Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
“The Surrender Access Panty,” Melissa said. “Designed specifically for anal intimacy. The gusset has the awareness feedback tech. So does the lace framing around the aperture. She puts them on when her suitor decides he wants her to think about what will happen to her back there, when he decides to use her. And, of course, the opening is sized and positioned so that he can take her anally without removing the panties, without interrupting the aesthetic, without any fumbling or negotiation. She’s wearing beautiful lingerie. She’s also available to him, exactly where and how he wants her.”
The room was quiet for a moment. Stuart Harrington leaned back in his chair, one arm draped over the back as he turned to watch the screen, his blue eyes moving between the image there and Melissa with an expression of frank appreciation.
“That,” he said, “is going to sell well on NMB.”
I couldn’t type. My fingers rested on the keys and I stared at the words I’d written last—garter—visual continuity—presentation maintenance—and I couldn’t make my hands move, because every nerve in my body seemed to have migrated to a single point between my legs that throbbed with a shameful, insistent heat I could no longer pretend was anything other than what it was.
I had gotten aroused. Sitting in a conference room on the thirty-sixth floor of Selecta headquarters, looking at pictures of lingerie designed to make women sexually available to their husbands for anal intercourse, I had become wetter than I’d ever gotten for Kevin. I could feel the slick warmth against the plain cotton of my own underwear, my boring, ordinary, non-sensor-linked underwear that suddenly felt like a flimsy barrier between my body’s honesty and a lie I was trying to tell myself.
“Melissa, this is exceptional work,” Penelope said beside me. Her voice sounded calm, measured, and a thousand miles away. “The integration of the intimates technology into a luxury lingerie context may be exactly the direction we need to build the crossover between HSG and more conventional New Modesty offerings. Stuart, what are you thinking for the NMB angle?”
Stuart hadn’t stopped looking at the screen, but now his gaze shifted—not to Penelope, and not to Melissa.
To me.
I seemed to feel it before I saw it. That weight of attention, that appraising calm I’d noticed when I first walked in, now focused and sharpened into something that made the hair on my arms rise. I looked up from my laptop and met his blue eyes, and whatever he saw in my face—the flush, the slightly parted lips, the barely concealed panic—made his mouth curve into that same technical smile.
“I’m thinking,” Stuart said slowly, still looking at me, “that we need real models for the launch campaign. Not CGI or even trained subs. The whole point of HSG is authenticity—real women, real dynamics, real responses. If we’re going to introduce the Surrender Line on the stream, we need girls who actually embody what the line represents.”
He turned to Penelope with an ease that suggested the thought had only just occurred to him, though something in the exactness of his timing told me it hadn’t.
“Penny,” he said, “your new girl would be perfect.”
The room went very still. Or maybe that was just me. Maybe the room continued at its normal pace and it was only my own internal machinery that seized and locked, every gear grinding to a halt at once.
“Anne?” Penelope said, and I couldn’t read her tone. Surprise? Consideration? She tilted her head slightly, the way she did when she was evaluating a proposal. “She’s only been with us a couple of months.”
“Which makes her ideal,” Stuart said. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table, and the gesture had the quality of a man laying down cards he knew would win the hand. “She’s new. She’s unpolished. She’s got that quality—that tension between wanting to be good and not quite knowing what good means yet. That’s exactly what the Surrender Line is about. It’s not for women who’ve already surrendered. It’s for women who are on the edge of it. Who are fighting it.” His eyes found me again. “Who are losing the fight.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I closed it.
Melissa was studying me now too, her sharp brown eyes moving over my face and down—not lewdly, but with the frank assessment of someone evaluating a canvas. “He’s not wrong,” she said. “That blush alone is worth a million dollars in ad spend. You can’t fake that.”
“I…” I managed. My voice sounded strangled. “I’m not… I’m just an assistant. I take notes. I don’t—”
“You don’t have to decide anything right now,” Penelope said, and her hand found my knee under the table—a brief, steadying pressure that should have been comforting but instead sent a jolt up my thigh that made me clench my jaw. “Stuart is getting ahead of himself, as usual. Let’s finish the meeting and we can discuss it properly afterward.”