by Joey W. Hill
No. She wasn’t that far gone. This was a whole new situation, like the first time she handled opening a plant on her own. There would be some weak moments, some stumbling as she figured out her approach to get the upper hand with the players who didn’t think she had the right to the upper hand.
There is no situation in life that cannot be explained by the same principles we use in business. Geoffrey’s voice resounded in her mind, hammering the point home. “If a person is making you feel something you don’t want to feel, take the reins away from them. If you can control yourself, you can control the situation, bring the tiller back to your hand. Keep your wits about you and wait for the opportunity.”
Sound advice, though she was certain even her dispassionate father could not have predicted this situation. And somehow, hearing his voice in her head now, thinking of applying his logic to this situation, swept her with a desolation that made her wish to be free of them all, her father and these men and Matt, in her bed with the covers over her head. And then the most unnerving thought of all intruded on the image.
What if Matt were there, putting his knee on her bed, lying down on top of her covers, curving that powerful body around her? Scooping up the covers and her into the heat and warmth of him, providing a shelter that was simply that, a place to draw strength and sanctuary, demanding nothing she was not willing to give? Or take it a step further…accepting something she’d always wanted to give but had been afraid to offer, mainly because no one had ever come right out and asked for her heart.
Get a grip, Savannah. He’s won the round, that’s it. He wasn’t proving anything except that she could enjoy oral sex, like any independent, healthy woman. What woman in her right mind wouldn’t enjoy this, even if she had been dragged kicking and screaming to it?
It meant nothing. Nothing.
Abruptly the gag was removed and a mouth was on hers, hard, hungry, as Lucas kept up with his soothing and stirring kisses along the insides of her quaking thighs. All her arguments shattered, because it was Matt’s mouth on hers, Matt’s scent filling her nose, Matt’s warm skin so close, that rough, handsome jaw that she ached to touch.
Sheer fulfillment flooded into an emptiness yawning open in her chest like a wound. His lips were the healing touch, reassuring her, yet spinning her off her axis once again so that something within her screamed in fury and desperation. Giving in to it, her lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl and she bit, latching down on his bottom lip.
Instead of him jerking away, allowing her to rip and tear at him as he was ripping and tearing at her insides, his hands cupped the back of her head, holding her still. Despite her painful vise on his bottom lip, he kept his mouth crushed over hers, his tongue plunging along her clenched teeth, his own lips persuasive, gentle. Responding not with matching ferocity, but with devastating tenderness. When his touch slipped forward to caress the sides of her throat, her cheek, she realized she had let go. The acrid taste of his blood lingered on her tongue.
“You’re doing beautifully,” he said in a whisper against her, his breath touching her cheek just below her mask. “They all love you, don’t you know that? You can’t do anything to drive us away. We’re your family. Your lovers, your friends, the adversaries that challenge and stimulate you. Your real social life, not the theater and charity events, the occasional dinner with a man just for show.”
She shook her head. No. She would not let this outrageous situation become that personal. She wanted an end to it, to go home.
Which meant she had to admit they had broken her, that she was as soft and vulnerable as Matt claimed she was. Capable of being hurt, manipulated. That he affected her so strongly that she couldn’t see this through to the end he had planned.
She went rigid, refused to let her body respond. After a moment, she heard a sigh, felt him draw away.
“Do you know it’s often the women who are strongest in public that most desire a man’s Mastery behind closed doors, Savannah?”
She shook her head, in protest or denial she couldn’t say, but she had no words with her body throbbing with the aftermath of the climax and the sense of loss his withdrawal caused. Lucas had pulled back as well, and now stimulation came in audible form only. Matt’s voice, hearing the shifts of their bodies around her, the rustle of clothing, the sound of their breathing.
“You have this overwhelming desire to surrender, to submit to a man strong enough to Master you. It’s like an aphrodisiac to the man who senses it. I know the exact moment I recognized it in you. It was like a punch in the gut. Or a light bulb going on.”
She heard the smile in his voice, and cold fingers gripped her vitals. Just by speaking the word, he had evoked the memory. A memory she had replayed over and over in her mind, not understanding why it was so fascinating to her. But he had known, and now so did she, despite her strongest desire to deny it.
“I know you remember it.” His voice took her back with him to the uncomfortable recollection. “I know I do. I’ve relived it every day since it happened. It led us to this moment. Didn’t it?”
* * * * *
He’d come back from the dinner break early, ostensibly to make a couple of phone calls, but there was always the possibility that he would see Savannah and could spar with her for a few enjoyable moments.
It made him frown, though, knowing he would find her in her office. She went on business luncheons, attended banquets and gala events with the right escorts, but never did he see her sitting on the edge of one of the downtown fountains, eating a sandwich and taking in the pigeons’ play, engaging in idle people watching. Or, even more shocking, out with a girlfriend, laughing, having some female conversation. Doing some playful male-bashing.
“She’s not a woman, she’s a fucking robot,” he’d heard one competitor say. “Geoffrey Tennyson didn’t spawn her, he had her built in one of his plants.”
