When in Rio (8 page)

“Just…just me…
aaah
…” His fingers had moved at last but on encountering more smooth skin, he stopped again and lifted his eyebrows sharply.

“What have we
here
? Not hair, obviously. Oh God. Do you keep it like this all the time?” Jack slid his hand that crucial inch to the side at last and cupped my mound, his sensitive fingers tracing the delicate, clean-shaven lips.

“Yeah…”

“Yeah?” he repeated in clear disapproval, but not of my shaving practices. My eyes flicked open to see him looking at me expectantly.
Blue.
“Answer again, and answer right, Katie.”

“Yes Sir,” I offered, and sank into his responding smile.

“Good girl,” he whispered, kissing my mouth now as gently as his hand was fondling my pussy. “I like it like this. I wish I’d known this the other day when your jeans tore—it would’ve provided me a whole new level of visualization.”

“You
saw
that?” I was horrified, although I wasn’t quite sure why. At least the mailroom guy hadn’t been the only one, and the idea of Jack sneaking peeks at my butt without my knowledge…

“Of course I did,” he said matter-of-factly. “You had bare butt showing at the office, you didn’t think I’d notice? I had to close my door to get any work done, and even then…” His fingers slipped around the side of my thigh to caress the spot that had been displayed through the hole in my jeans, just at the crease between my ass and the top of my leg. “Very distracting. You’re very distracting to have around the office, Miss Snow. You always have been.”

“Is that really why you brought me here?” I could have kicked myself for asking, but something drove me to find out now,
before
. “To see if this would take the edge off? Known quantity’s less distracting, that sort of thing?” It was easy to think more clearly when he pulled his hand away from my ass, but I still felt the loss pretty keenly. Kendra’s cautions seemed so far away, so irrelevant, although they still nagged at the back of my mind where common sense was trying to keep me from diving off into the deep end.

Jack backed away a little, scowling, his fingers still pressing into my wrists fiercely. “Would you be here right now if you believed that?”

I realized the answer even as I responded. “No, of course not. Well…I knew I was qualified to be here in any case. Not
here
, here. I mean at the conference. I don’t think you would’ve made advances you weren’t pretty sure were going to be accepted, and I didn’t think my job was in jeopardy if I wasn’t interested.”

When he remained silent, I kept going, a bad habit I had of trying to fill any conversational void. “I’d been throwing off vibes too, I know that, it’s just that up until this weekend I really didn’t think…I mean, there was the whole office, working-together thing. And I didn’t think you’d be interested. I didn’t think you were, um, inclined a certain way? Or that you wouldn’t think
I
was? Or—”

“Katie, stop talking.”

“Yes Sir.”

Smile.

Melt.

“Listen. First of all, if anything, it’s the opposite of what you think. You’re not here because of this. I meant it before, I almost didn’t pick you because of this. Hell, I almost didn’t promote you because I was worried about this. Even though you were clearly the best candidate. I
did
promote you, but I worried. And I was obviously right to worry.

“But about the other part, the vibes. Look, when we’re working together in the office, we work well together. You’re professional, you’re very passionate about your work. You clearly have a great deal of knowledge about the field and if you feel you need to argue a position, you do that. In your own way, you get right in my face and you always have, even when you weren’t reporting directly to me. And I give your opinion the respect it deserves. Right?”

I nodded, not sure where he was going.

“Your last supervisor didn’t actually like that about you. She told me you had an attitude problem. But I
do
like it. I know where you stand on things, you’re very honest and you don’t hide your agenda, which is unusual. And I know you’re working harder than I’d ever ask you to work already, so I’m not likely to barge in and demand you drop what you’re doing to work on some other project of mine because I assume my project is more important. That really hasn’t come up, even before you were promoted. That isn’t really my management style. So it’s not an area where we’d tend to have any conflict anyway.”

He pulled a face at the idea of having to have a management style at all. Like me, I suspected, there were times he wished he were still doing fieldwork every day.

