“Except,” I started, somewhat hesitant to challenge a knowledgeable man like him. “You see, I read that Fortune 500 interview piece they did on you. One of your answers was on how critical it is to be decisive, rational and consistent in setting a company’s business direction.”
His head canted to one side and he gave me a cocky one-sided grin. “Are you quoting my own words back to me now? Is that like, a thing with you up and comers?”
I laughed. His smile was way too contagious to ignore. “That’s only because you’re not following your own sage advice,” I said, amused.
“You can always come up with a suggested rubric for me to look at, since you’re so keen on telling me how to handle my seed money.”
“I’m going to ignore the double entendre and see what I come up with,” I told him. “Even though it sure does sound like you’re still trying to get me to work for you.”
“And that’s a bad thing? Maybe I like the way you’re busting my chops about following my own advice.”
“Fine,” I conceded, but mostly because I really was interested in the concept of learning on the job, especially in the area of startups and seed capital. I had taken a fascinating course on entrepreneurship back in community college, and had been curious about the applications in real life. And here I was, potentially about to play even a small part in seeing some ideas go through the selection stage. And Caleb was proposing to hire me in a paid capacity for the honor.
I’d have to be an idiot to keep turning him down. Kind of like the way I kept pushing him away romantically, only to discover that he was exactly the kind of man I wanted, needed, and hoped for.
“Hang on, little lady,” he said playfully, eyebrows raised. “Did you just agree to work for me? Is that what I thought I heard?”
I nodded. “On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“No unbecoming or unprofessional behavior in the workplace,” I teased.
He slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me close. “You mean like this?”
“Exactly like that.” I wrapped my arms around his neck and went up on my tiptoes to meet his awaiting kiss. “And like this,” I moaned against his lips as his other hand drifted down and cupped my butt, pressing me tight to him.
“Deal,” he muttered, stealing my breath. “Starting... later.”
I wasn’t about to disagree with my boss. Especially not now, not when things were starting to get interesting. And satisfying.
16
Caleb
I was shocked at how much work I was getting done.
Of course that probably had something to do with the fact that Riley was bribing me. We were spread out on my bed, with stacks of files around us. For every file we processed, I got a piece of clothing or a sexual favor.
The silky leg draped over my stomach twitched. I hid a smile. She must have read something good. Riley-Ann was surprisingly predictable. She liked the submissions that had a socially conscious angle. To be honest, I liked them too.
Not that I’d ever let myself consider that sort of thing before. She was already changing me. My instinct was to hide the fact from her. Protect myself. Make sure she didn’t know the power she held over me.
But I didn’t. I didn’t want to ruin this by playing games. And I knew Riley would smell it from a mile away.
She closed her folder a moment after I finished mine. We both read any submission the other deemed worthy. I had handed her the file knowing that she would love it.
“So?”
She glanced over her shoulder at me.
“Well, it’s challenging. There are groups like this everywhere.”
“Offline.”
“Right. There is no platform that is strictly business networking and microloans for women.”
“I think eventually they might have to allow men. If it takes off, they will get hit with bias suits.”
She nodded.
“But by then it will have done the job. It will be female dominated.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
She sighed.
“It could be really good. Did you read about the basket weavers who built a school with their profits?”
“I did.”
“So, it goes into the good pile?”
I nodded, trying not to draw attention to the growing hard-on in my pants.
“The very good pile.”
She added.
“What about yours?”
I handed it to her.
“Not for me.”
She dropped the file into a much larger stack.
“So. What do you want?”
I ran my fingertip up the back of her calf to her knee.
“I want to play with your pussy.”
“What!” she squawked.
I grinned and let my fingers wander up her thigh.
“I want to play with that pretty little pussy of yours.”
“But I still have panties on. You get one or the other. There are rules.”
“Oh,” I purred. “You can leave those on.”
“Okay…”
“Don’t move.”
She lay on her stomach. I knelt behind her and parted her thighs so I could settle between them. Now she was spread open, covered only by the thin cotton of my pajama shirt and the even thinner cotton of her panties.
They were a fresh pair, soft pink with little roses on them. I’d sent my housekeeper over to Riley-Ann’s house for a few things after I’d ripped the last pair off her. I couldn’t wait to see all the cute little panties she had in her collection and buy more.
I slid my fingertips up and down her mound, barely grazing her panties. She wiggled her hips a little and I grinned. This was going to be fun.
I toyed with her for a while, touching and teasing all around her pussy and her cute little ass cheeks. She was rocking her hips more urgently as I lowered my face and licked her. She groaned. I pressed my tongue inward, pushing her panties inside her. I spent some time doing that and then sat back, satisfied with the mess we were making.
“Your panties are soaked.”
“Hmmm…”
“Should we do a new file?” I asked, my fingertips grazing her thighs. “Or do you want to break for lunch?”
