Make Me (2 page)

“I’m fine. You go on home. I’ll take care of this.”

He’d never mentioned the incident again, which led her not to, either.

But she did feel safer on the job than she had before, knowing how well trained he was in self defense, and figuring that he’d extend that protection to her, if it came down to it.

Probably. It was kind of hard to tell with him. She didn’t think he liked her much, and was still surprised he kept her around.

“Jodi!”

Demanding. He was annoyingly demanding, too, she thought as he rudely broke into her thoughts.

“I don’t know where you are, but you need to be here, with me and find me that file!”

“Don’t worry. I just saw it. I misfiled it.”

“No, really?”

Was sarcasm an emotion? If so, he was very emotional. Otherwise, not so much. Like, not
at all
.

“Okay, I found it. Will that get you out of my apartment on my day off?”

That got her a glare that she ignored. “Yes, but this is very sensitive information that doesn’t belong on your computer. I’m going to copy it onto my jump drive and wipe any evidence of it ever having been there, or the NSA will come knocking at your door.”

“Thank you, I think.”

He stood and crossed to the door with her trailing after him like a little girl after her father. “Next time call before you come over!”

When Cayson was quiet and not working on something, it wasn’t usually a good thing. He reached into his pocket and brought out his phone, showing her his recent outbound calls. All of them were to her number. “I’ve been trying to call you. Twelve calls in the last hour.”

Jodi’s eyebrow rose as she frowned and tried not to feel guilty. She was surprised the number was so small, really.

“Forty-two texts.”

Now that was more like what she expected.

She couldn’t stop herself from blushing although she knew she had no reason to. “We turn our phones off when we have a girl’s night.”

“Lovely. I’m sure the security of the country will wait until you two have finished blazing up, drinking Beefeater gin and tonics with way too much lime, eating Cheetos and painting each other’s nails.” He licked his thumb then rubbed it on the corner of her mouth, showing her the neon orange cheese dust she was wearing for all to see.

“Goodbye, Cayson.”

He didn’t bother to say goodbye back.

He never did.

That next day, once the scare about whether or not he’d somehow discovered her interest in spanking had eased, her anger came to the forefront. He could tell her what to do while she was working in his office, but what she did on her off hours was of no concern to him. None – illegal or not. He wasn’t the police. He had no input about her behavior at home whatsoever, and she intended to tell him just that.

She didn’t bother to knock, just burst into the room with much more drama than she had intended, the door banging back against the wall until she’d wrangled it shut it behind her.

He was working, staring intently at the computer screen and probably hadn’t even heard the commotion. He was notoriously hard to reach when he was problem solving, trying to identify a virus or a recalcitrant line of code.

“Cayson.”

Nothing. Not even so much as a flicker of his eyes as they stared blindly at the screen.

“Cayson!” Louder, more demanding.

Still nothing.

She was of a mind to go over there and unplug his computer, but he’d probably kill her for that. Besides, she knew he had a battery backup installed in case they were hit by a brownout. So instead, she grabbed a magazine – one of the ones she insisted he leave out on the coffee table for clients – not that any really visited them, but still. It happened to be a celebrity magazine with a picture of an outrageous female singer on the cover.

Jodi grabbed it and held it in front of his face.

“Son of a – what the hell is that?” he bellowed, jerking back in surprise.

“Lady Gaga in her meat dress.”

“No, that is a horror. An abomination. And why are you showing it to me when I have so much work to do?” He turned his chair towards her, reluctantly at first, but then with more intent, training those laser green eyes on her.

All of that focused attention settled on her like a hand – his hand – heavy, calculating and unrelenting – and she began to reconsider the intelligence of confronting him like this.

But it was much too late.

He glared at her expectantly, the fingers of his left hand drumming on the edge of his desk impatiently. “What?”

She didn’t know why she was so nervous all of a sudden. She never really had been with him, even in the beginning. She’d always known instinctively how to handle him, and had rarely put a foot wrong about it.

But now, something was different. There was an unfamiliar and unsettling element to how he watched her, and she knew it had to do with his earlier threat.

