by Simply BWWM
He stepped to the front of her desk and planted his hands down on it, looking at her imploringly. “Yeah, but I’m here to fix that! When you left San Francisco, we were broken up, that’s true, but that wasn’t that long ago, and I know you still love me, and I’m here to make it right. I’m gonna fix what was broken, and I’m gonna win you back and you’ll be my girl, just like you were.”
She began to shake her head, but he held up his hand to her. “No, listen to me. Let me move in with you. Let’s work this thing out, okay? We got a real shot at making it, baby!”
Nicole shook her head again anyway. “You can’t move in with me. Jeffrey is living with me, and I’m starting a new life here. I’ve already begun building it.”
“You can’t be that far into building it; you just got here!” he pressed further. “Come on, baby, give me a chance here!”
She sighed and stood up, walking toward her door. “Paul, you’re not moving in with me, and yes, I have started a new life, and it doesn’t matter that I just did it, it still counts whether it’s one week or one month or even one year. It’s a new life.”
“No, no honey, you can’t just give up on us like that! Now, come on! At least come out to dinner with me! Let me try. Give me a chance. I love you, baby! I came all the way from California for this, for you! Come on. Give me a chance. You know I’m good for you, baby. Come on.” He pleaded with her and she knew that he wasn’t going to give up. She wanted him out of her office and the best way to do that just then was to give in to his request. Then, he would be happy, and he would leave.
“Fine. I’ll have dinner with you, but that’s all. We’ll talk about everything then, okay? But for now, I have work to do, and you have to leave.” She reached for the door and held it open, and he grinned at her.
“That’s good enough! That’s all I need is one shot, and baby you are going to be back in my arms and happier than you’ve ever been.” He paused in front of her, raising an eyebrow. “Can I get another kiss before I go?”
She furrowed her brow and pushed his shoulder, edging him out. “No. No kisses. Now out!”
“Okay fine, but you’re having dinner with me, and there’s going to be a lot more than just kissing then!” He winked at her, and she closed the door, leaning her back on it for a moment as she closed her eyes and breathed out in frustration.
“Men are the worst,” she moaned as she opened her eyes again and walked back over to her desk to return to her work.
Chapter7
She was sitting at her desk after lunch at Sam’s when Dane walked into her office again, and she looked up at him in surprise and wondered if it would be discourteous to ask him to knock before he walked in, as he never did announce himself first.
He closed the door behind him and then walked slowly over to her desk with a thoughtful look on his face. Taking a seat, he eyed her curiously.
“What can I do for you?” she asked curiously, reminding herself as she caught herself gazing at his body that she was cutting herself off from him, and she made herself look only at his face and his eyes. They were inquisitive but impassive. She could not tell at all what it was that he was thinking, but she could definitely feel the familiar pull toward him even from her place across the desk. Her eyes left his for a moment and flashed to the sofa behind him, and her breath caught in her throat as she remembered riding him hard there, his mouth on her flesh, her reeling with unthinkable pleasure and passion.
She tried to restrain her thoughts, and she met his gaze again. He seemed to be distracted himself for a moment. “I want you to come with me on a business lunch tomorrow.” He looked as if it wasn’t an option that he was giving her but rather a request.
“Okay. I can do that.” She made a note on her calendar. “What time?”
“Let’s say we’ll head out at eleven,” he suggested, and then he gave her a strange look, almost as if he was peering into her, trying to see more inside of her head than he could get at from the outside.
“Is there something else?” she asked, curious about what thoughts might be going through his head.
He held his breath a moment and then let it out and looked openly at her. “Yes, there is something else. I know it’s none of my business, but I want to know. Who is Paul? What was he really doing here? I feel that if you and I have had the intimate relations that we’ve shared, then I should have some kind of ground to come to you and ask you about another man who is here saying he’s your boyfriend.”
She nodded. “You do have a right to ask, and I don’t have anything to hide from you. Paul was my boyfriend when I was back in San Francisco. We were together for six months. We had just begun talking about moving in together when I got the job offer to come here.” She sighed, thinking back on all the drama and trouble, all the fighting she had gone through with Paul when the call had come in for her.
Dane listened intently.
“I took the offer, and he refused to move with me, so we broke up. We were finished. I moved out here and took the job, and then I met you.” She looked away from him as she felt her cheeks warm, thinking back to the night they had met.
“Why is he really here then, if you two broke up?” Dane asked, pressing further.
She looked back at him then, meeting his gaze. “He’s here because he thinks he’s going to win me back and move in with me.”
Dane was thoughtful for a long moment. “Do you want him back?” he asked, eyeing her closely.
Nicole felt frustration building in her as she sat there across from Dane explaining so much to him, not really sure how much of it was truly his business and how much of it wasn’t. “I don’t know what I want,” she finally stated flatly.
