Like cancelling her wedding and having to face her family and friends and tell them why. She had refused to let James off the hook for the pain he’d caused her the second time. She’d been honest that she was dumping him due in no small part to all the money he’d cost her…and exactly how he’d spent it.
“There’s a lot of roads to explore,” she eventually hedged. “You could do a running series.” She hesitated. “Porn addiction.” That was a subject she knew all too well. “Internet hookups.” She held up her copy of the printout. “Kinky lifestyle stuff.”
Bill scrunched up his face and turned his gaze to the ceiling. Everyone went silent, recognizing his “deep in thought” face.
After a moment, he spoke. “I like that.” He still stared at the ceiling. “I like that a lot,” he said with a nod. “An ongoing series.” He looked at everyone at the table. “Let’s seriously consider this for a few minutes. We’ve hit a plateau on web hits over the past few months now that the elections are over. Housing market’s still in the tank, bad news there. Economy sucks. Jobs are down. People aren’t really paying that much attention to the fancy high-end lifestyle stories right now. Our biggest web hits the past few months are for the stories on entertainment and anything remotely related to sexual issues. There’s also that Fifty Shades trilogy that’s so popular.”
He looked at Suzanne. “Can you pull up those web stats Barry sent you?”
She nodded and did it, then hooked her computer to the projector. Bill stood, dimmed the lights, and walked over to the wall where the figures were displayed. “Right here,” he pointed. “See the trend? Every time we run a story remotely having to do with sex we get a spike in traffic. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why.” He looked at his staff. “Now, I’m not saying we need to turn into Playboy or Hustler, but let’s chew on this for a while longer. Anyone have anywhere they need to be right now?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“Good.” He stared at the numbers again as he slowly nodded. “Very good.”
* * * *
Two hours later they broke for lunch with a fairly detailed list of potential topics, ranging from local swinger groups to BDSM clubs. With the fetish convention being held in a few months, Bill wanted enough lead time to tap into that potential market. Suzanne would contact the promoters and secure an interview with them, the staff member to be assigned later.
Shayla avoided Suzanne’s gaze. Please don’t let it be me.
Shayla wasn’t a prude by any stretch of the imagination. She had no problem with people’s sexual preferences running more toward chocolate than vanilla. But after finding out that James was turned on by, among other things, anorexic, silicone sluts with breasts the size of watermelons getting the crap beat out of them, and that he regularly jerked off to them instead of her at times when she’d begged him to sleep with her, her self-confidence had taken a beating it hadn’t quite recovered from yet.
She knew she didn’t possess a Hollywood starlet’s artificially enhanced, top-heavy body, but she wasn’t ugly or obese. She didn’t consider a size sixteen “fat” especially when she was a lanky five-eight and it was distributed all over and not in any one area. Her pale northern complexion hadn’t seen enough of Florida’s tropical sun to tan yet, and her hazel eyes matched the rims on her glasses. She didn’t want contacts, not when she really only needed her glasses for reading or long stints on the computer. She wasn’t bat-blind without them.
Yet.
She’d chopped a few inches off her hair after moving down here though. Now it hung a little below her shoulders, a blasé brown that usually did what it was supposed to when she asked it to without it bowing too much to humidity’s wrath. Long enough to pull it into a ponytail, or wear it down in long layers.
Still, it stung to know James had preferred to sink into an artificial fantasy than to seek her out when there were times she begged for his attention. Rationally, intellectually, she knew it was his problem and not hers.
But her pride still suffered the aftereffects.
Adding to the sting, the additional betrayal of him taking out credit cards in her name and using them to charge his porn.
Bill accompanied them to lunch. After passing through the buffet line, he seated himself at the end of the table, next to Shayla.
Her senses on high alert, she recognized a setup when she saw it.
“I wanted to talk to you about this, Shay,” he started.
Oh, boy. Here it comes.
He speared a piece of raw carrot in his salad with his fork. “How would you feel about doing a hands-on investigative piece about the local BDSM lifestyle scene?”
She tried not to choke on her broccoli soup. “How hands-on?”
He chewed his carrot for a moment. “Something beyond the crap people normally see on the Internet. Separating fact from fiction. Is everyone doing like what’s on the porn sites, or is that the exception? That kind of thing. How do people get into this sort of lifestyle? Day in the life of someone. I’ve got Pete doing a report on the nudist colonies up in Pasco County. Alice is going to cover transsexuals, and we’ve got leads on strip clubs and swingers groups.”
Shayla felt her face redden. She studied her food. “What are you asking me to do, exactly?”
“Get to know some of these people. Write an article, hell, even better, a series of articles about them. What makes them tick, something fair and balanced. You could even interview mental health professionals and get their take on what they do, talk to law enforcement, that kind of thing.”
Shay’s appetite had faded. “BDSM?”
“I won’t require you to do it. If you want to say no, I understand. We can get someone else to do it. But I really think, after talking to some people locally and doing a little poking around of my own, that it’ll be one of our biggest series. A way to get your name well known on our site. I’m not talking about a sensationalized T&A piece. I’m talking seriously looking at it from the inside out. It’ll be a web-only series, but we’ll promo it in print.”
