The Supplicant Read online

  The Supplicant

  Carolyn Faulkner

  Blushing Books

  Contents

  What’s Inside

  FREE Books for Amazon Customers

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Carolyn Faulkner

  EBook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  Blushing Books

  ©2018 by Blushing Books® and Carolyn Faulkner

  All rights reserved.

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  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Published by Blushing Books®,

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  Carolyn Faulkner

  The Supplicant

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  EBook ISBN: 978-1-61258-726-4

  Cover Art by ABCD Graphics & Design

  * * *

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  What’s Inside

  Loch stood, putting his hands into his pockets as he looked down at her. "I'll give you that hundred thousand for a weekend with you. No other repayment expected of any kind, except that you would submit yourself to me completely during that timeframe, which would be of my choosing, since I'm not an artiste with a flexible schedule. And I'm afraid, my dear, that would be the only kind of arrangement I would be interested in making with you. I have no interest in being your private bank. I don't want money from you. No, I want something I think is much more rarified, much more valuable to me. I want your complete and total submission, so that I can show you that you needn't spend the rest of your life as a nun because your beloved husband has died. I want to force you to recognize the fact that you can be brought to excruciating heights by a man who doesn't know you very well or love you in the least and who will never make love to you, but that you can be fucked so hard you forget your name by that very same man."

  Arden opened her suddenly parched mouth, but nothing came out. She couldn't seem to wrench herself away from him, as if she was completely mesmerized by what he was saying. She should have been running away from him, running down the hallway and down the stairs and back to the relative safety of her car.

  But she felt as if her feet were rooted where they were, even as she stared down at them.

  Loch took a step towards her, watching her carefully, gauging her reactions as he took another step, so that she was now easily within reach of his long arms, surprised that she hadn't backed away from him, but not willing to question his good fortune.

  "Don't answer just yet, Arden," he whispered, so softly she felt compelled to look up at him. That was when he reached out and tugged her into his arms, enjoying her slight, ladylike, "oof," holding her against his hard, muscular body, plastering her blatantly against him and tipping her entire body just slightly towards him, so that she was off balance and had to lean on him to keep from falling forward.

  His fingers delved forcefully into that carefully coifed bun, pulling out the pins that held it in subjugation and letting her wavy tresses fall over his hand while he tilted her head back and kissed her in a way that was at once almost tender—but not quite—and almost ruthless—but not quite but that very definitely demanded a response from her.

  One that she found utterly impossible to deny him.

  Her mouth opened as if it always had and always would when his lips slanted across hers, and he took what she was offering without the slightest bit of hesitation, accepting her slight submission as his due and demanding more, bending her to him in every sense of the word as he claimed the deepest recesses of her mouth, plundering and possessing until—a long while later—he finally lifted his head.

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  Prologue

  "—and I thought he was going to pound me right through the mattress and the floor beneath it! I was seriously worried I was going to end up crashing down into the apartment beneath. Wouldn't that give old Mrs. Kingston something to talk about?"

  Her best friend nudged her ribs hard with her elbow, but it was all Arden could do to keep from blushing. She wasn't at all sure she was able to pull it off, and she knew that the sight of her pink cheeks would only egg Sylvia on.

  "But then I guess you can tell what a great time I had with him by the fact that I'm still walking funny two days later."

  Everyone else was laughing uproariously at that and offering their own lurid stories of their weekend conquests. Everyone except Arden, who was quietly happy not to have anything to contribute—especially since that was the moment he decided to make his appearance, with that deep, rumbling baritone that disturbed her more—and in more ways—than she cared to admit.

  He made her tremble in a way that only one other man in her life had, and she found that wholly unacceptable and annoying in the extreme, blaming him as much as she did herself for her reaction.

  He wasn't even mad to find them there—far from it. She almost wished he was, it would be easier to understand and cultivate a dislike of him if he was an asshole.

  "Good morning, everyone. I hope you all had a great weekend."

  Loch Frazier, head of the ever-expanding empire of Frazier, Inc., practically had to duck through the door into the break room where his employees had gathered to chat and grab coffee before starting work. Greeting each of them by name as he made his way through the blatantly admiring sea of them, he asked after them and their fami
lies—flawlessly remembering the names of their significant others, their children or parents or whatever their hobbies were and managing, somehow, to sound as if he actually cared about each one of them as he did so.

