Declaration to Submit by Jennifer Leeland Page B

shoulder and stalked toward the bathroom.
    If he hadn’t been completely infatuated with her before, he sure as shit was now.
    * * * *
    The mirror mocked Nell. She stared at her striped ass. Well, what had she expected? Romance? Love? The “punishment” had heightened her awareness of him, made her completely in tune with his rhythm. So much so that when he withdrew, she sensed it immediately.
    She inhaled a shaky breath. This was supposed to be a sexual education, an adventure. It felt like more than that, and Nell was terrified. No one had ever stripped her mask away so quickly and so thoroughly. She’d been willing to do anything, be anyone, if it made him happy.
    The minute he’d said he was Mark Conners, she should have run like fucking hell. Hadn’t she researched him? Hadn’t she run into a blank wall after he graduated from high school in Los Angeles? She shook her head. No photos of a man who clearly had some serious business chops, yet she hadn’t been able to locate what college, if any, he’d attended.
    The only thing she knew for sure about him was that his parents no longer lived in the L.A. area, that he had “gone out East” according to his friends, and that he had an uncanny ability to remain out of the public eye.
    He and his buddy, Fedders, who remained behind the scenes pulling the strings and making the money, hired others to charm the press. Yet Nell had discovered something about Mark when he was still M. Conners and when his high school teachers, friends, and associates called him Junior Conners. His father had been involved in several Internet start-ups in Southern California. And he had failed spectacularly, losing millions of investors’ money, and ended up as a lowly accountant for a cellular company.
    Until his father’s fall, Junior Conners had been in football, student government, on the fast track for college. Then he’d disappeared, and from everything Nell could see, he’d cut off his family.
    There was little resemblance in the confident man to the serious boy who had stared back from his high-school portrait. Nell hadn’t discovered very much before her company came under siege. Ernest had tasked her with finding out who the men were behind ConFed. He was gone before she could use anything she’d found out.
    Now she was having a wild weekend of pain and pleasure with Mark Conners and beginning to wonder if she’d lost her mind. No one connected with the photograph of a boy who was now a man and the sketchy details on a written report. No sane person anyway.
    Yet that picture had tugged at her sympathy. Her sources had said his senior picture was taken shortly after his father’s meteoric descent complete with a media frenzy and the family’s entire personal life splashed all over the news.
    The haunted sadness in Junior Conners’s expression had touched Nell in places she’d ignored for years. Her own loneliness, brought on by her need to succeed, had been reflected in his face. Had she detected that same expression when she’d first seen him and read more there than she should have?
    Probably.
    It’s not like she hadn’t guessed who he was before he told her. Who else would have been able to convince her to stay? She’d been intrigued the minute she’d spotted him, and nothing had changed. The clause in her employee agreement just made it easier to give in.
    Contract or no, he hadn’t promised her romance. He’d promised her sex, kinky sex. The kind she’d been too afraid to find for herself.
    She squared her shoulders. It was time to grow the fuck up.
    He knocked on the bathroom door. “Nell? Your suitcase is here. I’ll leave it outside the door.”
    She opened the door, prepared to apologize for being an irrational fool, but his back was to her. “Sir, I-I’m sorry I walked away,” she said and then held her breath.
    He stopped, but he didn’t turn around. “No, Nell. I’m sorry. You weren’t wrong. I should have been honest with you.”
    “Yes,