His Secret Desire (4 page)

Come to my office as soon as you read this. We have something to discuss. - Alex

“Samantha! I’ve been trying to get ahold of you since yesterday! Your phone’s been off. What happened at your meeting with Mr. Strauss?” It was Emily’s voice coming from behind me. I didn’t even hear her come up on me as I reread the note over and over. Her face was wrinkled with worry. She was genuinely worried about me.

“I...Um...” I said, tripping over my words before I found the right ones. “Nothing happened.” My face blushed and betrayed me again.

“Wait a second, did something happen?” Emily asks, her voice falling to a low whisper as she leaned in closer to me. A feigned look of concern covered a wry smile.

“You totally fucked him, didn’t you!” Emily whispered. It wasn’t a question.

Another pang of shock filled my veins and flashed across my face. How could Emily have known so quickly that we had sex? I looked around at my co-workers eyeing us like hungry vultures. Luckily, Emily’s voice was barely audible even to me. She was good at whispering.

“Why would you think that?” I asked reproachfully.

“Mr. Strauss actually came down to the floor and spoke with some of the employees. Samantha, he has never spoken to any of the temps before, let alone come down to the temp offices! It seems kinda weird that you get called up into his office yesterday, leave immediately afterwards without even talking to me or anybody else, and then suddenly today he’s strolling around the temp offices schmoozing with the employees? Don’t you think that’s a little odd?” Emily asked, lowering her voice further.

“I don’t know, Emily. There’s a first for everything, right?”

“And now you’re coming in here, late, and wearing that!” Emily said, her hands motioning towards my outfit.

Shame came upon me quickly. Emily knew that something improper had happened. Did everybody know? God, would I leave an infamous tale of a temp who fucked the boss and then got the boot? A no-named harlot who would be one more notch on the CEO’s belt?

“Forget my clothes. What did he say to all of you guys?” I asked.

“I mean, he didn’t speak to every single one of us.” Emily crossed her arms as if insulted. Strauss obviously hadn’t talked to her, yet he must have remembered her from yesterday. “He basically asked everyone about their daily jobs. Asked them if they were happy here. If there was anything he could do for them. He even made some comments about the pictures in people’s cubicles. Honestly, it sort of scared the shit out of everyone. People have been talking about it nonstop like he came down here to console us before he wiped us all out or eliminated the department or something.”

I recalled talking to Strauss yesterday, calling him arrogant. My words rang out in my head.
You own this company and all these people’s lives depend on you and you are too good to even grace them with your presence once.
I remembered how I had put so much venom in those words. I had wanted them to break skin.

Alexander Strauss, the recluse CEO, had never talked to any of these employees. Now, he had come down to my department and had talked to them like they were real people. Through the panic of the moment, the sheer surreality of it, was the thought that his coming down here was sweet. He had listened. Not only that, he had acted upon what I said.

I looked at the note again. There was a number on the bottom.

“Emily, look, I’ll tell you everything. Promise. But not right now, ok? I have to make a call. A private call,” I said.

“Fine, but as soon as you can, you better tell me everything,” Emily said. I could tell she pushed away her annoyance at being kept in the dark. I inwardly praised her restraint as she walked away.

I dialed the number. After one ring a husky voice picked up. “Wait at the elevator, Miss Dubois. I’ll be down in one minute.” It was the same security guard from yesterday.

A minute later, I entered the elevator door with the security guard waiting. He nodded at me as the elevator ascended. Once again, he entered a set of numbers into the keypad. I was too nervous to move. Too nervous to sweat. The elevator doors opened to Alexander Strauss’s floor and the secretary did not look up. The doors to his office stood open.

I will have self-control, I thought, I promise. I will not have sex with Alexander Strauss again. With that thought reverberating in my head, I walked into his office.

The doors closed behind me. I looked around the office and saw Alex sitting on his desk. He motioned for me to sit in a chair that was in front of his desk. I walked over to the chair and stood before him, silent. I was not going to sit. I was going to quit. Simple words would flow from me. Strong words. I was done with this job. I would not apologize. I could feel my defiance holding me up, filling me with strength.

