Under His Watch (11 page)

Ever so gently, he put his hand upon her there and made her whimper. His cock was hard as a rock, and part of him wanted to take her along both the paths of pleasure she offered, right then, enjoying her cries of erotic suffering under him.

How much better was it, though, to soothe her, and make her moan and sigh, so much more softly and gratefully than that?

“Isn’t this nicer than your own fingers, honey?”

“Yes, sir,” she said in a little sob of pleasure.

“I would have made you come, if you hadn’t played with
my
pussy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I’m afraid that now you’re going to have to show me how much you want my cock in your ass another way.” He removed his hand, and Charity gave a little cry of bereavement.

“How, sir?”

“You’re going to learn to worship my cock now, honey.” He walked over to the kitchen chair that still stood next to the bed, because Ryan intended that it would stay there from now on as a reminder to Charity that she would be spanked when necessary. He dropped his jeans and boxers and sat. “Come here, young lady,” he said, “and kneel in front of me.”

For the next thirty minutes, Charity Phillips sucked the cock of her salt-of-the-earth Navy SEAL bodyguard. The sight of his beautiful socialite on her knees, by itself, aroused Ryan. To tell her to look at his uncovered manhood, to tell her to kiss his balls, to tell her to take him deeper and enforce the depth with—gentle, today—pressure on the back of her head; all those things seemed to send him into a realm of passion he had never visited.

Her inexperience delighted him, too, though he felt a little guilty when she gagged, as she did from time to time, on his cock. But he loved to say, without letting her take her mouth from his hardness, “That’s okay, honey. You’re learning. You’re a good girl,” and he loved to see in her eyes how it turned her on to hear him speak that way, a protector having fun with his dirty little girl.

Ryan taught his dirty little socialite to rub gently and to lick. He taught her to keep her eyes respectfully downcast as she worshipped with her mouth and hands.

And he taught her that she would swallow his seed when the time came. “Get ready, honey,” he said. “I’m going to come in your mouth now. Get ready to swallow what a dirty girl gets as her reward.”

He had held off his orgasm for long minutes, not wanting to give up the delicious sights and sounds and feelings of Charity sucking his cock. Now he rested one hand lightly on her head, while the other caressed her shoulder, and he grunted deep in his chest as his cock spasmed in his girl’s mouth. He breathed very hard for a few seconds, while Charity suckled deliciously on him as if she wanted more of his essence, and then he raised her up to see the dazed look in her eyes and gather her into his lap so that he could thank her with words and hands.

“Did you like that, honey?” he asked.

“Yes?” she said. “It tasted funny.” She giggled. “I’ve never done that before—swallowed, I mean. No guy ever… deserved it.”

Ryan laughed. “And I deserve it?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

* * *

After they had showered, they went for a walk in a very hot Central Park.

“See?” Charity said, as they walked hand in hand by the boat pond. “You can be a conventional boyfriend.” She was wearing a blue sundress that made him very conscious that he couldn’t look at Charity as much as he wanted and do his job at the same time. Really, he shouldn’t even be holding hands with her, he supposed, but he had been careful to put her on his left side, so he could draw his gun from inside his light jacket if he had to.

“I can do a reasonable imitation, maybe,” he replied. “That doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get your bottom smacked if you spend all your time on your phone, though.”

Charity frowned.

Ryan continued, “You need to be okay with that, Charity. I can tell that you’re having trouble figuring out how to deal with what’s just happened between us, and what’s going to happen. That doesn’t worry me. What would worry me is if you felt you were getting mixed signals from me about how our relationship works.”

“But…” They took ten steps or so along the pond in silence. “But, when—” Ryan noticed, glancing at her, that pink spots had come into her cheeks. She gave a little snort of frustration, as if she couldn’t figure out how to express a thought that pressed itself upon her very urgently. “Okay, yes, when you talk about earning that… privilege. I mean, it’s so fucking hot, yes. And, yes, I want it and I even want… the privilege.”

Ryan laughed, and she turned and glared at him. “Sorry, honey,” he said defensively. “You’re just so adorable. To hear you talk about anal, and watch you blush when you think about it… You just make me happy, is all. Just right now.”

