Two Strikes

Two Strikes

A Den of Sin Vignette

By Holley Trent

The Den of Sin is a multi-author shared world series. That is to say although each story is unique and the author voices are different, the rules are the same, so the fictional Hotel Beaudelaire is always familiar.

Each story stands alone, though there may be some character overlap and recurring themes. The stories need not be read in order, but they may reference past events and previous guests of the Hotel Beaudelaire. To learn which stories are connected, please visit the Den of Sin website at
http://www.
denofsinseries
.com
, click on a story title in the menu, and scroll down to the section titled “Related.”

Season I – New Year's Eve Party

Forbidden Rendezvous
by Mel Blue

Ménage à Troys
by Holley Trent

Redeeming the Amazon
by L. V. Lewis

Wicked Surrender
by Ambrielle Kirk

Shamelessly Taken
by Mel Blue (free short story)

Two Strikes
by Holley Trent (free short story)

* * *

Season II – The Beaudelaire Bacchanal

Debauching the Virgin
by Mel Blue

Illicit Passions
by Ambrielle Kirk

O for Two
by Holley Trent

* * *

Valentines Day (Special)

As Sweet
by Holley Trent

* * *

Season III – Winterball Masquerade

Melt into Me
by Renee Luke

Reckless Attraction
by Ambrielle Kirk

Three Strikes
by Holley Trent

Unbidden Desires
by Melissa Blue

Winterball
by Holley Trent

Room service attendant Giselle Burke has worked at the New Orleans’s Hotel Beaudelaire for two years. While the rich and famous have their most carnal desires indulged during the hotel’s rare Den of Sin weekends, Giselle must remain an outsider looking in on the revelry. A hard thing for a woman who craves being touched.

When her longtime friend Max—known in BDSM circles as the “dark dom”—invites her into one of the hotel’s premium black rooms to help him break in his new submissive, she throws caution to the wind for just an hour. Max knows exactly how to extinguish her skin hunger, but he doesn’t recruit her into his play just because she sets a good example. With her, he doesn’t need to be the dark dom. Unfortunately, that’s the only way she’ll have him.

“
Three strikes and you’re out, and personally, I think that’s two too many.
”

Giselle Burke turned her supervisor Ms. Gibson’s words over in her mind as she pushed the room service cart out of the staff elevator and onto the Hotel Beaudelaire’s gold level.

“
We’re running a hotel, not a charity,
” Ms. Gibson had said.

Giselle sighed and rounded the corner. She strode toward the long corridor feeling burdened by the sting of yet another reprimand. Having to go immediately from her “chat” with Ms. Gibson up to this particular floor was like a shiv to the gut, but Ms. Gibson couldn’t have known that. She didn’t know anything about Giselle, really, beyond what her employment application stated.

To Ms. Gibson, Giselle was likely some lazy, twenty-something Millennial who expected to skirt the rules and never get her hands dirty—that she wanted rewards for doing no work.

It wasn’t true.

Yeah, Giselle dropped the ball occasionally. More than she would have liked, but it was so easy to get distracted at the hotel, especially during
these
weekends.

The place was packed with happy, smiling people drunk on love and lust, and Giselle went home every night, aching and exhausted, only to fall into a cold, empty bed.

For that reason, gold was her least favorite of the hotel’s partitions.

Most days of the year, these were just typical rooms that bore the antebellum mansion’s highest rates. The gold rooms were ornate, but more importantly,
large
.

They had to be, because several weekends per year, the hotel closed to New Orleans’s tourists, and converted into a den of sin. Gold rooms were set aside for ménage and swinger clientele. Those guests always left the hotel at the end of these long fantasy weekends looking so content.
Fulfilled
.

She would be, too, if she had four hands and two mouths lavishing her with non-stop affection for two days.

The only affection she’d been receiving lately was of the self-love variety. And, well, she’d been loving herself a
lot
, and who could blame her? She catered to the whims of the rich and gorgeous, who all heeded the Den’s rare invitations to let their hair down—to leave their inhibitions at the door.

Uptight money managers, prim professors, doctors, lawyers, athletes—you name it.

No matter how white-bread they presented themselves to the world, at the Den of Sin, they let it all hang out.

All
of it.

The Den was a place for fantasies to come true…just not Giselle’s.

Giselle navigated past an amorous couple in the hallway, and stole a look back at the passionate pair. Here they were—fucking like wolves in the wild against the wall and giving her no regard whatsoever.

God, that man had to be strong, holding all that woman’s weight like that. She seemed to trust his strength implicitly, given her hooded eyes and parted lips. She knew he wouldn’t let her fall. She was utterly relaxed in his embrace as he drilled his cock in and out. In and out.

Lucky them.

