by Ashe Barker
I press the internal door release button then open my front door, leaving it ajar as I rush back to finish dressing my culinary masterpiece before I shove it in the oven to sizzle for twenty minutes.
“I opened a bottle of wine. You can have the glass this time. I’ll just be a moment…” I call out to Sally, knowing she can look after herself while I finish up in here. There’s the sound of the door closing softly as she comes into the flat, footsteps, the splash of wine swirling into my one and only wine glass. Then more footsteps as she comes over to the kitchen door.
“Expecting company, Abbie? Not me, I daresay…”
I spin around at the unexpected deep tone. Cain! He shoots out his free hand to save my pizza from an untimely end as I fumble with it in my confusion. I was thinking about him just a moment ago. In my astonishment I could almost convince myself I conjured him here. Now that would be a fine trick.
“Whoah, careful.” He chuckles as he rights the teetering concoction of tomato, cheese and green peppers. “Looks tasty, you’ve been learning some new skills while you’ve been away. Will there be enough for three?”
“Three?” I look at him stupidly.
“You, me and whoever’s joining us. Who is that, anyway? Sally?”
I’m totally floundering. What’s he doing here? How does he know about Sally? Did I mention her by name? Maybe.
I collect my wits sufficiently to crouch down and slide the pizza into the oven before my attempts at juggling with it result in disaster. And the brief respite offers me an opportunity to think, to try to sort out this new and miraculous turn of events in my head.
Cain, here! Wow!
“I—yes. Sally. She’s coming round after she finishes work. She should be here by now… We were going to eat and then…” I trail off, not sure if, or how I want to tell him what Sally and I have been getting up to. But it seems there’s no need for me to ponder this matter further.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Abbie?”
“Tell you?” No harm in playing for a bit of time, a bit more regrouping.
Cain turns, strolls back into my living room. He picks up my copy of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone from the arm of my sofa, turns back to me. “Good book? Been reading it long?”
I shake my head slowly.
“No. Thought not. You’ve not been reading anything very long, have you, Abbie?” His tone is low, gentle. Kind. Not a hint of mockery there. He tilts his head to one side, his expression just hinting at a smile. And he waits for my answer.
I shake my head again as I follow Cain into my living room, wondering how he knows. How he worked it out. And I know that only one person could have told him. Phyllis. I’m surprised, maybe even a little shocked. Phyllis promised me, and I trusted her. My sense of disappointment that she broke her word to me is perversely keen, given that I’m actually deliriously pleased to see Cain.
“Phyllis told you.” It’s a statement, not a question. “I asked her not to. She wasn’t happy, but she did promise.”
He shrugs, glancing down at the wine swirling in his glass before he catches and holds my gaze again. “She told me under duress. I was on the point of setting my lawyers onto you for sabotaging my business.”
“What?” I’m staring at him, incredulous. Sabotage! What the fuck would that be about?
He chuckles again. “Yeah, I know. Ridiculous. I see that now. But then, I was short on explanations. And so fucking pissed off at you. Phyllis had no choice but to fill me in.”
“Why? I don’t understand. I told you it was a mistake. Why would you think…?” I’m babbling and I know it, so I stop, close my mouth firmly. He did think I’d hidden that letter deliberately, caused all that hassle with the Health and Safety Executive. He said as much on the phone. “But why did it take you so long to get that pissed off? It’s been a month since I, since…”
“Since you neglected to tell me that the HSE were on my back and I needed to go and grovel to them?”
Always helpful, that’s Cain.
“Yes. Since that.”
He perches himself casually on the arm of my sofa, Harry Potter now displaced to the table, next to the depleted wine bottle. He takes a sip from his glass of my finest plonk. “I was convinced you had dropped me in it with the HSE on purpose, though I’d no idea why. That made it all the more bitter, I suppose. I’d trusted you.” He hesitates, his smile wry as he observes me.
I’m sure my bafflement is perfectly obvious.
