out after the customer had gone. “Good girl,” he said. “Now you’re doing your job.”
It was only Jane’s second respectable sale since beginning work and she was thrilled. But after she had asked Hugo as many questions as occurred to her about the origins of the mirror she had just sold, she remembered what they’d been talking about before.
“So why do you have all those books?” she attacked the old subject with fresh energy.
“My Special Collection?”
“Yes, that collection of exploitive, woman-oppressing smut.”
“Jane, you’re a Philistine.”
“What?” Jane sputtered.
“You’re so ignorant I can barely hold a conversation with you,” Hugo informed her, before strolling back to his office. This silenced Jane momentarily and at one she left for lunch. When she returned at two, he was still in his office. As there were no customers in the shop, she went back to confront him again.
“Excuse me,” she said, walking into his office, where he sat at his typewriter, adrift in correspondence. “Could we continue our discussion from before? It’s been bothering me.”
Hugo sighed, leaned back and motioned to a chair. “All right, Jane. Sit down.” He turned off his typewriter and lit a cigarette. “Now what’s on your mind?”
“Why do you sell pornography?”
“Jane, I’ll answer you honestly. Erotica - collecting, selling, even publishing, is my real interest. Not antiques. Now, your purpose in my life - the reason I hired you, is to work in my antiques business. That’s why you should be spending your free time reading the books I give you - on furniture, not the books I don’t give you, on sex. Understand?”
Once again, he’d deflated her carefully formed arguments. “Now please go back out front, Jane. I just heard a customer.”
Jane was speechless and frustrated when she hurried out front. The customer turned out to be just a browser who quickly left. So Jane went back to Hugo’s office again.
“Are you back? Again? Well, as long as you’re here, you can make me some coffee.”
Jane had never been asked by Hugo to do this before. “Everything you’ll need is in the lounge,” he said, pointing to the door to the adjoining room.
But now, thoroughly distracted from his letters, Hugo got up and followed her, admiring the shape of her beautiful bottom under the smooth electric blue silk dress.
“Tell me something, Jane,” he said, watching her busy herself at the long chrome range. “Did that ex-boyfriend of yours ever spank you?”
“Spank me? Of course not.”
“Amazing,” Hugo observed, for Michael Flagg had been on his mailing list from the start.
“What is?”
“That he could resist the impulse for so long,” Hugo said, going back into his office again.
A few minutes later, Jane came in with the coffee tray. Although she was being terribly annoying that day, Hugo was finding it hard to keep his eyes off her stunning body and long legs.
“As a matter of fact,” Jane admitted, “Michael threatened to spank me on a number of occasions, but never did.” She smiled, but the recollection also brought her color up.
“Did he! And yet it never came to pass. Why not?”
“I don’t think he ever seriously intended to spank me.”
“No. Of course not.” Hugo tasted the coffee.
“Saying that was just his way of letting me know that he thought I’d gone too far,” Jane explained. “How is the coffee?” she added anxiously.
“Horrible. I’ll have to teach you how to brew coffee.”
“You shouldn’t drink so much coffee,” Jane said. “And you shouldn’t smoke.”
“And you shouldn’t lecture your employer,” Hugo said; “If you wish to continue to not be spanked.”
After Jane turned on her stiletto heel and strutted out of his office, Hugo sat for a few minutes wondering again how Michael Flagg could have ever resisted paddling that pert behind for two days, no less two years. He himself had only been around Jane on a regular basis for two weeks, but even so far, the day did not go by when he did not imagine the pleasure of putting the opinionated little activist over his knee.
It was when Jane began to expound on her philosophy and interests that the urge to upend and correct her was strongest in Hugo. Today he’d fought the urge valiantly, but did not know how much longer he could continue to do so, especially if she thought she was going to lecture him each time she got bored.
Chapter Four Return To Random Point
October was vivid, the air cracking fresh, the skies above Manhattan gorgeously blue for days. Laura and Marguerite did not check into the Bennington Club, as originally planned, but stayed at The Plaza at the expense of Randy Price instead. Marguerite went shopping every day and lunched with a variety of interesting men in the scene.
Laura passed her days in an orgy of bittersweet remembrance, revisiting the various places in and around the city where William had disciplined and made love to her the previous spring.
If Laura’s days were moody rambles under leaf dappled skies and looming gothic spires, her nights were spent in a contrastingly high tech and blindingly glossy atmosphere, as Marguerite shepherded her through all the hottest bars and clubs in Manhattan. If Laura’s goal in coming to New York was to even the score, Marguerite helped her achieve it beyond her most decadent fantasies, arranging for a number of highly paid sessions, between a series of gentlemanly dominants, Laura and herself. “Playing” in the scene with jaded executives and lust-starved dreamers, had for years kept Marguerite in the luxuries of life, but receiving “allowance” for submitting to or administering corporal punishment was entirely new to Laura and extremely empowering.
Occasionally, the session Marguerite arranged would include an act of sex, with Laura as the object. The fact that Laura would allow any number of liberties to be taken with her charming body insured her universal popularity with players of every stamp and Marguerite felt fully justified in asking enormous allowances from some of her wealthiest admirers, in exchange for the rarified thrill of taking Laura, while Marguerite either assisted or observed.
Laura saw nothing immoral in making a few thousand dollars while evening the score with her husband. She was, in fact, beginning to feel like a very clever and independent girl.
The more men she allowed Marguerite to introduce her to, the better she felt about the whole William - Damaris situation. Once Laura realized that she’d been had by eight different men, since last seeing her husband, William’s one short-lived affair with his secretary virtually ceased to disturb her.
Hugo Sands was certain that Marguerite and Laura would return from their antics in Manhattan for his party, an annual event for which he