Giselle paused in front of one dark wood door and straightened her crisp white shirt. She knocked, and while waiting for the room’s inhabitants to acknowledge her, risked one more glance at the couple.

The man, as if registering somehow that her gaze was upon him, turned his head to the right, blocking the woman’s face from Giselle’s view.

He dragged his tongue across his top lip and hitched the woman’s ass up a bit higher. His thrusts became longer, slower, as he presented his dick in Giselle’s view, over and over again.

Long, hard, and thick.

His wife was a lucky woman, as was the woman he was mercilessly hammering at the moment. The couple had been to The Den enough times that Giselle knew their names and could guess their kinks, not that they tried to hide them. Swingers.

Giselle drew in a breath, her pussy clenching in want as she watched the brazen display. He seemed to be saying, “Would you like some? You can be next if you’d like.”

Oh yes, she’d
like
very much. Unfortunately, good customer service at The Beaudelaire did not extend as far as offering one’s body to the guests, no matter how much the clients pled and cajoled. Giselle had already been lectured about that once, two years ago during her training. “
We’re not in the business of prostitution
,” Ms. Gibson had said. “
We make the fantasies possible, but we should never engage in them.
”

Giselle scoffed, even remembering the conversation. It seemed sometimes Ms. Gibson saw strictly in black and white rather than grayscale.

Giselle pulled her stare free of the decadent sight at her left and knocked again.
Come on, folks. Put on your panties and open up.

Ms. Gibson was going to have her ass and good if Giselle let the room service orders get backed up again. The Beaudelaire was a five-star establishment, and the management had a low tolerance of inefficiency. Giselle really wasn’t that careless, but…she always seemed to be in the right places at all the wrong times.

Like now.

The man down the hall had turned his face back toward his conquest, but seemingly hadn’t forgotten Giselle was there. He’d loosened his right arm from beneath the woman’s ass and crooked his index finger at Giselle.

Get in line
, he was saying.

“Nope,” she whispered as the door in front of her opened.

A woman with rumpled hair, who glanced at something to behind her and to her right, asked, “Did you forget the card?”

She turned her gaze toward Giselle and startled, cringing. “Oh!”

“Room service, Mrs. Troy.”

Mrs. Troy nodded and backed away from the door.

Mrs. Troy had come in with one man, but would be shared by
two
men for the weekend.

Eve Troy was beautiful. Well-educated. Wealthy. She was desirable to two of the most gorgeous men Giselle had ever seen in the flesh, and Giselle should have hated her. But, she couldn’t. Mrs. Troy was genuinely kind. She didn’t look down on Giselle the way some of the other well-heeled guests did. Every time she passed the woman, Mrs. Troy had acknowledged her with a nod. She
saw
her.

Giselle maneuvered the cart into the room and made a discreet scan of the other three corners. Mrs. Troy’s two men were missing from the view.

Thank goodness. If Giselle kept on blushing the way she was—like the virgin schoolgirl she most certainly was
not
—she’d have to call a cab home.

Some of her fellow staff members had become, more or less, desensitized to the carnival of flesh at The Den.

Giselle would never be. How could she, when she so badly craved being touched?

* * *

Max Fletcher caught sight of his favorite stand-in submissive as he strode through The Beaudelaire’s atrium toward the expansion area. That’s where they let the sadists like him play—the black rooms.

A smile pulled his lips, and he increased his pace as he slipped his fingers out of his leather gloves.

Her hips worked in their usual sinuous figure eight as she pushed the cart toward the kitchen. It’d been months since he’d seen those hips unclothed, and that back flattened beneath his palms. Their arrangement was a convenient one. Giselle was far too headstrong to make a good submissive, really, but she played along nicely and was reliable at showing the newbies the ropes.

The newbie that Ms. Gibson had picked out for him this time? Oh, boy. Not only was she inexperienced, but she was so damned timid if he were to sneeze in her general direction she’d probably keel over. What the hell had the woman been thinking?

Yeah, his tastes were specific. Hard to fill. Impossible, even, but the closest she could find to his perfect sub was this quavering wallflower with a little cartoon heart tattoo on her wrist?

He laughed. Of course that was all she could find given the parameters he’d plied her with. She’d found exactly what he’d asked for, but what he asked for wasn’t what he really wanted.

He couldn’t have what he wanted.

“Queen G!” he called out, laughing.

Giselle halted near the staff kitchen entrance and turned slowly with one of her black eyebrows raised in warning.

“Hello, gorgeous.” He loped to her, and she let him pull her into his embrace. They rocked side to side a few beats before she pushed him back, swatting at his naked chest.

“I’ve already got two strikes,” she whispered, cutting her gaze toward the kitchen. “Unlike some people, I don’t come from money and have to work for a living.”

“I keep saying it’s a shame a woman like you has to work at all. You should be horizontal on a chaise somewhere, being spoiled.”

