Submitting to Her Read online

  SUBMITTING TO HER

  by

  Max Sebastian

  Warning: This is an erotic story intended for adults only.

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  SizzlingStories.com

  * * *

  "On your knees..."

  Aiden Jones is horrified when a young woman gets his long-awaited promotion because corporate is fast-tracking female college graduates to fill some kind of gender quota in the company.

  He stubbornly makes life difficult for his new boss, leading resistance among the sales team. But when she grows tired of it, and offers him the choice between the end of his career and submitting to her absolute control, there is nothing he can do but accept her authority.

  Zoey Schoenberg has had a crush on the company's top salesman ever since she started as an intern on the fast-track program.

  Now that she has absolute control over him, she's going to really make the most of it - and show him just how thrilling a truly female-led relationship can be.

  But Zoey has a dark secret in her past that could threaten everything...

  * * *

  Copyright © 2013 by Max Sebastian

  All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your preferred online retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Kenny Wright. Image licensed from Dreamstime.com

  * * *

  Contents

  Contents

  Part One: FEMININE ASCENDANT

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: PLEASURE AND PAIN

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Three: BALANCE OF POWER

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Also by Max Sebastian

  About the Author

  * * *

  1. FEMININE ASCENDANT

  I walk into a room

  Just as cool as you please,

  And to a man,

  The fellows stand or

  Fall down on their knees.

  - Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman

  * * *

  Chapter One

  What's the professional thing to do when you've been in line for five years to head up the department, and when your boss finally retires three years overdue, they go ahead and promote someone else - someone fresh out of college, someone who's only been at the company six god-damn-months?

  Sit down and take it, I'll bet. Don't take it personally.

  "It's just business".

  Well, I didn't do that. I wasn't your right-on turn-the-other-cheek businessman, I was more the self-centered, arrogant prick kind. Bullish, self-absorbed, abrasive, chauvinistic, antagonistic - and all those other bad qualities that marked me down as a killer on the sales floor.

  And who could afford to be a saint in this economy? It was dog eat dog. Pacing the office all hooked up to my wireless Bluetooth website, hands whirling with Lucas from CI Systems on the other end of the line, bullshitting me about how the circulation's down on our popular IT monthly, I needed to be fully confident in myself. Our company and others like it go down the tubes if it doesn't have me - and guys like me - pushing, pushing, pushing.

  We couldn't be doing with co-workers who shrank from persuading grandma to part with her chocolate chip cookies for a smile and a song.

  I had a somewhat huge sense of entitlement regarding my long years of service, so rather than sit back and feel happy for my wet-behind-the-ears new boss, I turned myself into a road block within the team. I continued to manage the 15 guys under me, but according to my own schedule, not the schedule of Ms Zoey Schoenberg of ivy-encrusted Brown University.

  "Uh… Aiden, have we got the Hudson proposal written up?"

  "Almost. Couple of tees need dotting, a few eyes to cross."

  "That's what you said Tuesday."

  "Couple of hitches in the pricing. Bob's on the case."

  Sure, it was childish, I was sulking. I was gutted not to get the job that had my name all over it for so long. I mean, this was a girl who didn't hit a single sales target the whole time she'd been with us - and suddenly she's in charge of us all, supposed to make sure we all hit our goals. Quietly, the word got out that we were not going to play ball with Little Miss Ivory Towers.

  Those initial six months, I could see my attempts frustrating our new vice president. We still hit most of our targets - there was commission at stake here - but we gradually took it down, so the numbers appeared to decline where it counted. Not so much that it ate too badly into our pay checks, but in a business that's supposed to be growing, we made it clear things were not going too well.

  There were other things - paperwork didn't get done on time, invoices were temporarily misplaced or forgotten. Information she requested somehow failed to reach her until she'd asked three or four times. You get the idea.

  My team was loyal, they knew how long I'd waited for this job. I made sure we were all in on it. We all got into work five minutes late, and left the office five minutes early. Meetings started late, and overran. Things that were not done well enough suddenly appeared to make the grade.

  And nobody stopped for a friendly chat with Ms Schoenberg.

  I know, I could see she was suffering. The way she massaged her temples when we came in for a meeting. The way those dark circles emerged under her big brown eyes. The little silent sighs she thought I couldn't hear every time I told her something wasn't ready, or a mistake had been made, or one of her big new leads simply was not going to happen.

