‘I haven’t told you anything about what I like.’
‘Yes, you have! That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’
‘Broad brush strokes,’ he objected. ‘No fine detail.’ He smiled, his eyes suddenly bright again. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned brush strokes. It’s got my imagination working.’
‘Yeah, well, curb your imagination and make an appointment with the clinic.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He tried to reach out for my face, to turn it to him, but I darted away and jumped to my feet.
‘We should get on with things,’ I said, stretching my naked limbs in the sunshine. ‘I came here to train. Let’s do it.’
‘Five,’ he said instantly, and I dropped to all fours, head up in the approved manner.
He put me through my paces for much longer than I thought necessary in my slightly hazy, sun-stricken, post-coital state. After a while, my attention began to wander and I started to lose the thread.
I did all fours when he said Four, and then I forgot to put my hands behind my back for one of the others. At my third careless mistake, he called a halt to proceedings.
‘Well,’ he said. He was leaning on the mower again and his shorts were still undone. ‘This moves us nicely on into one of our next areas of training. I can combine a couple of them, in fact.’
‘I’m just hot and tired,’ I protested, but he held up his hand – the way he had done so memorably last time – and silenced me.
He waggled his fingers menacingly. ‘It’s time you met this hand, I think,’ he said. Despite the way my heart jumped into my throat, I was excited. I had been looking forward to this, even though I had a nasty feeling he might be using this opportunity to take revenge on me for not falling into his arms after sex.
‘Really?’ I said, thinking I ought to put up some kind of fight.
‘Next lesson,’ he said. ‘Verbal submission. You obey without question, and you address me from now on as “sir”. So shall we try that?’
I shrugged. Calling Joss ‘sir’ was going to stick in my craw. I tried to take the approach that it was, in fact, his legitimate title – Sir Jocelyn Montague Edward Lethbridge of Willingham Hall. It didn’t help much.
‘Go to a corner of the breakfast room,’ he ordered, ‘and wait for me there with your hands on your head.’
It was such a relief to shelter from the glaring sunlight that I didn’t think of disobeying but hurried up the steps to the patio and ran quickly across the hot slabs before they burned my feet.
The breakfast room was cooler and pleasantly shady, with soothing plain white walls. It was no hardship to put my nose in one of its corners and rest my weary body. The hands-on-head thing was a bit annoying, but not too much.
Not at first.
I heard Joss outside putting the mower away, then he came into the room. I stood straight, all my nerves on alert, waiting to be summoned.
But he simply crossed the floor and went out into the hall. I heard the creak of the stairs and tutted to myself. He was going to keep me strung up until he deigned to release my tension.
Now that I had had time to cool, my mind was free to envisage wild scenarios. What was he going to do to me? Would there be actual whips? Actual chains?
Would he make me scream in agony? Would he torture me?
I thought of all the waxwork scenes I had seen of terrible things being done to people in ages past and my knees began to tremble. How far did Joss’s tastes go? Shouldn’t I have asked him?
I was practically snivelling by the time I heard the stairs creak again. I was a fool. I could have got out of this. I could have slipped away through the patio doors and made a break into the woods – stopping en route to pick up my clothes, of course.
Instead I was waiting for a man whom I knew to have cruel and deviant tastes to come back and do something painful to me.
‘Bernstein and Woodward would be proud of you, girl,’ I muttered to myself.
‘Spine straight.’ He said it softly and was standing close.
I jumped. I hadn’t realised he was back in the room, and certainly hadn’t realised how easily he had crept up on me. The scent of his favourite aftershave wafted around me, a clue too late.
He put his hand around the back of my neck, nudging my head higher.