She started by removing all the attached fixtures and stripping out the existing wire. By the time Eric returned with a ladder and another luggage cart full of spools, she had a huge junk pile sitting by the door, all the torches taken down and set along the wall where they would be installed, and was searching along the tacked down carpet for where the local electric outlets might be.

  “I give up,” she said, more than a little surprised. “Where are they?”

  “There aren’t any. Not in this wing anyway.” Hands on hips, he looked up and down the hall at her progress. “You busy little beaver, you.”

  And just like that, Win was flustered and blushing again. She had to shake her head to get her thoughts back on track. “How do you guys clean the floors without power?”

  “Cordless vacuums. There are outlets all over the place in the cleaning closets, as well as the Nursery kitchen area, and two per guest room for charging phones and plugging in hair dryers. Other than that, we’re a total immersion experience and we don’t have a lot of modern conveniences out where it can ruin the medieval aesthetics.”

  “If I’m going to be working solely on batteries, I need to plug in my backups.” She bit her bottom lip and his gaze went straight to her mouth, lingering there until she asked, “If I leave them out in the hall, are they going to get stolen?”

  “I’d say no, but I don’t know anything about your fellow contractors. I can have security keep an eye on it, if you like,” he offered.

  “Please.” Gathering all her recharging bases, she followed him out into the hall and, like little Black & Decker ducklings, she lined up her batteries against the wall where they wouldn’t be as big of a tripping hazard to those wandering by. While she double-checked to make sure she had them all connected and charging, he placed a quick cell call to the security office.

  “Smile at the camera,” he said once he was done.

  She looked up at the wall, the ceiling, and all around. On this side of the improperly hung door, the torches were all flickering properly, but the gray stone walls seemed to absorb the light. Far from exterior walls, there were no windows to help brighten up the corners.

  “Where?” she asked, searching the shadows.

  He grinned. “I’ll never tell, but you are now on film.”

  “Are they working?”

  Eric laughed. “God, I hope so.”

  Giving the ceiling—and then him—a last, searching glance, back into the nursery wing she went. She tried not to think about how short her skirt was or the view she might be providing either him or the hidden security cameras as she set up the ladder under the ceiling access hatch, and up into the crawlspace she went.

  The crawlspace was exactly that, a space between the real stone ceiling above her and the fake wooden panels under her hands and knees that looked like a ceiling to anyone walking around underneath. With only the light of her helmet to see by, she crawled through six months’ worth of dust, sawdust and cobwebs, going from pipe to pipe, disconnecting wires. Up one side of the hall and down the other, she dragged loops of bad wiring along with her until she had enough to make a trip to dump it down the hatch worthwhile. By the time she was ready to crawl back down the ladder, Eric had it all gathered up and shifted into a semi-neat garbage pile for workers to pick up later.

  “I wouldn’t have thought it would be that messy,” he said once she was back on the floor beside him, cobwebs stuck to her hat and hanging off her puff of a ponytail. Her dress was now every bit as dusty as she’d feared it would be, and her white Alice-In-Wonderland tights were mussed all the way up to the garters and even torn in two spots.

  “Dirty girl,” Eric teased, making her tingle in places that should have been wholly offended instead. It was horribly distracting.

  “How long do we have to get things working again?” she asked, already mentally tallying how long it would take her to do just this one wing and how many pairs of underwear she’d end up going through unless she got this wayward attraction of hers under control. What were there… twenty or so guest rooms lined up along this corridor across from the Nursery? It looked like the hallway L-ed at the end. Who knew how many more rooms were around the corner, or up the other side.

  “Tomorrow.” He laughed at her instantly panicked look. “I know, not a chance in hell, but it’s all right. Technically, we’re not scheduled to be at full capacity for almost two months yet. So, we’ve got two working residential wings that we can lump everyone into, then it’s just a matter of getting all the common areas up and running as fast as possible. We can slog our way through the rest of the guest rooms as we have time. I mean, structurally, we’re sound. It’s the little things like lights, flushing toilets, and an elevator that doesn’t get stuck between the first floor and Dungeon that are holding us back.”

  “I am not a certified elevator tech,” she said.

  “We’ve got one scheduled to be here sometime before his shift ends today. Don’t worry about it.”

  Except she was worrying about it. She wanted to do a good job, but there was only one of her and a whole lot of work to be done in one night in just this one wing. Granted, she wouldn’t have to drill any holes, but as she sat down on the floor to wrestle a particularly stubborn length of wire out of its pipe in the wall, that wasn’t a very big comfort.

  She yanked. Her grip on her pliers slipped, and she whacked her knuckles on the stone wall. “Ow!” Mother humper, that hurt!

  Squatting down beside her, he took her throbbing hand in his and gently pulled her knuckles from her mouth. He tsked when he saw the broken skin and hint of blood welling up from the wound. “Your poor hand.”

  “Construction,” she said, trying to crack a joke as though her stomach hadn’t seized up in knots the instant he touched her. “The job’s not done until someone’s bleeding.”

  God, that smile of his went straight between her legs. A liquid warmth flooded her womb.

