Typist #1 - Working for the Billionaire Novelist (Erotic Romance) (2 page)

“Am I here to help you type … a
Smith Dunham
novel?”

“Well, you're not here to sit around and look pretty, though it certainly would help. Perhaps if you unbuttoned a few more buttons.”

I shook my head. “I can't do this.”

“Of course you can! A hundred words a minute. We'll take it slow at first. And no, you can't record the session and transcribe later. I need to see the words on the screen or they're not concrete.”

I stared down at my hands. I'd done worse things for a paycheck—like the summer I'd worked at the meat-processor. My main duty was scooping up the floor meat to feed into a machine that made sausages.

That was it.

Smith Wittingham's perverted scenes and twisted ideas were just so much
floor meat
, and I'd scoop them up to make the sausages that were his bestselling novels.

After lunch, he showed me to my room, which was on the lower floor and the smallest of the three bedrooms in the cabin. I hung up my clothes and lay down on the double-sized bed with my tablet computer. My plan was to research my new boss and send some emails to let my friends and family know I had not been eaten by a moose. My tablet couldn't detect any wireless internet. Hadn't there been something in the contract about internet access? I should have read the thing.

I tried again to search for wireless connections, but found nothing.

Was this shit for real? No internet? Oh, no. No amount of pay was worth going two weeks without internet.

Smith knocked on my closed door. “Just so you know, there's no internet access here.”

“I gathered that.”

He chuckled. “If you don't mind, I'm ready to begin now. I have the first sentence in mind.”

I grabbed a pillow from the bed and muffled a scream of despair.

Two weeks. How much worse could it get?

I took a moment to brush my hair in the little bathroom connected to my room, then emerged, ready to type. Smith Wittingham had already gone upstairs, to where I imagined the office was.

I found him in the largest bedroom, which had a great view of the trees and a pricy-looking ergonomic desk.

Smith waved me over to my new chair, one of those mesh things with a hundred levers.

“Not bad,” I said of the chair, smiling over the first thing that had gone well.

His voice strong and sure, like a narrator, he said, “My client bowled me over at the door, the word 'moose' escaping from her luscious lips.”

I froze in my chair. “What?”

“That's the first line. I know it's not great, but you have to start somewhere.”

The computer was already on, with a blank document on the screen.
He's messing with me
, I thought, but I wasn't going to engage in his chicanery. I typed his words, verbatim.

I expected he would laugh and say the moose thing was just a joke, but he kept going. The woman in the story was breathless from an encounter in the woods with a moose. Stranger still, it sounded sexy the way he narrated the story, what with her bosom heaving and all.

As I typed, he paced the room behind me, his sock feet quiet on the thick carpet. I zoned out, focusing only on one word at a time, coming from a disembodied voice that moved around like sound effects on surround-sound speakers.

He used my moose, but at least the woman, Detective Dunham's new client, wasn't named Tori. She was Sheri, and she had waist-length red hair, unlike my own shoulder-length red hair. I had a bunch of freckles on the bridge of my nose, but she had a “smattering of delicious angel kisses.” Her chest measurements were also more impressive than mine, and yes, he did describe her bra size. On the front page. I found it difficult to type while rolling my eyes, but I forged on. I kept up my pace, never falling behind his narration, for nearly two hours.

At the end of the second hour, Smith clapped his hands abruptly. “Tori! Time for a break.”

“But … why did Sheri hire Detective Dunham instead of going directly to the police?”

I twirled around on my fancy chair to find a smug-looking Smith Wittingham, his face working hard to look even more self-satisfied.

“Gotcha,” he said. “Good to know. I'm off to take a shower. You can join me if you like, or do whatever your heart fancies for the next two hours, then we'll reconvene.”

My left eye twitched. Join him for a shower? He'd removed the light jacket he'd been wearing when I arrived, and wore only a tight-fitting T-shirt. The man either had good genes or spent some time at the gym—perhaps both. As I was watching him, he dropped to the carpet and started doing push-ups. “You should do something to get your heart rate up,” he said between presses. “Increased blood flow is good for the brain, too. Maybe go outside and get that scary moose to chase you around.”

“Good idea,” I said, stepping around him. I paused at the doorway long enough to get a good look at his butt, on display in that position.

I wondered how sleeping with him would change me, besides increasing the number of guys I'd been with, sexually. Despite all my big talk with my friends, and the dirty things I'd say over email and text messages, the truth was I'd only been with Todd through most of college. There'd been a few breaks and other people, but not as much experimentation as I'd hoped to have done by the time I graduated.

Todd and I had broken up half a year earlier, and I'd heard through friends he'd moved on. And on. He was dating his third girlfriend since me, last I heard. Wouldn't it be great if Todd heard about my affair with a wealthy author?

Smith finished his push-ups and jumped up, his face red from exertion, his brown eyes looking bright and golden. “Shower time. You in?”

