The Billionaire and the Wedding Planner Read online

  “You won’t do what, Maria? You won’t jeopardize your client relationship? Then get into your office and bend over your desk.”

  Her eyes went very wide, and now despite the olive complexion the blush had become very visible. “No, I…” Her voice trailed away, and her breath came a little raggedly through parted lips.

  Jason knew he had brought her to the edge of obedience, and on his way upstairs he had planned precisely how to move her gently over it.

  “I’m going to let the photographer have access to the house,” he said softly.

  Maria started at this news, her brows knitting in confusion.

  “This isn’t about your competence, Maria. It’s about your apparent tendency to insubordination. Now take your spanking and show me you can be a good girl when I need you to be.”

  The words good girl had an electric effect on Maria, as Jason had thought they might. Her eyes went very wide. Then she shook her head slowly. “I… I can’t…”

  “You can,” Jason said, and he stepped forward, to cover the yard between them slowly but purposefully, and to take gentle hold of Maria’s upper arm. She shivered, but she didn’t pull away, and he turned her and began to march her into her office, where her tidy desk waited.

  She hesitated once, when they had almost reached the desk, and turned away, shaking her head. “Please,” she murmured, but Jason could tell that Maria herself didn’t really know at what her plea directed itself.

  He overcame this bit of resistance, pulling her along and saying, “We’ll get this over with quickly. Bend over, with your elbows on the desk. I’m going to pull up your skirt now.”

  Maria’s head turned, a little wildly, at that. “Please, don’t,” she said. “I… I’m…”

  The conflict he had heard in her earlier please seemed greatly magnified now, but again Jason heard a fundamental note of acquiescence and acceptance. Without using a great deal of force, he urged her forward and bent her down with his left hand, while with his right he reached down for the hem of her businesslike gray skirt.

  Instead of resisting, she gave a little sob deep in her throat, letting her weight rest on her elbows just as Jason had told her to do. Then he saw why: Maria Sali was wearing lingerie so sexy it made his cock swell and his heart race.

  Her trim, heart-shaped bottom was clad in a red lace thong that among other things (including letting Jason see just how unbelievable an ass she had) afforded her no protection from his spanking hand. She had a red garter belt on, too, holding up ivory nylons.

  Jason restrained his desire to ask why she had worn such things to the office today. For a moment, he speculated on whether it had anything to do with her meeting with him, but decided it must be for a date she had later. Lucky guy, he thought a little wistfully. He also restrained the urge to say something about the naughtiness exhibited in the wearing of such undergarments.

  Instead he rolled up the skirt, noting with some relief that Maria kept her legs close together, and said, “I realize this is old-fashioned and even sexist of me, Maria, but it’s something I believe can be helpful in the proper situation.” Then, with his left hand atop her waist to keep her in place, he started to spank her distractingly pretty bottom.

  He wished he had a hairbrush, frankly, both because for a disciplinary spanking he thought an implement always conveyed a helpful sense of authority and because he wouldn’t have had to worry quite so much about the sensual aspect of the punishment. He could certainly deliver a firm lesson with his hand, though, and he did, spanking hard and at a regular pace that kept Maria yelping, her head low and her face turned away so that Jason couldn’t see her expression despite the rather severe style in which she kept her obviously long, lustrous hair.

  She squirmed a little, and kicked a very little, but he held her fast and kept smacking her right, left, center, the same way he would have if he had had a hairbrush, until her cries at the repeated visits to her already sore bottom-cheeks grew loud and, in Jason’s judgment, completely authentic. He stopped, his hand aching just a little in the pleasant way it always had after giving Anne a more ambiguous lesson, intended as an immediate prelude to sex. He stepped back and said, “You may lower your skirt and turn around.”

  He felt a pang of regret as she hid the little he could see of the red thong from his sight. She sniffled a little and stood, turning to him with reddened eyes and an expression he could hardly read: resentment definitely had its place there, but so did respect—those things he would have expected, but she had something else in the way her lips twitched, he thought, and the way she drew them into a tight line, something very ambiguous.

