Billionaire Romance Boxed Set (9 Book Bundle) (106 page)

“Did Asher tell you that you were to do anything I
required?” he asked. “Absolutely anything I found
necessary?”

I gulped and nodded my head. “Yes, he did,
but…”

Solomon’s knee shifted and he pressed it up against me
harshly. The top of his thigh smashed against the center of my body,
pushing my skirt up and revealing my pantyhose covered thighs. He ground
his knee against my crotch and I squirmed hard against him, completely caught
off guard.

“Anything,” he said. “And what I
need right now is…”

“No,” I whimpered.

“What did you say to me?” he asked. To
reinforce the anger in his voice, he grabbed my face with his free hand.
His fingers squeezed against my cheek and he forced me to look at him.

“I…” I tried to talk but it was
difficult. I was scared and worried and this wasn’t at all like any time
with Asher. With Asher I felt—and I don’t know why I felt
this—safer. Asher looked angry sometimes, but he wasn’t really
angry. He wouldn’t hurt me, and he wouldn’t do anything to make me
upset. On the contrary, Solomon looked full of rage.

He pressed his knee against me harder and moved a hand
towards my breasts. He squeezed them roughly above my dress and jacket
and looked at me with a long, hard glare. When I didn’t say anything(when
I couldn’t say anything, I was so scared), he released my cheeks and moved his
hand lower. Past my chest, towards my stomach, to the hem of my
dress. He grabbed at the skirt and wrenched it up, revealing my pantyhose
covered crotch. His fingers looped into the waistband of my pantyhose, by
the center of my stomach. Cold, rough fingers, reaching lower.
Fingers that were going to touch my slit and…

I was wet. I was wet but I was not intentionally
aroused. I did not want Solomon Royce to do anything to me. When
Asher had looked at me with passion and anger after I’d destroyed his book, and
then picked me up and tossed me onto the alder wood table in his private
meeting room, I’d been shocked and somewhat scared, but not like this.
I’d… I’d really wanted to know what Asher would do, and when he did it I felt
ecstatic. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, and perhaps I should have been more
upset, but at the time I wasn’t. And then, later, after getting to know
him a little more, I was even less upset. I really liked Asher. I
liked him a lot.

I didn’t know Solomon Royce, but I didn’t like him at
all. If he felt I was aroused, out of terrified excitement and nothing
more, I knew what would happen. If he felt that, realized it, he would
take me right then and there. No matter what I said afterwards, whether I
said no or not, he would do with me what he wished. He would deny my
pleas and say that I wanted this, say that he could feel how aroused I was, my
wet, sloppy cunt. I couldn’t say how I knew it, but I was one-hundred
percent certain of this fact.

And so, as my only line of defense, I whimpered,
“No. Please, no. Stop.”

His fingers had crept beneath my pantyhose and were a
mere inch away from my clit. “What did you say?” he
asked. “Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

“Stop this,” I said, louder now, but feeling
quieter and meeker than before. “I don’t want this. No.
I’m not supposed to do this.”

He removed his hand from my crotch and pushed hard
against my chest, lifting himself up and off of me. Then, as if he’d done
nothing wrong, he stood up and walked away from the couch. Back turned to
me, he went to his table with the stacks of books and began browsing through
them.

“Jessika,” he said without looking at me,
eyes cast downwards at one of the books. He opened it and began reading
to himself. “Go to office F-7 and tell Henry I need to meet with him
in an hour. Then head to J-4 and pick up the Alfonse memorandum.
Once you’ve brought those here, I want you to call Gelton’s and get me a steak
and cheese bomb with a large coffee. Two sugars, one cream, plus a side
of sour cream for the sub. Make sure the mushrooms, peppers, and onions
are completely cooked before returning.”

I stumbled up and rolled off the couch, launching
myself to my feet immediately. I fixed my dress and my jacket and ran out
of the room as fast as I could. F-7, J-4, steak and cheese, coffee, I
repeated in my head. When I left Solomon’s office, I ran somewhere else
so I could write everything down without forgetting it.

