Six Weeks, page 7
From the sounds of it, he’d already made up his mind on both questions.
“I can’t promise forever,” she said. “No one can.”
Inside, she was furious. He’d made her love him. Damn him.
“Other people make those promises,” he said. “Why can’t we?”
Jaya plucked at the sheet with her fingertips. The answer to his last question was all tangled up inside her. They were both adopted as children. They knew how tenuous even a close blood bond could be.
How could he even believe in the promise of forever? Everyone eventually left.
Everyone.
Even her adoptive parents had died and left her.
“Maybe we should blame our parents,” Jaya said lightly. “It works for most things.”
Austen flipped over to his side, his back to her. His next words were muffled, as if he had pushed his face into the pillow.
“Two weeks left.”
Chapter Six
Jaya paused as she turned the corner in the office hallway, stopping so abruptly that someone coming up behind her bumped into her.
“Sorry,” she said automatically, turning to see who she’d been rear-ended by.
Oh no.
Ted Whatshisname stood grinning down at her.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he said, practically smacking his lips over the fact. “Come to see King Austen?”
Jaya frowned. “Sorry, what?”
“We all call him that,” Ted explained. “Royal reputation and king-sized billings—that’s our King Austen.”
“Oh, King Austen,” Jaya repeated. “Ha ha.”
Will the man ever leave?
Ted propped his shoulder against a wall and ogled her. “He’s a bore, though. Not an exciting bone in his—hey, what’s so funny?”
“He may not enjoy partying,” Jaya said, “but, trust me, Austen is very exciting where it counts.”
The lawyer’s teasing expression fell away. “Is that why his secretary spends most of her day with her tongue hanging out? Because she’s waiting to put it to good use on Austen’s ‘very exciting’ dick?”
Jaya turned and walked away. His secretary—the odious Kristy. Ugh, she couldn’t imagine any man wanting to spend a willing minute in the woman’s company.
It was Kristy’s presence which had stopped her short a few moments before. The other woman was back at the desk in front of Austen’s office. On guard, as Jaya always thought of her attitude, as though an audience with Austen was indeed on par with royalty.
A minute ago, Kristy had been seated but now she was standing, her face turned up to Austen’s as he stood in the doorway to his office. Jaya couldn’t blame the woman. Austen looked magnificent in a dark blue suit cut to emphasise the breadth of his shoulders and leanness of his hips and thighs—as if they needed emphasis.
Jaya’s steps faltered, however, as she shifted her attention to Kristy. She was amazed at the difference in Austen’s long-time secretary. Never before had she seen the woman smile. It altered the secretary’s face out of any resemblance to the glowering countenance Jaya knew.
Without the sour lemon pucker, Kristy Parker was actually attractive, she marvelled. Tall, curvy—statuesque was how many people would describe her. Her creamy skin glowed with health and vigour. Even her brown hair looked shinier, with bronze highlights in the soft waves.
Something about the way the other woman’s head was angled up to Austen’s made her feelings for him painfully obvious.
The woman was in love with him. Oh God.
Jaya strode up to them, watching closely as the pair heard her footsteps and looked up to see who it was.
Both of their expressions underwent a huge change. Kristy’s scowl was immediate and grandiose, even for her.
Austen—well, Austen looked at her with such a complicated mix of tenderness, hunger, resentment and just plain irritation that Jaya wondered if even he could make sense of what he felt for her. The combination seemed to shift, minute by minute.
“Were you looking for me, Jaya?” Austen asked, his eyes focussed somewhere past her.
She nodded, hoping that the use of her name was for his secretary’s benefit.
Jaya made a show of craning her head up and kissing his lean cheek. “Yes,” she said. “I wanted to take you to lunch.”
“Are you sure it was me you planned to invite?” he asked, nodding at something—or someone—behind her.
Jaya swivelled around.
Ted had followed her.
She turned back to Austen, placing her hands on his chest this time, if only to make her preference perfectly clear.
“Absolutely.” She lowered her gaze, veiling her eyes with her lashes. “Unless you’ve already eaten.”
His blue gaze shot to the hovering Kristy, his expression suddenly amused.
“Not at all,” he said smoothly. “I only now realise how hungry I am.”
Jaya read the intent in his eyes all too well and had to duck her head to hide her flushed cheeks.
“You have court at two,” Kristy reminded him, her lips a thin line. “The McNamara verdict.”
Austen checked his watch. “That doesn’t leave us with enough time to go out.” He glanced down at Jaya. “That means we’ll have to eat in.”
Not trusting herself to refrain from breaking out into giggles, she nodded. Austen’s secretary may not have gotten the message, but the other lawyer certainly did. His face was thunderous.
With a hand at her back, Austen ushered Jaya into his office. Kristy was right behind him.
“Should I order you something for lunch?”
“Yes.” Austen answered her. “Two sandwiches from the café at Queen and Bay. Ham and butter on baguette. Sparkling water and café au lait to drink. Tarte aux pommes for dessert.”
