by Eden Myles
The idea thrilled and embarrassed me.
Soon my belly muscles contracted, and as he started to pound me, really pound me the way I liked it, the wet, slapping sounds made me mewl in satisfaction. I felt a clitoral orgasm seize me and send out tremors like a shockwave through all my limbs. I gripped the desk tighter as my legs weakened and began to shake. The force of it made me tremble and growl through my teeth as I convulsed against him. I dug my fingernails into the wood and ground my pelvis back against Robert as we fucked like crazy. Seconds later, I came, and I brought him with me.
He pumped into me a few times before coming with a lunge and a deep-throated grunt. “Oh, Margo,” he moaned, forgetting himself as he held me against him for a long moment, his cheek lying softly against my hair. I knew I would need to punish him for that. The riding crop tonight, perhaps. He pulled out and his come gushed down the insides of my legs.
I rubbed myself against him. “Now you’ll need to clean that up,” I said.
***
“Ms. Faulker,” may I speak to you for a moment?” Adam said as I passed his workstation on my way to taking a deposition from a CGI animator who was trying to lay claim to part of the profits from a recent Disney release.
I checked my watch and said, “Can it wait until after lunch, Adam?”
Adam stood there, a shaggy punk-style guy whose beanpole body never seemed to fit in his suits right. He always looked like he’d be happier wearing a concert T-shirt and ripped-up blue jeans. He had a terrible case of bed head this morning and a pencil stuck behind one ear. But since he was our tech guy, and damned good at what he did—not to mention a sweet guy all around—I never complained too much. You see, I really can put my Attila the Hun complex in the closet when I need to.
When I saw his eyes, I knew this was serious business. My secretary headed toward me, probably intending to give me a head’s up on the other lawyer, but I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and said, “Can you buy me five minutes, Lydia?”
Lydia, who was a nicely manicured blonde who probably deserved sainthood for putting up with me for the past two years now, shook her head and said, “Sure thing, Ms. Faulker.”
Unlike Robert, I had never gotten too chummy with her, or anyone at the office, and I wouldn’t allow anyone other than Robert himself to address me as Margo. I knew it would be far too easy to be reduced to “one of the girls in the office” that way, and I wasn’t “one of the girls.” I was head partner at Burkett Associates.
After Lydia went off to buy me time, I walked over to Adam’s workstation and said in a low, conspiratorial whisper, “What did you find?”
He gave me a troubled look from under his shaggy hair, but as his eyes started floating across the office, I said, “Eyes over here, and I want to know what’s going on right now, Adam.”
His eyes snapped back around and he whispered, “I traced that ISP back to its source, Ms. Faulkner.” He didn’t go into details in case anyone was eavesdropping, but we both knew what he was talking about. “It came from a townhouse on the corner of Lexington Avenue.”
I felt my heart beat a little faster. He passed me a computer printout with the address written on it. Robert’s address. The funds had been channeled from his computer. I crunched the paper in my fist and gave Adam a steely look. “Tell no one about this.”
***
Later that same day, I caught up with Robert as he was coming back from court and asked if we might make something of a business date of tonight and spend it working on my deposition. The Copyright trial was coming up in just a few weeks, the big one with Disney—one of the biggest trials of my life—and I wanted to bounce some ideas off of him.
He walked with me to his office and said, “I have some transcriptions from old trials you might find interesting. But it’s a lot of paperwork, and most of its in storage at home. But I’d be happy to bring some of it round to your place tonight.”
“Why don’t we go to your place tonight?” I sat down on the edge of his desk and crossed my legs. I watched him looking me over while trying to remain a gentleman. “I have this idea, Robert. How would you like to top me tonight?”
He couldn’t hide his interest as he set his briefcase down on his chair. “I’m not sure if I understand you correctly.”
I’d given this a lot of thought over the last few hours. I knew it was sneaky, that I was being manipulative, but I had to learn the truth. I had to learn if Robert was involved in this missing funds issue. If he was, I knew I would find evidence of it at his home. “I go home with you tonight and you get to do anything you want to me,” I explained.
