Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

I ngrid

I knew, deep down, what happened to naughty young women. Or I knew what used to happen to them. Knowing that—knowing that what Mr. Alden intended to do to me represented merely the fate a girl would, or should, have expected for her disobedience in the olden days—made my defiance flare up. I hated myself in that moment for thinking, insanely but also very deep down inside, that a willful young woman really should expect to be made to bend over with her skirt up over a man's desk.

I took advantage of the momentary absence of Mr. Alden's hands from my body. I stood up and darted to the right, toward the enormous window with its amazing view of the busy city and the vast lake beyond. I glanced over my shoulder to gauge Mr. Alden's reaction, and saw him straightening up, the paddle still in his left hand and his right reaching inside his suit jacket. To my horror, he had a little smile on his face.

As I took a path toward the door that curved out so as to stay out of the awful, handsome man's reach, I understood that the door of course remained locked. When I got there, I didn't even try the handle; I turned around and put my back to the door, smoothing down my skirt, which had already half descended back into place as I made my futile attempt at escape.

I looked at Mr. Alden. He had put the paddle back down on his desk, and he had something small and shiny in his right hand. It looked a little like an alien weapon from a science fiction movie—the kind of device that seems tiny and innocent, but can kill a huge monster with space rays or something. He still stood right where he had the last time I had looked at him, but when our eyes met, he began to move slowly toward me.

"Help!" I yelled. "Help! Please!"

I didn't know why I hadn't thought of it before. What this… this asshole intended to do to me… it was illegal . I assumed that he must have a plan for shutting me up—I felt my heart skip a beat as my mind started to explore the scenarios that might involve—but he hadn't done it yet, for some reason.

Selecta was a megacorp—a publicly traded company, though I had to admit I didn't know exactly what that meant. Something about the stock market, but the kind of thing that only mattered to rich people, like everything about the stock market. I felt absolutely sure, though, that an executive at a publicly traded company would get in trouble for violating, like, all my civil rights. In a sexual way, no less.

He'd said some things about Selecta being… different, sure. I couldn't remember precisely the words he'd used, but they had something to do with being old-fashioned. Well, old-fashioned had to mean, like, law-abiding , didn't it?

"Everyone in the office," Mr. Alden said as he walked slowly forward toward me, making me press my back—and my butt—even more firmly against the door, "knows that you're going to get fucked in here, Ingrid. And now that they've heard you yelling for help, they've all got a very strong suspicion you're going to get paddled first. Many of them—the other secretaries, that is—know from experience what a paddling from their boss feels like."

He spoke in a very reasonable, even soothing voice. I blinked rapidly at him. He kept coming closer. I put up my hands in front of me, palms out, as if I could push him away.

"They know," he continued, still moving forward and now holding the little shiny thing in his hand up a little, extending it slightly toward me, "that it hurts a great deal, but not as much as they feared before they experienced their first real discipline."

My mouth hung open. My breath came raggedly in and out between my lips. Mr. Alden stopped about two feet away—just close enough to feel too close. Also, however, close enough that my body's wayward, helpless, distressing response to his proximity began to take hold of my limbs, my nervous system, my muscles. I felt my knees tremble under me, and I tried to back up even further for the support of the solid wood.

"The… the police…" I tried, hearing the weakness in my voice. "This is… you'll go to… to jail…"

His lips twitched, his smile widening a little, with a flicker of what must, I saw with a sinking heart, be amusement.

"Have you heard of the corporate laws, Ingrid?" he asked.

I blinked again. "Yes?"

Well, I had. Kind of?

"What do you know about them, sweetheart?" Mr. Alden asked, smiling more broadly, but with a stomach-churning air of arrogance and superiority, as if there was surely a great deal I didn't know about the corporate laws.

"They… they let corporations…" I felt my cheeks blaze with heat, "um… do stuff."

Function as little governments, I think they'd said, in my civics class. Which made so much sense, because they had gotten so big they had to be able to… to make their own laws, kind of.

My breathing sped way, way up. I tried to remember what my civics teacher had said about conflicts, between real laws and the corporate laws. How the company's laws only applied to their employees.

"I'm not a Selecta employee!" I blurted out, my voice sounding absurdly triumphant given the terrible situation.

"That's where you're wrong, Ingrid. We hired you an hour ago. You're under Selecta's jurisdiction now."

I shook my head. "I didn't sign anything."

"You don't have to, sweetheart. That's part of the corporate laws. It makes it easier for us to help people, by immediately giving them the steady work everyone needs in our difficult economic circumstances. Congratulations, Ingrid, you're the new executive secretary for my unit. Now go back to the desk and bend over it. You have a paddling coming, before I break your tight little pussy in properly with my cock."

