Page 5 of Thwack!

“Those regulatory vultures are trying to eat us for lunch. If I don’t have a detailed response to this latest monstrosity of a ruling by five o’clock, the two-faced asswipe down the hall will sell us out to the tune of millions.”

The two-faced asswipe down the hall was Drew Tate, their CEO—nominally James’s boss and definitely his enemy.

“So you’ll draft a response and it’ll be brilliant, as always. Don’t get yourself in a state.” He patted James’s lapels. “Go sit down like I told you to.”

“There isn’t time for me to draft a response, Ryan. I couldn’t find the contract because you weren’t here, and now there isn’t time. The situation is fucked.” James’s voice was approaching its full volume, which was impressive. That was why most of the company considered him an ogre. He had a tendency to get loud. It was all bluster, but no one except Ryan knew that. He went over and closed the door.

“What are you doing?” James asked with a scowl.

“Saving the rest of the floor from having to hear your tantrum.”

“I’m not having a tantrum, goddammit.”

“I know a tantrum when I see one. Now are you going to sit down and drink some water or not?”

“For fuck’s sake, Ryan. There isn’t time for fucking water. There isn’t time for anything! And it’s your fault. It’s a fucking disaster, and it’s all your fucking fault!” James took one of the folders off his desk and threw it in the air, scattering paper everywhere.

“All right, that does it. Over the desk.”

“What part of ‘there isn’t time’ don’t you understand?”

“That part where I don’t give a fuck whether there’s time or not.” Truthfully, he’d checked the time, and the two hours they had before five o’clock were more than enough if he could get James settled down, which he knew how to do. “Let’s go.” He clapped his hands briskly. “If you’re worried about time, then there’s no time to waste.”

“Ryan,” James pleaded.

“I know,” Ryan told him. “You’re all out of sorts. But I’m going to take care of everything, like I always do. You trust me, don’t you? You trust Daddy?”

James nodded tightly, still defiant but almost ready to let Ryan take charge.

“Good boy.” Ryan gave him a tender pat on the cheek. “Always my good boy. So come on, good boy, over the desk. Once you take what’s coming to you, you can get to work.”

Because he knew James was in a mindset where any kind of compliance would be difficult, he steered him around to face the desk himself, then gave the center of his back a push to bend him over it. James braced his hands on the surface, his expression wavering between stubbornness and desire as Ryan opened the desk’s center drawer.

“Not the ruler.”

“You don’t get to tell me how to take care of you.” He extracted the ruler and gave it an experimental thwap into his palm. “Why are your pants still up? You’ve got a lot of misbehavior to pay for already, James. I don’t know why you’d want to make things worse.”

James glowered at him, still a long way from surrendered, so Ryan reached around him to undo the Italian leather belt which he sometimes used to administer correction. Today he left the belt in James’s trouser loops as he pushed everything down at once—belt, pants, boxers—to bare his boss’s ass.

“Since you’re in such a hurry, I’ll make this quick.”

James dropped his head onto his clenched fists with a preemptive whimper. He knew quick meant no warmup, meant hard and hurtful right from the first go. But he also knew—as Ryan did—that he needed it that way today. He’d escalated from fine to meltdown in the twenty minutes Ryan had been away for break. He needed to be settled back down just as fast.

James Prescott II had the weight of the company on his shoulders because Drew Tate was as big a buffoon as James claimed. Without James’s constant striving, Tate would drive the company into bankruptcy. And without Ryan’s help, James wouldn’t be able to survive the relentless stress of working for an incompetent poser who only occupied his position thanks to nepotism. In Ryan’s eyes, James was a hero. Which made Ryan a hero-maker.

“You need a gag?”

Even with the door shut, James could get loud enough to be heard all the way down the hall, but James shook his head, still feeling stubborn.

“All right, but I’m not going easy on you.”

He followed that statement with proof he meant it by laying down a sharp, red line across James’s ass.

James had a luscious ass, totally wasted in suit pants. It quivered when Ryan struck it, whether with a hand or a belt or a ruler, all that muscle bouncing with firm tension. Ryan loved his job.

He’d stumbled onto James’s need for stress relief through pain and discipline accidentally, but he was the perfect administrative assistant to deliver it because he got a sadistic thrill from every thwack of the ruler, every slap of his hand, every whap of the belt. He loved James’s flinches and moans, the way his skin pinked up rosy red or turned blotchy and purple. Sometimes he thought he loved James himself.

“This is for getting on my case about being five minutes late,” he said as he administered a series of vicious stripes to the tops of James’s thighs. “I deserve a break, and you can wait.”