Shameful Influence (Bound for Service Book 7) Read online

  Nora: Spin this out. Look at skin temp

  Eric smiled as he followed the assessor’s suggestion and saw that although the humidity between Sally’s legs hadn’t reached a level close to peak, her skin temperature had risen past anything previously observed. The governor’s shame had taken very firm hold of her, its grip even stronger than Eric had hoped.

  That development presented a chance at making a good deal of progress in this first session with her, but it also carried some risks if it went too far. Spinning this moment out made all the sense in the world.

  “I...” Sally repeated, her voice barely audible despite the excellent microphone in her phone and its enhancement by the even better one in the ceiling.

  “I know how hard this is,” Eric said, adopting a much gentler tone.

  On his screen, Sally’s forehead furrowed deeply between her perfectly shaped red-gold eyebrows. The number in the upper right went to 8.

  “I don’t...” Sally tried, visibly frustrated, and apparently all the more so because she had managed to get a second word out but still had nowhere to go with it.

  “I know you don’t want to, sweetheart,” Eric said, backing off the tenderness just a little and adding a hint of steel to his voice. Sally started at the term of endearment, and then bit her lip in a manner so unconsciously wanton Eric felt his cock leap in his jeans. He clenched his teeth slightly, his personal self-reminder not to fall for a target, but damn, one couldn’t deny that the governor of Madison was an objectively pretty wonderful girl of the kind with whom, in real life, he wouldn’t have minded starting something.

  “No...” Sally said, shaking her head. “I mean, I don’t, but...”

  Eric saw one of the lines that ran along the bottom of his screen rise sharply. He nodded to himself as the icon by Nora’s name showed she had started to type again, almost certainly to call his attention to that same yellow line, the skin galvanics that presaged resistance—the defiance that came, according to legend, with Sally’s red hair.

  The resistance I’m looking for, Eric thought, feeling his mouth quirk with the special pleasure of dominating an intelligent, strong-willed girl. Plus, dominating a young woman whose house has Governor’s Mansion on a big sign out front comes with its own unique enjoyments.

  He nudged her further, watching the yellow line continue to rise.

  “But what, sweetheart? Did you mean to say that you don’t know who I think I am?”

  A flash from the text window.

  Nora: nice

  Sally stood up at her desk. Eric’s smile broadened a little at the sign that her subconscious had begun to work very much in his favor. The young governor thought, of course, that she had stood up in order to feel more in charge of the strange, troubling situation. In fact, the bodily impulses that had caused her to rise to her feet had a great deal to do with the rising humidity between her thighs shown by the blue line at the bottom of Eric’s screen.

  “No,” she said, though her face told him that indeed she had meant to say those precise words or something very much like them. “I meant...” Her blue eyes narrowed, and her little breasts heaved distractingly in the college t-shirt, their nipples tenting the gray fabric enticingly. Eric wished he could get his hands on her sweet little body tonight, rather than having to postpone Sally’s first in-person sexual training until the situation had time to develop further.

  But good things come to those who wait, he thought, doing his best to ignore the hardness between his own thighs. Sally Donaldson will be very ready to serve me, the first time I take those little nipples between thumb and forefinger—the first time she kneels for my pleasure and learns to take a cock deep in her sweet, soft mouth.

  Sally’s file, despite the naughtiness of the pictures her law-school boyfriend had taken, showed a girl who had kept her sexual innocence nearly intact. The assessors’ report, authored at the Institute by Nora, indicated the cause and the effect in a few incisive sentences.

  Sally is an alpha-plus, in Institute terminology: a repressed submissive whose mind recoils from her sexual needs unless intoxicated in some disinhibiting way. Her conduct with her boyfriend showed that quite neatly: under the influence of mild recreational drugs, she seems to have tried very hard to maneuver her first sexual partner in such as a way as to dominate her. His inexperience insured that beyond taking the pictures he had little idea of how to gratify her desires—probably in fact little interest in doing so. In turn, Sally, disgusted with herself upon the return of her inhibitions, broke up with him, telling herself that he had demanded she do the (to her) shameful things in the pictures. She has not had a sexual relationship since, or—in the period since we began to gather continuous data—engaged in any identifiable auto-erotic practice. Our best estimate says that her sexual experience consists of egalitarian intercourse with that boyfriend on perhaps four or five occasions.

