“A little,” she said. “I used to be with—” She glanced toward Elizabeth, who was starting to look as though she wished she’d never entered the bathroom. “He’s a friend of a friend. And he’s a good guy, I think. Some issues. We all have issues, you know. But I guess I should be more concerned about you. Because I don’t know you. Except to know you’re wired like Jane—and just as sneaky.”
“Sneaky? I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, ma’am.” I batted my eyes, not actually flirting but doing something like it that we both understood. Elizabeth, with evident relief, took her turn in a stall and a middle-aged Brazilian matron took her place at the sink, peering into the mirror with a frown.
“Look, I’ll just say this. Jack looks happy, I’ll give you that. I haven’t ever seen him look this good, in fact. He looks sorta relieved. I don’t know what that’s about, but I will tell you that he hasn’t been seeing anyone seriously in a long time, that I know of. Pretty much not since before he left for London, and sure as hell not since he’s been living back here again. And you’re…” She glanced at the local matriarch, who looked as though she didn’t understand a word, and almost whispered the next few things she had to say.
“You’re this very soft, juicy little sub girl who looks like she’s about due to get her butt and her heart broken, in that order. You look like you’ve already fallen, hard. Like, so hard I’m surprised you don’t need some kneepads about now. But Jack doesn’t look much better off, which is not the Jack I know. So whoever you are to him, just…I don’t know, just be careful. He’s nice, and you seem nice, but it also seems like you have huge potential to hurt each other if you’re just suddenly doing this on a business trip. Neither of you seems like the type to do that. I know he’s not. This conference ends in a week but when you go back home he’ll still be your boss, I’ll remind you. Unless I’m missing something big here, you’re fixing to go back to that hotel suite tonight and have all kinds of kinky sex with your boss.”
“Well!” sniffed the matronly woman, snapping her lipstick case closed with a furious little snort. “I never!” Her accent, what little we heard of it, was clearly English. The door swung shut behind her in a wave of silence that descended on the powder room.
Kendra and I heard Jane from the stall asking, “What? Ken, what just happened?” We tried not to meet each other’s eyes but when we did, we nearly hurt ourselves laughing.
“Some poor little tourist just got an earful of the kinky sex talk, is all. Nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about, sweet thang. Although I’m sure it will be worrying her pretty little head for quite a while.”
I had to put my own head against the cool tile wall of the bathroom until my renewed laughing fit passed, though Kendra regained control much more easily. It didn’t surprise me—she was obviously a “control” sort of gal.
“Kendra, who was it you went out with anyway?” I asked, not bothering to whisper. I had forgotten about poor Elizabeth for the moment, who must have been even more confused than Jane.
Kendra gave me an appraising look before murmuring, too low for Jane or Elizabeth to hear, “I was with Jack’s sister for five years. And if you tell Jane that he’s Anne’s brother, you’re not getting that Tiger Balm back anytime this trip, li’l subby girl. I don’t want her obsessing about my ex for the rest of the week, which is exactly what will happen if she finds out who Jack is. So please.”
“Jack has a sister who’s a lesbian?”
“No, Jack has a bisexual sister, who is now a blissfully married woman with two precious little kids and a husband who worships her. We’re still very good friends and I wish her all the happiness in the world, but I also don’t want to screw with my current happiness. So please, Kate.”
I nodded, a little stunned but not wanting her to feel anxious that any of this would get back to Jane. Or Jack. Although presumably, he already knew.
It really was such a small world.
Chapter Seven
The elevator ride back up to the suite was torture. We stood at the rear, smiling politely and nodding at the other guests getting on and off the lift, and all I could feel was Jack’s hand on my back, sliding under the straps of the blue cotton dress I’d worn to dinner, trying to get just that fraction closer. Sneaking around my ribs so that I had to suppress a giggle. And then stroking so, so softly at the side of my breast through the lightweight fabric, under my arm where nobody else in the elevator could possibly see.
