Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
I could see his chest, though, through the robe’s open collar. I saw dark hair, the same salt-and-pepper as his temples, over muscle that looked dense and earned rather than sculpted for display. I made myself look at his face instead, which wasn’t much easier.
“Good,” he said, and the word was quiet, almost conversational, as if we were alone rather than standing on a set surrounded by lights and crew. “You look beautiful, Anne.”
I didn’t know what to do with the compliment. Kevin had called me pretty, sometimes, in the way boys call girls pretty when they’re hoping it will lead to something. This was different: Master Paul said it with a kind of intentionality that seemed to pin me in place, unable to move off the way his voice sounded when it said beautiful.
“Thank you,” I whispered, because my mother had raised me to say thank you when someone paid me a compliment, even when the compliment made me want to dissolve into the floor.
“Melissa,” Master Paul called over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off me. “We ready?”
Melissa’s voice came from somewhere behind the bank of lights. “Darlene’s almost done with the bathroom. We’ve got about ten minutes before we can shoot in there. Might as well do some rehearsal while she’s working on it.”
She appeared at the edge of the set a moment later, tablet in hand, coffee apparently finished or abandoned. She looked at me—at the baby doll, at the way I was standing, at whatever my face was doing—and nodded once, a sharp little dip of her chin that seemed to signify approval.
“Okay,” she said. “Let me explain the philosophy behind what we’re doing. The Surrender Line campaign is going to be a series of short scenes—vignettes, really—that get edited into commercials for the HSG stream and also broken out as stills for marketing materials. Print ads, digital banners, social posts for the NMB subscriber base. The aesthetic of Her Secret Garden is that things happen naturally. We’re not posing you. We’re not giving you marks to hit or lines to read. The whole point is that the dynamic between you and Master Paul creates moments that feel organic, lived-in. That’s why we brought in a highly trained Institute trainer to work with you rather than a male model for the images and a director to tell you where to stand and how to pose.”
She turned to Paul. “You’re in control of the scene. You direct her through the dynamic. Darlene captures what happens. The mics in this studio are AI directed and incredibly focused, and the sound can be edited in post, so if we need something adjusted for the shot—an angle, a position, a lighting issue—we’ll call it out, but otherwise, it’s your show. Once we’re rolling, we’ll just keep going, to keep it as real as we can.”
My heart had started to race. I could feel it in my throat, that trapped-bird sensation again, wings beating against the cage of my pulse. You’re in control of the scene. The words seemed to rearrange the air in the studio, shifting the invisible architecture of power so that everything—the lights, the cameras, the people moving at the periphery of my vision—oriented toward the man standing three feet from me in a silk bathrobe, with hands that had spanked me until I sobbed and a voice that had called me good girl and a cock that looked much bigger even than the strap-on my boss had fucked me with.
“Understood,” Paul said. He looked at me, and something in his expression changed. His face didn’t soften, but it seemed to settle. It made me think of a classical violinist I’d once watched in a video, just before he started to play a sonata.
Master Paul seemed to enter something. A mode, a space, a version of himself that was both the man who’d handed me a monogrammed handkerchief and another, even more ancient kind of man: an elemental man, even.
“Here’s how this first scene is going to work,” he said, speaking to me now but loud enough for Melissa and, presumably, Darlene to hear. “Our names are the same, but we’re fictional versions of ourselves. You’re my future wife, Anne, and I’m your accepted suitor, Paul—though as your character, raised in a New Modesty community, you know you should always call me sir, even if you forget sometimes. I’m visiting you at your home, to train you sexually, the way NM suitors do in most NM towns.”
My lips had parted, and I could feel my chest heaving even as my heart began to race. I knew all this from my work with Penelope, but hearing it applied to me, and above all applied to me by a muscular man whose job entailed training girls like me sexually… I suddenly wondered if I might hyperventilate.