Corporate Seduction
a novel of BDSM erotic romance by
BRIDGET MIDWAY
Published by Phaze Books
Also by Bridget Midway
Adam and E-V-E
C-A-I-N and A-B-E-L
Sodom and Gomorrah
Original Sin
(print collection)
Fascination Street
Suburbia
Walls
“Service Recall” from
Phaze Fantasies, Vol. I
Love My Way
This is an explicit and erotic novel
intended for the enjoyment
of adult readers. Please keep
out of the hands of children.
www.Phaze.com
Corporate Seduction copyright 2007-9 by Bridget Midway
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Phaze Production
Phaze Books
6470A Glenway Avenue, #109
Cincinnati, OH 45211-5222
Phaze is an imprint of Mundania Press, LLC.
To order additional copies of this book, contact:
books@phaze.com
www.Phaze.com
Cover art © 2009 Debi Lewis
Edited by Kathryn Lively
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-60659-547-3
First Phaze Edition – December, 2009
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Dedication
Thank you to my friends at Virginia Dommes and male submissives, especially Mistress Dama, into, lil one, Miss Julie, Miss Pebbles, Miss Lynn, and others for all of your help in knowing what goes on in the BDSM world. What I learn from you there has been completely eye-opening and invaluable. I truly hope that through my work, you’re able to see the impression you’ve made upon me, and I have made you proud.
Thank you, my fans and readers who e-mail me and post messages to me that interracial BDSM erotic romance is something you really want to read.
Thank you to my family and friends for their understanding and support. What can I say? Your kinky little girl has grown up!
A big thank you to The Jimmy for digging my work even though he may not always dig all of my research methods.
And to all, learn to love yourself before you love anyone else. Sometimes a little self-discovery can be scary. When someone else depends on you for anything, be strong enough to be their support. Any of these fortune cookie sayings doing anything for you? Yes? No?
Chapter One
Would it be possible to have sex on that thing?
May Davenport licked her lips as she stared at the waist-high laser fax-copier-printer monstrosity, rumored to have been an accomplice in an office tryst. Who knew Hewlett-Packard could be an aphrodisiac, she thought.
Damn, she needed to get a life and get laid if thoughts of sex in the office consumed her time. And she needed to stop reading those damn erotica novels.
Reading them had her believing that the situations contained in them could be possible. Take-charge hunks. Hot, sweaty public sex. Happily ever after. Not in this office building, and not with anyone working here.
May cocked her head as she stared at the machine, as though willing it to share its secrets. Who was on top? Did anything break in the process? If they left the lid open, did it get any good pictures?
The rumor running rampant at Crystal Industries would have the entire twenty-five floors believing that such an act would not only be plausible, but indeed had happened between a junior associate who worked on the second floor and a female executive from the seventeenth floor who was not known to fraternize with anyone below her floor.
Stupid people. Why in the world would they risk their careers for the sake of hot sex? Sure, that kind of arrangement worked out in romance novels. Everything always worked out in those things. But this was real life. And real life had a way of kicking people in their asses.
May could kind of see the lure. The executive had power and the junior guy had hunger, sexual or otherwise, at least that was how another executive assistant from that floor had described the two to May during a good gossip session in the bathroom.
Damn, she needed to get a life.
What she really wanted to know was what possessed two people to throw caution to the wind and be so reckless as to risk getting caught going against Company Policy No-No Number Two. According to the Crystal Industries’ Employee Handbook, the Number One rule involved giving up stock trading tips. Priorities. How fitting that the company would care more about its bottom line than the interactions of their employees.
She chuckled to herself, sitting at her desk, which faced the main door. She had her back to her boss’s office. The bastard wanted to be sure he could look over her shoulder at a moment’s notice to make sure she didn’t pass time surfing the Internet or worse, looking for a better job.
So close to heaven, being this high off the ground, she thought she would have been happier.
What would make her extremely happy would be to move up in the company, for them to finally recognize her skills and talents in the financial department instead of being relegated as simply an executive assistant. Hell, she might as well say it. A secretary.
The thought made her grind her teeth. She knew her pinhead of a boss held her back. Other assistants were allowed to sit in on meetings. She had heard that some even ran them. Damn bastard.
What fueled her to stay at Crystal Industries, more than the pay and the health benefits that paid for her grandmother’s medication, was the fact that one day May would make it to the top and would have the distinct pleasure of telling her windbag of a boss to kiss her ass.
As she thought about the man planting his lips onto her cheek, her face felt flush. Sure he was a jerk, but he was a pretty good-looking jerk. Well, if tall, clear blue eyes and straight, white teeth turned a woman on, then he could be classified as handsome. For May, it did.
Some days she imagined her boss on his hands and knees, crawling to her, begging for her forgiveness. She wanted Winston Biggers to suffer. More than putting him through sheer misery, she wanted him as her secretary. Give him a taste of his own medicine.
