My Addiction (Club Desire #2)(24)
His hard tone was all too familiar. It was the one he used to tell subordinates that King Fretwell was right, they were wrong, and their compliance was expected. She had stopped being cowed by that when she was sixteen.
She swallowed her anger and fought for calm. “I won’t rehash this with you again. I have no desire to be in the medical profession. My work makes me happy, I make a good living, and that’s what matters.”
She kept speaking before he could interrupt. “Is there an actual reason you’ve been calling me, or are you still trying to bully me into doing what you want? Because if that’s it, let’s hang up now and save us both time and aggravation.”
“Kathryne Jane Fretwell,” he began, his voice ominous, reminding her of when she was small and had dared commit some minor infraction that earned his displeasure.
Before Kate could stop it, a laugh bubbled up and spilled out over the phone line. It wasn’t a happy sound and definitely didn’t bring any lighter feelings with it. “Seriously? Are you hoping by using my middle name, I’ll suddenly have an epiphany that everything you say is gospel?”
His normal diatribe began and flowed over her without any of the individual words registering. She had heard a variation on the same theme ever since she could remember, and she wasn’t willing to waste another minute on it.
“When you have something to speak to me about besides trying to run my life, then you’re welcome to contact me. Until then, I’m done.” She took the phone away from her ear and touched the red button to hang up. Not quite as satisfying as slamming it against the desk, but she wasn’t about to subject her iPhone to that treatment over his majesty, Richard Fretwell III.
She looked back at her computer screen, trying to remember where she’d left off. This was just a design update, so it wasn’t as challenging as some of her other corporate projects.
Anger still burned in her belly. She wouldn’t be able to get back into work mode right now. In fact, the only reason she had been sucked into work as soon as Dex had dropped her off was the urgent email from her client that these changes on the front page of their site needed to be done before seven a.m. tomorrow.
They asked for similar changes almost weekly. The adjustments were never difficult, but tended to be time consuming and sometimes tedious. Today’s involved hiding seven coconuts somewhere in the front-page design for their time-share resorts based in Atlanta. They had time-shares all over the world, but it was almost always the ones in the U.S. that needed these odd changes.
She pushed her hair over her shoulder. They paid on time, the work was easy and steady, and it was their money to waste on such mindless updates if they chose. Although she often wondered what their marketing department was smoking when they came up with such odd last-minute requests.
Maybe it was for a promotion of some kind? But that meant they had weird promotions nearly every single week.
She shrugged.
Whatever.
She frowned. In the past, she would never have gotten to the “whatever” stage with a project. Her understanding of a company’s motivations was part of what made her a good graphic designer. She vowed to figure this latest challenge out.
She knew exactly where this new laissez-faire attitude had come from.
Over the last few months she had started to realize the city of L.A., and even The Dungeon, was no longer working for her, and she had begun to research other options. Part of her dissatisfaction with her hometown was because her father lived here. She loved him, but he didn’t respect her as an adult. His smothering and dictatorial manner had become insufferable, and she was fast reaching her “done” mode with the situation.
Since she was self-employed, she could work from anywhere that was IT-friendly and easy to find clients. Someplace with a fetish scene like the one she’d always imagined would be a huge plus.
Thanks to her maternal grandmother’s very generous trust fund that her father had no control over, she could afford to move anywhere she chose. In fact, her grandmother had also left her some real estate scattered around the country that Kate was still deciding what to do with. If she moved to any of those cities, she would already have a home base while she got settled.
True to her organized and detailed manner, she had already narrowed her choices. The current front-runner was Phoenix. There was an elite dungeon in the city called Club Desire that had a reputation for being the best sex club in the entire southwestern U.S. One of her grandmother’s houses sat in Paradise Valley, a very nice suburb of Phoenix.
Throughout her research, Club Desire kept popping up, as if the universe was giving her a nudge toward Phoenix. However, there were also good possibilities in Las Vegas and San Francisco. But even though Gram also had a house in San Francisco and some land in Nevada, so far, Phoenix was her favorite. The city itself seemed more suited to her tastes.
The Vegas dungeon looked good, but seemed like it would attract more of the same types of Doms L.A. did, and she’d had more than enough of them.
San Francisco was a terrific place to go on vacation, since she loved seafood and the unique character of the city, but she couldn’t see herself living there for some reason, although she couldn’t quite articulate why.
As an added bonus, there were no earthquakes in Arizona, only heat and occasional dust storms. She could even drive a few hours north during the winter and go skiing.
And from her research, it sounded like a much better crop of Doms lived in Phoenix. The submissives grapevine said they were highly trained, very creative, and as hot as the face of the sun. She planned to make time for a trip out there soon to see for herself.