Ashleigh and the Governess, Ch. 10

When Aleksandra couldn't remember the word for something in Ukrainian, she felt a panic come on.
	It bothered her a great deal. Her life had been so comfortable for so long, that she was not used to the struggle. But her life hadn't always been about comfort! She had become distracted. She had missed many days of work, and several of her friends' birthday parties. She still enjoyed this new lifestyle of bossing her stepson around and getting massaged and stretched and pampered immensely, but she was starting to worry that it was softening her willpower. When she couldn't recall a simple word in her native language, it confirmed her suspicions. With this psychological discomfort in mind, Aleksandra looked down at her outfit and was surprised by it: a long silk robe with fur along the sleeves and the bottom hem of the garment that would drag along the floor as she walked. It was a good thing the floor was immaculately clean, because that was mink fur.
	Elizabeth was nearby when this happened, holding her smartphone up and taking a video of herself talking.
	"Good morning! I'm about to begin my day with some breakfast, which was catered by New Roasters. Love you guys!"
	The platinum-haired influencer was acting a lot more playful and upbeat than she was off-camera. It made Aleksandra think of an advertisement, or that Elizabeth was some kind of waitress going on about how good their salad was.
	"They gave me a watercress sandwich, and the arugula salad..."
	That was the word Aleksandra couldn't remember in Ukrainian: arugula. She continued watching Elizabeth as she made her sponsored video. From their conversations, she knew that her roommate didn't enjoy doing this new livestreaming thing although she appeared to be doing it more and more frequently.
	"Wow! Fifteen crystals! Thank you Raj!"
	That was another part of the job that annoyed her; now her followers could give her virtual tips that she was supposed to act all happy about. Even though fifteen crystals amounted to less than $5, and the platform took much of that, Elizabeth had to act excited because she wanted to motivate people to put money in to legitimize the platform. This change in her job stemmed from a bad contract she made with an advertising firm that she was now stuck living up to. Sometimes, people would sign up with usernames like 'DUCHESS_OF_THOTTINGHAM' and tip her $100 so the message splashed all across the screen and looked like it was her title, to troll her. Aleksandra knew how much that must have bothered the girl; their household had an unspoken rule that no one would ever mention Mara Alsace because Elizabeth found it so upsetting.
	"Okay. I'm going to sit down and eat this breakfast, and I'll be back on at noon for my workout.. eh? I'm getting a message here."
	She read a popup on her phone with obvious displeasure.
	"Oh... I guess they want me to stay on stream while I eat breakfast. Would you guys like that?"
	There was hesitancy in her voice.
	 "Okay, looks like everyone wants that," Elizabeth said, barely bothering to conceal her disappointment, "Now where should I put the camera?"
	"No, I'm not going to do make this into an ASMR chewing video while I eat breakfast, calm down."
	Aleksandra decided to get dressed and go in to the office since she hadn't been in all week. That would take her mind off her troubles. It took much more 'effort' for her to go to work now, like her default choice would be to stay on the sofa and maybe make Ashleigh or Marisol bring her a treat or do some Thai yoga massage to help her wake up. Her see-through robe swept behind her as she walked, barefoot, up the stairs into her bedroom. Her princess feet did not encounter a single speck of dust on the entire trip – a fact that always brought her joy. Yusra wasn't home.
	Once she had changed, Aleksandra could appreciate how empowered she felt wearing her business clothes compared to the boudoir gown. She picked out a cream white powersuit which was immaculately cared-for due to her stepson's clothing obsession, as were the backless white stilettos she stepped into to complete the outfit. She felt a sense of purpose as she moved down the stairs to her car, thinking of real-world concerns instead of the melodrama of some spoiled Lebanese family. She thought of all the things she would accomplish and how far she had come already.
	She noticed the difference in her office right away. The energy was off. A distressing amount of the employees were gone and many others looked worried and unhappy. Generic sugar pop music was playing through the speakers which was not their policy.
	"Lindsay, what are you working on?"