“Caleb! Stop playing with me!”
“Oh you want me to stop?”
I brushed my thumb up and down her pussy, and she arched her ass up, offering me a better angle.
“No!”
‘What do you want?”
“I want you to—”
“Yes?”
“Please…”
“Please what?”
She buried her face in the blankets, clearly feeling shy. I could still hear her loud and clear.
“Please fuck me.”
I chuckled and freed my cock from my pants.
“I was hoping you would say that.”
I tugged her panties to the side, too eager to wait to feel her. I rubbed my cock against her softness and notched it inside her. I shifted my hands to her delectable bottom and pushed myself in.
“Christ, Riley-Ann, you feel so good…”
“Hmmmmfff.”
Her face was still buried in the blankets, but she was matching my rhythm as I started to pump my cock in and out of her heat. I could tell that she was close from the fluttering waves that rolled over my cock. I’d never felt anything like I did when I was inside her.
“That’s it… reach for it, Riley-Ann…”
I reached down and strummed her clit through her panties. She convulsed on my cock and writhed on the bed. I held her down, working her clit and fucking her steadily. I was rewarded with a rush of warmth as she creamed all over my shaft.
I took a deep breath and paused, not ready to be done yet.
Grabbing a pillow, I lifted her hips and slid it underneath her. I held onto her ass with both hands as I started to rock her back and forth.
Goddamn, the woman was like my own personal cock seesaw!
I huffed and started to ride her hard and fast. My discipline snapped when she started to come again. She cried out, the sound breaking the last shred of self-control I had.
My hips bucked wildly and out of tempo. I held onto her hips, plunging in and out of her like an animal. And when I came, it felt like shards of light erupting from my cock.
I hissed my pleasure as her sweet pussy massaged my still pumping cock. I couldn’t believe how much seed I made every time. It’s like my body wanted to breed her.
It’s like my body knew.
I kissed her shoulder softly, and we rolled to a comfortable spot on the bed.
“Are you comfortable?” I asked her.
She pulled a file out from under her back.
“Not really.”
We burst into laughter, and I held her tight, unwilling to let go.
“If we keep working together, I think I’m going to be getting a lot more done.”
Riley-Ann got real quiet all the sudden.
“You still want that?” She bit her sexy lower lip. “I thought you only wanted…”
“No, woman. I want all of you. I’m not pretending to be impressed with your brain just to get your sweet pussy.”
“Oh.”
“I’m impressed with your brain, and your pussy.”
She hit me with a file but she was laughing.
“More than impressed. You are everything I could have ever wanted in a woman.”
I kissed her again, already planning what else I could do to impress her. To make her stay.
“Well, I guess I should feed you…”
She nodded eagerly and I laughed.
“Come on, sweetheart. I want you to help me cook.”
17
Riley-Ann
It was the middle of the afternoon, and I’d been working on some research. It was a new assignment in the study beside Caleb’s office while Caleb sat at his desk in back to back video conference meetings.
Kate: Hey. Can you talk? Call me. It’s urgent.
When I’d seen Kate’s text to call her right away, my first thought had been that she was going to give me heck for being so scarce at the ranch. I figured she wanted details on my whereabouts, on what happened since the evening after the county fair. So I’d ignored her text and kept working, promising that as soon as I was at the bar, I’d fill her in on everything.
Except her second and third texts had stopped me dead in my tracks.
Kate: You around? I’m at my old waitress job. Was saying hi to some friends and then something happened. I’m in shock. Call me please.
Kate: Just call me, please. It’s like, 9-1-1 level urgent.
The fact that she had put the numbers 9-1-1 at the end of her last message, well, she hadn’t done that since one of our good friends had gotten into a serious car accident years ago. It had to be serious, so I wasn’t going to avoid phoning her for the sake of holding out on what Caleb and I had been up to. So, I tapped on her name on the phone screen and made the call.
“Ri?” she called out my nickname in a shaky question and my hands started to tremble. I knew right away that something was wrong. And it was bad. My best friend’s voice had never sounded so tormented or twisted up before. Not ever.
“What’s going on?”
Her breath seemed to catch, and was so pronounced that I picked up the raggedness of her breathing through the phone and held onto my own chest, trying not to freak out.
“Talk to me, Kate,” I pleaded. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sitting at the takeout counter at my old job, and… I don’t think… I can’t believe it.”
“Kate,” I called her name again, pressing the phone closer to my ear as though that could somehow bring me closer to her, closer to finding out why the hell she was in such a state. But it didn’t help. All it did was add to my fear. Setting the phone on the desk where I’d been working with one of Caleb’s spare laptops, I clicked the speakerphone. “Do you realize how bad you’re scaring me, right now? What is it?”
“He’s… here.”
I didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. There was only one person Kate could be referring to that would cause her to lose it like this.