  Silence reigned: Jason wanted to see how she would break it, and for long moments it seemed clear that she had no idea how. Finally, she said in a slightly choked voice, “Are you satisfied, Mr. Garrons?”

  “Yes,” Jason said, nodding. “Thank you. I want to make sure you understand that I reserve the right to do that again if I find it necessary. It might help you to know that my stepdaughters are currently under the same threat, and that I had to spank Georgia Saturday night. If Emily needs discipline, I have given her the choice of having me administer it, or having me talk to Quint about the situation.”

  Maria’s eyebrows shot up. Her lips parted, but for a second she seemed not to know what to say. Then she murmured very simply, “Thank you. That does help.”

  Jason decided to elaborate, thinking it would help her understand the unique kind of wedding-planning process he had now for better or worse fixed upon for the Easton/Allerton nuptials.

  “It may present some differences from the control you’re used to exercising over the proceedings, but one thing I can promise is that I will never question your judgment in public, Miss Sali. If I see the need to assert my authority, we will do it here, in this way. So you know, in the future I will make certain I have a paddle of some kind with me, to make the punishment more impersonal, as it should be.”

  What was the flicker that crossed Maria’s face at that point? Could it have been disappointment at the word impersonal? He wondered again whether the red lingerie had in fact been about their meeting.

  “Understood, Mr. Garrons,” she said in a flinty tone. “May I request that if conflicts arise during the wedding or any of the events leading up to it, you wait to tell me your grievance until after the event is over?”

  Jason nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll let you know in private, just as I’ll punish you in private.”

  “Thank you,” Maria said. “Now, if we’ve settled the matter of the photographer, I don’t think we have any remaining business. Will I see you at the shower in three weeks?”

  He could understand the guardedness in her tone, of course, and he did his best not to resent it. He certainly couldn’t expect her to be happy about having just been spanked by a client.

  “I think I’m supposed to put in an appearance with Quint at the end.”

  “Then I’ll see you there.”

  Chapter Six

  Emily really didn’t think it would get her in trouble with Jason, to add two more cases of champagne to the order for the shower. After all, they could simply leave anything they hadn’t opened here at the Allertons’, and use it for the wedding itself, couldn’t they?

  Unfortunately, by the time he and Albright arrived to ‘put in their appearance,’ she and all her bridesmaids, none of them quite twenty-one yet, had taken a good deal more advantage of the great abundance of bubbles than Emily had envisioned when she had emailed the caterer and asked for the extra. The sight of so much good champagne had encouraged the girls, tittering over some of Emily’s naughtier presents, to down at least a bottle each, well before the crème brûlée. Even Georgia and her two best friends, two years younger than the rest of the bridesmaids, had gotten in on the act. Emily, despite being busy playing the appreciative bride, took the time also to play the gracious hostess and refill all her friends’ glasses whenever they looked empty, despite the increasingly exasperated looks s
he saw Maria Sali giving her from across the room.

  The scene into which the stepfather of the bride and the groom walked, then, had already begun to make Priscilla frown, and some of her and Anne’s dearest friends cluck a little. Smiles at the naughtiness of the younger generation had given way to glances shot at Priscilla as Emily and her friends laughingly passed around a sheer nightgown with a lace bodice, then some very skimpy red panties, and finally the naughtiest of all the presents, a triple-pronged purple vibrator accompanied by a bottle of lube. The girls’ laughter at Emily’s red face had grown rather raucous, even.

  “You know you’re a freak, Emily,” said Heather Davidson, Emily’s freshman-year roommate at college and probably the least sophisticated person in the room. She had, of course, given the embarrassing present, and now clearly took great enjoyment in its humorous effect.