Her glare turned into a little smile, but then she turned her eyes back to the pond and continued down the path of her reasoning. “But do I get that privilege if I pick up my room? If I learn to make soufflé? If I go to bed early? Or can I only earn it by—” She lowered her voice and leaned into his shoulder to murmur, “sucking your cock well enough.” Then she kissed his shoulder, as if she couldn’t help it. “Do you get what I mean?” she finally said, with a hint of desperation in her voice.

“Maybe?” Ryan said. “Are you asking what my rules for keeping your life in order and running smoothly have to do with me dominating you in the bedroom?”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, exactly. It’s like I can see having sex like that all the time, every time.” She giggled. “It’s all I want right now, by the way. And I can see getting spanked because I stayed up too late and had a lousy day next day because I was so tired. And then there’s this…” She stopped walking and turned to him, pulling his hand so that he turned to her and they stood face to face, very close, by the boat pond. “I want to, I don’t know, take you to Greenwich and show you off to my parents, but I’m afraid…”

Ryan smiled. “You’re afraid that I’m going to ask you at dinner whether your cunt is wet, and tell you to take off your panties.”

“Ryan! I mean, sir… Oh, dammit, I don’t know what I mean. It’s the stupid conventional boyfriend thing.”

Ryan bent down and kissed her waiting lips, turned up to him submissively. Then he said, “I know what you mean, honey. Let me put it this way, for now. I believe that the sex and the rules are related, at least as far as you and I are concerned. But the sex is play, and the rules are real, and I’m not going to mix them up. And as for being a conventional boyfriend—”

Ryan’s phone rang. “Joe?” Charity asked. He fished the phone out of his breast pocket, looked at it, and nodded. He pushed the button to answer the call.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“You’re not going to like this,” Joe said at the other end.

“Won’t stop it from being true,” he said, looking into Charity’s eyes.

“You sure your phone is secure?”

“Yup. All your precautions are in effect.” Joe had been Ryan’s instructor in the art of securing a person’s digital communications.

“The mining project is a front for a black op.”

“And Mithras?”

“They’ve got a defense contracting wing that’s fronting the op. I’m guessing somebody low-level sent the first threat, and then it got kicked upstairs, where they have the ritzy NSA stuff.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “So what am I not going to like about it?” Charity had looked away toward the boathouse. Now she turned back in alarm.

“They’re planning to destroy a lot of Alexandropolis to sell the cover.”

Ryan grimaced. “I’d say that’s fucking insane, but we both know that fucking insane is the operating system for this shit.” Charity’s eyes got wider.

“You want my advice?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Have her get her foundation to threaten to blow the cover unless they get to send a team.”

“Is this where I say, ‘That’s just crazy enough to work’?”

Charity looked at him questioningly, shaking her head slightly in confusion. He could tell she was desperate to know what Joe had said.

“I think it’s that or walk away. And I have a feeling walking away isn’t an option, if she’s already in this deep.”

Ryan gave a deep sigh. “Alright, talk to you soon.” He hung up the call.

“What?” Charity demanded.

“You’re not going to like this,” Ryan said.

Chapter Thirteen

They spent the rest of Sunday planning how Charity should approach Standish with the news that his little—albeit rich—foundation had an ethical obligation to go up against the CIA, the NSA, and whoever else might have involved themselves in plotting to overthrow the ‘elected’—and admittedly crazy—president of Handristan. Honestly, Charity wanted to do nothing more than to keep trying to earn the privilege of anal, but the news from Joe had taken Kandahar and Turkey right off her radar screen. Alexandropolis was going to get saved, and it was going to get saved by her.

“No,” she said to Ryan, who had just suggested she call her father’s old friend former governor Jacob Harkness and get him to put pressure on Standish, “that won’t work. Standish would just get his back up. I really think I need to just go in there tomorrow and plead with him.”

Ryan scowled. Charity knew why.

“Look, I don’t think there’s any way around me going there. And you’ll be with me, and we’ve got Joe in our corner, right?”