“And naked, I bet.”

“Of course, naked.” He trailed his gaze down her outstanding curves—disguised somewhat by her structured uniform components—and then back up to the quirk in her lush lips.

His cock jumped inside his leather pants in memory of what that woman could do with those lips given incentive.

“I don’t see why you don’t just quit this job and come service me full-time.”

“We’ve discussed this,” she said. She looked down at her gold nametag, pinned over her right breast, and straightened it. “We’d kill each other within a week.”

“Not true. I’d let you be on top sometimes, if you’d like. I won’t even fight about it.”

“You topping from the bottom? No thanks. I’d like some autonomy. Control of my orgasm.”

“You know me too well.”

“I’ve known you half my life. Goes with the territory.”

“True.” Max had met Giselle their first day of ninth grade at the Catholic school they both attended. She’d been sent to the Mother Superior’s office because her blouse kept popping open from the strain of breasts that hadn’t been there when her mother had ordered the shirts. When she’d walked down the aisle toward the classroom exit, she’d winked at him and giggled.

Like the dork he was back then, he grinned back, made some crude comment, and was promptly sent to the office, too, for being
disruptive
. They’d bonded outside that office while waiting on the Mother Superior.

They’d been friends for years before they had sex—a desperate
let’s be each other’s firsts
sort of scenario when they were eighteen and he was set to move away for college. He didn’t see her again for five years, when he found her pushing that same cart down the halls of The Beaudelaire during a Den weekend. That’d been two years ago.

“I need your help, G. I’ve got a wallflower submissive.”

She rolled her dark eyes and blew out a breath. “I thought you liked a challenge.”

“Challenges are things like round two of Jeopardy and ten-mile hikes in rough terrain. This isn’t a challenge. This is mission impossible. I get enough of those at work. I don’t want them when I’m at play.”

Her lips quirked up. “You exaggerate so fucking much. Did you talk to Ms. Gibson? See why she selected her?”

“I was on the way to her office, but when I saw you, I thought maybe we could put the virgin through her paces. Together.”

She put up her hands. “Wait. No. She’s a—”

He shrugged. “Might as well be. I suspect she talks a good game, but when push comes to shove, she’s not so great under fire. She turned the most delightful shade of red when I stepped into the room, and I hadn’t even picked up my crop.”

“You are pretty intimidating,
Maximus
. I’d probably want to run from you, too. Scary-ass motherfucker.”

Her face was such a placid blank, he couldn’t tell if she was bullshitting him. She’d certainly never given him any indication of fear of his person. Of his crop? Well, yes, that. Of course, that.

“You think I’m scary, Queen G?” He fondled the stretch of skin exposed by her gaping buttons, and dragged his fingertip beneath her bra band.

She drew in a breath and scanned the room behind her.

“No one’s there, G. Answer me.”

“No, of course I don’t think you’re scary,” she whispered. “But I could see why other women would. You’re so fucking alpha. You’ve got that Neanderthal vibe going on. Tone it down a bit, and maybe people can think straight.”

“I am what I am. Come on.” He hooked his fingers inside her collar and pulled her closer, against his chest. Pressing his lips against her left ear, he said, “Show her what I like. Help me pull her out of her shell, if there’s anything there worth pulling out.”

“What if she doesn’t like watching?”

“Are you saying yes?”

“No. I need to get back to work.”

“I’m offering you no-strings-attached dick, since that’s the only way you’ll take it, and you really going to deny me the pleasure of your company? Has your sex drive waned in the past four months, pretty lady?”

“Fuck you.”

“Other way around. I fuck you, and then I ask you to reconsider going home with me for the week so I can wreck that smooth pussy some more, you give me your usual rude refusal, we hug and make-up, and we go on our ways.” He dropped his voice a hair more. “Is your pussy smooth today?”

She snorted. “Nope.”

“If you were my submissive, you’d get punished for that. Five strikes, I think.”

“Good thing I’m not your sub.”

The
mouth
on that woman. He loved it. He’d never let that on. He had a reputation to maintain, after all. “You comin’, Queen G?”

She took a step back from him and leaned her head to the side as if to think. “Maybe I can take lunch after this next room service delivery. I’ll only have an hour, though.”

“Not long enough.” He needed
hours
, if that sub was as green as he suspected. Giselle always helped them loosen up. Something about leading by example. This sub would need a lot of examples, and, well, Max was happy to provide them. He’d start with peeling off all Giselle’s stifling clothing layers to expose that luminous brown skin, and then he’d bind her in ropes just the way he liked. Maybe he’d press her down to hands and knees in front of him. She’d be relaxed, trusting, as he patterned her ass with his paddle, his flogger, or his crop. And when he pushed her shoulders down to the floor and angled her ass up, she’d be welcoming of his cock. She always was.