Love and Demotion Read online

  We rocked together gently at first, and then he adjusted himself and held my hips, thrusting hard into me. His mouth moved hungrily from my breasts to my neck, and then we were kissing hard and fast, and then he took my lower lip gently between my teeth and it gave me a chill. I sat up so I could look at him, my spine almost straight, my hair fanning out against my back. He reached up and cupped my breasts, his big blue eyes sweeping from my face down my body and back up again.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he whispered.

  “You are,” I said. He closed his eyes and I bent down to kiss his brow. He swept one hand through my hair, his cock pushing even deeper. In that instant, I came, my pussy shuddering against him in waves that seemed like they would never stop. And then he made a guttural, animalistic sound and I could feel an extra vibration of his cock that signaled he was going to come. I leaned down, my breasts against his chest, and he circled one arm around my waist to hold me to him, his other hand firm on my ass. He pushed into me so hard and fast it was like I was riding an animal.

  “My god,” I said, and I came again.

  “I feel you,” he breathed, his mouth wet against my neck. I was almost embarrassed that I kept coming, and even when his body quieted to a stop, my pussy clenched against him greedily, as if trying to resuscitate a heart.

  He pulled me next to him, my head resting on his outstretched arm. We breathed against each other quietly for a minute or two, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Well,” he said finally. “This presents a problem.”

  “No one at the office has to know,” I said.

  “I think they’ll find out eventually.”

  “Eventually? In a few days it will be like this never happened,” I said.

  “I’m hoping that in a few days, this will be happening again,” he said. “And then again a few days after that. With some dinners and movies in between, I think. If that’s ok with you.”

  I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at him. His cheeks were flushed, a beautiful contrast to his dark hair and making his eyes an even brighter blue. I was too awed by him to be sure of what he was saying.

  “I thought this was a one-night thing. I mean, we work together. You’re my boss.”

  “I don’t have to be,” he grinned.

  “Unlike you, I actually need that lame paycheck.”

  “I’ll help you find another one.”

  Now I sat straight up, pulling the sheets around my bare breasts.

  “You’re not serious.”

  He sat up, smiling, and took my face in his hands. He kissed me gently on the lips.

  “I don’t think dating my assistant is a very wise idea. So what would you suggest?”

  I stared at him, and soon my smile matched his.

  “So, what are you saying?” I asked, my heart beating hard. I felt like I was standing on the edge of cliff.

  He took my hand.

  “You’re fired,” he said.

  I smiled and — taking a leap off that cliff — climbed right back on top of my former boss.

  Copyright © 2012 Logan Belle

  Logan Belle - If you enjoyed this story, turn the page for a free preview of Bettie Page Presents: The Librarian (Pocket Star/Simon and Schuster November 27, 2012) or follow me at www.JamieBrenner.com or @JamieLBrenner

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  Bettie Page Presents: The Librarian

  “Love is a great punishment for desire.”

  — Anne Enright

  Chapter One

  Regina Finch stopped on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd street. On either side of her, people jostled her in their hurry to get by, the crowds moving like waves breaking over a rock. After a month in New York City, she still wasn’t used to rush hour.

  She didn’t let the crowds distract her. This was her first day of work at her dream job, and she was going to savor every minute of it. Just one month after graduating with her master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Drexel University, she was on her way to the most magnificent library in the country.

  Regina gazed up at the beaux arts building, a stunning piece of architecture in white limestone and marble. If there was a more perfect place in the world than the New York Public Library, Regina certainly couldn’t imagine it.

  “You looking at the twins?” an old woman said to her. She had hair so white it was almost pink, and wore a robin’s egg blue suit with shiny gold buttons. She held a crystal-studded leash, at the end of which was tethered a small white dog.

  “Excuse me?” said Regina.

  “The lions,” the woman clarified. Oh, the lions. On each side of the wide stone steps leading up to the library was a white marble statue of a lion. They were regal looking creatures, perched on stone pillars, as if watching sentry over the knowledge inside the building.

