Holly and Her Naughty eReader (9 page)

I wanted to spend more time
submitting to Christoph Green.

The craving was strong and
foreign, and I knew right away it wasn’t me. I was carrying all sorts of
baggage around with me now, having gone in and out of so many books on my
Kindle, but there was no book in which I spent more time than
His Golden Shackles
. Half the night I
had been in there playing Annabelle Stone, the everygirl who discovers a
passionate submissive inside her that is perfectly matchedto Christoph Green’s wizard
dom. Like Catherine and Heathcliff, or Bella and Edward, Annabelle and
Christoph were written to have a love that cannot be denied, and whatever part
of Annabelle had parked herself in my brain was impatient to go back to the
book and be with her lover.

Who was I to keep those two love
birds apart?

Let me tell you about the first
sex scene in
His Golden Shackles
. It
begins with Christoph saying to Annabelle, “I want to make love to you. I want
to be inside you now,” and she’s all, “Holy cow!” (there are lots of Holy
Cow’s, Holy Moley’s, and Holy Shit’s in all of these
50 Shades of Grey
knockoffs…but surprisingly few Holy Fuck’s
considering that the writer is trying to convey a good fuck as a religious
experience….but I digress…).

Anyway, after Christoph declares
his intent to get inside Annabelle, it’s on like Donkey Kong With An Extra-Long
Schlong. Christoph starts out with some nipple biting, moves on to some
clitoris licking, does his first insertion in the missionary position (where
they look at each other with “rabid intensity”), and then, right when she’s at
the point where orgasm is about to arrive, they switch positions. This becomes
a theme for the entire scene. Christoph brings Annabelle up to but not quite at
climax, over and over again. Every time she’s about to get there, he switches
positions and the buildup starts again. It’s a scene you could use in calculus
class to teach the concept of limits.
The
limit of ecstasy as it approaches orgasm is….

And then when he finally allows
Annabelle to get there, Christoph says, “Go baby,” and she has a “volcanic
eruption of pleasure.” When it’s over, Christoph says, “Oh my sweet darling.
Where shall I take you next?”

As fun as a scene like that is
to read on the page, imagine living it in person. Imagine a dominant billionaire
sex wizard ramping you up for an hour until your body explodes in a volcanic
eruption of pleasure.

Yeah…you bet your ass I went
back into
His Golden Shackles
. Once I
had safely returned to my hotel room, I jumped on the bed, turned on the
Kindle, and started reading at page one.

Chapter 9

Still unhappy with my bangs, I gaze at my reflection in the window, and
furrow my brow in frustration…

And then I was Annabelle Stone,
heroine of
His Golden Shackles
.

Here’s the quick character
sketch on Annabelle: Quiet, humble, quirky and cute, relatable, looks like
Kristen Stewart but has more bounce in her step. She’s unable to land a good
job out of college so she goes to a temp agency to offer her services. The temp
agency assigns her to do clerical work at Greenworld Enterprises, a
multi-billion dollar conglomerate owned by a gorgeous, but troubled, young wizard
named Christoph Green.

The novel begins with
Annabelle’s treacherous commute to Greenworld Enterprises in lower Manhattan.
Playing Annabelle, I kept my cool as I nearly lost a shoe getting off the
subway (a kind stranger fetched it and threw it out as the doors were closing),
and then I held it together when my bus never showed and again when I had to
run five blocks to the office.

This was my second time going
through this scene at the beginning of the book. The author puts Annabelle in
the middle of a nightmarish morning where she’s trying to get to a new job on
time and everything is working against her. It’s a hackneyed way to begin a
story, but I don’t care. It’s fun.

As Annabelle, I was five minutes
late when I arrived at the front desk, and the receptionist was snippy with me
about it.

“You’re late,” she said. “I was
just about to tell the agency to send someone else.”

The receptionist was a beautiful
brunette in a sharp business suit with a Bluetooth behind her ear.

“No, no. Please don’t,” I said.
“I just had some bad luck out there.”

