Author's Note: Dara is a single mother of a college freshman working as a nurse and running a dairy farm that has been in the family for more than 100 years. After being burned by a cheating husband, Dara has vowed never to be involved with any man who isn't submissive to her, and in the first three parts of "Prize Bull," she has been seducing Travis, almost 19 years old, handsome, and naturally submissive. The two had grown closer, but in Chapter Three, a session with the riding crop went farther than intended, and Dara vowed to discontinue the relationship.
--Carlie Plum
*
It had been an accident. For the first time, I had allowed Travis to pleasure me orally, showing him he was doing what I wanted with a flick of the leather riding crop against his naked ass. And he had done so wonderfully that in the end I had been smacking him almost continuously as I climbed to my own orgasm, leaving him with a backside that was covered in welts and blood blisters under the skin. When I had first started paddling him, many months before, he had said he would tell me if it ever became too much, but too much came and went without him uttering a word. I couldn't see any other choice but to go back to simply being his boss. After treating him with some salve and Motrin I sent him home. Before he came in for work the next morning, I was out of the house, leaving him a note on his desk in his office in the barn and a tube of a cream I had searched for after he left. I had had it made up for my son Tim at the local compounding pharmacy after a particularly bad sports injury. With a topical analgesic, an antibiotic, and a steroid cream combined, I hoped it would ease some of his discomfort while it sped his healing. I instructed him to use the cream twice a day until he was totally healed. I thought back to the games I had played with him before, making him bend over and let me check him after each time I paddled him, showing my dominance by making him strip for me and let me rub salve on him when all he had was a slightly reddened bottom. I had been playing with fire the whole time, and now Travis had gotten burned.
I managed to avoid him for days. The dairy barn, where so many of our interludes had happened, was off limits as long as he was there. I checked on the cows after he left, tracking their progress through the software we used to monitor milk production and other vital statistics. I watched from the window as Travis got in and out of his truck, seeing that he was healing as he moved more easily with each day. He was still wearing the uniform pants I had had made especially for him. Made of a special material I had found searching online, they were lightweight. The winter version he was wearing now was designed to lock in heat despite how thin the material was. They had built-in linings where boxers would normally go: light, soft Polarfleece in the winter version, which I knew would be soothing against his injuries. For days, I either texted him instructions or left notes on his desk. I scheduled my comings and goings to my job off the farm and errands so we wouldn't meet in person, even though the barn and farmhouse were so close together.
Just when we had settled in to the new normal for what had always been an unusual relationship--not too many bosses paddle their employees naked bottoms for work infractions, and not too many employees come all over the floor from the experience, or beg their boss to finger their ass until they come--Travis caught me by surprise. It was almost the end of January, and the road to the farm was slick with snow as I drove up after staying late at work and then running errands to give Travis time to finish his chores. There was only one light on in the barn--the one we left on all night--and no sign of Travis' truck as I passed by, driving up the hill and parking by the farmhouse. Travis was waiting on the porch swing in the cold, his hand stuck deep in his pockets, a knit cap pulled low over his ears and a scarf around his neck. He stood up as I stepped onto the porch, but didn't say anything. "Go home, Travis," I said as I fumbled for the door key. "It's freezing out."
"Please look at me, Miss Dara."
I continued to flip through my keys, "I've known you since you were in the third grade with my son Tim," I told him. "I know what you look like," I continued, without turning my head.
"Look at me, Miss Dara," he pleaded, his voice cracking. I looked, saw the tears forming in the corners of his eyes.
"Come inside before we both freeze to death, then," I said, finally finding the right key and pushing the door to the farmhouse open. Once we were inside, I asked, "Okay, so what am I looking at?"
"Miss Dara, I'm six feet tall. I'm at least eight inches taller than you and I would bet I outweigh you by at least 80 pounds." Since I'm 5'3" and 105 lbs., he was probably right. "If I had wanted to stop you the other night, don't you think I could have? Do you really think what happened wasn't my choice?"
I was at a loss for words, but Travis continued. "You push me, Miss Dara, it's true. But you push me the way I want to go." Travis stopped for a moment, searching for the words, then went on. "I looked online some, trying to understand things, about me and you, I mean. And I realized I messed up. I should have said something the other night. The sites I looked at, they called it a safe word. A word that I should say if the pain is too much or if you push me too far. Please give me another chance, Miss Dara. You can give me a safe word and I promise I'll say it if I need to."
I looked at him, thinking. It was awkward to have to avoid my own employee, and the truth was, I missed him. I had started out with a vague sort of plan in my head, and somehow it had morphed into a, I don't know what. A relationship? A bond? Whatever it was, it filled a need in me that had never been filled before, a need I hadn't even known I had.
"You looked at these sites on the iPhone?" I asked.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Are they still in the history or did you clear it?"
"They're still there," he answered.
"Leave the phone here. I'll think about it." I opened the front door, signaling that the conversation was over.
After Travis left, I clicked though the pages he'd viewed, reading about dominant/submissive relationships. The safe word thing made sense, especially the part about the submissive having the responsibility to set limits. I realized that was what had freaked me out. As much as I loved being in control of Travis, I wasn't a mind reader, and he had to take responsibility for his own safety. I realized that I really wasn't a mind reader when I looked at the shopping pages Travis had visited. The things he seemed most interested in opened up new possibilities I hadn't considered, and I found myself getting wet thinking about them, so wet in fact that I pulled out a credit card and placed an order for a few items that I thought we would both enjoy before I went upstairs and masturbated myself to multiple orgasms.
I waited a few days before I joined Travis in the barn during chores. I wanted to be sure that I hadn't gotten swept up in the excitement at looking at the pages he'd viewed, or at finding out there were other people like us. I had left the iPhone back on Travis's desk in his office in the barn, but I'd wiped my browsing history so he wouldn't know what I'd looked at or what plans I had. At first I thought I'd wait until the package came to talk to him again, but in the end, my horniness got the better of me. Add to that the fact that I knew he was waiting for me to make a decision--I did a remote check on the Prize Bull software that was on the iPhone I had given him for work, and I could see he hadn't entered anything. The software was designed to track semen output in breeding bulls, but I had it modified to track every time Travis had an orgasm, with him responsible for entering the data, so I knew he hadn't come in almost a week and a half. I couldn't wait any longer to see how much he would come for me. So, two days after we had our chat, I came home from work and went into the house to change out of my scrubs and into my usual skirt, top, and cowboy boots, with a sexy red teddy underneath. Travis was doing so well running things on the farm during the slow season, it was rare that I had to put on work pants any more.
My confidence in him was proven as I walked through the barn. Everything was in its place, the cows looked healthy and cared for, and all the equipment was clean. Even though I had expanded the herd since Travis started work, the place looked more put together than when I was trying to work full time and take care of chores with part-time help and me filling in before and after long day of work at the doctor's office in town. I walked through the barn, not saying a word, but I could feel Travis's eyes on me even when I wasn't looking at him. I ended my tour in his corner office, where the partitions blocked his view of me. I called out, "I'd like a short meeting when you're all finished with chores, Travis. But don't rush, I have plenty of paperwork to look over."