Kept (11 page)

Reed was entirely unable to keep his hands to himself, of course, except when she was sick those two nights. Trish had even said it was fine to make love then, but he wouldn’t; he wanted her to get her rest. But once she’d recovered, it was no holds barred, and he barely let her out bed, in fact he kept her mostly nude or in one of his big sweatshirts with no panties pretty much all of the time so that he could fondle her whenever the mood struck him,

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which was almost embarrassingly often. It always amazed him how responsive she was, and that never seemed to change. He hoped it never did.

~ ~ ~

A few months later, what was technically their one year anniversary rolled around. They had arranged an appointment with their lawyers later in the week to discuss the agreement for the next year, and Trish spent her time fervently hoping that he would not make a big deal about it, but then, this was Reed. That night, he took her out to her favorite restaurant for dinner and bought her two dozen pink roses, then took her home and made exquisite love to her until she fell asleep in his arms just before dawn.

The meeting at the lawyers, however, did not go so well.

Trish just wanted to sign the exact same contract again. Everything was fine about it, and there wasn’t really anything she wanted to change. But Reed wanted to give her at least a ten percent raise in salary. She flatly refused.

"C’mon, Trish, don’t tell me that if you were in a more normal job you wouldn’t be getting an annual raise?" he pointed out sharply.

She stuck to her guns, saying, "I won’t sign off on a raise and that’s final. If it’s a deal breaker, then so be it."

Reed swallowed hard, not wanting to back down at all, but mindful of the fact that she seemed to be completely willing to walk away from him if he pressed the point. "Oh, all right," he agreed ungraciously. Damn stubborn woman.

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Kell was grinning from ear to ear. He loved seeing Reed stonewalled by a woman. It was one of those rarities in Nature – a charging bull stopped in his tracks by a feisty little domestic feline.

The second row started innocently enough when Reed presented Trish with her annual bonus. It was a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. When Trish saw the amount, she knew she couldn’t take it.

"It’s way too much. I can’t accept it." She tried to press it back into his hands, but he wouldn’t take it.

"The contract says that I can give you a yearly bonus. It doesn’t specify any particular amount. I gave you what I wanted to give you. Don’t insult me by returning it." His words were slow and even, but Trish recognized the look on his face. She wouldn’t at all put it past him to spank her until she agreed to accept that ungodly amount of money.

So, after what she considered to be an appropriate silence, she folded the check and put it in her purse. "All right."

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er innocent act wasn’t at all well accepted, especially by Reed, who watched her suspiciously H for the rest of the meeting, not trusting her easy acquiescence at all. He then personally escorted her to her bank and watched her deposit the funds into her account. Reed continued to keep a close eye on her all day, and, finally, when they crawled into bed that night, Trish had had enough of him looking at her like she was an alien from the X-Files.

"All right, this is quite enough of the prison guard act, you know. I did what you wanted; I deposited the money. So why aren’t you happy?" She sat up in bed, arms folded across her chest, looking as businesslike as one small, determined woman could when she was naked in a man’s bed. She meant to have some answers.

Second in the shower, as usual, Reed was still toweling off while standing at the end of the bed. He couldn’t suppress the stupid grin that settled on his face, which ticked her off that much more. "You are getting very sassy, young lady. Did you know that?"

Trish glared at him, not deigning to dignify that question with an answer.

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"Maybe you’re getting a little too big for your britches, hmmmmm?" Reed discarded the towel and crawled naked up the bed to push her over onto her back as he settled himself between her legs.

"I can’t be getting too big for something you never let me wear!" she informed him in a sarcastic tone, keeping her arms folded tightly across her chest despite the intimacy of their position.

Pinning her arms at her sides was disgustingly easy for him; he was so much stronger than she was. He busily worried a nipple with his teeth. "All the better for you – you’re just a bit more submissive when you’re naked, Trish. You fight it less."

Oh, God, if he was trying to distract her, it was working a little too well!

Then he casually dropped a bomb while exploring the other nipple. "Maybe that’s something you should include in your next spanking story?"

"Wha – what? How do you know what I write?" Trish had never told him the specifics of what her stories were about, or for what site she wrote them. He hadn’t asked, so she had never volunteered the information. Had Maggie spilled the beans?

Reed positioned himself at her entrance then worked his way in slowly, making her writhe and moan beneath him. When she was completely full of him, he said, "You know how much I adore spanking you – " this made her wiggle and squirm until he held her fast. "Well, I happened upon a site that had spanking stories, and, shall we say, that your writing style is unmistakable, Miss Katherine Templeton."

Damn him – he was always freaking right!

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"Didn’t you mention something to me last year when we first met about having a manuscript that you might want to run by a print publisher?"

Exasperated, Trish asked, "Do we have to have this discussion in bed, for crying out loud?"

In answer, he disengaged himself from within her and set himself to work at an even more intimate spot, one that had her screaming his name within minutes.

Reed never forgot anything, though, and he nagged at her gently for almost a month before she agreed to show him the story she was working on. He loved it, and promised to get back to her about meeting a publisher friend of his.

In the mean time, he’d gotten a call at home from his CPA, Harrold Davidson, who handled his personal accounts. That was never a good thing. It was Friday night, and he was in his office at home, with Trish tap-tap-tapping away at her keyboard with her back to him, less than ten feet away. The night was gorgeous, dry and cool, and they had all of the windows open to let the air in.

Billy Joel’s The Stranger album was playing in the background, and, in general, all was right with his world, except this niggling thing, whatever it was, with his accounts.

