“Show me,” I repeat.
His eyes lift to mine.
“You said we were going to have a conversation among other things, right? Let’s do it. I know what to say to make you stop. I trust you.”
“You barely know me,” he points out.
“You’re a war hero and the President of the United States. If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody.”
He smiles again at that. “You make a specious case, given how many manipulative Presidents there have been, but I want to be convinced, so I’ll allow it.” He reaches down and slips a high heel off one of my feet, repeating the action on the other foot, rubbing gently at the red line left above my toes. “Why you act afraid of pain when you already wear these is a mystery to me.”
I giggle a little, and the look on his face at the sound of my laughter is electrifying. Belvedere, Embry, me…the President seems to love the laughter of others. The realization strikes me with a chord of melancholy. What loneliness and darkness does he carry in his heart that he needs such people around him?
He places my left foot on the arm of the chair he’s sitting in, and as soon as I see that he’s going to do the same with my other foot, I instinctively pull it back, since that would entail me spreading my legs in this short skirt. He doesn’t react, other than to look up at my face, and I realize that he’s waiting to see if I’ll say his name. My new safe word. I bite my lip and force my body to relax.
I place my foot back in his hands, and he sets it on the other arm of the chair. I’m grateful that our relative heights mean that he’s at eye-level with my chest and not my pelvis, but that gratitude disappears when he says, “Pull your skirt back for me.”
My hands shake when I obey, partly from excitement and partly from nervousness. I wasn’t lying when I told him it felt natural to obey him, but I’ve also never exposed myself so brazenly, so intimately and deliberately. Despite the impassive look on Ash’s face, I can see that he’s fascinated, aroused by bossing me around like this, and that bolsters me.
“I’ve never done this before,” I admit as I finish pulling my skirt up. Cool air wafts around my inner thighs and against my lace-covered pussy.
“Which part?” Ash asks, keeping his eyes on my legs, on the sliver of lace between them.
“Listening to someone. Showing myself off. I’ve only ever had sex once,” I confess.
His head snaps up. “Only once?”
I nod, swallowing. “When I was twenty.”
He groans, resting his head against my knee. “You mean I’m going to be the second man who’s ever been inside you?”
“You sound so certain that you’re going to take me to bed,” I tease, but my teasing comes out breathier than I mean for it to. It’s the way his dark head looks as it leans against my bare thigh, the way his legs are spread all strong and casual in the chair…yes, he should be certain that he’s going to take me to bed. I’ll take myself there if he doesn’t.
“It’s my job to be certain of things, Greer.” I feel the movement of his lips against my thigh as he speaks, and it makes it impossible to sit still. “Tell me—why haven’t you been with more men? Or women?”
“I’ve been asked out a lot,” I say. “Men, and yes, a couple of women. But I say no to them all.”
“Did someone hurt you the first time you had sex? Or was it otherwise unpleasant somehow?”
I think of Embry’s long, muscled body moving over mine, of his strong hands digging into my hips. “It was amazing. But it was the second time I had kissed someone and then had my heart broken, so I decided not to repeat that pattern.”
“And that’s why you haven’t kissed anyone since then,” Ash says, a question in his face. “You’re worried if you kiss a new person, that new person will also break your heart?”
“That’s right.”
“I won’t break your heart,” Ash promises.
“Again.”
Another groan. He seems to like being reminded that he had that power over me. He lifts his head. “Pull your panties aside. I want to see your pussy.”
“Okay,” I whisper, and I do as he says. It’s almost frightening how easy it is to listen to him, how easy it is to do something as unlike myself as spread my legs on a desk for a man I barely know, but dammit, it feels right. It feels good. It feels like another Greer—a Greer I put to sleep and buried in the backyard of my mind—is slowly waking up. The Greer who wrote those emails to Ash, the Greer who bit Embry’s shoulder and trailed scratches down his back as he moved between her bloody thighs. She is loving waking up to this, she wants to preen like a cat as Ash draws in a long breath once he sees the already-wet flesh of her pussy.
His hands slide up the outside of my calves, the rough skin tickling my knees and then my inner thighs as he braces his hands there and pushes me wider apart. I feel myself opening, feel his eyes on the part of me only one other man has seen. One other man who happens to be his best friend. And the Vice President of the United States.
