by Christa Wick
Griffin pinched his nose then ran his hands along his slacks. “You did an amazing thing for your mother, Kate.”
She gave a tight shake of her head, unclenching her jaw just long enough to rebut the compliment. “Obviously you never compared the medal times for the summer games against my trial times.”
“Don’t make your sacrifice less than it was, Kate.” He drew his body to the edge of the seat.
Thinking Griffin was positioning himself to make another move on her, she stared at him in warning. Looking him straight in the eyes hurt like hell. While his face remained hard to read and his voice stayed smooth and deep, something danced in his gaze. Problem was, she had no idea what that “something” meant.
Part of her felt it wasn’t too late to invite him back in. He was getting personal, talking about her mother.
Was he ready to open up?
She dismissed the idea with a narrow shake. Griffin intended to soften her up, weaken her with compliments and thoughts of her mother, remind her how she would give up everything for the right person.
She desperately needed to not lose sight of how Griffin wasn’t the right person.
Her thoughts drifted to the lamp beside him and its twin in her bedroom. The lamps and the chair he sat on had been in her mother’s reading room. At two, Katelyn would crawl up in her mother’s lap and listen to Madeline read The Little Mermaid and other fairy tales. As she grew older, Katelyn would sit on the floor at her mother’s feet, Madeline stroking her hair as Katelyn read her own books. But, even as a teen, there were times she would rest her head on her mother’s lap and the childhood books would come out.
She looked back at Griffin, realizing he had continued talking while her mind drifted. He had upped the deal, offering twice as big a payment for one final night as he had offered for the week.
His mouth only stopped moving when he saw the tears glistening on her cheek.
“Come back, Kate.”
There he was, throwing orders around again. It didn’t matter how soft the command. The words told her everything. He could have said he wanted her to come back, needed her to. That might have slowed her refusal, even reversed it.
“You’ve never met a person you can’t buy, have you?” She shook her head. “I’m done with you, Montgomery.”
Griffin looked stunned — for all of a second before he recovered. “Katelyn, I’m offering something that could be life changing
“
A soft, almost forgiving smile, ghosted her lips. “You’ve already changed my life, and it didn’t cost you a dime. Good-bye, Griffin.”
The stunned look returned. “Kate
“
His bottom lip bobbed, his tongue moving behind the gate of perfect white teeth.
She couldn’t tell what word he found impossible to shape. It didn’t matter.
“You were right about the independence issues. You know I won’t call the cops to make you leave.” Hooking his gaze, she felt the tears drying on her cheeks and realized she really could get over this man sitting across from her. It would time, but she could feel the strength to do so building inside her. “Please stop doing this to me.”
His mouth closed. Looking down, he gripped the sidearm of the chair and nodded then pushed onto his feet. Heading for the front door, he passed out of view.
Hearing more than one voice from the entry area, Katelyn started to stand. She made it to her feet as Griffin called from the front door, his tone dripping indifference.
“Your pizza is here.”
The front door clicked shut. She sank onto the couch, the final words of an almost love affair echoing in her head.
Your pizza is here.
**********
Irritation making his finger bounce, Griffin clicked the re-submit button on his screen. The screen refreshed, showing him the last thirty days of transactions on his personal expense account. He scanned the numbers again in search of one line with a very specific amount.
Fifty thousand dollars.
Nothing. A month had passed and Katelyn hadn’t cashed the check he’d placed on top of the pizza box. He had filled two checks out on his ride from Century to Katelyn’s apartment. He had written the first for one hundred thousand, his last chance amount. Seconds before exiting the limo, suffering a moment of self-doubt that had proved all to accurate in her rejection of him, he had filled out the second check for the fifty thousand despite the contract’s terms being unfulfilled.
With her tears and contempt warring for supremacy in his mind as he left, he wasn’t sure if he had intended the fifty thousand as a spiteful reminder of what she had agreed to or a misguided apology. Either way, she hadn’t cashed it.
His finger hovered over the touch pad one last time. He had ignored the account statement the first two weeks after walking out of Katelyn’s life. The third week he had checked every other day. The first few days of the fourth week he scanned the statement once at the end of each day. The remaining days?
“Pitiful, Montgomery.” He hit the power button on his laptop then strode into his reception area. Despite working in his office from approximately six in the morning until six at night, he had few in-person visitors. The waiting area was blissfully empty.
He turned to Liz. She was the more senior of his two personal assistants and, with Maggie on maternity leave since the prior Friday, the only one working. Liz smiled at him, her expression slipping as he continued staring. She lifted a hand to brush at the carefully styled gray hair that ended at the upturned collar of her blouse. Finding her boss still silent, she folded her hands in her lap and prompted him.
“You need something, Griffin?”
“Miss Willow,” he started. His cheeks reddened at the slip. “Have there been any messages from her?”
“All of your regular messages have been delivered.” Liz rose from her seat and approached Maggie’s desk. “I was just finishing up the P&E compilation for you before I addressed the unsolicited correspondence Maggie didn’t have time to sort before—”
Griffin snatched the thick pile from Liz. “Is this all of it?”
