“Maybe, but I sure as hell am not one of them,” Maisy said, still not getting what he was implying.
“Don’t knock it till you try it. There can be pleasure with pain. You’d be surprised,” Carter told her, and Maisy glanced at him, surprised by his statement. More surprising was the look in his eyes as he stared into hers. It was strange and hypnotic, and Maisy shivered as her mind turned to mush. If he’d grabbed her by her shoulders and kissed her just then, she would have leaned into the kiss without a second thought. Hell, if he had offered to show her how enjoyable pain was, she would submit without worrying as to the strangeness of the request. Dragging her mind back to the present, she looked at him without saying a word, waiting for his next instruction. Now she wasn’t sure she could trust herself to say anything that wouldn’t come out in a croak.
“Okay, how about you go through some of the stretches I showed you yesterday,” he said as he stood in front of her, arms folded and watching her. A little bit shy at his direct gaze, Maisy stepped into the middle of the room and started going through the routines they had started with yesterday. Her movements were a little bit slow and more painful today because of the aches in her muscles and stiff joints. But aware that she was being watched, Maisy forced herself to go through them. Carter noticed this and moved closer to her.
“Lie on your back,” he instructed as he came to stand between her legs. Then taking her left foot in his hand, he bent it backwards a little, massaging the joint as he went and easing the pain a little. At first, Maisy’s legs stiffened when he tried to help her, then slowly, she began to relax as she felt that ache in her ankle recede. After a few minutes, he moved to the other leg, repeating the process, and Maisy nearly wept in relief. Then he spread her legs and stepped in between them. Maisy’s eyes snapping open at the action as she stared at him wondering what he was aiming at. There was no hint of mischief in his expression and even his touch was almost impersonal, purely professional. Yet the minute he placed his hands on her thighs and started kneading, Maisy had to bite back a gasp as she felt her nipples harden instantly.
He kneaded her thighs with quick, mechanical-like motions even, yet to Maisy, it was the most sensual touch, and she had to fight to ensure her breathing stayed even and not pant like she wanted to. Then he dropped her leg and she almost screamed her frustration, stopping herself at the last minute. He moved behind her and placed his hands under her shoulders, urging her to sit up. Then he began to knead her shoulders, working out the kinks in them, and this time Maisy couldn’t help herself as her head fell back and she closed her eyes in barely concealed ecstasy. Her back rested on his chest, and even through her clothes, she could feel the solid wall of his chest. She leaned as far back as she could, luxuriating in the heat of him as she felt his hand encircle her neck. The touch was slightly improper, yet Maisy didn’t care. It had been a long time since she gave anyone this much control over her, a long time since feelings of this nature had coursed through her whole body, and the first time since she had felt this much. His hands brushed the side of her breasts, and the breath left her lungs in a whoosh as she moaned low in her throat. There was no ache in her body now, no pain. In fact, she felt strong, more alive that she had ever felt in her life. She felt . . . nothing. Blinking, she almost fell on her back as Carter stood up and stepped around her. She slowly got up, not believing how easily she had been aroused by something as simple as a shoulder rub.
“Okay, a couple of more stretches then get on the treadmill,” Carter said to her as he walked toward the office. “Remember, start slowly, then gradually increase your pace.”
Chapter 8
Maisy was half glad to see him go, seriously needing to get herself under control. She tried to blame her reaction to Carter on her recent lack of physical intimacy over the few past months, but something told her it was more than that. Starting the treadmill, she hopped on and started her workout, focusing on the repeated motion of her run to avoid the questions her mind was asking of her.
Carter sat behind his desk, wondering what the hell had just happened to him out there. He had begun just wanting to help her ease her joints so they didn’t hurt too much for the day’s workout. It had turned into an almost make-out session. One more minute with her in there and he would have given into the temptation of placing his teeth on the smooth expanse of her neck she had exposed when her hair fell back. This wasn’t the first time he had been attracted to someone he was working with, but it was the first time he had acted so unprofessionally. And while a part of him was ashamed of his actions, as natural as they were, another part, a part that seemed to be having the upper hand, was pushing him to throw caution to the wind. The little horned figure in his ear telling him he deserved a little respite from years of stellar behavior. Besides, it wasn’t like he heard Maisy complaining. He had noticed the way her breath became choppy when his hands circled her neck. The twin peaks of her nipples through the tank top that was spread tightly across ample breasts he wanted to wrap his palms around. He remembered how it had felt to have her thighs under his palm. Just a couple more inches up, and he could have felt how—
He blinked hard, jarred from his imagination by the sudden discomfort in his gym shorts, and looked down to see he was sporting a massive erection. Surprised by how much she was affecting him, he decided enough was enough. He wasn’t a schoolboy to get excited at just anything. She was his client, nothing more, and it was his job to help her lose some weight, and that was what he was going to do. After the weight jutting between his legs subsided, of course, he told himself.
After a few minutes, he came out of the room and saw Maisy on the treadmill. She had already worked up a sweat. Her breathing was a little labored, but her motion was fluid enough that he decided she must have hit her stride.
