Unleashing the Receptionist: ...the Receptionist, Book 3 Read online

  “What…” He licked his lips nervously. “What direction does it face?”

  “Excuse me?” Ethan looked so completely flummoxed I figured I’d better save the day.

  “Let’s take a look, Mr. Standish,” I said, taking him by the arm.

  “So formal, not really necessary, call me Peter,” he mumbled as I guided him into the hallway. The file room was right next to the kitchenette. “Oh dear. Oh dear.”

  Standish and I spent the next half an hour moving the contents of the file room around until the desk faced north, and the door wasn’t opening directly onto him.

  “Is this better?”

  “Very grateful. Thank you very much, Ms. Arthur.”

  “No problem, Peter. And please, call me Dana.”

  I spun around on my heel, all set to march back to my desk, but couldn’t help noticing a very interesting fact.

  Mr. Peter Standish couldn’t take his eyes off my ass. Just what kind of audit did he have in mind?

  Chapter Five

  Over the next couple of days, my ass got a lot of surreptitious attention from Mr. Oddball Tax Auditor. So did my cleavage. So did my legs. I didn’t say anything about it. It didn’t bother me. It felt kind of wistful, as if he were an orphan child pressing his face against the store window. Sad and lonely on the outside. He never tried to touch me. In fact he avoided it at all costs. If I brought him a mug of boiling water—he’d finally consented to let me do that much—he’d wait until I’d put it on the desk. Then he’d pick it up and work his mysterious tea magic on it.

  All the questions I had about Ethan and Simon’s past didn’t seem important compared to the crisis facing us. I decided I’d wait until after we’d gotten rid of the auditor to continue my pestering. Instead, I focused on our new guest.

  Peter Standish amused me. How one man could have so many neurotic quirks blew my mind. He wore the same outfit every day. I mean, exactly the same. On the third day I challenged him on it. It seemed like a potential public health hazard, after all.

  “Didn’t you wear that shirt yesterday? And the day before?”

  “No.”

  “Um…yes, you did. Do you need me to pick out some new outfits for you?” He didn’t blink at my cheeky attitude. We’d gotten used to each other by now.

  “I do not. I have exactly seven pairs of pants and seven shirts. One for each day of the week. On Sundays I do laundry.”

  “But…the exact same type of pants and shirts?”

  “Why not?” He scratched his nose with the eraser of his red pencil.

  I was fascinated. “Doesn’t it get kind of boring?”

  “I don’t expect clothes to be entertaining.” He bent back to his calculator and piles of paper, but I noticed how his glance raked me on the way down. Maybe he didn’t find his clothes entertaining, but I was pretty sure he got a charge out of mine. In fact, I was pretty sure he was still watching me from under his studiously downcast eyelashes.

  I decided to test that theory. I was wearing one of my tightest suits, made of nubby wool the color of plum wine. It cinched me around the waist, pushing my cleavage up and my hips out. I knew it wouldn’t take much to pop a button. So I shrugged one shoulder, using the movement as a sneaky way to strain the front of my jacket across my breasts. I felt it tug, exaggerated my motion, then felt it pop. The button flew off my chest.

  In a quick blur, Standish jumped to his feet and thrust his hand into the air. The button ricocheted off his hand, bounced against the window and landed on the floor, where he scrambled after it. “Got it.”

  He stood up and opened his fist. There sat my purple button, along with my answer. This man knew exactly what was going on with my clothes. Maybe he had a little crush on me. I left the tiny room so he wouldn’t see my smug smile.

  My bosses noticed too.

  “You have a new pet,” Simon teased one morning before Standish had arrived. “You should get him a little leash. Take him for walks.”

  I made a face at him. “Maybe I should let him pee on your leg.”

  “So you have him trained to pee on command?”

  “Funny. He’s sweet. I like him.”

  “It’s definitely mutual.”

  “Jealous?”

  Simon came around behind the desk and brushed a strand of hair behind my ear. He stroked my cheekbone with the back of his hand and gave a cryptic smile. “I suppose you could think that. If by jealous you mean that if he puts one hand on you, I’ll kick him in the balls.”

