Delphine Dryden

An Excerpt from When in Rio

“Answer again, and answer right, Katie.” 

“Yes Sir,” I offered, and sank into his responding smile. 

“Good girl,” he whispered, kissing my mouth now as gently as his hand was fondling me. "I like it like this. I wish I’d known this the other Friday when your jeans tore—it would’ve provided me a whole new level of visualization.” 

“You saw that?” I was horrified, although I wasn’t quite sure why. At least the mailroom guy hadn’t been the only one, and the idea of Jack sneaking peeks at my butt without my knowledge… 

“Of course I did,” he said matter-of-factly. “You had bare butt showing at the office, you didn’t think I’d notice? I had to close my door to get any work done, and even then…” His fingers slipped around the side of my thigh to caress the spot that had been displayed through the hole in my jeans, just at the crease between my ass and the top of my leg. “Very distracting. You’re very distracting to have around the office, Miss Snow. You always have been.” 

“Is that really why you brought me here?” I could have kicked myself for asking, but something drove me to find out now, before. “To see if this would take the edge off? Known quantity’s less distracting, that sort of thing?” It was easy to think more clearly when he pulled his hand away from my ass, but I still felt the loss pretty keenly. 

Jack backed away a little, scowling, his fingers still pressing into my wrists fiercely. 

“Would you be here right now if you believed that?” 

I realized the answer even as I responded. “No, of course not. Well…I knew I was qualified to be here in any case. Not here, here. I mean at the conference. I don’t think you would’ve made advances you weren’t pretty sure were going to be accepted, and I didn’t think my job was in jeopardy if I wasn’t interested.” 

When he remained silent, I kept going, a bad habit I had of trying to fill any conversational void. “I’d been throwing off vibes too, I know that, it’s just that up until this weekend I really didn’t think…I mean, there was the whole office, working-together thing. And I didn’t think you’d be interested. I didn’t think you were, um, inclined a certain way? Or that you wouldn’t think I was? Or—” 

“Katie, stop talking.” 

“Yes Sir.” 

Smile. 

Melt.  

“Listen. First of all, if anything, it’s the opposite of what you think. You’re not here because of this. I meant it before, I almost didn’t pick you because of this. Hell, I almost didn’t promote you because I was worried about this. Even though you were clearly the best candidate. I did promote you, but I worried. And I was obviously right to worry." He breathed out, a muscle in his neck tensing. “But about the other part, the vibes. Look, when we’re working together in the office, we work well together. You’re professional, you’re very passionate about your work. You clearly have a great deal of knowledge about the field and if you feel you need to argue a position, you do that. In your own way, you get right in my face and you always have, even when you weren’t reporting directly to me. And I give your opinion the respect it deserves. Right?” 

I nodded, not sure where he was going. 

“Your last supervisor didn’t actually like that about you. She told me you had an attitude problem. But I do like it. I know where you stand on things, you’re very honest and you don’t hide your agenda, which is unusual. And I know you’re working harder than I’d ever ask you to work already, so I’m not likely to barge in and demand you drop what you’re doing to work on some other project of mine because I assume my project is more important. That really hasn’t come up, even before you were promoted. That isn’t really my management style. So it’s not an area where we’d tend to have any conflict anyway.” 

He pulled a face--I suspected it was at the idea of having to have a management style at all. He had admitted that, like me, there were times he wished he were still doing fieldwork every day. 

“But—and I don’t know if you realize this—if I walk into your office and, say, tell you to give me what I know is your favorite pen because my last one’s out of ink, and Ted’s gone home already and his desk is locked so I can’t get the key to the supply closet, like last week? Do you know what you do? You drop your eyes, blush, hand over your pen and say, ‘yes Sir’, just like you did a minute ago.” 

I opened my mouth to protest, to explain, but he held a finger over my lips, effectively silencing me. 

“If I tell you I’m ordering lunch,” he continued, “and you say you aren’t hungry, and I say, ‘Kate, I know you didn’t eat any breakfast, I am ordering you a sandwich which you will eat and your only choice in the matter is whether it’s roast beef or ham’, do you get pissed off? No. Do you say you just want a salad? No. You look right at your toes and say, ‘roast beef, Sir’. And then you eat the sandwich and thank me in an extremely charming way that, frankly, leaves me in absolutely no doubt what your… orientation is. Work is not at issue in any of those cases. Am I off track in any way here?” 

“No Sir.” He had moved his finger just long enough for me to answer then carefully placed it over my lips again. 

“Good. That’s a relief. This would be a terrible time to find out I’d been guessing wrong for over a year.” 

Over a year?  

“So just to be clear, little Katie, although I don’t think anybody else in the office really picks up on it, I do pick up on it. And the only way you could have sent a stronger submissive vibe would have been to start off each visit to my office by dropping to your knees to await my bidding. Which, by the way, I do not want you doing when we get back to town. I’ve fantasized about it plenty but if I actually saw that in my office, I would never get another minute of work done in there.” 

My head was reeling, my knees trembling and my arms were about to fall asleep. 

Jack must have realized this, because he released my wrists as he bent to kiss me again before leading me through the entrance hall and into the living room of his suite. I’d been fairly impressed by my own suite, but it looked like a hovel compared to this one, which was billed as a penthouse. 

“That’s in the office, of course. Here, however…” He sat on the elegant art deco sofa and tugged me over to stand between him and the breathtaking nighttime panorama of the beach and ocean. “Here, I do want to see you on your knees, but only after you take off that dress and let me get a look at everything your bathing suit and those damn jeans and all your other clothes have been hiding from me all this time.” 

  “Yes Sir,” I said automatically, although at the moment all I wanted to do was fling off the dress and jump him. 

  “And while you do that, I’ll tell you exactly what that rip in your jeans made me think about.” 

Copyright 2010 Delphine Dryden. All rights reserved.