by Song, Myra
There isn’t time to dwell on this revelation, though, because he’s right behind me. Just his presence makes it hard to think.
Locke give no warning. One minute, my ass cheeks are cool, hanging in the open in his office, and then--
Whack!
Oh God, they’re stinging, his hand leaving a hot-cold sensation.
“What the hell?”
He tsks me. “You’ve got a lot to learn about how this works.”
Something in my core jumps at this, but my mouth can’t stay shut. “Learn about what? You’re into kinky shit. You like to choke and hit women. I think I can follow.”
Locke is on me, his powerful hands gripping my wrists, his chest pressed into my back. The hard ridge of his cock wedges into my bare ass and I can’t help but tremble at the memory of him.
Just this, this overwhelming, suffocating presence he has, is rapturous. There’s something being nurtured in me. It’s dark. It’s frightening. It goes against everything I stand for, everything I believe I need to protect myself.
The need to relinquish. To just let him have his way.
He nibbles on my ear and I squirm. “Elise, you drive me crazy. Something about you--” he inhales deeply and pleasure seeps through me. “You want to submit. I can sense it in you. You want a big man to give you orders. To debase you.”
I think about my jobs. Always a competition. A need to prove myself, that despite being a woman I’m as smart and capable as my co-workers. Or my father and brother, who always pushed me to be more. Quick. Sure.
He’s right, goddamnit. He’s right. The word he says-- submit. It speaks to me. It is a prayer, an offer.
But Locke, as ferocious and sexy as he is, is still going to be my employer. He still has a secret. I’m so sure of it, I can almost taste it.
“Soon, Elise. For now, let me challenge you. I’m going to spank you twenty times. Twenty, because you insist on putting your most badass face forward. Let’s see if you can make it to the end without speaking.”
Clever. He’s so clever. He’s using my competitive nature against me.
Locke’s hand smooths over my buttocks, soft, and it is immensely pleasurable.
Then he begins to spank in earnest. Each time his hand whips through the air before crashing onto my sensitive flesh. Heat is pricking, stinging. My eyes are watering. He strikes me so hard my hip bones jar into the desk, thump, thump, thump.
My pussy is so wet, the nerves screaming for release. Every five or so spanks, Locke stops and caresses the flaming skin. The touch is gentle, but it sparks me almost as much.
“Touch yourself,” he orders. It isn’t a request. My hand dives greedily between my legs, my fingers plunging into myself. I’m so close, it won’t take long. “Good. Stroke yourself. Spread your legs and show me how you like to be touched.”
His words are like booze. When mixed with the endorphins from the pain, I feel drunk. Drunk on his power. My fingers stroke my clit hard and fast, seeking a climax that’s just on the edge. I just need something to push me over--
“Come for me now,” Locke commands. “Say my name and come for me!”
It’s like he’s struck a match. The heat of the climax rips into existence and I scream as it pulses through me. “Jameson!”
He spanks me, then, the remaining four hits he owes me, and the pain of it mixes with the pleasure dragging my orgasm out.
“Fucking hell,” I curse as the climax recedes.
Locke
“Jameson!”
Elise cried out my name. Screamed it, really.
I just wasn’t expecting her to use my first name. No one calls me that. But on her lips?
My heart lurches in my chest. Oh, damn. This isn’t good.
But do I pull away? After countless warnings, omens, and red-flags that say ‘this girl could ruin you?’
Nope.
Instead, I free my cock from my jeans and flip her over. Yanking her pants all of the way off, I left Elise’s legs until her ankles are on my shoulders and the head of my cock is slipping in the wetness at her pussy’s entrance.
Just before slamming home, I look at her. Really look at her.
Her hair is dark again without the sun to illuminate its golden tones. Tendrils of it are plastered to her forehead. Elise’s blue eyes seem even bluer in contrast to the red from the tears she fought back as I spanked her.
She’d taken every hit and not said a damned word.
The things-- the things! I want to do to this woman!
“Lift up your shirt,” I say, my voice so husky with lust it sounds like gravel in my throat.
Her trembling fingers grip the hem and she tugs it up, revealing her fantastic tits. Those large, pink nipples. Her soft belly is quavering, tight with anticipation.
When Elise bites her lip, I spear into her. Warm, wet heat envelopes me in a tight grip. Her moan is a song in my ears. Leaning forward presses her legs up, makes her pussy even tighter.
Time to make her scream again.
I pound into her, dragging my length almost all of the way out before thrusting back in. She takes all of my cock, her head thrashing, her voice becoming ragged from the repeated “yes! yes! YES!” that is her litany of pleasure.
My balls are tight, heavy with need for this girl. Her body is so perfect under mine. Her curves were meant for this. For grabbing, for plunging, for sex.