Robert nearly forgot to move his briefcase and almost sat down on top of it, he was so distracted. When he was finally settled behind his desk, I sat down in his lap and slid my hand up his lapel. “Are you serious, Margo?”
“How do you feel about that?” I asked, whispering the words against his lips. “How would you like to top me? Use me? Tell me the truth, Robert.”
His hand moved to my thigh, gripping it possessively even as his eyes glided up and down me. He smiled in a hungry way I almost didn’t recognized. “Are you certain about this, Margo? Because I’ve developed a rather fertile imagination of late.”
***
We finished discussing the case over dinner at a new bistro in lower Manhattan that we had both been eager to try out. The food was subpar at best, and I was starting to feel anxious again. My stomach kept cramping up at the idea that Robert might be guilty and I had to all but force myself to eat. If I managed to discover something tonight, something damning, I was going to be faced with an almost impossible dilemma—either confront Robert, or turn him over to the police for questioning. I wanted to do neither. I wanted this whole thing to just go away.
Already, my mind was racing, reaching for several possibilities. There may have been a good and noble reason he’d taken the money. Maybe Robert was being pressed by mafia connections, maybe he was helping the police or FBI, or maybe he was covering someone else’s bad debt, someone he cared about. I liked that line of reasoning best, the idea of the noble Robert helping out a friend or family member. But even if it was personal, an addiction I didn’t know about ripping his life and company apart, I was willing to help him, to forgive him.
I knew what Dmitri would say if I could tell him my thoughts. He’d tell me what I already knew to be true: I loved Robert. I was in love with Robert. I had made myself weak and vulnerable to him, something I had promised myself I would never do again.
The first, second and third time Brent had cheated, I’d forgiven him. I’d even suggested an open marriage, if it would make him happy and settle him down. It was the only time I had ever compromised myself and my own standards for someone else. Was I wrong to compromise myself now?
I was feeling sick about the whole situation by the time we arrived at Robert’s elegant, seven-story, Beaux-Arts townhouse on Lexington Avenue, and it was obvious he was picking up on my mood. He guided me inside, up the glass elevator, his hand in the small of my back—he had been touching me in little ways all night—and said in my ear, “Is everything all right, Margo? Having second thoughts?”
“Not at all,” I told him as we stepped out of the elevator and into the plush foyer. I’d only been to Robert’s place a few times when he and Joanne had entertained a few of us from the office around Christmas. Back then, the place had reflected Joanne’s excellent tastes in traditional furnishings—all light and glass and air. It was like stepping inside a miniature Versailles.
Now it seemed darker, moodier, and there was a mothy feel to the elegant French furnishings, the coiling staircases and arched hallways. It was obvious from the pristine magazine layout of the rooms that Robert didn’t spend much time here anymore. I crossed the Persian carpet to the fireplace mantel where Robert and Joanne’s wedding pictures had once occupied the vast majority of the space, but I noticed they had been replaced by pictures of Robert in his youth back in Wales, or more modern pictures
of him and his co-workers at various functions. One showed Robert and Joanne standing with the mayor of New York at an important fundraiser they had attended, but that was the only one I could find of her. I did notice more pictures of me standing with him.
Robert brought us each a tumbler of good imported scotch, and I asked him about the missing wedding pictures. “I asked Joanne and she suggested it,” he said.
When I gave him a funny look, he explained, “When I visit Joanne’s grave, I always make up these conversations between us. I tell her a story about work, or I ask her a question and try to figure out how she would answer it.” He shrugged, set his drink on the mantel, and slid his arms around my waist, holding me against him. “After you and I…after that first time, I asked Joanne what she thought I should do, and she told me it was time I moved on, that I’d mourned her long enough. Joanne was a very practical woman.”