So he called the meticulous nudge at home and got the skinny. It seemed that the problem was in his favor, which was nice, but his checking account balance was exactly twenty-five thousand dollars more than it should have been, according Harrold’s calculations. Harrold didn’t have a deposit slip to account for the difference, and he was calling Reed to see if he might have made a deposit and not told him, or if he had any idea why he’d be off such a large amount.

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Reed turned his chair to look right at what he considered to be the source of the problem, no doubt at all – Trish. He told Harrold he’d get back to him, and hung up the phone absently, not taking his eye off his recalcitrant woman.

Without missing a beat of her typing, Trish asked, "Did you finally get a hold of that Harrold Davidson person? He called like three or four times today – he was driving me crazy! Who is he, anyway, for crying out loud?"

Crossing his ankle over his knee, Reed pushed his chair back and answered with exaggerated casualness, "Hal Davidson is my CPA." Trish’s back straightened and her typing stumbled, but she recovered herself quickly and started clacking away again.

"Oh?" just the right touch of lightness there. Good going, girl.

"Yeah. He handles my personal finances," the typing faltered badly, "and it seems there’s a bit of a discrepancy in my checking account," and then halted abruptly.

Trish began smoothly gliding her comfy office chair towards the door. She felt like a rabbit moving stealthily, desperately trying not to attract the attention of a big, bad hawk.

"What kind of discrepancy would that be, dear?" she asked with false sweetness as her quest to get to the door became a tad more desperate.

Suddenly, the chair halted, and, to her horror, began making the return trip without any help from her, only she didn’t end up at her own desk, but instead she was dragged over to him, where Reed positioned her chair right directly in front of him.

"I think I need a glass of – " Trish tried to get up.

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"If you want to be able to sit down in a week, you’ll park it right now," he warned silkily. Reed leaned forward, planting his hands on the arms of her chair and getting directly into her face.

"Now, little lady, we are going to have a chat about that bonus that I gave you."

She didn’t want to babble but she couldn’t seem to help it.

"It was a very, very generous bonus, yes, Sir. Extremely generous.

You’ve always been very – "

"Did you or did you not deposit that check into your checking account when I took you to the bank that day, Patricia Ann Barton?"

Her full name. Gulp. "Yes, Sir, I did."

"Well then, please explain to me," oh, God, his voice was all the more frightening for its lack of volume and complete levelness, "how exactly that amount ended up in my checking account?"

Should I take a chance and try to come up with a decent lie on the spur of the moment? she wondered.

His next emphatic statement answered her unspoken question. "And don’t even think of telling me anything other than the God’s honest truth, because, believe me, Patricia Ann, you are already in enough trouble that you really don’t want to compound what you’ve already got coming by lying to me."

Double gulp.

Trish tried to smile, but he wasn’t having any of that, either.

"Weeeeellllllll, you see, it’s like this: I accepted that bonus –

knowing it was really way too much money. I don’t deserve all that money for what I do – " She could see that she wasn’t making any points with him running herself down like that – his expression was

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thunderously dark and she wasn’t helping herself at all, so she left that tract. "Weeellllll, you see, banks don’t really care who deposits money into whose accounts. They just won’t show you the account number or the balance in the other account if you’re not named on it. So I waited a week or so and went back to the bank." He looked like he was going to have a stroke.

"And then you did what?" he growled.

Tricia bit her lip and confessed her sin, "I transferred the money from my account into yours."

"Expressly against my wishes," he finished for her. She would have sworn his teeth were bared.

"Ooooooh no. I accepted the money when you gave it to me, Reed. You didn’t say how long I had to keep it, and I know I didn’t agree to any specific timeframe, so . . . " A nervous giggle escaped her at the most inopportune moment. "I gave it back."

Reed was truly afraid he was going to throttle the woman sitting in front of him. Truly. His hands were itching, but that wasn’t really what they wanted to do. Oh, they would get their chance to blister her butt, but not just now. He was just too pissed –

slightly amused, mind you, and admiring of her gutsy, if sneaky move – but definitely royally pissed.

Sitting back in his chair again, Reed dragged his hand over his forehead, then over his eyes and down to his jaw before he spoke again, calmly and quietly. "Get your butt upstairs to our bedroom and wait for me in the corner." She was still sitting there.

"Don’t make me have to repeat myself." Trish disappeared like the wind. "And take off that t-shirt!" he hollered after her, shaking his head as he listened to her feet pounding quickly up the stairs.

Why couldn’t he have been interested in a normal, average woman who would revel in the luxuries his hard earned money

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could provide? Who had the intelligence that God gave a gnat to know that if he had only wanted to give her a dollar-ninety-eight as a bonus, then that’s what he would have given her? Didn’t she realize that he was trying to tell her that she was special to him, and to make sure that money was never an issue in her life again, so that she never felt the need to sell herself to make time for a creative endeavor?

What if she decided to sell herself to someone else? The idea had him literally shaking in his boots. Tricia didn’t seem to be unhappy with him, but his money was supposed to be an attraction for her, not a bone of contention. Why was it that she never let him give her anything?

Well, he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether she wanted the money or not. It was her bonus – she’d certainly earned it by putting up with him for a year - and she was damned well going to accept it, and keep it, if he had to beat her every night for the rest of her life to get her to do it!

When he arrived at the doorway to their room after locking up the house for the night, Tricia was standing where he’d told her to stand, in the only available corner in the room, diagonal from the end of the bed. And he could hear her already sobbing softly. Reed crossed to her, letting his palms reach out and grasp those naked twin globes of her bottom. With his mouth at her ear, he said, "I am very disappointed in you, Patricia Ann Barton. Not only am I disappointed, but I am thoroughly insulted by what you did." Her weeping became more pronounced as he spoke. "And you are going to be one very sorry girl for having done it."