“But—and I don’t know if you realize this—if I walk into your office and, say, tell you to give me what I know is your favorite pen because my last one’s out of ink, and Ted’s gone home already and his desk is locked so I can’t get the key to the supply closet, like last week? Do you know what you do? You drop your eyes, blush, hand over your pen and say, ‘yes Sir’, just like you did a minute ago.”

I opened my mouth to protest, to explain, but he held a finger over my lips, effectively silencing me.

“If I tell you I’m ordering lunch,” he continued, “and you say you aren’t hungry, and I say, ‘Kate, I know you didn’t eat any breakfast, I am ordering you a sandwich which you
will
eat and your only choice in the matter is whether it’s roast beef or ham’, do you get pissed off? No. Do you say you just want a salad? No. You look right at your toes and say, ‘roast beef, Sir’. And then you eat the sandwich and thank me in an extremely charming way that, frankly, leaves me in absolutely no doubt what your…
orientation
is. Work is not at issue in any of those cases. Am I off track in any way here?”

“No Sir.” He had moved his finger just long enough for me to answer then carefully placed it over my lips again.

“Good. That’s a relief. This would be a terrible time to find out I’d been guessing wrong for over a year.”

Over a year?

“So just to be clear, little Katie, although I don’t think anybody else in the office really picks up on it, I
do
pick up on it. And the only way you could have sent a stronger submissive vibe would have been to start off each visit to my office by dropping to your knees to await my bidding. Which, by the way, I do
not
want you doing when we get back to town. I’ve fantasized about it plenty but if I actually saw that in my office, I would never get another minute of work done in there.”

My head was reeling, my knees trembling and my arms were about to fall asleep. Jack must have realized this, because he released my wrists as he bent to kiss me again before leading me through the entrance hall and into the living room of his suite. I’d been fairly impressed by my own suite, but it looked like a hovel compared to this one, which was billed as a penthouse. I couldn’t really appreciate the details again in the semi-dark, however. Fortunately, Jack seemed to know his way around well enough already.

“That’s in the office, of course.
Here
, however…” He sat on the elegant art deco sofa and tugged me over to stand between him and the breathtaking nighttime panorama of the beach and ocean. “Here, I
do
want to see you on your knees, but only after you take off that dress and let me get a look at everything your bathing suit and those damn jeans and all your other clothes have been hiding from me all this time.”

“Yes Sir,” I said automatically, although at the moment all I wanted to do was fling off the dress and jump him.

“And while you do that, I’ll tell you exactly what that rip in your jeans made me think about.” The tone in his voice set my hands shaking and I could barely fumble open the two buttons and short zipper at the waist of the dress, slipping it off my shoulders to stand in front of him in only the thin film of salt-tinted damp the ocean had left on me earlier.

As Jack spoke, his fingers were traveling from my shoulders downward, patiently learning every inch of me, more sweet torture. “
Mmm
.
Very
nice, little Katie. I think this is really a good look on you. Even better than the jeans, although those were good too. Once they tore—and I’d been watching all that morning, wondering if they would—what I wanted more than anything was to pull you into my office and give you a
very
stern talking-to about appropriate office attire for casual Fridays. What would your response have been, I wonder?”

“Being very quiet and hoping you wouldn’t notice I was about to come on the spot, Sir?” It was true.

Jack laughed and grinned broadly enough to see in the gloom, and then wrapped his fingers around my hips to tug me a little closer. The motion set me off balance and I threw my hands to his shoulders to catch myself. He didn’t seem to mind, let me leave them there as he started to nuzzle my belly, tracing soft kisses across and down each hip in turn.

“You would have been in pretty big trouble if that were the case, because I’m sure I would’ve noticed
that
. No, I think once I’d gotten you in there, I would have told you to go to my desk and lean over it. And then slipped my fingers into the hole in your jeans, so you would know
exactly
what transgression you were there for. I would have shown you just how much access that little rip could provide, playing with everything I could reach through it. And then what do you suppose I would have done, little one? To make sure you remembered not to do it again?”

God, he was good at this. I was aching and wet and his hands hadn’t even ventured into anything like an erogenous zone yet. “You would have whipped me, Sir?”

