“The lesson isn’t over yet,” he said as he took care of the condom. “I’m binding you again. You’re not to move yet.”
“Okay.” Her thighs and arms were sore from holding the earlier position for so long, so she was glad she was on her back this time, although her legs were dangling uncomfortably and her pussy was sore and still wet. But she was in the perfect position to see the computer screen and keyboard right here.
“I’m going to work some more, but I’ll get back to you later. I don’t want to see you moving.”
He was reestablishing his power in their little game. She understood it with crystal clarity. He felt like he’d lost something in their interplay just now, and he was taking it back.
In some ways, they really weren’t all that different.
She was getting her power back too. Just in an entirely different way.
Her whole body ached and was deliciously sated at the same time. It was such an incongruous combination of feelings, she could barely process it.
As soon as she heard his chair turn, she opened her eyes. She didn’t move a muscle as she watched him type his password into the prompt that appeared on the blackened screen.
He might sound perfectly cool and controlled, but he wasn’t. He’d obviously been affected by the hot sex they’d just had too. He was breathing heavily, and his typing was halting and slow.
This had always been a long shot, but she’d decided it was worth the effort. If he typed slowly enough, she might be able to follow the letters that were keyed in.
KELLY321#blossom
Her eyes were closed again when he turned back around to check on her.
—
The next day, Kelly had to wait until late afternoon before she got a chance to get on Caleb’s computer.
Breah was around all the time, and there was simply no excuse for Kelly to be in Caleb’s office, if she were to get caught.
Finally, Breah left the house to go shopping. As soon as she saw the car pull out of the gates, Kelly hurried downstairs.
The office was locked, of course, but Kelly knew where the household keys were kept now, so she grabbed them from the kitchen, ran to open the office, and then returned the keys in case Breah returned quicker than expected.
On an edge of excitement and anxiety, Kelly locked the office behind her and ran to the computer and typed in the password. To her relief, the home screen immediately opened up.
After that, it was really just a guessing game.
She tried the email first, being careful not to make any changes to his inbox, in case he had it opened on his office computer and would notice. She checked out the folders but saw nothing of interest—certainly nothing that went back eighteen years. Next, she tried the deleted and sent mail, but all of that must be purged fairly regularly.
There was nothing in the email that could help her, so she closed it down and pulled up his document folders.
There were hundreds of them—so many she stared blankly, overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information he kept on this computer.
It was all perfectly organized, though. Each folder labeled with the project or task, and folders inside folders, compartmentalizing each document neatly.
He had an assistant, she reminded herself. He probably didn’t do all this organization on his own.
She scanned through the names of the folders, but she didn’t see one with the name of the project her father had worked on. It was so long ago, he may not even keep records of it anymore.
What she needed might be in some obscure file cabinet in his company’s storage room.
What she needed might have been destroyed ages ago.
She found a group of folders titled only by years, and clicked on the one with the year of her father’s death.
There was a whole group of folders inside it—a variety of different projects. And there was a folder with the project name she was looking for.
Tarleton.
Her hands were trembling as she clicked on it, looking at the new folders that appeared on the screen. Budget. Research. Admin. Marketing. Competition.
She clicked on Research and blinked at the number of documents that pulled up. When she started going through them, they were full of detailed scientific results she’d never be able to decipher. She pulled out the jump drive she’d brought and copied the entire project folder, glancing at the clock to reassure herself she’d only been in the office fifteen minutes.
No way would Breah get back from the grocery store that quickly.
She closed out the folder and scanned the rest of the titles. She was about to log off altogether when she saw a folder entitled Old Correspondence.
Out of curiosity, she clicked on it, discovering folders by year again. She clicked on the right year and found the same projects she’d seen listed in the other folder. When she opened the Tarleton folder, she found hundreds of memos listed by date.
She sighed. Didn’t the man ever delete anything?
She found the dates just before her father’s death and started opening them.
They were nearly all interoffice memos, from a time when email wouldn’t necessarily have been the primary means of office communication. They were mostly innocuous—about boring, mundane items connected to the Tarleton project.
She figured she’d just copy all of them, and then sort through them at a different time. But as she was closing the documents, she noticed a few words that made her halt.
The memo was to the CEO at the time, and it was made up of only two lines.
The problem we discussed has been taken care of. Please let me know if you would like me to tie up any lingering loose ends.
Kelly stared at the screen with a sickening churn of her gut.
It was too vague to be compromising, but she knew—she knew—it was referring to her father.
Caleb. He’d “taken care of” her father’s potential whistle-blowing, having the man killed instead of leaving a loose end.
It didn’t matter that he wasn’t completely a monster. Men crossed those kinds of moral lines all the time.
Caleb’s career was the thing that was most important to him, and everything else fell in service to that. Including her father.
Including her.
