Warren brushed his palm over the small of Jenna’s back. “This is Jenna.”
Master Conrad looked her over. “New submissive?”
Warren smiled down at her. “Something like that.”
One brow quirked above Master Conrad’s mask. “So will the two of you be playing later, as well?”
Warren wrapped his hand around hers. “Not tonight. She’s in training.”
Conrad’s gaze returned to hers with a deferential tilt of his head. “Then I look forward to seeing her progress in the future.”
“Perhaps.” Warren squeezed her hand, then began to pull her away. “Enjoy your evening.”
“Pleasure to have met you,” Jenna said.
Conrad’s eyebrows shot up, and Nadine flung her a surprised glance. It was the first time she had looked at Jenna, and she immediately dropped her gaze to the floor again a moment later.
Warren continued leading her to the bar.
“Why did they look at me like that?” she said.
“Because it’s against the rules for submissives to speak in the club unless they are either speaking directly to their Master or have the permission of their Master to do so,” Warren said, bobbing his chin toward the scantily clad bartender as if that was enough to let her know what he wanted to drink. “I sent the rules to you. I thought you’d read them.”
“I did.” She had read the rules, honest she had, but there had been so many of them, and some hadn’t made sense, which had confused her, and it had felt only natural to be polite. But she had messed up. Again. Except this time, she hadn’t intended to.
“Then why did you speak without permission?”
She bit her bottom lip and started to look down before she remembered what he’d told her in the elevator and stiffened her resolve, lifting her chin. She would not wilt in defeat. She was new to all this. In time, and with his training, she would get better.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disobey. I guess I don’t understand, because when you were introducing me to people upstairs earlier, it was okay for me to talk. Nobody looked at me funny, and you didn’t say—”
“That was different.” He took the two crystal tumblers the bartender handed him and extended one toward her. “That was when we were upstairs. Now we’re in the dungeon. The rules are different here.”
She looked around at all the semi-naked bodies and medieval accoutrements placed strategically around the room. “So, this is the club, but upstairs isn’t?”
He tilted his head like that’s one way of putting it. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”
She bit her lip, cataloging this new information into her quickly burgeoning submissive-in-training memory banks. “I didn’t know that.”
He took her hand and led her away from the bar. “That’s why you’re in training, so I can remind you.”
“You mean, punish me?”
“Not this early in your training, but, yes, eventually my reminders will be punishment.”
“And you’re just itching for that day to come, aren’t you?” she said with an air of flirtatious defiance.
He leaned down as they continued casually strolling among the guests and curious equipment. “You’re one to talk.” He let out a soft, amused chuff. “You’re as eager for it as I am.”
She grinned and looked away, sipping her drink. Rum and Coke. Not her usual poison, but it would get her through the night as things heated up.
But he had her dead to rights. She most certainly was looking forward to her first punishment. Very much so. And while Warren wouldn’t spank her with the back of a hairbrush, she was sure his spankings would get her just as hot or even hotter than the hairbrush did.
“So, why aren’t subs allowed to speak without permission?” she asked, genuinely curious.
Given all the research she had done, she assumed the reasoning had to do with control, but since she was here, she might as well ask, if only to see if she’d been wrong about that too. And Warren had a way of explaining things that awakened her imagination to all sorts of possibilities, so why not hear what he had to say on the subject?
He drank a swallow from his own crystal tumbler, which from the looks of it was scotch on the rocks. “Because we Doms have to have our rules, don’t we?” He gave her a wry, sidelong glance as he took another drink, then lowered his glass and leaned closer. “After all, we have to have some kind of code in place for our submissives to violate so we can all have our fun.”
She bit back a smile. “Ah, so the rules aren’t necessarily in place to be followed. Is that it?”
The way he shrugged one shoulder and smirked out one side of his mouth read as tomato, tomawto. “Some rules are there to be violated, and some are there to be followed.”
“How does a submissive know which is which?”
“Sometimes it’s obvious, such as the rules about recreational drugs not being allowed and that consent must be given for all sexual acts. But then sometimes it’s not so obvious.”
“What rules would those be?”
He winked down at her. “That’s for you to find out.”
“In other words, I’ll find out when I break them.”
He let out a lighthearted chuckle. “You’re catching on.”
She assumed he was referring to the rules that didn’t make sense, such as the one that frowned upon polite conversation while within the walls of the dungeon. Those were the rules that were put in place to ensure submissives had plenty of opportunities to bring on the wrath of their Doms, all in the name of play, pain, and pleasure.
He continued showing her around, answering her questions, explaining various pieces of equipment, telling her what to expect from this person or that one. It didn’t take long for her head to begin swimming from all the various levels of stimulation.
A woman wearing a metal mesh dress and no undergarments knelt on the floor at the feet of her Dom. Other women wore leashes, leather straps, or
