He flipped her over, the tip of his cock stroking her as he moved away. She saw the blue flash of his watch again, out in the room, as he opened the bureau and searched through the drawers, his naked body highlighted in stark relief. A moment later he was back, placing the familiar blindfold over her eyes, then rolling her onto her stomach so that he could buckle it around her head.
She heard him moving about the room, and the click of a light switch, but she remained in complete darkness. He helped her out of the bed and across the floor to the corner of the room where she remembered the hammock-like contraption hung.
“Climb up onto the bench,” he told her, his strong hands guiding and lifting her as she followed his instructions. “Now stand. Turn. Lean back as if you were going to sit down. That’s it. A little further.”
The feel of leather unexpectedly brushed the back of her thighs, and she toppled backwards, her feet flying out from under her. The sling caught her, swaying gently, the curved leather supporting her from her shoulders to her hips.
Alex fastened the familiar fur-lined cuffs around her wrists and ankles, then lifted her arms straight up and clicked the cuffs to the chains supporting the sling. She could move her hands and arms a little bit, and grab the chains to ease the weight on them, but she couldn’t lower them.
A delicious thrill of fear tingled through her, making her heart race, and her sex wet. She was in his power now, and had no idea what he planned on doing to her.
He picked up one of her feet, and kissed the sole of it. She gasped at the unexpected touch. Then he lifted her leg straight up. Resting the outside of her thigh against the support chain, he bent her knee slightly so that the inside of her calf brushed the support chain, then clipped her ankle cuff to the heavy chain. A moment later, her other leg was similarly chained in the air, wrapped around the heavy support chain.
Hanging on her back with her arms and legs above her and her sex spread wide open, Keri felt incredibly vulnerable. She was completely exposed to him. Blindfolded, she couldn’t see his reaction, or know what he had planned. She was literally in the dark.
Her fears rushed to the surface. He gave her no clues. She didn’t know how to behave. She’d do something wrong and displease him, then he’d send her away. The same pattern had repeated throughout her school years, again and again. Who was she to think it would be any different now?
Then his mouth closed over her sex, his tongue sweeping between her folds, searching for her clit. She gasped, then moaned as he found it. His lips closed around the tiny bud, sucking and nibbling until it bloomed.
Keri clenched her fingers around the cold chains, seeking some point of reference as she swung in the darkness, waves of fire cascading over her from his skilled teeth and tongue. She lost all sense of direction, feeling as if she floated, or perhaps flew, and still his mouth plundered her wide-open sex, the rough stubble on his cheeks scraping the tender skin on the inside of her thighs as he feasted on her flesh.
She came in a crackling burst, like lightning flashing across her skin, quivering and jerking against the chains that contained her. Alex’s tongue moved faster, lapping the fluid that flowed from her body, and she moaned, recognizing the buildup to a second orgasm. She wanted to move, to rock her hips in time with his tongue, to urge him on, but she had no leverage, no solid ground on which to brace herself. Only the chains, twisting and swaying, and his mouth, devouring her with single-minded intent.
He placed his mouth directly over her opening, his tongue plunging deep inside. She moaned and whimpered, shivering and twitching, clattering her chains and spinning the sling until she felt dizzy. Then he sucked on her, hard, and she burst again, flooding his mouth as she screamed in mindless passion.
She panted, suddenly bereft of his touch, feeling alone and exposed as her wet sex pulsed with heat. Then his cock slid into her, thrusting deep in a single motion. Her muscles clenched around him, but he pulled out as quickly as he’d entered.
“Please,” she begged. “Please, Master.”
“I will,” he promised.
He thrust into her again, pulling the sling toward him as he did, so that he pierced deeper than before. With her legs chained up and out of the way, nothing interfered with his access to her, and he rocked her back and forth as he slid in and out, tipping her body so that the angle changed every time. Sometimes his cock thrust straight back, almost entering her womb, sometimes the head of it pressed along the walls of her vagina, stretching her to take him, and sometimes he ground his cock against the sensitive nerves at her entrance as he pushed inside her. She never knew what to expect. Soon she lost all sense of their bodies as separate entities, and felt only that they were joined together, stirring and churning to create an overwhelming ecstasy.
Buried deep within her, he swung her up and down and side to side on the chains, rocking her against him as she moaned and begged, tears pooling inside the eyecups of her blindfold. His breath was loud and ragged, harsh groans escaping from his lips with every brush of his balls against her, every time her muscles gripped his cock.
The rocking motion shifted, changing to short, sharp thrusts, as he crushed her against him, harder and faster, until he cried out and burst. He shuddered and shook with the force of his ejaculation, and she swayed and rocked with him.
“Oh please, Master. Please. Let me come, too.”
He didn’t answer, but his fingers slipped between their bodies and unerringly found her clit. He rubbed it, squeezed, then pinched, and her world burst into millions of brilliant stars, all floating and flying with her as she soared.
* * * * *
Keri finished her presentation to Mr. Carlisle, the President of Uninational, and returned to her seat on her team’s side of the oval conference table. She’d felt Thibodeau staring at her the whole time, trying to rattle her, willing her to fail. But she’d kept her cool, and proceeded with a flawless delivery of her team’s final proposal.
