Her Hostile Takeover

by Chanel Ivy

  "Should we stop?" I asked her.

  "Hell no. I told Jamie, no interruptions, and I'm about to finish. I need to feel you cum too so whoever it is can wait until I'm done fucking you," she said between heavy breaths.

  I penetrated her again with two fingers using my thumb to rub back and forth over her clit. I felt her entire body tighten and then release as she cried out with pleasure. Her body clenched around my fingers, pulsating in waves as she screamed. Her orgasm slowed as her breathing returned to normal. She brushed my hair from my face, kissed me deeply, and bent down, getting on her knees. "It's your turn," she said as she pulled my tits from the cups of my bra and began to flick my nipples with her tongue playfully.

  She pushed me back as she kissed down my stomach massaging my thighs as she made her way down. She slid her fingers slowly into me with one hand and spread my lips with her other. Veronica licked me slowly as she quickened her fingers. She sucked and licked my clit with a rhythm that brought me to my climax. I arched my back with pleasure as I moaned her name and threaded my fingers into her thick dark hair pulling her mouth deeper onto my body.

  My whole body relaxed as my orgasm faded, and Veronica's tongue left my skin. I felt invigorated, but I also felt like I needed a nap. Veronica rinsed herself off and handed me a warm washcloth to do the same.

  "Grab your clothes and get dressed. We have more work to do," she said as she buttoned up her shirt and fixed her hair.

  "Right back to work, huh?" I asked, rubbing the warm cloth between my legs.

  "Yes. We've had our distraction for the day, and now I need to continue to prepare for my meeting with Jack Jackman Wednesday. I also need to find out who was so important that Jamie dared to defy my request for no interruptions," she said as she left me alone in the bathroom.

  Chapter 5

  I'm not sure what to think about her quick and cold exit after the passion we just shared. I guess I just have to pull myself together, get dressed, and show her that I can be ruthless too.

  I splashed some water on my face, fixed my hair, and gave myself a pep talk in the mirror before I left the bathroom.

  I walked over to the conference table that still had the remanence of our lunch on it and poured myself another glass of wine. Veronica was back at her desk, animatedly talking on her phone as I downed my drink. She looked up at me and rolled her eyes. Shit.

  I sat back on the couch and picked the blue Jackman binder back up and began flipping through it reading various paragraphs to myself as Veronica started yelling at whoever was on the other line. I didn't know what to do. Should I excuse myself and let her continue her conversation in private? My internal argument was interrupted by Veronica slamming the phone down on to its base with a growl full of profanities.

  I put the binder back down on my lap and cleared my throat, "Is everything okay, Veronica?"

  She slammed her fists down onto her desk hard, causing papers to flutter to the floor as she yelled, "No! Everything is not alright. That fucking waste of life Fred is like a disease. He won't go away. God, I hate that little shit!"

  "What did he do? Can I help fix it somehow?" I asked, genuinely wanting to do anything to make her situation better.

  "No, you... you are the problem."

  "Wait a second. What the hell is happening? What did I do?" I questioned, honestly appalled that I was implicated in something.

  "Did he send you? Did Fred tell you to start working here?"

  "No! Who the hell is Fred? I don't understand what's going on right now."

  "Fred is what's going on. The call while we were fucking was my security team reporting an issue with the internal surveillance camera feeds. I have them off when I’m in the office for obvious privacy reasons, but they showed the cameras being activated and were trying to notify me. The call I just hung up with was Fred telling me he just hacked into my video feeds and recorded our little tryst in the bathroom. He said he's going to sell it to the tabloids if I don't send him a million dollars in cryptocurrency. Damn it I hate that little fuck!"

  "Woah, you think I'm involved in blackmailing you. How could you say that?"

  "How could I not? It's so convenient that you walk in here all perky and Fred happens to hack my video feed at just the right moment? I don't know you. I'd be stupid not to suspect you."

  Tears filled my eyes, "I... I would never do that to anyone, I promise. And I'll have you know that I walked in here with no intention of doing anything other than work. I've never been with a woman before. You were my first. How the hell was I supposed to know that you'd need to pull someone from your team to go over the Jackman files? You picked me, remember?"

  "Shit. I'm sorry. I'm a little defensive when it comes to people trying to fuck me over. Unfortunately, I get this a lot. People like to try and screw me over. I better get Steve on damage control."

  "What do you mean damage control? You have to pay this Fred guy to go away. He can't release that footage to anyone. I can't have my parents see me like that!" I cried, my tears turning from sadness to frustrated embarrassment.

