The Professor's Pet (A BDSM Romance Novel) (5 page)

Jake:

Time was the great healer. That’s what they all said, and they said it for a reason. The months passed; work was busy, and the bustling activity of teaching,
grading and research all helped to ease the pain of my failed relationship with Jenny.

My cell phone rang early November; I looked at the screen. Jenny. I picked it up.

“Jenny Stone,” I drawled. My voice was warm and teasing. “How’s life in the big, bad city?” I was happy to hear from her; there was no twinge of pain.

“Jake Ballard,” she replied. “
It isn’t as big or as bad as you’d think. How are you?”

“Good, kiddo. I can’t complain. You?”

She hesitated. “I wanted to tell you myself; I’ve just started seeing someone. I didn’t want you to find out from Facebook, or some such thing.”

I waited for the pain, but there wasn’t any; time had worked its magic, and the passing months had healed that tear in my heart. I was genuinely glad for her.

“Does he treat you well, kiddo?” I asked her. Our lifestyle attracted a fair amount of jerks who didn’t understand the difference between dominance and controlling.

“So far,” she replied. “I keep telling him that my ex will come beat him up if he doesn’t…”

I laughed at that. If she’d been my submissive and said something like that to me, I’d have laughed my head off, then I would have put her over my lap and spanked her silly for the sass.

“What about you, Jake? Seeing anyone?”

An image of Emily McNamara flashed in my head; her cunt spread open in front of me, the fire in her eyes when she’d asked me to stop calling her pet. But Emily had finished her dissertation; moved to the opposite side of the country. It had been a one-night stand, nothing more. Or so I told myself.

“Not really,” I replied.

A silence fell over us; the same, slightly uncomfortable silence that had fallen too often over us; the reason that we’d broken up. Jenny and I – the sex was amazing, but beyond that, there hadn’t been the connection necessary to build something deeper. We’d come close; but in the end, we were ever so slightly out of phase with each other. The smallest of gaps, but one that had mattered.

The silence stretched, and finally, Jenny broke it.

“Look me up if you are in New York, Jake?” she asked.

“Will do, Jenny,” I replied automatically. We said our goodbyes, and I was left staring at an empty line.

***

I ground my teeth as I read the email that had just come in.
Irritation swirled through me.

“For fuck’
s sake, there’s no fucking need to meet in person,” I growled to myself. “And every fucking week, to boot.” An excess of swearing, but it seemed warranted at the moment.

I only had myself to blame for this situation. I’d recently started doing some consulting work for a tech giant in Silicon Valley. I’ll leave them nameless, but let’s just say that
pure math provides useful insights that you can apply to search engines, online advertising and much more. The tech behemoth had a lot of money, and I was angling for a grant. A grant would mean that I’d be able to hire a couple more PhD students, get some manpower to tackle some problems I was interested in.

So we’d arranged a project. The Executive Vice President of Technology was the project sponsor, and the email from his assistant just said that he’d like to meet in person each week to get a status update.

Damn it. The project was obviously high-visibility, but I just grimaced at the sheer inconvenience of flying to San Francisco every single week. And the meetings were on Friday. This was going to be a huge disruption.

“What’s the matter, Jake?” An amused voice asked me. I had been in the break
room when the email had come in, grabbing a cup of coffee that was necessary to keep me awake, but also tasted like sawdust. I looked up, it was Colin Baker. Faculty as well, Colin was also a good friend; kindly, warm and welcoming. Jenny and I had dined with Colin and his wife Karen many times, and he had been sympathetic but unsurprised when we had broken up.

I showed him the email.
“My overlords require me to attend meetings in person. In Silicon Valley. Every Friday at 2.00pm. For the next two months.”

He grimaced at me. “
Which company?” he asked.

I named the tech giant. “Ah, Emily’s working there,” he said. “Emily McNamara
, you remember her? My PhD student who graduated this summer? Some of her mail is still here, would you mind looking her up and giving it to her when you are there?”

“No problem,” I replied. The situation finally held some interest. Emily had been an intriguing mix of bold and shy; her normal tongue-tied stammering had disappeared when she had be
en naked, and she’d been honest, open and vocal about her desires. My cock stirred slightly in my pants. I wondered if she was still single.

***

Emily:

After that night with Jake Ballard, I thought about swinging by his office; seeing if I’d get invited to his house again. But something had held me back; perhaps a suspicion that Jake could be very dangerous. Not for my body, but for my heart.

In any case, everything was a bit of a whirl. A week after that night, I headed out to travel through Thailand and Vietnam; my graduation present to myself, made possible due to the generous sign-on bonus that my new employers had paid me when I’d been recruited to join their search analytics team. I was gone for six weeks, and on my return, I packed my belongings and left Boston; moving across the country to San Francisco.

The weeks
flew by in a haze of activity. I had a ton of boring errands to do; the kind of chores you have to do when you move to a new city in a new state. Finding an apartment, setting up electricity and heat and the oh-so-necessary internet; changing my driver’s license; that kind of thing. All effective at helping me forget the memory of Jake’s amused eyes, his mocking laughter, and his heated, heated touch.

Or rather, almost effective. During the day, I could lose myself in the
joys and the pressures of a new job; at night, I had no such distraction. Jake was with me in the evenings; my memories of that night startlingly vivid, even after three months.

Along with memories of Jake to try and forget, I had to deal with the fact that I’d loved everything he’d made me do. No, I’d begged for it, pleaded for him to use me for his pleasure. I was as complicit in my submission as he was.

Submissive. That word; dirty and shameful. I was the target of my own feminist ire. “What kind of modern, enlightened woman wanted a man to treat her like an object for his amusement?” I silently reproached myself. And my answer was always the same, implacable and constant. I knew what I had felt, knew what my body had told me. Pleasure greater than any I’d experienced before.