He continues, “I more than trusted you probably, and that made the sense of betrayal sharper. But you’d gone, and I was too busy trying to dig my way out of the shit to worry overmuch about dealing with you. I was livid, certainly, but as long as you kept your distance, I’d manage to keep my hands off you. Not entirely sure how I’d have reacted if—when—you eventually came back. But then, Phyllis discovered the entire 2012-13 accounts had been deleted from the system. The whole lot. And that did it. I knew you’d been working with them, you made a start on identifying our debtors, if you recall. Not that you did anything remotely resembling a good job.”
His grin softens the words, his expression warm with sardonic humor. “So, Phyllis was going to go through it again. But she couldn’t, because the spreadsheet where the invoices are recorded was mysteriously missing. And when she dug a bit further, she found the whole lot was gone. I don’t know how you managed it, but you did.”
I’m staring at him, open-mouthed. “But, I couldn’t… I wouldn’t know how. I mean, I didn’t…”
“Oh, you did. I’m sure you did. Not on purpose, I’m sure of that too, now. But it was you. The spreadsheets were fine before you used them, and they were far from fine afterwards.”
My stomach drops to the floor as I remember, suddenly recalling that awful moment when the screen went blank. I did think I’d lost the invoices. But I found them again, I know I did. I went back to the desktop, and navigated my way back to the accounts. They were there, everything was still there, I’m sure. I try to explain that to Cain.
“I don’t doubt you thought it was all fine. My guess is you were looking at the previous year’s spreadsheets. Would you have known the difference?”
I shake my head. I wouldn’t. Not then, and probably not now either. It never occurred to me to look carefully at the dates. The spreadsheet I found looked like the one I’d been working on, and that was good enough for me.
Cain takes another sip of his wine. I rest my case, m’Lud.
“So, as far as I could see when Phyllis told me what had happened, you’d done it again. Yet another example of you screwing up our business, deliberately destroying records. Inexplicable, but the facts seemed to speak for themselves. Taken on top of the business with Mrs Henderson, and the HSE, this was the last straw. I wanted it stopped. I wanted you stopped. As long as you had any involvement with Parrish Construction I could see this stuff continuing to happen. The only way Phyllis could prevent me from starting legal proceedings was to offer some other explanation. So she told me the truth. The truth you should have told me at the start. So, I repeat, why didn’t you, Abbie?”
I sink into one of my two little dining chairs and reach for the small porcelain cup alongside the wine bottle. Some day I’ll invest in more than one long stemmed wine glass, but for now I make do. Cain leans forward, hands me his glass as he takes the cup and pours himself a splash of wine. I offer a small, nervous smile before taking a sip.
I ignore his question. I have one of my own. Several, probably. “You were going to have me prosecuted? For what crime?” I still can’t quite believe all of this.
He shrugs. “I’m not sure, that would have been up to the lawyers to decide. And no, probably not prosecuted. But if I could show that you had been deliberately attacking my business interests, I reckon I could have had grounds to challenge the will and get control of the firm again. That’s what was in my mind, anyway, until Phyllis put an entirely new slant on everything.”
I stare at him, horrifie
d. That does make sense. He probably could have got rid of me that way. But he hasn’t. And he doesn’t seem to intend that any more. Instead, he’s followed me here. He’s come looking for me, looking for explanations.
Sure enough, he asks me again, “Why didn’t you tell me all of this from the start? You’d have saved us both a lot of hassle.” He’s persistent, as ever, but his tone lacks that clipped edge to it which denotes Cain in Dom mode. This is my caring lover I’m talking to right now, the man I can confide in.
“Isn’t it obvious? I was embarrassed. I thought you’d think I was ridiculous. Twenty-two years old and couldn’t read. I was ridiculous. What’ll happen now? About the accounts I mean?”
“Oh, that’s sorted. Phyllis got one of those data retrieval teams out to have a look. They restored the files. I’m more interested in what’s happening to you? Phyllis tells me you had plans to do a crash course or something. How’s that going?”