“Beautiful,” Ash says, a hint of awe in his voice. “Just…beautiful.”
I’m chewing hard on my lip, my thighs quivering, because as excited as the old Greer is about this, I can’t help the new Greer’s litany of worries—if I look too wet or not wet enough, if he can smell me, what I’ll taste like if he wants to taste me.
“Look up at the ceiling and breathe in and out in counts of four,” Ash tells me. “It will help calm you down.”
I’m surprised he can read my body so easily, but then maybe I shouldn’t be. He can perceive the meanings behind the faces of dignitaries and the words of politicians—why not a woman’s body? I tilt my head back and breathe like he told me to, in and out.
One two three four…
one two three four…
one two three four.
“Some Dominants don’t like to sit with their head below the head of their partner,” Ash says conversationally below me, his fingertips beginning to trace circles and loops on the inside of my thighs. “Because it’s demeaning. But look at us right now. Who is the demeaned one?”
I look down from the ceiling and right into the mirror hanging behind the desk. I see a young woman with flushed cheeks and wide eyes, the tops of her naked thighs visible within the frame. And Ash’s silhouette in the chair, those powerful shoulders and that strong neck. And then I look down at him, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie still perfectly straight and clipped to his shirt with a slim silver bar.
“Me,” I say, swallowing. “I’m the demeaned one.”
“And how does that make you feel?” His tone is still casual, still distantly curious, as if he’s asking me about a book I’m reading.
“A little excited. A little ashamed.”
“Why ashamed?”
I close my eyes. “I like this more than I should.”
“There are no shoulds when you’re with me,” Ash says. “The only things you worry about are the things I tell you to worry about. Understood?”
“Yes.”
Fingers skate up to the place where my legs join my hips, and I bite my lip again. “Now,” Ash says, leaning down to press his lips to the inside of my thigh, “would be a good time to call me Sir.”
“Yes, Sir,” I breathe.
“And since I’m in charge of you while we are alone together, I also want you to know that you’re not allowed to worry about pleasing me. It might seem like there’s a lot to learn, a lot to know, but there’s not. I’ll tell you everything you need to know, and you will only have two responsibilities—surrendering to me and saying my name aloud when it would hurt you physically or emotionally to continue. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir,” I say again, and who am I right now? Agreeing to something so extreme with a man I’ve only been in the same room with a handful of times? But I don’t care. I want this, I want this, I want this. I don’t care how insane or how demeaning it might seem. Right now, it only feels quiveringly, perfectly right.
“Good,” he says, a smile in his voice. “You have no idea how much it pleases me to have you here. I’ve fantasized about this moment for so long.”
“You have?”
He sits up and reaches for the box balancing on his thigh. “Here. Open this.”
Curious, I wrap my fingers around the proffered box and pull it closer. Ash leans back as I examine it, smoothing his tie and looking faintly amused. “There’s nothing dangerous in there,” he tells me.
Still, I take my time opening it, wondering what could be so important that he had it in his bedroom, at the ready. I have no idea what to expect—bullets or military badges or mementos of his dead wife even—but it’s none of those things. I swing the lid all the way open and pull out a stack of papers folded into quarters, papers that are dirty and soft from repeated handling.
I glance at Ash with a confused look, and he inclines his head toward the papers in a silent invitation. He wants me to read them.
With hesitant fingers, I unfold the paper. It’s computer-printer-sized, looks like it had once been bright white with fresh black printer ink. But the black of the words have faded and dulled, and the paper is smudged with what looks like oil and dirt and blood.
Dear Ash,
It’s my seventeenth birthday today. It’s been exactly one year since we met…
My eyes snap to his. “My emails,” I say, a little numbly. “I thought you never got them.”
“I got them,” he replies. “I got them and I read them a thousand times and then I printed them out so I could read them wherever I went.”
“But you never wrote back, never even once. Not even to tell me to stop writing to you.”
“You were seventeen, Greer. Was I supposed to write back and tell you that yes, I did fuck my fist every night thinking of you? That every time I read your emails I had to jack off, that even the mere sight of your name on my computer screen got me hard? I hated myself enough for having those feelings for a girl that age. I couldn’t make it worse by reaching out to you.” He gives me a rueful smile. “But I also couldn’t bring myself to tell you to stop. To block your emails. God, I wanted you so much and it was the only way I could have even this little piece of you. So I kept reading. Kept coming to fantasies of you fingering yourself at your desk as you wrote to me.”
