When One Love Is Not Enough

By Rachel Cray

ADULTS ONLY.
Kim Beech is a secretary at the London office of an international law firm. She has to rush to hospital when her father falls ill, and has a chance meeting with Andy, her old boyfriend. They fall for each other again, and agree to go out together every weekend when Kim comes to visit her father.
Meanwhile, when she returns to work, she meets Steve - a handsome American lawyer who has just transferred from the New York office - and her loyalty to Andy is put to the test. Steve is prepared to share her with Andy; he'll see her during the weekdays and, over the weekend, Andy can see her. Kim enjoys the sexual attention she receives from both men, but eventually realises she is deceiving them and deceiving herself. She can only have one love. Once she has made up her mind which man she wants, how can she tell the disappointed party...?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rachel Cray
• Release date: Mar 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476187242

Rachel Cray

Rachel writes erotic romances to two sub-genres: the first she calls "law firm erotic", where her characters are the horny partners and employees of a U.S. law firm, and whose spare-time activities may best be described simply as sex-related. The second sub-genre she calls "village erotic", where the cast are the horny inhabitants of Maybourne, a fictional old market town in the heart of England with a number of olde worlde villages, Tudor buildings, a ruined abbey and other picturesque features in both rural and urban settings.She has worked in several European countries, first as a secretary and then as an executive assistant, before returning to her roots in Surrey, England, and close to London; for many years she was the director of administration at the London office of a large U.S. law firm before leaving to run her own recruitment company. Now in semi-retirement, she devotes most of her spare time to writing erotic romance novellas, drawing on her life's experiences in a variety of fields. She is married with children and grandchildren.

Book preview

When One Love Is Not Enough

by Rachel Cray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Rachel Cray

Rachel Cray’s home page

Discover other titles by Rachel Cray at Smashwords.com:

Law Firm Love series:

Interview for Love

Working Overtime

The New Client

Snatched

Dirty Pictures

No Way Out

Maybourne series:

A Close Match

Village Accounts

Kate's Return

Lucy and Friends series:

Jack and Me... and His Lodger

One Man too Many

Needing Her, Needing Him

and

A Stranger in My Bed

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons (living or dead), actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission by the author, except for brief quotations for review purposes.

This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

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When One Love Is Not Enough

by

Rachel Cray

CHAPTER 1

That Tuesday morning at the office started like any other day. I was a legal secretary at the London office of the leading international law firm of Brockbank & Taylor, and I’d been a partner’s secretary for a couple of years. I worked for Nick Hunter, an American partner specialising in banking and corporate restructuring.

My desk phone rang, and I answered.

Is that Ms. Kim Beech? a distant female voice asked.

Yes, I replied. Can I help you?

This is the Royal Yorkshire Hospital in Harrogate. Please don’t be alarmed, but we have your father here. He’s been having a few problems with his heart, and he’s been brought in for some tests. He’s comfortable now, and he’s asking for you. Are you able to get up here to see him?

I was suddenly blown out of my orderly and secure world into an anguish of uncertainty. I loved my dad. My mother had died some six years ago, and he was living alone in his house – nearly two hundred miles away in Yorkshire – but he had fiercely retained his independence and insisted that he could take care of himself when I moved down to London the following year. I had to get to the hospital and visit him as soon as possible.

I had to seek permission first from Nick, my boss, although I didn’t expect any problems there. When I went into his office, I found him with a young guy whom I hadn’t met before. Before I had a chance to open my mouth, Nick jumped in with an introduction.

Kim’s my secretary – I really don’t know where I’d be without her, he explained to the visitor. I shook hands with him; he had a nervous smile which signalled to me that he was just starting today.

Kim, this is Steve Kramer. He’s a second year associate attorney, and he’s just flown in from New York. He’s replacing Doreen – she’s transferred to the Atlanta office, where she’s needed for a special deal that’s cooking. So I want you to take good care of Steve – at least for the first three months. You know what he’ll need – you’ve looked after new lawyers before.

Steve was an inch over six feet tall, lean but with a powerful frame and rugged features. I guessed he was in his mid-twenties. He didn’t smile as he shook my hand, but new people here never smiled for the first week or two; they had too many other things to think about.

I’m very pleased to meet you. And welcome to the London colony, I smiled. And then I turned to Nick and explained my situation. I liked him; he was mature and understanding – a great guy to work for. He was most sympathetic and gave me a week’s leave immediately.

Steve will still be here next week when you get back – I hope! – and you can do the full induction with him then. In the meantime he can get out and meet Doreen’s contacts and generally familiarise himself. And he can help me with a couple of projects that I haven’t had time to address.

I then spent some twenty minutes handing over my current workload to one of the other secretaries, and went home to pack a suitcase.

I shared a house with a girl in her late 20s called Adrienne Foster. She was a paralegal for another law firm in London and was currently on a month-long due-diligence assignment in the Czech Republic on behalf of a client. We generally communicated with each other by email while she was away, and I quickly dashed off a message to her to explain what was happening.