  She was always in the office first thing in the morning, long before anyone else got in, and judging by the time stamps on her emails, she always stayed late into the night.

  "Aiden, this number's just too low - we can't offer full pages for this kind of rate."

  "Hey, it's what they're willing to pay - we can't push them up any more. We'll lose the whole account."

  "We're twenty percent below target on the issue."

  "This economy? Not many people hitting targets."

  I was being pretty awful to her, I freely admit. It was totally fueled by my crushing sense of injustice. I just didn't care. I'd seen young executives forced out before, having failed to cope with the stress. I was certain that if we carried on underperforming for long enough, our overlords on the Board would decide this wasn't working, and that nice big leather chair in that corner office would be mine.

  Of
course, I needed taking down a peg or two - but no one around me was telling me what a humungous piece of shit I was being.

  "Does she really think we can sell to a bank the fed's just bailed out to the tune of $68 billion?"

  "She's got this theory that companies in a shit storm need to advertise to get themselves out."

  "That something they teach on her MBA course? Jesus."

  My co-workers hadn't much noticed Ms Schoenberg when she was the quiet brunette at the desk by the overgrown pot plant, the lone woman in the office bucking the testosterone-driven trend for selling advertising in our specialist magazines and journals. Now she was our new college fast-track boss, they really weren't impressed. Many of them were older than my three decades, and felt even worse than I did being bossed around by someone so much younger. Her leads were wrong for our titles, her strategies couldn't sell fish to a sea lion.

  *

  Away from the office, my guy friends laughed at me. They saw it as my just desserts, losing my promotion to someone like Zoey Schoenberg.

  "How many little hotties have you screwed this year, Aide? High time one of them screwed you back."

  "Thanks, Robin. Thanks for your support."

  As far as they were concerned, it was sweet revenge for all those times I went home with a gorgeous girl itching to get naked, while my friends went home to an empty bed - or worse, to a peeved girlfriend or sour-faced wife waiting with arms folded and lips pouting around what-time-do-you-call-this questions.

  The wives and girlfriends in our circle weren't impressed by my new boss either, or what I told them of her. When we were out with them - perhaps for dinner or a house party, or a celebratory drink or two in a nice bar - they always turned my moaning into evidence I basically needed to find the right woman, settle down, start doing what they were doing in life. Work to live, not the other way around.

  My married friends seemed constantly obligated to peddle me the whole commitment line, but mixed within it was this strange idea about finding someone to take over my life. Give up control. They weren't even subtle about it.

  "You need a bit of female leadership in your life, Aide," Marty Williams would usually tell me over a few drinks of an evening, always linking in my office gripes to my complete inability to hold down a relationship for longer than three months. "It can't be healthy having everything your own way. You never heard of Karma?"

  "So I should just settle down and stop having sex like you?"

  "There's benefits," he'd say, and then his whole argument would evaporate as a single text from his wife made him suddenly stand up and apologize before grabbing his coat to flee the scene.

  God, how could you live like that? At the beck and call of some woman at home. A butler, only unpaid.

  Vic Rennie, on the other hand, liked to live vicariously though my social life, so his advice to me was to look on the bright side.

  "Work sucks," he said. "Everyone knows that - fuck it. Go out and enjoy yourself outside the office - stop focusing on work so much. Let the bitch rot in her high-and-mighty job. Forget about it - focus on the tail."

  "Tail?" On that occasion, his wife Rona happened to overhear his advice. I saw Vic blush like a schoolgirl, and found myself wondering how our stud college linebacker had found himself so completely powerless like this.

  "Tale - T-A-L-E," he said, spelling it out, resorting to a homophone of all things to get him out of trouble. "Aide's been writing a novel for ages." With Rona behind his back, Vic offered me a pleading look to back him up in his little white lie.

  "I keep getting stuck with it," I said, much to the guy's relief. "I'm not sure I'm much of a writer." I did have an ounce or two of mercy in my soul when it came to people I felt deserved it. But I was thinking: how had Vic come to live in terror of the woman he'd chosen to spend the rest of his life with? How did that decision get made?

  This was a man who used to regularly shove through three hundred pound buffalo to blitz the quarterback, and not think anything of it.

  "You know your problem, Aiden?" Rona would say, and at least to start with I'd always remain dutifully calm and listen, though I knew exactly what she was going to say. "You always go for dippy little blondes that never answer back and do everything you say."

