“I need a cigarette after that,” I said quietly, grinning like a fool. Michael pulled me into his lap again, lighting my cigarette for me the minute I had it to my lips and handing me my glass of champagne. I took a long sip of the cool, bubbly wine, still catching my breath. I realized suddenly that I was beginning to entertain feelings for this mysterious man, and made a firm resolution against doing just that. I was fleeing the government—whether or not the government had discovered my crimes already. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know whether or not my theft had been found out.
“Ready for bed?” he asked me, his hand idly caressing my leg. I smiled slowly, finishing off my champagne in one long gulp.
“I should probably spend at least a little time in my own quarters.” Michael looked at me for a long moment before nodding. He poured me another small glass of champagne, bringing my face to his for a quick kiss before drinking from his own.
“If you’d like to meet tomorrow, I’ll be in the same place as I was today in the afternoon. Apparently you’re supposed to socialize on these cruises.” I laughed.
“Against my better judgment, considering I barely know you, I’ll probably find you.” I could still feel Michael’s hands all over me, touching my pussy, teasing my breasts. I stood up, finishing my champagne and stubbing out my cigarette in the ashtray the cruise ship had helpfully provided. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I told him, going through the French doors and making my way through his stateroom slowly. I didn’t really want to leave; I mostly felt as though I should. My slowly developing feelings for this man were nothing but a liability to me, I told myself firmly. No matter how charming he was. Or how good a lay.
Chapter Four
In spite of my deep, satisfying exhaustion, I didn’t sleep very well when I got back to my stateroom. I could still feel Michael’s throbbing cock when I closed my eyes, and as I stripped out of my skirt and blouse, I realized that I hadn’t thought to pick up my panties on my way out. Although I told myself that I would put off seeing Michael as long as possible, I knew I would give myself an excuse to meet up with him as early as I could the next day. His ability to utterly obliterate all of my anxiety was too good for me to force myself not to see him. I didn’t even bother putting on pajamas but crawled into my bed—not as spacious, nor as richly dressed, but still comfortable—and turned off the lights in the room, hoping I would fall asleep quickly.
I didn’t. Instead I alternated between fantasies about seeing Michael again and terrors of what would happen to me if I was captured before I disappeared in Mexico. Occasionally, for a change, my brain would give me flashes of how I had ended up in this conundrum. Staring at the ceiling, I imagined Michael and me meeting up at the bar on the deck. I thought of his warm, controlling hands all over my body, of his lips brushing against my neck, my jaw, my lips. In my fantasy, Michael led me into a hidden alcove, somewhere close to the lifeboats, and slowly stripped me naked right there—where anyone at all could come upon us. He grinned at my discomfort, telling me that as long as I was quiet, no one would investigate. “How long do you think you can take it, my dear?” he asked me, touching me all over, driving me insane with lust. I remembered the sensation of his cock inside of me, the way he had teased and pinched and rolled my nipples with his fingers both of the previous times we’d had sex. I reached up and touched my chest, recalling the pain in my shoulders, the pressure of the railing against me as Michael had thrust into me from behind.
The fantasy melted away and my worst nightmare filled my mind; I was caught, some federal agent had tipped off the cruise ship and they were waiting for me when we reached Mexico. I disembarked from the ship, and my stomach fell with a lurch as I looked up and saw somberly-dressed agents standing on the doc, looking impersonal and utterly impassive as they watched the crowd for me. Spotting me, they walked quickly, and I started to run in the opposite direction. I obviously couldn’t get back on the ship—that would have been ridiculous. I tried to get lost in the crowd; even though I knew it was utterly useless. Once I tried to go through customs, I would be detained. But the instinct to flee was impossible to suppress. If only Michael were here, I thought, glancing around me to see how close the agents were. I didn’t know why I thought Michael would be able to help me; as wealthy as he surely was, it wasn’t as though he had any say in what a federal agent did and didn’t do to a criminal. Certainly he couldn’t prevent me from getting arrested. Whenever I looked, it seemed, the agents were gaining on me—never enough to catch me outright, but a little closer each time. I was panting for breath, panicked and trying to think of a way to get away from them for good. I couldn’t go into any of the closed areas—the agents would just follow me in, search for me in the more confined space.
I felt hands on me, and I looked around wildly to see that the agents—dressed oddly in exact replicas of Michael’s suit from when I first encountered him—had caught me. Each agent had hold of one of my arms, and they were forcing my arms behind me, quickly locking handcuffs around my wrists. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder how they had known exactly how I would look—though my efforts at something approaching a disguise were certainly not elaborate, I had undertaken them the very night before I left. Somehow, they had known exactly how I was going to look coming off of the cruise ship. I hung my head, my heart pounding. I was an American—there was only so much that they could do—but I knew I was going to be charged, tried, and convicted. Rightfully, I should be. I was absolutely guilty of a crime. They led me into an interrogation room, sitting me down at a table and taking out a manila folder that had my name on it. They opened up my suitcases, finding the small one that had the $300,000 I had embezzled. Why in the world had I embezzled cash, I asked myself—and suddenly I was remembering exactly how the situation had started, exactly how I had started on this course of events.