Serious writing. She did want to do serious writing. On her résumé, she’d highlighted some of the IR pieces she’d written, and that in-depth reporting was one of her loves.
She just didn’t know if she could be unbiased on that particular topic.
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course.”
She nodded. “Okay. Let me have a few hours. I’ll get back to you before the end of the day.”
* * * *
She knocked on Bill’s open door later that afternoon. He was alone and on the computer. “Hey, what’s up?” he said.
“Can I talk to you privately for a few?”
He sat back and nodded. “Sure. Close the door if you want.”
She did.
Shayla sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. It took her a moment to compose her thoughts. “About the story idea. The BDSM one.”
“Don’t want it?”
“I honestly don’t know if I can be unbiased.”
She’d found out in her few weeks of working for the magazine that Bill Melling wasn’t just a good boss, he was a nice guy. Fair, easy to talk to, and was considered a friend by many of his employees.
“Need to talk about it?” he asked.
She took a deep breath. “As long as it’s just between you and me.”
He nodded.
“I have ex issues. The reason I left my ex was because he downloaded BDSM porn behind my back. Well, that wasn’t the only reason, but that sums it up nicely.”
He sucked in a breath. “Yowch.”
“Yeah.” She studied her fingernails. “It was the second time I’d discovered he’d been downloading porn. The first time, I found it on my computer and he swore he’d stop. It turns out, after the final accounting the second time, he’d downloaded over fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of porn. Using credit cards he took out in my name.” She picked at her cuticles. “I believed him the first time when he sa
id he’d stop. He did seem to change. Got more attentive. I had no reason to doubt his word that he’d stopped and wouldn’t do it again.”
“He didn’t stop?”
“Nope. He got sneakier, proposed, and asked me to set a date for our wedding.”
He winced. “Double yowch. Bastard.”
She managed a wan smile at his tone. Bill was obviously on her side. “So we spent months shopping for a dress and rings and ordering invitations and a cake. All that crap. Then I found out how sneaky he was when he’d borrowed my car. I found a stack of mail in it that he’d forgotten he left there. Including some envelopes with my name on them. That’s when I learned it wasn’t the one thousand dollars of the first go-round. It was over fifteen thousand, and it was six different credit cards he took out in my name without my knowledge. Most of it for sites showing that BDSM stuff.”
“Well, I appreciate your honesty. I understand that it would be too much for you. I’ll go ahead and reassign—”
“I’ll do it.”
He tilted his head as he studied her. “I was expecting you to say no after hearing about all of that.”
It surprised her, too. “I want to find out why he wanted that stuff more than me. Why he was willing to lie and steal and throw away what we had for it.”
She chewed on the inside of her lip to keep from crying. “We were together eight years. Lived together five of those. He swore I was the only woman he wanted. That I was the love of his life. His soul mate.”
She took a deep breath. “Then I found the first batch of porn. And you know the rest of the story. I want to know why it was more important than me.” She met his gaze. “I want to see if I can figure out what it was he destroyed my trust for and why, because he damn sure never could answer the question.”
* * * *
Why the hell did I say yes? She sat on her screened-in lanai and stared out at the green space behind her apartments. A small flock of some sort of ibis walked along, checking the ditch for insects as they moved.
She still didn’t know for sure. She sipped her beer and contemplated it for a while, until it grew dark outside and she felt a slight buzz from her empty stomach combined with the effects of the beer.
Inside her apartment, she settled on a toasted cheese sandwich, easy to make and easy to eat. Part of her relished the freedom of living a peaceful life, never wondering where or when—or for how much—the other shoe would drop.
Part of her cursed James for putting her in this position. Being alone with no one to rely on. All she’d wanted to do was make him happy. Was it too much to ask of him to be honest with her? To not go behind her back?
To not put her in frigging debt over his Internet porn?
Hell, after the first discovery, she’d even offered to explore kinky stuff if he wanted to. He’d flat-out refused the offer, leaving her even more confused than before.
I need to quit thinking about it tonight. This isn’t helping.
Instead of the TV she opted for music. She thumbed through her iPod and found Michael Hedges. Mellow and soothing guitar instrumentals that never failed to settle her nerves. She curled up on the sofa with a book and read while she ate.
Finally, when she couldn’t stop yawning, she shut off the music and headed to bed. But she lay there, her mind racing about the article she had to write.
Why the hell did I say yes?
Chapter Two
Tony Daniels stared at his computer monitor. He loved his job, but he hated some of the people he had to work with. More than once he’d envisioned punching his boss, Darren, in the face.
Or tying him up and beating the crap out of him with a cane.
He scrubbed his face with his hands. Not to mention there were more than a few people working under him who would greatly benefit from spending the day in a ball gag.
He smiled. Such evil daydreams were a way to amuse himself during a usually long workday. Like envisioning an employee strapped into a straightjacket, with a butt plug up their ass, a ball gag in their mouth, and tied to their chair.
His own personal form of morale improvement.
He nearly giggled out loud.
