neither see nor hear them, the men had passed next door, to find Julia hanging in her own lost world, her body leaping to the touch of fingers on a ripe and engorged nipple.

Two doors away, Barbara was fighting her own battle against the heady brew of pain and restraint in which she floated. Her toes strained to touch the ground and take some of the weight off her pinioned wrists, the stretched position lifting and thrusting out her firm full breasts. Like Kathy and Julia before her, she felt an electric jolt convulse her body as something, someone, cupped one of those bursting dugs, running a hard thumb over the rigid nipple. The teat seemed to kick under the touch, the spasm arcing directly into her belly, and she moaned through her gag.

Further on, Fiona struggled to contain her own pains and passions as she stood against the door to her bathroom. The hook screwed into the architrave above the door kept her on her toes, like her sister sufferers, but, in her case, the door was closed and her engorged nipples caught on a sharp moulding of the panelled door. In the thirty minutes that had elapsed since she had been hung here, she had been in constant motion, the sexual stirrings up and down her body giving her no rest and her teats had rubbed themselves sore on the wooden section. She made no attempt to avoid the contact. On the contrary, she pressed herself, as best she might, against the unfeeling timber, welcoming the pain in her breasts for giving her something to cling to in the unreality of the sightless, soundless world in which she hung.

In the next room, Pamela hung in her own insensible world. When the men reached her on their tour of inspection, she felt a hand slide between her thighs and instinctively clenched her bottom cheeks. Her moan of surprise at the unexpected touch was accentuated by the answering protest from her anus. When she had been preparing herself for her suspension, she had added an extra refinement of her own, something she had concealed from her sisters in the adventure, but which, in the seeming hours that she had waited, had pricked her conscience, as well as her sphincter, bringing a resolve to confess all when it was over and ask them to judge and punish her.

While she was waiting for Carol to come and set her chain over the hook, making her strain up on her toes, she had crouched and inserted a tampon soaked in pepper oil into her rear dimple, knowing the irritant substance would burn and worry all the while it was there, the fiery bite renewed in strength every time she clenched her sphincter on it, expressing fresh juice.

The men had found Carol in the last room, two six-inch flower pots on their sides behind her. As unofficial leader of the women, at least until they were accepted by the men, then they would have only masters, for leadership is prohibited among slaves, she had helped each to take her place against her own hook, taking up the slack in a length of chain until the girl was stretched up on her toes, the muscles in back and thighs showing how she strained to keep the weight off her wrists and share it with her toes, her feet arched, as if on imaginary four-inch heels. With the girl on her rack, she'd snapped in a padlock to hold the chain but, when it had come to her own turn, she had had to improvise, standing on the two pots, her ankles already parted by the broomstick tied to each with the soft strength of a stocking.

Carol had made some preliminary tests and set her own chain and padlock to where it would, she thought, hold her in as tight and strict a suspension as any of the others, and draped it over the hook. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she'd drawn up her parted legs, taking her weight on her wrists, and kicked away the pots, which had rolled out of reach on their sides. Stretching out her legs, she reached for the ground. For a moment she panicked, thinking she had miscalculated, then felt the carpet under her bare, scrabbling toes. Only just in reach, but enough to take some of her weight, so long as her calves and ankles lasted out; enough to ease the aching bite of the metal cuffs into her wrists. It hurt, but it was not her only hurt. She'd laid into Kathy's bottom cheeks with deliberate severity, the exercise was not going anywhere if it wasn't full powered and she needed to set an example for the others and Kathy had returned her strokes with interest. The four purple welts in her backside throbbed and burned. When alien fingers touched their soreness, tracing the thick inflamed ridges, she nearly went out of her mind in shock. No, she hadn't deceived her sisters. This was going to work.

When they had established that six girls occupied six rooms in identical situations, each testing one for reaction to tactile stimulation of belly, breast or vulva, the men retired to their own conclave, in the same lounge where the women had spent an anxious two hours deciding whether to commit themselves to the challenge that Carol offered them. Surprisingly, the men had as many, though very different, doubts.

The first and most obvious question in their minds was expressed violently, was this some kind of elaborate hoax? It did not take long to dispose of that. As Stephen pointed out, the signatures on the pact were genuine enough and so were the six naked and bound bodies they had found suspended in the bedrooms.

"Besides," Dwight declared, firmly, "they didn't fake those cuts on their bums. I ran my fingers over the last ones. They weren't no lipstick lines, I can assure you. That gal took a good four from a cane or crop, or the like."

"That's all very well, but I still can't believe that these women really want this." It was Peter letting his doubts show. "These are not little wimps or soft girls, these are tough cookies, used to being someone and giving orders. I just don't believe they're the type."

Stephen smiled at him indulgently.