Wulf filled the time between his bites with small talk, mostly observations about their common books but also a few comments about A Ray of Light, mostly about the business structure that Rae had never thought about, and she nodded while she chewed.
When both of them fell comfortably silent, they listened to the music drifting from the ceiling and walls.
Rae had grown up eating her mother’s cooking because eating out more than a few times a year blew their budget. Her mother had been grown from austere Norwegian stock, so she boiled a hunk of beef in water with salt, dehydrated onion bits, cloves, and a bay leaf. Throwing in a couple potatoes and a carrot rounded out the meal for the six of them. The dorm cafeteria hadn’t been much of an improvement, the one semester that she had had a meal plan. Since then, she had subsisted on cheese sandwiches grilled in foil with an iron on the cotton setting, oranges, and vitamin pills.
The door to the kitchen rattled and cracked open. A black cat pushed its face through and then slid the rest of its body after. It trotted two steps and leapt onto Wulf’s lap.
“Oh! You have a cat? He’s so cute!” Rae said.
“She. Her name is Brunhilde.” He stroked the cat, who kept trying to nose its way toward the steak on Wulf’s plate.
One of the waiters rushed out, jabbering in Swiss or whatever, and tried to remove the cat. Wulf said something, and the man argued but returned to the kitchen, then came back with minced steak on a small plate, which he set on the ground at Wulf’s feet. The cat hopped down and nibbled at the steak.
Obviously, the staff weren’t the only ones who ate in the kitchen with Wulf.
Rae turned back to her food, though she watched the cat out of the corner of her eye. Every now and then, Brunhilde arched her back and rubbed Wulf’s leg, then resumed her supper.
Yeah, that cat was no stranger to eating at Wulf’s feet.
The steak on Rae’s plate parted under her fork as she ate it. Sopping up the creamy sauce only made it better.
Wulf smiled as he watched Rae devour the food, and he said something else about Orlando by Virginia Woolf. She nodded again.
She squeegeed a last smear of whisky-peppercorn sauce off her plate with her fork and licked the fork clean. “That was so good.”
“I’m glad you liked it. My staff will be gratified by your appetite. I hope you saved room for dessert,” Wulf said, just as the waiter guy reappeared holding, dear Lord in Heaven, yet more menus.
“I’m so full. I couldn’t.” The red whalebones were cutting into her bloated belly. Other waiter guys cleared Rae’s embarrassingly clean plate.
“Do try something, even if it is only one spoonful. Yvonne is an excellent pastry chef and chocolatier.”
Rae knew that wine made her stupid, which is probably why she turned to the waiter guy who was waiting for her to say something and said, “Maybe the chocolate mousses?”
“The same,” Wulf told him and handed over his menu.
He was obviously mirroring her choices, so Rae asked him, “Do you want something else? We could have the Bavarian cream or one of the things that I can’t pronounce.”
The waiter turned his impassive face toward Rae. Gray stubble grew in the deep wrinkles around his mouth like grass sprouting in sidewalk cracks. “Mr. von Hannover, the chocolate, he prefers. If you would prefer something else, you should say.”
Rae glanced at Wulf, but he merely shrugged and said, “They know my tastes.”
“The chocolate is fine, thank you, sir.” Rae shrank in her seat a little.
The waiters filed out, leaving them alone again. Brunhilde the cat had wandered off some time that Rae hadn’t noticed.
“Do you eat chocolate for dessert every night?” she asked.
“It is often fruit and cheese with a little chocolate, but yes.”
The dessert came within a minute, suggesting that it had already been made, and Rae resolved to eat just a little taste of each of the three chocolate layers in the tall flute, a little from the white chocolate froth on the top, a bit from the milk chocolate layer in the middle, and just a taste of the deep chocolate silk down in the base.
Of course, she ate the whole thing and drank a glass of the sweet white wine, which was called Riesling, that another waiter poured in another glass around her plate.
Between the wine and the chocolate and the enormous amount of food, Rae felt on the verge of falling asleep and dreaming about flying through clouds. She slouched and rested her head on the back of her chair. “That was amazing.”
