“Home Owner Associations should spend less time and money on their pools and landscaping and focus their resources on perimeter security. Digiford Solutions has a new line of digital neighborhood watch guards. They offer surveillance technologies…”
His voice droned on, but the words were absorbed by the roar in her ears. He smiled into the webcam, lips moving as his index finger stretched along his pant leg. It pointed at her then to the floor beside his leather loafers. Damn him. It was a test. A test she so often failed.
The same finger lowered his zipper and crooked between his thighs. Come here.
Inhale. Exhale. She dropped to her knees and crawled, her pulse cresting. Chills raced through her limbs. Silent and mouselike, she moved across the carpet on hands and knees like she’d done so many times before.
“Since Digiford is your latest acquisition, your argument sounds more like a marketing plug.”
He tsked. “Nancy, I hardly need shameless advertising. Digiford stock tripled when we acquired it, and it continues to pressure the competition.” Beneath the desk, he gripped the base of his length and wiggled it, bare and erect.
She swallowed back rising bile and knelt between his legs. Get it over with. Don’t fuck up.
The chain at her ankle jerked, snapping her leg straight behind her. At the other end, the Craig fixed her with a warning in his eyes, prepared to extract her at the first sign of infraction.
Roy clenched a hand in her hair and guided her mouth.
Don’t gag. Keep quiet. Oh please, don’t gag. She inhaled without sound, and he shoved her face to his pubis. She stretched out her tongue to accommodate him, breathing shallowly and silently through her nose.
The grip on her head controlled the up and down motion, and the muscles in his thighs trembled and flexed beneath her clammy hands. He sped up his movements without faltering in his discourse on babies dying in drive-by shootings and marital arguments ending in gun-fire.
Could she yank open the desk drawer inches from her hand, the one housing a revolver, before the chain ripped her back?
At the edge of her periphery, the Craig waited a desk length away, feet braced apart and a double-fisted hold on the chain. His eyes were alert and locked on her hands, ever-loyal to Roy and the wealth she knew Roy shared with his guards to ensure that loyalty.
Her options were nonexistent, and the instinct to survive prevailed. She sheathed her teeth with her lips and sucked in her cheeks.
Without warning, he came. Stream after stream of ejaculate pumped against the back of her throat, and through it, not a hitch in his voice. “I’m not pro-gun control, Nancy. I’m anti-bloodshed.”
“That’s all the time we have today. Thank you for joining us. Roy Oxford, Chairman and CEO of Oxford Industries.”
“Thank you, Nancy.”
“Up next, we—”
The monitors blinked off, and his arm swung. The back of his hand hit her face so violently her body slammed against the desk cabinet. Fire shot through her nose, and the coppery taste of blood washed her tongue.
His lips twisted in a snarl, and his eyes promised more.
She curled into herself, protecting her core. What had she done wrong? “Sir?”
He jerked open the drawer she’d glanced at during the interview. Envelopes and stationary filled the space his gun once occupied.
Aw God, he missed nothing. She scrambled back, cowering.
He followed her, leapt on her, and squeezed her throat. “I meant what I said. I do not trust you, Charlee. You’re as slippery as Craig Grosky and ten times as smart.”
White bursts dotted her vision. She opened her mouth in a useless gasp and clawed at his hand, begging with her eyes.
“You will not share your father’s end.” He released her and wrenched her thighs apart, renewing the pain in her ass. “I very much want you alive.” Then he was in her, forcing himself into her dry opening, pounding her into the carpet, his tongue lapping at the blood on her lips.
Her father had been dead to her since the day he delivered her to Roy. The reality of his death meant nothing. The cause, however, was as jarring as the weight hammering her into the floor. “You killed him,” she choked out.
He slapped her and resumed his thrusting. He of anti-bloodshed accepted a sixteen-year-old girl as a collection of debt. Then he destroyed all traces of the transaction, Craig Grosky included.
Something tore inside her, something beyond her vaginal tissues. It was the sensation of an emotion separating from the whole. To fear a man was to give him power. He had enough of that. So she let it go, and the chronic impulse to lock her joints and hold her breath ripped away.