Shamefully Trained (The Institute: Shameful Arrangements #8)

Chapter 1

Alex

It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t ask Senator Gowry to fuck me in his fucking hideaway in the Capitol. Even I, twenty-one years old and fresh out of college, in pursuit of my dream of a career as a political operative, knew that had to be a bad idea.

Really, though, part of me knew that I couldn’t even blame Gowry.

The simple facts of politics bore just as much responsibility.

I had thought of myself as politically seasoned, astute even, but the way my college ‘friend’ Joe introduced me to Jason Gowry should have told me I had just gotten out of my depth.

I should have understood that whatever friendship existed between Joe and me took a back seat to his duty to deliver to his boss the kind of young woman his boss liked to fuck.

“Senator, this is Alex Murphy—the one I told you about,” Joe said, after drawing me away from a group of my colleagues in Senator Hathaway’s office.

The milling crowd at the reception thrown by the Joint Committee on Taxation seemed to fade into the background.

Gowry looked me over in a way that should have sent me back across the room at once.

He didn’t bother to hide it. His gaze went from my face to my breasts, to my waist, to my legs, and then back up again, cool and assessing, as though my friend had presented him with a dossier in a skirt.

“So this is the pretty one,” he said.

I ought to have bristled, especially when I felt myself blush, helplessly, at the strangely phrased semi-compliment.

Instead I smiled, because I knew men like him liked smiles, and because I understood what kind of power Gowry had.

Not formal power only, though he had plenty of that.

The other kind, too. The kind that made people lean in when he spoke and lower their voices when they said his name.

“I hope that was a favorable briefing,” I said.

His mouth shifted, not quite a smile. “Depends what you’re here for.”

There was no graceful answer to that. Somehow that made me want to try to give one. “To meet people who matter.”

His eyes sharpened at once. “Honest. That’s refreshing.”

It wasn’t honest, though. I was there because Senator Hathaway’s staff had been told to show our faces, to be useful, to build connections.

I was there because I needed, after the last few humiliating weeks in which everything I did seemed to displease the senator, to prove I could still be useful.

If Senator Jason Gowry happened to take an interest in me, if I could draw something out of that interest and carry it back to Frances Hathaway like an offering, then maybe my stupidness in other respects would matter less.

My ‘friend’ murmured something about leaving us to talk and drifted away before I could decide whether to resent him or thank him.

Gowry lifted a hand toward the bar. “What are you drinking?”

I told him white wine. He shook his head.

“No,” he said. I swallowed hard. “You need a martini.”

He vanished and a moment later he had pressed a glass into my hand. I sipped, and coughed. Senator Gowry chuckled.

Then he steered me, not by touching me at first but by simple confidence, moving through knots of people until I found myself standing in a recessed corner near a marble pillar, half screened by a display of flowers and a banner for the committee.

Anyone glancing over would have seen us talking and nothing more.

He planted himself in front of me and took up the available space so naturally that I didn’t realize I had been pinned there until I thought of leaving and understood I would have to ask him to move.

“I hear you’re ambitious,” he said.

I chewed my lower lip involuntarily, then tried a flirty response though my heart rate had begun to speed up.

“People talk too much.”

“Hathaway keeps clever girls around until they become inconvenient. Have you figured that out yet? From what I hear it’s only a matter of time for you.”

That stung because it was close enough to true to feel intimate. “You seem to have heard a lot.”

“I hear about everything that might be useful.” Gowry drank, looking at me over the rim of his glass. “Are you useful, Alex?”

The chauvinism in that should have revolted me. It did, a little. It also thrilled me in some low humiliating way I didn’t want to inspect too closely, because he wasn’t pretending. Most men in this town wrapped their hunger in civility and strategic feminism. Gowry let his show.

I swallowed again, wondering whether I should try to continue this increasingly dangerous-feeling game.

“I suppose that depends on what use you have in mind, Senator.”

He laughed softly. “There you are.”

His attention was heavy and direct. I could feel heat gathering under my blouse, and not all of it was anger.

Every instinct that had gotten me anywhere in politics told me that men who liked hearing themselves be obeyed also liked hearing themselves be flattered.

So I let my tone go a little lighter, let my eyes stay on his for an instant too long, asked him about appropriations and trade language and a committee fight Hathaway wanted badly enough to hide how badly she wanted it.

He answered, but only enough to show that he knew exactly what I was doing.

“You don’t waste time,” he said.

“Should I?”

“No.” He took my empty glass from me though I hadn’t noticed I’d finished it. “I appreciate efficiency.”

There was a pause in which something seemed to change, though the difference didn’t occur in the world around us. The reception hummed on. Glasses clinked. Someone laughed too loudly. My pulse had become absurdly palpable to me.

“My hideaway is upstairs,” he said.

It was not phrased as an invitation. It was a fact, and he followed it with another.

“It’s quieter there.”

I should have said no. I knew that before I answered, while I answered, and afterward too.

But in the instant before I spoke, I thought of Hathaway’s cool appraising face, of how little she had given me lately, of how much she expected.

I thought of leverage. Access. I thought, stupidly, that I was not a child and could handle an arrogant senator in a closed room—even one of the legendary hideaway offices so prized by senior legislators.

“All right,” I said.

The hallway outside the reception felt too cool after the crush inside.

He walked beside me and I matched his pace, my heels sounding small on the marble floor.

There was almost no conversation on the way up.

That should have warned me too. By the time he unlocked the office door, I had entered a kind of narrowed state in which every choice seemed already made.

