Page 17 of Service Included

When he rose from the floor, I worried that he’d misunderstood, until he shrugged out of his jacket and draped it on the other chair, covering my blouse. His blue shirt hadwhite cuffs folded double, which required cuff links, a thing I’d only seen on a prom tuxedo before meeting him. Today’s pair resembled gold knots, as if miniature rope had been tied and dipped into molten metal. I watched his fingers, the nails clean and neat, twist the ball holding his cuff closed. In the quiet, my breathing sounded louder than his, louder even than the air system, which echoed the hum I felt crossing and recrossing my bare skin, an invisible touch that puckered my nipples and lifted my chest until my shoulders dug into the back of the chair. Still, he didn’t hurry.

By the time he switched to the second cuff, my breasts were so needy, I had to bring my hands to cup their weight. When I lifted them toward the man standing in front of me, his gaze sharpened on my offering. That’s when I noticed the smear of chocolate on my pale skin.

“Here, Mary.” He dropped the set of small gold links onto the slope where my breasts nestled together. They tumbled for a moment, but I squeezed my flesh together, and their metal posts caught.

I stilled. The cuff links felt cool for one instant, then warmed to match my burning skin.

“Do not let them fall,” he said while working his shirt buttons. The pressed white fabric parted to reveal a white cotton V-neck. A triangle of dark hair curled up to the hollow at the base of his throat. I waited and watched. I could picture thrusting my fingers through those strands, moving my hands down his chest to stroke his heated skin. My spread fingers scissored closed, squeezing my nipples into points. When my shoulders shifted, I felt the cuff links slide a fraction closer to my fingers.

“What did I direct you to do, Mary?”

“I shouldn’t…” I had to breathe a few times before I could continue. “Let them fall.”

“Are you being very still?”

“Yes. Of course.” I wasn’t. My thighs and butt were clenching. My hips were shifting under my skirt. The chair seemed to have become as uncomfortable as a bike seat.

“Then I will continue.” Finally, he removed his shirt, laid it over his jacket, and returned to stand in front of my seat.

Pulling a T-shirt over your head is a thing anyone old enough to tie a shoe can do without thought, but Mr. G seemed to be relearning how to remove this article of clothing. His lackadaisical pace made my heart beat double-time. My eyes were almost level with his flat stomach. I couldn’t see anything but the dark trails of hair across his lightly tanned skin, where shirtless summer weekends had left lingering kisses into fall.

I checked his thighs, at least what I could discern of their muscularity underneath his suit pants. Perhaps I also looked at the area between them, even though we weren’t going todo itin his office—obviously. There was no bed, and it was still daylight.

“Patience, Mary,” he said.

I don’t know why he said that. I hadn’t spoken. Maybe I’d licked my lips, but I hadn’t tapped my foot or given any indication of a need for speed. Patience, he’d said. Like waiting all the years it took me to shake Lincoln County wasn’t blue-ribbon-bedeckedpatience.

Then he pulled his undershirt over his head, and I saw the hair in his armpits surrounded by more than enough on his chest that it could belong to Mr. Thomas Magnum, Private Investigator. His nipples were light brown and so unlike my own that I let out all the air in my lungs. One of the cuff links tumbled into the lap of my skirt.

“Mary.” His tone was stern, almost as hard as I imagined his grown-man muscles would be. “Bored already?”

Nowhere near bored. Restless as a weathervane with an urge to spin, that’s how I felt. But the one metal knot in my lap, the other still precariously balanced on the shelf of my breasts,pinned me in place. I wanted to touch him, but that wordpatiencehung between us.

My arms trembled from holding my breasts for this long.

“Do you need me to assign a new task?” His voice was smoothly formal as he bent to remove the cufflink that rested at the apex of my thighs.

I knew he would touch my breasts next, taking the other cuff link. He would touch my skin. Touch me.

“Something more challenging—or, shall we say, harder—than dictation?”

That word dictation, it contained one of those other words I was trying not to even think, but I couldn’t help myself. I looked at his pants.

The pleated fabric couldn’t contain what he sported.

“Please.” I knew well the peril of idle hands. “Tell me what to do.” Idle hands would touch bare skin. Idle hands would fumble under panties, they might find wet places between legs, maybe even cause a good girl to end up right here in this chair. In so much peril.

His fingers plucked that second cuff link from my skin, but nothing more. Nothing. I didn’t know I could miss something I’d never had, but I missed his touch.

And then he spoke. “Loosen your hair.”

At the end of a workday, the pins securing my bun always seem to have burrowed into the base of my skull. I loved to remove each one in front of my mirror, but when I did it in front of him, there was no way to separate the motions of my arms from the connection to his gaze. As my thumb fed each pin automatically through my fingers into my palm, I watched him. And he watched me until the last pin slipped into my hand, and I felt the rope of my hair slide down my back. With the weight released, my head felt lighter, almost floating.

“Comb it out.” His low, dark tone, so similar to chocolate, made me shiver. “With your fingers.”

I didn’t think I could speak, so I opened my palm to show him the handful of pins I clutched, and then I tottered to my feet. My knees held, and I was at the desk next to him. The tiny clicks of those restraints hitting the glass made me shiver.

I felt the heat of his body close behind me. Then his arm came along my side, and he dropped the two gold knots among my cheap steel pins. They clinked, their fine metal ringing more clearly on the glass top than the skinny bits I had let fall.

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