Dirty Work

by Lauren Milson

  Chapter Two - Mr. Stone

  The first time I saw her picture, I knew she had to be mine.

  I was impressed by her credentials. She was the student body-selected speaker at her college graduation, and she had terrific clips in her application packet. I knew that she would be a great addition to the firm.

  I always vet my candidates by looking them up online. Sometimes you’ll have a fantastic-looking girl with all the right lines on her resume, only to discover that she lacks discretion and good judgement by looking at her social media accounts.

  Kate had nothing to concern me. She didn’t even post pictures of herself drinking. Her pictures showed her reading books, cooking, and traveling.

  I had a conflict. I wanted her to be part of the firm, but I wanted her to be mine.

  I knew I’d be able to do both. She was mature. Discreet. She’d be introduced to my world.

  People call me a benefactor. I have a club where people can come to explore their darkest fantasies.

  I fund the place. Sometimes these fantasy come with a hefty price tag. I make them happen.

  They aren’t all sexual. Sometimes it’s a couple that’s always wanted to do a honeymoon in Paris and never had the money to do it.

  But sometimes it is sexual. Most of the time it is. Most of these women come to my club looking to be dominated. They look for something more than what your average man can give them.

  But the one thing I don’t allow is infidelity. I’m not looking for anyone to be hurt. The last thing I need is an angry husband coming and busting down my door because I allowed his wife to be dominated by two men in leather masks.

  Anything else is on the table. You name it, and I can deliver. As long as it isn't illegal, I can make it happen. I can even make it happen if it's a little bit illegal.

  And I exercise the utmost in discretion. That’s why I knew Kate would be perfect to help me with the club.

  I knew I had to have her. To myself. For the club. For the firm.

  I offered the job to Kate quickly and we went over her benefits package and confirmed her start date. I brought her to the elevators and wished her farewell.

  I waited for the next elevator to come, because I had to meet my business partner and private guard down in the basement.

  The elevator dinged and I stepped on, but Kate was still there.

  “Get lost, dear?” I asked, pushing the button for the basement.

  “Yes. I guess I’m not giving you a very good first impression, am I?”

  “My first impression of you is already set,” I responded. “My first impression of you was of an ambitious young woman who wanted a good job. A girl who’s funny, judging from your emails.”

  “But getting lost in the building? I don’t even work here yet.”

  “Exactly. You don’t work here yet. If you get lost after you start working here, then we might have an issue. But nothing that I won’t be able to guide you through,” I said.

  “Mr. Stone, can I ask you something?”

  She was so gorgeous. The curve of her lips and her angelic face. I wanted to consume her. Take her to my club and go into one of the private rooms and make her mine.

  “Of course you can ask me something,” I said, drinking in her body.

  “Why are you going down to the basement?” she asked. “I noticed that you and that other guy were coming up from there before.

  I stroked my chin and considered her question.

  “You really want to know?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, shifting from one foot to the other. Her hips shifted and I imagined her on her knees in front of me, my cock filling up her mouth.

  “Fine,” I said, grabbing her hand as the door opened on the first floor, pulling her back toward me, not allowing her to exit. “I’ll show you.”

  The doors opened at the basement level and Brad was waiting for me on the other side of the doors. He was the muscle of the operation. A former NYPD cop, he now did private security for me and was a shareholder in my operation. He was a friend of my father’s.

  “Brad, I think we have to let Kate into the inner circle a little bit earlier than we had planned,” I said, holding her shoulders from behind and guiding her through the narrow, dark corridor.

  “Wait…” she said, bracing herself against the wall and shrugging my hands away from her body. Her protests were cute, and I knew it was only a matter of time until she would be subsumed into my world. “I thought you were going to show me some executive cafeteria or something.”

  Brad stayed silent, stifling a laugh behind his hand.

  “Do you want to see what I’ve got or not?” I asked her, slipping my hand into hers. “I told you we were going to be friends. I thought you agreed to that.”

  “I know,” she said, her eyes darting back and forth down each end of the hallway. “But I thought we were going to go for a latte during lunch. That’s my idea of a work buddy.”

  “I know, Kate. And this isn’t something that I wanted to show you right away. I wanted to earn your trust first. But you asked,” I said, pushing her hair away from her shoulder and leaning down to whisper in her ear, “and I will always give you what you want.”

  Chapter Three - Kate

  I think one of the problems I have is that I always get in too deep, too fast.