She’d known to expect it, but it still made her shake helplessly with emotion. There might be more in these documents. Maybe something genuinely compromising. She finished copying the correspondence folder and pulled out her drive.
She closed out the computer quickly and turned around to leave, feeling shaky and heavy and profoundly angry.
She’d only taken one step toward the door when she heard the key turn in the lock.
With a gasp, she reacted instinctively, ducking down to hide under the desk.
It was probably just Breah, straightening up or something. It wasn’t even four thirty yet, so Kelly couldn’t imagine how she’d returned so quickly, though.
It wasn’t Breah. It was a member of Caleb’s security team, and she heard him talking in his earpiece. “There’s no one here. I told you it was just that damned misfiring sensor again.”
Shit. How stupid could she be? Of course Caleb had some sort of extra security on his office.
The man continued, evidently responding to something said through his earpiece. “I’m not sure how you think someone managed to get onto the grounds and into the house, and then into the office without being caught on camera or triggering an alarm. But you still send me out to check every damned fly that triggers a sensor.”
Kelly wasn’t even breathing, afraid of making any sort of noise. To her infinite relief, the voice got softer as the man evidently backed out of the office, and then the door shut and clicked as it locked again.
She waited five minutes before she dared to crawl out from under the desk, then she took her jump drive, and ran back to her room.
—
Kelly dreamed of her father that night.
She’d had dreams about him before—
a lot of them just after he’d died, when she was just a kid—but the dreams now were rare enough to be memorable.
This one wasn’t made up of a real or coherent narrative. It was all just flickered images and feelings. Nothing she could really make sense of, but the fragmented pieces fit together into what felt like an actual experience.
And it was so concrete, so absolutely visceral, that it might as well have been real.
She could see her father in glimpses and flashes—his broad, laughing face, the lines beside his eyes and his mouth, the hair on his forearms beneath the pushed-up sleeves of his old gray sweatshirt.
She could hear hints and glimmers of his familiar voice, his comforting chuckle, the sound of him clearing his throat.
And she could smell him in heartbreaking wafts. A mingling of coffee and the soap he used and the indefinable, unmistakable scent of Dad.
In the midst of these fleeting, sensory flickers of the dream, Kelly could feel him too. His hand in her hair. On her shoulder. On her back. Until, at the very end of the dream, he was hugging her.
And he didn’t feel like a flickering vision. He was solid, warm, strong, real.
It felt so real.
But even in the dream, she knew he was lost. Knew he was gone. Knew that, no matter how much she clung to him, she’d never be able to keep him.
She was sobbing as she woke up.
As she’d slept, she must have turned over onto her stomach, because her hot cheek was pressed down against the mattress. She turned her head until she could bury her face in her pillow. Choked on the waves of grief, trying desperately to hold them back, knowing she couldn’t cry in front of Caleb, even while he was sleeping.
He’d fallen asleep beside her again after they’d had sex that evening.
But there was no way she could hold back the emotion. She wept in tight, jerky spasms, clenching her whole body to try to keep from making any sound or shaking the bed. It felt like an old wound had been violently torn open.
Felt like her father had just died.
Caleb was sound asleep, just a few inches away. She could feel his presence and hear his steady breathing, although she didn’t dare turn her face to look at him. She needed to be away from him. Needed a real outlet for her grief. Needed something warm and alive to comfort her.
She wished Reese were here. Or Ralph, the dog. Or Breah with her comforting maternal air. Anything other than lying alone beside a cold, sleeping form, strangling on sobs with her face smothered in a luxurious pillow.
She tried to capture the dream again. Tried to see, hear, smell, feel her father—who’d been lost for so many years. Wanted it so much she felt like her chest would implode, but the dream, like her father, was lost.
And all that was left were scattered fragments and feelings.
Flickers that could never coalesce into substance.
Kelly couldn’t seem to stop crying, something she hadn’t done in years. And the large bed, the dark room, the house that wasn’t hers, all felt like they were swallowing her alive.
Her whole body shook with coiled grief and helplessness, and she wasn’t any different than she’d been at ten years old, when her father had been violently, unjustly, unbearably snatched away from her.
Just a body with half a skull, bleeding into the dirt.
It was three o’clock in the morning. Caleb was sleeping. The rest of the world seemed to be sleeping too. Warm and safe and content. With people they loved. With people who loved them.
And no matter how hard she tried to put things in perspective and accept the bitter irony of her life, she still couldn’t make any sense of it.
That Kelly had to lose her father—who had been all she’d really had in the world—who had been the only person who’d ever been truly hers.
She knew she was sobbing too hard, too desperately—it was dangerous and might hint at things about herself that could never be revealed. But she couldn’t stop.
She felt Caleb shifting beside her and knew that even her tightly suppressed sobbing had woken him up.