He was aware of her as more than just an extension of himself now, more than just the person that made sure his lights didn’t get shut off and that his mother got a lovely present on Mothers’ Day as well as her birthday and that he had coffee – strong, hot and black – available at all times.

And then it hit her.

He was looking at her like a man looked at a woman he wanted, and she wasn’t sure she was at all prepared for that.

Jodi shook her head and closed her eyes, trying to clear the apprehension from her brain so that she could speak clearly. “About the threat you made earlier –”

“It’s not a threat; it’s a promise,” he interrupted.

Jodi ignored him. “You’re not my father or my brother or my boyfriend – and even if you were, you wouldn’t have the right to sp–” She knew her face was bright red, so she decided not to use that word. It had too much power, at least for her. “To do that to me. What I do on my own time is my own business – legal or illegal.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but she shut him down cold. “No.
I’m
speaking now.”

Both sable eyebrows rose so far they practically disappeared into his hairline, but his lips closed slowly without him saying a word and that only served to embolden her. Jodi moved closer to him, so that she was inches from standing between his knees, daring to shake her finger at him as if he was a recalcitrant schoolboy.

“I don’t appreciate the implicit
threat
you made last night, nor the explicit one you made this morning. As I said, you’re in no position to say anything about what I do when I’m not in this office – Oh!”

Reading about being put over someone’s lap and it actually happening to you were two very different things, she discovered abruptly.

He managed to pull her down over both of his knees with a minimum of effort on his part and a maximum of humiliation on hers. He had carefully positioned her so that her hands were, in effect, useless. There was no way to escape or exact any revenge on him in front of her; and he held her too far over his lap for her to be able to reach back and accomplish anything but getting her wrists easily captured and held to the small of her back.

And he was quick about every bit of it, too. The spanking began before she had a chance to begin yelling at him, and, to her complete embarrassment, when she opened her mouth to castigate him and question his ancestry back to Neanderthal man, what came out was a deep groan at the way he was roasting her behind.

Jodi made a mental note to wear nothing but heavyweight clothing around him from now on, damn the California heat. Her pretty, floral silk skirt was no protection at all from the devastating effects of his hand – nor were the slip, pantyhose, or bikini panties beneath it, damn him.

Aside from the searing pain, what surprised her the most was that he did this as if he’d done it a million times before – blistering her from stem to stern and back again, showing absolutely no signs of stopping, reducing her to a blubbering mass before the first pass was finished.

She was horrified to realize that he had driven her beyond her usual composure so easily, but it had gotten to the point where she would have done anything to get him to stop – literally
anything
.

When he did finally stop, she knew that it had been entirely his choice and that she had had absolutely no input into his decision. Neither her futilely but automatically kicking feet nor her sobs lessened what he delivered to her in the least.

And then she had to lie there, her bottom stinging in the aftermath, helped along by the intimidating presence of his palm on her hot cheeks. “I know I’m just your boss, but I think I pay you reasonably well to do a job that sometimes involves you handling very sensitive information. How long do you think you’d be able to maintain your security clearance if they found out that you used pot?”

She couldn’t believe she had the nerve to, but she sighed exasperatedly at that, and then shrieked bloody murder when he gave her another crisp round of swats for her efforts.

“I’m disappointed that I have to say this to you at all, but I need you to have those clearances, and therefore I expect you to consider that eschewing the use of any and all illegal substances to be a part of your job description. And, to elaborate on my promise, if I find out you’ve used it again, the spanking you’ll get will make this one look like a walk in the park.”

It wasn’t as if she used it every day – or even every year. Karen liked it, and had brought some over. It was never in her house for more than a weekend at the most. But she wasn’t going to explain herself to him. She was too angry by far for that right now.

He helped her up and, as if it had never happened, turned back to his work.

Jodi had never been angrier at another person in her life and she allowed herself to reach out and smack him on the shoulder, as she’d done many times before when he was at his most aggravating. But this time she couldn’t seem to stop – stop hitting him or stop at his shoulder. Before she got very far past his head, though, he’d rolled himself away from the desk and, instead of pushing her away from him to get her to stop hitting him, he reached up and grabbed her wrist, using her own momentum against her and tugging her down on top of him.