She would tell him to answer her phone and lie to whomever she was dating at the time, like he did. She would make him fetch her meals, and have him drive all the way to the oceanfront instead of going to the office cafeteria to pick up her lunch. Above all, she would do to him what he never had done to her. She would treat him like a sex object, stare at him as he worked and make comments about how good he looked and smelled.
In her imaginary world where she ruled over her boss, she would also have him as her own personal fuck toy. She closed her eyes and imagined feeling his tongue against her pussy, stroking her nether lips and diving inside of her until she came hard. But she wouldn’t stop there. She would make him fuck her until she was exhausted or grew tired of him. She would use him in the same way he’d been using her.
Get this. Get that. Fuck you!
Absently, she tugged at a loose piece of string at the end of her sleeve. With one pull, she managed to unravel the stitching going up the arm, making a nice, long opening at the inside seam.
“Shit.” She tossed the useless thread and attempted to close the hole. “My favorite sweater, too.”
The good thing about the gaping opening was that it created a Saturday night project, since May didn’t have a date and had no prospects of getting one in the near future. Calling numbers at the local bingo hall and taking her grandmother to and from the doctor’s office offered little in the way of finding suitable dates, or any dates for that matter.
The next obstacle would be to get out of here on time. Before she could look at her watch, a bellow broke her thoughts.
“Maybelline, come in here,” the jerk du jour said as though he’d known her immediate plans.
Why did he have to use her full first name? He knew she hated it. The name constantly reminded her of her southern roots and her mother’s ignorance about popular cosmetics.
“I thought it sounded sweet,” her mother had said.
She used to correct her boss constantly the first year she worked for him.
“It’s May, just like the month. Just call me May.”
Four years and a Bachelor of Arts degree later, he still called her the name that made her skin crawl.
Pushing herself back from her pressboard-and-steel desk, she grabbed a notepad and pen. The man never asked her in his office for something simple. Not once. He spouted orders like a drill sergeant, always without looking her in her eyes.
Lack of eye contact suited her fine. She’d always been a sucker for blue eyes, even if they were in the head of the most insensitive man she’d ever met.
Plants died around him. She’d tried keeping a fern in his office. Within a week, it turned brown and suffered a horrible death. She thought about bringing in a goldfish but she imagined he would swallow the thing whole like a snake.
She took a deep breath, calming her queasy stomach and giving herself the strength to walk through her boss’s door, hopefully for the last time today. She glanced at her watch. Five minutes to five. He had better make it quick.
Behind a desk big enough to crush a Mini Cooper and surrounded by so many windows, he could have leased a portion of his office to a gardener as a greenhouse. Winston Biggers reigned in his office and, by most people’s accounts, ruled all of the twenty-third floor.
Different shaped awards decorated a four-tiered glass shelf that sat next to his private bathroom. His diploma from the University of Virginia hung on the opposite wall above an elliptical trainer. Guess even the King of Mean needed to keep in shape.
Thanks to the fresh flowers brought in each week, his office reeked of jasmine and lavender today. Even the sweet aroma didn’t raise Biggers’ spirit.
At a good six-foot-four and dressed in tailored clothes, his presence overwhelmed an entire room. He looked expensive, from his daily barber-cut brown hair with a light streaking of gray strands, down to his shined shoes that must have been worth more than a small house here in Virginia Beach.
May breathed easier seeing his head down, his gaze trained on the piece of paper on his desk. She cocked her head and stared at the top of his.
He wasn’t balding like the rest of the high-level executives in the building. Didn’t mean he would be immune to the follicle failure. It happened to all execs. Bald heads, ulcers, bad marriages. And they kept putting these guys in high-rise buildings. Men like Biggers were walking poster children for stress-related suicides.
The sight of his hair brought her back to her daydream of having him between her legs, her knees wrapped around his head as she held a good chunk of his hair fisted in her hand.
She chewed her bottom lip and wondered if he ever had fantasies. Didn’t all bosses fantasize about their secretaries? In her sexy erotica novels that she loved reading so much, they all did.
Not that she cared. The only thing she cared about involved walking out of the office by the time the big hand hit the twelve and the little hand camped out at the five. If he didn’t look up, she could get away fast and still get off on time.
Princess Watkins promised her a drink and she knew her friend wouldn’t wait for her for very long. But then again, with a name like Princess what did May expect?
“Flowers,” Winston said, breaking May from her rambling thoughts.
“Sir?”
Working with the totem pole with style for years, she had grown use to his shorthand way of speaking. Right now he had her stumped. She had to stop thinking about sex so much at the office.
Maybe the idea of having a margarita in about twenty or so minutes made her stumble. She could almost taste the burning tequila on her tongue. Thinking about the bitter salt that would cover the glass rim made her suck in her cheeks. Sugar, definitely sugar on the rim tonight.