  One time in college I had gone vaguely undercover to find out some information about the football team allowing their players to skip exams without any penalty. My idea of going undercover was squatting behind the benches where the players sat, and trying to throw a tape recorder into some nearby bushes to catch the coaches talking about it. This resulted in me getting banned from games and the story being cut from the paper.

  Too much, too fast, and I didn’t fully think through my plan.

  That was when I was a freshman, four long years ago, and I’d like to think that I’ve become a better journalist since then.

  So when I was being told that there was some kind of underground secret lair by my new boss, a world bubbling right below the surface of New York City, my first instinct was to run.

  But Mr. Stone was right. I’d asked, I wanted to know, and now, being surrounded by him and his bodyguard and being pinned up against the wall of that tight hallway, my body and my mind were screaming to know what was going on.

  His mint breath on my ear and his towering body over mine made my mind go to one place immediately - this is some kind of perverted sex thing.

  The way he told me that he’d give me what I wanted? This underground club had to be a sex thing.

  I wanted it to be a sex thing. It’d been too long since I’d had a guy pay attention to me like this, let alone have sex.

  And the way he told me that he’d give me what I wanted?

  My panties were getting wet already, and he’d only touched my hand.

  “Let’s see it, then,” I said, courage filling up my belly like a drug.

  He grabbed my wrist and we walked quickly, his bodyguard following us with long strides, through the hallway.

  Lights overhead flickered. The walls were dark stone and cold to the touch. I braced myself against Mr. Stone as he guided me deeper and deeper down the hallway, into what I didn’t know.

  I imagined being whisked away into some dark room and having a mask placed over my face. Something leather or vinyl. Something that would turn me on but that I wouldn’t want to look in a mirror with. Something that wasn’t me at all.

  “This is us,” the bodyguard said, slowing us to a halt with his words as Mr. Stone got a large key ring out of his pocket.

  “This is a good place for us to start,” he said, slipping the key into the lock and pushing the door open.

  The three of us stepped into a room that looked like any other small, private office. Some generic artwork adorned the walls, and there was a large desk with two chairs in front of it and two more against a wall.

  “Brad, Kate, you both wait here. I don’t need my muscle for my ten o�
�clock.”

  I took a seat against the wall with Brad and wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

  Mr. Stone left the room through a door on the opposite side of the room that we’d come in through. He returned a few seconds later with a cute young couple. The woman was very pregnant, and the three of them were chatting like old friends.

  “Here, please sit down,” Mr. Stone said, guiding the lovely couple into two chairs opposite the desk. He took a seat across from them. “Please, I hope you don’t mind that I have two of my associates here with me today.”

  “Oh, of course not,” the pretty, young pregnant woman replied with a Southern accent. “I’m just glad that you were available to meet us on such short notice.”

  “The pleasure is entirely mine,” Mr. Stone replied. “My attorney was able to draft up a contract, which is what I was hoping to be able to go over with you today. It’s just a confidentiality agreement, really. It just states that you won’t reveal the source of the money. We have our accountants working on everything with the IRS, and we are paying all the taxes on this gift, so once everything is finalized, the money will be placed in a trust for your child.”

  “This is really incredible,” the man responded, taking his wife’s hand in his. “I just want to know one thing, Mr. Stone. Why are you so secretive about all of this? Don’t you want some recognition for all that you’ve done?”

  “The joy I get from this is enough,” Mr. Stone replied. “And anyway, if this got out, I would have questionable characters coming to me constantly. And that’s not what I want.”

  The situation I was in was getting stranger and stranger. This couple surely didn’t know that just on the other side of one of the doors in the office where they were sitting was a strange, dark, deep corridor with a number of rooms off it. I assumed that the rooms were just like this one.

  Mr. Stone looked past the couple and locked eyes with me.

  “Kate, I’d like you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Sumber,” he said, gesturing for me to stand up. “Kate here is the newest addition to my little enterprise, and she’s going to be helping me out. I thought it would be good for her to sit in on this meeting so she can see the kind of people we are trying to assist.”

  I rose in disbelief and shook hands with Mr. Sumber. I put my hand out to Mrs. Sumber, but she moved right past it and locked me in a sweet embrace.

  “Your boss, here, is a very interesting man.”

  Mr. Stone rose from his desk and moved toward the door.

  “You have my number. Anything you two need. Please, don’t hesitate. I don’t want to keep you any longer. I know you have your flight leaving soon. Brad, can you please buzz the driver?”

  Brad slipped his phone out of his pocket, punched something in, and nodded.

  “He’ll be around front in three minutes,” he confirmed.

  “It was very nice to meet you. Good luck with everything,” I said to the smiling couple as they left.

