by Molly Thorne
He seemed disappointed, but didn’t say anything. He stepped into his office and started working at his computer.
Five minutes later, he called me into his office.
“Frank Mill comes at eleven, you say?”
“Yes.”
“To be punished?”
“For botching the contract in Washington.”
The punishing thing was a joke that was not a joke after all. Theo Lambert could be as ruthless with his own people as with the competition. Sometimes he’d ask me to set up a meeting with some manager “to be punished”. The punishment was no more than a long, concentrated dose of verbal abuse, ranging from irony to irate yelling, invariably ending in a cold dismissal. He never fired anyone, though. Not for this, at least. I knew his girls (well, his assistants) were always in rotation, but they were always the ones who decided to leave. And that was a completely different thing.
“So, that’s the first meeting. At eleven,” Theo said. “What time is it now?”
“Nine thirty,” I replied after glancing at my watch.
“We have some time, then,” he said, and sat up.
“For wh—?” I started to ask, but I stopped dead. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I read it in his eyes, clear blue eyes that were looking at me as eagerly as a hungry lion looks at his prey.
Suddenly, I felt as if the room were filled with a strange energy. I wondered if Roentgen, the scientist who discovered the X rays, had felt something like that when he made his discovery. I was discovering a new ray, a form of energy emanated by men like Theo Lambert. It was overwhelming and alluring, and left me with no energy of my own except for an intense desire, the desire of being taken by him. If I had been a scientist, I would have named this energy alpha rays, but I think the name was already taken.
“For this,” Theo said, and suddenly he was kissing me. The first thing that took over my perception was the aroma of his expensive perfume, barely covering the smell of man that was beneath it, a primal smell that put all my senses in overdrive. The second thing was the wonderful texture of his lips, pressing on mine like an animal immobilizing its victim. Then the warmth and wetness of his tongue, making its way into my mouth, exploring it, filling all the cavities, dueling with my own tongue and always winning, making me lose my breath as the kiss continued and his hands started running up and down my back.
“Mmmmh,” is all I could say, as my arms embraced his magnificent torso through the expensive fabric of his suit and his fine shirt. Our bodies were touching each other now through the layers of clothing, trying to ignore them, to nullify them. My nipples reacted immediately to this new intimacy in which our skins were rubbing on each other even when we were still fully dressed.
“Mmh,” he mimicked, and started undressing me. He pulled up from the rim of my tight dress, moving it up inch after inch, with his own body getting in the way and complicating the procedure. He just didn’t seem to be able to detach from my body, both of us wanted to keep the intense contact of man on woman, woman on man, as the kiss went on and on.
“This is... ooooh,” I started and stopped again, because he had pulled up my dress up to my waist now, and my ass and crotch were fully exposed except for the area covered by my slim panties. His hands had stopped messing with the dress and were firmly grabbing my buttocks now; as I had interrupted the kiss to be able to talk, his lips were now running up and down my neck, rising goosebumps all over my face and chest.
“Wrong. This is wrong,” he said, and he somehow made it better, turning me on even more. I thought of how wrong it was (even more wrong than he realized), and felt incredibly dirty. I was such a bad girl! I was lying and betraying everyone all the time. And I wanted to be punished so much. He would be the one to punish me. Right there. Right then. With his manhood. He would push inside me with such force that he would make me scream.
And of course, he did. He didn’t even try to rid me of my panties. He just set them aside with one of his big hands, unbuttoned his tailored trousers with the other, and slid his member inside me without so much as a warning. I gasped, but his mouth covered mine and the gasp died in a new hot, wet kiss. He grabbed my legs and held me in the air, keeping me impaled in his cock. I held myself putting one arm behind his neck and tugging at his tie with the other. It was a fine tie, voluptuously silky, but strong as all hell.
“Damn,” he said, and he turned around until my ass touched the edge of his desk. He passed his arm over the surface, throwing papers and other things to the floor. I felt the touch of the cold glass in my buttocks as the warm mass of his virile member irradiated heat all inside me. My arm started sliding down his neck as I drifted back, then I let go and tugged at the tie with both hands, like a rider who mounted a horse from below instead of above. I hung from his tie as I started moaning and screaming in pleasure, contemplating Theo’s body against the sun that bathed the city through the glass, Theo still dressed, Theo looking more a bad boy and an alpha leader than ever, Theo pushing, pounding, time and time and time again, until I had to let go with a scream that must have been heard in all the fifty-two floors of the Lambert Tower. I lay there on the cold glass, feeling the delightful weight of his privileged body over mine, and fell asleep as I caressed the hair in the back of his head, as I felt the tender kiss of his lips going up and down my neck, marking it with his saliva as any savage beast would do.
I was asleep on Theo’s desk, my dress rolled up to my waist, when he went to play golf with the sharks. Fortunately, he had remembered to cancel his previous appointments.
12. BOUGHT
When the cold comes, it all ends.
