Under His Watch (8 page)

“This is my cock, slut,” Ryan said. “Do you like it?”

“Yes, sir,” Charity said, and bent her head to kiss it and to take the head inside her lips, a little inexpertly.

Ryan gave a groan of pleasure, and then he stepped back a little. “Stay right there,” he said, starting to jerk off.

“Why?” Charity said with sudden alarm.

“I’m going to come on your face, slut.”

“Oh… I… I… don’t know…” She had a look of panic in her eyes at the thought of something so very shameful happening without warning that way.

“Color?” he asked softly and quickly, still pumping his cock, very close to coming.

Charity’s eyes widened. “Oh…” Then a smile broke out on her face. “Green, sir,” she said.

“Alright, then,” Ryan said, returning to dominant authority. “Hold your face still, slut, and get ready for your facial.”

Charity’s mouth dropped open and she began again to pant. The sight of her on her hands and knees looking at his cock, knowing that she would soon get her very first facial, drove him over the edge nearly instantly. He heard himself give a little shout, and he watched enraptured as his semen splashed onto her cheek, then her nose, then her mouth, as she couldn’t help closing her eyes.

“Take it in your mouth again now,” he murmured, and she opened her mouth dreamily, still with her eyes closed. Ryan fed her his softening cock, and his heart felt light at the contented sound she made, suckling at the head of it. Then he withdrew again, and took her in his arms, pulling her up to a kneeling position on the bed so that he could hold her tight, feeling her wonderful little breasts press against his chest and burying his face in her fragrant hair.

Now, the softness.

Chapter Nine

They fell asleep, there on her bed, for an hour or so after that. Ryan laid her down gently, and then he held her from behind in a silence broken only by kisses to her ear and her neck that tickled and made her giggle. The feeling of his lovely cock against her bottom seemed to be making her naughty again almost immediately, but the experience of submitting to him as she had just done had taken a great deal out of her. He pulled the comforter over them, and they napped.

Charity woke up before Ryan did. She turned over and looked at his sleeping face. He had turned off the overhead light at some point after she had fallen asleep and now again only the dim lamplight showed her his angular features. Had she really just done all that? Or, she supposed, rather, had she really just let him do all that to her?

She felt a dissonance arising in her mind, but with it a feeling of surprise—shock, even—at where the dissonance lay. The reasoning part of her mind—the part that kept her on the trail of Mithras Mining, for example—wasn’t telling her that she had made a terrible mistake by letting Ryan tell her he would take her in hand, as his… well, as his possession, frankly. No, instead it told her that her feelings for Ryan—face it, her growing love for him—just didn’t fit with who she was. Maybe she could find a hipster who would fuck her that way?

His eyes opened; Charity couldn’t help smiling to see he was awake, and she couldn’t help saying, “Sir.” Just that—just “sir.”

“Honey,” Ryan said, and kissed her, putting his hand behind her head and keeping her lips there against his so that she couldn’t help making the little whimpering sound that seemed now a permanent addition to her phonic repertoire.

“How are you doing?” he asked, after the kiss had gone on for delicious, reason-stealing seconds.

“Wonderfully, sir,” Charity replied. Now that Ryan was awake and had kissed her that way, everything in her mind had turned around—Charity’s life would have to conform to belonging to Ryan. Hadn’t she already said she would obey his rules, after all?

Her stomach rumbled then, audibly, and she giggled. “What’s for dinner, sir?” she asked.

He laughed. “Well, me—later.” He looked meaningfully into her eyes, and there was that tummy-fluttering feeling that had started this whole thing, the night before, when it had come upon her as he’d prepared to spank her for the first time.

Charity swallowed and whispered, “Yes, sir.”

“But,” Ryan continued softly, “although I think I can give you some valuable protein, I’d also like to cook you a more traditional kind of dinner.”

“Yes, sir.”

He made spaghetti alla carbonara, and it was incredible. He made her watch him and do some of the cooking, which felt strangely domestic and kinky at the same time—especially since when she got some eggshell in the sauce, he bent her over quickly and gave her three swats on her behind, which was bare; Charity was otherwise covered only by an apron, according to Ryan’s decree.

