Don't Ever Stop: A BDSM Billionaire Romance (2 page)

He was tall. That’s the first thing about him that really struck me. He was massive, towering over everyone else. He must have been six-foot-six, or close to it. He had wild, dark hair, that seemed to be straining against the close-cropped cut he had. I could tell it was thick, and coarse, jet black, not even a hint of gray. His face was hard, angular, and he had a serious expression in his eyes, no, not just his eyes, his expression was set into all of his features. A hard, uncompromising demeanor. And there was something about his eyes, what was it? They just seemed slightly, off. I’d never seen eyes like them. Thickly lashed, maybe blue, maybe brown, I couldn’t tell from this distance.

Time seemed to slow down as he approached the table. I got a chance to really study him. That’s when I realized: his eyes were different colors. His left was a piercing, hard blue, clear and bright as the sky in mid-summer; his left was the deep dark brown of autumn leaves, warm and soft and smoky. I’d never seen another man like him.

Then, just as he was about to walk past, his gaze flicked down and caught mine. I was gawping, clearly, just like every other woman in the room. He seemed to linger on my face for just a moment, and then, suddenly, he looked away.

I turned to Jen.

‘Who. The fuck. Was that?’ I said. I felt like all of the wind had been knocked out of me. No-one had ever made such a strong impression on me in my whole life. I felt like I was going crazy.

‘That,’ Jen said, making me wait, ‘is Mr. Redmond Cooper. Probably the richest, most powerful entity in this room.’

That
was Redmond Cooper?
That
was the reclusive, brilliant CEO of Global Media?
That
was the man that Time Magazine had rated as the most influential man in the media five years in a row?

Redmond Cooper was an industry legend. Aged nineteen, he’d started in the mailroom of his local paper, sorting the post and learning about the trade. Just five years later, he’d been the editor of the largest paper in the Midwest. Three years after that, he joined the executive team at Global Media. The rest was history. Everyone knew about Redmond Cooper - heck, he’d been used an example in my training of just how quickly hard work can be rewarded in the newspaper industry.

‘He’s probably a little bit out of your league,’ Jen said.

I felt a fierce blush spread across my cheeks, and then my chest. Thank goodness I was wearing a black dress tonight. If I’d been dressed in red I’d be looking like a tomato about now. And that’s
way too much red
for one person.

Patrick, who’d been speaking to a busty blonde who worked for one of the national papers, turned and joined in.

‘There’s all sorts of weird rumours about Redmond Cooper. Like, seriously weird.’

‘Well, yeah, but no one dares publish anything, because he’s just such a hard man. He can totally ruin careers. Or, you know, make them,’ Jen said.

‘Well,’ began Patrick, ‘I know someone who works at Global, who says that Mr. Cooper has never been – and will never – get married. His tastes are too…
narrow
, shall we say? Apparently, he likes to–’

‘Alright, Patrick, that’s enough,’ snapped Jen. ‘Rose doesn’t need to know all this stuff, for goodness’ sake. She’s only been at the company three weeks. Jesus. She might not even be here in a couple of months.’

My jaw dropped and Patrick raised his eyebrows, then shrugged at me. His gaze motioned towards her empty wine glass, as if to say
she’s drunk
.

‘I was just going to say,’ whispered Patrick, as Jen helped herself to more wine, ‘that I’d heard on the grapevine that Redmond Cooper is a bit of a–’

Suddenly, with a fanfare, the lights went down, and the awards began.

CHAPTER THREE

And The Winner Is...

So, I began to quickly realise that awards ceremonies are seriously boring. There is a lot of talking about ‘the industry’ and ‘the state of print media’ and ‘electronic content’ and ‘the blogosphere’ and lots of other really lame-sounding buzzwords that no-one really understands.

There were awards for ‘Best Opinion Piece On Foreign Policy’ and ‘Best Sports Article’, and they just seemed to keep coming.