  “Ouch.” His possessiveness thrilled me, but I worried about my poor little pet. “Don’t worry, it’s not like that. He’s not like that. He doesn’t like to be touched, even to shake hands.”

  “Strange.” He didn’t sound convinced. “By the way, interesting outfit you’re wearing.”

  I had on a tight black blouse with little jet buttons that marched all the way up the front to the high collar. The collar and placket for the buttons were made of a thick fabric, but the rest of the blouse was one step removed from see-through. I’d worn my favorite new accessory—a pair of bronze nipple-ornaments Ethan and Simon had given me. They made my nipples especially prominent, and the gauzy black fabric did nothing to reduce the impression they made. I was practically, but not quite, obscene. But I wasn’t breaking any rules, and if someone minded, they would have to tell me so.

  “Ethan didn’t say anything about clothes. He only banned physical contact.”

  “True. Besides, I have a feeling you didn’t wear this for Ethan. Or me.”

  A mischievous smile was my only answer.

  “Well, enjoy your new pet, but just remember, we’re right here if he steps over the line.”

  “He won’t. He’s not interested.”

  “Now that I have a hard time imagining.” He lifted my chin and planted a long, slow kiss on my lips.

  “Simon!” I was shocked. “You know the rules.”

  “And you know I’m a rule-breaker. As are we all. We like breaking the rules almost as much as we like the punishment.” He winked, a green-eyed pirate devil-man.

  He kissed me again, and I was just starting to melt into him when he straightened up. “There you go, Ms. Arthur. Simon Dirk Tailoring is at your service.” He gave me a secret wink, then swung around.

  Standish stood in the doorway, dressed in his standard Standish-wear.

  “I was just helping Dana with a loose button,” Simon told the auditor. “And speaking of tailoring, if you should ever need any advice in that area…”

  “Mr. Dirk,” I said sternly. “Mr. Standish is perfectly happy with his style of dress.”

  Simon raised an eyebrow at the word “style”, but I squelched him with a frown.

  “Which, I might add, is highly appropriate for his line of work.”

  “Point taken.” Simon gave an ironic little bow of his head and headed into the inner office suite. “Standish, it seems you’ve won yourself a defender. Well done. Dana is a treasure.”

  I heard the warning in his voice, and so did Standish. He pushed his glasses nervously up his nose and refused to look me in the eye. Which might have been because his gaze kept darting to my chest.

  “Good morning, Standish,” I said cheerfully, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. “Simon was just telling me I should go home and change, but I think he’s being an old stick in the mud. What do you think?”

  “Oh, I completely disagree with him, all due respect, but on no account should you change, that is, maybe if you didn’t look so good, or if you worked at a different location, most definitely, but no, I think you’re just fine as you are.”

  I smiled innocently as he babbled. He really was cute. I rested my chin on my folded hands and tilted my head at him. Little angel Dana, that’s me.

  He went into his hidey-hole and started to shut the door. But he couldn’t seem to quite bring himself to. He poked his head out. “I…uh…brought an extra tea bag today, if you’d like to try it.”

  “Sure, I’d be thri
lled!” I chirped.

  Really, I couldn’t say why I was toying with him like this, except my intuition told me to. And besides, maybe I mentioned this already, but he was kind of cute.

  The red button on my phone blinked—Ethan was calling me into his office. “I’ll come by later,” I told Standish, and hurried to find out what Ethan wanted.

  Apparently he wanted to glower at me with a double dose of Blue Fury from behind his desk. “What are you trying to pull?”

  I twined my hands behind my back, a perfect little schoolgirl. “Excuse me?”

  “I warned you about Standish. I said we were to behave with complete professionalism.”

  “Which is exactly what I’ve done.” I lifted my nose in the air. This had the effect of accentuating my breasts. His gaze flicked across me.

  “That outfit is hardly professional.”

  “Depends on your profession,” I said pertly.

  From behind me came a click. Excitement churned inside me. I knew that sound—the remote controlled lock on Ethan’s door. The atmosphere in the room turned suddenly heavy and charged.