  ‘Egalitarian intercourse’ represented the assessors’ term for what Eric would usually call vanilla. Sally didn’t know what it felt like, for example, to kneel before a man and take his hardness between her lips when told to do so... or to bend over the side of her bed and reach back to spread the cheeks of her pert, well-whipped bottom so that her dominant lover could get her ready for butt-fucking.

  Yet, Eric thought, watching the yellow line of her galvanics and the blue line of her pussy’s humidity both go up as if in a wicked partnership to undo her.

  “I meant to say that I don’t intend to let this idiotic joke go any further,” Sally said. Fire flashed in her eyes, to the extent that those sweet blue orbs could manifest such irate heat. “I will pay you whatever you need. I have connections who will supply the funds, and—”

  “Check the Cheatsheet,” Eric interrupted in a hard, matter-of-fact tone, clicking Publish on the post he had ready in a window on the left side of his screen. The editors of the Northern State Press didn’t even know who wrote their infamous gossip column; they just knew how much advertising revenue it generated.

  This just in, the top of the blog now read. Madison is the state, and the issue seems to go way up the food chain.

  On the video feed, Eric watched Sally’s face go pale after she had refreshed the page. She cradled the phone against her face, the crease in her brow seeming almost painful.

  “You...” she tried, now. “You can’t. Please.”

  “I just did, sweetheart,” Eric said. “And it will only inconvenience me a little if I have to destroy your career to teach you a lesson.”

  This wasn’t true, strictly speaking: it would pose a serious problem for the Guard’s efforts to save civilization if they failed to develop Sally Donaldson as the asset they needed in Madison. Eric knew, however, from the data on his screen, that tonight’s lesson had started off well. The chance of failure looked remote.

  Sally needed to feel, though, that she had no choice, and this last nudge accomplished that perfectly.

  “Please,” she repeated in a whisper.

  “Go to the center of your office and stand on your special rug, Sally. Put the phone on the coffee table and turn on the floor lamp so I can see you better. Then take off your shirt. Once your clothes are off we can talk about business.”

  Chapter Three

  Sally didn’t understand. Why did her feet start to move, even as her face turned from side to side as if she could detect the camera someone must have planted in her office?

  She supposed she could tell herself that she wanted to find the device, destroy it—that she had begun to move in a way that probably looked like obedience to the asshole at the other end of the phone by mere coincidence.

  She knew that wasn’t true, though. The idea that she had put the phone down on the coffee table and tapped the speaker button because she needed to buy herself some time, rather than allow her career to end in this stupid, mortifying way, gained a little more traction. Her fingers found the switch on the floor lamp, and its warm light cast a pool of illumination on the rug with the year-old great sea
l of Madison. She took the three steps necessary to stand in its center.

  Again she looked around her, above her, below her, trying to persuade herself that she had some hope of locating the camera.

  “That’s it, Sally,” said the man’s voice from the coffee table. “Shirt off. Let me see those adorable little breasts.”

  I’m buying time, she told herself firmly. He already has pictures that are way more embarrassing.

  Those photos, of course, didn’t show her taking her clothes off atop the great seal of her state, but that hardly made much difference at this point.

  I’m buying time. There is no part of me that is doing anything but buying time.

  The words of the man on the phone rang in her ears. Those adorable little breasts. A thrill of shame had gone through her when she heard them—and again went through her, like an aftershock, as she remembered them, repeated them to herself. He wanted to see her adorable little breasts.