Wulf’s smile was kind. “Sometimes I forget that my people are all excellent at their jobs.”
“I have never tasted anything like that.” Her eyelids drooped.
“Yvonne trained here in the States, at the culinary institute in the north of the city. When my previous chef decided to open a restaurant, she wanted to try her hand at the kitchen, so we sent her there for classes.”
“Is his restaurant here?”
“No. He located it in Los Angeles. It’s worked out well for him.” Wulf’s voice was getting kind of far away.
“That’s cool.” Really cool. Dang nifty. She yawned.
“Quite.” Rae felt his warm hand slide around hers. “Shall we go upstairs?”
She sat up in shock, and the twinkling dining room glared before her eyes adjusted. She whispered, “No! We can’t. Not here. They will all know what we’re doing.”
He chuckled. His thumb rubbed the back of her hand, and a wisp of desire rose like smoke through her. “They are all adults, as are we.”
“Oh my God. I would never. That’s like doing it in your parents’ house.”
“I assure you, they are not your parents, nor mine.”
“They’ll laugh at me. They’ll talk.”
“Rae,” and Wulf pressed her hand between both of hers, calming her, “if everyone thought that way, the nobility would have died out generations ago.”
“Still, it’s not like we’re married or something.” That should make him back off.
Instead, Wulf stood and tugged her hand gently, pulling her to her feet. His fingers wound around hers. She bobbed as the wine rushed to her head.
He said, “Let’s go.”
She scooted out from around the chair and snagged her purse from where it hung on the back. Dizziness spun her head. “I couldn’t.”
“Come on.” He snagged the half-full bottle of Riesling and two clean glasses by their stems, and he led her through the dining room. The candlelight slanted one way through the glasses, then the other, as they walked beside the long table.
She followed him. “Everyone will know.”
“We’ll sneak upstairs. No one will notice us.”
“I so doubt that.”
He tugged her arm. She followed.
The wine and chocolate sang in her head. She wanted to press against his skin and feel him under her palms. Her body followed where he led her, even as her brain protested that everyone would know.
He stopped at the door to peer around the corner, and Rae didn’t see and bumped him from behind. When he turned to shush her, lest the staff hear them, she couldn’t help herself and kissed him.
His other hand slipped around her waist and drew her closer. The whalebones in her dress poked her ribs and hips as she fit her body against him.
He pulled back and grinned at her. “Careful. Given an opportunity, I will sweep all these table settings to the floor and have you on that table.”
She couldn’t breathe for wanting him to do just that, but Wulf looked out the door again and led her down the hall of ferns and urns to the main room. He paused at the base of the staircase to glance around them, scrutinizing the conversation groupings of satin couches and chairs and peering at the supersized grand piano for lingering servants.
Yeah, he was definitely mocking her.
Rae wanted to scurry away from all the eyes in this house, so she gathered up the skirt of that red-beaded girl plumage and led the way. Wulf chuckled all t
he way up the stairs behind her.
At the top, she waited for him to climb the last steps because she didn’t know which direction to go. She looked back, and the enormous chandelier hung like a crystal sun suspended at eye-level.
Wulf bounded up the last step and tugged her hand again. “This way.”
“All right.” She followed him to the left and hoped like mad that no one had seen them go upstairs.
The balcony skirted the chandelier and the entertaining room below. Rae wanted to hug the wall, but her scarlet dress was worse than useless as camouflage. She felt like a flag snapping in the wind.
After far too long a walk down a beige and gold hallway with too many doors in what must have been the house’s other wing, Wulf opened a door at the end of the hallway. Rae dashed in, and he closed the door behind them.
Rae had almost expected to find herself in a dungeon, a Black Room of Despair and Punishment kind of place, but the blue comforter draped over the oak four-poster bed looked more nautical than naughty. Blue stuffed chairs grouped around a coffee table.
The bookcases on the walls—three of the walls, carpet to high ceiling and corner to faraway corner—those caught her attention.