My father.
And he was the last person I thought I’d ever hear about again, let alone now when my life had finally seemed to be at a turning point. But wasn’t that how real life was? Troublesome, unpredictable, and damned inconvenient.
I gripped the armrests of the swivel chair I was sitting in, hoping to steady myself. But it was the pounding in my chest that had me feeling weak and off balance. And ready to run far away from this phone. From this news. No amount of shifting around in this chair would fix that. “You… you saw him? Are you sure it’s him?”
“It’s him. He came up to me and asked for you.”
“No. No, that can’t be him,” I muttered, still in denial.
“It’s your dad, Riley-Ann. He’s right here. My eyes are on him now. Mr. Billings is sitting in our favorite booth. The one beside the takeout counter facing the window. Can you talk right now… to him? He wanted your number but I wasn’t sure if you could handle a call like that out of the blue.”
“I… I don’t know,” I answered honestly. No one was ever ready or eager to speak when the darkest moment of their past came calling.
“Are you a hundred percent sure it’s him?” I asked again, hoping, praying inwardly.
It felt like I was underwater.
I was in shock, and nothing could pull me to my right mind.
Nothing except facing a cold, painful reality.
My father was back?
My dad.
The man who had felt he was more doing more good for my mother and me by being absent from our lives for long, long years, was in the picture again.
Kate had seen him?
After all these years, he had somehow come full circle and made my hometown a visit at the exact same time that Kate had gone there to catch up with one of her old waitress friends.
None of it felt real.
“Jesus Christ, Riley-Ann. It’s him. Now, you can either let me put him on the phone so you can talk to him, or not. I won’t give him your number if you don’t want me to. But he’s right here, and I think you owe it to yourself to talk to him.”
When my father had left and never came back in all those years, I had told myself countless stories to help move on with my life. One of those stories was that he had probably re-enlisted and died in some distant dusty desert. That he’d given his life to keep America safe. It had been easier to believe that than the sobering, depressing alternatives. Like the chance that he was homeless somewhere, begging for scraps to make it to another day. Or out of his mind and locked up in some mental ward. Or locked up in prison after hurting someone the way he had almost hurt my mother.
A hero’s death had been easier, more palatable a lie to swallow and make a part of my own reality. It meant I wouldn’t have to look at the face of every dark-haired man wearing camo-colored items of clothing and wonder if that could possibly be him. It meant I could put him to rest and lock up that part of me that thought he would find his way back to us whole again. It meant that a day like this would never, ever come, so I wouldn’t have to demand answers. Like where he had been all my life. Or how hard his struggles were without us. Or whether he had ever thought about me. It meant I didn’t have to face what I had lost. That I wouldn’t have to face him.
Almost every cell in my body wanted to keep that made up reality in place. I wanted to keep denying the truth that was standing in front of my best friend. But one small, almost hidden part of me was screaming out, crying the tears that filled my real-life eyes, begging with only one word.
Daddy.
“Ri?” Kate called to me again.
“All right. Put him on. But, Kate?”
“Yes?”
“Tell him to say whatever he has to say, but don’t expect me to have a reply.”
�
��I understand,” she whispered.
I held my breath as I waited for my past and my present to overlap. I had given Kate that warning to relay back to the stranger who was my father, because I couldn’t guarantee that my vocal chords would work. I couldn’t be sure that my lips would move, or my brain, or that every sound wouldn’t be drowned out by breathless, painful sobbing.
As I dragged myself to sit properly in the swivel chair, pushing back the pounding in my head while waiting for Kate to pass him the phone, Caleb appeared at the study door. He took three steps into the room, saw what must’ve been the most tormented expression he had ever seen on my face, and stopped.
“What’s wrong?” he mouthed the words silently.
All I could do was shake my head once so he would know that the best thing he could do was to back away slowly and leave.
But he didn’t. As I’d already learned, Caleb wasn’t the kind of man who walked away from his problems, even though he did admit to me at some point that he was back home to find himself and renew his passion for business. He didn’t turn his back on tough conversations, not in his work life, and surely not when it came to matters pertaining to me.
And then, he came and sat at the edge of the desk near me, and gently rested a supportive hand on my shoulder.
Only one thing surprised me more than his silent offer to be there for me.
The fact that I allowed him to.
I didn’t push him away, or ask him to leave. I didn’t say a word, not even to brace him for the impact of what he was about to hear.
I didn’t even turn off the speakerphone as I waited. Kate was about to give the most important man in my past the means to reach me, to hurt me, to break my heart into little pieces all over again. But no matter how much this conversation was going to hurt, no matter how dark or awkward this long-awaited mini family reunion would become, Caleb’s steady hand on my shoulder reminded me that my father’s battle with his demons couldn’t do the same damage.
Winning the Virgin: A Western Billionaire Cowboy Romance Page 8