She preferred to deliver the pitch proposal, watching the client for subtle reactions that she could use to adjust how she stressed various items during the pitch. There were other team leaders, like Thibodeau, who preferred to have one of the team members deliver the pitch proposal, so that he could give his full attention to the client’s reactions, and plan the rebuttals and negotiations accordingly. But she always felt it was easier to be the favored proposal going into final negotiations. That put the onus on the other team to refute your claims, rather than forcing you to refute theirs.
Carlisle shuffled the papers in front of him, glanced at his note pad, then turned toward Thibodeau. “The most obvious difference in your solutions is the help desk. You want twice as large a staff, and to use the Internet only to enter problems in lieu of calling. Won’t that be more expensive?”
Thibodeau nodded. “If all you consider are the salaries, yes. The ‘savings’ created by putting more of the front-end solution on the people reporting the problems assumes that this work is in addition to their normal workload. But in four independent studies—the details are in Appendix B with the other supporting documentation—it was shown that what actually happens is that your key employees, the ones driving your sales and development, spend more time suffering from a problem and working unproductively before finally reporting it, take longer to get a problem resolved because of the time they waste trying to navigate the ‘tool’ supposed to assist them, and feel a greater level of frustration and impotence which leads to unhappiness with the work environment, and ultimately, the company they work for. By trying to save a few dollars on some low-level technical salaries, you risk losing your most productive, experienced people.”
Carlisle had listened intently to Thibodeau’s speech, nodding his head at the description of frustrated end-users. Thibodeau’s polished delivery, his deep, rich voice sounding like a radio announcer or evening newscaster, enhanced the believability of his words.
Keri blessed the added research she’d done on Sunday, accessing the company Win/Loss dat
abase and looking up all the proposals they’d lost to Thibodeau for any insight into the strategies he might use. She’d actually hoped he’d take this tack, and had her rebuttal well in hand.
She turned to Carlisle. “Mr. Thibodeau’s studies are correct. Our company reviewed the same material, two years ago when they were originally published. Instead of simply throwing up our hands and declaring automation a fool’s choice, we put our programmers to work developing a better tool. The key problem with all of the self-help automation used in those studies is that they do text searches for key words. While technical support people may apply technical words to a given situation, the end-user will likely choose different words, reflecting the impact when using the product. So someone reporting an application that ‘does not compute the sales ratios correctly’ won’t find a solution for a ‘currency conversion error’. We solved that problem by the use of an innovative thought-mapping system, which allows the end-user to choose among groups of related concepts, rather than being forced to guess specific matching words, as well as by allowing contextual error reports. A sample session of a common problem report is in Appendix C.”
Carlisle immediately flipped to Appendix C of her proposal. He hadn’t investigated Thibodeau’s Appendix B.
She fought back a smile. It wouldn’t do to look too smug. But she knew she’d read Carlisle correctly. He considered himself an intelligent, competent man, and his inability to use his company’s previous attempt at help desk automation had been a black mark against all future automation attempts. She’d reframed the problem as one of miscommunication, and offered a solution not to the automation problem, which he wasn’t convinced needed to be solved, but to the communication problem, which he knew existed.
He nodded his head, flipping the pages to look at other examples. “This is good. Both the engineers and the sales reps could use this.”
“And of course there are overrides,” she continued, closing in for the deal. “People who have reported similar problems in the past or who are familiar with the system, such as desk side support technicians, can skip any or all of the prompts to speed their entry of problems.”
The room was silent as Carlisle leafed through the remaining pages of the appendix.
“It’s proprietary, I assume?”
“Of course.” She favored him with a brilliant smile, finally allowing a pleased expression. “This is pre-announce information, which is why you hadn’t heard of it yet. It will be officially launched at next month’s industry trade show, but it’s been going through real-world testing at two of our other clients. They’re willing to serve as references. But the productivity studies we’ve done with them indicate end-users resolve their problems faster, and feel a much greater sense of ownership and accomplishment, enhancing their workplace morale.”
He glanced at Thibodeau. “Any comment?”
Thibodeau shrugged, but Keri knew his mind must be racing, trying to find a counter-argument. “There’s still the issue of trying to capture the information in this new format correctly, populating the database it uses with the knowledge from the support staff. You have a high initial cost of personnel resources that might not be recouped by slight future savings.”
“And that is an issue, if you choose to build an initial comprehensive database,” Keri admitted. “We propose that as our favored solution, because we feel it provides the best results in terms of end-user satisfaction and confidence in the new tool. But the option exists for situations to be entered as they are encountered, allowing the tool to be loaded with the most common problems first, and leaving less common situations until later or not at all. Optional solutions numbers three and four use this methodology, and the resultant cost savings are detailed in the solution breakdowns.”
The meeting continued for another two hours, hammering out the details of Uninational’s final solution. But both teams knew Thibodeau’s company would be unable to meet Uninational’s new criteria. As long as Keri’s team didn’t do anything to lose the account, the win was hers.