I didn’t want to go back there. I didn’t want to
do anything for him, either. But the alternatives were worse, in my
mind. I wanted to tell Asher, to rush to him and inform him of what his
trusted director of public relations was really like, but I knew I
couldn’t. My problems, while important to me, were something that Asher
couldn’t deal with at the moment. He was busy dealing with issues that
could potentially cost him millions of dollars. I felt so horrible, so
sick, but I didn’t think my issues were anything compared to possible financial
ruin.

I needed to tell him sometime, though.
Tonight. Later. After this, once I finished acting as Solomon’s
temporary assistant and Asher finished doing what he needed to do for the
day. Once Jeremy arrived to drive us home…

No, I reminded myself, it wasn’t my home. Asher’s
home. For dinner, with his wife. For…

I didn’t fit in here. I didn’t want to be
here. I wanted to leave right now, to ask the head receptionist to call
Jeremy and have him pick me up and bring me back to my quiet apartment where I
could curl up on my couch and read a book and forget any of this had ever
happened.

I wanted to do that, but was it fair to Asher? I
had to tell him about Solomon, except would he believe me? I thought
about it, tried to figure it out. My heels thudded against the carpeted
hallway and I made my way towards the elevator that would bring me to the sixth
floor and Henry at F-7.

…

At the end of the day, I found myself in Solomon
Royce’s office, alone. He hadn’t tried anything further after his attempt
at forced seduction on his couch, for which I was grateful. Though, to be
fair, I hadn’t spent more than a minute in his presence after that,
either. Always busy, always moving. I did what he asked and hurried
out of his office as fast as I could. Now, though, he’d left, and I was
waiting for Asher.

Solomon hadn’t said anything before he left, he just
did it. I saw him leaving his office as I was walking down the hallway to
get my next task from him. He saw me, gave me a curt nod, then walked
away. I had stared after him for awhile, watching him enter the elevator,
and when I was certain he’d left I went into his office to wait.

Not on the couch. I didn’t want to go anywhere
near his couch. Instead, I waited by his desk. I sat in the office
chair facing the window. Not a great view, but the skyline looked nice
from here. The setting sun lay somewhere off to the side, but the sky in
front of me contained a myriad of oranges and yellows. I stared,
thinking, wondering what I should do.

I decided I couldn’t tell Asher about what
happened. Maybe it was a fluke? Some office game? Did they
hire strippers for newly returned executives sometimes? I doubted it, but
perhaps. Probably not. But, either way, if I told Asher, it would
cause issues. Asher needed and trusted Solomon to do good work, and from
everything I knew the man had performed well over the years. Also, maybe
Solomon had an arrangement with his regular assistant, Daphne? Some
sexual agreement? How should I know? If he assumed Daphne primed me
on that, and told me what to expect, then that was understandable.

Actually, none of it was understandable. No
matter what, Solomon Royce shouldn’t have done what he did. It wasn’t
excusable and I hated myself a little bit for trying to rationalize his behavior.
The point stood, though, that if I told Asher he would probably do something
about it. What that was, I had no idea. The obvious solution would
be to remove me from the equation, since I was likely of little business use to
someone like Asher Landseer.

I didn’t like that idea. I wanted to be
important, something more, but at the moment I couldn’t. And yet, why
would I want that? For who, too? It wasn’t that I wanted it, per
se, but more that I didn’t want Asher to have a good reason to not want me
around. I had very scant few reasons for him to take notice of me as it
was, so giving him even less would ruin that.

Except, was that the kind of person Asher was?
No, not really. Asher was a businessman, a billionaire, and the CEO of a
company. He was a husband, and a reader, and a lover of silly old movies
like
The Goonies
. He liked
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Dante’s Inferno
and
The Time Traveler’s Wife
. He liked
pizza with chicken and feta cheese and tomatoes and onions, and he was controlling
sometimes, a bit demanding, but not without reason. Unknown reasons,
hidden somewhere in the depths of his mind, but I never doubted that he had
very specific and important reasons for every single thing he said or did.

