Chapter 17
Alex
I stared at him. There I was, sitting sore and full and shaky after having for some reason confessed—or lied, or something—to him that I needed anal training, and he had apparently decided the next natural subject was legislative strategy.
“You’re serious,” I said.
He gave me a brief look. “Usually.”
I almost smiled despite myself. Then I remembered the plug, and what I had said in the bath, and the smile vanished into a blush.
He went on as if the context were irrelevant.
“There are researchers in Baltimore and Silicon Valley who are close to making amazing breakthroughs. Neural interface work, adaptive prosthetic control, some very promising sensory feedback systems. If the subsidy package lands where it should in terms of numbers, wounded veterans with catastrophic injuries could be looking at very different lives in five years.”
The shift in him did something unsettling to me.
He had remained wholly himself, as I’d already learned to recognize him—controlled, exacting, impossibly intense—but now that same concentration had attached itself to something outside my body.
Something the world would call serious and, frankly, decent.
I put down my fork. “And Hathaway’s blocking it because…?”
“She can.” He took a sip of wine. “As far as I can tell. And because she knows my client wants it badly enough to pay somewhere else—create useless jobs in her state, I would guess.”
That made too much sense. Washington had worked like that long before I entered it, and it would continue to work like that after I had been rearranged into whatever Porter intended to make of me.
“She’s bringing Hale and Norris?” I asked.
“Of course. And that’s enough that I can’t see passing the bill without her.”
I hesitated. My brain, to my immense gratitude, had remembered how to do at least one thing besides imagine his cock in my ass.
“What about Gowry’s bloc?” I asked. “If you peeled him, Johnson, and Sinogar off because of the veteran angle, you could probably get Bradley and Weland as well.”
Porter looked at me with more direct attention then. Not sexual, exactly. Evaluative.
“Numerically, that works,” he said. “Yes.”
“But?”
“But Jason Gowry would never give me that win.”
I felt my fork pause halfway to my mouth. “Never?”
“No.” He set his glass down. “It’s personal, unfortunately.”
I blushed, and looked down at my plate. Two alpha males—or, I couldn’t help thinking, one real alpha male and one extraordinary asshole.
Warmth came into my chest, to match the heat in my face, as I understood to my distress that something in me found an insane kind of pride in having the actual alpha’s plug inside me, training my anus for his rigid manhood.
Porter continued, “If Gowry helped me on something this visible, it would only be because he saw a larger game.”
I thought of Gowry’s office, of his belt, and of the humiliating knowledge about me—about my pussy, more precisely, and how it responded to discipline—that now existed in two men’s minds.
My appetite flickered, then steadied again.
I realized that Porter had a way of making even ugly subjects fit into clean lines.
“You sound very certain.”
“I am.”
I took another bite, chewed, swallowed. “Sometimes men like Gowry do things because someone offers them an angle they hadn’t considered.”
Porter’s gaze sharpened. “Do you believe I’ve missed one?”
Maybe I should have backed away from the question.
Instead I said, “I think men who enjoy feeling powerful often mistake that feeling for strategic competence. And perhaps men who actually are competent, strategically, sometimes underestimate just how mistaken a self-proclaimed alpha can be about his own intelligence.”
One dark eyebrow lifted.
That was all, but it made my pulse jump. Praise from him had become dangerously potent.
He leaned back slightly. “That’s a useful formulation.”
I looked down at my plate before my face could betray too much pleasure in his words.
We finished the main course in a rhythm that would have seemed almost normal if not for the fact that every shift in my seat made me aware of the thing inside me and sent fresh heat through my lower body.
The conversation moved in and out of policy detail.
He asked what Hathaway had been like to work for.
I answered carefully. He asked which committee staffers actually mattered and which merely enjoyed acting as if they did.
I answered that too. At some point I realized, with a kind of dazed alarm, that he was not merely making conversation. He was listening.
He had made me climax in a bath with a plug in my ass and then asked me for my political judgment over boeuf bourguignon.
Dessert arrived from one of the boxes he had set aside earlier: little ramekins of crème br?lée.
He cracked the caramelized top of his with the back of his spoon.
I watched the motion and immediately, absurdly, imagined the same hand holding the back of my neck while he pushed me down over his desk.
I looked away too late. My body had already reacted.
He noticed, of course. “What are you thinking about?”
I nearly choked on custard. “Nothing.”
“Lying is generally a poor strategy, especially with me.”
I stared at my dessert. “I’m aware.”
“Then answer.”
The command came softly, and because of the softness even more powerfully. I could have refused. I knew that. But I also knew the plug remained inside me because he had decided it should, and that somewhere in the last hour my resistance had become entangled with a strange wish for him to know me.
“I was thinking,” I said, and had to stop because my throat felt hot, “that I can’t stop being aware of it.”
“Of the plug.”
“Yes… sir,” I said, looking down again and remembering his rule about where my eyes should go when his penis was uncovered.