“Big lunch,” Jaya commented once he had closed the door on the other two. His office was spacious but lacking the interior glass panels of the others lining the hallway. Discretion, she supposed, the same discretion that put his office at the end of the hallway. His clients faced serious charges, but they also had serious money to defend themselves.
“You think so?” Austen’s hand went to his tie, loosening it from his collar. “Because I was just thinking I need an appetiser first.”
He treated her to a display of his considerable strength by effortlessly picking Jaya up off her feet and depositing her in his big leather chair.
He dropped to his knees in front of her.
There was something so sinful about having this man on his knees before her. So powerful, yet so vulnerable.
Jaya was glad she was wearing a skirt when he started touching her, running his hands from her ankles up to her thighs, oh so slowly.
She was already shaking by the time he reached the hem of her panties. Not lace this time but pink cotton. She hadn’t anticipated they would be on display.
“Sweet,” Austen murmured when he pushed her skirt up to see them, “but what’s inside is even sweeter.”
Roughly pushing aside the crotch of her undies, he buried his face in her pussy. He used his tongue like a heat-seeking missile, quickly finding the dormant core of her body and setting it on fire.
Her cunt got wetter with every lick, and when he spread her pussy lips to get directly at her clit, she writhed as if he had put a naked electric wire to her exposed flesh.
Clutching at his head, she cried out, “God, Austen!”
His mouth was wild against her body and it made her wilder too. Soon she was humping his face, urging him on, begging him for release.
Spurred on, he sucked her entire clit into his mouth, drawing on it ravenously until she was sweaty and shuddering.
She creamed in his mouth, her climax coming in loud gasps which Austen responded to with low groans of satisfaction as he swallowed every luscious drop.
He waited a minute for her body to stop quivering before he lifted his head. His chin was wet with her juices. The sight made Jaya’s stomach contract.
“I could live off your cream,” he said, getting to his feet. He sounded perfectly serious.
“As good as a well-aged single malt Scotch?” she teased.
“Better.”
Glowing from both her recent climax and his compliment, she stared pointedly at his crotch. The material of his trousers was unmistakably distended.
“What about you?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said dismissively. “Our lunch will be here soon.”
Jaya sat up straight, suddenly inexplicably angry.
“I don’t want you to ‘take care of it’,” she told him. For an instant, she wondered if his ‘taking care of it’ involved his secretary. “I want to. That’s my job now.”
He stared down at her, his features unreadable. “Is it?”
“Yes,” she said, sounding far more convincing than she felt. “It’s my turn now. I want you to come in my mouth. I need it. Please.”
“God,” he muttered as he stepped closer. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”
Since it was clearly a rhetorical question, she didn’t reply, but she could have easily gone over the points for him—starting with how irresistible his sexy golden cock was.
Instead of merely telling him with her mouth, she told him with her lips and tongue, too. She licked him up and down the whole hard length of his erection, paying special attention to the sensitive rim of his cock head, then laving it all over with special care and deliberation. His fingers, previously lax around her head, tightened in her hair.
He was ready.
Jaya drew on the tip of his dick, giving it slow suction that gradually grew stronger, until she was sucking him fiercely.
With a low inarticulate cry, he came suddenly in her mouth, reams of hot jism jetting between her lips almost faster than she could swallow. Her throat worked rapidly, trying not to waste a drop of his delicious cum, even as she shifted one hand to his balls, milking them for every last bit of ejaculate.
She pulled back, satisfied with the sight of the glisteningly clean cock she left behind. Holding it one last time in her hand, she gave the head of it a quick kiss.
“Jaya?”
Hearing his odd tone, she looked up questioningly.
“Are you free for lunch tomorrow?”
* * * *
They ate the luxurious lunch picnic style on his desk, each of them perched on opposite sides of it.
As usual, Austen’s tall frame took up more than its fair share of the space but somehow it gave her a comforting feeling. He was big and tough and, from what she had heard about his work, a vicious litigator, but with her all of that was transformed into tender protectiveness.
Well, not quite tender… Not always.
When his secretary had brought them their lunch, perfunctorily knocking on the door before she barged in a moment later, Austen had nearly reduced the woman to tears with a sharp reprimand.
“I might have been in here with a client,” he’d pointed out coldly.
“I’m allowed to come in when you’re with a client,” Kristy had said. “I’m just not allowed in when you’re with her.”
If Jaya had been in any doubt as to how the other woman felt about her, the pronunciation of that last word had made it crystal clear.
“Jaya is my partner,” Austen had told her with chilling finality. “There is no part of my life I don’t trust her with.”
Kristy had spun around and walked out without another word.
“Jaya is my partner.”
What does that mean?
Instead of trying to figure out the answer to that question, she picked up an apple tart. She was already full but as long as they were chewing, they didn’t have to talk. Plus, she was glad she got to watch Austen eat. His recent weight loss bothered her in a primal, mother bear way.
She put the tart back down.
“What’s the verdict for this afternoon?”
