BoardResolution (12 page)

“He never gave it back?” Matt raised an eyebrow.

She shrugged.
“Of course not.
As I said, he’d told me whining didn’t get you anywhere. It meant the things that mattered got taken away from you, and when you lose things from your own actions, you must learn from them.” Savannah shook her head. “Don’t look at me like that, Matt. I know it sounds dysfunctional, and maybe it is, but you know, kids from good income brackets get about everything they want these days, and for the most part, they
are
whiny, self-indulgent, spoiled brats whose parents don’t know how to say no to them. Geoffrey may not have been a loving, affectionate father, but he taught me everything I know about how to be successful.
How to be hungry only by choice.”

Reaching out, Matt put a hand to her face, startling her. She was immobilized by how good it felt, that human contact freely offered, pressed against her skin. “You were the best thing that ever happened to him,” he said quietly. “He had all the money in the world, and he got his most valuable acquisition the day you were born. And not just because you could run his company better than he could run it himself.”

Savannah didn’t know what to say to that. She looked toward the bottom of the stairs. “It’s odd no one’s walked by here to disturb us.”

“I told them there was free food in the main courtyard. It drew them off. Here.” He offered her his plate. “As I said, the food’s quite good.”

“Of course.”
She shook her head at it. “Geoffrey already had his menu planned out. It wouldn’t be less than perfect. Hungry by choice, remember?”

“The best kind of hunger there is,” he said. Suddenly, she knew exactly where his knee pressed against hers, and what hunger he was talking about, because it had her lower extremities in a perilous grip.

“I want to give you something for later.” He broke the charged silence between them. Withdrawing the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket, he folded it into her hand, his own remaining over it.

“What, is my makeup running?”

“No. It’s for when everything about this day hits you, and you finally cry, even if it’s for no other reason than you don’t feel like crying and
that
breaks you down.” He rose. “Keep the coat until you’re warm. I’ll get it back later.” Then he leaned down and kissed her forehead, just a gentle brush of lips, his hands holding the lapels so she was in a light embrace within the jacket. “I’m here if you need me, Savannah. I’m always here. Come down when you’re ready. Lucas and Jon are in the foyer hallway, keeping people from coming this way. You don’t have to come down at all if you don’t want to.”

“Of course I do.” The dangerous temptation of such an image broke the spell. She rose to her feet, slid the jacket off her shoulders and handed it back to him. “I don’t need this.” But she kept the kerchief. It was a gift, after all.

She was on the step above him, so their positions put them at eye level. His expression had hardened with an emotion she couldn’t read as he studied her face. In a surprising move, he suddenly slid an arm around her back and legs, swung her up in his arms and turned, carrying her down the steps.

“Matt,” she hissed. “What are you doing?”

At the bottom, he let her feet touch the floor, but he held her elbow another moment. “That was to remind you that someday, you might need someone else to carry the load for a while. And you can trust me to get you where you need to go, no matter how steep the hill is.
Up or down.”

He left her there, amazed, speechless. Oddly happy and hurting at once. And that was when she used the handkerchief for the very first time.

* * * * *

She’d kept it folded under her pillow ever since.

The fuzziness receded and she became aware of her surroundings again. They’d adjusted the chains so she was level and turned her over so she was once again on her stomach. She was lying on the table, still bound, but the straps had been loosened back to their prior snugness, rather than the snugness that had been necessary when she didn’t have the back support. They’d also let her head down so her cheek was on the table.

Matt was sitting in the chair, leaned forward, his face no more than a foot from her.

“I guess we got a little carried away. You carried us all away. You were something else.”

She
coughed,
her voice raw from her screaming. “But I’m still tied up. So you’re not done with me yet.”

“I’ll never be done with you.” He drew even closer, so the depths of his brown eyes were all she could see. “You’ve scared yourself, and you’re retreating again. I can see it. I’m not going to let you. I’m going to feed you.”