  Ethan’s voice dropped into the sudden tension with two stern words. “Come. Here.”

  “Fine.” I stepped forward. “But I feel I should remind you of the current policy against physical contact established by the head of this firm…” I broke off with a squeak, finding myself suddenly turned across his lap. In the space of half a second, I was staring at the beige carpet and feeling my skirt yanked over my head.

  “You’re pushing me,” Ethan growled. The sound of a drawer opening came next. Ethan’s treasure chest of sex toys. Excitement shot through me, made me wet between the legs. All these sounds were like cues to me, announcing we’d reached Punishment Time.

  About time. All that abstaining stuff had been driving me crazy. I decided to push him harder.

  “You’re breaking the rules, Ethan. You said no physical…”

  Wham. The paddle. The flat wood came down on my right cheek. I yelped as adrenaline flooded my brain. The next spank followed right on top of the previous one. When Ethan paddled me, he gave me no room to rest, no room to catch up to the pace of his strokes. I clutched the side of his leg, afraid I’d lose all sense of where I was. The carpet blurred before my dazed vision. He maneuvered his knee so my clit, with its delicate piercing, pressed against the fabric of his trousers—a fine woolen weave. Caught between his hard spanking and the pressure of his knee, I felt wild spirals of arousal somersault through my body.

  Adding to the general frenzy was the fact that my breasts were hanging over the edge of his thigh and the weight of the bronze dragged on my nipples. Every time Ethan spanked me, my breasts would get jostled and a charge would shoot straight to my nipples, then ricochet back to my pussy. If only I could make him stop for a second so I could take them off.

  I opened my mouth to request this, but only a desperate wheeze came out. Ethan wouldn’t stop anyway, not for a silly reason like that. I’d have to grit my teeth and bear the spiraling pleasure, the maddening friction against my clit.

  “You insist on being disobedient, don’t you?” Spank. “Even when I spell out exactly what I need from you, that little rebel inside has to thumb her nose at me.” Spank.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I shouldn’t have worn this. I’ll take it off.”

  “Do you think that’s funny?”

  The spanking stopped suddenly. I blew out a long breath of relief, then yelped as his thumb worked its way into my pussy. With my clit still pressed against his pants leg his thumb explored inside me, pressing one spot then another, until he hit the jackpot—the one that made me jerk like a marionette. His hot thumb applied a slow, steady pressure from above, his knee from below, until I became nothing more than a quivering, whimpering slice of Dana in an Ethan sandwich. I raced toward a mind-blowing climax, bucking and twisting in his lap.

  “You stubborn little rebel, I should have known you wouldn’t be able to stick to the new policy. I should have done this first, brought you off hard so you wouldn’t be tempted to do anything crazy with the auditor. Come, Dana, get it out of your system. Come so hard you don’t need another orgasm for days. You’re such a hot little thing, you can’t last for a week without a man’s cock in you, or his thumb, or his tongue, or…”

  I lost track of the body parts he was listing as I soared into a full-body orgasm that included even my weighted nipples. I grunted like a primitive beast against his knee. I probably left spots of drool. When the spasms finally died down, he rolled me off his lap so I curled on the floor between his legs. He opened his pants and brought out an industrial-strength erection.

  “I need your beautiful, greedy mouth on me, Dana. Suck me off, hard and fast.”

  Eagerly I took him into my mouth. The aftershocks of my orgasm still radiated through me, and I felt grateful and at peace with the world. I gave him long, hard sucks the way I knew he liked it—the way I’d seen Simon do it. I figured men knew what to do with their own equipment, right?

  I ran my tongue from the root of his cock to the tip, gave some love to the hard ridge around its head, the lovely soft veins, then settled in for some deep suction. He tasted wonderful to me, alive and springy in my mouth. I was so caught up I almost didn’t hear the knock on Ethan’s office door.

  Ethan stilled me with a hand on my head. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Cowell, it’s Peter Standish. I have some questions.”

  “Come in.” He tried to tug his cock free, but I kept my mouth tight around it. Payback is a bitch.