It had been months before my escape. One day, like any number of days before it, I had been at work. It was sometime in the middle of the afternoon—in those hours that seem to drag no matter how busy or slow the day is. I was working on a sales report, poring over spreadsheets and compiling data and trying to think of how best to phrase the conclusions that Larry would have to report. Larry, my boss, had a certain low cunning, but he couldn’t operate anything outside of his email program (and he occasionally had problems with that). It amazed me, because Larry wasn’t much older than I was—maybe 36 or 37. How he had managed to grow up and go to college without exposure to basic computer programs I had no idea. It occurred to me, more than once over the three years that I worked in that office, that Larry really did know how to use the programs—he played dumb to make me do his work for him. Certainly I didn’t have any power to choose not to do his work anyway.
Larry came to “check on my work.” I tried not to flinch away from him as he hovered over my desk, just behind me. Instead, I focused my sights on the screen in front of me and told him what I had compiled, what the research suggested, the projections, how I was weaving it all into his proposal. I hoped that he would be just as bored by the details as I was, and would hurry away with the excuse of taking a client call. That happened a lot—whenever I got into a longwinded explanation, Larry suddenly remembered that he had a client call that he had to get to. Important things brewing for Larry. Instead of running away, however, Larry leaned in closer, and I could smell the sour alcohol dregs on his breath as he hung over me, his hand on my shoulder. He was pointing to something on the screen. “What’s this?” he asked. I took a deep breath and made myself remain calm, even though I was revolted.
“That’s this quarter’s projections,” I said, re-launching that part of my lecture. Larry’s hand “slipped” and he was groping me suddenly, massaging my breast through my blouse slowly. I moved his hand away.
“Sorry about that, Kat,” he said, starting to chuckle in his heavy voice. “That shirt material’s slick.” I gave him a curt smile, turning back to my screen. I glanced at my blouse at the corner of my vision, convinced
that I would find it smudged with a greasy handprint where he had touched me. While Larry never was actually greasy—except for his hair—he always gave me the impression of being thoroughly and completely coated in slime—or maybe flop-sweat. I hated his tendency to call me “Kat.” I hated his stupid jokes about how slippery the material of my clothes was—his excuses for touching me. I droned on, explaining things until Larry finally left, too confused to comprehend what I was saying and too proud to ask for a better explanation. I wasn’t even sure what Larry said in his much-vaunted meetings—he never had a clue what was in the material I gave him.
Sitting at my desk after Larry had left, I suddenly felt enraged. For years I had taken Larry’s bullshit excuses, for years I had done his work for him and let him take all of the credit. No one in the office gave even a little bit of notice to the fact of my situation. I had gone to Larry’s boss about him early on; the man in charge of Larry’s department had asked if I was mistaken—“After all, sexual harassment is a serious charge.” He told me that he was sure Larry didn’t have any intentions behind it—after all none of the other women he had worked with had ever complained. He even had the nerve to imply that I was reading too much into the situation because of some bizarre kind of narcissism. Instead of marching out of the job when that happened, I had told myself that I would just keep the job long enough to find something better. When nothing better appeared, I convinced myself that it was all in my mind. But it wasn’t, and I wasn’t getting any younger. There weren’t enough job openings available for me, and anyway what was I going to do? Go and be a secretary somewhere else, where likely I’d have the same issues as here? That wasn’t the solution.
Part of my job involved cash handling; the amount of cash that flowed through the office was kind of incredible. I handled the vending machine money, the deposits that had to be entered into the bank account, everything for the department. It was actually fairly easy to take the money. I would alter the records for what the vending machine take was, skimming ten or twenty dollars every week—never enough to be truly noticeable, and all of the records of the money were made by me anyway. There was no oversight at all. Another trick I used was to count the deposit before I went to the bank and remove ten or twenty dollars there—and again, the deposits and their records all went through me. It took a little rudimentary changing on reports to show that the deposits were the correct amount, that everything was as it should be. Every large sum of money that passed through my keeping left my hands a few bills shorter. And then I got access to the bank account itself—withdrawal privileges.
The last month before I left my job for good, when I had gotten the much-vaunted withdrawal privileges, I started falsifying expense reports. I would add on a little here, a little there, and feed my growing stockpile of cash. I withdrew a little more than I needed to cover the cash needs, covering it up by changing the amounts on the records. I found a way to get my cruise on the expense report—making it someone else’s business entertainment expense by booking it one way, expensing it, and going back to change it privately after it had been paid. I even got the company to pay for my new wardrobe. By the time everything was in order, I had my $300,000 in cash packed away neatly, my documentation—with an assumed name, of course—and everything set for my “vacation,” from which I would never return. In case the company hadn’t figured out what I had done, I had an excuse for my extended absence, which would buy me a little more time to disappear.