It had made Matt angry, and he’d made sure to scuttle the man’s plans for overseas expansion with him. Lucas had pointed out it was an emotional, rather than a fiscally intelligent act, and he had not disagreed with that assessment. Nor had it erased his satisfaction in doing it. He wondered often if Savannah realized she had a circle of devoted knights trying to protect her from harm when she wouldn’t even let them into the inner circle of her life. Geoffrey was gone, and what protection the man had provided, as well as the damage he had done, was gone. She was as alone in the world as a person could get. He wanted her in his world, and she wouldn’t even give him an opening to make a move in that direction.
He rounded the corner, his peripheral vision sharpened so he could see if she was in her office. The door was open, her desk light on. And she was standing on top of her desk.
She hadn’t taken off her shoes, and he assumed it was to give her extra height to reach her objective, though he shuddered to think about her stepping on her unstable wheeled office chair in those skinny heels.
He detoured. Determining in a few strides what she was doing, he quickened his pace.
Apparently a bulb had burned out in the incandescent ceiling lighting she preferred to fluorescent. Anal-retentive plague that she was, she was changing it herself, rather than waiting to have a maintenance person with solid shoes and a ladder do it tomorrow. She was on the ball of one foot, the other off the ground, straining, her right breast clearly outlined against the fabric of her turquoise turtleneck. The ceiling was too high for her to use one hand to steady her upper body, and as she worked to free the panel over the light fixture, she was precariously balanced. When it came free with a jerk, she overbalanced.
Matt got there in time to clamp his hands on her hips, his palms curled over the hipbones, his fingers on the soft curves.
“What are you doing? Get down from there.”
She was flustered, and he didn’t often get to see that. She backed out of his hold, and he nipped the panel from her fingers, taking it to the floor.
“I’m trying to change a light bulb.”
“I
can see that. Get down.”
“I just need to—”
“Get. Down. Now.”
Instead of coming back with another sharp retort, he saw something incredible happen. A moment of confusion. Nervous tension. Something came over him, too, an instinct, and the remarkable feeling that a door had just swung wide open. And he wanted to test it.
“You heard me, Savannah,” Matt said softly. “Come here. Now.”
It was a long moment. Then she shifted her gaze away from his, down, and moved toward his reaching hands, her neck and cheeks flushed.
Still reeling from the revelation, he almost missed his cue, but he recovered in time to take her elbow as she reached down for him. He gripped her waist and she put her hands after a brief hesitation on his shoulders, curiously docile as he lifted her clear of the chair, pushing it out of his way, and lowered her to the floor.
It was a moment before he found his voice, and he managed to make it gentle, since she was blinking at him with the startled look of a deer, not anything like the Savannah he knew.
“Don’t you attend the corporate safety seminars you torture your employees with?”
He saw the snap as the spell was broken. She even took a defensive step back, looked around herself, and that familiar disdain and faint irritation took over her features.
“We fulfill all OSHA requirements, Kensington.”
“Oh, yeah. That was definitely an OSHA-approved maneuver.” He flicked a hand out, caught a loose lock of her hair, enjoyed her look of shocked anger at the casual familiarity.
“I know you think you have to live up to your Savannah Cyborg image, but you don’t have to be and do everything yourself, you know.”
He actually saw a split second of hurt at the nickname that was used too often for her not to have overheard it countless times before. It made him angry with his clumsiness. And with her, for being so worthy of the name, but only in how she closed herself off to any advances of affection or friendship.
“You delegate administrative tasks to your assistants. Why can’t you let other people help you with things?” He let his concern for her show, hoping to amend that inadvertent barb. “Damn it, if you’d fallen, there’d have been no one to see you fall.”
“That’s the plan,” she said dryly. “Better to bust your backside when no one’s looking.” Some of the spunk was returning, but in the shift of her eyes, he saw she knew something significant had happened. He wondered if she understood what she had revealed, if she even knew it about herself.
The thought brought out a fierce possessiveness in him, a desire to crush anyone who’d taken advantage of such a sweet gift. He enjoyed the many faces and forms of sex, and having an excess of alpha in his personality, he’d often let the natural Dominant in him take over with his casual lovers who liked BDSM. The idea of exercising it in a less casual mode with the woman who’d become his obsession was so intoxicating he had a hard time keeping his cock settled in his trousers. Fortunately, she chose that moment to distract him.
“Fine.” She tossed her head, presented him with a bulb from her desktop. “You want to do maintenance, here’s your chance. And don’t worry. I’ll stand right here and catch you if you fall.”
Typical Savannah. In the time he’d had two thoughts, she’d marshaled her defenses and reorganized her strategy. He thought if Napoleon had had her, the world would have undone the Tower of Babel and everyone would speak French now. The Russian winter couldn’t have defeated nerve that cool. But he’d seen the heat just for a moment in her eyes, in that soft expulsion of breath as he set her down. He’d also felt the warmth of her skin beneath her clothes. Maybe she would have melted the ice in Russia, if she couldn’t match it.