A glint in his eye told her he hadn’t misunderstood her, so his reply had to be deliberately tongue-in-cheek. “Amazing and incredible. Couldn’t you tell?”
In spite of herself, she felt her cheeks growing hot. “I meant your court thing.”
“My court attendance,” he said with the faintest smug lawyer emphasis on the third word, “is to receive the verdict from the presiding judge on a trial held three months ago. The allegations involved insider trading. The evidence on the part of the Securities and Trade Commission was overwhelming.”
“And?” Jaya prompted.
“And I am almost certain my client will be acquitted.” The smugness was very evident now. “The charging legislation is not worded well. I heard the prosecutors have already petitioned the government to change it.”
“For the next trial?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“But not for your client’s?”
“No,” Austen said. “That’s not how the law works. For my client, they’re stuck with the clause they charged him under. They can’t go back and retroactively amend it.”
“But they will now, because of you?”
“Yes.” He smiled broadly. “So I’ll have to come up with another line of defence for my next client with an insider trading charge.”
Jaya was silent for a moment, measuring his expression. “You enjoy this, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said again. “It may not spell excitement to everyone, but I get satisfaction in finding the holes in the evidence and in the law.”
“The prosecutors must hate you.”
He shook his head. “They don’t light up with joy when they see my name on a file, I’m sure, but they know what they’re getting with me. On my clients’ behalf, I will pursue every angle and exhaust every legal argument. But I don’t waste the court’s time doing that at every trial. Many times, it never gets to that point. If my client has no reasonable defence, I tell them that. The judges know now that if my client is going to trial, it’s because there is a good defence behind them, just as they know if my client is pleading guilty, it’s based on solid advice that they have no real case to take forward.”
Jaya tilted her head to stare at him. “Do your clients ever plead guilty?”
From the news articles, she remembered the high-profile trials but not the plea bargains.
Austen grinned. “All the time. A bad lawyer will go to trial every time because he wants the money that comes from dragging a case out, even a hopeless case. Another type of bad lawyer will plead out every client who comes to him.”
“You’re a good lawyer, I know.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How do you know? From the online reviews?”
“No. Because you’re a good man, through and through.”
His face darkened suddenly. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew the way I felt about you sometimes.”
A lump of her already swallowed lunch seemed to come back to get caught in her throat. “What way?” she managed to croak out.
Austen got off the corner of the desk where he’d been sitting and paced restlessly around the room.
“You don’t want to know,” he said flatly.
“Of course I do.”
He stopped pacing and ran his hand through his fair hair. “It will only scare you further away.”
Now, after that warning, she needed to know.
“Austen, tell me.”
He turned to her, his eyes dark and haunted. “Sometimes I fantasise about keeping you tied to my bed where you’re always waiting for me, hot and wet and ready.”
Jaya’s pussy clenched. Talking like that was a good way to make her cunt horny. As for being ready for him, she was always that way. Her blood pounded a wild rhythm every time he came close to her.
On a basic level, she understood what he was saying, and her instinct was to soothe him.
“It’s only a fantasy,” she said. “It’s not as if you’ve gone out and bought the chains.”
One side of his mouth moved upwards. “That’s a solid test statement. And, no, I haven’t.”
Despite the disavowal, her pulse was still racing. Could it be that the thought of him physically restraining her excited her?
A vivid image invaded her thoughts. Her, tied naked and helpless to Austen’s bed. Him, standing over her, roughly kneading her bare breasts as he fed her his cock.
Jaya cleared her throat. “Austen, you’re a lawyer. I know you. You would never break the law. As for the fantasy…”
As she trailed off, she looked across at him as if seeking aid.
It took him a moment before he responded huskily, “As for the fantasy…?”
She managed a shaky smile, her excitement threatening to swamp her.
“Let’s put it to bed. Literally.”
Chapter Seven
Surrendering to Austen was the wildest experience Jaya had ever undergone.
When he’d first tied her up, he’d been hesitant. They’d used his neckties and he’d made all the bonds too loose, so Jaya pulled the knots out every time she struggled in her binds.
Still, that first experiment had been titillating enough he’d ended up taking her roughly, two of his expensive ties still knotted around her wrists.
They’d tried again the next day, getting further along in the fantasy and hornier by the time they decided to jettison it in favour of good, hard fucking.
She savoured being tied up, being wanted so badly that the man who wanted her was driven to such extravagant excess, but Jaya discovered that, most of all, an out-of-control Austen was her kink.
Jaya wanted to try again for the third time, but Austen had other plans. Only he wouldn’t tell her what they were.
He only told her to dress casually and that they were taking a trip out of the city, which left a few hundred suburban and smaller urban destinations as distinct possibilities.
“I have to work tomorrow,” she reminded him in the car.
“It’s about forty minutes away,” Austen told her. “Plenty of time for the round trip. I’ll have you safely tucked into my bed by your usual bedtime, I promise.”
That narrowed down the list of possible destinations. Except forty minutes the way he drove was probably closer to an hour’s distance from the city for anyone else.
