Page 48 of Trained at the Office
I felt the ripples of his words spreading outward through my ribcage, then reaching into my face, heating my cheeks and bringing tears to my eyes. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I could only lie there in his enormous bed in his cedar-scented robe and feel the full, transformative weight of what this man had just said to me.
He watched me with an expression that combined the vulnerability I’d glimpsed a moment ago with something fiercer—a bracing, as if he’d prepared himself for the possibility that I would pull away.
“Sir,” I started, and then stopped, because the name felt wrong for this moment. Too formal. Too bound by the roles we occupied in the studio. “Master… Paul,” I said instead, and his name in my mouth without the title tasted different—intimate and strange and terrifyingly real. “Master, I… I think I’m already…”
My voice cracked. The tears came—not the tears of humiliation or confusion that had become so familiar, but something simpler. The tears of a twenty-year-old girl who had walked into a corporation a few weeks ago looking for a paycheck and had found something she didn’t have a name for.
“I think I’m already in love with you,” I whispered.
The words left me and hung in the amber light of his apartment, and I felt simultaneously terrified and weightless, as if confessing this had removed some essential ballast and now I might float away. My hands found each other in my lap, that familiar desperate grip, and I looked at him through blurred vision and waited for whatever came next.
What came next was his mouth on mine.
He kissed me, softly and slowly. His lips moved against mine with a tenderness that seemed to contradict everything I knew about his hands, and one of those hands cradled the back of my head, fingers threading through my tangled blonde hair, holding me as if I were something that might break.
I tasted salt—my tears, I realized—and I kissed him back with everything I had, which wasn’t much. I was a twenty-year-old girl who’d never been kissed like this, who’d only been kissed by Kevin in the back of his car and by Paul the suitor on camera, and neither of those things had prepared me for the experience of being kissed by a hyper-dominant alpha male who’d just told me he was falling for me.
When we separated, his forehead rested against mine. Our breath mingled. His thumb stroked the nape of my neck.
“This complicates things,” he said, and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.
“It does?” I asked.
“Yes. But I don’t care,” he said, and kissed me again.
The second kiss lasted longer. Deeper. His tongue found mine and the tenderness began to shade into something warmer, something with more weight. I felt my body responding the way it always responded to him—the heat building between my legs, the nipples tightening against the soft fabric of the robe, the slow, liquid loosening of every muscle south of my navel. My hips shifted on the mattress, pressing toward him, that involuntary tilt that my body performed in his presence like a compass needle finding north.
And then—I don’t know how to explain what happened next except to say that it rose up from somewhere deep inside me, from the same place that had produced five orgasms in the dark and the courage to ask for the confession scene and the wordbitchsobbed into the sheets while he fucked me. A need so specific and so consuming that it bypassed thought entirely and arrived at my lips as words before I’d consciously formed them.
I pulled back from the kiss. I could feel how flushed my face had gotten and how brightly my eyes must be shining. I looked up at him with a wanton expression I could feel on my own features: desperate, hungry, adoring, shamed by my own hunger and adoring despite the shame.
“Sir,” I breathed. “Master Paul. Can I… may I please…”
I swallowed. My eyes dropped to his lap. To the shape of him beneath the dark joggers—not yet fully hard, but definitely present. The outline of the thing that had been inside me, that had filled me, used me, come inside me, and made me something I hadn’t been before.
“May I please worship your cock, sir?” The words came out in a rush, breathy and wrecked and so brazen that I felt my entire body flush from hairline to toes. “I want to… I need to… please, can I just… serve you? Please?”
All I knew was that the need to kneel before this man, to take him in my mouth, to devote myself to his pleasure with the focused, reverent attention of someone performing an act of devotion, the way he had taught me to do… that need felt so overwhelming that it eclipsed every other sensation in my body. The soreness between my legs, the throbbing of my welted bottom, the shudder in my thighs—all of it faded to background noise beneath the roaring imperative to do my duty to the huge manhood that had claimed me for my master’s pleasure.
Master Paul’s eyes darkened. His hand stilled against the back of my neck, and for a moment he simply looked at me—looked at my flushed, tear-streaked face and my desperate eyes and my lips that were already parting, softening, preparing themselves for him. I watched something shift behind his expression: the vulnerability of the man who’d just confessed he was falling forme receding, not disappearing but stepping back, making room for the other thing he was. The thing I needed him to be.
“Come with me,” he said.
He rose from the bed and crossed the bedroom in three strides, moving through the doorway into the living room. I scrambled after him on unsteady legs, the robe slipping off one shoulder, my bare feet padding against the hardwood floor.
The living room was warm with late-afternoon light, the amber glow pooling across a worn leather armchair that sat beside the bookshelves. It was the kind of chair that looked like it had been sat in for decades—deep-seated, with wide arms and a high back, the leather darkened and softened by years of use.
Master Paul settled into it. He sat with his knees apart, his back against the leather, his arms resting on the chair’s wide arms. He looked up at me standing before him in the cedar-scented robe, and the expression on his face was one I recognized from the studio—that slow, thorough, proprietary assessment that made every inch of my skin feel like it was being catalogued and claimed.
“On your knees,” he said.
CHAPTER 28
Anne
I sank to the floor. The Persian rug felt soft and a little scratchy against my shins. The motion made the robe fall open further, exposing the inner curve of one breast and the pale line of my sternum. I knelt between his spread thighs and looked up at him, and the geometry of the position—him above, me below, the leather chair framing his body like a throne—made something inside me compress into a single, bright point of devotion.
“Take it out,” he said. “Slowly. Show me what kind of girl you are when there aren’t any cameras.”
