Page 52 of Shamefully Trained

“No, sir.”

His mouth moved slightly. “Good.”

He served the food himself. The rich scent reached me first: wine and beef and herbs, something deep and comforting and absurdly domestic considering the state of my body and mind. He spooned boeuf bourguignon onto my plate as if this were a perfectly ordinary dinner for two people in bathrobes after a bath. Perhaps, for him, it was not so far from ordinary.

For me, it felt like dinner inside a fever dream.

I took the first bite and nearly moaned from relief both at the layers of flavor and at having something real to focus on besides the plug and my own thoughts. Tender meat, silky sauce, mushrooms and little onions that seemed somehow more flavorful than vegetables had any right to be.

Porter ate a few bites in silence. Then, to my complete surprise, he said, “Hathaway is being impossible.”

I looked up. “What?”

He speared another piece of beef on his fork. “The assistive tech bill. She’s holding the votes I need and using them to extract leverage on a completely unrelated appropriations package.”

CHAPTER 17

Alex

I stared at him. There I was, sitting sore and full and shaky after having for some reason confessed—or lied, or something—to him that I needed anal training, and he had apparently decided the next natural subject was legislative strategy.

“You’re serious,” I said.

He gave me a brief look. “Usually.”

I almost smiled despite myself. Then I remembered the plug, and what I had said in the bath, and the smile vanished into a blush.

He went on as if the context were irrelevant. “There are researchers in Baltimore and Silicon Valley who are close to making amazing breakthroughs. Neural interface work, adaptive prosthetic control, some very promising sensory feedback systems. If the subsidy package lands where it should in terms of numbers, wounded veterans with catastrophic injuries could be looking at very different lives in five years.”

The shift in him did something unsettling to me. He had remained wholly himself, as I’d already learned to recognize him—controlled, exacting, impossibly intense—but now that same concentration had attached itself to something outside my body. Something the world would call serious and, frankly, decent.

I put down my fork. “And Hathaway’s blocking it because…?”

“She can.” He took a sip of wine. “As far as I can tell. And because she knows my client wants it badly enough to pay somewhere else—create useless jobs in her state, I would guess.”

That made too much sense. Washington had worked like that long before I entered it, and it would continue to work like that after I had been rearranged into whatever Porter intended to make of me.

“She’s bringing Hale and Norris?” I asked.

“Of course. And that’s enough that I can’t see passing the bill without her.”

I hesitated. My brain, to my immense gratitude, had remembered how to do at least one thing besides imagine his cock in my ass.

“What about Gowry’s bloc?” I asked. “If you peeled him, Johnson, and Sinogar off because of the veteran angle, you could probably get Bradley and Weland as well.”

Porter looked at me with more direct attention then. Not sexual, exactly. Evaluative.

“Numerically, that works,” he said. “Yes.”

“But?”

“But Jason Gowry would never give me that win.”

I felt my fork pause halfway to my mouth. “Never?”

“No.” He set his glass down. “It’s personal, unfortunately.”

I blushed, and looked down at my plate. Two alpha males—or, I couldn’t help thinking, one real alpha male and one extraordinary asshole. Warmth came into my chest, to match the heat in my face, as I understood to my distress that something in me found an insane kind of pride in having the actual alpha’s plug inside me, training my anus for his rigid manhood.