Well, he could have, but he’d probably been a little afraid that if he made too big a fuss, his little secret might come to light.
So here he was in her office.
“I’m glad you could come, Mr. Smith.”
“I’m doing it for Jeanine.” His voice was gruff, semi-irritated, but at least he was here. Since she’d last seen him, his face was less florid, and he appeared to have a lost a few pounds, not a dramatic difference, but enough to be noticeable. This was a good sign. He looked healthier. “And this better be completely confidential.”
“Of course it is,” Charlotte said without offense. She had decided to forgive him for trying to get her fired. She was going to put aside the past and make this all about solving her clients’ issues.
Instead of sitting in the chairs by the window, the positioning of which would have the effect of making him the odd man out, she’d pulled three chairs into a triangle in the middle of the office. Upon sitting, he’d immediately hiked a pant leg and crossed one foot over the opposite knee. It would have been a relaxed pose except for his fists bunched on the arms of the chair. Next to him, Jeanine sat with her knees primly together.
With his statement, Mr. Smith had given Charlotte the obvious place to start. “Counseling works best if there’s willingness on both sides.” For him, she avoided the word therapy.
“Don’t push your luck,” he said like a sullen schoolboy.
His attitude wasn’t the greatest, but she’d known it was something she’d have to deal with and diffuse. “Regardless of what brought you here, you are here. Why don’t you tell me what you hope to get out of it?”
“To make her happy.” He pointed at Jeanine.
The finger-pointing was a tad rude, but Charlotte didn’t admonish him as if he were the schoolboy he sounded like. Instead, she changed tack completely. “Eric tells me that you’ve planned a family outing with the Wrights over the holiday weekend.” It was Martin Luther King Day the following week.
Mr. Smith had lifted the ban against seeing Charlotte, and Eric dropped by every couple of weeks. He was already discussing colleges and career planning. Right now, he was vacillating between forensic psychology and being a medical examiner. Charlotte figured he’d been watching too much CSI, and his thinking would change over time.
“We’re all going up to Alcatraz,” Jeanine said. “Our two youngest have never been. Neither has Melody. Eric went on a school field trip, but Melody was sick that day.”
“It sounds both educational and fun.”
Jeanine smiled. Mr. Smith harrumphed and said, “It’ll be crowded as hell on a holiday weekend.”
“Yes, dear,” Jeanine said sweetly, “but you said you couldn’t take a day off, and a weekend would be too busy. So we picked the holiday instead.”
“I don’t really need to go, do I?” It was a question, not a statement.
“Eric and Melody want all of us to go,” Jeanine insisted. Charlotte was proud of the way she spoke, with determination but no acrimony.
“I said I’m going,” Mr. Smith grumbled.
According to Melody, she and Eric had started hanging out together again, but they were not boyfriend and girlfriend. Eric, on the other hand, was a teenager who knew what he wanted. Charlotte had the feeling he would turn out to be an amazing man. She credited him for the changes she saw in Melody. All right, the girl hadn’t suddenly turned into Miss Popularity, but she occasionally had lunch with Lydia and her peeps. She’d even been seen around a few of her old friends from middle school. She hadn’t dumped a soda or a beaker of sugar water on anyone. She hadn’t gotten into any fights. Her breakouts seemed less severe and of a shorter duration. And, miracle of miracles, she’d thrown out the brown hoodie and sometimes pushed her hair behind her ears to show her face. Her parents had decided not to switch her over to Mrs. Flannigan, so Melody still met with Charlotte twice a week, and her parents attended weekly. Mr. Wright was still his wife’s second voice, and Kathryn Wright had obviously had a fresh injection of Botox because her face simply did not move. Not to mention the puffy collagen-enhanced lips. Charlotte had a hard time not staring at them. Maybe they’d settle down in a few weeks and look a bit more normal.
Whatever, she wasn’t going to fix the Wrights, she knew that. But they’d stopped urging surgery as a solution to every problem Melody mentioned, and they were talking with their daughter, really talking. And listening. Now this, a family outing. Things were definitely looking up since last November.
“It shows great progress that you and the Wrights are willing to work constructively together for the sake of your children.”
He harrumphed again. “Don’t get me started about that woman.”
Of course, he’d been willing to use Kathryn Wright when he was trying to get Charlotte fired. Now she’d become that woman. She probably had been before the incident as well.
“You’ve shown incredible restraint, dear,” Jeanine said, once again without acrimony.
Mr. Smith glanced at his watch. “Look, this is time and money. Let’s not waste it talking about that woman. Let’s get to the issues.”
Charlotte resisted the smile. She’d been intending the little conversational diversion to lead into the point that people needed to work together to solve problems. But trust the cost of something to get to David Smith first. In that, he was just like Steven Wright.
“That works for me. Tell me why you’re here.”
“We all know why I’m here. But for the record, I never meant Jeanine should actually do it, just that we could fantasize about it.”