There was so much warmth and feeling in his voice that it made my heart hurt to beat. I slid my arms around his neck and leaned against him while he held me and kissed and mouthed the side of my neck. We swayed together like that for a long moment, like we were dancing to invisible music. “I’m sorry, Robert,” I said, and he murmured some incoherent words against my neck before scooping me up in his arms.
“Don’t!” I screamed. “I’m heavy!”
“Not that heavy.” He carried in to his bedroom, the only room that felt cozy and inviting. He had a lovely antique sleigh bed made of gleaming dark mahogany, covered in a handmaid quilt that Joanne had purchased up in Amish county in Lancaster, but instead of taking me there, he transported me to the Queen Anne desk that sat in one corner, the place where he wrote his personal checks or did light work when he took it home with him. It was cluttered with paperwork, an antique ink quill and an equally old, Prohibition-era telephone, but he swept everything aside and set me down on the edge, looking me over with a greedy, male intensity that had my heart quickly thudding against the wall of my chest.
“Did you meant what you said? About me having my way with you?”
“Yes, Robert.”
“Good,” he said, his voice a faint growl in his throat. He clutched the back of my neck and kissed me, his teeth nipping at my mouth and the sides of my neck. He sucked an earring into his mouth, tugging on it delicately. “There’s so much I want to do to you tonight, Margo. So much tenderness I want to show you. But right now I just want to be inside you. I want to…I need to fuck you.” He shoved my business skirt up to my waist and pressed his thumb hard against the sensitive nub of flesh under my clit hood, pinched it, twisted it. I jumped at his aggressive touch and my body immediately responded to him, ejaculating all over him. In seconds I was wet and ready for him. “Yes, Margo,” he moaned into my neck. “Let go. I want to feel you come around me. I want to feel you submit.”
I moaned at the shockwave of pleasure that radiated outward from his touch. He ripped at my panties and dragged my ass forward, forcing my legs wide apart while simultaneously undoing himself. Within seconds I felt him nudging his hardness against my opening, then he clutched the sides of my face and kissed me, heaving his pelvis upward, easily impaling me. I was dripping wet and he slid home easily. I cried out into his mouth at the sudden ferocity of his lust, but he didn’t relent, holding me immobile while he bucked inside me in a series of long, shockingly powerful strokes that had my shoulders thumping the wall behind us and my body shuddering under the assault of his cock.
“Margo…my Margo,” he whispered hoarsely as he crushed me against his body, my knees gripping his shoulders as his rock hard cock shuttled easily along my slippery sex. I sighed as he stretched my walls and filled me so completely it hurt. He bucked against me repeatedly, thrusting and grunting, and only his hands now cradling the back of my head kept me from slamming my head against the wall above the desk. His body trembled as he fucked me harder than he ever had before, almost like a sexual dam had been opened inside of him. Near the end, he said the most ridiculous things to me, telling me how he loved me, how he wanted to be with me forever, fuck me forever.
I came hard as Robert jerked the orgasm out of me. My sex contracted around him and his cock twitched and flooded me with his seed even as I jetted my wetness against him. Robert slowed his fucking, his mouth sucking on my ear and along my neck, and I slumped against him in response.
We stayed like that for some moments while we both sought and found our breath and our rampaging heartbeats slowly returned to normal. I felt like I’d been flayed, physically and emotionally. Soon we were both laughing like old friends, Robert’s come pouring out of me as he attempted to dislodge himself. “I’m sorry,” he laughed, touching my cheek tenderly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Margo.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” I told him. “I’m tougher than I look.”
“You are that,” he said softly, kissing my nose and the scar on my cheek.
“I like this side of you,” I told him shyly.
“What side?”
“Your dom side.”
He laughed at that. “Let me take you to bed. I promise I’ll be gentle.”
“Robert,” I told him, wrapping my arms around his neck, “I told you. You can do anything you want to me tonight. Tonight I’m your courtesan.”
***
I woke in the early morning hours, my wrists tied to the rails of Robert’s bed with his necktie while he knelt over me, trailing the long string of black pearls I’d worn the day before between my legs, teasing them over my already come-soaked pussy and up over the peaks of my fully aroused nipples.
