The Making of a Mistress: Read Chapter One of Victoria Fraser’s Story

You know Victoria Fraser as Mistress.

You know the confidence. The control. That ability to make a perfectly ordinary sentence sound like something you ought to sit up and pay attention to.

But she had to begin somewhere.

And I think it’s time you met Helena.

In The Making of a Mistress, book seven in the Awakening of Desire series, we go back into Victoria’s past to discover how she became the Domme you know. Before the certainty, before the experience, there was a woman with plenty to learn, and Helena Drummond was prepared to teach her.

I’ve enjoyed introducing you to these two through pictures, but now you can meet them on the page. That’s where the looks become conversations, the silences become interesting, and you discover what’s happening behind Victoria’s composure.

I’m sharing a chapter below, free to read.

Consider it an invitation to spend a little time with Victoria before everyone knew her as Mistress Fraser. 

The Making of a Mistress: Part One releases on my website on 25 November. Preorders will be live soon.

Get comfortable. Give Victoria your attention.

I suspect she’ll keep it.

Read Your Free Chapter Below

One airless evening in July, with the windows wide to the gardens, months of watching came down to a row of pearl buttons, and I understood at last what the chair was for.

The evening started slowly in the heat, guests arriving with the day still on their skin, the first hour all gardens and holidays. Marion brought iced water and held the wine back, and I sat in the chair and checked the room guest by guest, and found nothing anywhere but ease. I didn’t quite believe it. The spring had taught me that a room this settled was usually waiting for something.

It was linen and bare arms that night, the candles burning straight in the still air and the blackbirds still going past ten across the road. By then I knew the smell of a charged room. It was a real smell, under the wax and the cut flowers, warm and human, and once you knew it you couldn’t mistake it. The grey-haired guest, whose name was Nan, had spent the early evening by the open window in quiet conversation with the youngest guest, Edie, two women talking about their travels. Then Nan, without breaking the sentence she was in, reached over and began to undo the front of Edie’s linen dress, one small pearl button at a time, from the neckline downwards.

It took perhaps ninety seconds, in the middle of an ordinary conversation about a visit to Angkor Wat. “You go before dawn, and stand by the lily pond in the dark, and wait,” Nan said, as though discussing nothing at all, her fingers working their way down Edie’s breastbone. “The towers come up out of the black so slowly you can’t see it happening, and then all at once they’re there.” Edie sat through it with her breathing gone shallow and her eyes down, and all of her seemed gathered under Nan’s fingers. And I, in the blue chair six feet away, with my water glass and my excellent posture, felt every second of it on my own skin.

I did what my training told me and watched. I counted the buttons, four of them, and noticed the button at which Edie’s breathing changed, from the top of her chest to the bottom. It was the fourth. Nan’s tempo never varied. Her sentence about temples ran on at conversational pace while her fingers kept their own slow time, like an experienced pianist playing two pieces at once.

And then, after the fourth button, I lost count.

Nan didn’t stop at the waist. She kept on, at the same unhurried pace, until the last button gave and the linen fell open from Edie’s throat to her knees, and Edie was naked underneath it. Everyone watched. Nan went on talking about the lily pond at Angkor, and the monks in saffron crossing the causeway at first light, and while she talked she slid her hand inside the open dress and cupped Edie’s breast, and ran her thumb over the nipple until it hardened. Edie’s head went back against the window frame. Her lips parted, and she didn’t make a sound, and I understood that she had been told not to.

Nan moved to the other breast and took her time there too. Then her hand went lower, flat against Edie’s stomach, which was trembling now, and lower still, and Edie’s knees came apart for her without being asked. Nan’s fingers found her. I watched them slide between her legs and come up shining in the candlelight, and go back, and begin to move in small slow circles that never changed their speed. “The heat comes up off the stone by seven,” Nan said to the room, “so you want to be gone by then.” Edie’s hands were gripping the edge of the window seat. Her hips had begun to lift into Nan’s hand, and each time they did, Nan drew back a fraction and waited, until Edie stilled, and then began again.

It went on for longer than I could measure. Edie’s temples were damp, her thighs shaking, while only the small wet sounds of Nan’s fingers and Nan’s voice filled the room. When Nan finally slipped two fingers inside her and pressed her thumb hard against her clit and glanced in Helena’s direction, I saw the nod, consent flowing in all directions. Then she bent her head and said, “Let your mistress see you come,” and Edie came apart on the window seat with her mouth open and her eyes squeezed shut, silent still, her whole body clenching around Nan’s hand again and again, and Nan held her through it and finished her sentence about the temples.