Before she knew it, she was lying a top him, her legs trapped by his where they crossed heavily over her calves, her wrists trapped against her back – again – by his left hand.

“Naughty, naughty,” he tsked.

She’d never seen red before, but this was it. Jodi put her head down and would have bitten him with all of her might, but there wasn’t a spare inch on him where she could do that, the bastard.

And before she could root around more, looking for something – like a defenseless nipple – to satisfy her urge to hurt him, his other hand grasped the bun at the back of her head and forced her to lift her face up.

She saw his lips coming towards hers but couldn’t even begin to process the idea that he was going to kiss her, even after he was actually doing it!

And damn him if he wasn’t better at it than she had ever imagined! She was beginning to melt against him, her anger draining away even though she didn’t want to. “No, Cayson, stop!”

He did, instantly, but she was still trapped against him. “Well, I had to give you something to do with your mouth besides take a chunk out of me, didn’t I?”

It wasn’t any kind of an apology at all, but more than she’d thought she’d get out of him.

“Let me go!” She wiggled and struggled, trying to find a weak spot, but she rapidly realized there wasn’t one.

Instead, he kissed her again, this time more tenderly, and she was even further lost to him.

“Cayson, stop,” she said softly when he finally lifted his head, but even she couldn’t muster any conviction in her protest. It came out like a breathy moan. “Let me go.”

His lips were pressed against her forehead as he spoke. “I’ll let you go if you promise me that you won’t bite me, and you won’t try to get off me.”

The first item was relatively easy – not that she had lost the urge to sink her teeth into him, but she was too confused to go through with it right now – the second . . . well, having her arms free was better than not.

“Oh, all right,” she agreed petulantly.

He hesitated a moment and lifted her chin, looking down into her eyes before he let go. “I think you made the right decision. Don’t make the wrong one now or I’ll spank you again, and this time I’ll mean it.”

Her mouth formed an outraged “O”, but she was smart enough not to say anything. Good Lord, he hadn’t meant the spanking he’d given her? Did he mean it could have been a lot worse?

Jodi didn’t think she wanted to know the answer to that question, considering how badly her behind still stung.

She only moved around on him a little, enough to bring her wrists up to rub them as if his hold hadn’t been as gentle as it should have been, when the opposite was true, she knew. He hadn’t hurt her in the least except when he’d been actively spanking her. And she knew she’d gotten in some reasonable punches at him before he’d subdued her.

“Stay still!” he scolded sternly, clamping an arm around her waist to still her.

The first response that came to mind was to say, “Make me!” but not while she was in this position. No sir. She was beginning to realize that her neutered boss wasn’t so, and feared he would take it as a challenge, and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to know how that ended, either.

Or did she?

But she was just stubborn enough that she continued to try to move, at least until he ground out a warning from between clenched teeth, “If you don’t stop moving, there’s going to be a stain on the front of your blouse.”

“A what?” she asked, dumbfounded, until his words sank in and she realized that she was lying on top of the long, hard length of him. Blushing furiously – for no reason she could fathom; it wasn’t as if she hadn’t had an erection pressed against her before – she stammered, “Oh – oh my God, I’m sorry, you’re – you’re –” she couldn’t quite finish her sentence.

“A man?” he supplied neutrally.

“A man?” she parroted back at him, as if the idea was in doubt when the evidence was swelling and straining beneath her. It took her a horrifyingly long beat to gather her wits. “Yes, of course you are.” And then another beat. “Oh my God, you mean – oh, I’m sorry.” She couldn’t possibly get any more embarrassed than she currently was and still live through it.

Jodi lay stretched out on him, as stiff as a board, her face buried in his chest not for comfort or even to arouse him, but so that she didn’t have to look him in the eye.

Not so much of a eunuch after all, her boss. What a strange way to make that discovery!

But he wasn’t going to allow her that escape. Not when things had taken such an intriguing turn between them. “Is your bottom still sore?” he asked, reaching down to cup a cheek and squeezing it less than gently.

