Control (2 page)

‘He didn’t know the first thing about books,’ I say, which is perfectly true. He did have plenty of first-hand experience of the kinds of things that
go on
in my books, however – though of course I don’t say this.

‘That’s odd. Maybe he was just nervous.’

As Andy appeared about as inclined to nerves as a robot programmed to kill, I have to start wondering if Jeanette knows him somehow. Perhaps this is some sort of defence of him, which will then be followed by her persuading me to hire him. I can’t imagine why she keeps banging on about him, otherwise.

‘I don’t think he was the nervous type,’ I say, at which she laughs.

‘What, that little mouse? I think we’ve got our wires crossed, Maddie. He was the most nervous I’ve ever seen such a tall man be! He could hardly ask me if you would make a nice boss. I told him yes, of course –’

‘Who on earth are you talking about?’ I ask, but of course I know the moment the words are out of my mouth.

The nervy guy. The one who watched.

‘The chap with the dark hair and the glasses! Didn’t you interview him? Perhaps he took a fright and ran off …’

Of course, of course – he wasn’t some spying customer at all! He was my second candidate.

I
T’S ODD, SHOWING HIM
the ins and outs of the place. I can feel his eyes on me all the way around my store, as though they’re checking me for specks of seediness. My wicked ways are going to rub off on him – poor, sweet, nervous candidate number two.

His name’s Gabriel Kauffman. Gabe, he tells me, but he doesn’t sound convinced about this shortening of his name. Clearly he prefers Gabriel, but that’s a bit too formal for someone who’s probably seen most of my tits and at least some of my pussy.

Or maybe he doesn’t look convinced about the shortening because he’d like things to stay formal – something which I can well believe, when looking at him. He’s even more tweedy and well put-together than the glimpse had suggested.

He has side-parted his hair so perfectly, I could use the white stripe of his scalp to rule a line under
Bargains!
on the sign in the window. It’s made even whiter and straighter looking, by the perfect coal black of his hair.

I think it should be weirder that I immediately think
Snow White
, but somehow it doesn’t seem weird at all. The perfect pale skin, the dark hair, the probable fear that seven dwarves are going to do dirty things to him … it’s all there.

Snow White was pretty nervous and unaware of her own beauty too, after all. And she likely thought all sorts of things, before the dwarves reassured her that they just wanted her to keep house.

I tell him his duties in a clear, direct sort of way. No sexual subtext.

He seems to respond well to boundaries. Restrictions. He’s as obedient as a dog, his tongue curling up to his teeth whenever I lay out another rule or duty for him. I explain that the shelves need dusting every Wednesday, that I like the little recommendation cards to lie flush to the wood, that the book of the week stand should be perpendicular to the shelf behind it.

I like right angles, I tell him, and his tongue touches his upper teeth. He has neat little pointed incisors, I note – that should seem vampiric, but don’t.

Eventually, he manages to work up the nerve to ask questions, though they’re not exactly the questions I expect. If Andy asked them, I’d be nervous. They’re the questions of a thief, a meddler, a pain in the arse.

‘So, while I’m working in the shop, where will you be? Will you be here with me?’

He looks away while he says it, too. I’d think he was planning something, if he wasn’t so wound tight and reined in. He probably just wants to make sure he doesn’t fuck everything up.

‘At first, I’ll be with you. There’ll be a short training period, and then you’ll be on your own for three mornings and two afternoons of the week. Maybe less at first, if you’re not quite ready.’

He turns and flashes me the first smile of this entire interview and hiring process. It makes his face different – much less sombre, obviously, but it gives him a boyish air, too. His application told me he’s thirty, and he looks it until he smiles. It’s the heavy eyebrows, I think, and the tweed.

‘I think I’ll be fine. Everything seems really straightforward,’ he says, and then there’s a moment. It’s not exactly the kind of moment that tells me he’s going to use what he saw against me in some way, but it’s definitely one that gives the impression that he hasn’t forgotten. The whole thing hasn’t just slipped out of head, as his behaviour until now had almost suggested.

I think the event embarrassed him. But not enough to make him block it from his mind.

I stick out my hand, and he hesitates before shaking it. As though maybe sex is coating my palm, or girl cooties, or something similarly nerve-firing. It’s weird enough that I imagine, for a second, that he’s never actually shaken a woman’s hand before.

But then he steels himself, and grabs a hold of me, and shakes until my teeth rattle.

I need to get Gabriel on his own as soon as possible. I know this, because while we’re in the store together, stuff happens. Stuff that isn’t within the boundaries and restrictions and rules. And it’s entirely my fault and it’s nothing to do with him, it really isn’t.