“It’s all that the mail room has delivered.” She smiled, her pale blue-gray eyes sparking with soft amusement.
Griffin scowled. “Don’t look at me like that, Liz.”
“My apologies, sir.” She forced her eyes and the corners of her mouth down.
“Should I ensure the mail room and front reception know Miss Willow’s messages are not unsolicited?”
He answered with a sharp bob of his head and narrowed eyes then prowled back into his office, shutting and locking the door behind him. Pulling all the unlikely, oversized envelopes from the pile, he put them on the corner of his desk. Still not looking at the mailing labels, he quickly sorted out the metered mail. That left him with thirty or so envelopes to examine. He fingered through their top left corners. Two prep school “buddies” whose names he vaguely recalled, a one-night-only pet, alumni from college
Damn it!
Almost at the bottom, he had the sinking feeling Katelyn had shredded the check but intended to leave it out there as a constant Fuck you, Griffin Montgomery reminder until he cancelled it or the check otherwise slipped from memory.
Only there was no chance in hell it would slip from his memory.
Reaching the last envelope, he closed his eyes for a moment. He didn’t really want to find one with her name and address. If she kept the check, he could lie and tell himself there was a slim chance and he hadn’t totally ruined the possibility of her returning to him.
Slowly, he opened his eyes. Katelyn Willow greeted him in a tidy, unassuming scroll. Below that, her address. Flipping the envelope over, he broke the seal and pulled the check out.
VOID in thick black ink shouldered its way across the check. His lips rolled against one another. Terse, no nonsense. He half wished Katelyn had drawn devil horns and a tail on the G of his signature or replaced VOID with ASS HAT and an arrow pointing to his name. Anything oth
er than the emotional abyss of that single stark word would have been better.
Leaning to the side of his desk, Griffin shredded the check. Picking up his phone, he called Devyn Cole, his head of security.
“I need to know if she’s working,” he said as soon as Devyn’s voice came over the line.
There was a pause as Devyn worked through the order. “You mean the girl, Katelyn? Willow, was it?”
“Yeah.” He snorted, thinking of all the pleasure the last month could have brought if Katelyn had been more like the tree her last name represented.
Instead, she refused to bend. Not even for one night.
“Let me guess — you want it, like, five minutes ago,” Devyn joked.
“More like an hour ago,” Griffin murmured and ended the call.
He made two more calls that afternoon. The first to his attorney to draft foundation documents for a new charity with a three-year, ten million dollar endowment. The second went to the vice president two stories below him in charge of the company’s real estate assets. He needed a vacant office suite in a nearby building, one within walking distance.
The calls finished, Griffin leaned back in his chair, folded his hands behind his head, looked up and picked patterns from the marbled ceiling as he planned just how he would convince Katelyn to let him back into her life.
**********
Riding the elevator to the third floor of a small office building three blocks from the heart of Chicago’s financial district, Katelyn checked her reflection one last time. She had an interview in ten minutes with a start-up charity. With the interview request coming on short notice and no familiar names, she had dressed conservatively in a black skirt with one inch heels and a white, French cut blouse buttoned up to her collarbone. The clothes were freshly pressed, the shoes freshly shined. She had finished French braiding her dark brown hair in the back of the cab.
She winced at the thought of the cab fare. Thirty bucks blown, but she had been too keenly aware of how close she would need to pass to Montgomery’s office building if she walked. Better to eat the cost of the cab and arrive at the interview with her nerves intact than a twitching mess with no chance of being hired.
Katelyn sighed, wondering when she would finally get Montgomery out of her head.
Each night brought a new dream, some so deliciously good she woke wet and sore from her pussy’s nocturnal flexing. Other mornings found her heartbroken all over again, tears on her pillow.
“Suck it up, Kate,” she hissed at herself a second before the elevator doors opened onto the third floor. An amiable young man greeted her in the entry room.
The entire floor looked to be under construction — dusty and wrapped in plastic.
Seeing that she had no coat to hang, he walked her through one open room to deposit her in another. Several eight-foot folding tables had been arranged in the center of the room, blue lines showing different office arrangements covering every last inch of their surface.
“Someone will be with you momentarily.” He smiled and left.
Watching him disappear into the next room, she thought one last time how he looked like some smooth-faced Harvard freshman or first year B-school undergrad at UC finishing up a summer internship. He certainly looked out of place for a charity organization — the suit was too nice, the cuff links real gold and his hair cut probably cost more than a month of her groceries.
Dismissing her suspicions as pre-interview tension, she studied the blue lines in front of her. The director’s office was clearly marked on each drawing — the potential office size varying from a sensible ten-by-ten space to a huge corner office. She frowned, more tension knotting in her stomach. She wouldn’t want to work for the director that picked the corner office, would consider all but the smallest office wasteful of space that could be occupied by volunteers.
“Which one suits you, Kate?”
Hearing the familiar voice, her body swayed forward at the same time her stomach did a back flip and her legs threatened to fold. She inventoried her body’s response, wondering if she had expected, deep down, for this to be another of Montgomery’s games. Had she intentionally sabotaged herself by coming?