	The beleaguered office girl gave her a piteous look. She had a large document box on her desk and she was looking through old, desiccated paperwork. There were volumes of yellowed pages, so old that they had hand-written cursive on them, relating to arcane real estate data. Aleksandra found it fatiguing to look at; dozens of lines of tract ID numbers, sales prices and acreages from such a bygone time that it couldn't possibly matter anymore.
	Lindsay took a photo of the page, then took a photo of the next page, and the next. Each one was nearly indistinguishable from the other, and this file alone had over a hundred such pages.
	"It's a fact-checking exercise," Lindsay explained as she worked, "They want us to go through the old documents and see if anything was recorded incorrectly."
	Aleksandra hadn't authorized this.
	"So you are photographing and uploading the documents?" she asked Lindsay, whom she had hired because she identified her as a bright, enterprising girl. Here she was doing the sort of dull, repetitive job that she wouldn't give to the lowliest intern.
	"Yes," she said, "But they keep on saying that photographs aren't good enough. They want me to enter the data into the computer manually. I refuse!"
	"Good for you!" Aleksandra told her, "You are the head of marketing. Who gave you this assignment? What else has changed?"
	"We've been hoping you'd come back. Why didn't you answer your phone or emails? We have a lot to talk about."
	Aleksandra saw distressingly few of her loyalists around the office. She understood right away, what was going on. She felt vulnerable, despite her tailored pantsuit and her money and her home court advantage. The Lipka Organization was a privately held company without a tangible product. No supply chain would be interrupted if the company reduced or even ceased to function. The Sisters had basically done to her the same thing she was planning to do to the Caldwell group: purging her supporters to stage a quick takeover. But how did Yusra have the ability to execute this plan in a few days? Aleksandra thought it would take months!
	"They want us to switch to a shared office space! Could you imagine!?" said Tawny, hurrying over to them with some visible difficulty walking in the four-inch heels she was sporting.
	Aleksandra really didn't know what to say to her employees and they were looking at her like they expected her to rally them. She racked her mind for some sort of counter move, but she was too panicked. When they chartered the company, she had allowed the Sisters to do nearly everything because they wanted it that way and because she thought they were making it a seamless experience for her. She cursed herself for being as careless as Ashleigh was, signing things without reading them carefully. Now it looked like they were in the same boat! Her thoughts had an obnoxious habit of drifting back to that stupid reality TV show she had been watching like it was some intrusive coping mechanism. Tawny and Lindsay exchanged a glance, then Lindsay spoke:
	"I think they're trying to make us quit by giving us really crappy jobs."
	"She pulled me off all of my assignments!" Tawny complained, "Now she wants me doing 'lifestyle research' which is basically just browsing clickbait articles all day and commenting on all of them. I don't see the point. I wanted to ask you if I can be switched back to my old job."
	"Same!"
	None of them noticed Yusra until she was right next to them, and she took a posture like she was surveying the women. Tawny and Lindsay both wilted beneath her scrutiny. Lindsay grabbed her left elbow with her right hand and Tawny lowered her chin to the ground, bowing her head a little. They behaved like the boss caught them doing something they weren't supposed to be doing: talking.
	"Aleksandra, can we speak privately?" Yusra asked.
	She nodded.
	"Back to work!" Yusra told the employees, and they hurried back to their desks without delay.
	Tawny had a standing desk now which was highly inappropriate considering her footwear. Her computer monitor was larger than it needed to be, and before Tawny got to work she stopped to put on a pair of glasses. They had blinders built into the sides, which was probably the reason she had them on since Tawny didn't need a prescription. At least they were cute: half pink, half white fashion glasses. The frames suited her pretty face which would now be buried in a screen for eight un-distracted hours a day.
	When they got to her office, Yusra invited Aleksandra to take her own chair.
	"Why have so many people quit? Why are you reassigning people without consulting me?" Aleksandra asked.
	"We have to lower our payroll," Yusra replied as though it was obvious, "So we needed to make some changes to the company. Your income will be unaffected, if that is your concern. You will be happy when you see the new numbers."
	"But this will weaken the Lipka Organization!" Aleksandra snapped, "You have my Head of Marketing doing the work of an unpaid intern. What will happen to our PR campaign?"
	"It will be mostly outsourced to other agencies," Yusra replied, "And you can still be in charge, the project will just be moved out-of-house."
