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)
“Stuart, this is Anne Chamberlain,” Penelope said, resting her hand briefly on my shoulder as she guided me to my chair. “Anne, Stuart Harrington. Executive Vice President of Strategic Development at NMB.”
“Hello,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. NMB. The worst meetings were about NMB. New Modesty Blue: Selecta’s own curated porn channel, its ‘stories’ drawn from the lives of young couples in New Modesty town.
Stuart’s mouth curved into something that was technically a smile. “Welcome to Selecta, Anne.”
The woman beside him leaned forward and extended her hand across the table before I’d even fully sat down. She too was tall—I could tell even with her seated—with dark hair that fell past her shoulders and sharp, intelligent brown eyes that held none of Stuart’s calculated appraisal. Where he radiated control, she radiated energy, the barely contained kind that suggested she was always three steps ahead of whatever conversation she was in and impatient for everyone else to catch up.
“Melissa Mitropoulos,” she said. Her handshake was firm, almost aggressive. “I’m the head of HSG.”
Stuart laughed. “Melissa is the creator of HSG, she means to say.”
I looked over at Penelope, mystified but frightened to ask. To my relief, my boss smiled.
“Her Secret Garden,” she explained. “It’s the fastest growing stream on NMB. Geared toward repressed young women with submissive tendencies.”
I tried not to react, but I couldn’t help the hard swallow or the crease in my brow. Surely I’d imagined that Penelope had left an ellipsis at the end of her sentence, one that contained the two words like you.
Thankfully Melissa picked up the flow of the discussion smoothly, so I could look back across the table at her without showing how uncomfortable I had started to feel. What she said, though, didn’t help much.
“You’re going to hear some things in this meeting that will probably make your eyes go wide, so I apologize in advance. Or maybe I don’t. Depends on how it goes.”
She flashed a grin that was equal parts charm and challenge, and I found myself liking her immediately, which confused me, because I also found her terrifying.
“Melissa has a proposal,” Penelope said, settling into her chair with the composed grace I’d come to recognize as her default state. She opened a slim leather portfolio and uncapped her pen. “Stuart and I are here to evaluate it. You’re here to take notes and look pretty.” She glanced at me sideways, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking. “The second part you’ve already got covered.”
I opened my laptop. My cheeks had gotten very warm.
Melissa stood, even though the room was small enough that standing seemed unnecessary, and clicked a remote. The screen on the wall lit up with a single image: a woman’s torso, probably computer-generated to judge from its perfection, photographed from collarbone to mid-thigh, wearing a bra-and-panty set that stopped my breath in a way I immediately resented.
It was black. Not the plain, functional black of everyday underwear, but a deep, liquid black that seemed to absorb light. The bra was structured but sheer, with delicate lace panels that revealed more than they concealed—the shadow of nipples visible through the fabric like something glimpsed through fog. The panties sat much lower on the hips than the training intimates I’d seen in the previous presentations, cut to suggest rather than cover, with a lace waistband that dipped in a provocative V below the navel.
But it wasn’t just beautiful. There was something about the construction—the way the fabric hugged the body, the strategic placement of seams, the subtle reinforcement at the gusset—that told me, with the product literacy I’d unwillingly developed over eight weeks of meetings, that this was not ordinary lingerie.
“What you’re looking at,” Melissa said, her voice carrying the confident clarity of someone who had rehearsed this but didn’t need to, “is one of the prototypes for what I’m calling the Surrender Line.”
She clicked to the next slide. A new torso appeared on the screen—the same flawless computer-generated body, but this time wearing a baby doll nightgown that made the black bra-and-panty set look almost conservative by comparison.
The fabric was a pale champagne silk, gossamer-thin, falling from a gathered empire waist to a hemline that barely grazed the tops of the thighs. Through it, every contour of the body beneath was visible—the curve of breasts, the shadow of the navel, the faint suggestion of hipbones—as if the garment existed not to cover but to frame. Beneath it, matching panties in the same champagne silk, so sheer they might as well have been made of light. I could see everything through them. The smoothness that on a real young woman would have to come from shaving or waxing. The little cleft. Everything.
“The Surrender Baby Doll,” Melissa said. “Same feedback technology as the current training intimates, but integrated into fabric that a husband actually wants to see on his wife. The awareness panels are woven directly into the silk at the gusset—she won’t feel them as a separate element, but they’re there, maintaining that low-level contact with the clitoris and perineum. These don’t have the sensors or the vibration modules of the newest line, but they don’t need them. The difference is context. This isn’t underwear she puts on under her clothes in the morning. This is what she puts on at night, for him, because he’s told her to be ready to serve his pleasure.”