  Sally had always felt so ambivalent about her breasts since they had sprouted and grown in her eighteenth year, somehow ashamed both of their growth and of their littleness. That night with Joe Barrila, the night of the pictures, she had worn a lacy white bra. Joe had told her to cup her little tits in her hands and show them to him, their tiny nipples pointing at him through the lace. He had told her to reach one hand over and pinch her nipple, move the lace with the fingers of the other hand, show him how naughty she could be in her wicked lingerie.

  Feeling her forehead crease deeply, Sally put her hands to the hem of her t-shirt and raised it swiftly over her head. As the fabric covered her vision, she concentrated on turning all her fear and confusion into righteous anger. She hoped that the defiant face she showed, once the shirt was off and she stood in her pajama bottoms with her hands at her sides, told the man how little she cared what he thought about her breasts or about anything else.

  “Drop the shirt, Sally,” he said matter-of-factly. “Then pull down your pajamas and your panties.”

  Sally felt her nostrils flare. Her anger seemed to grow with the sensation, so she tried to flare them wider. Then, suddenly, something else took hold in her mind, from somewhere else deep and dark in her thoughts, and then she saw herself as if from outside, topless and trying desperately to pretend, with her slightly right-tilted nose, that it didn’t matter.

  All the blood in her body seemed to rush to her cheeks, except the part that refused, to her dismay, to leave the region below her waist, and seemed to warm her there more with every shameful moment. Her hands, despite her conscious effort to keep them by her sides, flew to her chest, to cover the little breasts the man on the phone had said he found adorable. She still had her t-shirt in her right hand, and now she stretched it across her front as if she could hide her stiff little nipples from view.

  “Sally, sweetheart,” said the voice from the coffee table, its tone mingling patronizing concern with impatience, “you need to learn to follow my instructions.”

  “What do you want?” Sally hissed, clutching the t-shirt to her chest more tightly.

  “First of all, I want you to call me sir,” he said, sounding more amused than frustrated, now. “Then I want you to do as I’ve told you, and take off the rest of your clothes. That will show me that you’re learning.” Now the voice grew sharper. “Say yes, sir, now, Sally Donaldson, or I’m going to release a picture to the Cheatsheet. Maybe just one of the ones of you in your pretty lingerie.”

  Sally closed her eyes, grasping the fabric of the shirt very tightly. Her heart raced.

  I have no choice. No choice.

  “Yes, sir,” she whispered. She categorically refused even to think about what saying the words did to her body. She pushed even farther back the memory that she had said them to Joe Barrila the night he took the pictures.

  “Good girl,” he said. “My name is Master Eric, Sally. Go ahead and do as I’ve told you, now. I want to see all of my good girl.”

  Sally took a deep ragged breath through her mouth. She didn’t open her eyes. It seemed just a little easier not to have to see her office, even though behind her closed lids an image of a red-haired girl taking off all her clothes still hovered.

  The t-shirt dropped from her fingers, and for a moment she stood holding her little breasts. To her horror, she found that her fingers began to move gently, rhythmically, as if soothing herself there.

  “You can play with your tits when I tell you to, Sally,” the voice—Master Eric’s voice—said.

  Oh, God. How can he... how can he call himself that?

  “If you do as I say, I’m going to have you play with your cunt, too, as a reward after you show it to me.”

  Sally’s hands flew away from her breasts. They hovered in front of her tummy for an instant.

  “I...” she said in a voice that sounded terribly shaky to her own ears. “I don’t... do that.” And I don’t use the c-word, and I don’t let anyone else use the c-word in my hearing.

  “It looks like you did it for your boyfriend, though,” Master Eric said, the amused note returning to his voice. “Look at those naughty fingers you’ve got up your little pussy in this one I’m looking at now. And you’re going to town on your clit in this other one.”

  “He made me,” Sally hissed, opening her eyes and looking around once again, in vain, as if she could appeal to someone’s possibly sympathetic face. “That’s why I broke up with him.”

  “If you say so, Sally,” Master Eric said. “It doesn’t make much difference to me, because you’re going to play with yourself for me whether you like it or not. I need to start training you for your new role.”