“Okay,” Dane said with the same even tone. He stood up and walked over to her door, glancing once at the sofa in the corner. She saw him do it, and she saw his lips part as if he had lost his breath just looking at it.
Then, he turned toward her and gave her a nod. “I’ll see you tomorrow for lunch.”
She watched him leave. “Yes, eleven,” she agreed, and he closed the door behind him. With a sigh, she buried her face in her hands and wondered if anyone was in the Zen room.
Picking up her phone, she called Jeffrey, and he answered with a smile. “There she is! How are things going today? No shenanigans I hope?” he asked lightly.
“Jeffrey, it’s barely ten in the morning.” She scowled gently.
“So?” he asked realistically. She sighed and closed her eyes.
“There have been shenanigans, but not the good kind.” She groaned miserably.
“Oh no! What happened?”
“Paul was here waiting for me when I got to my office this morning,” she announced simply.
There was a loud gasp at the other end of the line. “What? No!”
“Yes.”
“What in god’s name was he doing there? What does he want?” Jeffrey sounded completely horrified at the very idea of it.
Nicole leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling in her office, wishing there was a Zen projector that would lower itself from the ceiling tiles and make her whole world go away without her having to bother to go down the hall for the same effect.
“He wants me back. He came to tell me that he misses me, he loves me, and he wants to get back together and move in with me. I was right all along. He’s figured out that he can work from Hawaii, and that’s his plan.” Her tone was snarky and sarcastic, but she felt absolutely justified in it.
“He wants to move in with you and work from Hawaii?” Jeffrey sighed, and she could picture him closing his eyes and trying to find his own peace and patience. “After you asked him to do that exact same thing about thirty seconds ago, when you were offered this job and you took it. He was so dead set against it that the two of you broke up, and now that you have begun building this beautiful new life, he wants to move in with you and work from here.”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell him to get the hell out? What
did you tell him?” Jeffrey sounded slightly worried then.
“I told him that he can’t move in because you live there, although I wasn’t totally honest with him, because I didn’t actually admit to him that you are only here temporarily. So, there was that omission. Then I told him to get out of my office.” She had been only somewhat proud of that part of it.
“Did he leave?” Jeffrey asked hopefully. “He must have, you’re sitting there talking with me about it.”
“Yeah, he left, but not before two un-great things happened.” She frowned in dejection.
“What things?” Jeffrey’s tone grew serious.
“Well, he wouldn’t leave before I promised him that I would go to dinner with him. I didn’t want to, but if I didn’t agree to it, I don’t think he would have left. I think he’d still be here.”
“Fabulous. So, you’re trapped into a dinner date. What’s the other thing?” Jeffrey sounded as if he didn’t really want to know.
“He forced a kiss on me. It was sudden and sort of spontaneous, but he did it, and just as he was doing it, Dane walked in and saw it.” She felt miserable that Dane had seen it. She had enough going on with him without having to add any other trouble to it.
“Oh, honey,” Jeffrey said quietly. “What a messy morning.”
“Very.”
“Well, you just brush those boys off. You can cancel your dinner date with Paul and tell him to fly on back to San Francisco, and you aren’t going any further with Dane, so you don’t have to worry about him catching you lip locked with your ex. It’s all water under the bridge. Focus on the work and tell the boys off, honey. It’ll all work out.” He sounded as encouraging as he could.
“I will do that. Thank you for the talk, Jeffrey. I appreciate it.” She smiled, and he sent her a hug through the phone and then ended the phone call.
When she came into work the next morning, there were a dozen red roses waiting for her in a crystal vase with a card attached. Wishing she didn’t have to open the card, she did, and she sighed in frustration when she read it.
‘Can’t wait to see you at dinner, love Paul’
She was going to have to message him and tell him that she wasn’t going to have dinner with him. If she messaged him, there would be less of a possibility of him overruling her declination and him trying to talk her back into it.
Dane came in at eleven that morning and stopped when he saw the massive bouquet of red roses on the table behind her desk. “Who sent you roses?” he asked in as offhand a manner as he could without sounding too jealous.
Nicole sighed. “Paul sent them. More of his attempt to win me back, I guess.” She picked up her purse and her sweater. “So, we’re going to lunch, right?”
Dane pulled his gaze from the bouquet of roses and looked at her. It was then that he smiled genuinely, and his face seemed to light up. “Yes. Lunch. You look really lovely, by the way.” He gave her a smile and held the door for her as she couldn’t resist a smile back at him, and he followed her out of the door.