I meet his eyes confidently now, a small but significant wisp of pride forming, taking root. I have good news on this matter and I’ve been dying to tell someone. It’s so rare I have anything to boast about. “It’s gone well. Very well, actually. Sally’s a literacy teacher, she knew how to help me. She’d been on at me for ages and I should have taken her up on her offer years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
He puts his cup of wine on the table, and with both palms frames my face. His smile is sexy, sensual, and I detect there the admiration I’ve been craving. “Maybe the time wasn’t right for you before. And now it is. Now you have a reason, a use for it. Well, I hope you do. Was it me? Us? The business? What was it that spurred you on to do this now?”
I shrug as my wisp of pride curls seductively around, growing and swelling as for the first time I can lay claim to actually having achieved something, made a plan, set myself a goal and gone out and got it. “I suppose it was. All that. And—I’d had enough. Enough of being left out, feeling excluded, enough of hiding and lying and covering up. I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be someone you could be proud of, not a liability.”
“I was proud of you. I’m even more proud now. Now, I’m in awe. Can you forgive me?”
I glance up, meet his steady gaze—his eyes now warm and hinting at more heat to come. But I have no idea what he can mean. “Forgive you? What do you need forgiving for?”
“For being so dim I never realized something was wrong. You had me completely fooled, love. Looking back, I can see the clues were there. That night you went to bed with a headache rather than helping me with a tender? Was that one of your coping strategies?”
I nod. “More a defense mechanism than a coping strategy, but yes. I felt so guilty, lying to you like that.”
“And when we went to the site in Morpeth and you pretended to read the health and safety notice before we went in? You were pretending, weren’t you?”
Again I nod.
He shakes his head, his grin wry. “Christ, that was so dangerous. You need to know that stuff before you go on a building site. You were an accident waiting to happen, I shudder to think what the HSE will do if they ever hear about that. Thank God I kitted you out with steel toe-caps and a hard hat. At least that bit was taken care of. And that business over the sketch of the JCB, when I asked you to draw a sign with our company name on? You were so shirty about it. Was that somehow part of this too?”
I nod again. “It was. I couldn’t remember what the words looked like to draw it from memory. And back at the office, when I copied it, I was so nervous, terrified of making a silly mistake, of being found out.”
“You cried, as I recall.”
“I was just so relieved by then to get it right. Nervous tension, I suppose.”
“And Mrs Henderson?”
“I feel so embarrassed about that. What a stupid mistake to make. And I lost us all that money.”
“Not as it turned out, eventually. And I should have realized when I looked at your notes. All those bloody pictures, for Christ’s sake. But the numbers were correct, and I just thought the art was sort of you—quirky. I knew how much you loved drawing so it didn’t strike me as that odd at the time.”
“I was so concerned with getting the numbers right I never even gave a thought to what they represented.”
“I can see that now. It all makes sense now. And I was such a bastard to you. Especially over you taking that week off to come here, but before that too. Browbeating you into working in the office. You said often enough that you didn’t want to…”
“You weren’t to know. I made sure of that.”
He steps back, widening the space between us. I see the shift, subtle but unmistakable, from tender lover to stern Dom. They are all part of the same complex, exciting package, but it’s clear which is in the ascendancy now. My stomach clenches, and already my pussy is dampening in response.
“It scares me what a good liar you are. And that has to stop. Now. Here. And it goes without saying, there’s a penalty to be paid.” His tone is shot through with authority. With a promise of retribution soon to be delivered, firm and sharp and painful. The rational part of my brain is telling me to be wary, to back away. But the slutty submissive in me is relishing all of this, and the wetness in my pants increases as I imagine the sharp slap of his palm against my bare bottom. Please. Soon
“Yes, I know.” My cunt is now thoroughly wet in anticipation. He must know, must be able to tell.
“You’re ready then? You’ll bend over, now and present that sweet arse of yours for the spanking you’ve so richly deserved?”
