The Deep End. AM Hartnett

Grace had been a teenager when the attack happened, and she had seen photos on news shows of Laurin and Taureau together. They were Barbie and Ken on cocaine. In this picture, Bette was the aftermath of a horror movie. Mascara ran down her face and her lipstick was smeared. Her blonde hair was mussed and caked with something black that Grace guessed was dried blood. The woman wore such a look of anguish that Grace felt a pang of sympathy for her.

      What would she have been if she had lived a different life? During the trial, accusations of sexual abuse as a child had been used to explain the bad turns she’d taken in her life. No one had believed her, until her mother came forward and confirmed that Bette’s father had brutalised her. It wasn’t enough to garner sympathy among the jury.

      As the article confirmed, Elizabeth Laurin had been sentenced to ten years. She probably would have gotten less if it wasn’t for the furore Dominic Taureau and Shane Werner had created in the media.

       With the death of Shane Werner in 2004, he inherited his grandfather’s multinational aerospace and transportation company, Werner Transport, and renamed it Taureau-Werner Inc., He operates as Chief Executive Officer from his rumored home outside of Saguenay, Quebec. In 2005, he named Hugh Caroway as Executive Vice President of Taureau-Werner. Caroway acts in Taureau’s absence when necessary.

       Since the attack, Taureau has lived his life out of the public eye. It is rumored that he suffers from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and extreme paranoia. Upon Laurin’s death in 2005 of breast cancer, Taureau refused comment (although Dominic Taureau claimed to speak for the entire family when he told a reporter, ‘good riddance’).

      She next tried an image search. There weren’t even any photos of Taureau during the trial: apparently he had been let into the courtroom via a private entrance. The only thing she found was a sketch artist’s drawing, blurry and indistinct with only slashes of pink to represent his scars. Nothing after the trial, nothing in the last fifteen years. Nothing until he had showed himself to her the previous night.

      Grace sat back and processed what she had read. Did this story really tell her anything about Taureau? That he’d been damaged by the attack? That he had preferred, and obviously still did prefer, his lovers with a streak of adventure?

      She pulled open her top drawer and dug deep. She kept her emergency pack of cigarettes taped to the back panel, and for seven months she’d kept her hands off it, but what she wrapped her hand around wasn’t her cigarettes. It wasn’t a stapler or half a box of ballpoint pens.

      She closed her fingers and electricity shot through her. She didn’t need to look to know her hand was wrapped around the smooth shaft of a vibrator.

      Her temperature rising, she crooked her head and took a second sweep of the office.

      An unfamiliar sound drew her attention to her computer screen where a small notification flashed before her eyes. No one in the office used the IM function of their email program any more. There had been too much abuse, and so it had been disabled.

      She closed her drawer and moved her mouse to open the message from JAT.

      OTHER DRAWER.

      There it was, sitting in her tray on top of a mound of paper clips. It looked like a perfume roll-on, but the engraved writing on the cylinder read ‘Breathless Sensations Clitoral Gel.’ She’d read reviews of this stuff but had never taken it off her wish list.

      Another line of text joined the first.

      OFFICE.

      She moved the cursor to the text area, but discovered that she couldn’t add her own message. It was symbolic of this whole thing: he could push her buttons from afar, but she was powerless to reciprocate.

      Turning her screen off as she rose, Grace looked through the partition at the rest of the staff. Some bounced from cubicle to cubicle. Others typed furiously, earbuds drowning out the noise around them. No one paid her any attention as she took the vibrator and lube from her desk and slipped into Caroway’s office.

      As soon as she had closed the door behind her, she heard the muffled ring of a telephone. She knew right where to look. There in the credenza, next to her emergency supplies, was an iPhone, face lit up with an incoming call from JAT.

      She cradled the phone against her ear.

      ‘It’s not like you were going to do anything today, anyway,’ he murmured in that sinfully raspy voice.

      Grace suppressed the shiver that danced along her spine. ‘You move fast. How did you get them into my desk so quickly? And this phone? You didn’t do it yourself.’

      ‘I have people who do that sort of thing for me. There’s a headset in with your stash. Put it on. I want your hands free.’

      Digging into the credenza, she tingled as she thought of him the previous night, laid back in his chair looking at her like she was dinner. Her fingers trembled as she worked the earpiece in. She loathed wearing a headset, ever since her first job working at a call centre selling newspaper subscriptions, and preferred a crick in the neck over mobility, but, as soon as static crackled in her hear and she heard Taureau breathing, her heart beat faster at the thought of him giving those orders practically in her brain.

      ‘There, that’s better,’ he went on with laughter on his voice. ‘Now take your clothes off.’

      She thought back to that mugshot she’d seen only moments ago, and couldn’t put that tweaked-out young man together with the voice in her head.

      ‘The morning meeting isn’t going to go on for ever,’ she reminded him, turning in a circle as she shimmied out of her cardigan. ‘Where do you want me to look?’

      ‘Don’t worry, I can see you, and the meeting will go on as long as I want it to.’

      ‘How can you be so sure?’

      ‘I have someone in that room that makes sure it does.’

      The authority in his voice was like a drug shot into her veins. She tossed the sweater onto the floor and went to work on the belt bisecting her dress. She let it fall and reached behind for her zipper. ‘Do you have a hard-on?’

      ‘Shush …’

      There was only the sound of his breathing as she completed her disrobing. No garters and thong today. She had dressed in anticipation of getting canned. Navy bikinis and a bra to match were as wild as it got.

      ‘Everything,’ he said when she was down to her wedge sandals.

      ‘You know, I’ve never been completely stripped down in here,’ she said, and kicked her shoes under the desk.

      ‘I know. You seem to like getting fucked while you’re half-dressed. Go over to the conference table, and take your gifts with you.’

      ‘Is that what these are?’ She held up the vibrator as she strode towards the table. She tossed the lube onto the surface and placed her palm flat on the edge. ‘Do you want me like last night?’

      ‘No, I want you on your back to start.’

      She stood on her toes and lifted her knee to the edge of the table, then stopped and looked around. ‘Why do I still have a job?’

      He chuckled, so low and lovely. ‘Because you were a very good girl last night and you did exactly what I told you to.’

      ‘Fair enough,’ she said, out of breath.

      She felt as though she was moving underwater as she climbed onto the table. Glancing around, she rolled onto her ass. The surface had never felt cooler, or perhaps it was because she was so hot.

      ‘I still don’t know where to look.’

      ‘Don’t look, just listen.’

      As his words simmered in her blood, Grace leaned back on one elbow. ‘Tell me.’

      ‘Show me how wet you are.’

      Her thighs trembled as she drew