I had got used to blushing and flushing as Theo unfolded his constant surprises. I’d grown accustomed to the heat: the burning sensation in my cheeks and my ears when I realized I liked being used, and sometimes in my buttocks, when he decided to apply some sweet punishment. The cold was different. The cold takes you completely by surprise, freezing your cheeks and lips as words refuse to take shape in your brain. It’s the chilly sensation when you realize you fucked up, or someone has blown your cover. I felt my whole body giving in to the freeze when I opened the Internet browser in Theo’s computer and tried to navigate to the Lambert Group website.
As soon as I pressed the "L" for Lambert, a cascade of suggestions popped down from the address bar. The first one was lambert group. The second one was my name.
There it was, in all its bolded, black-on-white, incandescent glory: lara everwood, one of the strings Theo had searched for in his browser. Not lara bold, but lara everwood: my real name.
How long had he known? Why hadn’t he done anything? Had he put me in charge of the computer so that I’d learn about it?
I knew him enough to know that this was the case. I realized now that Theo giving me access to his computer had not been an innocent gesture. Like everything he did, there was an ulterior motive to it. He wanted me to discover that I’d been discovered. He was manipulating me once more.
As always, Theo was two steps ahead of me, and this time I felt the danger, physically. My whole body felt it: it wanted to flee, run, jump, fly, go to the other side of the world or sink into the earth. I was alone in his property, it was late at night, nobody was waiting for me anywhere, and my enemy had discovered my secret.
And that was not all. Not by any stretch. There was this other thing.
When I was a little child, I was afraid of spiders. I mean I’m still afraid of them, but as a child spiders provoked a deep terror in me. We lived in a wooden house where spider appearances were unfortunately pretty common, so my childhood happened against a faint, subconscious backdrop of danger: the idea that I’d be living my life normally until one day, at any moment, one of those ugly monsters would appear and make me freeze in terror. And whenever it happened, it was every bit as bad as my anticipation had painted it. I’d get scared to death at finding that horrible creature climbing up a wall or running across the floor, and all my senses would tingle for long minut
es or even hours, way past the moment when the spider ran from me. I never killed any of those spiders. Not once. Not ever. I was too terrified of them. The mere thought of getting close to them to be able to hit them with something, the very idea of touching them by means of a shoe or a folded newspaper, filled me with dread and gave me nightmares. So I never even tried to harm those spiders. I just stood there, avoiding direct eye contact with the little monster but keeping it inside my field of vision, to verify that it wouldn’t appear by surprise again, crawling over my bare feet or falling on my curly hair. I purposefully prolonged my awareness of the spider as I tried to keep a passive control on it, not letting it get away from my peripheral gaze, but not trying to kill it either. After a while, the fear and the chill remained, but the horror subsided. The spider became a bit like any other object, something that was just there, as long as it was not moving or threatening me in any way. I blocked my terror by satiation, by overdose. And then it became numb. It was as if I was just looking, keeping something on check, without thinking about how horrifying it was, how bad it would be if it attacked me. After a while, I was even able to tune it out. The spider would run and hide in its little cave or something, and life would go on. Until the next one.
Some of this weirdness remained a part of me as I gradually became an adult. I had a way of blocking fear, horror and depression by overexposure, detaching myself from it instead of hiding from it or facing it directly.
I remembered Vanina’s eyes. The look of despair that she tried to hide behind her anger. I was feeling that despair, then and there. Until that moment, I had reacted like I always do, since I was a little child and something scared me. I had tried to be cautious and not open up to that feeling too much. I was certain that if I paid attention to it, I would feel it enlarging, trying to swallow me whole.
I had told Callie about it once. She thought it was the wrong thing to do. “You should open up to your own feelings and fears instead of building a wall around you,” she said. She really had no clue. She should be here in front of Theo’s computer, press Enter and stare at a page of results for her own name, I thought.
Or maybe she was right. What was it I was feeling exactly? I’d become a good wall builder. Too good, perhaps. Was I scared or ashamed? Did I fear Theo’s revenge... or Theo’s disappointment? Maybe I was terrified of not pleasing him. Did I want to please the man I had set out to destroy?
Look into your heart and you’ll find the truth, people say. But my heart is too well guarded. I can’t see clearly.
Maybe I don’t want to see.
* * *
The following day, we both knew my charade was over.
He arrived at the King of Hearts, greeted me like every other day, asked me about his appointments for the day, and disappeared behind his desk. A couple minutes later, he told me to cancel all his morning meetings and called me into his office. When I entered, I found him examining a folder that I recognized as my own file.
He gave a brief look at me and returned to the file in his hand.
“Lara Bold,” he said, as if it was the first time he saw the name, and made a thoughtful pause. “I bet you’re pretty bold, yes.”
Well, there was no denying that. Boldness had put me in his way, boldness had brought me here. Maybe it was all destined to end badly for me, but nobody could say I hadn’t been bold, precisely.
“Lara Bold. You might as well put Lara Fakeasfuck there,” he continued. “Do I look like a person who wears a mask? Do I look fake to you?”
I knew I was supposed to deny that, but the truth was that part of what I found fascinating about Theo was the way he’d keep his true feelings hidden behind a perfect mask. In that, we were very much alike, only he wore his mask in winner mode and I was just a poor girl who could only hope to isolate herself from her feelings to avoid getting hurt so much and so often.