  “My new what?” The blood came and went in pulses of heat that matched her flaming cheeks to her racing heart.

  “Do as I said, sweetheart, and I’ll tell you.” His voice sounded bored, now. “Or don’t.”

  That Or don’t froze Sally’s blood. He would release the pictures, and it seemed he didn’t care about the consequences, that he could find some other way to accomplish whatever evil he had planned. He didn’t mind stomping the brilliant career of Governor Sally Donaldson into the ground, casually, on the way. Whoever Master Eric might be, he would move on and find a different girl to bend to his sick, shameful will—maybe one who could admit that she had dampened her panties when he told her to take off her clothes.

  “Wait,” she said. Then, trying to recover a shred of defiance, “I don’t. He made me.”

  “And I’m making you now, Sally,” Master Eric said with finality. “Last chance. I think I’ll just send the one of you with your finger in your butt-hole and the big smile that says you know how naughty it is to touch yourself that way, but you like it anyway.”

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, seeing the picture in her mind, tummy turning over at the imaginary sight and the idea of an unseen stranger looking at it right now. Her thumbs found the waistband of her pajama bottoms, worked inside the elastic of her black bedtime panties.

  “Oh, no,” she repeated. “Please. I don’t.” She sounded to herself as if she didn’t even mean to beg the man who called himself master for a respite. Her voice seemed intended to provide some tiny reassurance to Sally herself that she didn’t pull her panties down because a man told her to, that she never would—that she hadn’t, for Joe Barrila, though the truth of that night contradicted what she had just said to Master Eric.

  As she murmured the words, though, her hands pulled down her panties inside her pajama bottoms, and the warm air of her office, set to seventy degrees thanks to Madison’s abundant geothermal energy, flowed between her legs and over her backside in a way it shouldn’t in an office.

  She dropped the garments once she had them down to her knees and they pooled around her feet. Her instinctive, reflexive modesty sent her hands in front and behind, to cover her pussy and her bottom, before she even straightened up. Part of her knew that would only give Master Eric the pleasure of telling her to uncover those private places for him, but Sally found she couldn’t help
it: a girl shouldn’t be naked in the governor’s office, atop the great seal. Above all, a girl shouldn’t be naked there if she herself were the governor.

  “Kick your clothes away,” the voice said from the coffee table.

  Even that movement, which Sally thought shouldn’t have mattered, sent a thrill of mortification through her whole body because of how terribly conscious she felt of the motion of her thighs against each other. The awkwardness of striving to keep herself covered made the embarrassment even worse.

  The pajama bottoms and panties ended up a little ways past the t-shirt, just off the circular rug that bore the shield and the crest, a polar bear and a pine tree the most prominent symbols of Madison’s fresh new potential.

  “Now I’m sure, Governor,” Master Eric said, emphasizing her title with the utmost irony, “that you don’t think I’m going to let you keep your hands there. Put them on your head.”

  Sally chewed on her lower lip, her hands trembling in front and behind. Her chest heaved with her rapid breathing. For a long moment she thought she simply wouldn’t be able to comply; something about the idea of the posture the voice had demanded involved too much shame.

  But then she saw again in her mind’s eye the last picture he had mentioned, the most shameful one of all. The rational part of her mind tried to tell Sally that the situation presented a logical equation—this shame wasn’t greater than that shame: to put her hands on her head and show Master Eric, wherever he might be, her pussy and her bottom wasn’t as shameful as having the whole world see the photograph of Governor Sally Donaldson with her finger up her anus, smiling shyly at the camera as if to say, I know I’m a bad girl but it feels so good.

  But deeper down, in the irrational places that seemed to get stronger the more Sally tried to pretend they didn’t exist, she knew no equation applied. Her hands moved up and away from her intimate charms, as a Victorian gentleman might have called those naughty places, because the man on the phone said Sally had to show them. Master Eric wanted to see her little pussy, and Sally had to put her hands on her head so that he could.