Jen and Patrick were loving it, cheering and whooping when certain names got read out, drinking copious amounts of the free alcohol on offer, really going to town on the entertainment. I still felt like a total fraud, nervous and terrified. The thought that started to gnaw away at me was this: What if we actually won? What if we had to head up onto that stage, the three of us, and make a speech, and say thank you, and bow? I wasn’t even sure in my current, panicked state, whether I’d make it up the tiny set of stairs that led onto the stage.

Somehow, I just knew it was going to happen.

‘There’s no fucking way,’ Jen said, slurring the ‘s’ on
there’s
. She leaned over the table, her tits practically falling out of her top. I could see the older guy sitting opposite her getting a nice good view of her, licking his lips, the dirty old pervert.

‘Yeah. They’ll give it to The Post, again. Those fuckers win every year. I swear they steal all our fucking clients. They’ve got no respect for geographical fucking boundaries. It’s like I always say, why bother having…’ And Patrick was off, ranting about internal politics and the poor management of the team.

Then, suddenly, it was time. The chairman of the press society took his place at the rostrum. The words ‘Best Classified Advertising Team’ flashed up on the screen behind him, and he started to talk.

‘Classified advertising is the backbone of the Newspaper industry,’ he said. Honestly, I’m going to spare you the details of his speech, mainly because I was so nervous that I didn’t take any of it in. He was pretty damn boring to begin with, and my stressed-out mental state meant that I might as well have been somewhere else.

Finally, he drew in his breath and said, ‘Which brings us to the award. It goes out to a small team. A focused team. A team that brings tremendous results with limited resources. It goes to...’ A drum roll began to fill the room. I knew with every fibre of my being that we were going to win. I can’t explain why. But when he finally said, ‘The team at The Chronicle, Jen, Patrick and Rose!’ I thought to myself, of course it’s us. Of course we won.

Jen and Patrick went ballistic, hugging each other, and then as an afterthought, me. I did my best to appear as happy as possible, but let me tell you, it was hard. We began to start the impossibly long walk up to the front of the room, past the people who actually deserved to be there; past the press barons and the journalists and the sports reporters and the editors and the subs and the features writers and everyone else.

I climbed the stage with Jen and Patrick, with our arms linked, in a show of mock unity. Then, something weird happened. Jen looked at me with this kind of drunken intensity. She looked, well she looked evil, her eyes flashing murder at me. Then we were there, at the mic. Jen grabbed it from the hand of the chairman and tapped it twice.

‘Is this thing working?’ she said, forcing a weird laugh out of her mouth. ‘I guess so! Well I just want to say thank you to Patrick and to Rose for all of their hard work this year. I’m sure they won’t mind me saying just how difficult it is to work with two people who are so incompetent. Just kidding!’ she said. There were titters of laughter around the room, but this strange intensity that she was leaking seemed to be making people feel very uneasy.

‘No, seriously, I would just like to say though,’ she said, ‘what a breath of fresh air it has been to have Rose on the team. She’s so naive and inexperienced that it makes me and Patrick seem like geniuses.’

I was starting to feel really uncomfortable. Fuck fuck fuck, I couldn’t believe that Jen was talking about me like this. What was her problem?

‘And,’ she continued, ‘we’re really looking forward still to her first sale. We’re all sure it’s going to be a big one.’

What the fuck? That liar! I’d already made sales! I wanted to scream.

Then, she said: ‘Anyway, I heard that she’s not going to pass her probationary period, so we won’t have to put up with her for much longer.’

I didn’t know what to do. I looked around, my face starting to prickle with the hot terror of shame. I felt anger and shame bubbling up inside me. Then, feeling like a child, a pathetic child, I started to cry. As I tried desperately not to make any noise, and with tears stinging my cheeks, I walked off the stage. The room was quiet.

As I walked back to my table, I saw him, looking right at me. Redmond Cooper. His eyes were hard slits, and he was scowling. He looked furious.

CHAPTER FOUR

Letting Off Steam

Why on earth would you hold an awards ceremony on a
weeknight
? A Wednesday night, at that!