The majority of her anger had been washed aside in the tidal wave of humiliation and embarrassment, which for her also brought the inevitable tsunami of arousal. Although it was less apparent, hers equaled or exceeded his.

“Yes,” she glared up at him.

He smiled at that, one of the few rare, genuine smiles he’d ever shown her and his free hand joined the other, lifting her against him but only slightly, in a slow, lazy rhythm.

“Shouldn’t I get down?”

“In a minute,” Cayson answered, his lips about to claim hers in a kiss that was infinitely gentle at first, then became less and less so as he began to grind his hips against hers.

After long, intense moments when Jodi quickly began to realize that she was dangerously close to completion herself, forget him, she abruptly found herself standing on her own two feet next to him.

“That’s enough for now.”

Her body was still keening for his, her hips still responding to the rhythm he had set and throwing her off balance until she could rein them in.

She had never wanted to fuck a man as badly as she did him, and he had put her away from him as if she was a two dollar whore, standing there next to him, shivering with unfulfilled ecstasy, lower tummy knotted in a way that had her wanting to shove her hand down her pantyhose just to ease the ache some right there, where he could see her do it.

But he wouldn’t see her. He was already absorbed in the numbers and symbols on the computer screen in front of him.

Tears of hurt and fury filled her eyes, but she refused to shed them, even after she was safely tucked into her own chair in the outer office.

She would not cry. She would not cry. She would not cry.

She would not let that bastard make her cry.

* * *

He all but ignored her for the next few days, not that that was at all unusual, but it certainly was considering what had transpired between them. Some days he came in, some he didn’t. She was always there, of course, his lap dog – quite literally, now – always faithfully dependable, loyal to a fault.

But Jodi was devastated in a way she never had been before. She’d wanted him since she’d met him but things had been so starkly asexual between them – he had given her no hint at all that he might be sexually interested in her or anyone or anything else – that she was fine working for him and suppressing the feelings she had for him. He was completely detached and disinterested in most of the world around him, and she enjoyed easing his way so that he could work.

But that had all flown out the window in the matter of a few minutes – minutes she played over and over in her mind, obsessively, although she couldn’t quite bring herself to masturbate to it yet. It was too raw, too stark and – now, considering how it had ended – too painful.

It was beginning to get to the point where she wondered if she had dreamt it, if it had been a fantasy she’d conjured up while pleasuring herself – not unlike a lot of others he starred in.

Five days passed. Five long days of coming in here, seeing him even more rarely than usual, red-eyed, heart – and other even more neglected areas – aching. This morning she had decided to take matters into her hands and had begun to look for another job online. Things here could only get worse, as far as she could see, and she needed to get out while she still could.

He was working from home and she got a text from him mid-morning:

Done with Anderson project. Will email you the file.

She texted back as little as she could possibly get away with and didn’t think anything of it.

K

He didn’t come into the office that day and she wasn’t surprised. There were a few more emails, all work related, evidence that he’d gone on to other, smaller projects.

Jodi locked up and headed home. She hadn’t had much luck on the job front. Leaving this one was going to put a serious crimp in her lifestyle. She was going to end up going back to being one of the working poor and wasn’t looking forward to it at all. She’d probably end up having to sell her little house, which wasn’t much more than a cottage, but it suited her perfectly and she’d done a reasonable amount of remodeling to make it more livable – expanding the kitchen, adding a second bath and bedroom upstairs for the occasional guest like Karen, and furnishing it in an extremely indulgent manner since she could afford to do it right – meaning expensively – if she managed her money carefully.

But all of that would have to stop – the occasional jaunt to Vegas to meet friends where she paid for everyone’s hotel stay, outrageously expensive Depression glass to compliment her Wedgwood china pattern, and the more than occasional Lladro figurine that her sister had gotten her addicted to.

She’d have to downsize. She wouldn’t have any other choice.

Still, it had to be done. She couldn’t work for someone who – who... was so cold. Not that he hadn’t always been that way, he had. It just hadn’t really affected her personally. She could handle his tunnel vision, the kind of single-mindedness that made him really great at what he did and yet made him horrid at other, more normal things. She’d been there to run interference between him and the world.