  “Funny,” he said, caressing her aching knuckles. “We’ve very different jobs, and yet the mottos are practically the same.”

  Win tried to take her hand back, but her tug lacked conviction and he did not let her go.

  “I’ll get a Band-Aid,” he said. “After all, we wouldn’t want to ruin your pretty dress, now would we?”

  She tried to say no, but her head nodded yes. Chucking her under the chin, he left her there while he vanished into the adjacent door-less nursery.

  Jesus, what was wrong with her? She shook her hands out, but there was no such thing as simply throwing the lingering hum of his touch off her skin. This was ridiculous. “Get your act together,” she told herself. “He is not that good looking.”

  Except he was, and her lady bits knew it.

  “He works in a sex resort that has a dungeon, for crying out loud.”

  Although, it probably really wasn’t. How much more likely was it that they simply called it that because it was dark, the pipes leaked, and it had a few spiders? Just because it looked like a castle, that didn’t automatically mean there was an actual dungeon.

  Except, his title over her was Master in Charge. Also, there were BDSM themes carved into just about every door she’d passed, she’d been threatened with a spanking twice now, and the gladiators carried whips.

  This was absolutely a BDSM sex dungeon, and she’d known exactly where she was from the moment he’d said bomb. She’d been sleeping in a hotel in Texas last year when she’d seen it on the news.

  “What the hell are you doing flirting with this guy?” she breathed, just as Eric came back out of the nursery with a Band-Aid and a squeeze tube of antibiotic ointment in his hand. “I’ll be okay,” she hedged again, but he played doctor with her bloody knuckle anyway. He even kissed it when he was done, and not one time did she even try to take her hand away from him.

  “All better,” he promised with a wink.

  Oh, the things that silly wink did to her insides.

  “I should get to work,” she breathed, embarrassed at how infatuated her voice sounded. He was hot, so what? She’d known and worked with many hot guys before. He was sexy, big deal. He also worked at the most infamous sex resort that she hadn’t known existed in the modern age until last year’s bombing made the news. But if he worked here, then that made him kinky, at the very least, and that also made him anything but someone she needed to invest time in. Win was not kinky. Win was practical. She was also professional and right now she had a job to do.

  “Me too,” Eric said, letting go of her hand. He managed to keep his crooked smile, although it did seem a little less easy-going now and a little more pasted on as he muttered something about taking the antibiotic back. Getting to his feet, he quickly walked away.

  Chapter Four

  It took four hours and three spools for Win to wire up just that part of the hallway. She spent more than half of that time crawling up in the ceiling with a tool Eric liked to call the ‘fishing rod’. It wasn’t. It was a whip-slender pole, a good five feet in length, flexible as sin, and with a drill bit on the end. Up in the ceiling, Win would stick it down through the stone and mortar embedded pipes at whichever torch she was working on, then climb down long enough to attach new wire to the end, then climb back up into the ceiling, then zzziiiippp! up the wire went and several minutes would pass while she did whatever electricians did to make things work up there. Then the whole process started all over again with the flexible drill bit poking down out of the next pipe over.

  Eric watched her do this twice. Then he got the hell over himself and all the awkward feelings that had come with kissing the boo-boo of a woman he was starting to feel a little smitten by. He kept having to remind himself that she didn’t work here and, all teasing aside, he really was professional enough to know better than to treat her like any other guest, no matter how good she looked in that costume or how positive his inner intuition was in insisting that she was submissive.

  She could be submissive all she wanted, she was still off-limits and he needed to respect that.

  And the first step to respecting that was not to kiss her owies.

  The second step was getting as much distance between them as he possibly could, while maintaining his Master in Charge illusion, so she couldn’t run amok or make their long list of necessary repairs worse than it currently was. She struck him as being perfectly competent in everything she’d done so far, but looks could be deceiving. The last construction crew they’d trusted had proved that.

  Still, it wasn’t his style to stand propping up a wall while she climbed needlessly up and down that ladder, quietly working herself into complaint-less exhaustion. After her third trip up into the ceiling, he stepped in to help tie wire onto her fishing pole, and the job went much quicker after that.

  Twenty-three torches were rewired: twelve on one side of the corridor and eleven on the other.

  “Thanks,” she said a little breathlessly when she crawled down out of the ceiling for the last time. She wiped her sweaty face on the towel that he handed her, and took sips from the juice box he’d swiped from the Nursery fridge, because it had been hours at this point and she hadn’t had a thing to eat or drink. Then she went all the way back to torch number one and the installation process began.

  “When did you eat last?” he asked, checking the time.

  “I’m fine.”

  “That’s not what I asked.” Because it was almost five, and not because he was being all Daddy-Dom about this. Or at least that’s what he told himself. Electricians had to eat, too, and it really had been hours without her cracking open so much as a pocket-sized bag of peanuts or a water bottle.

  “I’ve got a Snickers in my luggage if I need it,” she said, grunting softly as she stripped the wire tips on the torch she was working on.

  He wasn’t her Dom. Technically, he wasn’t anybody’s Dom until tomorrow when the Nursery finally opened back up, and yet…

  Eric checked the time again. Fuck it. “Forty more minutes, and then we’re breaking for dinner.”

