Chapter 6
Anne
“Please,” I whispered. “Please don’t. Please stop.”
Even as I said it, though, my hips pushed back against her hand. My body moved without my permission, seeking her fingers the way a plant turns toward light—involuntarily, instinctively, with a need that made a mockery of the words coming out of my mouth.
Penelope didn’t stop.
Her fingers moved in slow, deliberate circles over my clitoris, spreading the wetness that was—I could feel it—everywhere, coating her fingers, coating my thighs, evidence of an arousal so total and so shameful that I pressed my face into my arms and sobbed.
But the sobs kept breaking apart into moans, because what she was doing felt—it felt—
It felt like nothing Kevin had ever done.
Nothing Kevin had ever come close to doing.
Kevin’s careful, anxious fingers had touched me like I was made of porcelain, and I’d felt…
nothing much. A vague, pleasant friction that never built to anything, that always seemed to be happening at a slight distance from wherever the actual sensation lived.
I’d thought that was what sex felt like. I’d thought that was all there was.
This was not that.
This hand knew exactly what it was doing.
Penelope’s fingers moved with care—deliberately, unhurriedly, effectively.
She found the spot that Kevin had never found, or had found and immediately lost, and she stayed there, circling it with a pressure that was firm enough to make my toes curl and light enough to make me desperate for more.
Her other hand remained on my back, holding me in place, and the combination of the restraint and the pleasure, the burning skin of my paddled bottom and the exquisite, unbearable sensation between my legs, created something I had no framework for.
Something that built inside me like a wave, like a wall of water, like something titanic and inevitable that was going to crash over me and leave nothing standing.
My mind whirled. The spinning felt almost literal.
The office, the desk, the contract, the meeting, the lingerie, the white lace panties with their oval opening—all of it seemed to dissolve into a warm, pulsing haze, and the only things that existed were her hand and my body and the impossible pleasure that was climbing, climbing, climbing toward something I had never reached before.
Not with Kevin. Not alone in my apartment with my own tentative, guilt-ridden fingers. Never.
“Please,” I said again, but the word had changed. It wasn’t a plea for her to stop. It had become something else entirely, and we both knew it.
My breathing turned to shallow, desperate pants.
My fingers gripped the far edge of the desk until my knuckles went white.
The wave was right there—right there—I could feel the crest of it, could feel my body tightening around a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain, and I was going to—I was about to—
Penelope’s hand stopped.
She pulled her fingers away from me in one clean motion, and the loss of contact was so sudden, so brutal, that I actually screamed.
A short, strangled, disbelieving scream that turned into a sob, then turned into a frantic, writhing attempt to push my hips back toward her hand, to find the friction again, to get back to the edge she’d just shoved me away from.
“Anne.” Her voice was steady. Controlled. If I hadn’t heard her breathing change during the paddling, I might have believed she was entirely unaffected. “Look at me.”
I turned my head. My face was a wreck—I could feel it.
Tears, snot, blotchy redness, mascara I’d forgotten I was wearing smeared across my cheeks.
I looked at her through swollen eyes and saw her standing behind me, her fingers glistening in the lamplight, her gray eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that pinned me more effectively than her hand on my back ever had.
“Tell me you want the modeling job,” she said.
“I—” A sob broke the word in half. “I—”
“Tell me, Anne. Tell me you want it. Tell me you want to put on beautiful lingerie and let people see you. Tell me you want to surrender. Because your body already has, honey. Your body surrendered the first day you walked into this building. All I need is for your mouth to catch up.”
The wave was still there. I could feel it suspended and trembling, like a held breath in every nerve ending. All it needed was one touch. One brush of her fingers. One second of that devastating, skillful contact, and I would shatter into something I’d never been before.
“Please,” I sobbed. “Please, I want it. I want the modeling job. Please, Penelope, I want it, I’ll do it, I’ll do whatever you want, just please—please…”
The words spilled out of me. I couldn’t have stopped them any more than I could have stopped my own heartbeat.
I didn’t even know, in that moment, whether I meant them or whether I simply said whatever she needed to hear to make her touch me again.
