Free When in Rio by Delphine Dryden Page A

you to work already, so I’m not likely to barge in and demand you drop what you’re doing to work on some other project of mine because I assume my project is more important. That really hasn’t come up, even before you were promoted. That isn’t really my management style. So it’s not an area where we’d tend to have any conflict anyway.”
    He pulled a face at the idea of having to have a management style at all. Like me, I suspected, there were times he wished he were still doing fieldwork every day.
    “But—and I don’t know if you realize this—if I walk into your office and, say, tell you to give me what I know is your favorite pen because my last one’s out of ink, and Ted’s gone home already and his desk is locked so I can’t get the key to the supply closet, like last week? Do you know what you do? You drop your eyes, blush, hand over your pen and say, ‘yes Sir’, just like you did a minute ago.”
    I opened my mouth to protest, to explain, but he held a finger over my lips, effectively silencing me.
    “If I tell you I’m ordering lunch,” he continued, “and you say you aren’t hungry, and I say, ‘Kate, I know you didn’t eat any breakfast, I am ordering you a sandwich which you will eat and your only choice in the matter is whether it’s roast beef or ham’, do you get pissed off? No. Do you say you just want a salad? No. You look right at your toes and say, ‘roast beef, Sir’. And then you eat the sandwich and thank me in an extremely charming way that, frankly, leaves me in absolutely no doubt what your… orientation is. Work is not at issue in any of those cases. Am I off track in any way here?”
    “No Sir.” He had moved his finger just long enough for me to answer then carefully placed it over my lips again.
    “Good. That’s a relief. This would be a terrible time to find out I’d been guessing wrong for over a year.”
    Over a year?
    “So just to be clear, little Katie, although I don’t think anybody else in the office really picks up on it, I do pick up on it. And the only way you could have sent a stronger submissive vibe would have been to start off each visit to my office by dropping to your knees to await my bidding. Which, by the way, I do not want you doing when we get back to town. I’ve fantasized about it plenty but if I actually saw that in my office, I would never get another minute of work done in there.”
    My head was reeling, my knees trembling and my arms were about to fall asleep. Jack must have realized this, because he released my wrists as he bent to kiss me again before leading me through the entrance hall and into the living room of his suite. I’d been fairly impressed by my own suite, but it looked like a hovel compared to this one, which was billed as a penthouse. I couldn’t really appreciate the details again in the semi-dark, however. Fortunately, Jack seemed to know his way around well enough already.
    “That’s in the office, of course. Here , however…” He sat on the elegant art deco sofa and tugged me over to stand between him and the breathtaking nighttime panorama of the beach and ocean. “Here, I do want to see you on your knees, but only after you take off that dress and let me get a look at everything your bathing suit and those damn jeans and all your other clothes have been hiding from me all this time.”
    “Yes Sir,” I said automatically, although at the moment all I wanted to do was fling off the dress and jump him.
    “And while you do that, I’ll tell you exactly what that rip in your jeans made me think about.” The tone in his voice set my hands shaking and I could barely fumble open the two buttons and short zipper at the waist of the dress, slipping it off my shoulders to stand in front of him in only the thin film of salt-tinted damp the ocean had left on me earlier.
    As Jack spoke, his fingers were traveling from my shoulders downward, patiently learning every inch of me, more sweet torture. “ Mmm .