When I feel her wet channel clamping down on me, I know she’s close. Picking up the pace, I really nail Elise. I want us to come together-- something I’ve never cared about with any other woman.
Reaching a hand up her front, I palm one of those perfect breasts, loving how it feels in my hands. Then I pluck one of her pink nipples, pinching it between my finger and thumb, treating it as an anchor.
Elise arches her back, I slam into her, burying myself fully, and twist her nipple hard. Her shriek fills my office, fucking fills me, and I come. I come hard inside her, my semen rushing in a torrent into her hot hole. Elise is calling my name again, Jameson, Jameson! and she’s clenching down on my cock, coming with me.
We lock eyes as the climax ebbs and something passes between us. It’s potent. It’s irresistible and irrevocable.
Reluctantly, I pull out. Elise stretches like a cat, rocking and mewling in contentment on my desk. As I tuck myself back in and straighten my hair, her eyes go to a cup of fountain pens on my desk.
I raise an eyebrow as she pushes them off the desk, scattering them on the floor.
“I owed you for my desk,” she says playfully.
This moment is becoming too personal. Too intimate. Now that I’m not buried inside of her, luxuriating in her sensual, slick heat, my chest is tightening. I can’t fall for this woman. She can only be a moment’s entertainment. Sex.
I wanted her. I’ve had her now, twice. I got what I wanted, so why was I already thinking about how I could get her into my bedroom?
You can’t, Locke. If she knew about you--
“Get dressed,” I bark at her. Hurt skates across her features, but she does without complaint. “I need to show you around. And you’ll need to change for this evening.”
“What I’m wearing is fine for security,” she fires back. Elise sounds wounded, but fiery. I’ve pushed a button for her. Good. If she gets pissed at me, then she’ll just turn me down.
“It’s black tie. You need to fit in.”
Her cheeks are still pink from fucking, but they stain a little darker. “I don’t have anything like that.”
I think about the present I picked out and had Ben fetch for me yesterday. “I think we can solve that problem.”
Her eyebrows press together and even when she’s trying to figure me out, she’s adorable.
“I haven’t signed anything yet,” she warns. “I could walk.”
This gives me pause. She’s definitely wounded now. Her hands keep tugging at her shirt, as if she can cover her shame with the flimsy jersey. A pang of regret stabs at me as I acknowledge that I’m behind that.
Someone as lovely as she is shouldn’t feel guilt after her pleasure.
She’s right about her contract. There’s a building irritation in me and I realize I’m torn. Part of me wants her to sign the contract. It would be official. I’d be her employer, she my employee, and on top of that, she would undoubtedly be investigating me. Sex and emotions muddied up everything, and I needed my vision to remain crystal clear.
On the other hand, if Elise refused…
I could fuck her again. Not date, because there are too many skeletons in my past and a big one in my present to try to hide from a lover as sharp as she is. Naturally inquisitive. And naturally submissive.
My cock twitches at this thought and holy hell, we need a change of scenery or I am going to fuck her again.
“Do you still wish to?” I ask cautiously. “To sign the contract?”
I must have pushed her too far, because it takes her no time to squat and pick up a pen from the floor. “Just show me the dotted line, Locke.”
Elise
I sign with a jagged flourish. My signature looks angry.
Well, big surprise there. It’s my fault, really. I’d sworn I wouldn’t fuck him and then I did, persuaded by a stupid semantic technicality. It was my fault that when Locke had finished with me, he’d let me know exactly how done he was.
Was I crazy? It’s just that, in those last throes of rapture, it had felt like we were making, I don’t know… a connection. Something sparked, for me at least.
His name. Jameson. It had spilled from my mouth like gospel.
It clearly meant nothing to him, because he was already handing me a carbon copy of the contract. It contained an non-disclosure addendum. P.I.’s don’t talk about their clients, but I should have read it more carefully. Folding my copy and shoving it into a back pocket, I follow on his heels.
We leave the office in a quick clip.
Jameson’s home could be a freaking museum. The walls were this gorgeous, silvery gray color. Like the morning fog. His windows were mostly set in the ceiling, with exception to the full-windowed wall and door he had to the garden. At first I thought the high windows were strange, but then I quickly understood their function.
Angled to make full use of the sun as it traversed the sky, the windows picked up its rays while keeping the light directly off the art.
There was a lot of art. Paintings, spanning Dutch renaissance to Spanish Baroque to modernism were covering the walls of his home. Gorgeous statues dotted the corridors, their marble subtly gleaming and seeming to glow.
Seeing so much art, real art --not just prints or copies -- is making my chest ache. It reminds me of home, of family. There’s even a chance that Locke bought one of these from my father.