  By this time Emily could see that everyone had gotten a little drunker than she wanted them to be, and she had noticed the look on Priscilla’s face, but at least the bubbles that seemed to be fizzing in her very veins also seemed to take away the need to care so much about propriety. Even drunk, though, the vibrator made her feel strange and flushed, and she wished she hadn’t poured herself quite so many glasses of champagne.

  “I am not,” she replied bravely to Heather.

  She shouldn’t have contradicted her friend, though, she instantly understood, because she should have known that Heather wouldn’t want to allow Emily’s denial to stand. If she had considered why Heather had asserted the bride’s freakiness with the gag gift—or was it a gag gift?—she would have remained silent, at least if she were sober.

  “Oh, don’t you try that, girl,” Heather said. “I remember what you said about that guy who put his finger up your butt!”

  At that moment—in the shocked silence, even, rather than in the uncomfortable, uproarious laughter that followed it—Albright and Jason walked in. It wasn’t immediately clear whether they had heard the conversation that preceded their entrance, because Jason said very smoothly, “Don’t let us spoil your fun, ladies,” making the laughter, when it occurred, even more uproarious and even more uncomfortable, as everyone watched Emily desperately try to hide the vibrator and the lube.

  Even through the haze of bubbles, Emily could feel the mortification of the moment, as she saw not only the present—drunk and disorderly bride with drunk and disorderly bridesmaids around her, and a look on Priscilla’s face that would curdle milk—but also the past: just eighteen and hooking up with guys at college, experiencing regular orgasms for the first time, and one of the guys, despite her weak protest, putting his middle finger in her anus as he tongued her clit and making her come as she had never come before or since.

  As she had never come with Albright Allerton V, with whom she had started sleeping six months later. When Albright asked, politely, if they could try different positions, if they could leave the light on, if Emily would send him a naughty picture, Emily said, “That stuff is so stupid,” as her face turned red. Albright had stopped asking.

  She knew he hadn’t stopped thinking about it, though, and she had noted with some dismay that they didn’t have sex as often as they had even a few months ago. It was harder here at home, because they had to find ways to slip away, but Albright could definitely afford to get a hotel room, something Emily secretly hoped he might do, and she could tell Jason she was staying at a friend’s house. She knew that she should be an assertive, modern woman and ask him to do it, and that he would probably be pleased, but every time she thought about it for some reason she remembered, precisely, what it felt like to have a man invade her in her most private place, and she felt she couldn’t ask for that kind of thing, ever—so how could she even ask for sex? It might be old-fashioned, but Albright should handle that stuff, and everyone said you had less sex after you were married, for better or worse.

  Now, though, quite drunk and fumbling to thrust the vibrator under her chair, she met her bridegroom’s eyes, and saw in them a quizzical expression that she thought had in it also something a little wounded. Had he heard what Heather had said? How could Emily have been so idiotic as to tell her roommate about the hookup?

  The moment seemed to die down, though, as Jason and Albright made their way around the room giving hugs and exchanging greetings. The masculine presence seemed to have a steadying effect, and Emily, who had been a little worried Jason would notice how drunk all the girls had gotten, started to calm down as Georgia, fumbling with champagne-numbed hands, helped her pack away the gifts safely in their bags. On the list her sister had been keeping of who had given what, for thank-you note purposes, Emily saw at the bottom, in very loose, clearly inebriated handwriting:

  Heather: purple thing and bottle of something

  She blushed anew, and at that moment she saw that Priscilla was talking very seriously to Jason. Her heart sank. Maria Sali had joined them, and seemed to be having a quiet argument of some kind with Priscilla.

  Albright came up beside her, put his arm around her waist, and kissed her. “Missed you,” he said. “Seems like you girls had a good time.”

  Emily tensed, and she felt Albright sense the tension and pull himself away. Oh, no, she thought. Albright, I’m only worried about what Jason and Priscilla are saying, because… The memory of Georgia’s spanking flitted through her mind.