He didn’t even ask when we got to the door of my suite, just kept moving to his own door, opened it up and pulled me in after him. A split second later he pinned me to the foyer wall and finally kissed me, and I was glad he was holding me up or my knees might have buckled at the bolt of sheer need that shot through me.
We didn’t pause for first-date kisses, went straight for the heavy stuff. He was licking and sucking, exploring my mouth with his tongue in a way that made me ache to have him repeat the action between my legs. It seemed as though I had been waiting years for his kiss. Well, possibly I had. He acted as though he had been waiting for years too, which raised some interesting possibilities. But at the moment, all that seemed important was that he was kissing me, and it was making me want him more keenly than in my most explicit fantasy.
“I wish you’d worn that new dress again,” Jack said at last, pulling just far enough away that I couldn’t recapture his mouth with mine. “You looked so good in the store, do you know what I wanted to do right then? All I could think about, actually?”
“N-no?” My higher brain functions were clearly taking a dive in direct proportion to the proximity of Jack’s mouth to my ear as he whispered naughty, delicious things.
“I wanted to follow you back into the dressing room, put you up against the wall just like this and hold both your hands with one of mine…” He shifted his grip as he spoke, pulling my arms up over my head and restraining my wrists one-handedly with surprising ease. “Then put my other hand right up your skirt to play with you. Would you have liked that, little Katie?” His hand had dipped under my hem and stroked up along the bare skin of my leg but paused just at the top of my thigh, and I whimpered and squirmed, trying to get closer but unable to.
“Oh God, yes,” I whispered, already trembling with desire. I could hardly imagine what it would feel like when Jack actually touched me. I didn’t have to imagine for long.
“You had panties on then. I would have had to push them over to the side so I could touch you, slide my fingers inside you. What about now, little one? Did you leave them off like I told you to, or did you think it was just talk? If I move my hand, what will my fingers touch?”
“Just…just me…aaah…” His fingers had moved at last but on encountering more smooth skin, he stopped again and lifted his eyebrows sharply.
“What have we here? Not hair, obviously. Oh God. Do you keep it like this all the time?” Jack slid his hand that crucial inch to the side at last and cupped my mound, his sensitive fingers tracing the delicate, clean-shaven lips.
“Yeah…”
“Yeah?” he repeated in clear disapproval, but not of my shaving practices. My eyes flicked open to see him looking at me expectantly. Blue. “Answer again, and answer right, Katie.”
“Yes Sir,” I offered, and sank into his responding smile.
“Good girl,” he whispered, kissing my mouth now as gently as his hand was fondling my pussy. “I like it like this. I wish I’d known this the other day when your jeans tore—it would’ve provided me a whole new level of visualization.”
“You saw that?” I was horrified, although I wasn’t quite sure why. At least the mailroom guy hadn’t been the only one, and the idea of Jack sneaking peeks at my butt without my knowledge…
“Of course I did,” he said matter-of-factly. “You had bare butt showing at the office, you didn’t think I’d notice? I had to close my door to get any work done, and even then…” His fingers slipped around the side of my thigh to caress the spot that had b
een displayed through the hole in my jeans, just at the crease between my ass and the top of my leg. “Very distracting. You’re very distracting to have around the office, Miss Snow. You always have been.”
“Is that really why you brought me here?” I could have kicked myself for asking, but something drove me to find out now, before. “To see if this would take the edge off? Known quantity’s less distracting, that sort of thing?” It was easy to think more clearly when he pulled his hand away from my ass, but I still felt the loss pretty keenly. Kendra’s cautions seemed so far away, so irrelevant, although they still nagged at the back of my mind where common sense was trying to keep me from diving off into the deep end.
Jack backed away a little, scowling, his fingers still pressing into my wrists fiercely. “Would you be here right now if you believed that?”
I realized the answer even as I responded. “No, of course not. Well…I knew I was qualified to be here in any case. Not here, here. I mean at the conference. I don’t think you would’ve made advances you weren’t pretty sure were going to be accepted, and I didn’t think my job was in jeopardy if I wasn’t interested.”