“Spanked you,” he corrected. “With my bare hand. I find it’s every bit as effective as I need it to be. Turn around.” He was already turning me, trailing more kisses over my hips and around to my lower back, cupping my ass with both hands and squeezing firmly. “Are you a whip-and-paddle kind of girl, little Katie? What idiot taught you that, when he could’ve been using his own hand on this gorgeous ass?”

“I’m whatever kind of girl you think I need to be, Sir,” I replied, trying not to gasp as his hands stroked and lifted, exploring sensitive territory that I already knew he planned to work over in more ways than one very soon. I would be whatever kind of girl he wanted me to be. Hell, I would be any kind of
anything
he wanted me to be, if he would just keep doing…
that
.

“Hmmm. What a good little sub you are. We’ll see, though. You have to be pretty naughty to earn a whipping or a paddling from me, and this would have been a first offense. A bare hand doesn’t work too well over jeans. I think I would have told you to unbutton them and pull them down just far enough. And the little pink-leopard-print panties too.”

Well, damn, that hole must’ve been bigger than I realized. Those jeans are going straight in the trash when I get home.

“And then once you were bent over my desk again, with your bare ass in the air waiting for punishment, that’s when I would’ve seen that your pussy was shaved as smooth as silk.” His fingers marked his words, finally finding their way inside me then out again, running the slickness over my pussy and circling teasingly forward and around my already-sensitized clit. “And that’s really pretty naughty too. I would’ve started spanking you, just testing at first, but then harder and harder, making sure you learned your lesson.”

When he drew one hand away, I had just time to anticipate the first slap striking my butt sharply,
not
just testing. Warmth spread from the spot and I felt myself growing wetter still. Jack could feel the same thing when, after delivering another three swift spanks, he dipped a finger down between my cheeks and felt my pussy again. There was no hiding my arousal, and I couldn’t restrain a groan at the feel of his touch as he stroked and pinched and then spanked another few times, harder still.

“Get on the couch. Kneel on the seat, grab the back and bend over, spread your legs,” Jack said suddenly, quietly, and I could hear a little hitch in his breath. It excited me even more to know that he was starting to lose his own control, and I nearly jumped on the couch in an effort to position myself to his satisfaction as quickly as possible. His “good girl” when I was in place sent another thrill from my nipples straight down to my sex, and I know he saw the shiver that ran through me.

“Nice, little Katie. Very,
very
nice.” He stood just behind me and ran his hands under my body, stroking my breasts gently and then pinching my nipples until I squirmed. Then his touch wandered again, ranging down to my clit for only the briefest of teasing rubs before heading up again, over my ribs to my shoulders, then straight down my spine to fondle my ass again. “I don’t want you to move again until I say so, all right, little one?”

For a moment I panicked, because I wasn’t quite ready to give up that level of control, but already I couldn’t find the words to say so. “Yes Sir…”

He must have heard the anxious note in my voice, because he bent and whispered his next words in my ear very gently.

“I’m just stopping to take my clothes off, all right? Kate, listen a minute. I don’t do breath play or any edge stuff, I don’t have any diseases and I do have condoms. But you still need to tell me a safe word in case you need me to stop or just back off in any way, okay? Now, before you get too far down.”

Taking a deep breath and tightening my grip on the back of the sofa, I tried to ground myself in the moment and think of a safe word. Stoplights were boring, overdone, but easy to remember. “I don’t have any diseases either and I’m on the Pill. And just…red light, yellow light,” I whispered, then cleared my throat and repeated the safe words a bit louder with an embarrassed smile.

“Red light, yellow light. I like the classics. I was worried you were about to give me something like ‘rutabaga’ or ‘fluffy purple unicorn’. I’d never remember all that,” Jack said with a smile that I could hear.

He had taken off his clothes—I could see them landing on the floor, trousers and shirt and boxers—but I couldn’t see him from my current angle. Only feel him, his hips and cock brushing against the backs of my thighs, his fingers running gently up my spine and playing with my hair. He wove some loose strands back up into the messy bun I’d worn at dinner, a thoughtful gesture and one that showed he was mindful of safety as well, even though we were obviously not employing any devices where loose hair might become an issue. Tonight, it was clear, was just about boundaries and clarification.