by Cj Howard
Benjamin reached down between their bodies and began to rub her clitoris even as he thrust harder and faster inside of her, and Claire knew that she wouldn’t last for much longer—she’d been teased and tormented for so long that just the feeling of Benjamin inside of her, thick and hot, was almost enough to make her climax.
She held back for as long as she could, twisting her hips, feeling her inner muscles flex around Benjamin’s cock in erratic spasms, but all at once the tension that had been mounting deep down gave way, and wave after wave of pleasure washed through her. Benjamin kept moving inside her, slowing down only slightly to build her up again, kissing and touching her without restraint until Claire became turned on once more.
They almost fell into the water together but managed to keep more or less upright, and Claire felt the tension mounting inside of her again. She was lost to the pleasure even as she sensed Benjamin becoming more and more turned on, as he thrust even faster inside of her, kissing and nibbling the column of her throat even as he touched her in counterpoint to the movement of his hips. They both reached orgasm—Claire for the second time—in the same moment, moaning in the echoing confines of the bathroom, and Claire forgot all about her misgivings—about the deal, about Benjamin, about her father’s problems—as sensations coursed through her veins and lit up her nervous system. She’d have to think about all those things later.
Chapter5
Benjamin waited in his office for Claire’s arrival, confident that she would be there shortly. It had been three days since their dinner and sex, and he hadn’t seen her at all since the morning after, when she had told him she’d take a few days to think about the proposal. Technically, she still had another three days to make a decision, but Benjamin knew that she wouldn’t want to let the interest accrue on her father’s debt any more than it already had—and he knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep avoiding him on the pretense of “needing to think” for much longer.
He sat back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling, smiling to himself. It was more or less a foregone conclusion that Claire would go along with the proposal he’d made to her—although, of course, he’d made the stipulations she’d brought forward part of the contract he would have her sign. He wouldn’t ever make having sex with her a requirement, but he hoped that it would continue for the limited amount of time they had together.
It had been better than he’d had in years, possibly the best sex he’d had in his life, and he was fairly certain it had been almost as good—if not exactly as good—for Claire, much though he’d seen her resisting the notion of giving up control to him.
That was what he’d liked most about it—watching Claire try and subvert him, watching her fight between the desire to have sex with him and the desire to avoid asking him for it. It was something he’d sought in the many women he’d been with but never quite found; too many of them either froze him out entirely or gave in too quickly, ruining the suspense.
The possibility of testing that tension between them, of having the opportunity to keep seducing Claire over and over again, was too attractive to give up, even if technically it would be inappropriate to do that with his employee.
But, Ben reminded himself, Claire was not going to be the typical employee; she was going to be a particular kind of personal assistant, someone to take notes unobtrusively at business meetings and dinners with associates and be at his side on the occasions he had to speak to the press. She wouldn’t be presented as his girlfriend or anyone like that—she would be steadfastly presented as an assistant and a professional—but it would open up many opportunities to be alone with her.
And those chances would bring the possibility of another seduction. See how she responds to it. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. It was possible that she’d want to remain entirely professional, and Benjamin would adhere to that if it was what she wanted. Even if it would be a waste of some amazing sex.
“Mr. Minken?” the phone crackled slightly with the static of the connection, and Benjamin picked up the handset.
“Yes, Karen?” His secretary—stationed a floor below, where she could intercept any visitors—was very good at her job and not at all attractive to Benjamin, two traits that he had privately insisted on when he’d hired her.
“I have Claire Stevenson here for you,” Karen said. “She said you’d be expecting her, but she’s not on the list for the day.”
“It’s a standing opening,” Benjamin explained. “I’m sorry I didn’t let you know about it beforehand. Please send her up.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Minken,” Karen said, before closing the line. Benjamin smiled to himself. She was right on schedule—though he wasn’t about to tell Claire that he had bet on her returning within a few days to give him her decision, nor that he was fairly certain that she would have come to the “right” choice.
She could have always gone to one of your rivals, and gotten them to finance her in exchange for some service, he thought. But then that wasn’t all that likely—he’d been watching her a bit, from a distance, and she hadn’t seemed to spend much time outside of the hotel.
There was a knock at his door a few moments later, and the man on duty poked his head in. “Claire Stevenson?”
“Let her in,” Benjamin confirmed, and the guard nodded, opening the door to let the woman in.
Claire had dressed in the same impeccable, professional manner she had the first time they’d met, and Benjamin thought there was definitely an element of her “going into battle” to some degree. She was wearing heels, but low ones, and a shift-dress in royal blue, with cream accents. Her braided hair was pulled back away from her face into a kind of bun he could barely discern. He wondered how she was going to handle the last meeting between them before she became his employee.
“Have a seat,” Benjamin suggested, sitting up in his own chair and meeting her gaze levelly. It was going to be business between them—strictly business—at least for the next few minutes.
“Thank you,” Claire said, seating herself. “I’ve given your proposal—and my requirements added to it—some consideration.”
