My Naughty Little Secret by Tara Finnegan

excellent written statement. It was pretty much an open-and-shut case and the insurance company wasn’t in the least concerned.
    “You’ve done really well on this. Myra’s most impressed. She’s anxious that you handle the upcoming appraisals now. She wants you to be ready for promotion in the event she should leave.”
    Whoa, hold on. Myra quit Banbury’s? No way. There was no personnel director here, so the buck stopped with Myra. I didn’t want her job and I certainly didn’t feel ready for it. At least in Lynham’s, there’d been a few layers of a safety net.
    “Myra’s not leaving, is she?” I asked anxiously.
    “No, not at the moment, but she knows I intend to retire in a few months and she feels she may move on after that. But since she has made her intentions clear, I want to give you the opportunity to be prepared to step into her shoes. I haven’t mentioned it to Dermot or Michael just yet, but I will very soon.”
    Dermot was the finance director, and he had been with Banbury’s for years. I knew he and James went to school together. Myra had been here for fifteen years and she and James were also very close. Where the hell did Michael fit into the mix, I wondered? He only just started before me, as a department head I knew, but still. It seemed he was in quite a position of trust here. Again I thought back to all of the different occasions I’d seen them together. Either they were arguing furiously or chatting intimately. I was so absorbed in the news that I quite forgot that:
     
    a: I was knickerless.
    b: I had a date.
    c: I was going to get a spanking.
     
    The day flew by in spite of my earlier apprehensions that it would crawl.
    Myra set me up with all the appraisals information. I had to schedule the interviews, ensure there was adequate cover on the shop floor while they were going ahead, review last year’s appraisals, and check out the budget that had been allowed for pay rises. I hadn’t even time for lunch, and when five-thirty came I wasn’t free to leave. I rang Michael’s extension to tell him I’d be delayed.
    “Ok, I’m going home to put the food in the oven, but you’re to ring me when you’re done; you are not to walk up to the apartment on your own.”
    “It’s only three minutes up the road,” I argued.
    “Jesus, Siobhan, does everything have to be a confrontation with you? Just ring me,” he warned, reminding me about what I was facing into.
    Above all days, James landed down to go through the appraisals procedure and before I knew it, my watch read seven-thirty. I was starting to get anxious and when James finally left, I grabbed my change of clothes and legged it out of the building, forgetting to call Michael in my haste. I crashed into him on the steps again! He grabbed me to steady me and then kissed me.
    “Well, that’s very discreet,” I complained.
    “And you were supposed to ring,” he retorted sharply.
    “Sorry, I forgot, James kept me and it was late.”
    We walked up to his apartment and the smell of food was divine. Coq au vin , prepared yesterday and cooked today. A girl could really get used to this treatment.
    “Food first, spanking later.”
    Oh, God, I’d suddenly lost my appetite, I wanted to skip the food, but he had gone to so much trouble that I didn’t dare. Actually, it was delicious. I’d missed lunch and I was starving and so ate greedily. It was washed down with a cool glass of Chablis. I brought up the subject of James’ retirement. He seemed surprised that I knew, but for some reason I didn’t mention that Myra might also leave. I guess I didn’t want him to know. We packed the dishwasher and the sexual tension was starting to charge the air. We both knew what was next. He surprised me by calling me, not for my spanking but to look at his laptop.
    “Look what I found online. Seems spanking isn’t that unusual.”
    He called up a site, Taken in Hand, and we spent the next twenty minutes “taking the tour” of the site.