Page 31 of Indecent Proposal

I dashed up to the top floor again and looked up at the ceiling. There was a hatch, thank fuck. Most people didn’t know these existed. I put one foot on the band across the door usually used to push it open, then braced my other foot across the corner against the wall, and pushed myself up to reach the hatch and yank it open.

I had to pulled myself up and through, but then, I was free and clear on the roof.

Once I got myself through, I hauled the hatch closed after me and inspected the area. The roofs of buildings usually held some way up, since there were air conditioning units and other machinery up here that people had to get to.

Ah-ha. On the other side of the roof: a proper door with another stairway.

I picked the lock easily—it wasn’t electric, so few of these were—and then made my way down. This stairway was narrower and a bit darker. They hadn’t intended for it to be used by any employees in case of an emergency, but only by building maintenance personnel when doing repairs. There wasn’t any kind of surveillance in here so it was a walk in the damn park to get down to the ground floor and exit out into a bare maintenance hallway, then out the back entrance of the building onto the narrow back alley.

That was a close call.

A significant shut down protocol like that—magnetizing the doors and all—meant that either I had seriously pinged their security team, or they would react that strongly to any possible outsider because they had something to hide. I couldn’t discount the possibility that someone had figured out who I was (I was pretty damn sure if you searched my face on the internet you’d find my profile on our company’s website). But I had to listen to my gut, and my gut told me something was going on here.

Maybe Susan had gotten it the wrong way around. Maybe she had thought that the people trying to talk to Richard and ‘poach’ him were shady. But maybe it was different—maybe they were government people trying to get him to turn informant, or a more reputable company trying to use the shady dealings of Hardman Holdings to get Richard to quit.

I’d find out for certain when I learned what was on this USB drive.

I drove back to my own headquarters to have our tech team look into it. There were password protected files as well as encrypted ones, and sorting through every single document and email was going to take a while. Having a team of experts on it would do more than I could on my own, which had admittedly been a damn hard pill for me to swallow when we’d first started our company.

Yeah, it hadn’t really surprised any one of my friends when I’d had a hard time relinquishing control, even to a tested tech team. These were my assignments and I was used to handling everything myself. It had taken forever to convince me that handing things over to the experts was fine and that I also shouldn’t spend my entire damn time hovering over their shoulders to make sure they were doing it right.

Still, it was always hard for me when we had something that required me giving a piece of the job over to someone else and then twiddling my damn thumbs until it was done. I could try interrogating Susan again but I didn’t want to make her too suspicious. Interviewing other Hardman employees was a possibility but with Claire’s life in danger it was probably best to keep a low profile. There was still a sniper out there somewhere.

Claire…

It would be wrong of me to use my free time to go and have sex with my client. Or, well, maybe notwrong, but sure as fuck unprofessional.

The problem was that I couldn’t get the image of Claire out of my head—touching herself and moaning my name, getting off almost instantly after how I’d teased her. The challenge in her voice as well as the undeniable lust.

She wanted me to come and punish her for what she’d done. She’d deliberately pushed at my boundaries and broken my rules. Who was I to disappoint her? She’d think I was a man who couldn’t actually hold to his word, and there was no way that was going to happen.

If she wanted to push my buttons then I’d push back. I’d show her what it meant to be dominated and to be disciplined.

And if I had time to kill anyway…

CHAPTER11

Vaughn

It took an embarrassingly short time for me to convince myself to go up to the cabin again while the tech whizzes did their thing. I made sure to stop by the grocery store to get some more fresh food while I was at it. I had a whole stockpile of nonperishables just in case, downstairs in the security room, but I didn’t want Claire to have to dig into that unless she really needed to. It was more for emergencies.

The entire time I drove up to the cabin I kept telling myself that I should turn around. The words felt hollow. It was like I was saying them just for the sake of it, just so I could say that I had. I knew the truth—I was going to do this with Claire and the chance to turn back was long ago.

When I pulled up, the cabin was properly dark and looked abandoned. She had the windows and blackout curtains closed, as she should. Good. It looked like she was finally taking seriously the rules about her safety and was only going to break them in a sexual way now that she had my attention.

I appreciated it. No sex was worth losing her life over.

From another perspective, it showed me that she knewhowto break the rules—that she would go against my orders in ways that were fun and sexy, not in ways that would actually annoy or upset me.

This would be fun.

I let myself in. “Honey, I’m home,” I drawled insolently.

“Would it kill you not to cop an attitude?” Claire snarked from where she sat at the dining room table, reading a book.

She was wearing my shirt again, this time buttoned up for the most part, and over a pair of shorts. Y’know, I might not even get her fully naked. The idea of fucking her while she still had my clothes on was pretty damn tantalizing.

Not that I’d be going all the way tonight. Oh, no. Good submissive girls got to be fucked. And Claire hadn’t been good, not at all. She still had a few lessons to learn first.

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