“I figured that if you weren’t done thinking about it, you wouldn’t have come,” Benjamin said with a nod.
“I think you already know you kind of have me trapped, anyway,” Claire pointed out. “Unless I’m willing to let my father go to prison for years and years and years—and come out still owing money—I have to go along with this.”
Benjamin shrugged. “It’s still a choice,” he said.
“On paper,” Claire told him tartly.
Benjamin smiled slightly. “So you’ve chosen to accept my proposal, with the changes we discussed over dinner,” he surmised.
Claire nodded slowly. “I will work for you for one year, as your personal assistant—according to your contract—and that will satisfy my father’s debt, right?”
“It will indeed,” Benjamin said. “I have the contract and your dress code ready for you, if you want to look over them.” He watched Claire raise an eyebrow, but he had gone over both documents very carefully, making sure there was nothing objectionable in them. He wanted Claire’s contract with him to be foolproof; above and beyond his distaste for ever forcing a woman or harassing one, he wanted to make sure—pragmatically—that there was nothing she could take him to court over.
“I’ll look them over,” Claire said cautiously.
Ben wondered if she was thinking about their night together, too; he wondered if it had filled her head as persistently as it had his own. Inwardly sighing, he opened the drawer where he’d been keeping the documents and brought out the folder, handing it across his desktop to Claire and turning his attention to his computer monitor to give her the time and space to read.
Nevertheless, he kept her in his peripheral vision, half-watching her as she absorbed the contents of the contract, the dress code he had worked up. She would—he thought—realize that it was completely above-board, at least as much as those
things could be. She was working off a debt.
“My biggest concern right now is the fact that I have a job in Jersey that I’m abandoning, and an apartment there,” Claire said after a few moments, putting the paperwork down.
Benjamin considered that for a moment. He had to admit he’d been fairly certain that element would be a sticking point, and he didn’t have great answers for her at least on the score of the job she would be abandoning.
“I can write in a guarantee of a good reference for you at the conclusion of this job,” he suggested. “As for the apartment, would your complex let your father live in your unit?”
Claire pressed her lips together, and for a moment, Benjamin could see the distaste in her eyes. “If someone convinced them to, probably,” she said. “I just don’t know how much I want him to live in my place.”
“How much longer do you have on the lease?” Benjamin took out his phone to make a note.
“Six months,” Claire said.
“You really can’t bring yourself to put him up for six months?” Benjamin raised an eyebrow at her.
“I don’t want him that close to Atlantic City again,” Claire said, her voice slightly grumbling.
Benjamin resisted the urge to laugh, even though it was as much out of a sense of empathy as anything else. “I can buy out your lease,” he said. “That should satisfy the leasing company. And I can have your stuff put into storage.”
Claire looked at him in disbelief. “Okay,” she said slowly. “You brought me here to work off my father’s debt. You’re doing things now that...that cost more money.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t get it.”
“I would be personally buying out your lease, and personally putting up the storage for your things,” Benjamin explained. “These are costs I’m willing to pay out of my own pocket for you to work for me. Your paycheck and the debt are a different bucket of money—that’s money owed by the casino, money you’re earning from the casino.”
Claire frowned, working her mind around that, and after a few moments, she just shrugged. “I will never in my life understand the machinations of billionaires, and it’s not even worth trying,” she said. “If you’re willing to do that, then I guess… I guess, thank you.”
“As for your job, I’m sure you can tell them it was a family emergency,” Benjamin suggested.
Claire sighed. “I’m about a month ahead in my work, anyway,” she admitted. “They’ll have time to train my replacement before they really, truly need them.”
“But you can’t count on them for a reference,” Benjamin said.
Claire shook her head. “Not leaving suddenly like that,” she agreed. “Ah well. I’m not going to deal with my father going on trial and being imprisoned for a decade or better.” She opened the folder once more and flipped through to the pages of the contract that required her signature.
“All that remains is to make sure you have adequate clothing for your first two weeks of work, and to let the people downstairs know to stop adding interest to your father’s debt with us,” Benjamin said with a slight smile.
“There’s one other thing,” Claire told him, speaking quickly. “I want to see my father.”
“You do?” Benjamin found that somewhat hard to believe.
“You told me you’d have him kicked out of Vegas, right?”
Benjamin nodded. “Already arranged,” he told her. “Nobody in the city will let him stay in their hotels, and nobody is going to let him play anywhere, even if he somehow manages to borrow, beg, or steal the money to do it. I have an airline voucher ready for him.” When Claire’s chest rose and fell with a deep breath, Benjamin was at once glad she had her cleavage covered and regretful of that fact.
“I want to see him for like…ten minutes or so,” she said.
“That’s easily done,” Benjamin told her. “What state is your wardrobe in? I don’t think you brought many clothes with you.” He’d heard she’d brought nothing more than a carry-on, and he didn’t imagine that all of the clothes that Claire had brought with her had been work-appropriate, especially given the strict dress code he’d set up.