The distinction had ceased to matter. Need had swallowed everything—pride, conviction, modesty—and left only this: a girl bent over a desk with her panties at her thighs, begging her boss for an orgasm and a job modeling degrading, wanton, beautiful lingerie.
Penelope didn’t answer with words.
I felt her kneel behind me. The movement was smooth, unhurried—I heard the soft rustle of her suit trousers against the carpet, felt the shift in the air as she lowered herself.
Her hands found my knees, and she spread them gently but firmly, widening my stance until my thighs were parted and my polka-dot panties stretched taut between them like a cotton bridge.
Then she blew.
A single, soft breath of warm air, directed with the same kind of control she used in everything else she did, straight across the slick, swollen center of me, across the place where every nerve I possessed seemed to have gathered into a desperate network of lewd desire.
The sound I made wasn’t a moan, a scream, or a sob.
It seemed all three at once: a broken, animal noise that I would have been mortified to hear coming from anyone else and that I was powerless to stop coming from myself.
My hips bucked forward against the edge of the desk, then pushed back toward her mouth, seeking more, seeking contact, seeking anything other than this exquisite, torturous almost-nothing that left me shaking and clenching around emptiness.
“Oh, God,” I choked. “Oh, God, please, please, I can’t… I need…”
Penelope exhaled again, another warm breath that ghosted over my most sensitive flesh, and my knees nearly buckled.
The air against my wetness felt like being touched and not touched at the same time, like being held at the very precipice of sensation without being allowed to fall.
My fingers scrabbled uselessly against the desk.
My forehead pressed into the wood hard enough to leave a mark.
I had started to cry again—openly, messily, without any pretense of composure—and between the sobs came sounds I’d never known I could make, desperate little whimpers that belonged to a girl I didn’t recognize as myself.
“Please,” I said again. The word had become the only one I knew.
Penelope stood. I heard her rise, and then she stood behind me again, and her voice, when it came, carried a roughness that stripped away the last pretense of professional detachment.
“What we both need,” she said, in a tone that sounded rueful and almost tender, “is a good hard cock inside us. That’s really what this calls for, isn’t it?
A man who knows what to do with a girl who’s this wet and this desperate.
” Her hand rested on my burning bottom, and I flinched and moaned simultaneously.
“But we don’t have that luxury right now. So we’ll have to do the best we can.”
I heard her move away from me. I should have used that moment—those few seconds of separation—to pull up my panties, stand up, and walk out of her office and out of this building and never come back.
I should have. I knew I should have. Instead I stayed exactly where I was, bent over the desk with my skirt bunched at my waist, my polka-dot underwear stretched between my thighs, and my paddled bottom blazing in the open air, because the need inside me had become a physical force, a kind of gravity.
I heard a wooden sound: the click and the creak of something opening. A cabinet, maybe. I turned my head, craning my neck to look over my shoulder, and what I saw nearly made me faint.
Penelope had started to undress, as she looked inside a wardrobe in the corner of her office.
She’d already removed her suit jacket and was working the buttons of her ivory blouse with quick, practiced fingers.
Beneath it she wore a bra I hadn’t expected—not the sensible nude or white I would have guessed, but a deep, arterial red, lacy and underwired.
It cupped her breasts with the frank provocation of a woman who dressed for herself beneath the armor she wore for others.
The blouse dropped to the floor. Her trousers followed—unzipped, briskly stepped out of—and beneath them, a matching red garter belt, its straps taut against her thighs, holding up sheer black stockings that ended in a dark band just above her knees.
Red lace panties that she peeled off and set aside on the credenza without ceremony, as if this were simply another task to be completed.
She was beautiful. The thought arrived uninvited and undeniable.
At forty-something, Penelope Gallagher had the body of a woman who took exquisite care of herself—lean and firm, with the slight softness at the hips and belly that spoke of maturity rather than neglect.
In her red lingerie and stockings, with her chestnut hair still immaculate and her pearls still resting against her collarbone, she looked like something from an obscene parody of an old painting: classical, composed, and incredibly sexual.