“That’s it, then. I look forward to receiving your best and final offers next Monday.” Carlisle shook hands all around, and left the room.
The two teams gathered their materials, packing up their laptops and calling their respective offices to get the urgent phonemails that had been left for them during the meeting. Thibodeau extended his hand across the table to Keri, in the manner of a tennis player reaching across the net after a match.
“Well done. That help desk tool wasn’t in your initial proposal.”
She shook his hand, surprised by how warm it was. She’d expected it to be cool, like him. But their handshake ended before she had a chance to analyze the sensation.
“A girl’s got to keep her secrets,” she answered, shrugging dismissively. He knew as well as she did that no one ever disclosed their big guns in the initial proposal.
His eyes darkened, and his gaze flitted down and up her quickly, as if searching for any other secrets she might be concealing. Her cheeks blazing, she lowered her head and turned away to continue stuffing her gear into her briefcase. He wasn’t reacting the way she expected, and that always threw her. It didn’t help that she really did have secrets, now. What would her teammates, or Heaven forbid, Thibodeau and his teammates, think if they knew how she’d spent Friday and Saturday night?
She was saved from further embarrassment by the interruption of one of his team who’d been checking phonemail. “Hey, Andy. Rosenberg moved the Thursday meeting up to Tuesday at ten. He wants to know if you can make it.”
He muttered a curse under his breath and immediately went to attack his new problem, leaving Keri feeling curiously abandoned. She didn’t question her good luck, and simply grabbed her briefcase and fled.
Her teammates caught up to her in the hall. Jimmy slapped her on the back. “Great job, Keri. You really nailed it.”
She felt the heat resurfacing in her cheeks, her mind returning to the weekend, and the way she’d been nailed by Alex. Was there no word that didn’t have a sexual connotation, now? She forced the images aside. But it was hard. The memories were so vivid, she fancied she could even smell the spicy scent of his cologne.
“It was a solid proposal. We all worked hard on it, to make it unassailable. The team deserves the credit.”
“Yeah, but you uncovered the details of the studies they used to support their proposal. That really sold Carlisle, making their data seem out of date,” Susan said.
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
“We’ll all be getting the big bucks for this one,” Jimmy answered. “I smell a signing bonus. And I know just what I’m doing with mine. There’s a sweet little sailboat down at the marina that’s been calling my name.”
They chatted casually about their plans for any bonus they received as they drove back to the office in Susan’s SUV.
“I thought I might take a vacation,” Keri said, after listening to Jimmy’s plans for a bigger and better sailboat, and Susan’s plans for redoing her kitchen.
“A vacation? This’ll be a big bonus,” Susan reminded her. “You’ll have to take a pretty big vacation to use it all.”
“Well, there’s the vacation wardrobe to be considered.”
Jimmy laughed. “Oh, this I’ve got to see. You? Buying clothes that can only be worn once? Watch your driving, Susan. Frogs are about to start falling from the sky.”
Keri grinned at his good-natured teasing, and turned around in her seat to face him. “I never said they could only be worn once. Just that they could only be worn on vacation.”
“Oh, so you’re not planning one vacation,” Susan said. “You’re planning a whole string of them. Gallivanting around the world, while we hold down the fort for you back here.”
“It was just an idea. I don’t even know where I’d go.”
But she knew who she wanted to go with. She imagined traveling someplace exotic, someplace that came alive at night, in the company of her mysteriou
s Master Alex.
“Ooh, I know that look!” Susan squealed. “You’re going with someone.”
Keri’s face heated again. It seemed to be a common condition for her today, no doubt related to how Alex had made her blood boil over the weekend.
“It’s nothing definite,” she mumbled. “Just an idea.”
“So who is he? Do we know him?”
“Knock it off, Susan,” Jimmy said. “She’s practically ready to climb out the window to get away from your questions.”
“Well, you’d tell us before you actually went anywhere, right?”
“Of course. Someone would have to cover my workload.”
Susan pulled a face. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“I know. So, Jimmy, tell me more about this sailboat of yours. How big did you say it was?”
Jimmy cheerfully filled the awkward silence with a loving description of his prospective boat. Keri smiled and nodded at all the right times, but her mind was a million miles away, thinking about Alex.
What could she tell Susan? After all, Keri had made love to him more intimately than she’d ever imagined was possible, and yet, she didn’t even know what he looked like. She’d pictured him as looking like Julian McMahon, but she didn’t expect that’s what he really looked like. It was a sign of how badly Susan’s questions had rattled her that she couldn’t even do that much, without Andy Thibodeau’s features getting tangled in her thoughts.
She stared out at the surrounding city scrolling by, a smile slowly spreading across her face. She’d faced down Andy Thibodeau, “The Shark,” and she’d won. She’d dreamed of this day, the day she’d finally prove that she was the best of the best. And she was.
It wouldn’t last, of course. There’d be other accounts she wouldn’t win, simply because her team couldn’t put together a cost-effective proposal that met all of the client’s needs. Other cases where her competitors would have proprietary software or services that gave them the edge. But for today, at least, she was on top of the world.
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