It gnawed away at me in the background of my mind, until one day, I finally made my peace with it. If my best friend had come to me with the same problem, I would have asked her if the guy treated her well. And if he did,
I would have told her that what they did in the privacy of their bedroom was no one’s business but theirs. I resolved to treat myself with the same kindness.

***

“Do you have plans for the weekend?” Anna asked me. In the high-tech world in Silicon Valley, few of us had the luxury of offices. Our team, all eight of us stats geeks sat in an open area, with cubicle walls that were waist-high to give us the illusion of privacy.

I looked at Anna, who sat next to me. She was standing, leaning over the
cubicle divider to look at me. It was 4.30pm on Friday evening, and we were winding up for the week.

“I was thinking of renting a car, maybe heading up to Napa Valley or something,” I replied, pushing my keyboard away, and leaning back in my chair. I’d finished unpacking the last of my boxes last night; the apartment was finally livable, the chores were done, and I was restless to get out and explore. I’d been at work for a month now, and all I’d done so far in San Francisco was get to and from work, and grab takeout at the cheap Indian and Chinese restaurants that surrounded my apartment.

She started telling me the names of a couple of her favourite wineries, but then she stopped suddenly. “Holy crap, Batman, hot guy alert,” she whispered instead.

“Sanjay again?” I tried not to sound bored. Anna had a crush on my boss, Sanjay.
She couldn’t stop talking about how amazing he was. I understood why; objectively, he was gorgeous, though he did nothing for me.

“Yes,” she said, not taking her eyes off whoever was piquing her interest. “But he has company. Seriously smoking hot company.”

I was curious, but the way my cubicle was positioned, I couldn’t stand up and look without it being totally obvious.

“Shit, they are coming this way,” she squealed, and ducked down into her cubicle, her face flaming red.

I swivelled my chair around and looked up; my eyes met a set of laughing blue eyes, the eyes that had been haunting my dreams for the last three months. Jake Ballard.

“Emily,” I heard my boss say,
through the heat that suddenly filled my body. “Jake tells me you two know each other.”

I looked up, trying hard not to blush.

“Hello Emily,” he greeted me. His voice was a lazy drawl that sent shivers racing through my body. My mind flashed back immediately to three months ago, when he had looked at me and asked me if I wanted to be taken in my cunt or my ass. I swallowed as arousal snaked through me.

“Professor Ballard,” I replied, then flushed instantly as I realized I was still following his rules. His lips twitched; he was trying to hold back the laughter. Jerk. My eyes were hot with embarrassment and
anger as I looked at him.

“Jake,” I said coolly, striving for self-possession. “What a surprise to see you here.”

“Jake is working with us on search algorithms,” Sanjay explained. “He’ll be mostly working with Anya’s team, but there might be some crossover.” I sighed with relief. For an instant there, I was terrified that I’d have to work with him every day. But my relief was short-lived. “Jake, the team typically goes to the bar next door for drinks Friday evening, why don’t you join us?”

Jake smiled, laugher dancing in his eyes as he took in my expression. “I’d love to,” he said smoothly. “Emily, coming?”

I’d have loved to beg off, but Sanjay was standing there, and I needed to act as normal as possible, else be the target of whispered speculation. “Absolutely, I just need to finish up here, I’ll be along in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll give you a ride,” Jake announced. “Sanjay, see you there?”

***

I got into the car in silence.

“Still feeling regret for that night?” he asked me. There was a note of something that might almost have been vulnerability in his voice.

“What? No.” I shook my head. Regret was the furthest thing from what I was feeling. What I felt was arousal; I had to only look at him, and the memories of that night came rushing back.

“So what gives, Emily? Why the anger?”

“You always laugh at me,” I replied.  “I don’t like being laughed at.”

“Pity,” was all he said, lips twitching.

***

Sanjay and Jake were deep in conversation at the bar, and I used the opportunity to study Jake covertly. He looked good; I’d forgotten how good-looking he was, in a rugged, all-guy kind of way.

“So that’s
Dr. Jacob Ballard,” Anna pulled up next to me, a glass of wine in her hand. She whistled through her teeth. “Some people really do have it all, don’t you think? His project is attracting some serious buzz, and then he’s a total looker. How do you know him?”

“We worked on the same floor in Boston,” I replied.
“Anna, you know everything that happens round here, how long does his project run for?”

“Eight weeks,” she said. “Why?”

“Just curious,” I lied. There was a germ of an idea in my head; one that would hinge on whether Jake wanted a repeat of our night together, or not.

“He’s checking you out,” she giggled.

“He is?” I instinctively looked at him, our eyes meeting. He smiled at me, raised his glass slightly and then resumed his conversation with Sanjay. I felt piqued, and then I laughed to myself at my reaction. Okay. I wanted him to be fascinated by me; to ask me to come up to his hotel room. I definitely wanted a repeat of that night. Sure, it wasn’t the wisest thing I could do, but I still wanted it.

“I’m going to get another drink,” I announced, and headed up to the bar. I deliberately found a spot by Jake, leaned forward to grab the bartender’s attention.

“Emily,” his voice was at my ear. “Want to get out of here, grab some dinner?”

I turned towards him. His head was slightly inclined, he was waiting for my reply. Sanjay was nowhere to be seen, but I could see Anna’s eyes upon us.

“Are you going to laugh at me?” I asked him.

His lips twitched. “It’s pretty likely, yes. You get angry so easily, it’s hard to resist.”

I laughed despite myself. “In that case, Professor Ballard,” I muttered, sotto voce, “you can pay for dinner.”