“I need an arrangement ordered and sent to a young lady.” His deep voice rolled over the desk and nearly bowled May over. He swiveled in his chair and retrieved a piece of paper behind him.
“Yes, sir,” she said. She wrote on her pad, “guilt flowers” and underlined it.
Men were so easy to read. It was no longer a sport for her to figure them out. Now it became second nature to decipher their inner workings.
Biggers proved to be an easy read. Controlling in all aspects of his life. No personal attachments like pets or children (he would have considered both to be in the same category). Girlfriends that lasted six to eight months. Long enough to develop a comfortable rhythm but short enough to avoid the annoying marriage question.
He probably had a cordial, almost too proper relationship with his parents. More than likely an only child, and if he did have a sibling, especially a brother, they competed on every aspect of their lives from jobs to relationships.
To think of him now, May felt a tiny twinge of sadness. As soon as he spoke, a sensation that compared to a caterpillar crawling across her naked belly disappeared.
Probably just hunger pangs anyway since she worked through her lunch thanks to some new reports Biggers wanted prepared.
“I need the arrangement sent to her tonight.” He scribbled something on a notepad. “Something big, but tasteful. Nice and sweet, but heartfelt.”
“Perhaps a stuffed animal with it?” May started to write that on her pad.
If she couldn’t have a man there to wring his neck when he skipped out on dinner then a stuffed animal would do nicely.
He slipped on a pair of glasses with short, rectangular, wire frames that reminded May so much of her granny’s glasses. His blue-eyed gaze cut over the top as though he looked down on her and her opinion.
Years of smiling with his deep, long dimples caused him to have two distinct creases in his cheeks that made him look even more distinguished and handsome. Didn’t help that he also had a cleft in his chin.
Men. They get older and look even better. Women constantly had to overhaul their looks.
Now that he glared at her like she just disrespected his family, his stare turned her off. She hoped the woman he would be standing up tonight never got this chilling look. It caused a rippling shiver from her toes to the top of her head. She gripped her pen and pad tighter to calm herself.
“I want something classy, not gaudy.”
May bit the inside of her lower lip, trying hard not to spit on him.
What did he know about class? Designer clothes and working close to the top floor didn’t give him any sort of prestige.
“Yes, sir.” She wrote “asshole” on under her initial comment and underlined it twice.
“On the card I need to have written, ‘Can’t make it to dinner tonight. Sorry. Some other time. Win.’ Got that?”
As though she could not get that pathetic excuse for an apology.
But she obliged him and repeated his message. “Unable to make it to dinner.”
He cut her off. “Can’t. Not ‘unable to make it.’ I can’t.”
“There’s a difference, sir?” Not that she meant to be insolent, but his pettiness wore on her nerves, especially now.
He leaned back in his black, leather swivel chair and removed his glasses. “‘Unable’ makes it seem like I could go but don’t want to. ‘Can’t’ says that I cannot physically make it to dinner. And I can’t go. I just can’t.”
His voice held something that said he had a bigger but not necessarily better excuse for not showing. If she didn’t know any better, she would have thought he sounded exhausted.
So this was what Winston Biggers was like as a boyfriend. He created the rules. He set the pace. His wants. His schedule.
Bastard.
Did he ever once think about his woman’s needs?
What was May thinking? This was the same man who’d given her a day to get over the flu.
But a man who worked this many hours and rode her hard had to have had a story for why he became the man he was today. Not that May necessarily cared. But he did intrigue her. How could a handsome man manage to never marry and seem so unfulfilled?
She wanted to kick herself for asking, but a good employee, the one who desperately needed and deserved a raise, would do so. “Did you have some extra work that needed to be done that’s preventing you from meeting this woman for dinner? I could help you if that’s the case.”
He stared at her, his face and expression looking softer than she’d ever seen it. At that moment, the crow’s feet around his eyes didn’t look as sinister. His lips parted but he uttered nothing. Was he actually touched by her gesture?
She blinked and directed her gaze back to her pad and pen. Her hand trembled and she shook it as though that would somehow reset her feelings.
“No,” he answered, finally. “Something else came up.”
She nodded, relieved he didn’t suggest more work. “Can’t make it to dinner tonight. Sorry. Some other time. Win.”
He nodded. “Here’s her name and address.” He handed her a paper.
May stared at the name. A gasp rose up her throat but she swallowed it down before it had a chance to become audible.
She kept her expression neutral. “She won’t be happy.”
“It’s not like she hasn’t canceled a million times on me when she got a break in one of her cases.” He folded his glasses and slipped them into a small, brown leather case.
Yeah, but Courtney Vanderloo wasn’t just any detective. To say she’d been highly decorated throughout her career would be like saying Americans were moderately pleased Saddam Hussein had been captured and executed.