  “I do like the lions,” Regina said. Her roommate had admonished her that she didn’t have to answer every nut who talked to her on the street. But Regina was from Pennsylvania, and she couldn’t be rude.

  “Patience and Fortitude,” said the woman. “That’s their names.”

  “Is that true?” said Regina. “I never knew that.”

  “Patience and Fortitude,” repeated the woman, and she walked away.

  *** ***

  Regina didn’t know how to tell her new boss, Sloan Caldwell, that she didn’t need an orientation tour of the library – that she had been visiting it since she was a young girl. But Sloan, a tall, cool, Upper East Side blonde, had been intimidating during her interviews, and was somehow even more so now that Regina had the job.

  “Don’t you want to take notes as we walk?” Sloan said. Regina opened her bag and scrambled for a pen and paper.

  Regina followed Sloan down the white marble hallway, its Franco-Roman design always reminding her of the photographs of the great buildings in Europe. But Regina’s father had often told Regina that there was no point in comparing the main branch of the New York Public Library to anything; as a piece of architecture, it stood on its own.

  “And this is the Public Catalogue Room,” said Sloan.

  The grand room, officially called the Bill Blass Public Catalogue Room, was lined with low, dark wood tables dotted with the library’s signature bronze lamps with metal shades finished in dark bronze. The computers seemed out of place in a room that otherwise seemed reminiscent of the early twentieth century. “These computers do not access the internet,” said Sloan, clearly bored with the speech she had no doubt given countless time. “Their only purpose is to enable visitors to look up the books they need, and find out if they are circulating or non-circulating material, if they are available, and so forth.”

  Regina, of course, knew this system better than she knew her way through anything else in life. (If there was anything Regina loved, it was a good system. She craved order above all else): After the visitor looked up their books, they wrote down the titles and call numbers on little slips of paper with the small pencils provided in cups on either end of the long tables. Regina was comforted by the fact that in the age of texting and emailing everything, the New York Public Library was the one place people had to actually take pencil to paper.

  Sloan kept walking, her high, wing-tipped heels clicking on the marble floor. She wore her straight hair pulled into a neat, low ponytail, and dressed in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren. Like Regina’s roommate, Sloan Caldwell looked her up and down and could barely conceal her verdict: wrong, wrong all wrong. Regina wondered if there was some secret Manhattan dress code that everyone was privy to except her. Ever since she moved to the city, she felt like one of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers — she almost passed as a person who belonged, but something told anyone who looked closely enough otherwise.

  “And here we have the heart of the library, the Main Reading Room.”

  Regina’s father had often traveled to New York on business and he would bring Regina along. They rode the Amtrak train together, a ritual of bonding that included lunch at Seren
dipity, and a visit to the New York Public Library main branch on Fifth Avenue. To this day, the faintly musty smell of the Rose Main Reading Room brought back memories of her father so quick and sharp, it always took her a minute to recover.

  Regina paused to read the inscription over the door, a 1644 protest against censorship from Milton’s “Areopagitica”: A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.

  The room was breathtaking; the sheer size of it never failed to dazzle her. The ceiling was over 51 feet high – only about ten feet shorter than a brownstone house. The room was 78 feet wide and 297 feet long – about the length of a city block. The enormous, round-arched windows were filled with sunlight, and then there was the ceiling, a canvas of sky and clouds painted by Yohannes Aynalem, surrounded by ornate wood and gold-colored carvings of cherubs, dolphins, and scrolls. But her favorite part of the room was the four-tiered chandeliers, dark wood and brass, carved with satyr masks between the bulbs.

  Sloan paused in front of the deliver desk at the front of the room. It was more than a desk: the ornate, dark wood fixture ran half the length of the room, and was essentially the command center. It was divided into eleven bays with round arched windows, each bay separated by Roman Doric columns.

  Sloan leaned on one of the bays.

  “Here it is – your new home,” she said. Regina was confused.

  “I’m working at the delivery desk?”

  “Yes,” said Sloan.

  “But…I have my degree in archives and preservation.”