I turned and walked away down the hall. “Going for that walk you suggested! Have fun.”

“Oh, I will.”

His voice suggested naughty business, but it was all too soon. I ran away.

Once downstairs, I put on my shoes quickly and raced out the door.

From my vantage point out in the woods, everything that had happened in the cabin seemed surreal.

Was he allowed to flirt with me so brazenly? I'd signed so many documents, including one that acknowledged I understood the author wrote some scenes of a sexual nature. I'd agreed that I wouldn't be crying sexual harassment over typing some dirty words. The document said nothing about him inviting me to take a shower with him, though.

As I walked through the woods, I noticed a distinctive feeling happening between my legs. It was a sexy movie feeling, only the movie was playing in my head. I couldn't stop thinking about Smith in the shower, stroking his long, thick cock, his face contorted, then relieved, as he came in the water, his seed swirling down the drain.

Back at school, I'd always been disappointed when Todd took a long shower in the morning, because he'd be uninterested in making love the rest of the day. I'd wake up alone in bed, hot for him, but he'd rush off to class and leave me wanting, horny and desperate. Frustrated. Exactly the same way I was feeling at that moment in the forest.

Nobody was around, not even a moose, so I leaned back against a sturdy tree, took a deep breath of the fresh Vermont air, and slipped my hand down the front of my jeans.

Our second writing session of the day went even better, with us laying down a significant number of words. The mystery itself was convoluted, with a number of suspects in the “accident” that Detective Smith Dunham's sexy client Sheri suspected was a murder.

I found myself smiling and laughing internally at the dialog Smith gave Sheri. She wasn't just some cardboard sex object for him to bang, but a real person, with a sense of humor and a strong will. She was exactly the kind of woman he never put in his novels. I loved her.

This session went longer than the first, and by the third hour, I was exhausted and exhilarated. We'd fallen into a rhythm together, where I'd mostly sit and type, being his flying fingers, but now and then he'd pause as though searching his mind for a word. I wouldn't say the word out loud, but would type a suggested word on the screen.

For example, he paused when describing a hotel suite, and I typed the word
sumptuous
.

In a softer voice than the one he used to dictate the words of the novel, he said, “Ah, yes,
sumptuous
is even better than
elegant
. That word wouldn't come to mind because it was the wrong word. But you pulled the right word from my subconscious. You must be psychic.” He touched me on the shoulder.

I was so startled and excited by his touch, I moaned.

“Interesting,” he said softly. He resumed his pacing behind me, and the dictation.

He only uttered three sentences, and they were stilted and awkward.

I turned around to look at him and noticed his posture was drooping. “Time for a break?” I asked.

He collapsed on the nearby bed, face down. “Done for the day,” he mumbled.

He didn't move, and I wondered if he was playing a new game, or actually that exhausted. His eyes were closed, and he looked comfortable enough, so I got out of my chair and quietly left the room, shutting the door behind me.

Downstairs, I came upon a revelation: a land line telephone! I shook my head at my own stupidity. My cell phone had no coverage there, and there was no internet, but I was not
entirely
cut off from the rest of the world. I called my mother first, to let her know I'd made the journey safely.

My mother said, “Who is this mysterious author? I'm dying to know. Can you tell me?”

“I can't tell you, but she is a nice lady.”

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I was hoping it might be a nice man who'll take care of you.”

“Mom! I can take care of myself.”

“Of course. That's not what I meant.”

“It's still interesting work, Mom. And I'm having fun. It's nice out here in the country and I had a little jog today.”

“Tori, be a dear and give me the initials of her name, just so I can imagine.”

“Um,
some
of the letters in her name are C and J,” I said. It hurt me to lie to my mother, but I was sworn to secrecy. If it had been anyone else, I would have told her, Non-Disclosure Agreement be damned, but it was Smith Wittingham. My mother was in a book club dedicated to Smith Wittingham's books. Asking her to keep that secret would be cruel and unusual punishment.

As we chatted, with her filling me in on all the adorable things my cousin's baby girl did that day, I stretched the phone's long, curly cord to its limit and raided the kitchen. My meals were included in the contract, but I didn't know which of the portions in the fridge were mine. I didn't want to upset Smith, so I perused all the pre-packaged meals and sampled a small portion from four of them.

The food wasn't bad at all. The typing and the fresh air really had inspired my appetite, and I had to go back for seconds.

After dinner, I stayed in my bedroom. We didn't have internet at the cabin, but there was TV, so at least I wasn't going to die of boredom. I heard Smith shuffling down the stairs and rummaging around in the kitchen, but I didn't go out to talk to him. I wanted to maintain some boundaries, some separation from him, and keeping to myself in my room seemed like the best way.

My room got chilly that evening after the sun went down—summer nights in the mountains were cool. I crawled under my sheets in my nightshirt and closed my eyes. With my eyes shut, my other senses screamed at me that I was not at home. The sheets felt nubby and foreign, and the sounds were all wrong.