When he remained silent, I kept going, a bad habit I had of trying to fill any conversational void. “I’d been throwing off vibes too, I know that, it’s just that up until this weekend I really didn’t think…I mean, there was the whole office, working-together thing. And I didn’t think you’d be interested. I didn’t think you were, um, inclined a certain way? Or that you wouldn’t think I was? Or—”
“Katie, stop talking.”
“Yes Sir.”
Smile.
Melt.
“Listen. First of all, if anything, it’s the opposite of what you think. You’re not here because of this. I meant it before, I almost didn’t pick you because of this. Hell, I almost didn’t promote you because I was worried about this. Even though you were clearly the best candidate. I did promote you, but I worried. And I was obviously right to worry.
“But about the other part, the vibes. Look, when we’re working together in the office, we work well together. You’re professional, you’re very passionate about your work. You clearly have a great deal of knowledge about the field and if you feel you need to argue a position, you do that. In your own way, you get right in my face and you always have, even when you weren’t reporting directly to me. And I give your opinion the respect it deserves. Right?”
I nodded, not sure where he was going.
“Your last supervisor didn’t actually like that about you. She told me you had an attitude problem. But I do like it. I know where you stand on things, you’re very honest and you don’t hide your agenda, which is unusual. And I know you’re working harder than I’d ever ask you to work already, so I’m not likely to barge in and demand you drop what you’re doing to work on some other project of mine because I assume my project is more important. That really hasn’t come up, even before you were promoted. That isn’t really my management style. So it’s not an area where we’d tend to have any conflict anyway.”
He pulled a face at the idea of having to have a management style at all. Like me, I suspected, there were times he wished he were still doing fieldwork every day.
“But—and I don’t know if you realize this—if I walk into your office and, say, tell you to give me what I know is your favorite pen because my last one’s out of ink, and Ted’s gone home already and his desk is locked so I can’t get the key to the supply closet, like last week? Do you know what you do? You drop your eyes, blush, hand over your pen and say, ‘yes Sir’, just like you did a minute ago.”
I opened my mouth to protest, to explain, but he held a finger over my lips, effectively silencing me.
“If I tell you I’m ordering lunch,” he continued, “and you say you aren’t hungry, and I say, ‘Kate, I know you didn’t eat any breakfast, I am ordering you a sandwich which you will eat and your only choice in the matter is whether it’s roast beef or ham’, do you get pissed off? No. Do you say you just want a salad? No. You look right at your toes and say, ‘roast beef, Sir’. And then you eat the sandwich and thank me in an extremely charming way that, frankly, leaves me in absolutely no doubt what your…orientation is. Work is not at issue in any of those cases. Am I off track in any way here?”
“No Sir.” He had moved his finger just long enough for me to answer then carefully placed it over my lips again.
“Good. That’s a relief. This would be a terrible time to find out I’d been guessing wrong for over a year.”
Over a year?
“So just to be clear, little Katie, although I don’t think anybody else in the office really picks up on it, I do pick up on it. And the only way you could have sent a stronger submissive vibe would have been to start off each visit to my office by dropping to your knees to await my bidding. Which, by the way, I do not want you doing when we get back to town. I’ve fantasized about it plenty but if I actually saw that in my office, I would never get another minute of work done in there.”
My head was reeling, my knees trembling and my arms were about to fall asleep. Jack must have realized this, because he released my wrists as he bent to kiss me again before leading me through the entrance hall and into the living room of his suite. I’d been fairly impressed by my own suite, but it looked like a hovel compared to this one, which was billed as a penthouse. I couldn’t really appreciate the details again in the semi-dark, however. Fortunately, Jack seemed to know his way around well enough already.