  I heard the door click open. Tentative footsteps followed. I pictured Peter Standish standing there all nerdy and shy, daunted by the presence of the mighty Ethan Cowell. What would he think if he knew that I was kneeling under Ethan’s desk with his cock in my mouth? I smiled around the massive pole of flesh, then swirled my tongue across its head. It pulsed in response and I tasted a drop of salt.

  Ethan’s hand fisted in my hair. I could tell he was torn between wanting to pull me off him and wanting to get off. I made the choice harder by stretching his balls. Ethan loved it when we played with his balls. A deep mossy smell surrounded me, with my head buried between his thighs. It felt like I was burrowing into the very core of this man.

  “Some items are missing,” Standish said. “In the file of the Caper, Inc. deal. Without those items, the numbers don’t add up.”

  “The Caper deal, huh?” Ethan’s voice was strained, probably because I’d taken his balls into my mouth while I wrapped my fist around his cock. “A discrepancy?”

  “A big one, I’m afraid. I have two sets of figures, one from Margo Lang and one from Simon Dirk. They disagree by several hundred thousand dollars.”

  “We had a computer crash while that deal was bl—wrapping up.”

  Was he about to say, “blowing up”?

  I snorted.

  “What was that?” Standish asked.

  “What?”

  “I heard an odd sound.”

  “Missed it. Anyway, I’ll do a thorough hunt for my notes on the Caper project. End of the day all right?”

  “Sure.” He hesitated. “Have you seen Miss Arthur?”

  “Not lately.”

  I sucked hard, my cheeks going hollow with the effort. Ethan gave a sudden groan.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Brilliant. A little under the weather, but nothing an early night can’t cure.”

  “Ah. Well, I just wanted to say that, well, Miss Arthur’s been very helpful. She’s an asset to your organization.”

  “Well, don’t tell her that, she’ll get a big head.”

  Again I snorted, nearly choking on Ethan’s shaft.

  “Did you hear…?”

  “No,” said Ethan grimly. “Excuse me, please. I must get back to work now.”

  Footsteps padded across the carpet and the door snicked shut. Ethan clamped my head between his hands and thrust savagely into the depths of my throat. I scrambled to handle
him, to contain the warm salty liquid welling in my mouth. I sucked him dry, loving the taste of him, the way his cock went soft and vulnerable after its thunderous eruption.

  After I’d swallowed every delicious drop, I let his cock fall from my lips. Ethan still hadn’t moved. He sprawled in his chair in a kind of stupor. I crawled out from under the desk. He opened one ice-blue eye.

  “You little devil,” he rasped tenderly.

  I merely smiled. “I’m going to get back before Standish freaks out.”

  He put out a lazy hand. “Come here.”

  I went to him. When I was close enough, he reached out a hand and clasped the back of my thigh, tugging me up tight against him. His big warm hand splayed against my flesh, nudging the curve of my ass.

  “Be good,” he said, with a squeeze. His eyes glittered at me from under half-closed lids.

  “Or what?” I teased.

  “Or else.” He raised one wicked eyebrow. I shivered. Ethan’s “elses” were something else.

  “Sure, boss.”

  Chapter Six

  I made a quick trip to the bathroom to straighten out my appearance. Then I peeped into Standish’s little cubbyhole, where he sat like a little squirrel in a nest. His head bounced up with flattering eagerness.

  “Dana! I was wondering where you were.”

  “Bathroom break,” I said breezily.

  He went pink, which amused the hell out of me. What kind of man is embarrassed by mention of a pee break?

  “You know, last night I had a hard time sleeping,” I said, with a slow, sensuous stretch.

  He mumbled something, utterly riveted.

  “I kept worrying that I’m not doing enough to help you out. I’m more than just a receptionist, you know.”

  “Oh, I know!”

  I paused for a startled second. He didn’t know…that, did he?

  “I mean, you could be more. You’re obviously very bright and kind and hardworking and smart and…beautiful…” He trailed off. “I’m sorry, that was extremely inappropriate.”

  I nearly let out a telltale snort. Inappropriate? He had no idea. He also had no idea how endearing he was.