“Remember, breathe from the mouth, not the nose, and try to find your rhythm,” he advised her. “Fifteen more minutes of that, and we can move to working on the weights.”
Maisy gaped at him as if he had just grown an extra eye. “Fifteen more minutes?” she shrieked, struggling to keep up with the pace of the machine. “I can’t do fifteen more minutes of this. Hell, I doubt I can do this for three minutes longer. Yesterday, I only did twenty, and look at how hard that was for me.”
“That was yesterday, and this is today; today you’re working on that treadmill for the next fifteen minutes. Now stop whining and concentrate on what you’re doing.”
She opened her mouth to complain again and immediately lost her footing, slipping a little, but righting herself at the last second to continue her run.
“See what I was telling you? I’m already too tired to—”
“Keep quiet and concentrate on your run. I don’t want to hear another peep from you, or so help me God,” he said in a voice that was just loud enough for her to hear, but filled with so much authority Maisy’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes returned to her front as she kept on running. After a few minutes, she quipped under her breath, “I can’t believe I thought working with you would be fun. You’re a mean, horrid person,” not expecting him to hear her. So, she was surprised when she heard from him loud and clear.
“Yes, I am, and that’s why you pay me. Don’t slouch forward or drag your feet; remember the best way to do it is the right way to do it.” They continued like this, her complaining that her legs were aching, him ordering her to continue and turning a deaf ear to her whining, and then the begging, and finally the cursing that came after. When it was nearing the fifteen-minute mark, he told her to start winding down from the run. By the time the clock on the wall showed that her time was up, Maisy didn’t wait for him to tell her to get down from the machine before she switched it off and got down herself.
“Good girl. Now tell me you aren’t proud you stuck with it till the end?” he asked, giving her a dazzling smile she couldn’t fully appreciate because of the ache in her knees.
“No, I’m proud I have so much control over my hands that they aren’t wrapped
around your neck,” Maisy replied, baring her teeth at him.
“Funny. Now, take a break, and we’re moving to the weights,” he replied, smiling as he went to bring the weights they would be using. By the time they were done for the day, Maisy was sweating so much her clothes felt like they weighed about a hundred pounds; if she could shoot laser beams from her eyes, Carter would be a pile of smoking ash on the floor. It didn’t help that he had joined her in her workout, using weights that were four times heavier than hers yet handling them with so much ease that only the sweat from his body would have made her know that his weights weren’t made of foam. She couldn’t even begin to count how many times she wanted to kill him when he told her to lift her elbows higher in that calm, commanding tone of his. Thinking of his tone, she couldn’t deny a part of her felt a secret thrill from hearing him tell her what to do. It was a part she was surprised to find she had and blamed it partly on her sexual attraction to him. But there was just something about hearing him tell her what to do that made her weak in ways she wasn’t even ready to try to figure out. One thing was clear, though; he wasn’t interested in her in any way apart from as her personal trainer, and Maisy was fine with that. At least she thought she was.
Chapter 9
That night before she went to bed, she called Brittany, suddenly missing her friend and feeling quite lonely.
“Hey, you aren’t working?” she asked her friend, surprised that Brittany had picked up on the second ring.
“Nope, I surprisingly find myself free and was just about to call you.”
“Really? That is kinda weird,” Maisy said, knowing it was rare for Brittany not to bring some of her work home from the office.
“I know, right? But I have this new assistant who is as efficient as a robot, and she helped me . . . Well, not help since it’s actually her job, but I find that the pile of work on my desk has been reduced almost by half since she arrived yesterday.”
“Her? Are you telling me you hired a female secretary?”
“Yes, I did, and you can’t believe how annoying it is that she’s absolutely perfect for the job. Enough about me. How are things down there?”
“Great actually; went to the gym yesterday and this morning, too,” Maisy told her friend, and hearing herself say it aloud made her happy she had gone through with it. Brittany was happy for her friend, and it clearly showed in her voice.
“You did? Well, that’s great; I’m really happy for you, and a little bit jealous, too. So, tell me how it is.”
“You remember Carter?”
“The guy who made you run out of the gym the first time? Yeah, I remember him.”
“Well, he’s my personal trainer and is working with me one on one.”
“Now I’m seeing pictures. How is he?”
“He’s the most mean, sadistic, unfeeling person I’ve ever known,” Maisy replied heatedly, still feeling the burn from her morning workout. “Which is more annoying since he’s so hot. I was this close to dragging him to the floor and kissing him senseless.”
“Whoa, hold on. What did you say? Don’t tell me you have a crush on your personal trainer.”
“I’m not talking crush, Brittany. I’m talking I-want-to-do-naughty-things-with-him, want-him-to-do-naughty-things-with-me kind of feeling. This is the first time since I broke up with Eric that I’m feeling like this about someone. I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve felt this attracted to someone.”
“Okay, and you’re sure that it isn’t that you’re falling for him or anything like that, right?”
“Hell no. I may be okay enough to want to jump his bones, but I am definitely not recovered enough to want to risk my heart like that again,” Maisy said.