  "Tessa, don't worry. No one is going to see that video, and I'm not paying that little turd anything. I'll have my security team find whatever Fred or his family has that they don't want anyone to know and we'll use it to get the video. As I said, this happens to me a lot, so I know how to deal with asshats like Fred," she said as she picked up the phone again. "Hey Steve, I'm sure you've heard about our little video problem. Can you get the IT team working on that, so it never happens again, and I have a project for you that needs to be handled ASAP. Do you remember Fred DeCaro? Yeah, he used to work for me. Yeah, I know you said he was going to be trouble, that's why I fired him. Yeah, well next time I'll listen to you before I hire anyone else from now on. Listen, now that we know I screwed up, I need you to find Fred's skeletons and get them to me. I need to use whatever you can find to get Fred not to sell some private video he stole while he was in our system. I don't care how much you have to spend. And I need it done like five minutes ago, okay? Perfect. Thanks, Steve. Call me as soon as you have anything," she huffed as she hung up the phone and sat back in her desk chair.

  "Now what?" I asked, drying my eyes.

  "We wait for Steve to do what he does. In the meantime, can you start going over last quarters big buys for the Jackman account?"

  "Wait a minute. Someone just watched us being extremely intimate with one another, you have your people working on a way to blackmail him into not selling the footage to the highest bidder, and now you want to jump right back into work? My mind is in a thousand different places right now, and the Jackman account is not one of them. How can you jump right back into work like that? I feel so violated by this Fred person and now by you. How can you be so indifferent?"

  Veronica stared at me for a moment before answering, "What do you want to happen, Tessa? Do you think that just because we fucked, we're now in some kind of relationship? I don't do relationships."

  "Wow. Just wow. I guess what happened between us meant absolutely nothing to you then, huh? I was attracted to you the second I saw you. I actually had butterflies, but I guess the feeling wasn't mutual. I was just someone to play with."

  "Now wait a second. You don't get to do that."

  "Do what? I don't get to have feelings and tell you about them now that you've stomped all over them?"

  "Tessa... I... Ugh, I felt the same feelings when I saw you sitting at your cubicle today. When Greg pointed you out, I felt like I was back in high school, crushing on the new girl in class, but you have to understand..."

  "Understand what? That you're too good for me? That you have too much money and I'm too poor for you? That you have an apartment inside the building you own for the billion-dollar company you created along with a few other apartments and houses around the world while I can barely pay the rent on my shitty studio apartment in the worst part of Philly? Oh, I understand alright, I'm not good enough for you to be in a relationship with," I yelled as I stood and
slammed the Jackman binder on her desk.

  "No, you don't get it at all. I could give a shit about how much money you have, where you live, or who sees us together. I simply can't do relationships. My life is always too complicated, and if I let people get close to me either they are going to get hurt, or I'm going to get taken advantage of. I've learned to treat every relationship like a business transaction, like a hostile takeover. You do what you have to do to get the other person to trust you implicitly, so when you need to you can use that trust to get whatever you need from that person before they can do the same to you. It's eat or be eaten in my world, Tessa. That's just the way it goes. I don't want to see you caught up in any blowback I get from my business dealings. Case in point, you've been with me for literally five hours, and you're already a part of a blackmail scheme against me. I can't have anything happen to you. That's why we can't be in a relationship."

  "What the hell happened to you to make you so bitter? Did someone run over your dog when you were a kid or something?"

  "No one ran over my dog, but I didn't have the most pleasant childhood. I don't like talking about it though."

  "Well, either you talk about it, or I'm leaving. I can't focus on work while we wait for the call from your security people. You want me to think you truly have feelings for me, so be vulnerable. Show me I wasn't just a quick hook up and tell me about the real you."

  "Geeze, is it blackmail Monday or something?" she said, shaking her head and smiling.

  I turned and started walking towards the giant mahogany doors to leave.

  "Wait. Don't go. Fine, I'll tell you, but if you think you're walking out of here without signing a non-disclosure agreement, you've got another thing coming."

  "What?"

  "I'm joking! Well, I shouldn't say that. After whatever is going to happen with Fred, I'm sure my attorney is going to want you to sign an NDA anyway."

  "Really?"

  "Yes, really. I told you, that's just the world I live in Tessa. It's been a rough road to get to where I am today, but I think my cynical outlook started when I was nine. My brother, Jeffrey, was twelve, and he had a lot of issues being sick frequently. The doctors told my parents it would be best if he got his tonsils removed. My parents agreed because this was back when kids sneezed, they took their tonsils out, everyone knew someone who had it done, and it was a simple routine procedure." Veronica rubbed her face briskly and took a deep breath before continuing, "Unfortunately, my brother reacted badly to the anesthesia. He was dead within twenty minutes of them putting him under."

  "Oh my God, Veronica. I am so sorry to hear that. That's a terrible thing for a nine-year-old to have to go through," I said, reaching out to hold her hand.