Forty-five minutes later, he was parking his car in a small parking lot before some tall pine trees, behind which massive mountains shot straight upward out of the ground, at just a slight distance from where they were. He had driven them through a big and beautiful graveyard to get to the parking lot, and though Nicole had said nothing about the graveyard, it had given her some questions as to where they were going and why, but as she stepped from the car in the pretty morning light, she was stunned by what she saw before her.
At the tops of the mountains, the clouds had gotten caught again, and there was a misty rain falling softly, but it was gone halfway down the mountain, and it was perfectly sunny where she and Dane were.
At the base of the mountains was a great dark brown and red framed temple with a large lake out in front of it, and a bridge over a deep ditch where a river flowed between the parking lot and the temple.
“What is this place?” she asked in hushed awe as he came to her side.
“It’s the Byodo-in Temple. It’s beautiful isn’t it? The biggest statue of Buddha outside of Asia is kept in the main room of the temple. Let’s go see it; I’d love to share this with you.” He held out his arm for her, and she took it, following behind him as they walked leisurely over the bridge, surrounded by tall trees, green meadows of grass, and flora and fauna everywhere they looked.
Floating along the surface of the great pond before the temple were several black swans, but just beneath the surface of the water was the biggest school of Koi fish that Nicole had ever seen. There had to be hundreds of them swimming in there, so many different shapes and colors, all red, orange, white, and black, though some had a bit of yellow on them.
She marveled at it all, and when he walked her over to the massive bell just outside of the temple, she was hesitant to ring it. Dane explained that most of the visitors ring the bell, that it’s a common practice.
She whispered a secret prayer in her head and pulled the log back that was tied with rope to the beam above them. She let the log go, and it swung forward and hit the side of the bell, sending off a low gong over the lake and through the temple, up the side of the mountain and all the way up to heaven for all that she knew. She hoped that it took her silent prayer with her.
Dane gave her his arm again, and they went to the edge of the first open walled hallway that led into the side of the temple. He took his shoes off as a sign of respect, and she did the same, glad that she had just had a pedicure.
Together they walked in silence, passing the side of the pond and walking around the front of the temple to see the carefully raked rock garden, created with absolute precision. It was huge and beautifully done. When they had gotten a good look at it, they walked inside the front doors of the temple, and she saw the enormous statue of Buddha sitting inside of the temple. Before him was an altar, and on the altar, apart from many offerings of things from money to flowers to food, was a big round brass bowl, inside of which there was sand, and in the soft sand there were several sticks of incense.
Together, they lit one of the sticks of incense, and they placed it before the Buddha, offering up their prayers and then leaving a contribution of money for the temple. When they walked out, Nicole felt a strong sense of peace in her, and she walked with Dane to a bench where they sat together, apart from the other people who had come to the temple to visit.
“I never knew that any kind of place like this existed, especially here in Hawaii.” She shook her head and gazed at the beautiful structure in wonder.
“It’s a smaller version of the same temple in a bigger place in Asia,” he told her thoughtfully, and then turned to face her. “I wanted to share this with you before lunch. This is a place of true peace. I come here sometimes to regroup. It’s important to me, and I enjoy being here. I knew that you would like it, and I wanted you to see it with me. I wanted to share this special place with you.”
“Thank you so much.” She smiled happily at him, but then she gave him a curious look. “Can I ask you something personal? What is it that draws you to being submissive?”
He didn’t even have to stop and think about it; he simply answered her honestly right then. “I’m able to handle the constant pressures of running an international billion-dollar corporation, but I need release and relief from it sometimes, and I’ve discovered that I can find that through submissive sex, but there’s never been anyone who makes me feel the way that you do.”
Dane stared at her and lifted his hand to her face, tracing his fingertip lightly down her cheek and making her lose her breath. “I’m so amazed by you. You’re intelligent, beautiful, you’re a powerhouse, and you’re sexy as hell.” He smiled a little then, but the seriousness returned to him. “Even so, with all of that, you still make me feel things that I’ve never felt before, and I’m addicted to them now. I’ve seen beautiful women all over this world, but I’ve never had such an electric connection to one. Especially right from the start, but I do with you. I did�
� right from the start.”
Nicole nodded. “I understand,” she said simply, hoping that he knew just how much she did understand it.
He grew curious again then, and he looked at her with questioning eyes. “What did you feel when you first saw me?”
Everything in her stirred at the memory of it. She smiled bashfully and closed her eyes, remembering it as if it was happening right then. “I felt like everything around us disappeared, like it was only the two of us in the room, or even in the whole universe. I was so stunned by you. There was this pull toward you, this kind of magnetic pull, and I needed to be near you. I needed to be alone with you. When I met you, I saw the way that you were looking at me, watching me, and it turned me on like nothing else ever has. It was electric, and you looked so hungry for me. It made me feel the same.”