Don't Ever Stop: A BDSM Billionaire Romance Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  He lifted up the rope now, taking it out of my...

  CHAPTER ONE The Glamorous World Of Local News

  CHAPTER TWO Redmond Cooper

  CHAPTER THREE And The Winner Is...

  CHAPTER FOUR Letting Off Steam

  CHAPTER FIVE Miss Goody Two-Shoes

  CHAPTER SIX White Bear Problem

  CHAPTER SEVEN Retail Therapy

  CHAPTER EIGHT A Whole Lotta Flowers

  CHAPTER NINE Hair Of The Dog

  CHAPTER TEN Going Global

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Unmistakeable Eyes

  CHAPTER TWELVE Bone China

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN A Wish

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Glamorous World Of International News

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Good Conscience vs. Bad Conscience

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN An Unfortunate Encounter

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Weak At The Knees

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Teacher's Pet

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Cards Are On The Table

  CHAPTER TWENTY Answering Back

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Home Of The Satyr

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Asanawa

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE An Exercise In Imagination

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Negotiation

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Pick Your Own

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX In At The Deep End

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Green To Red

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Terrible, Forbidden, Wonderful

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Healing

  CHAPTER THIRTY Liberty. Peace. Strength.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Fly In The Ointment

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO The Inevitable Retaliation

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Sick Day

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR All Dressed Up And Everywhere To Go

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE A Dangerous Game

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX White Jasmine

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN An Ill-Thought-Out Apology

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Making A Scene

  MORE

  DON’T EVER STOP

  Vivie Rock

  This book may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the copyright holder. This story contains explicit content that is intended for adult audiences only. All characters involved in sexual situations are 18 years of age or older. An older edition of this novel was sold as ‘Red All Over’ and ‘His: Bound To Please’.

  Copyright © 2015 Vivie Rock. All rights reserved.

  Logo Image © Photochatree at bigstockphoto.com.

  Cover Image © Curaphotography at Depositphotos.com

  TEASER

  He lifted up the rope now, taking it out of my hands, and slid it over my shoulders. Feeling the weight of it behind my back made me realise just how powerful it was, how tightly a rope like this would be able to bind me. How impossible it would be to break free of it if I was, say, held hostage somewhere. Was I being held hostage now? He slipped the rope further down my back…

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Glamorous World Of Local News

  It was the biggest night of my life. It was the weirdest night of my life. There I was, a nobody, sitting at a table with some of the most powerful people in the world of newspaper publishing, having a panic attack.

  I was hoping – no, praying – that no-one would decide to speak to me. As long as they didn’t speak to me, they wouldn’t realize that I wasn’t meant to be here.

  OK, I’ve started in the wrong place. I do that a lot. Let me try again.

  My name’s Rose. About a year ago, I had that same feeling that so many young people have after finishing college:

  Oh my god, what am I going to do with my life?

  I’d been independent at college, living away from home (even if college was a bit of a fantasy world of zero responsibilities), and so having to come back to my parents’ house, to their overprotective rules and dinnertime squabbles was a struggle. It was nice to be looked after, I guess, but I was desperate to get away. Trouble is, there’s not much that a Bachelor's Degree in English Language can get you these days, work-wise. Everyone’s got a Degree now, or so it seems. And English Language is not exactly vocational, except if you want to become a sleepy academic writing papers on a topic almost no-one cares about. It’s not the reason I studied English, either. I love communication, and I wanted to learn more about it. There’s something magical about the way that talking, or writing, can connect someone else to that private, inner world we all have. I love the way everyone’s vocabulary, whether or not they come from the same place, is slightly different. The word that I use when I’m happy might be different from the one you use, for example. The way I communicate to you that I’m scared, or excited, might be different too.

  Something else I should say is, I’m a bit of a rambler. Maybe you can tell.

  So this realization hit me: that I was going nowhere, with no plans, living with my parents. And job-hunting is not fun, especially when you don’t want a job.

  For such a long time, I felt like it was going nowhere at all. I’d had interviews at places like factories and warehouses, pubs and restaurants. I guess maybe my heart wasn’t in it though, or maybe it was just nerves, because I never really managed to sell myself that well in them. Either I felt like the person had made up their mind about me before the interview even started, or that they were just rushing through to get to the next person in line.

  Then, after a month of looking, my dad said, out of nowhere:

  ‘Rose, I’ve got you an interview at The Chronicle’.

  I nearly choked on my cornflakes.

  ‘What? I thought you needed a journalism qualification to write for a newspaper?’

  It was something I’d looked into briefly. Although being a hack had always been appealing, the idea of learning shorthand and spending more time as a student wasn’t something I’d wanted to do.

  ‘Not a journalist’s job,’ my dad said, a twinkle in his eye, ‘advertising sales. The good stuff.’

  No prizes for guessing how my dad had made his money.

  ‘Dad, I don’t want to work in sales. It’s miserable, and I’ll be useless. I’m no good at arguments, and I’m not persuasive at all.’ It was true, I’d always been a total pushover.

  ‘You should do it, dear, it’ll be good practice at least.’

  True to form, I gave in, and attended the interview.