“Chill Babe. Lucky for you,
we’re very short-handed today and you’ll get your shot,” the receptionist said.
“How fast is your typing?”

I remembered from the test at
the temp agency that I could do 110 words per minute.

“I don’t know, 80 or 90 words a
minute,” I said.

She sighed heavily, like my
answer pained her. “That will have to do, I guess. Christoph’s assistant is out
sick today and he wants someone taking notes on a conference call.”

“Christoph? You mean…Christoph
Green?”

“You know any other Christophs?
Come on. I’ll take you to him. The conference call starts in two minutes.
You’ll be seated at a laptop out of view. Write down every word you hear.”

“Oh…umm….okay.”

She led me down a long hallway
to a corner office with huge oak double doors and left me standing in front of
them.

“Go inside,” she hissed at me.
“He’s waiting.”

“Yes, okay, here I go.”

I opened the door to find him
seated at a desk in the center of the room. The corner office was a beautiful,
extravagant place, bigger than my apartment, with a high ceiling. Windows all
around might have given a glorious view of New York, but the shades were drawn,
which was disappointing.

Christoph turned to look at me
and I forgot any disappointment about the view. He was much better to look at
than the Manhattan skyline.

Young, yes, he was young, but
behind his eyes was a maturity that belied his years. He stood to welcome me,
and he was the perfect height. A full head above me, but nothing more. Six-two
maybe. He wore a charcoal suit that fit him so perfectly my eyes got lost
following the lines of his body, at the artistry of it all. And his emerald tie
brought out the haunting shade of green in his eyes. I imagined myself buying
fifty more green ties for him so I could view his eyes in fifty shades of
green.

“Hello. My name is Christoph,”
he said.

He spoke with such authority,
even when going through the motions of a simple formality like introducing
himself.

And then we shook hands. Eegads.
I remembered this from my last trip through this book. I think it was even more
exciting on this second go-round. Now, the stream of sexual energy that came
from his touch was charged with memory of where all of this was headed, and I
felt a tiny explosion of pleasure deep inside me.

Here’s what’s cool about
His Golden Shackles
. At this point in
the story, Annabelle tells the reader, “I felt like, with him near me, I was
more than another anonymous nobody.”

What a great line.

To be somebody, to be
noticed
—that’s what Annabelle wants from
a man. That’s what I want too. I want to make a connection with a guy in such a
way that when he looks at me, he doesn’t see another pretty place to put his
penis, he sees a partner who makes him better than he is on his own. I want to
be with someone who wants to become something special, not by himself, but
together with me.

And that’s how LA Jones, the
author of
His Golden Shackles
,
created Christoph. Yes, he is a deeply troubled man in need of a woman to
rescue him (aren’t they all?), but what really makes him work is the man he
could be
when that rescuing is done.
Christoph Green isn’t just another magical billionaire who is unhappy because
he hasn’t found love. He is a good man whose own inner torment makes him behave
like a selfish child.

Unlike Christian Grey and most
of his imitators in the Kindle store, Christoph Green is not a benevolent
billionaire whose business is a net good for society. Christoph owns strip
mines that destroy the landscape, and factory farms that aren’t terribly nice
to the animals they slaughter. He has stakes in precious metals and gemstone
companies, and doesn’t care if they use children in the mines or work in a war
zone. He has plenty of money in the defense industry, profiting handsomely from
all the wars around the world. And the text hints that he built this empire
using a hefty dose of sorcery, that he wasn’t above using magic to destroy his
rivals or grow his bank account.

As a reader (and as Annabelle),
you don’t know exactly what motivates Christoph to be the way he is, but you
know it’s something. He doesn’t apologize for or excuse the actions of his
business. Instead, he does what he wants to do and dares anyone to step in his
way.

We finished our introductions.
To show his immediate interest in me, Christoph delayed his important
conference call so he and I could chat. He served me a cup of Earl Gray tea (I
read somewhere that the author has a big crush on Patrick Stewart). We talked
for an hour. Christoph asked questions about Annabelle’s personal life, and spoke
with such command she couldn’t help but answer honestly.