Or, maybe not everything, but most things.
Sometimes he talked regularly, as if he were an average person. Casual
conversation. We’d stayed up late last night talking about nothing
important, but it was fun and amazing. I knew his favorite color(blue) and
that he didn’t like raisins, especially in cookies. He knew that I liked
to read and wanted to review books as a job, and that I realized I probably
couldn’t make a living off that but that I loved it anyways. I’d even
shown him my small website with some of my book reviews, too. On his
smart phone, he browsed through it, humming and hawing as he looked at what I’d
done.

He never made fun of me for any of it, either.
He didn’t say it was dumb or useless and he seemed genuinely interested in what
I did. Maybe it was dumb and useless(in fact, I was fairly certain of
it), but it was my passion and so he accepted it. He accepted me in some
ways that I’d never really felt accepted before. I felt like I could tell
Asher stupid things that were important to me, and probably no one else.
Things that sounded silly and trivial, except he wouldn’t laugh or mock
me. He would listen and nod and understand.

I stared out the window at the skyline, thinking these
things. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a bottle of perfume sitting
on Solomon’s desk. Tucked away in a corner, behind a short stack of
books, looking quite out of place. I reached for it and picked it up and
looked at the front.

Ambre et Vanille parfum, it read. Emblazoned on
the front was a French woman’s name, somewhat like my own but probably entirely
different. I didn’t know a lot of French and the flowery, calligraphic
writing made it hard to read. Unstoppering the bottle, I sniffed at the
perfume.

Interesting, I thought. Very feminine. Did
Solomon have a lady friend he intended on giving it to? Or—and this was
odd of me to think—had he intended on giving it to me? A way of
apology? For some reason I couldn’t even begin to imagine that; it didn’t
seem in his character, what little I knew of him. I stoppered the bottle
and put it back where I’d found it.

The window, staring, thinking, and…

“Jessika?” Asher poked his head into
Solomon’s office, knocking lightly on the door as he did. “Are you
finished?”

I stood up and faced him, smiling. “Yes,
I’m all done. I was waiting for you.”

Asher grinned and beckoned for me to come. I
walked across Solomon’s office and joined him in the doorway. He took my
arm in his, very gentlemanly, and escorted me down the hallway and to the
elevator.

“Was everything alright?” he asked.
There were other people in the building still, but none leaving right
now. When the elevator dinged, the doors opening, we had the entire
six-by-five foot compartment to ourselves. “Solomon can be confusing
at times,” he added. “I hope he wasn’t too difficult.”

I gulped, briefly reconsidering what I’d
decided. I should tell him; I wanted to tell him. And yet when it
came to it, I said, “He was fine. I managed to do everything he
asked.”

Everything, I thought, except for the first thing.
And I was very, very glad of that.

…

Jeremy drove us home and Asher brought me back to his
guest home. Once inside, he said, “So, if Beatrice agrees, then I
think it would be best if you stayed here during… everything. Would
that be alright with you?”

I glanced around the guest house, pretending to think
about it. Alright? It would be perfect! This place was
wonderful, and then—as much as I tried not to think it—I’d be closer to
Asher. If his wife left again, like he said she did often, he and I could
spend more time together. Watch movies, order pizza, maybe even go to
fancy Japanese restaurants. Not that I needed anything excessive, but I
couldn’t imagine Asher taking me to a hotdog stand and ordering a chili
dog. I would absolutely love it if he did—I’d love going anywhere with
him, really—but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a billionaire would
do. I’d be perfectly happy staying in, both of us reading quietly next to
each other. I could write up a book review and post it on my website and
then show him after. And…

“Yes,” I said, perhaps smiling too
widely. “Of course that would be fine. I actually really like
it here.”