Remembering the whole process of my crime, I pictured Michael again. I slipped in and out of sleep, waking on a scream during dreams of being apprehended by the feds, or boiling in anger as I remembered Larry and the way he treated me, or starting into complete wakefulness by the intensity of my arousal, my pussy wet and ready for more of Michael’s particular brand of stress relief.
By the time I finally gave up on the idea of deep, restorative sleep, it was morning anyway. I managed to get out of bed, and decided that the best way to get on with the day was a long, hot shower. I made my room service order for breakfast and crawled out of bed, picking up my robe on the way into the shower. In a few short days, I would be in Mexico. I’d already made my plans, worked out where I could live, how I would live. I stepped into the shower and turned it on hot, letting it drench me for a few long moments. I had a place to live chosen, and I had everything set up for my arrival. In a few months or a year I’d move on to another place. I’d lose myself in the country, keeping tabs on whether or not my crime had been discovered. Since my parents had passed away, I didn’t have anyone to be responsible to, ultimately—no one to worry about my whereabouts. As I shampooed my hair, I considered Michael again. I was able to laugh at the fact that my conscience was so troubled, that I was so worried about being caught, that I had immediately assumed that a man staring at me in a nice suit was a federal agent. I shook my head, rinsing my hair and reaching for the body wash I had packed.
Of course, thinking about Michael made me remember everything that had happened the previous day—and the previous night. I couldn’t quite stop myself from remembering the way he had spread my legs apart, the feel of his mouth against my pussy. The fact that he hadn’t seemed phased by my admission of embezzlement was interesting. I considered what he had told me about his life; how tawdry it was, ultimately. As we had been walking up and down the deck together, he had told me all about boardroom showdowns, fanatical yes-men who worked for him and who couldn’t quite seem to get the hang of telling him things as they really were. As I scrubbed myself from head to toe, I considered what it would be like to show up to some big event on Michael’s arm. I giggled, soaping up my pussy and giving myself a tentative touch, parting my labia and stroking my clit slowly. In some imaginary world where I could be publicly acknowledged as Michael’s paramour, I would have plenty more sexual interludes with him. But then, I thought, standing under the showerhead and letting the soap sluice down my body, in that imaginary world, how would I have ever even met Michael?
I finished showering and got out just in time for the room service to arrive. I wrapped a towel around my wet hair and tied the robe sash tightly around my waist, answering the door and smiling brightly at the crew member who brought my food. I gave him a good—but not noticeably huge—tip and sat down at the table in my room, breathing in the aroma of the strong, fresh coffee. I still felt tender and sore all over, but I smiled to myself as I had breakfast, thinking of how I had gotten in that state. It couldn’t hurt to see Michael while I was onboard, could it? I knew I was rationalizing, but I didn’t care. I realized that my rationalization depended largely on my trusting Michael’s story. I should know well enough by now not to do that, shouldn’t I? It wasn’t like I hadn’t encountered men lying before. I needed to get my head straight on the issue. Either Michael was lying or he wasn’t. He didn’t have a wedding ring on, but that didn’t provide me with evidence either way—if he was married, he could’ve just taken it off. Even with what he had divulged to me thus far, Michael was still largely a mystery to me. I didn’t even know his last name, for crying out loud.
What did I know about him? He apparently knew food and wine quite well. He had been able to afford an enormous stateroom on a cruise that was fairly pricy to begin with. He was an incredibly good lay, and had very good talents in the area of oral sex. He dressed well. Anything or everything he actually told me could be a lie. With that in mind, did I still want to see him? I picked at the last few bites of cut fruit on my plate and thought about it. But there was really no point in thinking—I knew I had already made up my mind to see him again. I put aside my dirty plates and went to the tiny closet that housed my wardrobe. I had unpacked as soon as I was onboard; in addition to not wanting my clothes to be wrinkled, I figured it made sense for me to have them ready to wear when I was going to be onboard for several days. I picked out a new shirtdress that I had bought shortly before my escape, something that would be easy both for wearing and for undressing. I picked out a pair of heels as well, a
nd quickly got dressed. I considered foregoing panties—it had certainly served me well the night before—but decided that the risk of exposing myself to other strangers was too high compared to the reward. Besides, I remembered quite well how well Michael was capable of teasing me even through panties. I smiled to myself as I got dressed, the caffeine hitting my system and allowing me to feel optimistic again. It was a fling, it was fun, and soon I would be in Mexico, away from the government and any recourse against the money I had taken. What was there to be afraid of?
Love In Handcuffs: The Secret Billionaire (Part One) (BDSM And Domination Erotic Romance Novelette) Page 4
