“These panties are soaking, aren’t they, Ingrid Vogel?” he asked in a low, mocking voice.

I didn’t even actually know the answer, not for sure—and yet the sound of Mr. Alden’s voice, the very tone of his words, told me beyond any shadow of a doubt that he could see how wet I’d gotten the moment he put his hand on my rear end in place of the paddle.

“Yes,” I gasped. “Yes, sir. Oh…”

But I wasn’t allowed to speak unless he had asked me a question. I couldn’t even say please—even when I meant to beg him to command me, to degrade me further with his terribly skillful fingers.

“You need it very badly, don’t you, sweetheart?”

He put two fingers on the mesh that covered the burning nub where I felt neediest of all. He pressed lightly—much too lightly. I whimpered, arched my back, tried to push my private parts further out. The rational part of my brain tried to distract my body, keep it from answering, but the action of the wand took over. I told myself that the wand had taken over, anyway.

“Yes, sir,” I moaned.

“Well,” he said, “you’re going to get it very soon.”

His hands left me.

“Stand up and take off your blouse and your skirt. You’ve got a little more of your paddling to come before I fuck you.”

Automatically I straightened up. My hands went to the button at the neck of my silky white blouse. A frighteningly attractive idea rose unbidden in my brain, that the compliance wand had freed me from the mortification of having to strip of my own free will… because I wanted to show my new boss my naughty underwear… because I needed a fucking from an arrogant, dominant man whom I had to call sir as he enjoyed my helpless body.

“Turn around,” Mr. Alden commanded.

It felt like I had just stepped from his climate-controlled office into the broiling sun of a summer day. My whole body blushed. Again, though, as I obeyed, and saw that he had sat down in one of the armchairs at the other end of his vast office, I had the utterly unwelcome thought that really I should feel grateful that he had touched me with the wand. My brow creased hard and tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I looked down at the rug. My fingers finished unbuttoning, and my hands traveled downward, to grasp the hem of the blouse, which had of course gotten completely untucked from the waistband of my skirt.

At least, having sat down across the room, Mr. Alden wasn’t as close to me.

“Come here,” he said casually, as if it represented an afterthought.

I swallowed hard. I wondered, with an idiotic little thrill of hope, whether the two impulses from his orders would somehow interfere with one another inside me, and I could just keep on standing there, caught between the old command to strip and the new one to go to him. Maybe, I thought, my body would even try to do both things at once, and I would trip and fall. Maybe I would break my ankle, and Mr. Alden would have to get help and I would get away.

Apparently the action of the wand on my nervous system didn’t have any trouble with that kind of negotiation, though. The latest command overrode the earlier one: with my hands crossed in front of my tummy and my trembling fingers grasping the blouse’s hem, I walked toward him, waves of mortified heat washing through me with every step.

I walked slowly, not from the overpowering reluctance I had in my head—I wished it were overpowering, anyway. The measured pace of my feet, I sensed in the ideas that seemed to bubble up from the dark, shameful part of me, came from not knowing how close my boss wanted me to get, and fear of being punished if I overstepped.

“Look at me,” he said, his tone sharpening again, as if he wanted to ensure I understood that he had no intention of losing the pleasure he clearly took in my abject degradation.

My feet stopped. I raised my eyes. Mr. Alden gazed back at me. He had his arms spread, one elbow resting on each of the armrests of the big leather chair. With his right hand he pointed to a spot on the thick red carpet, two feet or so in front of his knees.

My involuntary reaction told me that the bearer of the horrid compliance wand didn’t need to use words. My feet went of their own accord, picking up the pace a little now that I knew precisely where my boss had decided I should stand, to take off my clothes for him.

I arrived there all too soon, still looking at Mr. Alden’s impossibly handsome face and wondering how it could lack any sign of cruelty or malice given what he had done to me, and planned to do to me. I wanted to look away, out the window or even down at his knees, clad in his elegant charcoal gray suit pants. I couldn’t. It made me feel so lightheaded I wondered if I would simply pass out, but I had not the slightest ability to turn my eyes to anything else. My new boss’ blue gaze, seemingly lit up and made bluer by his golden, slightly curly hair, held me transfixed.

He leaned forward, putting his hands on his knees. My heart jumped and my knees quaked under me. Somehow I understood, though it seemed shameful and terrifying to me that I could apparently read his mind in some way, that the change in posture represented a command to go on with my most important task.

The one I refused to do. The one that I’m going to get paddled again for defying.

Take off your clothes.

With a little sob I pulled my blouse up over my face. I had a wild little hope, just as stupid as all the others I’d had about the operation of the compliance wand, that when the fabric broke the eye contact between me and Mr. Alden the compulsion to obey his every whim would vanish too.

Instead, when the whiteness interrupted my view of him, the dark heat inside me demanded that I rip the blouse off my face immediately, so that I could continue to obey him. I felt terribly uneasy in that moment, suddenly sure that he would paddle me harder and longer for having blocked his view of my features and my ability to meet his eyes the way he had ordered.

I pulled it off, and the unease gave way to a new surge of heat to my face and, worse, down below, inside my panties. Mr. Alden’s face had such an intent, evaluating expression on it that I felt like a butterfly pinned to a sheet of cardboard as I let the blouse fall to the floor. His eyes traveled downward. I bit my lip and I had to stifle a sob at the sheer frankness of his inspection of my little breasts in my naughty, lacy bra.

My arms twitched with the automatic impulse that came from my habitual modesty: I wanted desperately to cover my chest with my hands. They stayed at my sides, trembling.

“Put your hands under those sweet little tits,” Mr. Alden said. “Offer them to me.”