It was getting harder to resist the smile. Using sex with another man as a fantasy had now become his idea. Jeanine had finally broached the subject with him a couple of weeks ago. Last week, when she’d call to say that he’d agreed to a counseling session, she’d made it abundantly clear that Charlotte should leave out the part about his sexual problems for the time being. Another thing Charlotte found funny, or odd. He was more willing to discuss his wife and other men—or fantasizing about it—than he was to admit he had erectile dysfunction. She would get around to the issue eventually, but for now she’d decided to go along with Jeanine’s wish.
Charlotte, however, would call him on his avoidance tactic. “If that were the case, Mr. Smith—”
“Oh please, call him David,” Jeanine said, and this time there was a note of exasperation.
Charlotte raised a brow. David Smith nodded. And she went on. “If that were the case, David, you didn’t make it clear to your wife that it was only a fantasy. Our entire therapy has been predicated on the fact that she thought you actually wanted her to be with someone else, then come home to tell you about it.”
His jaw tightened. He didn’t like being pinned down, in addition to the fact that Charlotte had voiced exactly what he’d wanted.
“I don’t remember how I said it.” His voice rose slightly.
“I remember,” Jeanine said, calm in the face of his irritation.
“Communication is key,” Charlotte said. Communication was their biggest problem. She hoped to introduce exercises that would help them improve those skills. “You both need to be clear about what you want and what your limits are.”
Jeanine’s gaze shot to her face. “You’re not saying I’m supposed to do it?”
“Of course not. What I’m saying is that you need to make rules that fit the two of you. If, in a healthy relationship, you want to discuss spicing things up in different ways, then I’m all for trying alternative”—she smiled meaningfully—“approaches.”
David Smith merely gaped. Jeanine started to smile. Perhaps she’d figured out where Charlotte was going with this.
“I’m not judgmental,” she went on. “Getting a little kinky can be quite fun.” Oh yes, she knew all about that. “You can experiment with all kinds of things. Toys. Role playing. A little bondage. Dirty talk. Spanking.” She could certainly attest to how good spanking was. She’d also used a lot of dirty words over the l
ast few weeks to goad the principal into giving her a well-deserved punishment.
David’s face began to redden. He opened his mouth, but couldn’t seem to get a word out.
“However,” she went on, “your fundamental relationship needs to be sound before considering anything like adding another partner or even swinging. You need to have ground rules. Both of you have to agree. There can be no coercion.”
David made an odd noise, as if he were choking. For a moment, she was worried. In the next, he let out a guffaw that bounced off the walls. “You’re putting me on, right?” He wiped at his eyes. “This is a joke.”
“I’m perfectly serious.” But she liked his reaction. It was something she could work with.
“But you really talk about sex with your patients. I wasn’t actually sure what you did.”
Yet he’d accused her of being a bad influence on the students she worked with. She had, however, put that aside. If she couldn’t, she wouldn’t have agreed to counsel them both.
“We talk about emotions,” she corrected, “in relation to sex.” Though she had to admit she didn’t normally dive in the way she had with him. It was the history between them. She’d wanted to shock him into being honest. “But let me make this clear, I’m not recommending that you and your wife bring anyone else into your relationship.”
“But we can use whips and chains,” he said, still laughing hard enough to make his eyes tear up.
“Whips and chains might be a bit much. Why don’t you start with silk scarves for binding? A feather teaser might be nice, too.” Very, very nice. She should know.
He looked at Jeanine. “I’m supposed to tie you up, or are you going to tie me up?”
“I haven’t considered that yet,” Jeanine said, her expression thoughtful. “But I think I’d like to do the tying up.”
He guffawed again. “I can’t believe you’re actually suggesting this, Dr. Moore.”
She didn’t correct him on the title. “I’m simply throwing out ideas. But my real point in all this is that the two of you need to talk about what you want. I can mediate for you here. And I can give you homework.”
“Homework?” he echoed.
“What’s the first assignment?” Jeanine asked, her words quick, laced with excitement.
“You each write down a fantasy. Then you let your partner read it. There should be no judgment about the fantasy. You both promise the other that you won’t get angry. Discuss why it turns you on.” She smiled. “Then quickly shred the pages so the kids can’t read them.”
They both laughed with her.
“If, however, you don’t feel you can read the fantasy without making a judgment or getting hurt, then don’t exchange. Bring them here, you can read them with me present, then we’ll discuss how you each feel about them in a nonjudgmental atmosphere.”
The homework wouldn’t solve their problems. It was simply a tool to begin the dialogue.
“Do you think you can read the fantasies without judgment?” she asked them both
“No,” Jeanine said.
“Yes,” David answered just as quickly.
“Since one of you says no, then bring them here for your next session. Don’t read them ahead of time.”
They both agreed. Charlotte put them in her calendar for a week from Wednesday because next Monday was the holiday. Things were going exceptionally well. The first step was that David had actually agreed to see her. The second was that he’d laughed.
But the best part? She liked her own advice. She wanted to try it with Lance. He’d gone totally wild the night she’d spun that fantasy about having sex with another man while he watched. A little fantasy could work wonders. The wonderful thing about Lance was that he was old enough to appreciate a good fantasy. Younger men just couldn’t get into it. They didn’t get that the mind was as powerful a sexual tool as the body. How could she ever have thought that younger men were the better way to go? A real man like Principal Hutton was absolutely perfect.