“That’s in the office, of course. Here, however…” He sat on the elegant art deco sofa and tugged me over to stand between him and the breathtaking nighttime panorama of the beach and ocean. “Here, I do want to see you on your knees, but only after you take off that dress and let me get a look at everything your bathing suit and those damn jeans and all your other clothes have been hiding from me all this time.”
“Yes Sir,” I said automatically, although at the moment all I wanted to do was fling off the dress and jump him.
“And while you do that, I’ll tell you exactly what that rip in your jeans made me think about.” The tone in his voice set my hands shaking and I could barely fumble open the two buttons and short zipper at the waist of the dress, slipping it off my shoulders to stand in front of him in only the thin film of salt-tinted damp the ocean had left on me earlier.
As Jack spoke, his fingers were traveling from my shoulders downward, patiently learning every inch of me, more sweet torture. “Mmm. Very nice, little Katie. I think this is really a good look on you. Even better than the jeans, although those were good too. Once they tore—and I’d been watching all that morning, wondering if they would—what I wanted more than anything was to pull you into my office and give you a very stern talking-to about appropriate office attire for casual Fridays. What would your response have been, I wonder?”
“Being very quiet and hoping you wouldn’t notice I was about to come on the spot, Sir?” It was true.
Jack laughed and grinned broadly enough to see in the gloom, and then wrapped his fingers around my hips to tug me a little closer. The motion set me off balance and I threw my hands to his shoulders to catch myself. He didn’t seem to mind, let me leave them there as he started to nuzzle my belly, tracing soft kisses across and down each hip in turn.
“You would have been in pretty big trouble if that were the case, because I’m sure I would’ve noticed that. No, I think once I’d gotten you in there, I would have told you to go to my desk and lean over it. And then slipped my fingers into the hole in your jeans, so you would know exactly what transgression you were there for. I would have shown you just how much access that little rip could provide, playing with everything I could reach through it. And then what do you suppose I would have done, little one? To make sure you remembered not to do it again?”
God, he was good at this. I was aching and wet and his hands hadn’t even ventured into anything like an erogenous zone yet. “You would have whipped me, Sir?”
>
“Spanked you,” he corrected. “With my bare hand. I find it’s every bit as effective as I need it to be. Turn around.” He was already turning me, trailing more kisses over my hips and around to my lower back, cupping my ass with both hands and squeezing firmly. “Are you a whip-and-paddle kind of girl, little Katie? What idiot taught you that, when he could’ve been using his own hand on this gorgeous ass?”
“I’m whatever kind of girl you think I need to be, Sir,” I replied, trying not to gasp as his hands stroked and lifted, exploring sensitive territory that I already knew he planned to work over in more ways than one very soon. I would be whatever kind of girl he wanted me to be. Hell, I would be any kind of anything he wanted me to be, if he would just keep doing…that.
“Hmmm. What a good little sub you are. We’ll see, though. You have to be pretty naughty to earn a whipping or a paddling from me, and this would have been a first offense. A bare hand doesn’t work too well over jeans. I think I would have told you to unbutton them and pull them down just far enough. And the little pink-leopard-print panties too.”
Well, damn, that hole must’ve been bigger than I realized. Those jeans are going straight in the trash when I get home.
“And then once you were bent over my desk again, with your bare ass in the air waiting for punishment, that’s when I would’ve seen that your pussy was shaved as smooth as silk.” His fingers marked his words, finally finding their way inside me then out again, running the slickness over my pussy and circling teasingly forward and around my already-sensitized clit. “And that’s really pretty naughty too. I would’ve started spanking you, just testing at first, but then harder and harder, making sure you learned your lesson.”
When he drew one hand away, I had just time to anticipate the first slap striking my butt sharply, not just testing. Warmth spread from the spot and I felt myself growing wetter still. Jack could feel the same thing when, after delivering another three swift spanks, he dipped a finger down between my cheeks and felt my pussy again. There was no hiding my arousal, and I couldn’t restrain a groan at the feel of his touch as he stroked and pinched and then spanked another few times, harder still.
When in Rio Page 6