He grinned at her, fast and reckless, enjoying her, and her look of startled surprise at his reaction. He became less amused and more absorbed as her gaze lingered on his mouth, changing the look in her eyes. Testing, he took the bulb from her fingers and had to grasp it quickly to keep from losing it as she did her best to let go before he touched her fingers.
“Careful, don’t drop it,” she admonished, a snap to her voice.
He gave her an even look, toed off his shoes and slid onto the desk. His height helped him reach the bulb with a few inches to spare, and he unscrewed it and put in the new one, blinking as it came to life in his eyes.
“Jesus, Savannah, you could have turned off the light first.” He took the panel from her and replaced it.
“Then how would I know the bulb worked while I was up there?”
He looked down and found her staring at his feet.
“What?”
“You…” Her lips pressed together, and then he saw a corner curl up in a tiny, shy, totally out-of-character smile. “You have a hole in your sock.”
He sat back down on the desk, brought one leg to the floor and put his ankle on his knee, blinking around the flash image still popping within the spectrum of where he focused his vision. There was in fact a small hole worn just over his big toe. Not big enough to push through, or notice when he got dressed this morning.
“So I do.” He looked up at her, at the unusual expression on her face. “What is it?”
“I just never think of you as someone with holes in his socks.”
“Come here.” Before she could evade him, he caught her hand, tugged her over. As he did, he put both feet on the floor so she was eased between his thighs. He took his fingers and carefully raised the hem of her skirt on the right side a few inches, so she could see what he had seen when she stood on her desk. A pencil-thin run in her stocking, starting just above the knee.
“And I don’t think of you as someone with a run in your stocking.”
She looked up at him, but the rest of her body didn’t move. She was suddenly as still as a wild animal again, and he was even more aware of the feel of skin and silky nylon beneath the pads of his fingers.
His hand shifted, slipped up several more inches and encountered a lace top, the short skirt hem forming a folded crescent around his wrist. Her scent filled his senses.
She jerked back as though he’d slapped her when his fingers touched bare skin. Moved back so quickly she bent her heel and would have stumbled if he hadn’t straightened just as fast and caught her by the waist, a touch she threw off as soon as she regained her balance.
“The office isn’t a dating pool, Matthew. Go get yourself a one-night stand from a club like a regular guy.”
He seized her by the elbow and whipped her around so fast that the shock was still in her face when he put her up against the wall and his body against hers. His fully aroused body. She felt perfect, her little pussy rubbing against him as she squirmed. It fulfilled his intention to let her know how she affected him, though it was more direct than he’d planned. Nevertheless, he pressed his cock harder against the juncture of her thighs.
“If you’re going to flirt,” he snapped. “Expect to get a response.”
“I wasn’t flirting.” She shoved at him. Panic flickered across her face as she realized what he already knew, that she was ineffective against his strength. Though she tried to mask it, he felt her shiver down through her legs and arms. “Let go of me.”
It registered like another fist in the gut. The trembling of her body, the emotion in her face, the wonder and desire followed by the panic and confusion. It was the shock of the truth, more than her demand, that had him easing his touch, gentling it.
For he was a very sexually experienced man. Enough to recognize a woman with none.
She’d never known a man, never handled his lust or accepted it into her body. Savannah Tennyson, the cold-blooded CEO of Tennyson Industries, was a virgin at the age of thirty-five.
* * * * *
“I can see from the way you’re holding your mouth, the tense line of that classic jaw, that you remember that night as vividly as I do. I knew a couple things after that.” Matt’s fingers sent tingling jolts of pleasure down her neck as he drew short lines on the soft ski
n just beneath the straps holding her head up. “That you craved a man’s Mastery, and you were untouched. And to a man like me, already in love with you, there was no way I was going to settle for less than total possession. Then came Lucas’s summation of the situation, and we know the best way to take a fortress is to trick our way in, or use a battering ram. The only way to keep it is to win over the inhabitant, make her admit she can’t do without you. So here we are.”
…already in love with you…
He said it with such simple assurance, with no guile in his voice… What did she know about love? There had never been any such ship on her radar. She had no idea what it looked like, felt like. Her feelings for Matt were sexual, a strong sexual obsession. Professional admiration warring with animosity, most of the time. And he was using his knowledge of that to take advantage of her, to make her another conquest.
She couldn’t explain why the simple telling of a story about a light bulb had made her body, so recently roused to climax, aroused again, the dampness between her legs heating with new moisture. Her nipples were so taut their light contact with the table was almost painful. But that was a physical reaction, not an emotional one. Wasn’t it?
“You want me to believe that Matt Kensington would let himself fall prey to a weak illusion like love?” She scoffed, though she didn’t like the harsh sound of her voice. “The idea of love is only used as a weapon.”
“We’ll see,” he said after a long moment. There was a forced lightness to his voice. “Jon is going to give you pleasure next.”
His hands lingered on her face, and she felt his reluctance to leave her side. It infuriated her. The whole situation, his ridiculous, patronizing assumptions, his gall in saying… God, why did he say that? Already in a tailspin, now she was diving out of control, all her thought processes lost, and all she could fall back on was frightened fury.