Submitting to Her(67)

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Zoey knew about my fears, and she played upon them more than a little.

I remember a conference in Portland. It was a fairly industry-specific event regarding compliance in the manufactured goods field, and so we were there only as sponsors and media partners, highlighting the brands of our relevant magazine titles, fishing for advertising leads and boosting subscription numbers a little along the way.

It had been a fairly successful event - five companies were interested in what we had to offer from a promotional point of view, which was probably three more than you might expect from a smallish event of roughly 200 delegates. And one of those leads appeared to be a sure-fire long-term inside front cover sponsor. That got both Zoey and I fired up.

After the event, there was a little time for drinks in the bar before we headed upstairs to change for a formal dinner. Zoey was high on a successful conference and the fresh pine scent in the Oregon air, so we stayed for a few drinks before dashing upstairs to retrieve our glad rags.

There at the bar, there was plenty of flirting for my beautiful boss, whose top two shirt buttons had mysteriously come unfastened somewhere on the walk from the seminar room to the hotel bar.

She was laying it on - the coy smiles, the easy giggles, the lingering stares, unconscious playing with her hair, and even the occasional touch on someone's arm. Her frequent glances my way, checking that I was seeing what she was doing, reassured me she was doing it only to wind me up. But as I felt the flicker of jealousy mixing with forceful arousal to make me feel quite quesy at watching her playing up her femininity and flaunting it for the other men, my mental reassurance couldn't quite dislodge the powerful biological reaction I felt seeing her flirting with others.

By the time the bar started to thin out as executives dashed off to change, Zoey was accepting business cards as though she were running a prize draw.

I eventually dragged her away reminding her that she was presenting one of the industry awards during the small ceremony after dinner.

"That was fun, wasn't it?" she asked me as we headed up in the elevator to our floor.

"Certainly was," there was a faint quiver of anxiety in my voice. I do hate being late, and this was a black tie dinner we were heading towards.

"Lot of hot guys at this conference." She grinned at me, knowing the effect she was having on me. "You think I should find someone to join us later?"

I laughed, acting as though I thought she were joking - though after what she'd done with Brandon that night back in Philly, and not forgetting the way she'd loaned me out to our CEO as a bizarre bribe to win her approval, I knew I could never entirely discount the idea that she was going to do something wild and terrible.

In answer to her question, I said: "I think these guys know too much about who we are and who employs us."

"You're telling me what to do?" she pouted, but there was a smile buried under her pout, from the knowledge she was getting to me.

Up on the 12th floor, we navigated the maze of hallways and found our room once again. Naturally, the company had booked two rooms for the event, but we weren't going to use one of them.

Zoey's teasing seemed to overflow into her changing for dinner - as I quickly stripped off and hopped into the shower for a quick rinse, she was running at a leisurely pace, and when I came out of the bathroom ready to pull on my shirt and tux, expecting her to slip into the shower after me, I found that she was still in her clothes from the conference.

"We'd better hurry," I said, looking at my watch.

Zoey gave me a look of mild surprise - but then I saw her eyebrow twitch, as though she had some mischievous plan that was just about to be set in action.

"You're telling me what to do, Jones?" her accusation had a playful tone, but I was suddenly unsure where she was going with this.

Was she really going to turn up late to the dinner, just to play our personal games?

"No, Ma'am," I said, compliant.

She looked me over, taking her time before removing the white shirt from my grasp.

"On the bed," she said.

Well, who was I to question my boss? If we were late, we were late. My heart started beating a quicker pulse as I sat on the bed, then pulled myself over to lie where she directed me, on my back.

While I'd been in the bathroom, she'd been looking through her suitcase, and lying there on the bed, I now saw her produce a length of quarter-inch rope as if by magic. This did not look like something that was going to be completed within the 20 minutes we now had before the official start of the dinner.

"Arms up," she said, stepping around to the head of the bed, and I noticed that our bed was suitably designed for the rope to be looped around so that my wrists might be firmly shackled in place.