The books on them weren’t stuffy leather-bound volumes that might have been hollow stage props but bright books of fiction and biography and nonfiction and essays. Three doors and a television were cut into the shelves.
The unsettling thing was that the books, instead of being a crazy quilt of colored spines splattering the walls, were shelved by color.
The wall they had come in was coated in red books, and books in the near corner shaded from red to orange, and then a meticulous rainbow of book spines flowed down the walls. Violet merged into black at the far corner, and monochrome shades of black lightened to gray and then white on the far wall. “Good grief, don’t you have an e-reader?”
Wulf hauled her toward him and caught her in his arms. She was still trying to take it all in when he kissed her and pressed her against the door with his body. His hard muscles under his suit crushed her, and her heart jumped. The smoky wisp of desire sparked.
On the long wall on Rae’s left, plate-glass windows overlooked the pool. Across the blue water and rocks, the other wing of the house spread out, and Rae could see, down on the first floor, through the windows to the fern-filled urns that led to the dining room. “Can they see us through those windows?”
“That, I can fix.” Wulf grabbed a remote from his bedside nightstand and pressed a button. The windows darkened like enormous light-detecting sunglasses. The lights dimmed to something like candlelight.
Without Wulf holding Rae up, her knees buckled, and she sagged against the door.
He stood the wine bottle and glasses on the nightstand.
He crossed the room in three long strides and Rae’s feet flipped off the ground as Wulf swept her up in his arms. “Now, where were we?”
Rae grabbed his neck to take some of her weight off his arms. Even though she giggled at the thought that he could pick her up like she was a wispy doll-girl, she shouldn’t let him hurt himself. Her skirt fluttered around her ankles and all that wine she had drunk discombobulated her. “Wulf, you’re going to throw out your back or something. You can’t keep doing this.”
He carried her to the bed without staggering. “You are far too concerned about that.”
“I’m not some tiny-little thing that you can just toss around!”
He grinned. “You certainly are not. I don’t prefer tiny, fragile, little things. They might break.” He hefted her closer and kissed her.
The kiss warmed Rae’s lips and zinged through her body. He dropped her legs and she ended up kneeling on the bed, still kissing him while he shrugged off his suit coat and yanked off his tie.
He unbuttoned all those too-many buttons that ran down his shirt. Even though Rae had half a mind to yank those buttons off to get at his chest, she unbuckled his belt and unhooked his pants, pushing at them. She wanted to roll on that bed with him, his body tight against her skin.
Wulf’s white shirt opened, and he flipped his shirt tails behind him and stripped his pants off. He was already hard under his black briefs.
Rae spread her hands over his chest, rubbing his blond fuzz under her palms. His breath warmed her face, and she could smell the wine and chocolate they’d had.
Her own head spun from too much wine. Wulf dragged her closer to him, crushing her to him, and his tongue forced her mouth open. She whimpered, wanting him inside her right then, but her dress was still on and she knew that he would make her wait for it. She wrapped her arms tight around his neck and held on, pushing her tits against him and feeling his breath rush into him. His hands roamed over her back and then rubbed down to her ass, squeezing her flesh.
At The Devilhouse, during the show, that man had parted that woman’s butt cheeks and then rammed his dick up her ass. Rae’s backside heated from Wulf’s strong fingers groping her butt, and her asshole felt sensitive as her cheeks rubbed together.
She shoved his open shirt back from his shoulders, but Wulf tugged it against her hands, pulling it back on.
She ran her hands up the front of his body, from his lean waist, over his muscled chest, and up to his shoulders. The soft blond fuzz on his chest between his pectoral muscles tapered to line separating his abs and disappeared into his pants. “Let me see you.”
“Rae, no.” He kissed her, trying to push her back onto the bed.
Rae slid her hands around his waist toward that terrible scar in back. “Does it hurt?”
“It is rather inflexible,” he admitted.
Her fingers found the twisted skin on his back. The skin knotted around the old wound. She whispered, “Please, all of you.”