	Aleksandra paused. Yusra was trying to turn the Lipka Organization into a pass-through company that just existed to finance other companies? Why should their payroll matter when Aleksandra could just pay everyone out of pocket without feeling it? And why was Yusra giving Tawny and Lindsay such menial, mind-numbing work when the Sisters were all about female dominance?
	 "I don't want to reduce payroll. I want to continue as we were."
	"We need to do this. There is a new investor who wants to join the project, but she will only invest in us if we operate a certain way. We can have a few girls working for us, but they need to all be paid minimum wage."
	Aleksandra frowned. She was starting to lose her temper. It felt like someone was hijacking her entire plan and changing it to suit their own wishes instead of hers. But she was terrified of offending Yusra so she chose her words carefully:
	"Who is this invesor?"
	"You know her. Her name is Judy Humphries."
	"Absolutely not!" was Aleksandra's indignant reply.
	Judy Humphries was a boorish woman; an absolute dread to spend any time with because of the way she vocally looked down on everybody. She was enormously wealthy and before Aleksandra had arrived into their neighborhood, she had been the Queen Bee, making all the housewives join her stupid book clubs and rigidly formal tea parties that took up their entire days and bored them to tears. Judy didn't even try to make these events fun. She would be berate a woman for making a 'bad' observation during a book discussion, or using the 'wrong' fork at brunch. If Yusra was bringing her in to this, Aleksandra was in trouble.
	"But you have agreed to this already," Yusra said, "You own 49% of the Likpa Organization. You have agreed to follow the company charter. What is the problem here?"
	Aleksandra knew she was being betrayed. Maybe this had been the plan all along. First they lulled her into a sense of security, then they got her to sign all these contracts they had written, now they were going to do the real work. It was all the Ukrainian woman could do to keep her composure when she felt so trapped and foolish. Yusra defied her to say something. Every thought brought her despair except for the idea of throwing up her hands and slinking back home for a lengthy foot reflexology session and to plan her next move. She felt timid and awkward in her office now, which used to be her seat of power.
	"I understand," Aleksandra murmured.
	She would fight back, but not now. She didn't give a thought to Tawny or Lindsay, to bettering their situations.
	"Excellent!" Yusra said, "It is very important we get her on board. You will be in charge of bringing her up to speed and getting her anything she needs."
	Aleksandra snorted. Of course Judy Humphries would want her as a personal assistant.
	"Oh. And she will require you to wear a uniform when you are working with her..."
	**
	Nothing, not a thousand pedicures, could make Aleksandra feel it was a worthwhile trade for her having to wear the outfit that Judy picked out for her. It was a leftover uniform she had from one of her businesses, perhaps from a beauty salon: A combination of a scrubs shirt and a black dress with a dozen buttons in the middle and white piping along the hems and collar. She blushed to see herself in it. The uniform had five pockets, one of which was above her left breast. Above that pocket, the Humphries Estates logo was prominently embroidered. Her life had changed in a snap. The office cleaner wouldn't arrive in time for Judy's visit, so it became Aleksandra's responsibility to clean the office to make a good first impression on the woman.
	"When she visits, I want you to treat her very politely," Yusra told Aleksandra, "You need to be thinking how you can earn her investment."
	Her cheeks became red when she started working, first from the embarrassment and then because she was getting hot and sweaty doing this demanding physical labor. Their office had a decent square footage and she knew from monitoring Ashleigh's performance that this would be a big job. She was deeply ashamed to be sweeping and mopping and wiping furniture down while Tawny and Lindsay were in plain view. But they didn't notice her much, they were so distracted with their own troubles. Now everybody knew that she had bowed to Yusra and that she would not be helping them. Aleksandra felt that she was in shock – unable to come to a decision and therefore willing to submit to Yusra because at least that reduced the hostility. Even if it meant dusting the feet of all the furniture and scrubbing the floors, at least it gave her time to think of a way to escape.