“Yes. Sir.”
His curt nod is the only acknowledgment he offers. It’s enough though. He continues, his voice cool, the words clipped, “Then, I want you to come back with me. To Berwick, to my house. You’ll live with me, as my submissive. Is that what you want too? Would you do that, Abbie?”
I don’t hesitate. “Yes. I’d like that. Sir.” My voice is a whisper now, a breathy sigh of acceptance, of relief.
He smiles, and despite his Dom persona which does not slip so much as a fraction, the smile is warm and reaches his eyes. “Good. I wasn’t sure you’d feel able to agree, at least not at once. Particularly after everything I said to you, after everything that’s happened. I thought you might require a little more—persuading.”
He regards me for a few moments. “I’m going to want you naked, Abbie. Very soon. And from the way your nipples are swelling under that blouse, I suspect that’s what you want too. Am I right?” By way of illustrating his point he reaches for my left nipple, rubs the pad of his thumb firmly over the hardening peak.
I close my eyes, loving the sensuous caress at the same time as I’m anticipating the sharp pain to surely come as he squeezes or twists. I see no point in denying how he makes me feel. “Yes, Sir. But—I’m expecting someone.”
“I know. The someone you thought you were letting in when I arrived. I can see we’ll need to be sociable but first, I have more questions. First, we talk?”
His hand drops from my breast, and I manage to bite back my groan of disappointment. I know better than to protest though. If Cain in Dom mode says we’re going to talk, then that’s what will be happening. He pulls out one of my dining chairs and gestures for me to sit, then takes the other chair facing me. He reaches for my hand across the table top, the wine now abandoned by both of us. His expression softens, though only slightly. It’s enough though for me to glimpse the tender lover again. This is the Cain who wants to understand me, who cares and wants to help. The Cain I can tell anything to.
“I want, need to understand how this all happened. You’re talented, bright. So bright you fucking dazzle me. And I’m guessing you’re not dyslexic as you’ve made enough progress to tackle Harry Potter in the space of a month. So…?”
He raises one commanding eyebrow, then simply waits. He’s silent, not pressing me. I can take my time. I draw in a deep breath, study our linked hands for a few seconds. Then I raise my eyes to meet his, and start
to tell my story.
“I was ill. When I was a child. Leukemia.”
I’m aware of his slight hiss of surprise. The Big L. Serious stuff, then and now. Having started, I rush on with my explanation, “I was in and out of hospital for two years. I hardly ever went to school. I was too ill to get much out of the home tuition they tried to provide, both from my school and from Jimmy’s where I spent most of my time.”
“Jimmy’s?”
“St James’ Hospital, in Leeds. The regional center for childhood leukemia. Getting well was the priority, the only priority. I managed to do that, with a little help from the staff at Jimmy’s, obviously, but by then the damage was done. I was so far behind the rest of my class I just gave up.”
“Leukemia. Shit. It must have been a dreadful time. For you and your family.”
“It was just me and my mum. And yes, she was desperately worried. I can see that now, though at the time I thought she fussed a lot. I remember she cried when I got the all clear. That confused me. But school, education, none of that ever mattered. It just wasn’t on our horizon. Me being alive and healthy was all she cared about, and that sort of rubbed off on me.”
He nods slowly, a slight frown on his face. “I can understand that.”
“Me too, up to a point. But it wouldn’t do, would it. Not forever. I had to change, had to sort myself out. And Sally was my solution. My salvation I suppose. Always there, always waiting. Once I’d confronted my demons, made arrangements with Sally, I felt the end was in sight. I could do it, I knew I could. And for the first time ever, I actually wanted to. I didn’t want to put it off. I’d never been so determined, I was actually making plans to learn, setting aside the time. I had to go through with it, I just had to.”
“I can see that too. You were right to do it, whatever I said. Whatever I threatened.”
“I hoped you’d understand. That I could make you understand. Afterwards.”
“I do. You have. But for the record, I want you to know I would have understood all along.”