“Let me guess: you’re going to take the afternoon off to take me shopping,” Claire said sarcastically.
Benjamin smiled broadly. “That was exactly my thought, yes,” he said.
Claire shook her head, and he could see the start of an argument in her eyes—but then just as quickly it left her. He was almost disappointed, but knew that Claire was merely biding her time; it wasn’t in a woman like her to just submit like that. She would pick her battles. She would find another hill to die on, if necessary.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “We’ll go shopping when I’m done meeting with my father.”
Benjamin could tell she was not going to make the shopping go easily—and the prospect of her fighting him to retain her own taste, while adhering to his rules, excited him more than he would have previously thought possible or even likely. He watched as she continued signing off on the contract provisions, finishing up that aspect of administrative detail, and sent an email to the man in Accounting, a few floors below, to let him know that Shawn Stevenson’s debt would no longer be collecting interest.
He would make sure that the paperwork got to Human Resources while Claire went to see her father, and he would call ahead to make a few appointments at stores he wanted to shop at with her. He’d have her the rest of the workday; that seemed, to Benjamin, to be a good start to their working relationship together. Their personal relationship, if it was going to happen, would come after.
Chapter6
Claire wasn’t sure how she would feel when she saw her father, but she knew that she wouldn’t be able to move into working for Benjamin without seeing the man who had landed her in the situation in the first place, at least once, before he left her life once more. Even so, she didn’t have any idea of what she really wanted to say to him.
As she followed her escort down the hall to the base-level accommodations her father had been housed in, it didn’t escape her notice that the suite she was in was in a much nicer, more prestigious area of the hotel. There was little artwork on the walls around her, and they were painted a bland taupe. The air smelled slightly stale, and there was an undercurrent of dust. Claire didn’t think that many actual guests stayed in the accommodations on the level her father was on.
The man who’d led her down from Benjamin’s office stopped outside of a door marked 112, and Claire took a slow breath, trying to organize her thoughts long enough to figure out what she was going to say to the man. It wasn’t fair, what Shawn had done—it wasn’t fair that he’d put her in the position of having to uproot her entire life, of having to put herself in the power of a man of dubious ethics. She could feel the anger at her father rising up, and the shame along with it, already so familiar to her from the man’s previous exploits and failed high rolls.
“Mr. Minken has said you’re to have as much time as you like,” the escort told her. “There’s a button inside the door frame you can press to let us know you’re ready to leave.”
“Do you know how much longer you’ll be holding him?”
The man shrugged. “Once you’re done, probably not very long,” the man said. “Just some paperwork stuff—and giving him the plane voucher—and then he’s out.”
Claire thought about that a moment and nodded. It was best that way. She took another breath and gestured for the man to open the door for her. The man swiped a card in a reader attached to the door, and Claire stepped through it a moment later, looking around. The lighting seemed oddly dimmer in the small, slightly cramped suite than it had even in the hallway, and yet stark all at once.
As Claire took in the small, tidy-looking bed, the utilitarian dresser, the spartan bathroom—door open—and finally spotted her father seated at a little college-style desk, she thought the stark quality of the light was as much because there were no windows as because the fluorescent lights were not modulated by
any kind of softening fixtures.
“Claire. sweetie!”
Claire felt her stomach lurch in distaste at that greeting. “Don’t try and sweet-talk me, Dad,” she said, shaking her head as her father rose from his chair to walk across the small room to meet her.
“But I love you,” Shawn Stevenson said, frowning slightly in confusion.
“If you actually loved me, you wouldn’t put me in the position to be someone’s slave for a year to keep you from going to prison,” Claire told the man firmly.
“All I asked for was a little help,” her father said, starting to sound defensive.
“Well, they weren’t going to let you leave here if I didn’t make an arrangement to take care of the entire debt, and you don’t have any way to help with that, do you?” She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling angry again. She hated—hated—feeling angry at a man that she loved, whose love she had always craved. She hated feeling angry at the man who had helped raise her. She hated resenting him, feeling contemptuous of him in his weakness. He just couldn’t help himself—more importantly, he never seemed to want to be able to help himself.
“You know I’m gratitude itself for you helping me like this, Claire,” Shawn Stevenson said, and Claire felt strangely deflated. She was still angry, but the man in front of her was so pathetic that she couldn’t summon up the energy, in that moment, to yell at him the way she wanted to. What good would it do, anyway?
“You’re leaving Vegas and never coming back here,” Claire said. “And the next time you get yourself in trouble, I’m not going to lift a finger—you know that, right?”
Her father frowned, and Claire could see the resentment in his eyes. “You didn’t have to come here, you had a choice,” he countered.
“Yeah, my choice was to come here and sell a year of my life or deal with you being in prison and still owing money to this damn casino for years to come—great choices, Dad,” Claire said firmly.
“It was just a run of bad luck,” Shawn said, his voice taking on the familiar whining tone that Claire knew well. “You know when I’m on fire I do great.”