I sat back inside Annabelle and
enjoyed the ride. Annabelle was already head over heels in love with Christoph,
and I was too. I knew full well where this was going, and I couldn’t wait to
get there.

“So…our conference call this
morning,” Christoph said.

This was a nice touch, I
thought. Here we were in Chapter 1 and he was already referring to the
conference call as ‘our’ call. LA Jones had written Christoph to connect with
Annabelle right away. Now in my second time through the book, I could see that
Christoph was lonely and sad right until the moment when Annabelle walked into
his office. Her rescue of this troubled man began the moment she stepped
inside.

“Yes, what about our conference
call?” I said.

“I have recently purchased an
electronics manufacturing outfit in India that is bleeding money because of
some poorly timed purchases of precious metals,” Christoph said. “This morning
I will be speaking with the managers about this. The call will be recorded, but
that’s just for the lawyers. I want to have my own notes on the call. That will
be your job. Write down as much as you can during the call. When it is over, we
will go over your notes and I will have you modify them as I see fit.”

“Okay, I can do that,” I said.

“Of course you can. Take your
place over there, please and we will begin.”

He pointed to a laptop in the
corner of the room, out of view of the camera he would use for the call. I took
a seat, he contacted India, and the call was on.

He was breathtaking in his
command of the situation. His managers in India threw lots of complicated
jargon his way, but he cut right through it and got straight to the point.
Somebody screwed up. I took careful notes, writing down as many exact phrases
as I could. They were speaking about gold, silver, and copper components used
in circuit boards and wires. The managers in India used options and futures
contracts to control the prices of their purchases, but between the metals
purchases and the demand forecasts and the production plans, it was clear that
there was lots of confusion in India.

The last time I went through
this scene, and played it as the author wrote it, Christoph finished the call
with a frightening diatribe about a list of names of people who were to be
fired immediately. It was a scene that taunted the reader, showing Christoph at
his most ruthless, and daring the reader not to find him attractive anyway.

And even as cute little
Annabelle typed away, getting more and more turned on as Christoph’s rant
increased in intensity, I found myself thinking through the problems that
Christoph was trying to solve, and realized the author had missed the obvious
solution to all this confusion about metals prices in India.

As I had done with Catherine
Earnshaw when she left her bedroom to find Heathcliff in the night, I took
control of Annabelle’s character and changed the story. I stood up from my
chair in the corner and stepped into Christoph’s line of sight.

“Excuse me,” I said. “May I make
a suggestion?”

Christoph, who was right in the
middle of a diatribe about laziness and incompetence, stopped shouting
midsentence and looked at me with awe in his eyes. I could tell he was
intrigued that I had chosen to do this, but would be gravely disappointed if I
didn’t deliver.

“Certainly,” he said. “What is
your suggestion?”

“Well, you know how many of
these circuit boards you’re selling every day, don’t you?”

“We should. But let’s ask.
Dinakar, do you know exactly how many circuit boards you sell on any given
day?”

“Of course we do, Mr. Green,”
answered the man on the other side.

“And you know exactly how much
precious metal is in each circuit board?” I asked.

“Dinakar?” said Christoph.

“Mr. Green, yes we know. Can we
please get back to--”

“Hush, Dinakar. The lady is
speaking. Please continue Ms. Stone.”

“If you know how many circuit
boards you’re selling every day, and you know how much metal is in each board,
then you know how much metal you’re selling every day,” I said. “Why not make
an arrangement to buy the exact same amount of metal at the end of every day as
you just sold?”

Christoph looked at me like I
was the only thing in the world worth seeing.

“Did you hear that, Dinakar?” he
said.

“Yes, sir, that is a strategy
that--”

“That is a strategy that will
work,” Christoph said. “It solves everything. Only one day of exposure to
market fluctuations. All this inane complexity you’ve tried to work in with
production schedules and futures contracts. Seriously, Dinakar. Why didn’t you
think of this already?”