“Well, as long as you’re sure it isn’t more than that, then I don’t see any problem with it. Just be careful, okay?”
“Of course, babe,” Maisy said, not needing to be reminded about the last time she wasn’t careful enough. She stayed on the phone with Brittany till past midnight, talking about many things like Chloe and the people she met in town. When she dropped the phone, she saw it was almost two in the morning and almost panicked. Then she remembered she was meeting Carter in the evening, not morning, so she could sleep in late. Thank God for that.
Chapter 10
“Come on, you can do it. Up, up,” Carter was saying in Maisy’s ear as she attempted to pull herself back up. They were doing sit-ups on an inclined bench, and Maisy’s stomach hurt so much she was afraid she may have ruptured her appendix.
“Don’t give up now. Six more to go,” Carter said, in a voice Maisy called his drill sergeant voice. It was different from the normal voice he used to tell her good job, or well done. She had begun to realize that she just couldn’t refuse him when he used his drill sergeant voice. The need to please and obey him, she was beginning to suspect, went deeper than her wanting to obey her personal trainer. She was still sexually attracted to him, even more than before. And hearing him tell her to do this or lift that or stop and hold it right there just did things to her down under, and she still blushed at times.
“Okay, four more to go.”
“I can’t do four,” Maisy wanted to say, but what came out from her mouth was a garble of incomprehensible words.
“No talking, just keep up till you finish this set. You can do it.”
Maisy came back up, struggling to catch her breath, and said, “I can’t do it; my stomach hurts like hell.”
“Then you know it’s working. Keep going. One more . . .” He stood over her till she dropped back down and struggled to come up, finishing the set. Immediately after she had, she collapsed in a heap on the floor, rolling over to her stomach.
“You know, I think the reason why you make me do this till I can barely stand up is because you know if I have one ounce of energy in me, I’ll probably strangle you,” Maisy said, looking at him from the corner of her eye.
“That can’t be the reason why, because then you won’t have any energy to do the next exercise. Stand up.”
“Hell no, I’m staying down here.”
“Get up,” he repeated, this time in his drill sergeant voice, and Maisy grudgingly stood up and followed him to a set of bars that had been screwed to the wall, another bar hanging horizontally above it.
“We’re doing pull-ups next,” he said as he brought the bar just a bit lower, but still high enough that Maisy wasn’t sure she could even reach it.
“I can’t do that,” she said to him seriously now.
“You always say that.”
“No, I’m really serious. I can’t,” Maisy said, ready to give up and even begin to doubt she could ever be really as fit as she wanted to be. Three days already of body-breaking workout and she hadn’t lost a single pound, the scale still saying the same thing it had been saying. She remembered something Eric had said one time when they went shopping for clothes together, and Maisy found it hard to get a type of jeans she liked that fit her. Eric, who had followed her, was already beginning to get pissed off at the delay, and Maisy found herself apologizing again and again to him.
“Don’t worry, honey. Nothing you can do about the fact that you’re fat; guess some people were born to be that way,” he had said, smiling at her in support. His statement had stung her that day, but today she was wondering if maybe he was right. Her mom and dad weren’t exactly thin, so it may be that it was just in her genes to be fat. She suddenly didn’t feel like continuing with her workout, wanting instead to find a store and get the biggest container of ice cream they had and gorge herself. Thinking about Eric had depressed her so greatly, and she was trying to figure out a way to tell Carter she was no longer interested. Her body ached so badly, yet he was pushing her to do more.
“I’m serious, Carter. I may fall and break something if I get on that machine.”
“That’s enough,” Carter responded in his no-nonsense voice. “I have about had enough of you complaining about everything I tell you to do. Trust me, I would nev
er tell you to do something you cannot do. If I say do something, it’s because I know you can do it. Okay?” He sounded low and just a little bit pissed, which made Maisy just a little pissed, and she angrily stepped forward and grabbed the bar, pulling herself up. Then she promptly fell back.
“Okay, that’s it,” Carter said, sounding serious now. “You didn’t even try at all.”
“Yes, I did,” Maisy retorted angrily.
“No, you didn’t; now get back on that bar and give me five sets of ten reps, or I swear to God, I’ll spank you so hard, your ass will be the one getting a work out today.”
Maisy gaped and looked at him to confirm he wasn’t joking, and the look in his eye just dared her to challenge him.
“Like hell, you will.”
“Well, why don’t you try me and see?” he replied, and this time Maisy was sure he was dead serious. She got on the bar and lifted herself up, managing to complete nine reps of a single set, before she dropped low. Not out of exhaustion, but to see if he was going to follow through with his threat.
“That isn’t high enough; go higher,” he told her, but Maisy just gave a half-hearted attempt before coming back down. After a few seconds without a response from him, she figured he was just bluffing and went to pull herself up when suddenly her eyes widened as she felt it. The full imprint of his palm on her ass as he spanked her hard. She could almost not believe it, then it came again, this time harder. Maisy realized she was aroused by the sheer naughtiness of the act. But even more importantly, she realized she didn’t give a damn.
Training Maisy Page 5
