"Yes, Miss Ashley. Shall I bring them up?" the butler asked her.

"No, I'll go and fetch them myself. I want to thank Mrs. B. for such a wonderful dinner. The potato puffs were marvelous, even if I do try to stay away from those hard carbs," Ashley said with a smile. She hurried down to the kitchen, where she found her two greyhounds sprawled beneath Mrs. B.'s large wooden kitchen table. "The puffs were heaven," she told the cook. "Thanks, even if I shouldn't have them."

"Nonsense!" Mrs. B. said with a smile. She was a small, round woman with fading strawberry blond hair that she wore in a bun. She was a perfect contrast to her tall, thin husband. "You're too thin, Miss Ashley, as it is."

Ashley laughed. "Bless you!" she said. Then she whistled to the two dogs, who roused themselves and ambled over to her. Ashley took their leads from a hook on the wall where they were hung, fastened them about the dogs' collars, and led them out of the house through the kitchen gardens. Once on her private beach she released Ghostly and Graybar, and let them run as she strolled along.

The sun was getting lower and lower on the horizon when she finally decided to turn back. Whistling for the two dogs, she turned about. She wanted to get well settled before she turned on the Channel. They had done some upgrades in the last year. Now you could simply subscribe to it the way you would any other premium channel. And the remote had a terrific new feature on it: You could have two fantasies ready to go if you wanted, and Ashley did.

In both of her fantasies she was a Roman noblewoman, the lady Cordelia, but the fantasies had slightly different themes. In fantasy A the noble Cordelia possessed a Celtic sex slave named Quinn, whom she used and abused to their mutual pleasure. In fantasy B, Cordelia, visiting her properties in northern Gaul, was kidnapped by a northern barbarian named Rurik, who made her his sex slave, to be deliciously used and only sometimes abused.