I was in London for the Board Meeting. Every six months we hired a room in an hotel and had a day discussing everything from finance to manufacturing. I was head of R&D, a qualified mechanical engineer. The company made bicycles, quad bikes, ride-on mowers; pretty much anything that had wheels but was not a road vehicle, a car or a van or a truck.

We had a good lunch before the afternoon session and a few drinks after it finished at five. Mike Lambert, CEO took me aside.

“Manufacturing’s a mess, Sonia. Larry,” who was the director of manufacturing, “Is going to have to go. I want you to take it on.”

We talked about that. My job was full-on and to take on the ailing manufacturing side was a lot more work but he was offering a huge pay rise and, to be frank, I relished the opportunity. I asked if I could think it over.

“Of course. But I don’t want to hang about. Larry is going to be fired tomorrow and I want succession. Let me know in the morning.”

I promised I would. The cab I finally managed to get took me to the small mews in Paddington and dropped me outside the house, called Groom’s Cottage, where I had been due ten minutes earlier. I clattered up the slate steps in my heels and rang the doorbell. There was a slight delay and when the door opened, there she was.

Christina was about ten years older than I, about fifty. She wore, as she habitually did, a grey dress, knee-length, black tights, flat black ballet pumps and a warm smile. Her greying hair was drawn back in a tight ponytail.

“Hi, Sonia. A tough day?”

“Not especially. Every day seems tough at the moment.”

“Let me take your coat.” I put my small overnight bag on the floor of the hallway then I slipped off the beige suit jacket and she took it and hung it on a hook rack on the hallway wall before leading me through to her sitting room where she sat me down and handed me a ready-prepared gin and tonic. We sat and talked in the very feminine room, chintz and brocade, flowers, pictures of bucolic scenes on the walls.

“It sounds like a big job,” she said. “Do you need the extra stress?”

“It’s pressure, not stress.” She raised an eyebrow, she never liked to be contradicted but she smiled. “Pressure I can cope with. If it gets stressful, I know what to do.”

She smiled. “That’s why you’re here isn’t it?” I nodded. “Well, we both know what you need.” Her demeanour changed and she became very brisk and professional. She stood, took my empty glass and told me to follow her. I got out of the comfortable chair and followed her through to a bedroom. A single bed occupied centre place in the room. “Take off your blouse and skirt. Is everything else as I instructed?”

It was. Stockings with suspenders, no bra, silk shorts with lace edges. I knew what to do. I bent forward, my feet shoulder-width apart and my hands on my knees. She stood behind me and ran her long fingers down my bare spine until she could feel the base of the heavy steel plug in my arse under the silk. “The medium size?”

“Yes, Christina.”

“When did you put it in?”

“During the afternoon break.”

“You were late.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t get a cab.”
“Ten minutes late.” As she spoke, she was walking around me and to a chest of drawers. Opening the top drawer, she took something out then turned to face me. It was the tawse. “Two strokes for each minute. You know what to do.” Her voice was flat, no emotion, no anger, no warmth.

I lay on my back on the bed with my legs spread and my knees bent. She stroked my face and put a finger in my mouth. I sucked it. Christina took a strip of leather from the bedside table and placed it gently between my teeth.

The first strike was vicious. God, how that tawse stung. It was a bitch of a thing. And there was no gentle start, no crescendo, just an immediate, sob inducing, welt creating slash on my left inner thigh. Taking her time, she walked around the bed, stroked my face again then delivered the second strike; it was, if anything, harder than the first, and on my right thigh. I tried not to cry but despite biting hard on the leather I couldn’t hold back a whimper. No reaction from Christina.

She walked around the bed and delivered the third strike and I gasped and felt a tear in my eye. The seventeen remaining strokes were delivered in the same clinical manner, each delayed by her slow movement around the bed; the waiting between the fire of the strikes as painful as the strikes themselves. My thighs were on fire, the pain all-consuming. I felt myself drifting mentally. I felt her hand run over my brow, over my cheek, caressing and comforting, then down to my breasts and to my achingly hard nipples.

She took a pair of nipple clamps from the drawer and clamped each nipple, tightening them until I sobbed again.

No smile, no kiss, no words until, “Turn onto your front, please.” I did. “Arse up, please, Sonia.”

I couldn’t see but I knew what was coming and I whimpered. If the first twenty were bad, the next twenty with the vicious rattan cane would be worse still. She took her time, as she always did; her movements measured, designed to raise my tension. She ran her hands over my arse and pulled my knickers down to my knees.

“Stroke your clitoris, please Sonia.” My cunt was wet, my nipples numb and aching, my clitoris hard and uncovered. I ran my fingertip over it. “Get yourself close then maintain that closeness.” She knew my body better than I did. When I was showing the signs she wanted to see, the first stroke of the cane whistled before crashing into my flesh, searing it, making me buck and scream, still despite the leather strop I bit into.

The waiting, it was always the waiting that did it for me, made me sweat and shake and sob. The next nineteen strokes came slowly, so, so slowly. Her accuracy was amazing, two in one spot delivered from either side of me, the next two a fraction of an inch above or below the previous two until the pain was all of me, my mind floating, my finger busy on my clitoris, my cunt flooding.

After the eighteenth, she stopped and touched my face. “Are we ready?” You’re never ready. You may think you are, but you really aren’t. I nodded though. “Good. You know when to let your orgasm come, don’t you?” I nodded again. She moved out of my line of sight and I started to rub my clit faster, harder.

The penultimate strike was a long time coming, but when it came it was like a blow torch. I bucked as I had not bucked before and as the final blow came, even harder, so did my orgasm. It was indescribable. I screamed and the leather fell from my mouth, but the scream was pure, unalloyed ecstasy; cathartic, mind-bending, joyous.

She wasn’t done. “On your hands and knees, please, Sonia.” Always the ‘please.’ She was always polite, respectful, kindly almost. One hand on my back, the other at the clamp of my right nipple, she stroked my back for a few minutes before suddenly opening the clamp and the flood of blood into my nipple made me cry out. Slowly, deliberately, she walked around to the other side of the bed. “Ask me, Sonia, please.”

My voice was barely a whisper. “Please, Christina, will you take the other clamp off?”

“I can't hear you.”

I repeated myself louder as her hand stroked my back and then the awful waiting ended and the clamp opened, releasing the blood and a scream that could have been heard in my home city of Bristol, one hundred and twenty miles away.

“Rest now, Sonia. Take a shower if you’d like to. Join me in the sitting room for a drink.”

A while later, dressed again, I sat carefully in the chair I had occupied on arrival and we talked some more and had another gin and tonic. She told me she thought I should take the job, accept the pay rise but maybe we’d need to make our counselling sessions more frequent than the current three-monthly intervals. She’d leave that to me to decide.

“Time for you to go. Give me the pouch.”

I took a black velvet, drawstring pouch from my handbag, gave it to her and stood with my back to her as she sat. She reached up under my skirt and gently eased the plug out of my arse. I groaned as she held its widest point at my tightest point for a few seconds then gave me the blessed relief of its removal. “Wait.”

She put the plug in the pouch and then in my handbag and reached up under my skirt again. I felt the lubricated finger of ginger touch my hole, the pressure as it was gently, slowly pushed into me until I closed around it, leaving a length of twine she had threaded carefully through the ginger hanging from my arse. “You’ll be warm on the train.”

As my train thundered through the black night, I looked out of the window and saw my reflection in its glass; serene, composed, relaxed. The fire in my arse another component of her consultancy and working with the others that kept me sane, focussed and de-stressed.