  And amazingly, I got the job. Thanks, Dad.

  The interview wasn’t that bad, all things considered. The woman who’d end up being my boss was a hard-voiced Scottish woman called Christina. She grimaced when she spoke and asked me questions like,

  ‘You don’t want to be a journalist, do you?’ and, ‘What’s your favourite cocktail?’

  She seemed like she didn’t suffer fools gladly, to put it mildly. I did my best to answer her questions, trying to pretend that the thought of selling small ads to farmers and one-man-band plumbing companies was fascinating. Finally, Christina said,

  ‘Look let’s cut the crap. It’s not a glamorous job. It’s not fun. But we’re a good team here, and it’s a good paper. Do you want to make money?’

  ‘Yes.’ I replied, honestly.

  ‘Then you can have the job. We’ll see how you get on, and in three months, if you don’t like it, we’ll say goodbye, no hard feelings. How does that sound?’

  It sounded great to me. Well, good enough, anyway.

  I was put on the classified adverts team. I worked with Patrick and Jen. Patrick was a good-looking young Irish guy, who was an excellent sales-person. He had a silver tongue and could talk anyone round to his way of thinking. I’d h
eard him do it so many times; a customer would start off aggressive, and, in the space of five minutes, Patrick would have them eating out of his hand. If we had any angry customers, we always passed them on to Patrick.

  Jen was gorgeous. She used to openly flirt with all of her male customers, and was particularly good at landing big accounts from car dealerships and builders. Jen was fun, if a little intimidating. She drank a lot, sometimes during the day. She’d come back from a working lunch, half-cut and slurring, but Christina turned a blind eye, partly because of the results she got, and partly because she enjoyed a drink too.

  So all of a sudden, I was part of a crack sales team. Totally great, right? Well, under normal circumstances, it would be great. But imagine my shock when, after three weeks of working for the paper, a silver envelope appeared on my desk, with my name, Rose Smith, beautifully hand-written on the front.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, holding up the mysterious letter.

  ‘Holy shit!’ said Patrick. ‘They managed to get you an invite! That’s great.’ He flashed me a smile.

  ‘An invite to what?’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s not quite the Oscars, but basically the next best thing. Our team’s been nominated for a prize at the National Press Awards.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I replied. ‘But, um, why do I have an invitation?’

  Jen, who’d been quiet up until now, interjected. ‘Good question.’ There was a note of venom in her voice I’d never heard before. But, to be honest, I could understand why it was there. I’d done nothing to deserve this invitation. I knew nothing about newspapers, nothing about why we’d been nominated, and almost nothing about advertising sales. I opened the envelope. The invitation was expensive. I already knew it was going to be a special night.

  So, there I was. In the most expensive (about eighty dollars) dress I could afford, wearing too much perfume and too much makeup, still praying desperately that no one would talk to me. The room was lavishly decorated. Strings of shining gold stars hung from the ceiling, twinkling as the swooping spotlights carved their way through the mist-steamed atmosphere. Thirty or forty round tables were arranged around a central stage, with powerful people dressed in much nicer clothes than me everywhere I looked.

  ‘That guy over there,’ said Jen, ‘that fat old guy, Paul, is the head of NewsBiz.’ Jen looked incredible, of course. She’d made sure to spend all of her spare time at the gym this past month, making sure she looked as good as possible for the awards. She was slender, and her full breasts were almost spilling out of her low-cut black dress. The men sitting around the table were all just staring at her, entranced by everything she said.

  ‘What’s NewsBiz?’ I asked.

  Jen looked at me like I was a total idiot.

  ‘Um, it’s our parent company, Rose.’

  I guess I was a total idiot.

  Jen turned back to continue to talk to whichever millionaire she’d caught the attention of this time. And that’s when I saw him for the first time. The man who would change my life, change me, forever.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Redmond Cooper

  We were still a little way from the start of the awards. The waiters were clearing the deserts away from the now messy tables. A group of men from a table in the centre of the room got up and headed towards the exit - past my table. As they moved through the room, there wasn’t a head that didn’t turn to look at them. And the reason was right in the middle of group. As he got closer I felt my chest tighten and my heart begin to beat harder, like it was being hit with a lump hammer.

  He was tall. That’s the first thing about him that really struck me. He was massive, towering over everyone else. He must have been six-foot-six, or close to it. He had wild, dark hair, that seemed to be straining against the close-cropped cut he had. I could tell it was thick, and coarse, jet black, not even a hint of gray. His face was hard, angular, and he had a serious expression in his eyes, no, not just his eyes, his expression was set into all of his features. A hard, uncompromising demeanor. And there was something about his eyes, what was it? They just seemed slightly, off. I’d never seen eyes like them. Thickly lashed, maybe blue, maybe brown, I couldn’t tell from this distance.

  Time seemed to slow down as he approached the table. I got a chance to really study him. That’s when I realized: his eyes were different colors. His left was a piercing, hard blue, clear and bright as the sky in mid-summer; his left was the deep dark brown of autumn leaves, warm and soft and smoky. I’d never seen another man like him.

