The Billionaire and the Wedding Planner Read online

  “Emily,” Maria said in calm tone that seemed to say in its very quiet that it was delivering bad news, “there is no extra. You and your bridesmaids drank it all.”

  “Well,” Emily retorted. “I’ll just have to reimburse you for—”

  “That’s not the problem,” Jason said very coldly. “Emily, you embarrassed Priscilla in front of your mother’s friends, and you embarrassed yourself.”

  Tears sprang to Emily’s eyes. “It wasn’t me. It was Heather, giving me that… that stupid—”

  Priscilla spoke, and now her voice sounded disappointed, which seemed much worse than angry. “That wasn’t the embarrassing part. My and your mother’s friends can take a little bit of salaciousness—we can even enjoy it from time to time. What we can’t take, and what I won’t tolerate, is the younger generation of women, who should be spreading their wings as sophisticated young ladies, acting like a bunch of drunken hookers in my living room.”

  Chapter Seven

  Maria could hardly believe she had just heard Priscilla Allerton call her soon-to-be daughter-in-law a drunken hooker. Having seen a great many bridal parties at a great many showers, she herself wouldn’t even have rated Emily’s drunkenness as in the top ten embarrassing incidents, even with the three-pronged vibrator and the comment from the red-headed bridesmaid about the finger up Emily’s bottom.

  But context, she supposed, means everything, and the sheer contrast between the behavior of Emily and her bridesmaids and that of the society ladies in Priscilla’s living room had struck her very forcefully. When they had discovered the discrepancy in the champagne order, and Priscilla had seized upon it instantly with outrage, Maria had known there would be trouble yet again with the Allerton/Easton wedding.

  She also knew that she would probably come in for some of the blame, since people seemed to assume that the wedding planner could somehow magically prevent the bride from consuming the available alcohol. Most of Priscilla’s fury was clearly directed at Emily and Georgia, but Jason, just informed of the circumstances, didn’t seem to have made up his mind yet, and Maria, to her distress, couldn’t stop thinking about the spanking he had given her three weeks ago in her office.

  Maria had told herself in the immediate aftermath of the incident that if letting him indulge his twisted ideas about the disciplining of adult women would save her a little trouble, she could endure it. She wouldn’t have to interact with him much, anyway, and she would just laugh scornfully about the little crush she had nursed before he had decided to take the outrageous step of bending her over and raising her skirt to see the lingerie she hadn’t put on for him exactly.

  But she had thought about it much too much in the intervening time to fail to appreciate that at least for her, Jason’s method had some efficacy. She couldn’t see how she would earn another spanking, since she planned to do her job with complete competence, but Maria had to admit that the way it stayed in her mind, and the way it didn’t, in fact, stop her from thinking about him as eminently crushable, had probably made her more attentive to the needs of this particular wedding.

  Now she found she couldn’t help the way her heart raced as she watched Jason assess the situation with Emily. At least Maria couldn’t be held accountable for the extra champagne; Emily had done that completely on her own.

  “Mother!” Quint said, again defending Emily despite the clear indefensibility of her position. He had good instincts, Maria thought. Despite all the headaches of this wedding, the vibe between bride and groom seemed a good one. They clearly had some communication issues, but so did every couple—the young ones above all. Quint’s instinct to protect his girl, and her basic gratitude for that protection as she faced the adult world, certainly shone through.

  “Drunken hookers is a bit much,” Jason said dryly.

  “You didn’t see them,” Priscilla retorted. “You don’t have to do the work to keep the gossip down.”

  Maria remained silent, but she thought Priscilla was now overreacting. The effect on Emily was immediate, though: her eyes went wide. Gossip, Maria recalled, had been the bane of her mother’s existence. She looked at Georgia, who seemed equally stricken, though also equally unsteady on her feet; the younger sister had clearly consumed even more champagne than the older one, perhaps under the spell of the newness of the experience.