“You’re awake,” he said.
I stretched like a cat. “How could I not be?”
He looked tousled but not sleepy.
“Did you sleep at all?” I asked.
“Not really. I hate the idea of wasting this night.”
I smiled. “The night wasn’t wasted.”
The grey light of dawn was peeking through the heavy, luxurious velvet curtains on the windows, but it was still dim, the sun not quite up. It cast rippled shadows over the bed and over my body as Robert traced the cool, hard balls over my lower belly, circled my navel, before tickling them between my legs once more. Finally, he bowed his head and kissed me there, a loving kiss. He kissed my pussy the way he kissed my mouth. “Hungry, pet?”
“After last night? Yes.”
“I love how you’re never afraid to eat in front of me. How about I make us something and we have breakfast in bed?”
I smiled at that and he traced the path of the beads up my body until he reached my face. He took it almost reverently in his hands and kissed me, his tongue dipping briefly into my mouth. “Eggs,” I said between kisses. “And bacon. And pancakes!”
He laughed. “Yes, milady.” And slid off the bed.
“What about my binds?”
He smiled greedily. “I’ll feed you by hand.”
Once he’d gone, I went to work undoing the knot of the tie. Over the years, I’d gotten very good at tying, and untying, knots. Once I was free—it didn’t take more than a few minutes—I grabbed up a robe and got to my feet. The Queen Anne desk was the most logical place to start my investigation. I went over the top and the cubbies first, then checked all the drawers, starting at the pencil drawer and working my way down both sides. I found office supplies, ledgers, notepads, all kinds of junk, until I reached the bottom right-hand drawer.
That’s when I discovered the fireproof metal lock box. I dragged it out and set it on the desktop. It was old and battered—it was obvious that Robert had had it a long time—but not locked. Inside, I found what I was looking for—and dreading. There were a large number of check receipts, the amounts generous and the most recent dated only last week. They were all made out to an Amanda Burkett. As I dug down, I also found a pocket-sized picture of a pretty brunette in her mid-thirties smiling for the camera, and a number of carefully folded watercolor pictures done with a childish enthusiasm. Green grass, a happy couple holding hands amidst scrawled
flowers, and a bright yellow sun in the upper right-hand corner.
I looked over each of the drawings even as I felt my heart stutter inside me. Eventually, I returned to the picture of the young woman. Amanda Burkett. The woman he’d never mentioned in any conversation we’d ever had. The checks dated back almost twenty years. Joanne would have known. She would have had to.
I was shaking so badly I could barely throw on my clothes from last night, but somehow I managed. I went out into the apartment, carrying the picture of Amanda with me. I found Robert in the kitchen, dressed in only his pajama bottoms, frying eggs in an iron skillet. When he turned and saw me, his face seemed to freeze and I felt the fission in the air.
I walked up to him and put the photo down on the counter in front of him.
He looked at it and something passed behind his eyes, some darkness. “How did you get this?” he said, a question that surprised me.
“When were you going to tell me about your family?” My voice trembled and I could taste the tears in the back of my throat.
Anger, insult and fear warred for dominance of his face. “That is no concern of yours, Margo. You had no right snooping in my things.”
“And you had no right making me believe that I was the only one!”
“I never cheated on you!”
“But you did lie to me,” I said, choking back the tears. “Did you take that money, too?”
Unexpectedly, he grabbed up the skillet and threw it viciously into the empty sink where it made a bone-shaking clanking noise. “What you did is grounds for dismissal in my company! I’m still senior partner here!”
I had never seen Robert, quiet Robert, so angry in my life. He didn’t show this level of outrage even in the courtroom. His anger passed over and through me like a charge of electricity, leaving me shaking in its wake.
So he wasn’t going to explain himself. He was going to turn this all around, the way Brent had. Somehow, in those last months of our marriage, it had become all my fault he was cheating. I was the bitch, the banshee, the Nazi—the enemy.