Power Play. Charlotte Stein

      Chapter One

      When he tells me to lift my skirt and bend over his desk, there’s a moment where I hesitate. There’s always a moment. It’s like the feeling just before the lock springs under the pressure of the correct key you’ve somehow chosen. My body goes completely still and the word no makes a fist in my throat, and then I just do it.

      I wriggle my tight skirt up over my thighs and expose my backside to his waiting gaze.

      In fact, I do much more than that. Mainly because I’ve started anticipating these little trips up to the thirtieth floor, and this morning I went without knickers. Plus, when I bend over my legs somehow automatically spread, so he doesn’t just get a view of the dark seam between the lush curves of my ass cheeks.

      He gets to see the slippery pink flesh between, as flushed and swollen as ever I’ve felt it. Of course I like to pretend I hate these little excursions up to the thirtieth floor, and that what Mr Woods does to me is degrading and disgusting and oh, isn’t it awful. But the fact remains that the moment he tells me to bend over in that silvery voice of his, my clit swells. My sex plumps. Wetness trickles from the clenching hole between my legs, down over my quite possibly quivering thighs.

      I quiver, for Mr Woods. I bend over, for Mr Woods. I forget that I was ever Ms Harding, Executive Editor of Barrett and Bates, and I become this other creature.

      I don’t even know her name, to be honest. She looks like me and talks like me and even acts like me in some respects – I still lay my hands on the desk so that they’re apart but parallel to each other – but she can never have that little buzz of respect before her name the way I so often do: Ms.

      And she could never let herself be used the way I’m going to let Mr Woods use me right now. I turn over in my mind each way he could possibly debase me as he stands behind me in his crisp grey suit with his crisp grey face and his mouth in that mean line it so often falls into.

      He could push something into my cunt. He’s never done it before, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t do it now if he wanted to. I’m as slick as I’ve ever been, but more than that I feel greedy down there, as though I could take anything he wanted to offer. That award he got, for excellence in business or something like it? That big, thick, curved one, with the little nubs all around its length like a thing just made for stirring the nerves inside someone’s body?

      Yeah, he could fill me with that, if he so chose. In my normal life, the life outside the strange, still unspoken relationship we’ve struck up, I would never let someone choose something like that for me.

      But here it’s different. Here he doesn’t have to say a word, and my mind floods with a million options, each more disgusting than the last. In fact, I suspect that my mind is actually far more disgusting than his. After all, he’s never actually fucked me. Most of the time he doesn’t touch me between my legs, and he hardly ever pushes me into touching him.

      It’s just this, it’s just him behind me with the thought of what he could do buzzing through my body. He could order me to oil my own ass and let him slip his cock inside. He could cane me until my flesh sang red-hot songs, until I bled and wept and begged him not to.

      And though I’m sure I’ve never wanted any of those things, there’s something about him that makes me give in anyway. Something about his eyes, as calm and colourless as a midwinter day. And his tone, his perfect, metallic tone.

      No order is ever barked; his voice is never raised. His orders don’t seem like orders, to be honest. One day he just said to me, quite matter-of-factly: I’d like to see your cunt now, Ms Harding. In the same way one might ask to see the quarterly reports or the latest projections or something of that nature.

      And then a sort of haze had descended over me, as though his words had thrown a veil over my head. The veil is with me right now as he murmurs that I should spread my legs wider, wider. He wants to see just how wet I am, just how bad I’ve been, before he progresses to anything further.

      And oh God, how I’m longing for anything further. Use the award, I think at him frantically, while my cheeks turn crimson and my body shudders over the idea. Force me to take your cock, I think at him, though somehow I know he never will.

      I’m not allowed.

      ‘I see you’re very wet, Ms Harding,’ he says, then follows it with more disapproving words that I don’t want to hear. ‘Yes, very wet indeed. Would you care to explain to me how you got into such a disgusting state?’

      No, I would not care to explain. My entire body sizzles with embarrassment and I have to force my hands to remain flat. And yet I find my mouth opening and words that aren’t my own come out, as though I have a talk-string on my back and he just pulled it.

      ‘I’ve been thinking about fucking,’ I say, which at least has the virtue of being honest, if not the virtue of being what I actually wanted to say.

      ‘Fucking who?’ he asks, just as I knew he would. Only this time I find the wherewithal