He took one last shudder and withdrew from that last orifice, flopping down on his back beside her. She stretched out to lie on her stomach, pillowing her head in her arms.
God, that had felt incredible. She should be ashamed of herself.
But she wasn’t.
“I’m not sure my spanking ended up sending quite the message I meant it to,” he said in a low voice.
She grinned. “Whose fault is that?”
Though he did not grin back, he seemed more relaxed and less angry. Incredibly hot sex did that for a person.
“What was that?” she couldn’t help but ask. “A kinky side to the famous Michael Reynolds?”
He glanced at her wryly. “More like a ‘Vanny Donald bringing out a wild side I barely remembered I had’.”
“But you’ve ah…been ah…” She gestured vaguely behind her.
“I’ve been having sex a long time, Vanny, and have probably been offered everything you could imagine a woman would offer me. Some things I tried because I wanted to, just to see.” He traced one finger lightly along the sticky crack of her ass. “Who knows what you’ll be offering me soon?”
About to delve further on that, he pulled his hand back and cut off the cozy chitchat. “My original point still stands though. It was irresponsible to talk to that cop on the fly, without a lawyer, especially under the current circumstances. I don’t exactly feel like handing them your head on a plate.”
“No. So you handed them yours.”
“They can’t prove it wasn’t a training exercise.”
“Isn’t there some kind of governmental investigation too, though? I thought I heard something on the news about that.”
“The governmental investigation is to make sure there were no spills, and there weren’t. I’ll take care of this whole situation, believe me. But I don’t need the Houston P.D. poking around while I do. Especially not around you.” He reached for her hand, linking fingers. “I might have overreacted a little down there. I don’t know. Maybe it was childish of me to get so freaked out.”
“Funny you saying that since I’m the one who got spanked.”
He shook his head, and with a little chuckle, closed his eyes, bringing her fingers to his lips. “You do make me lose control. No doubt about it.”
She wanted to push it on the investigating point. Didn’t he care who was trying to bring his rig down?
But frankly, she just didn’t have the energy.
“Are we still going to New York?” she asked.
“Yeah. As soon as I can move again.”
* * * * *
Tiffany Fischer liked to spend money. Specifically, other people’s money. As much as she possibly could. And she could a lot. Probably that came from growing up dirt poor in an Appalachian mining town where the mine had long since run out. Not that her ex-husband Jeff or any of their social set knew that. On the contrary, she’d been “passing” as a born-and-bred member of the jet set for as long as she could remember. She’d left her twelve brothers and sisters and her dead-tired parents behind long ago and had never given them a second thought. Or a forwarding address. The last thing she would ever want would be one of those gaunt, ignorant ghosts showing up on her doorstep. And they never had.
Unfortunately, something worse showed up one day, delivered to her swank Park Avenue apartment. A dossier chronicling her whole sorry childhood in the mountains and her early start in New York as a penny-ante whore. And her one big mistake. It was the mistake that convinced her to do what the anonymous note ordered her to do.
What was the harm anyway? Jeff and Michael were always buying and selling companies. What did she care if they bought some Texas oil company? So she nagged Jeff until he checked it out and when he did he told her it was a good deal after all. He even brought her a very nice diamond necklace as just the kind of thank-you gesture she appreciated.
It had all turned out very well. Until today.
“Hi there, Cissy-Lou.”
Tiffany hadn’t even heard the little man come in. Her eyes shot open at the name and he was simply in front of her. There in the supposedly private room she was always shown to at her hair salon in order to wait out the highlighting process. No need for anyone to see her with foil sticking out of her hair and all. Not to mention a green mud mask on her normally perfect face.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing in here? This is a private room.”
Maybe she could just ignore the “Cissy-Lou”. Maybe she’d been hearing things and this nondescript man who was assuming a seat across from her was a pervert whom hair salon security would come and throw out at any minute.
“Now now there. I thought we were old friends.”
She peered at him, as best she could through the globs of green mud they’d slathered under her eyes. Impeccably dressed in a business suit that her keen eye could tell had cost more than most house down-payments, he wore round little glasses and was going bald. Forty or so, she’d guess, though with that pasty skin he looked older. And he was little, just as she’d noted initially. Maybe no taller than her five foot five.
Forgetting for a moment the foil in her hair and the mud mask, she asked in the cordial voice that expensive business suit demanded, “Do we know each other?”
“Well, we’ve never met in person, but I’ve admired you from afar and I must say seeing you this close, your beauty has not been exaggerated.”
An automatic smile at the compliment started to crack the drying mud on her face before she realized he was probably making fun of her given what she looked like right now.
“You better get out of here right now or I’m going to call security.”
“Don’t bother. I own the place.”
“Well,” she stood up in a huff, “I certainly won’t be patronizing such a rude—”
“Sit down, Cissy,” he said quietly.
Feeling a terrible sense of dread at the use of the name again, she did.
“How did you like the little package I sent you a few months past?”