  Jason turned to the younger girl. “Georgia, you should have been telling your sister to ease up on the champagne, instead of getting drunk yourself—especially at your age.”

  Georgia’s eyes filled with tears. “How was I supposed to do that?” she asked. “Emily kept filling everyone’s glasses, and she’s the bride, right?”

  Priscilla looked to Maria, her expression showing some exasperation that the high-priced wedding planner didn’t seem to have any advice to offer.

  Well, actually, Maria did. “You give her something nonalcoholic. We had tons of orange juice for mimosas, and you could have just given Emily a flute with OJ. If it happens again, though…” She shot a nervous glance at Jason, wondering if Emily and Georgia would get spanked for this, and thinking that if they did there probably wouldn’t be a repetition of this incident. “I think that’s probably unlikely…” She had lost her train of thought as the memory of her own spanking came back yet again, but she hastily retrieved it. “If you have to, lie and say there’s no more champagne.”

  Emily looked at Maria a little resentfully, but Priscilla had clearly appreciated the counsel. “Please do remember that, Georgia,” she said.

  The younger girl, her sweetness unsullied by the bridal attitude that currently obscured Emily’s, nodded.

  “Alright,” Jason said. “Emily and Georgia, let’s go home. Quint, are you available this evening?”

  Emily looked sharply at her stepfather, and then at her groom. Maria saw instantly first—on Jason’s face—that the question didn’t pertain to an ordinary friendly occasion like watching a baseball game. Then she saw on Emily’s face that it could only refer to the subject of the consequences for her of the champagne incident: the consequences in fact, Maria realized with a gulp and a hot face, for the bridal backside.

  “Jason, you said I…” Emily uttered cryptically, and then clearly realized she couldn’t really say anything without giving away to Priscilla and Quint precisely what she didn’t want to reveal.

  “I’ve changed my mind after what happened today,” Jason said shortly. “Quint, can you come by after dinner? Eight o’clock?”

  “Sure,” Quint said, obviously a little mystified and looking quizzically at Emily, whose burning face was turned to the carpet.

  * * *

  As Maria finished the job of putting Priscilla’s living room and kitchen to rights, her inability to stop thinking about her own spanking by Jason had as its even-worse alternate a great many wild ideas about what he would say to Quint, and what Quint would do about it. The apparently very real possibility that Emily would receive a spanking over her fiancé’s knee tonight made Maria feel rather lightheaded, and she didn’t want even to think about why until she could think about it alone.

  Nor did she want to think about it outdoors, as she walked back to her apartment in the South End. Nor when she was making herself a salad, or eating it. She couldn’t get the images of Quint’s visit to the Easton home out of her head, but she didn’t have to interrogate herself about her reaction until after dinner, when, according to her early-retiring-early-rising custom, she got right into her short, simple, but lace-accented white nightgown and climbed into bed to read.

  Even as she stripped off her panties and put them in the hamper, one part of her mind didn’t let the rest of her think about what she knew she would have to do, once she lay under the covers. She didn’t do it very often, after all.

  Usually, when she could tell it was going to happen, Maria read for a while—not as long as she did on the nights when it wasn’t going to happen, but enough to fool herself into thinking she had not gotten into bed with the intention of being n
aughty.

  Being naughty had always been how she thought of it. She supposed, as she turned out the light and turned onto her right side, left knee drawn up so that her nightgown rustled tantalizingly over the region in question, that that way of thinking about playing with herself contributed to the severity of the problem. Maria couldn’t help thinking of it as a problem, because she had never been able to shake the idea that nice girls didn’t do it.

  She had, however, come to a rather uneasy truce with it, especially during the five-year drought of male companionship occasioned by having to work so hard first as Heather’s assistant and now on her own. She didn’t think she had ever simply acknowledged, though, that going to bed directly after dinner had nothing to do with reading, that particular night, the way she did now under the influence of Jason Garrons’ program of family discipline.