A weak chuckle, somewhere close to a sob, broke from her abused throat. A throat that remembered vividly what it was like to have him slamming against the back of it. “You can’t bribe me with food, Kensington, at least not unless you plan to keep me like this for several days without food and water.”

“An intriguing possibility.”
He cocked his head. As sensation returned to all her limbs, she realized he was stroking her forehead, playing with her loose hair. “Actually, while manufacturing this invention and renovating the room for it, I’ve thought about it a great deal. Imagining what it would be like to have my woman suspended in it every day, accessible to me whenever I wanted to play with her nipples, slip my fingers or cock into her wet cunt. Put her on display for business associates who come in here for meetings, a mesmerizing centerpiece for my conference table. I think my competitors would give me anything for the privilege. But just to look at you. No man other than those in this room tonight will ever touch you again. You’re mine.”

That harshness came to his eyes again, and just as naturally as command came to him, resistance to capitulation flooded her. But this time she had no sarcasm to offer, just simple denial. “No,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he responded, just as quietly. He supported her skull in his hands as he readjusted the straps so her head was lifted, her facial expressions exposed to them all again. The chains tightened and she was raised from the table, only this time she was only lifted about two feet, and it was her upper body that was raised higher than her lower, so her breasts thrust out at Matt at eye level, in a blatant display that roused an embarrassing heat along her throat and face. His eyes followed the track of it, and when his gaze got to her face, his own fire was a match for it.

“Here.” Lucas slid a small plate to Matt’s elbow and Peter placed a gold-edged wineglass next to it. Savannah smelled the rich scent of red Merlot.

“You need to eat and drink,” Matt said. “We don’t have a good strategy for getting rid of your body if you die from too much pleasure.”

His eyes glinted with humor, and she bared her teeth at him. He brought the tumbler to her lips, cradling her cheek with his hand, touching the corner of her mouth, compelling her lips to part. The angle was awkward with her position, and before she could take more than a sip, he took it away.

“A better idea.”
There was a pause while he took a swallow. She wondered and imagined and then hoped, and then his mouth was there, sealing over hers, opening, letting the wine on his tongue spill onto hers, his hand still along her face, the grip of his hand moving along her throat as if to help her swallow the liquid.

She didn’t drink much, having a low tolerance for alcohol, and just this swallow was made more potent by the method of delivery, by his care for her, by the stroke of that tongue on hers. He pulled away reluctantly, and then she smelled one of the snacks they often brought in for meetings from the gourmet deli down the street. Goat cheese flavored with thyme, wrapped in a finger-sized, seasoned flatbread.

“Your favorite, I believe,” he said, those eyes watching every inflection on her face, his own expression still a little intimidating, reminding her that he was not going to brook resistance. Savannah decided she was going to let him win this minor point to fortify
herself
and regroup. She wanted to try a different strategy.
An experiment, really.

She ate the entirety of it from his hand, even obeying the sensual urge to clean the soft cheese off his fingertips, taking the taste of his skin with it, those strong fingers resting in her mouth.

The tension and lust poured off him as she did it, and she knew her experiment was successful. It wouldn’t be easy, but with the power of that knowledge, she knew she could turn this to her advantage, make him
her
slave if she wanted to.

But something else came with the thought. Anguish. She didn’t want to make Matt a slave. She wanted his harshness, his power, his command. She wanted the tender protectiveness and chivalry as well, and wondered if there were even more gentle sides to him than he’d yet revealed to her, aspects of his personality that might exist in a softer world, one outside these corporate walls.

“God, you make me insane, Savannah,” he muttered.

Join the club
, she thought. “How did you know these were my favorites?”

It was Lucas who spoke. “You don’t eat much that we have brought in. Or at least you didn’t at first. But then we started noticing the things you would eat, more than once.”

“We wouldn’t touch any of those,” Peter put in. “And made sure that portion of the tray was closest to you. Then we figured out if we ordered more of that type of snack, you’d eat more.”

