Dominated by My Dad's Boss novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Teach Me
Bron asks a stranger at a kink party to teach her to dominate and he kneels on her first command; Monday he walks into her father's office as the man buying the company.
The man at the rail was the only one in the Carbarn who wasn't watching the stage.
That's why I picked him.
Everyone else stood with their faces turned to the cross where a woman in a leather harness was waiting for a flogger.
He stood with a glass of water and looked at the room as if he owned the floor.
I had a brass tag in the pocket of my dress, and my hand had been closed around it for an hour.
It said EMBER.
It had come in an envelope with my mother's handwriting, and my mother had been gone fifteen years.
The card said to come here, to this old streetcar barn in Ohio City, and look for a door with a lantern.
The woman with the clipboard at the entrance had told me what that door meant.
"The Lantern's only open the last Friday of the month," she'd said.
"Dommes and the subs they bring. A sub who walks in alone doesn't walk out the same."
Her red armband said MONITOR.
"I'm not a sub," I said.
"Then you'd better be a Domme by the last Friday, hon."
That was four weeks away.
So I crossed the old iron rails in the floor and stopped in front of the man with the water.
He was tall and broad, with grey at his temples and a short beard going silver.
He looked at me over the glass.
"Teach me to dominate," I said.
His eyebrows rose a quarter inch.
"That isn't something you ask a stranger."
"It's the only thing I know to ask."
"There are classes on Tuesdays."
"I have four weeks."
He set the glass down on the rail without a sound.
"Why four weeks?"
"I'm not telling you why."
"Then I'm not teaching you."
I held my hand out flat, palm up.
"Why would I?" he said.
"Because I'm asking nicely, and you're going to say yes."
He studied my hand.
Then he studied my face for a long time, and I held still.
"No names," he said at last.
"No names."
"Come here."
He walked me past the stage and down three steps to an alcove built into an old inspection pit.
There was a bench there, a low black light, and a curtain of chain that clinked shut behind us.
"Stand," he said. "Feet apart. Chin up."
I stood.
"You've never done this."
"Is it that obvious?"
"You're holding your breath."
I let it out.
"Good. Now. You aren't asking. You aren't hoping. A Dominant tells the room how it's going to be, and the room agrees."
"That sounds like my father's foundry."
"Then you're halfway there. Tell me to kneel."
My mouth had gone dry.
"Kneel."
It came out thin and polite.
He didn't move.
"Again."
"Kneel."
"Look at me when you say it."
I looked at him.
His eyes were brown, steady and amused, and under the amusement something was waiting.
"Kneel," I said, and this time I didn't say it to him.
I said it to the girl who'd stood ten years old on the stairs while her mother's car backed out of the drive.
My voice came out low.
He went down on one knee.
Then the other.
He did it slowly, with his eyes on mine.
When his knees touched the concrete, my stomach dropped.
"That's it," he said quietly.
He was looking up at me.
A man his size was kneeling on a concrete floor because I'd told him to.
My hands were shaking, so I kept them still by using them.
I put two fingers under his chin.
His beard was rough.
"Open your mouth," I said.
He parted his lips.
I didn't know why I'd said it.
I laid my thumb on his lower lip, and he breathed in sharply through his nose, and his gaze went dark.
"Good," I said, and the word felt like a hot stone in my mouth.
"You're a fast study," he murmured against my thumb.
"Shut up."
"Yes, ma'am."
I only held my thumb there and felt his mouth move.
Then I took my hand away, because I'd have done something else if I hadn't.
He stayed on his knees a moment longer.
Then he rose in one smooth line and brushed off his trousers.
I could see how hard he was.
He saw me see it, and he didn't hide it.
"That's enough for tonight," he said. "Next Friday. Same place. Wear boots."
"What do I call you?"
"Sir, if you speak to me at all. What do I call you?"
"Ma'am," I said, and my face went hot.
He smiled for the first time, a slow, crooked thing that took years off him.
"Next Friday, ma'am."
I walked out through the iron doors without looking back, and I didn't breathe properly until I was on the sidewalk in the October cold.
On Monday morning I went to work.
I run purchasing in the front office of Renwick Castings, my father's foundry, three hundred people and a furnace older than I am.
My father had told me all week there was a man coming to sign the first papers for the sale.
"Bring the coffee, Bron," he said from his office door. "Come meet the buyer."
I carried in the tray with my hair still smelling like the Carbarn.
A man stood up from the chair opposite my father's desk, buttoning a charcoal jacket.
Black-rimmed reading glasses hung from his hand.
There was grey at his temples and silver in a short beard.
"Bron, this is Torin Sutcliffe," my father said. "He's buying the company, and for a year, God help me, he's also my boss."
The man looked at me.
He didn't blink, and neither did I.
"Ms. Renwick," he said.
It was the same voice that had said Yes, ma'am.
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