And somewhere in all of that, I stopped watching. I was somewhere else, somewhere hot, and lost. In my head it was my hand inside that dress, and it was my voice telling a story to the room while a woman watched and shook apart under my fingers, and I knew exactly how slow I would go, and exactly when I would let her come. Then, worse, it was me on the window seat. I didn’t know which picture frightened me more. I came back to the blue chair with my heart going and my collar soaked and my water untouched, wet between my legs, and it took more effort than I liked to pull myself together. I had told myself the blue chair was a spectator’s seat. It never had been. I had been part of every evening in that room since the first one, and tonight I could no longer pretend otherwise.

And the evening was not over. That was the part no training covered: I had to go on sitting in it. The wine came round, and I took a glass for no other reason than to give me something to hold onto. Fiona settled onto the arm of the next chair with a story about her war with a neighbour’s cat over her sweet peas, and I heard myself laugh in the right places, half a beat late each time, like a pianist counting a bar she used to know by heart. Fiona, mid-story, gave me one brief, kind look that understood everything, and went on with the cat as though nothing in the world were more interesting. It was, I understood later, the kindest thing anyone did for me that night.

When the story was finished, she leaned down to set her empty glass on the sill beside mine, and spoke so quietly that nobody else could have heard.

“When your year’s up, I’d like to be first.” She straightened, unhurried. “You’d be exacting. You wouldn’t let a single thing slide, and you’d make me earn every inch of it. And I’d do anything you asked of me, Victoria. Anything at all.” Her eyes held mine a moment longer. “I’ve watched you watching. I know.”

Then she went back to the far side of the room, and I sat with my glass in both hands and my face perfectly composed. Anything at all. My mind supplied, without permission, a dozen things I might ask of her, and the order I would ask them in, and how long I would make her wait between each one. I had to cross my legs. I had been wanted before. I had never before been offered somebody’s obedience, and I hadn’t known until that moment how badly I wanted to be given it.

I continued to watch, kept my posture and answered what I was asked, and I didn’t look at the window seat, where Edie sat buttoned up again with Nan’s arm round her, the two of them back on Cambodia. Underneath my dress and good manners, my body carried on without me.

What stayed with me for days afterwards was the tempo. Nan’s fingers had never once hurried. While every appetite in the room, mine included, wanted them faster, she kept absolute control. That encounter came back to me at odd hours all that week, while I marked, and once, disastrously, during a staff meeting about toilet refurbishments which were long overdue. Each time I pushed it away, and each time it came back.

That night, as the guests left one by one, each saying goodnight at the wing chair, I was at the coat rack in the hall when Helena Drummond, seeing off the last of them, stopped beside me and spoke quietly.

“When Nan started with the buttons,” she said. “Where were you?”

There was no point pretending I didn’t know what she meant, so I told her the truth. “With Edie, until the fourth button. Counting. Watching for the moment her breathing changed.” I paused. “And then I was with Nan, and then I was somewhere else completely and I couldn’t tell you for how long.”

Helena almost smiled, and she opened the door herself onto the warm blue July night, the gardens breathing across the road, the lamps just coming on. “Good. Now you know what wanting does to your attention. It never waits to be invited, and it will walk off with your attention every time you let it. Attention before intention, Victoria. Remember that. The intention will look after itself. Attention is the only part that has to be built: daily, and for years before anybody appreciates it fully. Home with you now. You’ll not sleep for a while yet, and that’s as it should be.”

She was right about the sleep. I rode home through the warm streets with my collar open and lay a long time in the dark of my bedsit, listening to my pulse. Somewhere towards two I stopped fighting what I had seen, and slid my hand between my legs, and let it play all the way through, at Nan’s tempo, never once hurrying. When I came, it was with my voice, telling Fiona, “Let your mistress see you come.” That was the first night of the rest of my education.

Haven’t met Mistress Fraser yet?

Start with May I Call You Mistress?, where Victoria and Abby’s story begins, then follow the women of Awakening of Desire through six books of desire, complicated relationships and the vulnerability behind all that control.

Explore the Awakening of Desire six-book ebook bundle.

Prefer someone whispering the story in your ear?

You can also experience the first six books in audio, narrated by Amber Heart. Headphones might be a good idea. 😉

Listen to the Awakening of Desire audiobook bundle.

Now you’ve read the opening, tell me: what are you most curious to discover about Victoria and Helena?