I stared at him, my cheeks burning like a furnace. Bad language wasn't a thing for me—in terms of using it, anyway. I just didn't, and I didn't like to hear it. I'd never known why it made me so uncomfortable. It seemed especially odd given that, as the awful Mr. Alden had apparently learned somehow, I had proven myself willing to take naughty pictures of myself in racy lingerie.

I just didn't use swear words, though, and I didn't like it when other people did. I never made a fuss about it—I considered myself reasonably strong-willed and very independent, but why try to get other people to stop saying the kind of obscenities that made me blush, rather than just avoiding those people?

I didn't know why Mr. Alden suddenly talking about my private parts and his… his manhood had struck me so hard. I realized that before this last, most obscene statement he had casually mentioned—more than once—his plans to have sex with me. He had used the f-word as if it were just a regular verb. For some reason that hadn't bothered me in the same way. Maybe my reaction had concerned itself entirely with trying to figure out what kind of joke he was trying to make, or what kind of test he intended to administer. Maybe he just hadn't said it while standing so close to me, my back against the locked door and my hands held out in front of my chest to defend myself.

With him gazing directly into my face, though, the cornflower blue eyes in his gorgeous, masculine face narrowing a little as he gauged my response, I seemed to get the full effect of his filthy words. Break your tight little pussy in properly with my cock. My face had flooded with heat, and I let out a little sob as I realized that down between my thighs my body had decided to let me in on an extremely unwelcome secret. The reason I avoided bad language clearly lay in its potential to arouse me in ways I didn't enjoy.

I felt my brow furrow deeply. I knew I had just tried—valiantly, I thought—to tell myself a bald-faced lie. I did enjoy it. I enjoyed it way, way too much. So much that the raging conflict between my mind and my body forced tears to spring, practically, from the corners of my eyes.

"Please," I sobbed. "Please… I don't want…"

"Shh, sweet Ingrid," Mr. Alden said, his voice low and soothing, the kind of voice an animal trainer uses to calm a frightened creature who's forgotten that her real purpose is to serve him. "Shh. You don't want it now. But you most definitely need it now. And you're going to get it. All of it."

"Oh, God," I whispered, as I felt myself clench down there and my hips jerk mortifyingly. My still-smarting bottom pressed so hard into the door that it rattled in its jamb.

"Here," he said, holding the silvery thing up a little higher, almost level with my face, and reaching it out a few inches more, so that I could see it clearly in his beautifully manicured hand. It was three or four inches long, oblong, its surface as reflective as a mirror's. It had a button, it looked like, where Mr. Alden's thumb rested. "This will help."

As I blinked, and before I could react, he pressed the thing gently against the side of my neck. I heard a click and I felt a kind of tingle travel through my whole body. It made me jump, but it didn't hurt and in fact, rather to my dismay, it felt good, almost like a massage.

Mr. Alden pulled the device away, gazing into my eyes as he replaced it in his inside breast pocket. I felt my own eyes go wide as I realized that something had changed inside me—in my mind, or in my body, I couldn't tell at first, and then I thought that maybe the change had happened in the connection between them somehow.

I tried to marshal my thoughts to give an exact name to what the little wand thing had done, but my brain seemed to go off onto a different track from the one I wanted it to travel.

"Ingrid," Mr. Alden said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. "Go over to the desk and bend over it, just like you were before, on your elbows. I'm going to paddle you now. You may not speak unless I give you explicit permission." He stepped back, as if to let me follow his instructions.

I had something like a nanosecond of confusion, as the rational part of my mind tried to figure out why he would just repeat himself like that, when I had made it so very clear that I had no intention of obeying him without compulsion. Then, as if they belonged to someone else, my legs started to move.

My lips parted, but no sound came out; all I could seem to do was form the beginning of a wh word. My brain wouldn't even tell me which wh word I meant to say. Somewhere I knew that I didn't want to be walking toward Mr. Alden's desk, that I didn't want to bend over and rest my weight on my elbows… and yet I did those things.

"It's called a compliance wand," I heard him say from behind me. "The secret is that it can't make you do anything you don't, deep down, really want to do."

I blinked. I turned my head over my shoulder to see him advancing slowly toward me. My tummy flipped, and an impulse to try again to flee formed in my mind. It went nowhere.

"Eyes forward, Ingrid," Mr. Alden said, in the same easy but frighteningly authoritative tone. "You may not look me in the eye when I am disciplining you."