  At least, that's what they thought. His employees were true devotees of what could only be called his cult of personality. Somehow, he managed to inspire a deep, abiding loyalty in people. Many of them had been with him from the start—from when he'd been working on his software from a tiny room in his tiny apartment. And, although he was also known by his detractors as a slave driver, he had made sure that those who had stuck with him—through what was, in the beginning, thin and thin—were amply rewarded for their work and their fealty to him once the company began to turn a profit.

  In fact, he was far from the only multi-millionaire to have arisen from the computer and marketing genius he had shown in building his business. Those who had left his employ—in his good graces—had done so with large, lucrative severance or retirement packages that included both stock, which continued to split in a truly meteoric rise, as well as health care benefits for those retiring that were the envy those who had left larger companies that showed considerably less tangible concern for their former employees.

  Unfortunately, Arden had never understood what it was about him that held so many people—people she considered to be relatively intelligent—in rapt adoration of him. If anything, she preferred to avoid him, if at all possible. In fact, just the sight of him made her uneasy enough that—as soon as she caught sight of him—her cheeks blushing even brighter red for some unknown reason at the idea that he had probably overheard what Syl had said. She kept her eyes carefully averted from him, sliding off the counter she was sitting on and grabbing her purse, intending to escape as quickly as possible, saying, "And that's my cue to leave this den of iniquity."

  To her horror, Loch stopped in his tracks at her words, staring down at her and murmuring, his voice having the same effect on her as if they were alone and he was whispering it into her ear, "You needn't go because of me, Ms. Valenti."

  She smiled nervously up at him, looking down again quickly and heading towards the door. "Thank you, Mr. Frazier, but, since I'm not an employee, I'll let you get to work."

  He smiled and it was a disgustingly pleasant thing to behold. "Well, you're welcome here any time."

  "Thank you."

  She would have ducked out, but Syl's voice bellowed from the back of the room, caused her to stop before she was able to make a clean getaway. "Remember, it's 'Feed a Starving Artiste' night. General Tso and I will be over at seven. You have Netflix fired up and we'll catch up on Luke Cage. Have plenty of drool towels around, please." She didn't bother to suppress a sexual shiver at the thought that embarrassed Arden yet again.

  "Okay. Have a great day, everyone!" She was very aware of how squeaky her voice sounded and equally as glad that no one could see how red her face was as she accidentally caught Loch's eye and he set her heart to racing at a dangerous pace when he very slowly, very deliberately winked at her.

  Chapter 1

  The music was so loud that her ears hurt, and she could feel the bass literally vibrating beneath her feet and up her legs. The crush of people was suffocating, but having claimed a large table for their group helped a bit to keep the masses at bay. The rest of the group—minus one big hunk in particular—were on the dance floor, gyrating wildly to the beat that was rapidly giving her a headache. She felt like a stick in the mud—and knew she was acting like one, too—but she'd claimed a chair that faced the dance floor and the stage, and she wasn't going to give it up until she decided to leave.

  Which, she determined, was at least an hour from now, if she was going to appear even slightly polite. They hadn't even gotten to gift giving yet, and it was Syl's birthday bash she was attending. She could hardly duck out early without insulting her best friend, even if the only man to whom she'd had any kind of reaction in ages—negative or positive—was sitting across the table from her. He'd been eying her all evening, only somewhat covertly, but she had no doubt that she was right, since every time he so much as glanced her way, every inch of her skin seemed to come alive in a very disconcerting way.

  She did clean up reasonably well, she supposed, even if she was in the only "nice" outfit she owned. Most of her clothes were ancient jeans and t-shirts, all decorated in various shades of paint spatters that never seemed to come out, no matter how often she washed them, but then, she had never much been into dressing to impress. Luckily, in her profession, that kind of thing didn't matter much, and the love of her life couldn't have cared less what she was wearing. The less, the better, as he would have said, in fact, waggling his eyebrows lasciviously at her and probably twirling a fake, Snidely Whiplash mustache at her.

