Chapter 10
Two night later, Kelly’s cheek was pressed down against a flattened pillow, and her bottom was high in the air.
Her naked body shook from the force of Caleb’s thrusting behind her. His cock was buried in her deeply, and his pelvis pistoned against her ass with increasing urgency.
“Oh God!” she mumbled, faking intensifying pleasure. She wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, but she also wasn’t anywhere close to coming. “Fuck, Caleb!”
“You gonna come, baby?” He was obviously tired from a long day of work and was already pretty far gone.
He’d worked late, so she’d had dinner and gone to bed on her own, relieved that she wouldn’t have to have sex with him this evening.
But twenty minutes ago, he’d knocked on her bedroom door, still dressed for the office.
She hadn’t been asleep yet, and she couldn’t lose the one true advantage she had in this scheme.
So she’d invited him into her bed, kissing down his body and undressing him only enough to get her mouth on his cock, hoping that would expedite matters.
It had. After only a few minutes of sucking, he’d eased her mouth off him so he could turn her over on her hands and knees.
He wasn’t going to last long.
“Yeah, yeah, gonna come!” Her hands fisted in the sheet as she squirmed her hips desperately against Caleb’s fast thrusts.
For a ruthless asshole and a womanizer, he was surprisingly concerned about her always coming before he did, so she had to fake it to bring their sex sessions to an end.
Deciding it had been long enough, she turned her head to bury her face in the pillow. Muffling a loud cry, she shook her body and clamped down hard with her pussy around his cock.
She extended it only as long as it was believable.
Then, panting wetly against the pillow, she turned her head back to the side and let her body relax.
She was still supported on her folded knees, her bottom in the air and her chest and shoulders against the mattress.
Caleb held fistfuls of her ass, and his cock was still deep inside her clinging channel. But he wasn’t thrusting at the moment.
“That sounded like a good one,” he said, his voice hoarse but controlled. With one hand, he released her and reached down to stroke her damp hair away from her face.
“It was. Amazing. I wasn’t too loud, was I?”
“No. Just loud enough.”
She snorted. “Why do I suspect you’re getting a caveman thrill out of the doggie-style?”
Caleb chuckled briefly, his palm stroking down the length of her spine. “Why do I suspect you are too?”
“Not me. This position was your idea.”
With another soft laugh, Caleb started to rock his hips against her bottom, moving his cock very slightly. Then he reached around her body and stroked her open, his fingers pressing into her clit.
He rubbed with firm pressure as his hips established a new rhythm.
“Oh God!” she cried sharply, genuinely surprised when her body responded to the stimulation.
“Yes,” Caleb hissed, rhythmically pleasuring her with his hand and his cock. “Good, baby.”
She couldn’t let this continue too long. Hopefully he’d get a macho thrill from her second orgasm coming really fast. She started to hide her face in the pillow to fake another one.
“No,” he rasped, “Let me see.”
She didn’t argue, but she resented the demand. It made the pretense harder than it should have been. Calling on every acting skill she possessed, she bit her lip and tensed up her face.
“Fuck, you’re really close. You can do it, baby. Come for me again.”
She sobbed and shook herself through another simulated orgasm, not having to fake the urgency because she needed so much for this to end before her body responded even more.
“That’s right,” Caleb rasped, his tempo and force picking up as he grabbed her ass with both hands again. “That was so good. You always come so good for me.”
The irony would almost have made her laugh had the growing pressure in her pussy not been upsetting her so much.
Then finally—at last—he was falling out of rhythm with a loud, unrestrained burst of sound. He worked through his own climax with a series of pushes and moans until he pulled out and collapsed on the bed beside her.
He reached over to put a hand on her belly as they panted in the silence of the dark room.
An unexpected gesture. Almost like he was unconsciously seeking to connect with her.
She didn’t want to connect. She didn’t want to feel the weight of his hand on her stomach.
She didn’t want any of this, but it was the only this whole plan would work.
A couple of days later, in the middle of the night, Kelly’s phone buzzed with a text.
She was sleeping alone in her room—Caleb always returned to his room after sex—and she reached for the phone, blinking down at the words until she could read them.
How is it going?
She didn’t recognize the number, and there was no name attached to the question, but Kelly knew exactly who it was.