It’s a curiosity I can’t ignore. “You’re quite a collector. Did you purchase anything locally?”
Jameson stops and gives me a quizzical look. “A few things, yes. Why?”
“Did you ever buy from Luis Martin? Brilliant Oaks Gallery?”
His eyes light up. “Yes! I did! I purchased a Manet from him, as well as a Caravaggio. Don’t tell me--”
“My dad. You should have those paintings verified.” This part comes out more venomous than I’d like, but my view of my father was tinged heavily with pain.
Locke manages to look sympathetic and it rubs me the wrong way. People shouldn’t feel badly for what others have done-- they usually had enough wrong on their own plane to own up to. “I did when I heard the news. Is he still in prison?”
“Yep. Another twenty years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He broke the law, he got caught, that’s what happens.”
Locke start to take a step toward me, his hand moving like he might pat my shoulder. Or brush my hair out of my face. My breath hitches and I quickly shuffle away. I can’t. Not after how he treated me in his office.
“So fill me in on your security system,” I urge. My arms cross on my chest to let him know the subject of my father is closed. I brought it up, but that didn’t mean I wanted to spill everything and have a good cry out with him.
He sighs, like he’s actually disappointed, and I see red. What a jerk! So stereotypical billionaire playboy; he wants what he wants and pouts if it isn’t thrust in his face.
I need to finish this job and I need to get out. Being in this home, being next to this man just makes things complicated in a way I’m wholly uninterested in.
Locke
Luis Martin. Maybe I should be mad at myself for not seeing a connection, but Martin isn’t exactly a rare last name.
Yeah, I bought from her father. I knew exactly what he was when I bought from him and I knew the paintings he sold me were real. My love for art was balanced with a need for detail. When I did anything, from running my company to purchasing art, to sex-- the detail was what made me comfortable. Gave me control.
Which is yet another reason why I shouldn’t be so irrationally frustrated that Elise chose to sign the contract. That was the whole reason she was here, wasn’t it? I’d seen enough of her life to know a check the size of what I was offering was something she couldn’t turn down. And, in my fear, I was an ass to her.
Correction: Still being an ass.
Her father throws another wrench in my plans.
Luis Martin is a master forger and con man. For years he worked his gallery, the largest in Raleigh. People in the art world knew it, and his name, around the globe for years. Like me, people were stunned when a name appeared, seemingly out of the blue and from an unlikely city. Luis had done that with his gallery. He’d orchestrated purchases that would have made any metropolitan museum jealous.
He’d also sold numerous forgeries that he himself had painted. These forgeries were so good, fo masterfully crafted, that no one was onto him for years.
Then one of his forgeries had been stolen and turned up, half a year later, on a park bench in Seattle. While initially exuberant to have the seemingly priceless Degas returned, the museum took extra safe measures.
They brought in numerous experts.
They discovered it was a forgery. Martin had claimed that the thief must have left the forgery. A tease. Taunting them. After all, there was a calling card of sorts left with it.
But the museum had made a small, untraceable and almost impossible to see mark on the “original” they’d purchased.
The returned painting bore their seal.
The investigation moved quickly after that and millions of dollars of art connected to Luis were pronounced fakes.
And his daughter is walking beside me, stiff and purposefully, her sharp eyes taking in each piece I owned. And earlier she was so interested in--
No way. There’s no way she’d know about the case in that much detail.
“How old were you when he was arrested?”
She glares at me, furious that I’m still asking about something she obviously didn’t want to talk about.
“Sixteen. Right after I graduated high school.”
She says this casually, but now I’m invested. “Sixteen, huh?”
Elise shrugs. “Yeah. I worked hard and studied summers. Did it in college, too. Criminal Justice degree in two and a half years instead of four. Had to wait a year and a half before I was old enough to join the force, so I helped out with paperwork. Got a feel for the job that way. Twenty one, bam! First job as a cop. Promoted to Detective at twenty-two -- youngest in the Department’s history. Private Investigator at twenty three.”
She’s saying this, line by line, in a punctual voice. I may as well have asked her to recite the periodic table of elements. Yet there’s a hint of pride in her voice, and there damned well should be-- Detective at twenty two was an enormous accomplishment, not to mention her academic career.
I drift closer to her, hooked on the mystery of her. What had made her quit when she’d obviously been so driven to go into law enforcement?
We arrive at my main control room before I can ask. Elise hums in app
reciation, and she should. She has her track record. This is one of mine.
The room is outfitted with cameras, control panels, security tape reels, the works.
“You mic your house?” She nods to the audio equipment.
“Doesn’t everyone?” I joke, but she’s already moving on, looking at each screen and its respective view. She freezes when she comes to the study.
“I’m going to need a copy of that,” she growls, realizing I have our tryst on tape.