	Judy wasn't scheduled to arrive until the next morning, so Aleksandra put in an eight hour day detailing and tidying the place. It was exhausting, especially because she hadn't been to the gym or to her spin class in a while. The uniform was functional, she had to admit, but she loathed every second of wearing it. She knew she looked exactly like a maid and it was probably being done to entertain Judy on some level; she couldn't believe how far she had come in life only to wind up in these circumstances.
	'Why can't I stand up to Yusra?' Aleksandra thought to herself as she noticed Tawny shifting her weight miserably between one foot and another at her standing desk.
	'It's more than the fact she is blackmailing me. Even without the blackmail, I was doing everything she said... It's like she has some power over me.'
	It was a surreal experience for her. A few hours into the day, Tawny walked in to Aleksandra's office, which Yusra was using. Several minutes later, she emerged barefoot and crestfallen. She went without shoes for the rest of the day. Aleksandra did see women working on actual projects, but they were always the employees she didn't know very well – the ones Yusra had hired. One of them even asked her to clean out her reusable water bottle, fill it with iced coffee, and return it to her.
	"That is not my job," was Aleksandra's cold reply.
	The girl was surprised to hear 'no' but she didn't press the issue any more. She had dark hair and one of those upturned, ski slope noses.
	Before leaving the office, Yusra took Aleksandra aside and gave her instructions.
	"Go directly home once you finish here," she said, "You may change, but bring the outfit with you and have it ready to wear tomorrow morning. Stay here working until five."
	When the Ukrainian beauty finally got home, she was very much looking forward to climbing onto the massage table and telling Ashleigh exactly where to soothe all her tense spots to help her unwind after a day's work. Her feet needed the most attention; they weren't used to walking and stooping and crawling so much.
	"Marisol, please tell Ashleigh I will be needing a two hour full-body massage. I will be ready for him in the salon room immediately."
	"I'm sorry. Ashleigh is helping Elizabeth right now. Should I send her to you after?"
	"Yes, please."
	She couldn't do any research here on how to get away from the cursed Sisters of Diana, and she couldn't even take advantage of her stepson's servitude either! One way or another, she ended up on the sofa in a bridal gown, watching a spinoff show about one of the Lebanese sisters who moved to Miami. Aleksandra believed that her best bet was to appear cowed and compliant, while secretly making her plan to escape. But how far would she have to go with the charade? How long until she was appearing before all of her old friends dressed in this housekeeper's uniform, acting like an assistant to Judy Humphries? It boggled her mind; this was the exact humiliation she wanted to inflict on Ashleigh and now it was being done to her.
	A sick thought crossed her mind. If they were treating her like she had treated Ashleigh, did that mean they would make her... with the shoes...! The statuesque woman nearly retched at the idea. She literally could not fathom putting her face next to a pair of shoes, much less her tongue, and certainly not for pair after pair! She pushed the thought out of her mind and watched TV for a while until they had a pleasant (if quiet) dinner and went to bed.
	Yusra was more in charge of their lovemaking now. Before, Aleksandra felt like a pillow princess who got sex when and how she wanted it. She would climb into bed with Yusra who would tongue her clit and bring her to multiple orgasms practically on command, as the capstone to a beautiful day. She missed those days. Now when she got into bed with Yusra, she surrendered her body to the woman. Sometimes Yusra would still caress and worship her like she was a princess but far more often the woman would act like she was a warlord and Aleksandra was her trophy. She would grope and pinch and bite the Ukrainian trophy wife, more so entertaining herself by playing with her body than trying to please her. And that was to say nothing of the sexual teasing, which was Yusra's real passion.
	Despite the way she was feeling towards Yusra, she slept in the same bed as her and accepted her touch that night.
	"How are you liking your show?" Yusra whispered in her ear as she squeezed one tit affectionately.
	"I am enjoying it. All the colors are so bright. Maybe we could go to the beach!"
	"It is too far."
	Aleksandra seethed inwardly. They lived half an hour away from the beach, at most! She was just keeping her housebound! Then Yusra started kissing her nipples, and she got more comfortable and swept up in the pleasant sensation of lips grazing across her sensitive body. She felt Yusra's hand on her abdomen, moving down towards her pussy. She was to lie still and allow Yusra to play with her, and listen to the things she whispered in her ear. The young woman felt trapped in this bed, but had very complicated feelings about whether she wanted it or not.
