Vanilla

He paused. “I think of you every night before I go to sleep.”

“You do?” Pleased, I nuzzled his cheek. When I tried to pull away, Esteban held me close for a few seconds longer. I stroked his hair, petting him.

“I don’t want to leave,” he whispered.

So don’t was the answer that rose to my lips, but I didn’t say the words aloud. Briskly, I pushed away from him and cupped my hands around his. It wasn’t the first time I’d given him a task to complete while we were apart, but it was the first time I’d added a prop.

“I want you to wear it for me.” I squeezed his fingers around it. “At work. Not every day. But when I ask.”

And then, as I’d known he would, Esteban nodded and gave me what I asked for.

He said yes.

2 (#ulink_f4f6c34b-7df7-547c-859c-c0ea5dbd2fc1)

My partner didn’t want to work. I wanted to get paid. It was kind of an old argument.

“One of us is not independently wealthy,” I told him sharply as I pushed his feet off my desk. “Unless you intend to fully support me in my old age, you’d better get working on that long, long list of things I told you needed to be signed off on before the weekend.”

Alex Kennedy could’ve made a career out of being charming, and he knew it. “C’mon, Elise. It’s Wednesday. Hump Day!”

“So hump yourself over to your desk and sign these files!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alex told me with a cheeky grin.

I rolled my eyes, refusing to give in to his relentless charisma. “Doesn’t work on me.”

“Sure it does.”

“Not from you, it doesn’t,” I said and pushed a folder toward him.

“Damn it. It works on everyone else.”

I lifted a brow. “I’m not everyone else.”

Alex got up to pace in front of my desk. “Work is boring and annoying, and we’ve been doing it all day. Let’s go out for a late lunch. My treat.”

“Far be it from me to turn down free lunch, but we have to get all of those clients squared away first. Paperwork.” I held up a hand at his groan. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Bane of your existence. I get it. But you’re the one who has to sign off on this stuff, or else none of it will go through.”

Alex sighed. “Fuck my life. I thought starting my own business meant I got more time off.”

“Sign this shit!” I waved the folder at him. “Then take all the time off you want! Buy me lunch, too, that’s all good. But get this stuff done, so I don’t have to deal with a bunch of pissy voice mails about transactions that didn’t go through because you were too busy dancing around to sign anything.”

He did dance then, wiggling his ass and giving me another grin. “Dance, dance, dance...”

A short rap at the door turned us both. Olivia, Alex’s wife, poked her head around the door. She laughed at my expression.

“Is he giving you a hard time again?” she asked.

“Baby.” Alex went to kiss her. “I’m trying to take her out to lunch. I’m trying to be nice.”

“Lunch?” she asked. “At this hour?”

“We’ve been hard at work all day,” he said.

“Well, one of us has. He’s being lazy,” I told her.

She gave me a face that told me she knew exactly what dealing with that was like. When Alex tried to dance over to her, she held him off with a hand on his chest, though when he dove in to kiss her neck, she giggled and gave in for a minute before pushing him away. Over his shoulder, she said, “I sent you a link to your album with the shots I worked on for the calendar project. I marked the ones I thought came out the best, but you let me know if there are any others you’d like me to work on.”

I’d started modeling in college when a friend taking a photography class had needed someone to pose for a final project. The pictures hadn’t been very good—my friend was no artist. But as it turned out, I was a very good model. Other people in the class asked for help with their projects, one thing led to another and before I knew it, I’d collected quite a portfolio. And, because I was up for anything, most of the pictures were what my mother considered “filthy.” I’ve never considered being naked on camera porn, but I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder.

A few years ago I’d been new to the D/S scene, just getting my feet wet, so to speak, when I’d attended a munch, a purely social meeting sponsored by a group of women and the men who liked to serve them. The munch had been held in a local art gallery, hung with Scott Church’s work. He was looking for people willing to pose for a series of BDSM-themed portraits. I agreed. We’d done lots of shoots together since then, from sweetly provocative lingerie cheesecake to hardcore portraits. I liked working with Scott, never for the money even if sometimes there was some, but because I liked having my picture taken. In some ways, modeling, like the things I did with Esteban, was all about control, except that when I posed for pictures, I wasn’t the one in charge. And there’s power in that, too, sometimes, giving someone else what they want to take from you and make their own.

I’d met Olivia at one of Scott’s photography seminars, where I’d been one of the models. Shortly after that, she’d been asked to participate in a local annual calendar project for a Harrisburg charity, and though it wasn’t exactly the type of shoot I’d been doing before that, it was for a good cause. The pictures Olivia had taken had turned out to be so much fun and so well received that we were back for a third year.

“Hey, pictures. Can I see?” Alex came around my desk to look over my shoulder, though I hadn’t even opened the email from his wife, much less the online album.

“Since apparently you’re not going to bother doing any real work,” I told him as I found the link and clicked through, “I guess so.”

Alex leaned closer as the screen populated with thumbnails of the shots Olivia had taken. He pointed. “I like that one.”

I enlarged it. “Me, too.”

Olivia grinned as she looked to see which we’d both picked. “I figured.”

Together, we’d done a re-creation of a famous Vargas portrait, the artist known for his pinup paintings of women in various situations showing off their garters and stockings. This one was me in front of an apple-bobbing barrel, my hands tied behind me as I captured an apple in my teeth. Pretty vintage skirt, stockings, a lady with her hands tied. No innuendo about it, this picture was meant to be sexy.

“It’s a little too bondagey for a charity calendar,” I said. “But it’s fun.”

Alex looked at me. “It’s sexy as all hell, that’s what it is.”

“You’re right, my darling perv,” Olivia said, scrutinizing it. “But so is Elise. It’s too sexy for the project. The ones I marked would work better. Elise, let me know. I have to run now. I have a shoot scheduled with a set of newborn twins, and their mother tells me if we don’t catch them at nap time, it will be impossible to get any good shots. I tried to tell her I could work with kids, but hey, she’s the client.”

She kissed her husband and gave me a wave before heading out. Alex was now clicking through the rest of the pictures she’d taken. All variations of some kind of pinup imagery, though all far tamer than the first he’d picked. He paused on one of me with my head tipped back and eyes squinted closed, laughing. It had been a good day in Olivia’s studio.

“You could do this full-time, you know. Why are you crunching numbers and doing data analysis for me?”

“Because I’m more than just a pretty face?” I posed it as a question, adding an innocent blink and making dead doll eyes. “Because I like to pay my bills and do things like eat and buy stuff?”

“Bills, schmills,” Alex said.

I rolled my eyes. “Says the bazillionaire.”

“Pfft.” Alex leaned over my shoulder again to scroll through the pictures then nudged me. “Seriously, I know my wife’s a bloody genius with the camera, but you...look at you.”

I looked over the photo he’d pulled up. Critically, I could see what he meant. False modesty is a worse sin than vanity, I’ve always thought. I was pretty. I’d been pretty my whole life.

“There’s more to me than eyes and mouth and tits, Alex.”