I drove up to Yorkshire; I set out around noon and arrived at the hospital just after 5 p.m. I’d only stopped once on the way, and I was feeling hungry now. But all plans to eat were put to the back of my mind until I’d seen Dad.

During the journey, I had a couple of minor near-misses with other traffic and realised that I needed to slow down and concentrate on my driving. I had to stop worrying; this cloud could have a silver lining. While I was in Harrogate, I might get the chance to see Andy, my former boyfriend.

Andy was one of the most sensuous men I had ever been with. His taste for sexual adventure had always appealed to me; our affair had been intense – for as long as we were both living in the same town – and it had been an agonising wrench for us both when we split. He had worked with my father prior to his retirement and our passion for each other grew with a force that I hadn’t known with anyone else before.

Then I had been lured south to London, tempted by a huge increase in salary. It had been a terrible wrench for us both; we told ourselves that we could stay in touch, that I could come up and see him regularly whenever I came to see my father, or he could come down to London and stay with me for the weekend.

It had been difficult for both of us. We managed to keep the relationship alive for over a year, but pressures of work slowly killed things. After an agonising couple of years, we got together again with a renewed determination to make it last; sadly, it folded around nine months back.

Then, about six months ago, I found someone else – his name was Roy – but he was utterly different from Andy. Roy was a nasty brute – he was rough and arrogant, and he demanded sex from me whenever he felt like it. I couldn’t understand how I had become entangled with him. We were so different from each other, in our interests and our background.

The truth was that he seemed to fill a strange need buried somewhere deep within me, in a place where Andy hadn’t been near. I had the impression that Roy could be dangerous – physically harmful – and I mused that, perhaps, my desire to be close to an unstable person like him could bring some kind of strange thrill in my life. But I could never be sure. Time and again, I had wanted to finish with him but... I couldn’t find the right occasion, the words or the courage to express myself.

Even before I had received the telephone call from the hospital today, I could feel my life starting to undergo some kind of transition. There had been an ugly scene with Roy in my home late on the previous Sunday afternoon. This had set another chain of events in motion and, to shift my mind away from anxiety about Dad, I began to reflect on that episode as I continued my drive northwards; it confirmed all along that Roy was an extremely unpleasant character.

* * *

The previous Sunday, I had been at home, getting my things ready for work the next day.

I stopped everything and answered the door when the bell rang. It was Roy; I hadn’t expected him. Aren’t you going to invite me in? he smiled.

I stood aside as he strode over the threshold. This is a surprise.

A nice surprise, I hope. He kissed my lips quickly.

We weren’t due to see each other again until Tuesday evening. Has anything happened?

No, not really. Except... a sudden urge, you might call it. He walked past me, and on into my living room.

I turned and looked at him quizzically.

I’ll come straight out with it, Kim. I’m horny. How about it? Can we go upstairs?

I smelt his breath: he’d been drinking. I had to be firm. No, Roy, I’m not in the mood.

Come on, Kim. You wouldn’t deny me my conjugal rights, would you?

You don’t have any rights to my body. We’re not married, we haven’t signed any legal form to tell the world we are bound together in any way, and besides...

Oh, listen to the smart-ass legal secretary on her high horse! Why don’t you come down to the real world? I’m your boyfriend, and I’m horny. So why not let me just slide up inside? I won’t take long. And you might even enjoy it once we get started.

"I said No. What part of ‘No’ do you not understand?"

We’ve been together nearly six months. I thought we had some kind of... understanding.

What you mean is that you think I should understand I have to get down on all fours for a fuck every time you get hard, right? I surprised myself with my language. I had dragged myself down to his level.

We don’t have to do doggy-style every time, he grinned.

He was pushing me over the limit now. We had been out the previous evening, but he had decided not to stay the night; a temporary erectile dysfunction after several pints of beer may have contributed to this shortcoming, and he had gone home to lick his wounds.

Then he had been round again earlier that morning and had been tying to persuade me to have sex with him, but I couldn’t face it. His routine typically demanded a blow-job first and then, before he was ready to climax, I’d tuck him inside me and he’d finish off. But if he was hard already, I was expected to stop everything and we’d do it on the carpet with almost zero foreplay.

Although we’d been together some five-and-a-half months, I’d only agreed to start having full sex with him in the last four weeks. And then everything seemed to change. He wanted oral sex nearly every time we met. I’d only started going out with him because I ached to have a man standing beside me; I needed a guy for companionship, not necessarily for intimacy. As I mentioned before, his roughness had strangely attracted me when we first met. But I had made the wrong choice. I should have known; in my first conversation with him, he had listed his only interests as playing football and drinking beer. Nothing else really mattered. I’m not a snob, but I wanted a little more from life.

So how about it, then? he asked now. Shall we go upstairs? Or do you want to have it across the kitchen table?

That was it, I thought. Now he was showing