His hideaway was larger than I had expected, and darker, with the city spread out in black glass beyond the windows. He shut the door behind us. The click of the latch was very soft. He didn’t lock it. A part of me almost asked him to, because I thought I might decide to seduce him.

Then he turned to me and said, “Take off your clothes.”

For a second I stared at him, because the aggression of it was harder to process than if he’d come at me gradually. No flirtation now, no easing. Command only.

“Senator—”

“Now.”

I wished, even as I started to obey, that I had argued, at least about the terms. Or even that I had gotten frightened enough to refuse.

I was frightened, but it came with a strange floating feeling, as if I had stepped outside myself and left some lesser, more pliant girl standing there in my place.

My fingers went to the buttons of my blouse.

I watched them undo each one. I folded the blouse because I was apparently ridiculous to the core.

My skirt followed, then my bra, then my panties, and all the while his eyes remained on me, cool and proprietary, until I had nowhere to put my hands and no idea where to look.

“Naked means naked,” he said.

I had left my shoes on. My face burned. I slipped them off.

His eyes, to my distress, focused downward.

“You don’t wax,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t mind that on a redhead, I suppose, but you’ll need to trim that bush at least. Even better to bare a little pink cunt like that completely though.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered, feeling my face go as hot as the sun.

He nodded at the rug in front of his desk. “Kneel.”

I did that too, as if his lewd, brutal words had cast some kind of spell over me.

The carpet fibers pressed into my knees.

The room smelled faintly of leather and whatever cologne he wore, spicy and expensive-smelling.

I could hear my own breathing. He came around the desk slowly enough to make me feel each step in my stomach.

When he unzipped his trousers and took himself out, I had one absurd thought, not about his body but about the fact that this was happening in a United States senator’s hideaway under framed photographs and a flag. Then his hand was at the back of my head.

“Open,” he said.

I did. I had kissed men—on the mouth. I had let a few touch me, and I’d had sex exactly twice.

But I had never done this before, and he knew it at once.

He pushed into my mouth with casual arrogance, and the shock of it made tears spring to my eyes.

I gagged, trying and failing not to. His fingers tightened in my hair.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You’re terrible at this.”

I made a miserable sound around him.

He drew back enough for me to breathe. “Have you never sucked cock before?”

I was crying already, more from humiliation than pain, though there was pain too. “No,” I whispered.

He stared down at me with open contempt and what looked horribly like satisfaction. “Of course not.”

Then he put his hand on the back of my head again and used my mouth harder.

I tried to do what my body seemed to understand and my mind didn’t, tried to relax my throat, to breathe through my nose, to take what he gave me without choking.

I couldn’t manage it well enough for him.

He held me there until mascara and tears and saliva had made a complete wreck of me, then released me with a short disgusted sound.

“Up,” he said. “You’re going to get the consequences of that awful performance now, you little whore.”

I sobbed and rose, my confusion over why I obeyed this asshole growing but somehow not stopping me.

I felt unsteady when I stood. He turned me and bent me over the desk with one hand between my shoulders.

The polished wood was cold against my breasts and cheek.

Papers shifted under me. I heard the whisper of leather sliding through belt loops.

“Wait…” I said, and then I felt the first stroke.

It landed across my bare ass with a force that took the breath out of me.

I cried out at once, not from calculation or dramatics but because my body couldn’t help it.

The second came lower, the third higher, each one a bright hard stripe of pain that left me clenching and shaking.

I tried to push myself up and his hand shoved me down.

“Stay where I put you. You earned this, and you’re going to get it. A whore like you needs to learn her lesson when she fails to give pleasure.”

The belt hissed and cracked against me again.

Tears ran onto the desk blotter. I hated him in those moments, hated him with a clarity that should have solved everything, and yet beneath the pain there was that same terrible unraveling, my body answering with heat where it should have answered with revulsion alone.

When he stopped, the silence throbbed.

“Reach back,” he said. “Spread yourself for me. Show me that sweet pink cunt.”

I froze.

He laid the belt, folded, against one scorched cheek. Not striking, just letting me feel it there. “Do it.”

My hands shook. I reached them back and let out a little whimper as I grasped my whipped bottom cheeks.

I pulled myself open for him in the most degrading posture I had ever imagined, much less taken.

I could feel how wet I was and wanted to disappear.

He made a pleased noise that ruined me further.

“That looks nice and tight.”

I closed my eyes.

“Are you on birth control?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t ask anything else. He didn’t ask if I wanted him to use a condom, or if I wanted him at all, because by then the transaction had moved beyond language into something uglier and simpler.

He positioned himself behind me and pushed his hardness into my pussy.

I cried out again, half from the sudden intrusion, half because my body was already too sensitized from the belt and the humiliation and the forced arousal of it all.

“Fuck, that is tight,” he swore under his breath, a man’s half-grunted sound of satisfaction. Then he began to thrust.

The desk hit my hips with each stroke. I clutched at the edge of it, hearing my own little helpless noises, hearing him breathe harder, feeling the room narrow to impact and shame and the hot involuntary pleasure that kept breaking through despite everything I thought I believed about myself.

I tried not to move back against him. I couldn’t entirely help it.

“That’s it,” he said roughly. “You wanted something from me, didn’t you? This is what girls like you trade.”

I made some protest—I think I said his name, or no, or please, I honestly didn’t even know—but it dissolved when he drove deeper and my body clenched around him in traitorous response.

Then the door opened.

I jerked, horror slicing through the fog so cleanly it almost hurt. Gowry swore and stopped, still inside me. I twisted enough to see past my hair, past the corner of the desk.

Senator Hathaway stood in the doorway.