Southern etiquette.
Never eat the last one.
She remembered a gradual increase in the food she’d eaten at their sessions, an ample variety of her preferences present.

“We made it a competition, coming up with foods we thought would become your new favorite.” Peter laughed, caressed her bare calf from somewhere out of the range of her vision, reminding her forcibly of the view he had of her spread legs. “I knew you’d love those chocolate cream finger cakes.”

“I lost a five hundred dollar bet on it,” Lucas grumbled good-naturedly. “I was sure you’d pick the caramel creams.”

“When Ben baked the cakes himself and slid them on the tray like they came from
Dean and Deluca’s
? Not a chance.”

Savannah choked. “Ben baked…”

“It isn’t the sleazy lawyer routine that gets him women. It’s his culinary skills,” Jon added.

“Yeah, like you don’t use the lost angel thing to seduce women.” Ben snorted outside of her vision.

“Five hundred dollars on whether or not I’d eat a sweet?”

Matt dabbed at the corner of her mouth with one finger, put a missed bit of goat cheese on her tongue. “We always have a betting pool running on something. At the end of the month, the winnings go to the preferred charity of the final winner.”

“What’s your chosen charity?” she asked.

“A man’s charities are a private thing. Not manly to discuss,” Lucas interjected.

“And I think our guest has recovered enough,” Matt said, his eyes studying her face.

Anticipation sprang up in her, thick as heated blood.

She wasn’t sure she could take anything else. Emotionally, she felt as delicate as an eggshell, just Matt’s words creating a shiver through her body. But wetness touched her thighs, her pussy leaking a tiny drop, her body’s betrayal of her interest. It was as if Matt’s multiple-layered strategy had already trained her body to such a level of sensual awareness that the mere suggestion of sexual activity could get her revved up again.

He
rose
, his fingers whispering across her cheekbone, and leaned over where she could see him touch the table controls. The motor engaged and she was moving along the track, down the table, and as she turned in that direction she saw she was going to the very end, where Peter had moved and now waited, just to the right of the rounded table end.

Peter would have looked more at home at a monster truck rally. With a corner lift to his mouth at almost all times, as if he were sharing a private joke, he had a soft Southern drawl and a way of wearing his clothes that suggested he’d be most at home in jeans and a T-shirt from a seventies’ rock band. His fingers would tap restlessly as they conducted their meetings and at times she’d hear him humming a heavy metal tune under his breath. He wore his hair cropped in a short military cut that emphasized the strong lines and corded neck of a bodybuilder. He wasn’t a bodybuilder, but an Army reservist. He spent a great deal of time staying in shape to serve his country if called. He’d taken a leave from Kensington to volunteer for a year tour in Afghanistan. During that time Matt had casually mentioned many were sending shoebox care packages to the soldiers. He’d left her a copy of the instructions that were circling the corporate offices, encouraging participation. In the margin, he’d noted how to get one specifically to
Peter,
if she wanted to have her staff make up one for him.

Before she knew it, she was collecting items, especially as she had watched the news reports and thought of Peter’s face, the laughter so often in his gray eyes, the strength in those broad shoulders, a strength that the media footage made clear could be erased in an instant by the fragile reality of mortality.

Moist
towelettes
, sample-size toiletries, a pack of playing cards she’d found that had images of New Orleans integrated into the depictions of numbers and royal personages. She remembered he had a weakness for ice cream and put in a bag of hard candy that boasted fifty-one flavors similar to ice cream.
The latest Dean Koontz novel and a
Nightcrawler
X-Men comic book.
The others called him
Nightcrawler
, because they claimed he preferred trawling the New Orleans nightlife over sleeping.

And then she put in something she hadn’t expected to buy. On one of her layovers, when she was browsing in an expensive airport jewelry shop, she’d seen a gold St. Christopher medal. She’d purchased it with not a thought for the three-figure price, because it didn’t matter. Getting him back safely did.

She’d never done something so…nurturing before. Filling the list in the privacy of her home, she didn’t involve her staff. She even mailed it herself.