  She lay there in the dark with her hands in front of her for a while; that always made part of it—the period of fighting the urge, of looking at your hands and telling them to be good. What did Jason think about girls who played with themselves, she wondered?

  Her left hand, as usual, began it, slipping down, back, and over, as if to smooth down the nightgown, and discovering incidentally that with her knee drawn up that way there really wasn’t much nightgown to smooth, there. That in fact it was just as easy for her hand to smooth the bare skin of the bottom Jason had spanked—easier, even. That in running her hand over her little cheeks, her fingertips seemed unable to keep from moving up and down the furrow that had grown unaccountably warm.

  Her thoughts left Emily and Quint, turned them into a generic couple, turned Maria herself into the bride, the bride herself at last. Maria, just as bitchy as any other bride and even more assertive because she knew how everything worked. Maria on her wedding night, when her husband, who looked just like Jason Garrons but wasn’t, put his foot down and told her he had had enough of her bratty behavior. Sicilian temper or not, she was going to strip down to her bridal lingerie and take the consequences, before they consummated the marriage.

  Her left hand’s naughtiness became contagious; her right hand had caught the itching fire, and worked its way underneath her raised left thigh, to find her arousal and spread it widely, so that her three middle fingers could move slickly on her naughty clit. Oh, she needed to be spanked, didn’t she? All her bitchiness, all her domineering in the wedding planning, it had all been because she couldn’t confess to her bridegroom the real reason Maria Sali needed discipline: that she played with herself in bed at night imagining her bridegroom with a punishment strap in his hand, ordering her to strip and lie atop the bed for a whipping.

  Maria smiled at the circularity of the logic even as she gave into it and turned herself, giving in also to the sensation that demanded she put herself in the position of the bride about to be fucked, after her spanking. On her back, with her legs spread, left hand still underneath and now rubbing so very, very wickedly in the place where that slutty bridesmaid had said Emily Easton admitted she liked to have a finger. On her back, ready for a big cock to enter her aching pussy, right hand rubbing frantically so that she came, and then came again, whispering the thing she longed to call a bridegroom: Sir.

  “Sir… oh, I’m sorry, sir… please don’t… please don’t…”

  She had come three times, now, and the hands and the strap and the cock in her mind definitely belonged to Jason Garrons; she couldn’t care about that, because she needed it so badly. Why did Emily have the luck to be spanked tonight? Could she beg Jason to spank her again, because she should have told Georgia to replace the drink and lie about the champagne—of course she should, and she deserved spanking, and whipping, and fucking, on the kind of wedding night when the bridegroom demonstrates to the bride that when it comes to sex and discipline, she will henceforth submit to his every desire. When he lets her know once and for all that she has had her day of being a princess, and that he is now irrevocably her lord and master.

  Her hands, returned to lie in front of her, gave off so strong a fragrance of naughtiness that Maria’s face felt hot despite there being no one to smell it but her, and no one to see how wet she had left the sheet beneath her. Maria always did the laundry the next morning, after being naughty had happened in bed the night before.

  Chapter Eight

  Before Quint arrived, Emily tried one final time to change Jason’s mind. He had just spanked Georgia, in her room, thinking as he did so that she and her boyfriend Dave seemed serious enough that Jason might have the same talk with the college senior who would be headed to Harvard Law in the fall as he was about to have with Quint.

  Georgia had bent over her bed for punishment more readily this time, and raised the skirt of the pretty red dress she had worn to the ill-fated shower. Jason had applied the hairbrush severely enough to make her sorry she had drunk so much and contributed to her sister’s disgrace. He had told her to remain bent over with her punished bottom on display, if only to an empty room, and to think about how she would act in the future, and her sniffled response, delivered in a rather thick voice, seemed to Jason to indicate the beneficial effect of the painful lesson. To get her boyfriend involved seemed like a very good idea.

  To his surprise, he found Emily in the hall right outside Georgia’s room.