It was him. Whoever the hell him was.
“You know, Tiffany is such an overused name these days. If you were renaming yourself, you could have chosen something so much more original. I’m afraid you don’t have much imagination, Cissy-Lou.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Why? It’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore.”
“Well, it’s the name they’d probably send you to prison under if they saw that videotape. Even that, a whore killing her pimp is so unoriginal. It’s a wonder you’ve gotten as far as you have.”
She swallowed, hard. “I didn’t mean to kill him. He was, he was abusing me.”
“He was your pimp. I thought that was part of the job description.”
“How did you get that tape?”
“Never you mind, Cissy. We’re not here to talk about that now.”
“What do you want?”
“So impatient. Just settle down. You have a good half hour to go with those highlights anyway given your particularly platinum bleached-blonde look.”
“It’s honey blonde,” she snapped automatically.
“Ten years of highlights ago maybe. Now it’s colored straw.”
She kept her mouth shut.
“Now, I had asked that simple favor of you—”
“I did it! I did what you asked!”
“Yes, yes, that was fine. But now I’m going to need a little added effort. I have something very special I’d like from you.”
She wished she didn’t look like a space alien right now and had her normal armor of perfect beauty on. She’d give him something special. She felt at a horrible disadvantage, but she supposed that was probably the point.
“Fine,” she said. “Just name it.”
And he did.
* * * * *
Jeff Fischer slammed the door to Michael’s office.
“Hi there. Welcome back to the East Coast. So how was the wedding
anyway?”
“The wedding? Oh, Samantha’s wedding? Fine. Just a small family thing. I’ve almost forgotten about it at this point.”
“Yeah, it was all of two weeks ago.”
“I’m sorry, Jeff. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“And in your bed, I hear.”
He glanced up.
“Tiffany,” Jeff admitted. “My ex-wife keeps such close tabs on you she could qualify as a stalker. But since I keep equally close tabs on her, I guess I won’t make a federal case about it.”
Michael leaned back in the comfortable leather recliner that served as his office chair for the fifteen some years he’d been CEO of Reynolds Industries. Whatever offices he established at subsidiaries around the world, this one, his original office in New York, was where he felt the most at home, where he got the most work done. Alhough you wouldn’t know it from his work product, or lack thereof, from this morning’s day at the office. “You should forget about Tiffany, Jeff. She’s not worth it.”
“Didn’t stop you from fucking her.”
He shrugged. “If you didn’t want guys to sleep with her, you shouldn’t have divorced her.”
“Like being married to me stopped her from doing that,” he scoffed.
“Not with me,” Michael said quietly. “I don’t know what Tiffany told you, but I swear on our friendship that I never laid a hand on her while she was married to you.”
“Yeah. That I know. Why do you think she divorced me?”
Michael couldn’t hide his surprise.
“Oh you thought I divorced her, did you? Nope. She’s like a drug for me.”
His friend’s taste in women was horrible. Sure, Tiffany was a very experienced lay with fantastic tits, but —
Of course who was he to talk given his latest mistress, hired no less?
“So has Tiffany bribed the crew on my plane or something? We just got back to New York this morning.”
“She doesn’t divulge her secrets to me on that score.” He nodded his head toward the adjoining door leading into Michael’s secretary. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was Miss Prentiss. The way she dresses, somebody’s paying her well.”
“Yeah. I am. And since when has Tiffany ever forged an alliance with another woman, paid or not?”
“Good point.”
“I’m just amazed you’re still hooked.”
“Addicted. Not in love. There’s a difference.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Are we talking about the hick?”
Michael laughed. “Is that how Tiffany described her? I’m not surprised. If you’re coming to my father’s party for Samantha this weekend, you can meet Vanny and decide for yourself.”
“Not before that?”
Michael closed the file on his desk. He couldn’t concentrate anyway. He’d go back to his apartment and stop pretending. “No. I’m not letting her out of bed until then.”
“Quite an acquisition you made down in Texas, I’ll say that.”
“I didn’t acquire Vanny,” he snapped.
“Wow. When’d you get so sensitive all of a sudden?”
When his friend’s good-natured jibes started hitting too close to home, he guessed.
* * * * *
Michael’s apartment in New York was like Michael’s apartment in Houston. Exactly like it. Big windows. Extravagant skyscraper views. Hardwood floors and beige leather couches.
Nice if you liked cold and impersonal, which apparently he did.
The one difference, as far as Vanny could tell, was that there was a locked room in this one. Nosy as she was, she had searched everywhere for the key while he was gone, but finally gave up. It was probably just the room where he hung the heads of his prior mistresses, sort of like a Bluebeard without the marriage vows.
When he came home after what was evidently a very short day at the office, she asked him, “Have you ever thought about a couple of throw rugs? Maybe a picture on the wall that doesn’t look like the finger-paintings I did as a kid and Pops put on the fridge.”