“I figured you would prefer the ten-by-ten office.” He came to a stop a few feet behind her and slightly to the right, judging from the direction of his voice.
“But my appraisal of you has been consistently off, so I had several plans drawn up.”
Appraisal. He was doing it again, reducing her to dollars and cents. She turned, trying not to see anything more than the blur of whichever designer silk suit he was wearing as she stormed from the office. She saw jeans instead, a charcoal gray sweater, and the arm extending to slow or stop her retreat.
“You were too fragile for us to have this discussion last time, Katelyn.” His hand pressed lightly against her hip, the briefest contact enough to freeze her in place. “You’re not fragile now.”
She glared at him, hoping the truth stayed hidden behind the ice of her gaze.
She was fragile as hell. A month’s worth of dreams had eroded her anger, fueled her lust, deepened her heartbreak. His ruse to lure her to the office also dashed her last hope at a job in her field. One last rent check stood between her and applications for anything she could possibly get.
In control, Griffin turned her back to the desk. In the center of all the blue lines, a stack of papers rested face down. He flipped them over.
“These are foundation documents and a three-year endowment naming you as director. In addition to this floor of the building and its furnishings, the initial endowment provides ten million dollars in funding.”
Ice water trickled down her back. “And just what do you expect me to do for all this?”
“Run the damn thing, Kate.” Griffin stepped closer, his body heat filling the thin cushion of air between them. Other than the gentle force of his fingertips against her hip, he wasn’t touching her — not yet. “Whatever cause, whatever staff you want.”
“Think about it.” He closed that last little gap of space between them. “All of those good people you know who are out of work because of someone else’s scandal. You can give them their careers back—”
“Right,” she bit out, spinning to face him. “Give it back so I can yank it away by having them work for a director who
“
She couldn’t finish, couldn’t admit what she had become in signing that first contract with Montgomery. Katelyn pushed at his chest, trying to open the space between them back up. He had her angled against the desk where she couldn’t go forward, back, or to either side without him or the table blocking her.
She slapped at him. He caught her hand.
“Let go of me!”
Griffin released Katelyn, only to have his words pin her in place, their weight crushing her into the dust covered flooring. “You know I went to Century that last night.”
Katelyn jerked her head to the side, teeth grinding at the slow betrayal of her body. She couldn’t move. Like a marionette, she felt an invisible string of tension running from her hands and feet but with a hook at the end of each attached to her heart. Try to step away, her flesh caught and tore inside her chest. Raise a hand to push at him, searing pain stole her breath.
“I went there looking for a sub for the night, since the one I had at home proved obstinate.” He tried to capture her chin between his thumb and index finger. She jerked in the opposite direction. “I found a slave instead, a woman who—”
“I know what a slave is.” One of the imaginary hooks plaguing her insides fell away. Did Griffin really have the audacity to boast about what he had done that night?
“A month of reading?”
More than curiosity coated his question. She could hear the speculation in his tone. He thought, perhaps, that she had been intensely researching his lifestyle and, by extension, what would please him.
As if!
She narrowed her gaze, one lip curling upward as she dismissed the sugges
tion.
“More like a few hours. Don’t flatter yourself, Montgomery.”
His brow lifted, fresh fire dancing in his gaze. The bastard thought he had her caught in his net — had her hooked at the end of his line. She closed her eyes at the unfortunate image. Yes, he had her hooked, she could feel the curving steel slicing deeper into her heart. When he tried to reel her in, he would destroy her.
He tried anyway, his voice a deep rumbling lure. “I didn’t realize she was a slave at first. I strapped her to an X-frame, just her bra and panties on.”
Heat fired low in Katelyn’s gut. She realized her breathing had slowed to nothing and she sucked a long, slow breath in. She couldn’t let him know the effect he still had on her body. One mention of the X-frame and near nudity with him intent on dominating the submissive had Katelyn wet.
“I have no idea what color her eyes were.” He went on, his voice soft and contemplative. “I had Martinique blindfold her. But she had the brown hair and nicely toned body I had req—”
Fighting tears, she interrupted him. “Are you intent on being cruel?”
He shook his head, his gaze and expression sincere. “I’m trying to tell you what I went looking for and what I found.”
Her heart stopped. She couldn’t breathe. Blood froze in the veins it had coursed through seconds before as she hung on his next words.
“I found a hole in myself, one I’d been painting over for so many years I forgot it was there.” Reaching behind Katelyn’s neck, he found the black length of ribbon she had used to secure the French braid. He pulled it free. “But I also found a woman who had been abused, the signs were there on her marked flesh, in the way she trembled when I touched her—”
“Congratulations,” she snapped. “I’m sure you’ll both be very happy together.”
Heat flared along Griffin’s cheeks. He took a step forward, his broad torso pressing against her narrower one. “Don’t be intentionally obtuse, Kate.”
“Screw you, Montgomery.” Pressing both palms to his chest, she tried to push.