	'Ah!' Aleksandra let out a little gasp as Yusra dragged her fingertip across her clit on her way down to start fingering her.
	The mature woman was extremely good with her hands but there was one big problem, which was that she wouldn't just let Aleksandra cum whenever she wanted. Only Yusra decided that, and she had turned it into a very frustrating process. Aleksandra was allowed to beg Yusra to make her cum, but she wasn't allowed to do much else. This is what made her feel objectified, like her body was just something for Yusra to play with to see her reactions and her cute little squirms. This was another moment she asked herself why she couldn't demand better treatment, but after having acquiesced to Yusra so many times, it was natural to do so again.
	"Pleeease!" Aleksandra whimpered as Yusra frantically rubbed her clit, getting her close to finishing, only to slow down when she was really getting into it. How did Yusra always know when to stop? Was it because of the way Aleksandra would always grab the bedsheets with her hands when she was getting really excited? She moaned in frustration as Yusra pulled away – and the self-possessed way she did it was annoying, too.
	"Do you want to cum for me?"
	"Yes!" Aleksandra snapped. She gave Yusra an harsh look. She had become a mean pretty ice princess, begging to cum, unable to do anything for herself.
	"I need you to make a good impression on Judy."
	Yusra mentioning that name was the opposite of sexy. Aleksandra felt her body and her spirit begin to shut, the way a flower closes its petals at night. Honestly speaking, it ruined the moment. Judy hadn't been relevant to her life in years, not since she took over and practically exiled the woman. Her return meant bad things, and Aleksandra was reminded that Yusra was almost certainly her enemy. Yusra wanted to conquer her. And here she was, dressed as a sex kitten, lounging around the house all day and making love at Yusra's convenience while the Sisters (most likely) spirited away her fortune.
	"We don't need her!" Aleksandra whined.
	"Yes. We do. The Sisters has wanted the Humphries to join us for a long time. If we can convince her to invest, it will be very profitable."
	She resented the fact that Yusra was making Judy sound like some VIP client and it was Aleksandra's job to service her. She gave no reply. She suspected that she would be used as a bargaining chip to incentivize Judy to join.
	"Your income will be unaffected," Yusra repeated, "And the duration of your contract is the same."
	"Okay," Aleksandra said. She didn't particularly believe Yusra, and felt disconnected from her.
	Aleksandra felt sad. She wished Yusra didn't make her hang the uniform on the outside of the closet, because she kept looking at it and feeling worse. Having been stripped of her money and power, she was now finding out what a role they played in her sexual identity. It was hard for her to feel satisfied when she didn't own property, didn't have income security, or a 'prestigious' job – it hurt her self esteem. Sure, she still had her bank account and Mercedes and her part of the Caldwell estate but she could see the writing on the wall. She had cast her lot with a bunch of pirates, and now they were using her as bait and robbing her. Now she warmed Yusra's bed, allowing the woman to touch her however she pleased, hands moving across her body like an occupying force upon soft, fertile land.
	The governess was very energetic that evening, perhaps excited by the uniform hanging in the distance. After plenty of begging, Yusra finally allowed Aleksandra to cum so hard it took her breath away. She quietly acknowledged that Yusra point about the teasing: she felt heights of sexual pleasure she had never experienced before in her life. Was the danger part of it? And after she came, she felt a wave of disappointment wash over her. Like her entire endeavor up to this point had been a sex fantasy, which was spectacular, but now they were changing it to someone else's fantasy.
	Their bedsheets became soaked with her girlcum, Yusra could practically get it to gush out of her. Sometimes Aleksandra would be embarrassed by this little idiosyncrasy her body had, but mostly she was just inconvenienced by the fact that Yusra would never let them change the sheets after making love. She would have Aleksandra sleep in her own damp mess, which would lead to her having fitful sex dreams that made her slumber more draining than refreshing. Yusra slept with one arm over her. She kept on having these horny dreams and she would  wake up looking at the damn uniform. She wanted to escape, but instead she just sat there with Yusra's weight on her and wished that Judy wouldn't be in her dreams again.