  Sloan looked at her critically, one perfectly manicured hand on her hip. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’re smart, but so was every candidate for this job. You can work your way up like everyone else. Besides — the library has Archives covered with Margaret. Have you met Margaret? She’s quite well-preserved herself. I think she’d been here since the cornerstone was laid.”

  Regina felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. Working at the delivery desk was not very challenging work. All she would do is sit at the desk, take people’s slips of papers, enter their requests into the computer, and then wait until someone retrieved the books from the various rooms and floors, which Regina would then hand over to the visitor, who had been waiting at a table with a number.

  Regina tried not to panic. Everyone had to start somewhere, she told herself. And it could be worse: she could be working at the returns desk.

  The important thing was that she was there — finally a librarian. And she would prove herself worthy of the job.

  Chapter Two

  Regina took her brown-bagged lunch and sat outside on the top stairs of the library. She opened her thermos of milk and stared out at Fifth Avenue.

  “Are you the new librarian?” an older woman asked, pausing on her way down the stairs.

  “Yes, I’m Regina.” She said, covering her mouth as she chewed.

  “Welcome. I’m Margaret Saddle.”

  It was awkward to be sitting while the woman stood over her, so Regina got to her feet, brushing off her pleated cotton skirt.

  “Oh, yes – you work in the archives room, right?”

  She nodded. “For the past fifty years.”

  “Wow. That’s…impressive.”

  Margaret had jaw-length white hair and pale blue eyes. She powdered her cheeks but otherwise wore no make-up. Her pearl necklace was large, and if Regina had to guess, she would say it was real.

  The woman gazed back at the building. “This is a place worth devoting one’s entire professional life to,” she said. “Although, it’s all been downhill since we lost Brooke Astor. Well, it’s nice to meet you. Come visit me on the fourth floor any time. You might find you have questions, and lord knows that other one won’t be in a rush to answer them – if she even knows the answer. Alright then – enjoy the sunshine.”

  Regina wanted to tell the woman that she had her degree in archives and preservation, but she didn’t want to appear to be jockeying for a position. But she could tell already that she’d much rather spend her days working with Margaret Saddle than Sloan Caldwell.

  Margaret shuffled off, and Regina sat down back down on the steps, forgetting she had left her open thermos behind her. She knocked it over, sending milk trickling down the stairs, the heavy lid bouncing like a ball.

  Regina was horrified. She didn’t know what to attend to first – the expanding pool of white liquid, or the lid picking up speed as it careened towards Fifth Avenue.

  She straightened the thermos to stem the flow of milk, and then headed down to chase the lid. But before she could make it two steps, she saw a tall, broad-shouldered man intercept the lid with one swipe of his hand.

  He looked up at her, his eyes a velvety dark brown, almost black. As he headed towards her, she was surprised to feel her heart begin to pound.

  “Does this belong to you?” He held up the lid, a hint of a smile on his face, a face that was so ruggedly handsome, it was embarrassing. He had high cheekbones and a chiseled nose and the smallest cleft in his chin. His hair was shiny and dark and long enough that the edges curled around his shirt collar. He was older than her, maybe thirty.

  “Um, yes – I’m sorry. Thank you.” She took the lid from him. Even though she was one step above him, he still towered over her.

  “No need to apologize. Although, now that I see that mess up there…maybe.”

  Mortified, she followed his gaze to the milk puddle.

  “Oh, I’ll…I’m going to clean it. I would never leave that…”

  But his grin told her he was just kidding. “Take it easy,” he said, handing her the black plastic lid. His fingers grazed hers, and she felt actual heat at the contact.

  And then he walked past her, past the puddle, and disappeared into the heavy front door of the library.

  *** ***

  Regina climbed the five flights of stairs to her apartment on Bank Street, her bag heavy with books she couldn’t resist checking out of the library.

  She lived in a small apartment, on the most perfect block in the most perfect neighborhood in the city. She thought of it as her Great Escape – not only from the limitations of her hometown, but from the far-reaching, needy arms of her mother. There, tucked away in a brownstone in a neighborhood that was once home to literary greats such as Willa Cather, Henry James, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edgar Allan Poe, Regina was truly on her own for the first time in her life.