But before she could think of how to explain this, before she could try to make her mind work instead of simply howling in grief and outrage, before she could even remember why she was in bed with Caleb in the first place, he put his hand on her shoulder and turned her over.
Revealed her wet, crumpled face.
He silently pulled her against his bare chest, and his arms wrapped around her tightly as she buried her face in his shoulder. She kept sobbing because there was no way she could stop.
It was wrong. She knew it was wrong. She knew why she was here and that Caleb was the reason for it. She’d seen the memo on the computer screen not so many hours ago. But she clung to him anyway, let him hold her.
She knew that she hated him and that he was comforting her—and that she desperately needed him. She couldn’t begin to wrap her mind around that truth.
She couldn’t do anything but weep, until she finally cried herself to sleep like a child.
Through it all, Caleb didn’t say anything, and she never looked up at his face. She had no way to read him, no way to understand what he was thinking, why he was doing this. Whether it was a random flicker of his humanity or he was putting clues together in a way that would ultimately find her out.
He was gone when she woke up the next morning.
And, staring at his rumpled side of the bed with bleary, aching eyes, Kelly wondered if she could have dreamed the whole thing.
Chapter 8
The next day, Kelly went to meet with a new client. It was the first client she’d seen in almost a month.
She felt like her entire life was on hold until she finished this thing with Caleb, but she’d told him that she wanted to start getting her life back in order, and he would expect her to follow through.
One part of that would be to get her business going again, so she’d touched base with the two clients she’d had in progress—and she’d even managed to line up this new one.
The meeting went well. The retired woman seemed to like her¸ and the sketches she’d made of her treasured pet Pekingese. They went over a schedule, plan, and budget for getting the portrait done, and Kelly headed back to Caleb’s place, relieved the meeting was over so she could focus again on Caleb—and what she needed to do.
During a break, she called up Jack Martin to get an update. He told her he’d planted a few clues about her possible connection to a Russian gang in Baltimore, just so Caleb would believe he was on the right track. She’d told him about the files she’d copied, and sent them to him so he could have someone go through them. He ended by telling her to be careful.
She would have liked to talk to Jack more often, but she was worried about Caleb finding out. She’d nearly had a heart attack when he’d appeared out of nowhere in that dressing room. She didn’t want to risk anything like that happening again.
There was no way she was going to risk revealing herself. Not after she’d gotten so far.
When she arrived back at Caleb’s place, it was after seven in the evening, and he was already home.
She found him in his office, where he was predictably working on his computer.
“How did it go?” he asked, turning away from the email he was writing at her knock on the door.
“Good. She likes my ideas.”
“Did it feel good, to get back into working?” His eyes were thoughtful and observant.
“I guess so. It felt a little weird, to tell you the truth. It feels like so much has happened since I last painted a portrait. It kind of feels like I’m a different person.”
The words were true. She could hardly remember the person she’d been before she’d met Caleb in the park.
“I’m sure it will feel more familiar once you get back into it. Were you nervous about being out?”
“A little. It felt like someone might be watching around every corner.”
“That’s why the bodyguard is there. He won’t let anything happen to
you.”
“Yeah, but it’s weird to go around with a bodyguard too.”
He frowned deeply. “I don’t care if it’s weird. This guy sent thugs after you once. What’s going to stop him from doing it again? You need protection.”
“I know. I appreciate it. It just feels strange.” As they’d talked, she’d been drifting toward his desk, and now she leaned back against the edge. “Is everything okay with work?” She nodded toward the computer.
“Yeah. The emails just never end.” He sighed and smiled at her tiredly, rubbing his neck. “Are you hungry?”
“A little.”
She saw the expression change on his face as he scanned her from head to toe. “You have your work clothes on, I see.”
She wore another long, flowing skirt with a lacy bohemian top. Her hair was pulled back in a knot at the nape of her neck. She smiled at his expression. “Got to give the clients what they want.”
“Are your clients the only ones you give what they want?”
“I might make an occasional gesture toward someone else.”
He slid his arm around her waist and pulled her between his legs. “So did you want to eat now?”
She reached out and grazed her fingers over the rough skin of his jaw. “Maybe we can eat afterward.”
He released his breath with a little groan and slid his hand to the knot of hair at the back of her neck, pulling out the clip that was holding it up.
Her hair cascaded down her back in long, thick waves, and she saw the change in Caleb’s eyes as he watched it fall.
It was almost like awe kindling in his eyes, and seeing it there was thrilling and terrifying both.
She leaned toward him instinctively, letting him pull her down into his arms. Instead of kissing her, he kind of buried his face in her neck.
She could feel his hot breath and the press of his skin against her throat. It made her shudder with pleasure, and she let out an involuntary little sound when one of his hands moved up to cup one of her breasts.
She was tired and wasn’t thinking clearly, and his touch, his breath, his need seemed to soothe a hidden, damaged corner of her heart.