It’s just that I keep thinking:
watch me
.

I keep bending over, right when I shouldn’t. In much shorter skirts than I’d usually wear for work. And stockings with seams, that I absolutely
never
wear for work. It’s much too delicious and addictive when he reacts as predictably as a puppet whose strings have just been pulled.

He gets flustered. Blushes are really obvious on his face, because his complexion is that perfect milk-pale – he can sometimes compose himself by the time I turn around, but he’s never able to hide that flush high up on his cheeks. Sometimes it even gets him around the throat and at the tips of his ears, and then I just want to lick it off him.

By the end of the fourth day, I’m beginning to suspect that hiring him was as much a mistake as hiring Andy would have been. Apparently I’m not allowed to hire any men at all, because I’m a sex maniac.

Not that he knows it. I mean, obviously he knows I have sex with men in my kitchen. But I don’t think he has any idea that I’m delighting in driving him up the wall. He tells me that he was largely home schooled. That until a year or so ago, he still lived with his parents. When I ask him if he has a girlfriend, he goes even redder than he did for my shirt with one too many buttons undone.

‘No,’ he says, but it’s after a long, long, putting-books-on-the-shelf pause.

I’m absolutely dying to ask if he’s
ever
had a girlfriend. The urge to run my hand down the strange arch of his back is more overwhelming, however. I settle for a pat, but even that startles him. I’m not sure he knew I was directly behind him, and now he hurriedly stuffs the book in his hand onto the shelf – as though he’s been caught reading something he shouldn’t.

Which is odd, because he was only looking at the back cover. What’s wrong with the back cover of
Temptress In Time
?

For the first time I wonder: what on earth is a man like him doing in a shop that sells erotica and erotic romance novels? They must be like alien spaceships to him.

‘You know, you get twenty per cent discount on anything in store,’ I say, half-laughing. His expression stops me taking it to the full laugh.

It’s a perfect mixture of both utter terror, and starving hungry eagerness. I’ve never seen a man look so famished – not even Andy. Not even carb-free-dieting Kevin. It makes me do something very odd, indeed.

As he’s watching, I lift my hand and sort of place it casually, on my chest. High up – not in a suggestive way at all. But then … then I guess it becomes suggestive. More suggestive than I was with Andy. More than I’ve ever been with anyone, as though his reserved nature somehow permits me an excess of freedom.

He’s not going to say anything, after all. He’s not going to do anything. He just watches as I slide my hand down over my plump left breast, tugging my shirt just ever so slightly as I do, so that a curving upswell of flesh is revealed. And when I get to my nipple – stiff beneath the lace clasp of my bra – such a surge of tingling sensation rolls through me that I go weak in the knees.

I think I come very close to sitting down suddenly, on the floor. My heart is vibrating its beats through my body. I can’t stop staring him down – I want to live in those big chocolate eyes of his. I want him to look at me for ever, watch me touching myself like such a dirty, wicked girl. He seems paralysed, but that’s fine by me. I want him perfectly still and taking me in, every nuance and shudder, and is he holding his breath?

I think he is.

‘Is there something you want to ask me, Gabriel?’ I say, though I know he couldn’t ask if he was forced to with hot pokers. I shiver just thinking about his restraint. I shiver thinking about Andy, who would have grabbed me and fucked me up against the bookcase ten steps before this moment.

I don’t know which is better – this exquisite tension, this waiting, this teasing. Or just getting.

‘I …’ he begins, but he doesn’t really seem to have the necessary breath for it. ‘I think that …’

I’m holding my breath, now. The lids have drooped down over his eyes. You could almost mistake it for sleepiness, if it were not for his hoarse voice and the fact that my hand is fondling my tit.

‘I think that …’ he says again, and this time I lean right in.
I’m
the eager one, now.

But he just finishes with:

‘… we should keep the Regency romances in a separate section to general historicals. Don’t you?’

* * *

Of course, by the time Andy comes sniffing around my patch again, I’m ravenous. I’m as hungry as Gabriel probably doesn’t know he is. A week of talking to him about clockwork toys (it was the family business, until his parents died), the books of Charlotte Bronte and exactly what I’d like for lunch, right down to the kind of pepper and how many times I’d like my coffee stirred – and all as I’m dressing too sexy and being very inappropriate, employer/employee wise – would be enough to drive anyone bonkers.

And I’m not anyone. I’m someone that, for the last five years, has been living largely in a sex drought. While managing a sex book shop.