“Ash,” I say, stunned.
“I have them memorized, you know. Word for word. I don’t want boring, common ways of being bad,” he recites, his hands once again warm and rough on my inner thighs. “I want to be the kind of bad that leaves me wrung out with bite marks blooming purple on my body. I want someone to hold me by the neck and make me stare at an entire reckless realm of possibility. I want to crawl to them.”
My cheeks are flushed as he says my own words back to me. I’m so embarrassed and yet…that he memorized my words, touched himself thinking of them, that he carried my words with him wherever he traveled…
“Greer,” Ash says, his hands sliding up to my hips and holding me tight, “I have to know you meant what you said. It’s been ten years since you wrote me that email, and while I’ve spent those ten years wishing to God that you were mine, I know things might have changed for you.”
Everything has changed. So much has changed. And yet nothing at all, because here I am just as breathless and squirmy as I was kissing him when I was sixteen. As infatuated and obsessed as when I wrote those emails.
“I want to know if I can be the man to hold you by the neck,” he says. “I need to know how much you’ll let me do to you, how far you’ll let me go, because you are the only woman who’s ever said those words to me. The only woman who’s wanted that from me.”
His fingers dig into my hips, and I nod, vigorously, desperately. “Yes,” I plead. “Yes, please.”
A certain tension leaves his shoulders, and the smile he gives me is luminous. “I’ve waited so long for this. Wanted this so hard, so painfully, and now…” He takes a breath, moving his hands down so that his palms rest on the top of my legs and his thumbs brush against the crease of my thighs. “Now you are here, and you are actually telling me you want to be mine.”
“I’ve wanted to be yours since I was old enough to want it,” I tell him. I can feel the warmth from his thumbs, the faintest movement of them as they gently rub closer and closer to my cunt, and it makes me ache so fiercely I can’t handle it. I try to subtly move my hips so that I get the touch where I need it, but he merely presses his palms against my thighs to stop me.
“What do you want?” I ask him in a whisper. “Let me give it to you.”
The words are like water to a parched man, and he presses his eyes closed for a moment. Then he opens them. “Don’t move,” he orders, pressing my legs wider apart. I’m so exposed to him, and his thumbs are so very, very close to the place where I throb and need.
“Yes, Sir,” I murmur.
And then the first press of his touch. His thumbs brush against my folds, up and down, up and down, until I’m fighting the urge to squirm, and then he spreads my pussy open. He can see every fold, curve and slick line of me, and the way he’s looking at my cunt, as if it’s something for sale, a thing for his pleasure and his possession, it makes it impossible to stay still now. I wriggle a little on the desk.
Thwack!
A sharp slap on the inside of my thigh.
I’m surprised by the hot flash of pain, and even more surprised at the way my pussy tightens at it, the way goose bumps pepper my flesh and the way my nipples harden. I can’t stop the whimper that leaves my mouth.
“I’m the first man to look at your pussy this way, aren’t I? The first to spread you open and just look.”
“Yes, Sir,” I confirm, heat flushing in my stomach as I remember Embry that night. There had been no looking then, no deliberate teasing. Just hands and mouths and need. There’s something that’s so inherently, deeply right about the way Ash takes his time and exerts his control. Embry treated me like a treasure he couldn’t stop himself from plundering. Ash is treating me like a jewel to be polished and then shattered and then polished again. Like I’m all the more beautiful for the ways he’d like to wreck me.
“I want you to show me what you did when you wrote to me,” he says. “I want to see what it looks like when you fuck yourself.”
I let out a ragged breath. “Right now?”
“Yes. Right now.”
All at once, my bravery leaves me. “I’m just… I’ve never done that in front of anyone. I’m worried I’ll look stupid.”
“For ten years, I’ve been dreaming about you,” Ash reassures me, his thumbs back to rubbing their sweetly teasing rubs. “Just having you here, on my desk and spread open for my pleasure, is more than I ever hoped to have. There’s no earthly way you can disappoint me.”