Wulf hesitated, then yanked his shirt off his arms behind him. He pushed her back on the bed, his teeth raking her neck.
Rae fell back and closed her eyes. The world spun around the bed. “Good Lord, I’m tipsy.”
“What?” Wulf pulled away from her.
“No. Don’t. Come back.” She reached for him.
“Are you drunk?” His flat tone sounded like all the passion had been leeched out of him.
She didn’t open her eyes because the bed looped around them like they were flying. “Your staff kept pushing the wine. They kept pouring new glasses and I had to drink those, too.”
His tone turned distressed. “Reagan, are you drunk?”
His unspoken question finally woke her up, and she opened her eyes to see him looking aghast. “Drunk? No! Not drunk. Just tipsy. Just wobbly because I drank more than usual.” She locked her arms around his neck. “Not impaired. Not making bad decisions. Don’t stop!”
Wulf released his breath and lowered his head to kiss her again.
“Wait,” she said seriously, and his blue eyes opened near her face, also serious. She asked, “Are you too drunk? Am I taking advantage of you?”
He laughed and grabbed her wrists, holding her down on the bed. “Yes, I am impaired, and I might make rash decisions.” He kissed her hard then, and to Rae, his hard tongue probing her soft mouth felt like what was to come. He growled, “Sometimes, I get wild when I’m drunk. Sometimes, I can’t control myself.”
Rae’s panties were hot with the idea that Wulf wouldn’t be able to control himself.
He pulled back and grabbed her, flipping her over. She rose to her hands and knees, and he grabbed the heavy, beaded fabric over her hips and forced her back against his crotch. “Someday, I will have you like this.” His voice thickened with lust.
Rae’s butt cheeks rubbed against his hips, and her ass felt as hot as her pussy.
Wulf leaned over her back, and his rough voice whispered near her ear, “And I will make you like it, even more than you liked being spanked.”
Rae’s pussy spasmed with wanting him, and her arms trembled.
He grabbed her arms and pulled her up straight to kneeling. His body pressed all down her back and ass, and his hands
roved over her belly and down her thighs.
She lifted her arm to run her fingers through his close-cropped hair, rolling her head to the side to bare her neck. His mouth came down on her shoulder, biting her. The pain of his bites got all mixed up with the pleasure of his hands moving up her body and grasping her breasts. Even through the red dress’s beads and satin and her bra, she felt him slide his thumbs over her nipples.
She moaned and pressed herself backward against his chest and hips.
Wulf grabbed her hips and stepped back from her, then wrapped her long curls around his hand. He still had her by the hair as he yanked her zipper down her back. Her dress, barely clinging to her shoulders, fell. Rae grabbed the bodice and held it over her chest just as a reflex, but Wulf grabbed fistfuls of the fabric and pulled her backward off the bed by the dress.
The scarlet dress, weighed down with glass beads, plummeted to the floor.
She caught her breath at the cool air rushing over her skin, but Wulf shoved her back onto the bed and was on her back before she could flip over. Peach- and yellow-spined books covered the wall beyond the bed. He grabbed her wrists hard and pinned her arms by her ears as he nipped the back of her neck, sending lovely shocks down her spine. Rae’s cheek pressed against the soft comforter, and she groaned, wanting more, wanting him now.
He twisted her arms around and held her wrists together at the small of her back with one strong hand. Rae’s shoulders strained, but her body felt ready to burst with wanting him. He popped the hook on her bra. The lace fell over her arms as he chewed his way down her back. His bites scraped her, but she felt his other hand slowly, driving-her-crazy slowly, sliding from her knee up the inside of her thigh.
The foreplay was taking forever, and she tried to sit up to whirl him around and push him underneath her, but he stood beside the bed where she lay across it, holding her down. His breath warmed her spine and then her ass cheek, teasing her. His lips brushed her skin. He trailed his fingers up her inner thigh, pressing her soft flesh there, and she waited breathlessly for his fingers to reach her panties.
Red Hot Obsessions: Ten Contemporary Hot Alpha Male Romance Novels Boxed Set Page 193