That had been the sticking point for the last two hours: Ryan kept looking for ways to get the team sent without Charity; the Harkness idea had just been the latest version of “get someone to talk to Standish who will let your father persuade him to make you stay home.”

“Dammit, Charity, you’re not going to Handristan, and that’s final.”

Charity felt tears come into her eyes. “Ryan, if you want me to accept your resignation, this is the real way to do it. Nothing in the universe was more important to me than this temple—until you came along. But this temple is eternal, and we’re just passing through, and you and I have been together—really together—for two days. Who knows whether we can last—but the Temple of Apollo in Alexandropolis can last, if I can get there. You know you can keep me safe.”

“Do you understand that you’re being co-opted into a black op, Charity? Do you understand what that means? These people will do
anything
to keep their covers from getting blown.”

“You know you can keep me safe, Ryan.”

* * *

What Charity hadn’t even told Ryan was that she knew Standish would be on board from the word ‘Go,’ as long as she presented it in the right way. She didn’t trust anyone else to present it like that.

The next morning, she looked across his antique maple coffee table, right after he had poured her a cup and gestured at her to eat her omelet in his ultra-WASPy way, as if he couldn’t bear to say anything as vulgar as “Let’s eat,” and
“Bon appetit”
was too precious, and she said, “The government’s going to destroy Alexandropolis as a front for a black op, but I think we can get them to let us send someone in. To document what’s there now, and hold them accountable. I think if we play our cards right, we can force them to change the way they treat the site, and the temple especially. If we have footage of what it looks like when they get there, it won’t make sense for them to risk getting the attention we’d give it. They’ll preserve it instead.”

Standish Mather, seventy-year-old liberal bulwark of the northeast, raised his eyebrows. “You, Miss Phillips?”

Charity nodded.

“Is it safe?”

Charity tried to shrug with elegance. “Mostly?”

A small smile played across Standish’s lips. “But you wouldn’t care, would you, Miss Phillips, even if it were largely unsafe?”

Charity shook her head. “It would mean going to work as a consultant for Mithras.”

Standish nodded, knowing exactly where Charity was going. “And you’ll be telling Cliff Hodges to take out his checkbook, in order to secure an executive producer credit.”

“Well, if he insists, how can we deny him?”

Standish chuckled as if he had just won an auction for an unknown painting that only he recognized as the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

* * *

The negotiation with Mithras took fifteen minutes. Ten of them Charity spent making it clear that she very much thought Cliff Hodges’ secretary would like to talk to her. Cliff Hodges was currently located in Florida, but when Charity finally did reach his secretary Patricia, she got him on his cell phone within a minute.

“Charity Phillips,” said the drawl at the other end of the line.

“Mr. Hodges, I know what’s going on in Handristan. All I want is to go in there with a camera. Just me.”

“Out of the question,” Hodges said.

“Look,” Charity replied. “I understand that you really could kill me. But there are enough people who know about Handristan now that if you did that, despite the major inconvenience to them, they’d blow the whistle.”

“For a hotheaded little cultural heritage warrior, you really are a pain in my ass, Miss Phillips.”

“Just me and my bodyguard, and you can vet all the footage.”

Hodges sighed. “Tell Patricia to set you up on the flight that’s leaving Dallas Thursday morning. You’ll need to get there yourself. Patricia will send you the details, and the same packing list we’re sending the real managers. You’ll have to get your passport info to her immediately, so she can process your visas and do your security clearances. Ever been to the Caspian, Miss Phillips?”

Charity’s mouth hung open as she stood in her office at FPCH, overlooking Fifth Avenue. “N-no.”

“You’ll like it. See you soon.” Hodges hung up.

* * *

About to board the MetroNorth train in Grand Central, Charity turned to Ryan with a look of pleading in her eyes. She tried one final time, pulling him back just as they were about to step from the platform into the railcar. “Please don’t make me do this, sir.” Over the past two days—Monday to Wednesday—she had grown a little more comfortable switching between ‘Ryan’ and ‘sir,’ but she wanted to make a point this time, and let him know that she respected his authority but hated this decision so much that maybe he should rethink it.