  “Please don’t tell Albright,” she said, her eyes looking a little desperate. “Please… just… just spank me yourself.”

  Jason shut the door of Georgia’s room and led Emily downstairs to his study. It was ten minutes of eight, he saw on his brass ship’s clock. As he spoke to his soon-to-be punished stepdaughter, he checked to make sure he had two snifters ready with the brandy. He had enjoyed his last talk with Quint, about the ‘permission’ to propose, and he rather hoped this one, despite its serious purpose, would help cement a relationship in which both men could take pleasure for years to come.

  Quint’s father Skip Allerton (Albright IV) had divorced Priscilla five years before and headed off to San Diego for a trust fund-supported nautical lifestyle; nor did Quint really take after him, despite the sea being in his blood as well. He might sail the Bermuda race every year, but he cared intensely about his job at the family foundation and the young people it served with its educational programs.

  “Emily, I think you know that this is the right thing. Even if you hadn’t disgraced yourself in Quint’s home in front of his mother and her friends, it’s time for your future husband to take charge of you.”

  A shudder went through Emily’s body at that. She had changed into old jeans and a pink t-shirt as soon as they had gotten home, as if to put the shower behind her as quickly as she possibly could. She had eaten a solitary dinner of leftovers in the kitchen, refusing the offer of a sandwich—which Georgia had accepted gratefully despite her approaching spanking.

  She seemed to search for words for a moment, and then to force herself to speak, as if she wanted the whole matter of her behavior to fly away without her having to think about it, but simply had too much intelligence to turn away from examining it.

  “You can’t really mean that, can you? About him taking charge? That’s… I didn’t think you thought that way.” In her pleading eyes Jason saw that Emily had the natural conflict he had suspected she might have, in this regard. To be taken in hand by a strong, successful husband had a special place in Emily’s mental landscape, as it had had a special place in her mother’s. She continued on in a murmur that seemed almost to be directed inward at herself, rather than at Jason. “It’s so medieval.”

  “It is medieval,” Jason said. “It’s also Victorian, and it’s also something that works today, strange as many people find it. Letting your husband take the place evolution decreed should belong to the testosterone-producing doesn’t have to mean giving up your human rights.”

  “Except the right not to be punished like a little girl—a little girl in a very different family from this one, too,” Emily said, lifting her eyes to Jason’s and speaking with a little bitterness. �
��And the right to make my own decisions.”

  Jason thought for a moment, and then he spoke more seriously, hoping to impress on Emily something she might not have thought through before. “You’re going to give up the right to make your own decisions by getting married. Quint will, too. Every important decision both of you make will affect the other partner. I’m not sure you see how that’s connected to Quint establishing his firm hand…”

  He saw a little shiver go through her at the phrase firm hand, and he felt more certain than ever that to try to persuade Quint to take Emily in hand represented the best thing for both of them.

  “…but your behavior today indicates that especially right now you need your fiancé’s help to stay in control. He’s the appropriate man for the job, and from this point on the two of you will have to negotiate the terms of your discipline.”

  She frowned. “Negotiate?”

  Jason nodded. “That’s what I meant when we were talking about your mom, the night Georgia got her first spanking. This is something that you need to communicate about. If it turns out that you can’t come to terms about spanking, and you think some other dynamic that keeps you in sync with each other when stuff like this incident at the shower arises is better, that’s fine with me.”

  “Really?” she asked. Her eyes had become suddenly hopeful.

  “Really. But remember what I said about supporting the wedding. The two of you will have to convince me that you’ve settled the matter, and that Quint…”

  “Albright,” Emily said. The false hope (or at least Jason felt fairly sure it would be false) of escaping punishment had returned some of her willfulness to her, it seemed.

  Jason decided to confront the name issue head-on. “I’m going to suggest to Quint that he make it clear to you that a wife calls her husband what he wants to be called, just as he calls you by a name you find pleasing.”