He pointed to a mess of squiggly lines on a canvas up over the fireplace. “That’s an original Kandinsky. I paid several million dollars for that.”
“That just tells me some people have too much money. They want to pay too much for something to prove how important they are.”
“It doesn’t appear to be working. I have some Renoirs in my country home. Would you prefer I get those in here?”
“How about something normal?”
He guffawed. “If you say horses, I’m going to say we’ll have to agree to disagree.”
“Not horses, but how about, I don’t know, a cottage or a lighthouse.”
“You like lighthouses? You ought to talk to my brother Evan. He lives in one.”
“In a lighthouse? You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not. He’s my youngest brother. Majored in some kind of environmental thing—I forget the exact name of it—and has pretty much bummed around since then. He’s got not only Reynolds money but money from his mother’s family. One of my father’s rare rich wives. A few years back Evan bought a lighthouse off the coast of Maine. He’s been restoring it.”
“That is so cool. What’s it like?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been there.”
“You’ve never been to your brother’s house?”
“It’s not really a house.”
“But he lives there. Wow. If I had a brother, I’d visit him once in a while.”
“I think we originally started talking about art. Could we go back to that?”
“No. I don’t know anything about art. I was simply pointing out your apartments seem to be a little sterile.”
“I don’t spend much time at home.”
“Oh? Because in Houston, you almost never left and here, on our first day, you’re back already.”
“Forgive me for bothering you.” He tugged on his tie but looked up when the doorbell rang.
And then rang again. Whoever was out there was apparently rude.
Scrunching his forehead, he looked at her then.
“What? Do you want me to hide or something?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just I usually don’t get visitors.”
“Maybe it’s a package.”
“They leave those at the front desk and then ring up.”
“Are you in there, Michael?” a gruff voice called out.
Michael went to the door and opened it. “Father. What brings you here?”
“You do. Leaving the office after half a day. I want to know what’s going on.”
“I wasn’t aware I was on a time clock.”
Damien Reynolds walked into his son’s apartment as if he owned the place, which, for all Vanny knew, maybe he did. He was supposed to be eighty years old, but this patriarch of the Reynolds family sure as hell didn’t look it. If she had to guess, she would have said more like sixty. And a youthful sixty at that.
In person, she could see what she hadn’t seen in the black-and-white photos of the two of them around the Houston office. Michael looked a lot like his father. Such a close resemblance startled her.
“And who is this?”
Michael put his hands on his hips and, instead of answering his father, spoke to Vanny with a nod of his head toward him. “Vanny, in case you can’t tell, this is my father.”
“Vanny? What kind of a name is Vanny? What is that short for? In my day, people had real names, didn’t pick them up off of cereal boxes and video games.”
“Vanessa,” she said, surprising herself.
“Vanessa, eh?” The old man looked her up and down, but not in a lascivious way as she might have expected if she had listened to Michael’s tales of him, but rather in more of a scrutinizing way, eyes narrowed as if to focus, mouth set in a line. “Well, Vanessa is a very nice name. Why don’t you use that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Vanny is what my dad always called me. I guess it’s easier to ch
ase around a mischievous little girl yelling Vanny instead of Vanessa.”
“Mischievous,” he said. Then he smiled. “I have a daughter myself, you know. She didn’t run around. She was more subtle, but we still had to chase after her.”
“Subtlety isn’t Vanny’s strong suit.”
“What is?”
Jesus, she hoped Michael wasn’t going to answer that one. Fucking was probably what he was thinking.
“She’s very in-your-face. And very strong.”
She felt an unreasonable flush of pleasure at the compliment.
“Yeah? Good. A woman needs that. Well, I’ll get out of your hair then,” he said to Michael, who muttered, “That’d be a first.”
“I heard that.” He turned to Vanessa. “So we’ll see you in the Hamptons this weekend then.”
“Uh, no, I don’t, ah…”
“Father’s giving a party, Vanessa, at the family’s compound in the Hamptons. For my sister. I forgot to tell you about it. Yes, we’ll be there, Father.”
After he got the old man out, she blurted, “I’m not going to any party.”
“Of course you are. What else are you going to do? You don’t know anybody in New York, do you?”
“No, and that’s exactly why I’m not going. I don’t want to meet a bunch of uptight, snooty rich folks.”
“Neither do I, but I have to go, don’t I? Look, part of the duties of being my mistresses is to attend social functions with me.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why? Why not? I need a date.”
She shook her head. “I don’t get it. I thought being a mistress was about having sex with you. What does being your ‘date’ have to do with having sex?”
“I might want sex at the end of the evening,” he countered. “As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I will.”
“Well, you can let me know then and we can have it.”
“It’s more convenient if you go with me,” he snapped. “I usually stay over when I go to the Hamptons.”
“Why?”
“I like the ocean.”
“Is this an order?”
“Why does everything have to be an argument with you, Vanessa?”
“Don’t you start calling me Vanessa. I was Vanny before I became your mistress.”
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