I wasn’t in a fit state to
move
the next morning, let alone go to work. I didn’t even think I’d had that much to drink… A couple of glasses of wine over the dinner, then a champagne for the toast. I only had a glass or two of champagne after that, too… It seemed like the polite thing to do. Paul, the fat man who ran Newsbiz, kept refilling our glasses and
literally
patting us on the back – so hard I almost spat out my drink. I swore there’d be a red handprint on my back this morning. But when I got up to pee, I checked myself in the bathroom mirror, and there was nothing there.

I surveyed myself in the mirror for any other damage last night had done. My pale green eyes had dark rings under them, exhausted from only four hours’ sleep. My skin looked a shade lighter, which made my freckles stand out even more than usual, and my brown hair, which I’d spent an hour curling last night, hung down in greasy ropes around my shoulders.

I only had twenty minutes to get ready for work, but I was going to need a shower. Fast. There was no way I could go in like this.

The sound of the shower tap turning on was a relief to my hungover ears. I stood shivering in my en-suite, waiting for the water to get hot. Thank goodness I had my own bathroom at my parents’ house. That was something. At least a little privacy on that front. I was totally embarrassed last night though, to have had my dad pick me up at the end of the night. My dad! Twenty-one years old, and my dad acts as my chauffeur. I couldn’t wait to save up enough money to get a place of my own. Unfortunately, I’d done the sums, and with the job I had now, it’d be a year and a half before I could pay off my overdraft and save up enough for a deposit. And that was just to rent somewhere. Ah well, for now, it was the small mercies. And right now, I was glad of my own shower.

The bathroom mirror began to steam up, a thick mist forming over my tired reflection, and I climbed into the shower, wincing at first at the heat, a little hotter than I was expecting. It stung my chest where it pelted down on me, and for a moment I almost enjoyed the sensation, but soon, I began to feel like it might take off a layer of my overly sensitive skin, so I switched down the temperature and set about cleaning off the remnants of last night.

It felt good to get rid of the debris of the awards ceremony. As I scrubbed off each layer of grime, memories from last night flooded back to me. The image of my dad, waving me over in the parking lot at two a.m. Sitting in the back seat of the car, in the position I’d always sat in since I was a child, on the left-hand side, behind the driver’s seat. As I looked out of the window, watching the last of the ceremony’s revellers, standing out on the sidewalk, warm and drunk and laughing, I remember catching the eyes of the man who’d dominated my thoughts that night: Redmond Cooper. He stepped away from the group he was with, watching my dad’s car drive away, and, feeling his eyes on me, I instinctively put my hand up to my mouth, swallowing away my embarrassment, frustrated with myself for crying onstage and making him look so furious.

And I remembered Jan too. How drunk she’d been when we all got off stage. That she’d told me my predecessor, Ryan, had been much more fun – that they’d been drinking buddies, that Ryan had
understood
her, that he’d been good at his job, too good, and that’s why he’d left. He’d gone on to better things, leaving Jen in this old place, with an Irish idiot (Patrick had gritted his teeth) and a young, Bambi-eyed pea-brain (I’d gritted my teeth). Shortly after that, Jan threw up on her dress and got a cab home, and Patrick and I had spent the rest of the night with Paul, having the obligatory pat on the back Paul seemed so keen on giving
my
back in particular.

As the hot water danced over my skin, I felt a little color return to my cheeks again. The scent of jasmine in my shower gel cheered me up, and I began to feel a bit perkier. Maybe Christina, our boss, would go easy on us after our success last night. And no doubt whatever state I was in, Patrick would be just as bad, and Jen would be off the scale. At least going in today would be a chance to clear the air with Jen. I was sure she’d just said what she said because she was drunk. I hoped so, anyway. I was terrified of another confrontation. If I cried again, I’d…

Even thinking about crying made me feel like I was about to set off again. Ridiculous! It had to be the hangover. I’d eat a couple of slices of toast. That’d sort me out. I had to stop being so weak. It’s like my dad always told me:
be strong to get along
.