These are the kinds of thoughts that will forever keep me out of the highest levels of management in this company.
Not that he cared.
Then again, he was paid well for his long hours and the work he did. Running the computer data center at the Bradenton headquarters of Asher Insurance, a national health, life, and disability insurance company, was nothing to sneeze at. And even though he was on call twenty-four-seven, unless everything went to hell in a handbasket after he went home he could leave work at the office on most days.
When he felt his personal cell phone vibrate in his pocket, he took it out and quickly glanced at it.
A text from his friend, Leah, popped up. Still on for tonight?
He sent her a quick reply. Yep. I’ll be there by 8.
Poor Leah was doing her damnedest to fix him up with her friends. Vanilla and lifestyler alike. He’d once asked her husband, Seth, to please tell her to knock it off.
Seth had simply grinned at him. “Nope. It makes her happy. I’m not going to piss on her parade.”
Then again, Tony couldn’t blame Seth. After witnessing firsthand everything Leah went through losing her first husband, Kaden, to pancreatic cancer, Tony didn’t know if he could have denied her anything that made her happy, either.
He let out a sigh and returned his phone to his pocket. Tonight, Leah had told him, her friend Valerie was also coming over for dinner. Nice woman, worked as a bookkeeper for a local auto dealership. He supposed he could suffer through another matchmaking attempt if it would make Leah happy.
Kaden, I hope you appreciate what I still go through for you.
* * * *
Despite Leah’s usual assurances that he didn’t need to bring anything, Tony brought a bottle of Riesling with him. Leah met him at the front door with a hug and a kiss on the cheek before taking the bottle.
“Thank you. You know you didn’t have to do that.”
“You know I always will.”
She laughed. It was a beautiful sound, so different from the early days after Kaden’s death when they all kept watch to make sure she didn’t kill herself in the deepest, darkest times of her grief. “Yes, I know. You’re stubborn like that.” She wore a short denim skirt, a tight tank top, and a leather collar around her neck.
That told him their guest was lifestyle-friendly, if not outright in the lifestyle. When it was a vanilla friend, she wore her silver day collar, which looked like a necklace, and less revealing, more conventional clothes.
Tony followed her to the kitchen where Seth worked on prepping the salad. “Hey, man,” Seth greeted him. “Sorry I’m not shaking hands.”
Tony slid onto a barstool at the counter. “No problem. I understand.” Leah set a glass of iced tea in front of him, already sweetened the way he liked it.
He had to admit she was efficient.
Lucky bastard.
“So,” Tony said, “based on Leah’s clothes, I’m guessing tonight’s matchmaking attempt already knows about my extracurricular activities?”
She grinned. “Yes. She used to be in the lifestyle, but when she dumped her ex, she got out of it. She wants to get back into the local scene here in Sarasota.” She jammed her hands on her hips, her green eyes sparking. “At the very least you two would make great play partners.”
“Ah. So you’re not trying to marry me off this time?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “No. I’m never trying to marry you off. I’m just trying to help you broaden your social horizon a little.”
He sipped his tea. “You know I work long hours. I don’t have a lot of time for broadening my social horizons.”
“Duh. And that’s why I’m trying to help you out.”
He was spared further lecturing by the sound of the doorbell.
“That’s Val,” Leah said, heading out of the kitchen.
She turned and pointed a finger at Tony. “Be nice.”
“I’m always nice,” he said. “I’m the sweetest sadist you’ll ever meet.”
Seth roared with laughter. Leah stuck her tongue out at Tony before turning to go answer the door.
* * * *
Val, as she asked him to call her, was three years younger than him at thirty-nine, shorter than him by nearly eight inches at five-four, had short brown hair, and pale blue eyes. She loved to laugh. He found her smart, witty, charming, and friendly. They had a lot in common, including tastes in reading and music. Gainfully employed, she owned her own house and wasn’t looking to jump into a new relationship without a lot of groundwork first.
He also wasn’t the slightest bit attracted to her, although he wouldn’t mind playing with her a few times.
Leah apparently sensed it. After Valerie left, Leah turned to Tony and scrunched up her face. “Nada? Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “Sorry. She seems like a very nice woman, but—”
“She doesn’t flip your switch. I get it.”
He smiled. “Never say switch to a Dom, Leah. In either context. I don’t do one, and I’m liable to use the other.”
She laughed. “Yeah, if I ever saw you switch with someone I think I’d make them haul you to the hospital for a CAT scan.” She sighed. “I’d hoped you’d really like her.”
“I do like her. I just don’t lust after her. I’ll be happy to play with her if she wants. I wish more women were like her. I’d be playing all the time if they were all nice, charming, and lacking a full matching six-piece set of emotional baggage. I’m allergic to clingy and drama. You know that.”
“Yeah.” She started clearing the table. “That’s why I thought you two would be perfect for each other.”
Leah had managed to find two types of women to try to fix him up with. Women he was physically attracted to, but he knew he could never have a relationship with. Or women who seemed to be perfect relationship material, but he felt zilch attraction toward them.
The Denim Dom Page 2