Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86432 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
A discreetly dressed server wheeled in dinner on a cart. Porter signed something on a handheld, tipped him, and sent him away. Neither man behaved as if there were anything unusual in the scene.
Once the door shut, Porter turned back to me.
“Set the table. Plates and silverware are in the cabinet over there and the drawer just below. Placemats and napkins the next drawer over. Glasses are on the rack.”
I blinked. “Like this?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re dressed enough.”
The answer made me flush so hard that my scalp prickled. But I went to the cabinet, and then the beautiful old table and did as I was told while he unpacked covered dishes and small containers. Every time I leaned or reached or took too long a stride, the plug reminded me what had happened in the bath and the terrible thing I had said.
The thing I lied about, part of me kept insisting. Not the thing I confessed.
I placed forks. Knives. Water glasses. Wineglasses. Napkins.
And while I did it, my mind betrayed me over and over.
Splayed across the table.
Pushed down with one hand between my shoulders.
From behind: his huge penis… taking me from behind.
In my behind.
Folded over the arm of a chair.
Spread across his desk, papers shoved aside by those cool, capable hands before he put me exactly where he wanted me… spread me open to thrust inside. To impale me. To have me like that.
I nearly dropped a spoon.
“Careful,” Porter said mildly, without looking up from the dish he was opening.
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
That word had begun to come more easily, which ought to have alarmed me. Instead it made my stomach tighten in a way that had only a vague connection to fear, and much more to do with anticipation.
When the table was set, he nodded toward my chair. “Sit.”
I did, gingerly.
The plug pressed deeper when I lowered myself. I must have made some tiny sound, because Porter’s eyes lifted to my face.
“Problem?”
“No, sir.”
His mouth moved slightly. “Good.”
He served the food himself. The rich scent reached me first: wine and beef and herbs, something deep and comforting and absurdly domestic considering the state of my body and mind. He spooned boeuf bourguignon onto my plate as if this were a perfectly ordinary dinner for two people in bathrobes after a bath. Perhaps, for him, it was not so far from ordinary.
For me, it felt like dinner inside a fever dream.
I took the first bite and nearly moaned from relief both at the layers of flavor and at having something real to focus on besides the plug and my own thoughts. Tender meat, silky sauce, mushrooms and little onions that seemed somehow more flavorful than vegetables had any right to be.
Porter ate a few bites in silence. Then, to my complete surprise, he said, “Hathaway is being impossible.”
I looked up. “What?”
He speared another piece of beef on his fork. “The assistive tech bill. She’s holding the votes I need and using them to extract leverage on a completely unrelated appropriations package.”
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.