“Here,” Alex said, holding out some papers to me before I could utter so much as a single word. He was smiling.

“What is this?” I asked. His smile defied my anger, which was all over me like red paint. When I studied his face, I did not see any sense of triumph that he was about to fire me. It was a friendly smile. Small, barely a shadow of a smile, but friendly nonetheless.

“Your talents are wasted in your current position. I want to offer you a new job.”

I looked down at the paper. My eyes scanned the document and realized what he was saying was true. I was speechless. Then I saw the salary he was offering me. My eyes widened and my jaw hung open.

“Why?” I asked. It was all I could think to ask. None of this made sense.

“There is something special about you. Yesterday, you were honest with me. Brutally so. Your ability to be truthful is a powerful asset to me. When you told me about the rumors surrounding me, that was incredibly valuable, whether you recognize that yet or not. I need someone by my side who will not bullshit me,” Alex said.

“What... what am I expected to do for this position?” I asked, my mouth dry. The contract before me had only a vague title of “executive assistant” with precious little description of my job duties.

“You are expected to do whatever I request.”

Alex stood up and walked over to where I sat. He walked behind me. I felt his hand slide through the back of my hair ever so slightly, barely touching it. I closed my eyes at the faintest hint of his touch.

“And what do you mean by that?” I asked. My defiance was gone. I was feeling something unexpected. I was excited. I struggled to steady my voice, still confused through the excitement.

“I am quite demanding. That much you said of me is very true. I have high expectations of the people around me. That will extend to you,” He said. He walked around to my side, inches away from me. His hand pushed the hair back around my ear slowly, caressing the skin. I could see his figure in my peripheral. I could smell his cologne.  “To what happened between us yesterday.”

“What?” I asked breathlessly. It had remained unspoken until now. Until now, I had almost thought it hadn’t even happened, like I had dreamed the entire thing. Now it was real. He was offering me a job as his assistant for an astronomically high salary. An assistant who would also be his concubine.

“You will be submissive to my sexual desires, Samantha. That is part of this.” His hand moved under my chin, moved my face up. His eyes burned into mine.

“What makes you think I would ever accept a proposal like this? That I would be...” I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence. Unable to say it aloud. Whore, I thought, he wants me to be his whore. His eyes seemed to incapacitate me. It was hard to speak against the torrent of his stare.

“I believe you enjoyed the sex we had yesterday. You have been thinking about it since you left my office. You ate food without tasting it. Watched television without seeing it. Nothing compared to our moment we shared. It was new,” He said, licking his lips very slowly as he spoke. “Giving in to your desire, that carnal urge crying out to be fed, that is something very new for you, isn’t it?”

I said nothing. I thought of the previous night in my apartment, stuck in a daze. Nothing had seemed real compared to the memory of the sex in the office. My eyes fell to his crotch, searching for that hard object that had filled me so completely for a brief moment of ecstasy yesterday. I lifted my head up, trying to shake off the echo of the lust that had swallowed me yesterday.

“Fucking my boss is something new for me,” I said. I welled up my anger. Channeled it from before.

He let out a small laugh. “Titles are meaningless when it comes to sex. Simply because I am the boss doesn’t mean anything when you submitted to me as you did yesterday. In that moment, I could have been a janitor or an artist or teacher. It was only important that I was dominant. My position in the company, my status in this world only provided the opportunity for that moment to happen. You allowed it to happen.”

I thought of my arms behind my back. His hard cock sliding in and out of me. Biting my lips.

“If you had wanted to walk out, you could have done so easily. If you want to walk out right now, you could do so just as easily. But you don’t. Why?” Strauss asked. He stood before me again, his leg touching mine.

“I stay because I want to,” I confessed. It was the truth. I could think of nowhere else I would want to be.