And maybe I was being unfair to him in thinking that way. Maybe he was as vulnerable as the rest of us or more. Maybe his mask was so perfect precisely because his need of...
“I know who you are.”
Theo cut my meandering thoughts. There it was, his long held revelation. I had seen it coming, and now that it was here, I found nothing to say. Oh, I sure wanted to say something, but I was nullified, drowning (again) in the clear pools of his eyes.
I felt terrible, but it had nothing to do with what I feared when I woke up in the middle of a nightmare, one of those nightmares in which I was naked in front of lots of people, and there was Theo pointing at me and telling everyone who I was and what a bad girl I had seen, lying to him and betraying his trust.
I should have felt bad because my cover had been blown and I wouldn’t get my revenge. But I felt bad because this meant I’d lose him. What’s wrong with me? Turns out, almost everything.
“I’ve known who you are for a while,” he continued. “Why do you think I never said anything?”
He was studying me with his beautiful eyes, penetrating my soul like that other time when he was punishing me. I felt vulnerable, as if he had stripped me naked. No useful words came to me. I felt like someone had snatched the ground from below my feet and I was falling into the deep abyss of his gaze.
“I never said anything,” Theo Lambert continued, “because I wanted to know if you were worth it.”
“Worth it?” I echoed. I felt terrible, but the irony was not lost on me. I had spent all this time doing the same thing: in a twisted way, I had gotten more and more entangled with Theo because I wanted to know if he was worth it, if there was indeed a heart of gold hidden deep inside the wealthy jerk.
“I’ve told you that you are an asset, and it´s true,” he said, taking a sip from his wine. “But I wanted to determine if your value justifies the sacrifice I want to do. At the same time, you’re much more than asset to me. You’re just not like the others.” He waved his hand as he said this, as if he were physically putting aside all of his toys.
“Sacrifice?” I echoed again.
“Sacrifice,” he repeated. “I’ve made a big investment in your father’s company. Now tell me, Lara: how much are you worth?”
“How much am I...? What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” he said, getting closer, and I felt my knees weakening. I took a sip of wine to regain courage, but it didn’t work.
He was right. I knew exactly what he meant. As I realized what was happening, I closed my eyes and surrendered to the moment.
The understanding came cold and hard, as it often was with Theo:
He’s buying me.
“I have an offer,” Theo said. His hand grazed my arm, giving me goosebumps. My stomach was now home to a whole colony of butterflies. I knew what he was about to say, but it was so weird that I couldn’t believe it even when he’d finished. “I let go of Everwood Press. I give it back to Philip Everwood. In exchange, I get you.”
Well, there it was. Completely unreal, but at the same time, just as real as his blue eyes staring at me.
I took a deep breath and exhaled a nervous moan. It sounded awkward, and I blushed. I had to gather my last shreds of courage to be able to speak again.
“I’m worth it, then. So, may I ask what are the terms and conditions?”
“Oh, it does not have to be a legal agreement,” Theo said. I was sure there was no way to make it legal, either, but we were past that point. “I trust you, and I trust that we are on the same page here. I return Everwood Press to your father, and you’re mine. It means that you will be with me, just as you’ve been with me all this time, but in a full-time way, and with full benefits. I hope that’s clear.”
I never thought things would turn out this way. I wanted to get my revenge, not to be bought to save my father’s company. I should have felt outraged, ashamed, and furious. And yet, I couldn’t.
I thought of dad, of his face when he recovered the work of his life. I thought of mom, who had died right before the business took off, always pushing forward, always standing by h
im, cheering him on, licking his wounds, sharing his dream. I thought of the days I had spent as a child walking inside the tall maze of books that filled a good part of our house. Everwood Press was not a company. It was my father’s life. And mine, too, in a way.
I also thought of Theo himself. I tried to decipher what was behind his deep, clear gaze. He was giving up on the takeover because of me... because he wanted me beside him. Could that mean he actually felt something deep, significant for me? Was that his way of saying that I was much more than a mere toy to him? Was he telling me that I wasn’t just an asset, but someone he didn’t want to lose?
I didn’t have any answers to these questions, but I had an answer for him.
I said yes.
“A done deal,” Theo replied, savoring the moment. “There’s nothing I like more than a done deal.”
13. AWOKEN
“Hi, Dad.”
He looked basically the same as when he was in a coma: lying in his bed, covered with impeccably white sheets, with tubes inserted in different parts of his body and surrounded by medical equipment. But he was awake. That was the only thing that mattered.
“Hi, sweetie. How’s it going?”
He smiled when he said it. I didn’t notice any troubling signs in his voice or general appearance. He seemed to have gone out of the coma without any ill effects. But the doctors said he’d have to remain in the hospital for some time, while they made all the necessary studies and made sure he was indeed alright. The possibility of a new heart attack couldn’t be discarded, and this eventual second time could be worse than the previous one, even fatal. We had to be careful and avoid him any stressful situations, they insisted.
That’s why I decided to lie to him. Learning that his beloved daughter had essentially sold herself to the man who wanted to destroy his company would probably have given him a heart attack when he was in the pinnacle of his health; it went without saying that learning about it now would very probably kill him on the spot.