  "Well, that's what any person with common sense would think, but not my parents. My mother would ask me why I was crying when she was the one who lost her son, her firstborn, her little boy. My father just shut everything out. He pretended nothing ever happened like Jeff didn't exist. He cleaned out my brother's room the day after the funeral. My father wanted to throw everything away, and my mother wanted to keep it all as a shrine in his memory, so my parents fought constantly. My dad was either at work or anywhere but at home. My mother was always crying and laying on the floor of my brother's room, drinking herself into oblivion. So, I found a friend in my older neighbor. She lived alone, was never married, never had kids, but had a semi-successful business in real estate. She would take me to her listings, and I would help her stage the houses to look more appealing. Most of the time she just had me box the owners' things up and hide them, she said most people wouldn't know good taste if it bit them in the ass. It was nice to have someone who cared that I was around, someone to talk to and treat me like a person, but then she started treating me like an adult instead of a child. She told me that in this world, you are either the predator or the prey. She said she was teaching me the only real way to get ahead in life, and her lessons were focused around using your sexuality to get what you wanted. She boasted that she had been with hundreds of men, and all of them gave her something she needed in return. She said I needed to learn how to do the same if I was ever going to get away from my shitty parents and be successful. So she showed me what to do. I'll never forget the first time she touched me. She took me to one of the vacant homes she was selling. It was an enormous mansion right on the beach. I remember looking out the wall of windows in the bedroom, and all I could see was the ocean and a lighthouse in the distance. I felt so happy. I was isolated and alone with no one to ignore me like my father. No one to tell me it wasn't fair that I was alive instead of my brother like my mom did... that was until Barbara found me alone. She went through the owners closet and pulled out a few outfits for me to try on. They were all on the skimpy side, but I was ten, and I was trying on designer clothes that cost more than my dad made in a month, so it was exciting. Well, until Barbara told me I had to change in front of her. She said I had to get used to being naked in front of people without caring that I was naked. She always told me, 'The more something makes you feel uncomfortable, the more you should expect in return for doing it.' She did everything in her power to engrain that into my brain."

  "That's disgusting. That woman was a pedophile, you know that, right?"

  "I know that now, but at the time, I thought that was how the world worked. Barbara did disgusting favors for people, but she got nice things in return. My parents didn't act like her, and they had nothing I wanted for myself. So she touched me, she showed me how to have sex and make it so over the top that you'd have the other person willing to do anything for you just to get more of you. She taught me about drugs and how they were so good that when people were addicted, they would do anything, even lie, steal, cheat, or kill to get more. She taught me that I needed to be the drug that people in power were addicted to. She was more than happy to trade me around to her friends and clients for sex. She said she was training me to be better at it and in turn better at manipulating people, but she was actually using me to make money for herself. When I turned sixteen, I had enough of being the one sucking dirty old man dick or letting them fuck me and not making most of the profit from these rich assholes. So, I planted drugs in her house, just enough to make sure it would be a trafficking charge that would land her in jail for a very long time, and I called in an anonymous tip to the police. I stood on my front steps and waved goodbye as the cops dragged her out in her silk robe and handcuffs on a Sunday morning. I had taken all of the cash from her hidey-hole in the floorboards when I planted the drugs, so I used the money to start investing. I still kept my dates with the rich assholes Barbara introduced me to, and I used what I had learned to get inside investment advice and build my empire from there."

  "Holy shit that's one hell of a story Veronica. I can't believe you made it through all that to be where you are today."

  "Yeah, well, I'm a survivor I guess."

  "What the hell happened to Barbara?"

  "Oh, she was sentenced to thirty years in a maximum-security prison. All of her friends were in real estate or finances, so none of them could help get her a shorter sentence. She should have made friends in politics or the judicial system."

  "How did she get so much time right off the bat?"

  "The drug bust I orchestrated was her third strike. She was arrested for prostitution when she was much younger. Before she found real estate and selling underage girls, I guess. Five years into her bid, she was stabbed for trying to rip off the wrong gang member. Serves her right."

  "At least she paid for what she did to you, even if she wasn't in jail for it directly."

  "Yeah, she taught me well."

  "Hey, you can't think like that. You did what you had to do to survive a shitty situation. Look how well you've done for yourself now, though. Let's not think about that awful stuff anymore. If you could go anywhere and do anything without having to worry about your business, where would you go, and what would you be doing?"

  Veronica looked at me tenderly th
inking of her answer before speaking, "I think I would be in the mountains somewhere. I love skiing, horseback riding, and hiking, so I would do that every day. What about you?"

  I smiled at her for being just as interested in my answer as I was of hers.

  "I think I'd be up in the mountains with you, sitting by the fire, writing poetry or drawing."

  "Wow. I never took you for the artistic type."

  "Yeah, my dad wanted me to get into finance because that's what he does, and he makes a decent living. My parents always pushed me to have a typical American dream life. A good career, money, a husband, kids, and a house with a white picket fence."

  "Is that what you’re shooting for? Is that what you want for your life?"

  "To be honest, no. My brother has all that, and for some reason, it's just not me. I see him with his wife and kids, and I don't envy him at all. Kids are messy and loud. I've never really wanted children. Even when my friends and I were little playing with our dolls, my girlfriends were always having their dolls get married and have babies, and mine were always traveling, trying new things, and definitely not having kids," I laughed at the memory of my adolescence.