But, sensing my hesitation, he wraps his strong hand around my own and gives it a squeeze. “I’ll help you get started,” he informs me, guiding my hand to my waiting pussy. I’m bare, and the outer skin there is so soft, so deliciously soft. “Don’t think of it like anything other than what it is. I’m making you do this. You don’t have a choice. It doesn’t matter that it feels strange or embarrassing, because the only things you have to worry about are listening and remembering your safe word. Say yes, Sir if you understand.”
His words relax me, soothe me. There’s no way in hell I want this to stop, and he’s right—the minute I relinquish all control and surrender my body to his wants and commands, the fear of embarrassment slips away. “Yes, Sir.”
“Good girl. Now show me what you did in that computer chair all those years ago. I want to see you come.”
I do as he says, letting my eyes fall shut as he moves my hand so that my fingers graze the wet folds and then move up higher to my swollen clit. The moment my fingers touch it, I nearly jolt off the table. I’m starved for this, needy, because even though I get myself off nearly every night, having Ash here changes it fundamentally. It’s no longer me and my blurry memories merging with my darkest fantasies, it’s me and Ash and Ash’s hands moving back down to grip my hips and Ash’s pulse thudding above his collar and Ash’s silver tie bar glinting in the dim light of the White House living room. It’s both of us together, and it feels just as intimate as sex, even though we are both fully clothed, even though the hand slowly rubbing my clit is my own.
It only takes a minute for me to find my rhythm, to find that perfect pace and pressure to send my body slowly spiraling upwards. I bite my lip to muffle the tiny moans coming from deep in my throat, but I can’t stop the rocking of my hips as my body wakes up and begins demanding more. I spread my thighs wider, Ash’s pleased hiss rocketing through me like a meteoroid, and I severely underestimated how much I needed this because I’m so close, so impossibly close, and it’s only been a couple of minutes.
“You’re going to come for me, aren’t you?” Ash asks in a low voice.
I nod, panting. I’m wet everywhere, my body hot, my thighs tight, my clit feeling firm and puffy all at once. My other hand, still pulling my panties aside so I can work myself for Ash, begins to cramp, and as if Ash can tell, he hooks the fabric with his thumb, freeing my hand from its task. I place that hand behind me so I can tilt my head up and lean back farther, relishing the feeling of Ash’s hands on me, his hungry eyes on my pussy, and that thought alone is enough to push me right to the cliff’s edge.
“Tell me when,” he orders. “I want to know when.”
“Now,” I manage. “Right now.”
Without hesitation, he plunges two of his fingers inside me. The rough intrusion sends my body convulsing, the orgasm suddenly infinitely more intense for those large, unfamiliar fingers inside me, and I clamp down on them, shuddering out my release.
“Look at me,” he tells me, and I do, meeting his eyes as my climax continues to pull at my stomach and thighs. As I continue to squirm down onto his hand and ride out my first non-solo release in years.
“Oh, that’s good,” he murmurs, glancing down to where I’m still trying to fuck his fingers. “That’s so good. That’s exactly what I need.”
He says it almost like feeling my pussy come around his fingers was some sort of audition and that I passed with flying colors, and the thought prolongs the shuddering contractions until finally several seconds—or hours—later, I’m left loose and tingling on the desk. And then I give a little laugh—incredulous, exhilarated.
I can’t believe I just did that.
I can’t believe it at all.
“Did that feel good?” Ash asks, fingers inside me still.
“Yes,” I breathe.
The fingers twist cruelly, pain flaring up and bringing with it a wave of deep, itchy desire. “Don’t be ungrateful,” the President chides. “What do you say?”
It’s so hard to think with his fingers inside me and pleasure still leaking through my limbs. “Yes, Sir?”
Another twist and I have to fight the urge to start fucking his fingers again. “Try again.”
Twist go the fingers, moan goes Greer.
“What. Do. You. Say.” Twist twist twist. “When. I’ve. Made. You. Feel. Good.”
“Thank you, Sir,” I gasp, not fighting myself any more and rocking into his thrusts.
A small smile like a comma at the corner of his mouth. “Good girl.” He presses his thumb to my clit and starts working it, building me up to a second orgasm so fast that I barely have time to register that it’s about to crest, and then it’s on me, and I’m shivering apart into bliss, contracting around the President’s hand, and gasping thank you thank you thank you as his eyes blaze with heat.
With gratitude.
“No, thank you, angel,” he murmurs, eyes on my face, fingers still gently working. “Thank you so much more than you can ever know.”