  Then, just as he was about to walk past, his gaze flicked down and caught mine. I was gawping, clearly, just like every other woman in the room. He seemed to linger on my face for just a moment, and then, suddenly, he looked away.

  I turned to Jen.

  ‘Who. The fuck. Was that?’ I said. I felt like all of the wind had been knocked out of me. No-one had ever made such a strong impression on me in my whole life. I felt like I was going crazy.

  ‘That,’ Jen said, making me wait, ‘is Mr. Redmond Cooper. Probably the richest, most powerful entity in this room.’

  That was Redmond Cooper? That was the reclusive, brilliant CEO of Global Media? That was the man that Time Magazine had rated as the most influential man in the media five years in a row?

  Redmond Cooper was an industry legend. Aged nineteen, he’d started in the mailroom of his local paper, sorting the post and learning about the trade. Just five years later, he’d been the editor of the largest paper in the Midwest. Three years after that, he joined the executive team at Global Media. The rest was history. Everyone knew about Redmond Cooper - heck, he’d been used an example in my training of just how quickly hard work can be rewarded in the newspaper industry.

  ‘He’s probably a little bit out of your league,’ Jen said.

  I felt a fierce blush spread across my cheeks, and then my chest. Thank goodness I was wearing a black dress tonight. If I’d been dressed in red I’d be looking like a tomato about now. And that’s way too much red for one person.

  Patrick, who’d been speaking to a busty blonde who worked for one of the national papers, turned and joined in.

  ‘There’s all sorts of weird rumours about Redmond Cooper. Like, seriously weird.’

  ‘Well, yeah, but no one dares publish anything, because he’s just such a hard man. He can totally ruin careers. Or, you know, make them,’ Jen said.

  ‘Well,’ began Patrick, ‘I know someone who works at Global, who says that Mr. Cooper has never been – and will never – get married. His tastes are too… narrow, shall we say? Apparently, he likes to–’

  ‘Alright, Patrick, that’s enough,’ snapped Jen. ‘Rose doesn’t need to know all this stuff, for goodness’ sake. She’s only been at the company three weeks. Jesus. She might not even be here in a couple of months.’

  My jaw dropped and Patrick raised his eyebrows, then shrugged at me. His gaze motioned towards her empty wine glass, as if to say she’s drunk.

  ‘I was just going to say,’ whispered Patrick, as Jen helped herself to more wine, ‘that I’d heard on the grapevine that Redmond Cooper is a bit of a–’

  Suddenly, with a fanfare, the lights went down, and the awards began.

  CHAPTER THREE

  And The Winner Is...

  So, I began to quickly realise that awards ceremonies are seriously boring. There is a lot of talking about ‘the industry’ and ‘the state of print media’ and ‘electronic content’ and ‘the blogosphere’ and lots of other really lame-sounding buzzwords that no-one really understands.

  There were awards for ‘Best Opinion Piece On Foreign Policy’ and ‘Best Sports Article’, and they just seemed to keep coming.

  Jen and Patrick were loving it, cheering and whooping when certain names got read out, drinking copious amounts of the free alcohol on offer, really going to town on the entertainment. I still felt like a total fraud, nervous and terrified. The thought that started to gnaw away at me was this: What if we actu
ally won? What if we had to head up onto that stage, the three of us, and make a speech, and say thank you, and bow? I wasn’t even sure in my current, panicked state, whether I’d make it up the tiny set of stairs that led onto the stage.

  Somehow, I just knew it was going to happen.

  ‘There’s no fucking way,’ Jen said, slurring the ‘s’ on there’s. She leaned over the table, her tits practically falling out of her top. I could see the older guy sitting opposite her getting a nice good view of her, licking his lips, the dirty old pervert.

  ‘Yeah. They’ll give it to The Post, again. Those fuckers win every year. I swear they steal all our fucking clients. They’ve got no respect for geographical fucking boundaries. It’s like I always say, why bother having…’ And Patrick was off, ranting about internal politics and the poor management of the team.

  Then, suddenly, it was time. The chairman of the press society took his place at the rostrum. The words ‘Best Classified Advertising Team’ flashed up on the screen behind him, and he started to talk.

  ‘Classified advertising is the backbone of the Newspaper industry,’ he said. Honestly, I’m going to spare you the details of his speech, mainly because I was so nervous that I didn’t take any of it in. He was pretty damn boring to begin with, and my stressed-out mental state meant that I might as well have been somewhere else.

  Finally, he drew in his breath and said, ‘Which brings us to the award. It goes out to a small team. A focused team. A team that brings tremendous results with limited resources. It goes to...’ A drum roll began to fill the room. I knew with every fibre of my being that we were going to win. I can’t explain why. But when he finally said, ‘The team at The Chronicle, Jen, Patrick and Rose!’ I thought to myself, of course it’s us. Of course we won.

  Jen and Patrick went ballistic, hugging each other, and then as an afterthought, me. I did my best to appear as happy as possible, but let me tell you, it was hard. We began to start the impossibly long walk up to the front of the room, past the people who actually deserved to be there; past the press barons and the journalists and the sports reporters and the editors and the subs and the features writers and everyone else.