  Mr. Stone smiled coolly and walked past me, opening the door to the dark hallway again. Brad was right behind him.

  “You coming?” Mr. Stone said, turning to me and holding the door open.

  “I’m sorry. What was that? What did I just witness?”

  “Ah,” he said, spinning his key chain around one finger. “I thought you’d be confused. I wanted to involve you in all of this, but I wanted you to warm up to me first. Get to know me. I guess the fact that you thought I was a chick made you more comfortable around me right away.”

  Brad shot Mr. Stone a confused look.

  “I’ll explain later,” Mr. Stone responded. “Anyway, I thought you’d be good for this. Better at this than the business we have going on upstairs. I know you’re discrete. I know you’re ambitious. And I think you’ll appreciate the good work we do here.”

  I slowed down my pace. My feet were killing me from all the running around I’d done that morning, and my mind was spinning with confusion. This was all because I’d gotten into the wrong elevator that morning and seen something I wasn’t supposed to. It was all happening too fast.

  “What about the job in HR?” I asked, pressing my temples with my fingers.

  “You can have that job, if you want it. I personally think you’d be incredible at it. But this is a different opportunity. Something where you’d actually be making a difference in people’s lives.”

  “Can I have a day to think about it?” I asked.

  “Yes. Now, come. There’s another room I want to show you.”

  I quickened my pace and had to nearly jog to keep up with Mr. Stone. Brad continued following behind us.

  When we got to a red door, Mr. Stone paused.

  “Now,” he said. “What you’re about to see behind this door is sensitive. It’s more sensitive than what you just witnessed with that couple. What you’re going to see behind this door is not for the faint of heart.”

  I knew it! It was a sex thing. A seedy, sordid, weird sex thing where rich guys came to get off. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I was spilling over with excitement at being able to see what was behind the red door.

  “I’m ready,” I said confidently, smoothing my skirt down along my hips. A hot white pressure flipped out of my stomach and made its way lower.

  “Brad, we won’t need you to come with us for this part,” Mr. Stone said. “Please guard the door.”

  “Very good, boss.” Brad moved aside and stood with his feet askance and his arms firmly down at his sides. A nervous twitch hit my stomach when I realized that Mr. Stone and I might be alone once we made our way past the red door.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Mr. Stone asked again.

  I nodded in approval.

  “Remember,” he added, “if you don’t feel comfortable, you just say the word and we’ll leave.”

  “Got it.”

  He glided the key into the lock and turned the doorknob with one graceful motion. Behind the door wasn’t an office like the one we’d just been in. It was a dark bar, bathed in red light. It looked like a normal bar, except that it was before noon and there were people standing around drinking and chatting.

  Strange, I thought, for some random Thursday morning.

  “This,” he said, “is another one of the fantasies that I can fulfill.”

  We moved through the space. It was filled with some of the most gorgeous people I’d ever seen. Most of them looked like models. The women were tall and thin and had long hair and stacked heels. The men were chiseled and muscular. There were a few normal-looking people, people who looked a little bit more like me, but for the most part it was a society for the beautiful.

  “What fantasy is this?”

  “Let me show you something else,” he said as we continued moving through the room, being eyed up and down by everyone there.

  I felt excited and exposed. Like I didn’t belong there. Like I had stumbled into something that I should never have known existed.

  Mr. Stone guided me into yet another room off yet another hallway. This one was bolted behind two locks.

  Once inside, I was faced with a room covered entirely in mirrors.

  “What is this? A fun house?” I joked.

  My heart thumped in my ears.

  “A fun house? Why, you enjoying yourself?” Mr. Stone asked.

  “Kind of. I mean, this is all very novel,” I said, trying to act nonchalant even though I was reeling from being thrust into this bizarre environment.

  I hadn’t noticed it at first because of all the mirrors, but in the corner of the room was some type of wooden plank along with a small bench.

  “Novel? So, you’re not used to being tied up and taken by a dominant man hell-bent on making you his?”

  “Oh, is that what this is? Is that what all this stuff is?” I asked, walking over to the corner where the devices were set up. “You know, I knew that you were hiding something freaky down here in the basement.”

  “You did?” He walked toward me slowly
, the racing of my heart picking up speed.

  He kept walking until he was standing right in front of me, towering above, and I felt my knees turn to rubber. I struggled to keep myself composed, but the position he had put me in was electrifying.

  “So,” he said, cupping my chin in his hand and slipping one arm around my waist carefully, “did you give any more thought about joining this enterprise I have going here?”

  I should have pushed him away and run for the hills.