  “Okay, well”—grunting, she paused to cap the wires and shove everything back into the wall box so she could screw the fixture into place—“I don’t like stopping before a job is done, so you go ahead without me.”

  “It’s so cute you think it works that way.”

  Except, in the normal world it did work that way. He was restless, that was all. Gearing up for tomorrow already, and the lines were blurring because she was a little woman in a Little costume, an irresistible combination that tickled at his Dom-y bone. He was so ready to be working again. That was why he was having this hard of a time convincing himself that Win did not need to adhere to his edicts.

  Blinking twice, she paused in the middle of screwing the new torch fixture to the wall. “H-how does it work, then?”

  You do what I say, was his normal response to bratty Littles who didn’t want to obey, but that wasn’t Win. She wasn’t bratting, and yet the mental image of her bent across his knee with her skirt tossed up over her toolbelt, kicking her steel-toed boots as he peppered her bare bottom with brisk, open-handed slaps not only flashed through his mind but took up residency there, just as if it had signed a lease.

  Stop thinking about it, his brain commanded, but it was already too late. The mental image was cemented in place and she was just too fucking cute. And innocent. And that costume wasn’t helping.

  “Forty minutes,” he told her again, following her onto the next fixture. “Then we’re breaking to eat.”

  He began holding things for her and by the fifth light fixture, he was pretty sure he could start wiring these on his own. It wasn’t difficult; black to black wire, white to white, don’t forget to ground, and then screw the fixture to the wall.

  Except in his mind, he wasn’t screwing fixtures, it was Win with that little smudge of dust on the side of her nose and that tear in her dirty stocking whom he had pressed cheek and chest to the wall. Maybe with her hands locked in his fist behind her back and her hips arching into his touch as he checked between her legs to see how wet she was.

  “I’ll get the next light,” he said, abruptly putting everything down and walking away while he still could. Having something to focus his mind on only helped until she appeared at his elbow, leaning in so she could double check his work.

  “You’ve got it,” she said as he screwed the fixture to the wall. “Not that I don’t appreciate the help, but you don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t take money out of your pocket.” Trying to pay more attention to the light than to her, he didn’t realize how offensive his words could be taken until she fell quiet.

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” she said, hurt.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that,” he assured. “I’m just”—more attracted to you than I ought to be—“not used to watching other people”—that I would really like to bone—“with nothing to do”—except fantasize about boning them—“so I appreciate the chance to keep busy. Besides,” he added when she frowned, “the more distracted I am with this, the less likely I’ll be to hurry you out of here before the job is finished.” He checked his watch again. “Twenty-eight minutes now. Better get a move on.”

  “If you’re hungry you can—” she started, but he cut her off.

  “You are not,” he repeated, pausing long enough to pin her with a stern look, “allowed to roam the Castle without me. And while that will mostly go into effect tomorrow after the guests arrive, from now on you might as well get used to the fact that we are a team. I go where you go. That means, you’ll have breakfast when I have breakfast. Lunch when I lunch. Dinner when I eat dinner, and when I quit for the day, you will be in the room we have assigned you. I hope you brought something to read because we don’t have TVs.” Tightening down the last screw, he chuckled and muttered, “Not that they’d be working if we did have them.”

  Finished with his first light, he went on to the next fixture and, after a moment, so did Win. It felt very easy, working side by side with her. Light fixtures were tedious, but not difficult, and most of the initial set up had already been done, so all it took was a few minutes per fixture and a periodic fiddling with the work lamp so they could see what they were doing.

  “What if I want to take a walk?” she asked.

  Was it his wishful thinking, or had she really said that in the same sullen tone most Littles would have used, looking for a loophole to rules he didn’t think needed any more explaining? “Then I guess you’ll have to page me, won’t you?”

  “I can’t even take a walk?”

  “Have you never worked in a high-security facility before?”

  “No.” Now she really did sound disgruntled.

  “Get used to it.” He tried to soften the harshness of her future confinement with a smile. “Like I said, the problem isn’t so much today. It’s tomorrow, once the guests have arrived. When everyone’s in costume and playing their parts, they’re not going to know whether you’re another guest or an employee, and we don’t want any unauthorized interactions that might end up in someone getting hurt. Either you, or our guests.”

  She finished the torch she was assembling before him, and he could all but feel the frown she shot him as she went onto the next light.

  “I’m kind of used to setting my own hours,” she muttered, not quite under her breath. “You’re making this feel like a prison.”

  “Prisons don’t pay this well,” he replied, unoffended. “They also won’t feed you as well as we will, nor do they put you up in your own room.”

  “But what if—”

  “Winona, honey.” Eric chuckled as he said it, but his amusement was starting to feel darker, only half amused, his inner Dom rousing in response to the challenge she probably didn’t even realize she was issuing. He stopped what he was doing long enough to look at her. The glow of the work light behind them caught in her eyes, making them shine when she glanced his way. Her cheeks turned nicely rosy, and damn if his palm wasn’t all of a sudden itching to turn her southern set just as brightly pink. She’s not a submissive, he reminded himself yet again, but it was so hard to rein in his responses to her rebellious cues.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17