“You’re going to get used to being naked, honey,” he said as he held it out to her. “Or mostly naked. You’ll be losing most of your pubic hair tomorrow, too.”

“Why?” Charity whispered. She knew, somewhere inside, but she wanted to hear him say it.

“To remind you that your pussy belongs to me now.”

“Yes, sir,” Charity said.

Then they had cooked, as Charity felt her arousal once again start to run down her thighs.

Now, sitting down to dinner at the nice dining-room table where Charity had, to her knowledge, never eaten before, the contrast between the domesticity and the kink rose in her mind more strongly than it had before.

“Sir?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Does… does the, um, sex stuff… Well, what does it have to do with protecting me? Or maybe
does
it have anything to do with that?” She sipped her wine, realizing she had gone bright red and trying to regain some of her composure.

Ryan chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “But let me see if I can figure out a good way to put it.” He took another bite, looking at the window where the blinds had been completely drawn, hiding the view of Central Park. Then he swallowed and said, “First, if it turned out that you weren’t a submissive…”

Charity bit her lip at that, and Ryan saw it. “Yes, honey, that’s what you are. I understand how hard it can be to come to terms with, and you need to know that it doesn’t mean you’re submissive anywhere but in bed, but you’ll never be happy with sex that doesn’t involve the kind of stuff we did today.”

Charity nodded slowly, realizing again just how different it had been for her today. “It was like it wasn’t even sex,” she said.

Ryan laughed. “Well, I would say that what you were having before wasn’t sex. So I guess you just had sex for the first time, Miss Phillips.”

Charity’s face grew hot again, but her embarrassment faded at the sight of Ryan’s kind smile. How could he be so very kind and yet have treated her so very dominantly, when it came to discipline—and to bed?

“Anyway, if you hadn’t been a submissive, I would still have tried very hard to keep you in line with the rules I set, but you might have had more trouble with it than I think you’re going to have now.”

“Now that we’re… together?” Charity squeaked, thinking again—as seemed to happen every other second—about what being together meant where Ryan Bedford was concerned. “Now that I, you know…”

A hard look came into Ryan’s eyes that somehow didn’t take away the smile, or the kindness. “Now that you belong to me,” he said decisively.

They ate in silence for a while. Charity’s phone rang from the bedroom, and she started to get up to answer it.

“Sit,” Ryan said.

“But…”

“Do you want a hot bottom, honey?” Ryan spoke without a trace of anger, but his authority came through in each syllable.

“No, sir,” Charity said, realizing suddenly that spanking could somehow both be a turn-on and be a disciplinary boundary-setter.

“Then sit. Even if it’s an emergency, a few minutes of a nice dinner isn’t going to get anyone killed.”

Charity sat. She thought for a moment, and then she said, “Thank you, sir. I know I should try to keep those kinds of boundaries.”

“Yes,” Ryan said. “And now you will.”

* * *

The call had been from Standish.

“Charity, dear, I’m so sorry to hear that you’re canceling the Alexandropolis project, but I understand completely. I just want you to know that it won’t affect our working relationship at all, as far as I’m concerned. You’ve still got your budget and, knowing you, you’ll have ten ideas of how to redirect Becca and her crew. Isn’t there something to be done about Kandahar, for example? And all the research you put into Alexandropolis will serve you very well, if you want to do that. In all events, you know me—I’m nattering on, and you’ll be much further up on where CH is going with respect to the Hellenistic, won’t you? See you bright and early on Monday, I hope? Breakfast in my office at 7:30? Ta!”

Charity looked at the phone. Ryan had been sitting across the table from her as she had listened to the message, and so must have seen her face go from shock to horror as she listened, though Charity had instinctively turned away to face the window when she heard Standish’s first sentence.

“What the fuck?” Charity whispered. She finally looked at Ryan, whose face wore an expression of apprehensive sympathy. “Someone told Standish that I canceled the project.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. He just said, ‘I’m sorry to hear you’re canceling it.’” She looked at the phone again, and started to dial.