  The only blight on this otherwise perfect landscape of newfound freedom was her roommate, Carly. Carly Ronak was a tragically hip Parsons student who only cared about two things: fashion, and men. And the men changed more often than her jeans; It seemed every week there was a different guy in the rotation.

  Regina had never had a roommate before. During college, her mother had insisted that she live at home rather than one of the Drexel University dorms in center city Philadelphia – a twenty minute drive from their house in the suburbs. She realized, now that she lived with Carly, that her mother had had maybe too much influence over her social life in the past few years. As daily witness to Carly’s whirlwind dating life, Regina had to wonder why she hadn’t ventured more into that arena herself. It was partly her mother’s fault – she was so negative on the issue of Regina dating that sneaking around hardly seemed worth the effort. The few dates Regina had gone on were so disappointing, they weren’t worth the lies to or the arguments with her mother. But now Regina had to wonder if she had missed out of something important.

  As for Carly, it took Regina a few weeks to figure out why she even bothered having roommate. She appeared to have an endless supply of cash, at least when it came to clothes. Shopping bags from Barney’s, Alice and Olivia, or Scoop were ubiquitous in the apartment. Regina didn’t know much about clothes, but she knew these stores were a far cry from Filene’s and Target, where she did all of her shopping. And then there was Carly’s constant maintenance of her long, highlighted hair at Bumble and Bumble, and seemingl
y endless meals out. Regina had never seen Carly so much as pour herself a bowl of cereal. She even ordered in scrambled eggs on the rare weekend morning when she woke up in their apartment.

  The mystery was solved one night when she was awakened by Carly and her hookup du jour banging around the kitchen at two in the morning. Carly admonished the guy for all of his loud moaning (which had awakened Regina an hour earlier) – “My roommate will be traumatized,” Carly had said. To which the guy replied, “I don’t get why you even have a roommate. Your dad is Mark Ronak.” Carly told him that it wasn’t a money issue; her parents insisted she have a roommate for “safety reasons.” They had both laughed over this, and the guy had said, “Good thing you have someone around here to keep you under control. Otherwise, you might be a bad girl.”

  Of course, Regina Googled Mark Ronak, and learned that Carly’s father was the founder of the country’s largest hip-hop record label. This little background detail served to widen the gulf between Regina and her roommate; The idea of either of her parents even listening to hip hop — or even pop music — was unimaginable to her. Regina’s father had been in his mid-thirties when she was born, and died eight years later. He had been an architect, and the only music he listened to was opera. Regina’s mother was a classically trained cellist who listened to only classical music, and insisted Regina listen to only classical in the house. Alice Finch worked as a docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and as far as she was concerned, the only acceptable forms of music, painting, and literature were the classics: in her household, there was no “pop” in music, no “modern” in art, no “pulp” in fiction.

  “How was your first day?” Carly asked, looking up from her copy of W magazine. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch, wearing a pair of perfectly faded bell-bottom jeans, a cashmere half-sweater, her honey-blonde hair was in a messy knot. “Did the other library kids play nice?” The room smelled like her Chanel Allure perfume.

  “It was fine. Thanks,” Regina said, dropping her heavy bag on the floor and walking into the kitchen to get a Coke. She could never tell if Carly was genuinely interested in talking to her or if it was just a reflex since she was the only other person in the room. Regina knew that Carly didn’t understand how “shelving books” — as she put it – could be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. But that’s exactly what it was to her; From the times she was six and her father starting bringing her to the library every Saturday afternoon – not even the New York Library, just their small library in Gladwynne, Pennsylvania – Regina had known it was where she belonged. She never went through a phase of wanting to be a schoolteacher, or a veterinarian, or a ballerina: for Regina, it had always been about becoming a librarian. She wanted to be surrounded by the smell of books, to be responsible for the rows and rows of tidy shelves, of the meticulous cataloguing and of helping people discover the next great novel they would read, or the book that would help them so the research that would earn them a degree or solve an intellectual riddle. She knew this from the time she was little, and she never lost focus.