Page 34 of The Associate
“You love this, don’t you?” he hissed, the words coming faster, laced with a venom that wasn’t for Leo. “You love being put in your place. Being told you’re nothing. That your only value is in how well you obey, how prettily you bleed, how loud you cum when I allow it.”
“Yes! God, yes, Sir!” Leo sobbed, his body a taut bow, his cock hard and leaking against the bench.
He agrees. He revels in it. Why can’t the other one?
The thought enraged him. Gael’s arm came down harder, the suede falls biting into the already-warmed skin, raising vivid, crisscrossing welts. Leo screamed, a sound of pure, unadulterated ecstasy.
He threw the flogger aside; it clattered against the steel table. He unbuckled his own belt with rough, impatient hands, the leather sliding through the loops with a sound like a sigh. He didn’t need preparation. Leo was more than ready, his body singing with endorphins, his need a palpable force in the room.
Gael put on a condom and slicked himself with the lubricant. He positioned himself, one hand gripping Leo’s hip hard enough to bruise, the other fisting in his dark hair, pulling his head back.
“This is what you’re for,” he whispered, his mouth close to Leo’s ear. “Remember that.”
He pushed in, a single, deep, unforgiving thrust, sheathing himself to the hilt in the tight, welcoming heat. Leo shrieked, the pain slicing through him a welcome thing, his body convulsing around Gael.
Gael set a brutal, punishing pace just the way he knew Leo liked, slightly more pain than pleasure.
But deep down, Gael knew that it wasn’t really about Leo’s pleasure, nor even his own. It was about exorcism. About dominating the frustration, the inconvenient obsession, the ghost of wide, doe-eyes. Each thrust was an attempt to drive Samuel’s image from his mind.
He’s not here, Gael thought, pistoning into the willing body beneath him.
But his traitorous mind superimposed images.
The curve of Leo’s spine became the stiff, rigid line of Samuel’s back in the conference room chair. The muffled cries against the bench became a hitched, stuttered breath. The willing, spread openness beneath him became a defensive, terrified cringe that had inexplicably aroused him more than any display of submission ever had.
The heat coiled, unbearable, at the base of his spine. His rhythm faltered, grew ragged. He was chasing it, chasing the release that would silence the noise in his head.
“Cum for me, boy,” he commanded, his voice ragged, his grip vicious.
It was all Leo needed. With a broken, sobbing wail, he obeyed, his body seizing in a violent orgasm that clenched around Gael, milking his cock, dragging him over the edge.
And as the wave crashed over him, as his vision whited out and his own release ripped through him, it wasn’t Leo’s name on his lips. Behind his clenched eyelids, it wasn’t his well-used body he saw.
It was a pair of wide, haunted eyes. It was the soft, bitten swell of a lower lip. It was the face of Samuel Ruiz, pale and shocked and unbearably, unforgivably present in the most intimate moment of betrayal; against Gael’s own rules, against his own carefully constructed world.
Chapter 9
Samuel
Samuel crashed through the revolving glass doors of the Voss & Wise building like a man pursued. The polished brass handle slipped from his sweaty palm, the door spinning with a violent, whooshing protest. He stumbled into the vast, cool expanse of the lobby, his dress shoe skidding on the veined marble, and collided hard with a young delivery boy balancing a tower of cardboard-wrapped parcels.
“Shit! Sorry! I’m so sorry!” The apology tumbled out of him in a breathless rush, but he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, already weaving through the morning crowd toward the bank of elevators.
His heart was a frantic thing against his ribs.
He was late. He, Samuel Ruiz, who had built his entire life on the bedrock of punctuality, was late.
The previous night had been a special kind of torture. After the silent car ride home from his parents’, the ghost of their conversation and the taste of his own capitulation still coating his tongue, his mind had refused to settle. He’d tossed in his narrow bed, sheets tangling around his legs, his phone on thenightstand buzzing with notifications that each time sent a jolt of pure, icy dread through his system.
It was irrational.
He knew his mother; she wouldn’t call Linda Covington after eight p.m. It wasuncouth. She’d wait until a respectable hour this morning.
But the knowledge did nothing to calm the frantic, nauseating loop in his head.
He’d spent the dark hours strung between exhaustion and a buzzing, anxious alertness, finally plummeting into a shallow, nightmare-riddled sleep just as the sky began to lighten.
Which meant he’d woken to his alarm already silenced, an hour lost. The ensuing scramble had been a blur of poorly knotted tie, forgotten notes, and a sprint to the subway that left his lungs burning. And now, here he was, hurtling across the lobby, the hands of the clock above reception seeming to mock him with their progress.