  Putting her head down, Arden tried ruthlessly to squelch the direction her brain automatically went in—to stem the tide of tears that flooded her eyes at the merest fleeting thought of him, of the whole world she'd lost when she'd lost him.

  And, by concentrating so hard she blotted out everything and everyone else around her for a long moment, in a manner she'd had to learn the hard way—for self-preservation—she did manage not to let those tears overflow, blinking them back until they were gone.

  But when she raised her head again, proud of herself for not having given in to the overwhelming wave of grief, she realized that Mr. Frazier was no longer sitting across from her, but rather had taken—not one of the seven other unoccupied seats, but rather, the one right next to where she was sitting. The imposing sight of him surprised her, and she couldn't prevent herself from starting a bit.

  Of course, hoping a man like that wouldn't notice her small movement was entirely too much to ask from an unforgiving universe.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you, but I hate shouting across the table and I did ask if it was all right."

  Arden was sure he had. He'd probably asked when she was preoccupied wrestling with her own feelings, and when she'd bowed her head, he'd taken that as her assent.

  There wasn't really a graceful way to get out of it now, either. She could hardly get up and move away from him, she supposed, without appearing to be downright impolite. Although it might be interesting to see if he followed her around the table if she did, she mused, in a sort of perverse, adult version of musical chairs.

  "No, it's fine," she lied blithely. "I just was off in my own head for a moment. Sorry."

  "No need to apologize. Please don't let me make you feel uncomfortable."

  It wasn't quite an offer to move, but then she didn't know if she would have taken him up on it if he had. She didn't want to be thought of—especially by him, for some unfathomable reason—as a ninny.

  "Although I have a feeling that this entire evening is making you feel uncomfortable, so me sitting next to you should barely register," he continued astutely.

  The problem was that he was dead on—she hated this kind of place, but it was in Syl's blood. She might have been in her mid-thirties for the third year, but she hadn't slowed down a bit.

  Arden, on the other hand, had never once sped up in any way in her forty-plus-too-many years—she had never been able to match her best friend's pace and had long since stopped trying.

  But worse than that, he was dead wrong about him not being a blip on her radar, because all kinds of klaxons were going off at his nearness—not just in her head, which she could have dealt with much more easily. But in her body, too, as if they had decided to join forces against her.

  It had been almost four years since her life had ended—well, that was what it felt like, anyway, even to this day—since the dearest man in the world—a man who, though he certainly had been up close and personal with her foibles for the past fifteen odd years of marriage, thought she could walk on water and nail Jell-O to walls—had left her.

  Frowning fiercely, she chastised herself for thinking of it that way. It wasn't as if he had wanted to go. The cancer hadn't been anywhere near polite
enough to ask. Perhaps if it hadn't been so damnably quick, if it hadn't been so unexpected, she might feel differently, might have been able to let go of the pain more easily and find the happiness he had told her multiple times during his lightning fast decline that he desperately wanted her to discover when he was gone.

  But she just couldn't, and she'd already made peace with the fact that she was going to be alone for the rest of her life.

  Her family and friends, however, were nowhere near as resigned to her fate as she was.

  And, apparently, she could now rank her own mind and body along with them, as they were on full alert at the presence of this highly masculine, almost threateningly potent man.

  She took a drink of her plain diet soda—the one and only drink she could afford in this place, frankly. And even it had been mind-bogglingly expensive—she'd been nursing all night, he'd noted. "You're…not wrong," she allowed on a drawl, studiously watching the band, although she wasn't seeing any of them. All of her—more than she could even remember feeling with her beloved—was concentrated on the man seated next to her.

  And he wasn't even touching her.

  He was, however, sitting there, manspreading wildly as if his knees had never met each other and looking as if he owned the joint, not a carefully cut, short black hair out of place. He was dressed in an expensively casual outfit of oxford shirt, surprisingly not unbuttoned to his navel, but there was still no mistaking the peek of dark chest hair that showed in the small V anyway, jeans that were undoubtedly designer and worth more than her house, probably, as well as a leather jacket that was probably quite pricey in its prime but that now looked as if it had seen better days.