“Yesterday, you and I filled two needs that previously went unfulfilled. So quickly you fell into my rhythm.  Your eyes closed, heeding every demand of mine, you felt complete. As if when I was inside of you, nothing was missing. Your thoughts fell away and there was only the moment of us together,” Alex said. He paused as he leaned his face in close to mine. His hand wrapped around the back of my hair and his lips pressed against my cheek. My eyes closed and I could hear him breathing me in.

He broke away and leaned against his desk, a few feet away from me. I opened my eyes and looked at him, trying to keep my face a blank canvass of no emotion.

“Before the sex, you showed yourself to be courageous. You told the CEO of the corporation you worked for exactly how you felt. There was no shame to what you said. No fear in your words. I can see you are intelligent. Given the right opportunity, you could accomplish much. You can help me. The drive in you radiates from you. Your hunger to accomplish, to create, is so apparent it’s as though you wear it like a piece of clothing. It only took someone like me to look for it.”

“Yet you want me also because I can be your whore?” I asked coldly.

“Don’t reject your sexuality. This is not about buying sex. Your sexual need is infused with mine now. We are two sides of the same coin. Because we complete a duality of submission and dominance, it binds us in a powerful way. Harnessed in the right way, that makes for a powerful tool in this business,” Strauss said. He paused for a second before continuing, “You are always free to leave.”

I looked down at the contract. Even the salary, so high that it defied belief, seemed to fade away in light of what Strauss had said. I looked up to see Strauss walk back to his desk and sit down. He had described something that I could only hint at. Something that felt right. My immediate assessment was that he wanted me as some sort of sexual servant, some call-girl in the building. But this man was rich beyond measure. He could have dozens if he so wanted. Yet he had articulated a bond between each other. Something formed yesterday. Here was the opportunity to explore that.

“What if I don’t accept?” I challenged.

“Then why are you still here?” Strauss asked.

I reached for a pen that was positioned strategically on his desk before me. He must have known I was going to agree before I walked in the door. Reading the contract carefully, I reached the end. The line where I was to sign stood out before me.

I stopped to think about going to back to the temp office. About going back to the wage that I could barely live on. Worse, about going back to a life without Alexander Strauss as my sexual partner. A life without his demands to be met. To be submitted to. I thought about never feeling his touch against my skin. If I turned and walked out, I would walk out on the possibility of a life I could never have dreamed of.

I looked up to Strauss and stared into his eyes as I signed my name on the paper. I placed the contract on the desk carefully and laid the pen next to it.

“I accept,” I said.

A visible smile formed on Strauss’ face. “Excellent,” he said.

Strauss stood up from his desk and walked over to me. His hand fell on my shoulder gracefully and he smiled. I breathed in his cologne, a faint whisper of his scent. His grip tightened as he looked at me and I wanted to tear off his pants and take him in my mouth. I almost begged him to demand it before I bit my tongue. The hard lines of his perfectly formed face radiated towards me. He smiled again, a small, wry smile, and broke eye contact.

He walked towards a sitting area in his office and stopped at a bar next to it. He poured two glasses of water over ice and walked back to me, extending one to me. I thanked him and sipped it quietly.

“There is much work to be done. I need you to accompany me to a press conference in one hour,” Strauss said.

I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing jeans, a decent shirt, and shoes that, while nice, were nowhere near the level of nice that would required of Alexander Strauss’s personal assistant. I felt like crying in despair. His first task for me was almost set up for failure. With only an hour, I would have no time to go home and get some other clothes. There was certainly no time for me to go shopping.

“I’m sorry Mr. Strauss, I’m not prepared at all for that. I thought I was going to be quitting today, to be honest. My clothes are ill-suited for a press conference. What am I going to wear?” I asked desperately. I was worried about losing the job that I was considering not accepting at all just a few minutes ago.

Strauss walked over to the conference table and picked up a box wrapped in sleek black wrapping that I hadn’t noticed before now. He placed the box before me. I looked over the box in my lap. It had no markings. It was lightweight and made no sound when I gently moved it back and forth, careful not to make it seem like I was a kid trying to probe into a present on Christmas Eve.