  "Isn't that the perfect kind?"

  "No wonder you get bored after one night."

  "It's not that I'm bored, Rona - it's just there's so many dippy little blondes out there…"

  I'd get a wry grin from Vic and a full eye-roll and sigh from Rona, but underneath it all, even I had to admit she had at least half a point. My dates were all pleasing to look at - but deathly dull. And increasingly these days, I was finding it harder to do the whole one night stand thing and get out alive. Girls gunning for guys of my age were generally of the opinion I was maturing enough to be looking for commitment. It was something of which I took full advantage when picking them up - but it got harder and harder to come away with dignity when I suggested this simply wasn't going to work out.

  Or when I snuck out of their apartments in the dark, leaving them sleeping peacefully in their beds, dreaming about what we were going to call our kids.

  Anyhow, my dating etiquette aside, even Rona and Marty's wife, Tasha, were oddly supportive of my stubborn strategy of quiet resistance and noncooperation in the office, both of the opinion that I should have got the VP job.

  "You should give her a hard time," Tasha had even suggested. "She's got to earn the respect of her team."

  "If she can't get you motivated, she doesn't deserve the job," said Rona as she bounced a bawling toddler on her knee, and I appreciated the support and vindication, ignoring her huge bias.

  My confidence in being a complete pig to our new boss was supported by friends, colleagues and after a while, even my own gut feelings. I came to forget how ridiculous I was being, the massive sense of injustice evolving into a full simmering winter of discontent as my strategy of missing targets bedded in for the long-haul Machiavellian route back to my birthright promotion.

  And then, after a few months, everything changed.

  Chapter Two

  It was one particular Friday afternoon in April, just after lunch. The chief executive of the company - of all people - was bestowing the honor of a personal visit to our department. It was a two-hour meeting in Zoey's office, just the two of them. Must have been grueling to say the least.

  Out in our maze of cubicles, the rest of us in the department looked at each other and signaled with small nods and bouncing eyebrows that something was going down in that room. It was Friday afternoon, which everybody knows is when people get fired.

  The atmosphere was tense.

  Four o'clock came round, and I felt this curious sense of nausea in my stomach. I knew full well it was guilt. Somebody was getting roasted alive - and I was the main reason for it. I wasn't immune to that innate human capacity for compassion, just because I was the instigator of the crisis. It wasn't really Zoey's fault she'd been promoted above me. She was just bright and highly qualified, and was probably always destined to jump ahead of a journeyman like me. And I'd made her life Hell.

  I could so easily have been compliant, could have so easily spurred on the rest of the team to work hard and meet all our targets.

  But I have to admit, part of that funny feeling within my belly was excitement. This was it, something was happening. Shaking up the constant tedium of life in the office. Perhaps by Monday, I would be the one with my own office, nicely sealed off from the rest of the floor with my own name stenciled on the sign.

  Heading into the last hour or so of the day, the door finally opened. We all waited and watched with bated breath, as though expecting to find out some great revelation like the name of the next pope.

  The CEO swept out and away without even a glance at the rest of us.

  Silence.

  The whole team was watching the clock, and waiting for that door to open again. Waiting for a certain Zoey Schoenberg to come scurrying ou
t, tail between her legs, perhaps carrying a cardboard box with her personal belongings. But there was nothing.

  Five to five, and I was beginning to actually worry. Had I gone too far? My ears were burning, my face hot with a rueful blush. What if she'd done something to herself? Jumped out of the window, or sliced her wrists with a pair of office scissors.

  Now I felt sick.

  I tried to hide it from the others, but silently I was muttering to myself that if everything worked out, even if Zoey kept her job, I'd cool it. I'd taught her a lesson by now, if that's really what I wanted to achieve. No point in sustaining my passive-aggressive onslaught. Suddenly, I was even calculating an insane strategy overhaul towards high productivity in the office, thinking if I failed to get her kicked out, the best plan might be to get her promoted on out of here or even head-hunted, so I could fill the VP shoes.

  Three minutes to five. The other members of the department were heading out the door now, with me thinking them rather cold-hearted. They could have waited until five, just this afternoon. Maybe Zoey would need a final drink to see her off, drown her sorrows. Then again, perhaps the poor girl was simply waiting until everyone had gone home before she carried out her Walk of Shame, cardboard box clutched in front like some kind of shield.