  She did her best to relax into his arm, and she turned and laid her hand on his chest, ran her fingers down his red silk tie. “I missed you, too,” she said, as huskily as she could manage, looking up into his face and seeing the tension go out of it. Emily tilted her chin up for a kiss, and her bridegroom gave it, and for a moment everything seemed just as magical as it was supposed to be. She forgot about the extra champagne and about the embarrassing presents, and just kissed her future husband.

  Georgia gave a tipsy, nervous giggle next to her, because the kiss went on for a while. When Emily broke it, and looked up at Albright to enjoy his rather surprised smile, she said, “Lean down so I can tell you a secret.” The bubbles in her veins were fading just a bit, but she thought she still had enough liquid courage to tell her stunningly handsome fair-haired fiancé what she had it in mind to say.

  He brought his head down, and she put her lips to his ears. “I’m so wet for you right now.” She almost added, “I want to show you what Heather gave me,” but her courage failed her.

  “Oh,” Albright said in a forced, offhanded tone that might have been arousal but also seemed to have a little disapproval in it. He raised his head. Emily became aware that he was now holding her up, and that she would have fallen, as a result of the alcohol, if he had let go. She realized then that she might well be a good deal drunker than she had supposed. “How much champagne have you had, Em?” he asked.

  “A lot?” she replied, wondering whether she could total the glasses up with any accuracy.

  The other bridesmaids and friends were thanking Priscilla for the shower and getting their coats, to walk out into the blustery air of the Back Bay in late March. The mother of the groom had a fixed expression on her face that almost everyone there must believe represented as much pleasantry as it seemed to. Emily knew better. Priscilla, she could see even through her buzz, was very angry, and so, she noticed now, was Maria, who had begun helping the caterers clean up, her demeanor icy as she carried a nearly empty tray of mini-quiches to the kitchen.

  Jason’s face, however, had the expression on it that seemed to sober Emily up in a second. She found herself truly clinging to Albright, as if she could somehow disappear into his sport jacket. Her stepfather’s eyes had fixed on her, and though nothing in his face spoke outwardly of his wrath, she knew him well enough to read at least a few of his thoughts. The idea of adding two cases of champagne to the order for the shower no longer seemed like such a good one.

  Woodenly, since the departing friends had made their way by now around to the bride herself, she dispensed hugs and kisses and smiles. Albright covered for her, doing most of the t
alking and keeping her close. He clearly knew that something was up—at least that his mother was furious about something. He almost certainly, Emily thought, had figured out that it had to do with the general drunkenness of bride and bridesmaids. But he gamely and cheerily fulfilled his social duty, and Emily found herself loving him in the quiet way she liked best to love him, knowing that he loved her and would do his best to take care of her.

  Then all the guests had gone, and Emily had no defense against the fate she could see awaited her. Only Georgia, Priscilla, Maria, Jason, and Albright remained in the Allertons’ elegant living room. Emily noticed now that Georgia must have drunk a lot of the champagne herself; she had an unfocused, unsteady look that made Emily wonder what she looked like.

  “Emily,” Priscilla said, without preamble, “did you change the liquor order?”

  The bubbles seemed to have deserted her completely now; she had no courage left, liquid or otherwise. She clung to Albright’s arm as if she might fall down not from the alcohol but from knees shaking with fear.

  “What?” Albright said directly and angrily to his mother. “Seriously? Em wouldn’t do that.”

  Oh, Quint, Emily thought, for when she loved him the most she did think of him as Quint.

  “Ask Emily,” Jason said, his voice hard, now.

  Quint turned to her, his face troubled. “Em? What are they talking about?”

  Suddenly, whether through the lingering effects of the champagne or just sheer recklessness, Emily decided she had to go on the offensive. “We can use the extra for the wedding—or we can return it.”

  “What extra?” Quint asked.

  “The extra champagne I ordered.” She looked at Priscilla. “And I’ll reimburse you—don’t worry.”