Her mother.
She tapped out Fine .
Any progress on the project we discussed?
Yes. A beginning. It will be a while before I have anything ready to show you.
You know I’m on a tight timeline, right?
I can only work at a certain pace.
Let me know how it goes.
Kelly scowled as she placed her phone back on her nightstand. Damn her mom anyway. Let her try to seduce a man to get close enough to find out incriminating information and then see how easy it was. Did she expect Caleb to suddenly spill out all kinds of compromising secrets postcoitally?
If Kelly started to ask about anything specific, he would immediately get suspicious. There was only so much she could do here, and it was ripping her apart to even do that.
So her mom could just go fuck herself.
“We can’t allow that to happen.”
Kelly had been walking downstairs for dinner, but she stopped short at the words and the ice-cold tone.
She knew it was Caleb speaking. She’d recognize his voice anywhere. And he must be just around the corner from the stairs she was descending because he was out of her sight. Since there wasn’t a second voice, she assumed he was talking on the phone.
She froze, listening until he started talking again.
“I don’t care. He must sign the contract. You need to find a way to make him do it.”
It was becoming clear what this conversation was about, and a chill ran from her neck to her fingertips as she processed the cold ruthlessness in his words.
He continued after another pause. “No. That won’t work. No use wasting your time with that. What do we know about his family?”
There was a much longer break as the person on the other end of the call evidently rehearsed information on the individual in question. “Wait,” Caleb said at last. “His daughter is at Eastlodge? How can he afford to send her there on his salary? What kind of scholarship?”
After the answer, his tone changed. “That’s it then. Call the headmaster. Use my name. Make sure Johnson knows that his daughter will lose the scholarship unless he signs the contract tomorrow by noon.”
Kelly was so numb from overhearing this conversation that she literally couldn’t move. She’d known who Caleb was—on paper anyway. She’d read all the evidence her mother put together on his callous treatment of others, his unethical business decisions.
But hearing it firsthand like this was something entirely different. This was the man who could have made a call to have her father killed. Maybe he’d even done it on his way to dinner.
Because she was so overwhelmed with shock, rage, and pain, she couldn’t do anything to hide the fact that she’d been eavesdropping when Caleb suddenly appeared around the corner.
He was sliding his phone in his pocket, and he glanced up to see her frozen on the third stair.
His eyes rested thoughtfully, observantly, on her face. “You heard?”
She nodded since there was no way to hide the fact now.
“Did it upset you?” He didn’t appear worried. Just curious and slightly wary.
This was important. She had to get her response right if she was going to stay in Caleb’s good graces. She also needed to be believable. She cleared her throat. “It sounded kind of… heartless.”
He gave a little shrug. “It was. It’s business.”
“Yeah, to you. But it’s not business to that poor girl who might lose her scholarship.”
“She won’t. I know how to read people. Her father will do the right thing.”
She let out her breath, forcing her body to react. She couldn’t let him see her real response to him at the moment. She absolutely couldn’t. She slanted a look up at him. “Are you sure?”
He smiled as if pleased that she was falling in line with what he wanted her to feel about this. “I’m sure.”
“Okay. I guess that’s good. It still seems rather ruthless.”
“Anyone you talk to will agree that’s a fair assessment of me.”
She smiled, as she was supposed to, and swayed a little closer to him. “So you’re ruthless, are you?”
“That’s what they say.” A sexy little smile tilted up the corners of his mouth. “Does this change anything?”
She shook her head and slid her hands up to span her fingers around the back of his neck. “I don’t think so. It’s not like I’m the most moral person who ever walked the earth, you know. And to tell you the truth?—”
She trailed off and dropped her eyes.
He tilted her head back up. “To tell the truth, what?”
She let her eyes grow warm and languid. “I don’t want it to go to your head or anything, but I might actually find it a little—hot.”
And that was clearly the right thing to say.
Later that week, Kelly needed to talk to Jack Martin, the private investigator who was helping her and her mother.
It should have been easy enough to make a phone call, but she was constantly on guard. Caleb’s security staff were ubiquitous, and she kept noticing security cameras in unexpected places. She didn’t want to risk a dangerous phone call while she was on Caleb’s property.