“Wait,” Ryan said.

“I’m just calling Becca.”

“Wait.” His voice had such command in it—the full naval officer—that she canceled the call.

“Why?” Charity felt her forehead crinkle in confusion.

“We don’t have enough information,” Ryan said. “Becca might be in danger.”

“What?!”

“I can imagine five different ways it was Becca who told Standish the project was canceled, and twice that many reasons. Only a few of them involve her being in danger, but what if she called Standish with a gun to her head?”

Charity felt herself breathing faster and faster. “Oh, God,” she said. “We have to save her. You’ll save her, right?”

“Don’t hyperventilate,” Ryan said calmly, reaching out and taking Charity’s hands in his. “It’s highly unlikely she’s in any danger. But we need more information before you reveal to anyone who might be watching or listening what you’re planning to do about them—as far as it looks—preemptively shutting down your production. Now if I were pulling a move like that, I would mail Becca pretending to be you, telling her to cancel the shoot on Monday and everything else going forward. Then, if I were Becca, I might call Standish to confirm and express sorrow, that kind of thing. Standish would say, ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it, but it makes sense’—because he knows about the death threats. I think you should check your email.”

Charity did, on her phone, and there was one from Becca:

WTF? I mean, I know you’re scared, but this isn’t like you, and you’ve got your hunky bodyguard. I’m calling Standish.

Then another one:

Okay, fine. Standish says we’re doing Kandahar. At least we have a chance of actually going
there
, right? It wasn’t like Herzyov was ever going to let us into Handristan…

Charity laughed at that, and showed it to Ryan. He looked at her severely. “You’re
not
going to Kandahar, honey. Been there, done that. You’re not.”

Charity pouted. “But I have my spec-ops guy!”

“Your spec-ops guy doesn’t want to go back there.”

“You have to, if I go. You have to come, and… um, make me come.”

Ryan chuckled. “What you’re doing, honey, is called topping from the bottom. You won’t like where it leads.”

Charity felt her face go red again. “Where?” she whispered, desperate to know, all fear and frustration about cultural heritage suddenly gone in an instant, as she grew very warm between her thighs.

Ryan smiled and spoke quietly. “Ever had to go to work with no underwear and a butt plug inserted deep inside your pretty little bottom?”

Charity gasped. “You wouldn’t.” But she knew he would, and she knew that even if it got her pussy hotter than a bonfire to think about it, the thought would keep her from trying to tell Ryan what to do.

“Try me. And that’s after the whipping I’ll give you—and before the other whipping I’ll give you.” The pictures in her mind of the way Ryan would treat her had an effect on Charity, beyond the arousal, that she found she couldn’t quite understand yet. She wanted that stuff—she wanted him to treat her like his treasured possession, and teach her to please him in every way—but instead of wanting to disobey him in order to get him to discipline her and conquer her, she found that she wanted to
earn
the shameful things through being a good girl for him.

“All of that just for saying that you have to take me to Kandahar?” Charity felt like she was playing for time, hoping that he might show her a way to get herself taken by him without being naughty.

“Yup.” His eyes crinkled, and he took a sip of the espresso she had made for him in the machine that was probably the only piece of kitchen equipment Charity knew how to use at this point. Bringing him that espresso had made her feel all tingly, without the slightest touch.

He seemed to want to remain enigmatic on that point, so Charity reluctantly moved on to the matter at hand. “They really wanted to make it easy for me just to move on, didn’t they?”

Ryan nodded. “And they wanted us to know that they’ve got some kind of government backing. One question is whether this little tactic actually came from the same guys as the initial death threat, or if somehow your situation got kicked up some chain of command. The first threat was mickey mouse.”

“They hacked my PC!” Charity protested.

“Mickey mouse. Especially compared to what happened today. What they did today was well-orchestrated, and involved very high-level tech.”

“So what do I do?” Charity asked, feeling a little desperate. “I can’t let them just shove me off Alexandropolis. That temple is really important.” She felt like she was trying to convince herself.