Anyway, it’s raining when he turns up on my doorstep. We’re closed, but I have to let him in. He’ll catch his death. His clothes will get soaked and then he’ll put on a wet T-shirt competition through the glass of my shop door.

When he steps inside, I think of Gabriel, staring at me. I try to hold on to that power.

‘So – you hired that other guy, huh?’ he says, as he shakes the rain out of his hair – all over my shop! Does he think he looks sexy doing that?

Because fuck, he does.

‘I hardly think you’d have been appropriate, Mr Yarrow,’ I say, but he just grins.

‘Because of all the sexual harassment that would have gone on in the workplace?’

There’s already sexual harassment going on in the workplace.

‘Because …’ I say, but I don’t get any further. ‘Because …’

Because I can’t control myself around someone like you.

‘What is it about you?’ he asks. I know he’s not really asking, however. And he proves me right by tugging me suddenly to him, without waiting for my answer.

I lose a little of my breath along the way. My inappropriate heels stutter through the carpet.

‘Have you fucked that little pansy, yet?’

Something like defiance stings its way through me, to hear him use the word
pansy
. Unfortunately he chooses that moment to rip my shirt open, so the defiance gets left somewhat by the wayside.

‘Have you been spying on me, pervert?’ is about all I can manage. It bounces off him as though made of nothing stronger than paper.

‘He doesn’t look like he’d be willing to give you what you need.’

‘What do you know about the things I need?’ I ask, but it sounds weak and ridiculous when I’m standing here with my shirt hanging open, not bothering to cover myself and certainly not stepping away from him.

The aching thrum between my legs won’t allow me to do either.

‘Just stop me when I’m wrong,’ he says, then reaches down for the hem of my skirt.

As he rucks the material up, slow, slow, he leans down to kiss me. Not rough or sudden at all but deliberate. His tongue eases into my mouth when my lips part for him. His fingers waltz over my prickling thighs.

I’m already shaking. It doesn’t take long for things to splurge. His hands go into my hair and then my hands are in his hair and when I press forward, I can feel his thick erection through his jeans.

Not like Gabriel, who probably straps himself down. Andy just ruts up against me, roughly, forces me back until my arse hits the polished edge of my shop counter. It’s little more than a desk, really, with a till and a few advertising knick-knacks. There’s plenty of room for him to bend me over it, should he so choose.

Though I don’t think I really want to give him the choice.

‘Fuck me like you did before,’ I tell him, but it comes out so much more brutish than simple words can suggest. I bite his leaning-into-me throat on that last
before
, and he responds with some force of his own in kind.

He lifts me – right up off the ground! – and sits me abruptly down onto my counter, spells out for me that it’s not going to be like before. He’s going to do what he wants and I have to squirm and agonise.

When he shoves my legs apart, I agonise all right. I let out a little sharp sound which gets even louder when he tightens his fist in my hair and yanks my head back, to lick shivering stripes over my curving throat.

On the last lick he bites, and I moan unashamedly. I go for the front facing hooks on my bra, and fumble myself free.

The air is almost unbearable against my swollen nipples. His tongue is far, far worse, however. He makes these lovely quick, tight circles, before catching the tip with just the barest hint of his teeth – first one, then the other. I can’t sit still for it, not at all, and I buck my hips, spread my legs wider.

I’m not wearing any knickers. I didn’t wear them, for Gabriel. I was hoping he’d catch a glimpse of something – a flash of glistening pink, perhaps – but now it’s serving an even lovelier purpose.

It means I get to be fucked, quick. It means that when I manage to get my skirt all the way up my thighs, he can see my bare pussy and no longer wants to wait. His fingers part my slick folds easily, too easily, and then I’m caught between a tongue against my stiff nipples and a rough rub against my clit and that sound – the sound of a zipper being tugged down.

He straightens but keeps his fingers busy between my legs, face lust-slackened, wicked eyes gleaming.

‘God, you want it so bad,’ he says in a voice as roughened as my own, and the juicy sounds my pussy is making don’t deny it.

But I think of Gabriel, not Andy. I think of Gabriel, staring at me, ravenously, and my clit jumps beneath Andy’s rough touch. A little
ah
flutters out of me, and he rubs at me more firmly.

I’m going to come, any second. Any second now.

‘Suck me off,’ he says.

I moan and grow slicker to hear the words, but they’re still frustrating. He takes his hands away and I’m mortified to find myself reduced to whining, even as the thought of his cock in my mouth stirs me further.