She finished her notes in the Smith file, and before the red light flashed to indicate her next client had arrived, she dashed off a quick text to Lance:
I’ve got a fabulous idea, Principal Hutton. Wanna play a new game?
She was already thinking about the fantasy she’d write for him. It had to do with a sleeper train. In fact, the fantasy had been growing in her mind since Lola and Gray had booked their honeymoon ride for mid-February. Charlotte and Lance had decided not to go despite the talk that night. After all, a honeymoon was only for two. Sex on a train. Very hot. She could come up with a really good fantasy about that.
Maybe they should send their fantasies as private emails. That was a sizzling idea. It would take some time to write. She wanted the fantasy to sound perfect when he read it. They needed to read them alone, so maybe she’d go to her place first, send it from there. Get him all worked up so that by the time she got home—
Her phone chirped. She read his message.
Hell yes, I wanna play. Tell me the rules.
They didn’t need rules. They didn’t need limits. They didn’t need a safe word. She trusted him completely, with her heart, with her soul.
And she told him how to play the new game she’d just made up.
Keep reading for an excerpt from
THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE
By Jasmine Haynes
Now available from Heat Books
PROLOGUE
THE PRETTY BLONDE STARED INTO THE REFRIGERATED JUICE SECTION, LIKE A CHILD IN FRONT OF A CANDY STORE WINDOW SEEING the very thing she wanted and knew she couldn’t have.
She was perfect.
Rand was relatively new to the area, having moved here to start a job last fall, five months ago. But even so, he didn’t prowl grocery stores early on Saturday mornings looking for women. He’d needed a couple of items and didn’t like waiting in line, so he’d stopped after his run along the canal.
Then he saw her. It was fortune smiling down on him, the law of attraction at work.
Her blond hair fluttered just past her shoulders. Her pretty profile showcased full ruby lips and long lashes several shades darker than her hair. The tight white T-shirt outlined mouthwatering breasts that were more than even his big hands could hold, and her jeans hugged the delectable curve of her ass. She wasn’t too thin, yet was well taken care of. Best of all, there was no ring on her finger. He never amused himself with married women. He came from a long line of players, marriage being no barrier whatsoever between them and the objects of their desire. He wasn’t about to be like any of them.
She was no sweet young thing, but closer to his age—forty—or possibly a couple of years younger. He preferred his partners to be older, seasoned, more sure of themselves, of who they were and what they wanted. Women who were old enough to appreciate trying something new, something daring.
He was as staid as they come during work hours, with a position that required a quiet, unwavering authority, steadfast diplomacy, and a hell of a lot of psychology. But after hours, his life was his own business. After hours, anything goes.
He smiled as she finally made up her mind and reached for the fridge door. Her breasts plumped with the movement.
Oh yeah, he’d love to get daring with her.
* * *
RACHEL STARED AT THE ROWS AND ROWS OF JUICE BOTTLES. SHE was a frugal shopper, buying only what was on sale, because in her mind, the sale price was the real price, and anything else meant you were overpaying. She lived for coupons. Penny-pinching was the only way she could make ends meet. Sure, her ex paid half the boys’ expenses since they had dual custody, but the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area was astronomical, gas prices had once again skyrocketed, and cable TV and high-speed Internet, not to mention the boys’ cell phones, just might bankrupt her. She had a full-time job she enjoyed, with excellent medical benefits, but she was a receptionist. Her salary barely covered standard monthly expenses. Her ex, an accountant, was the real breadwinner. Their house was un
derwater so they hadn’t been able to unload it during the divorce settlement, and they were still waiting for the market to recover. In the meantime, she lived in it. The boys were with her every other week; teenage boys could eat you out of house and home. For the most part, she made healthy home-cooked meals and only occasionally brought home fast food. It would have been cheaper to buy soda for the boys to drink, but she did her damnedest to make sure they learned good eating habits.
So she wanted that juice, which was on sale at half off, plus she had a coupon. Wouldn’t you know, though, the last bottle had twisted at the top of the rollers, stuck fast, and there wasn’t a grocery clerk in sight to help her out. Well, she was not going to be bested by a damn juice bottle. Yanking open the refrigerator door, she put a foot on the rubberized track, grabbed the edge of the shelf, hauled herself up, and stretched until her fingers just brushed the plastic bottle. If she could knock it a little, dislodge it . . .
“Let me help.”
The male voice was deep enough to send a delicious shiver down her spine. She would have gotten out of his way, but she felt him along her side as he leaned into the fridge door with her. His hand on the small of her back set a flame burning low in her belly. She couldn’t have moved if her life depended on it. Oh no, this was too good to miss. With barely a stretch, he straightened the bottle and set it rolling down the tracks to her waiting hand.
She was breathless when she turned to look up, and up some more. He was close enough to make her eyes cross, and she couldn’t focus sufficiently to take in more than cropped blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a square, smooth-shaven jaw.
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