I couldn’t see it now, beneath the table and the thick fabric of his robe, but it felt as if he had taken it out, as he made clear the authority he expected to exercise over me.
I felt I shouldn’t meet my sponsor’s eye without permission, when I said sir.
“And?”
I shut my eyes for one second. “And what I said.”
When I opened them, I could feel him still watching me.
“What did you say?”
The calmness of the question was devastating. He meant to make me speak it again while eating crème br?lée in his dining room.
My lips parted, and I couldn’t have looked him in the face even if he had commanded me to. “That I’m… I’m the kind of girl…”
“Yes?”
I flushed so hard I could barely see straight.
“Look at me,” he said.
Oh, no.
I had thought, just a moment earlier, that I could never have looked him in the eye. I swallowed hard.
“Look at me, Alex,” he repeated. “I’ll cane you if I have to, to get your obedience.”
A whimper of fear rose from my chest as I lifted my eyes.
“What kind of girl are you, you little slut?” he asked, his voice hard and his eyes narrow.
“Oh…” I said, because the expression on his face had made me squirm in my chair, and that had made me much too aware of the plug in my anus. “Oh… I’m… I’m…”
The words would not come.
My mouth worked around them, but the sentence remained lodged somewhere between shame and arousal, too revealing to survive contact with air. I stared into his eyes, saw exactly how little sympathy he had for my struggle, and still could not say it.
“No?” he said.
I shook my head once, miserably.
His chair pushed back over the floor with a soft scrape.
I felt the sound in my stomach.
“Stand up.”
I obeyed at once. My knees felt weak. The robe seemed suddenly much too heavy on my body, the belt too tight, the plug too present.
“Take off the robe.”
“Porter… sir…”
His expression did not change. “Now.”
I fumbled with the sash. My fingers barely worked. The thick fabric parted and slid from my shoulders, pooling around my feet. Cool air touched my skin. I stepped out of it because I knew better than to make him tell me again.
“Naked at the table because you couldn’t answer a simple question,” he said quietly. “Come here.”
I went around the corner of the table and stopped where he indicated, between his spread knees.
He remained seated, looking up at me in a way that made me feel more exposed than if he had loomed over me.
His gaze moved slowly over my breasts, my stomach, between my legs.
I tried not to cover myself. I tried not to shift my weight.
He put his hands on my hips and drew me a little closer.
“Look at you,” he murmured. “Trembling.”
The tremble turned into a whole body shudder, and a little whining sound from my nose.
His palm slid up and closed around one breast, not roughly, just with complete possession.
He weighed it, thumb moving over the nipple until it tightened almost painfully.
I let out a little sound I had not meant to make.
He did the same to the other, inspecting me as if I belonged to him already in every possible way.
Then his hands moved lower.
He parted me with two fingers and looked directly down at my red-furred pussy. Heat rushed into my face so fast that I almost swayed. He touched the slickness there and held up his fingers between us.
“So wet,” he said. “And all I asked you to do was admit what kind of girl you are.”
I shut my eyes.
“No.” His voice stayed calm. “Open them.”
I did.
He turned me with easy certainty until my back was to him. His hands spread my cheeks and I felt the terrible heat of his gaze on the plug nested there. His thumb stroked around it once, then pressed lightly against the base. My whole body jumped.
“Such a pretty little bottom,” he said. “And we’re going to make it prettier.”
My breath came faster.
“I’m going to have your pussy waxed. Your anus too, since you have a few stray hairs here.
” He said it with the same matter-of-fact certainty with which he had discussed committee votes.
“We’re going to get you nice and smooth.
Then when I put you in lace panties you’ll look as exposed as you should. ”
I made a helpless noise.
He laughed under his breath. “When you’re allowed to wear panties.”
That went through me so hard that my thighs trembled. I hated that he so obviously had known it would.
His fingers found my clit from behind, and at the same moment his other hand took hold of the plug and moved it slightly. The combination broke something in me at once. I gasped and pushed back before I could stop myself.
“Yes,” he said softly. “That’s what I thought.”
He kept me turned away while he played with me, one hand at my pussy, one at my plugged ass, until my composure dissolved into little moans and pleading breaths.
Every tiny shift of the plug translated through my whole body.
Every stroke at the front made me more aware of the fullness behind.
I could feel myself becoming mindless with it, the shame changing shape into need too fast to fight.
“What kind of girl are you?” he asked again.
I bit my lip hard enough to hurt.
His fingers left my clit.
I whimpered immediately, and he stood.
The next second he had bent me over the dining table.
The edge pressed into my hips. He drew my arms behind me and folded them there, pinning my wrists in one hand so thoroughly that I understood at once how impossible it would be to resist. His other hand rested at the back of my neck for one second, forcing me down.
“When you say it,” he said near my ear, “I’ll fuck your pussy.”