“First of all, you’re not The Dom anymore, and I trust you. Even if they had lied and told me that you’d cheated or that you were going to break it off, I certainly trust you a far sight more than I trust three women that I had just met.”
Wulf’s hand crept down her back. “I will keep that in mind, should evil princesses ever try to steal you away from me again.”
“Do you regret it, though?” she asked.
“Regret what?”
“Say, I had gone back to Pirtleville.”
“I would have followed you and convinced you to leave eventually.”
“Okay, fine. Say you had never met me. Say that I had refused to go with Georgie and Lizzy to that Devilhouse party.”
“What a terrible hypothesis,” he said. He caught her hand that had drifted up around his neck and drew the inside of her wrist to his lips.
“Would you have married one of them?”
“I would probably still be sequestered in The Devilhouse, with all that entails.”
“That’s not what I mean. You would have had to marry one of them eventually.”
“In all honesty, I probably would have gone on as I was. I was not seeking to marry. It was only after we met that I wanted to marry you.”
He had snapped shut that shiny shell, which didn’t mean that the answer was one that she didn’t want to hear. Right now, it probably meant that Wulf felt ripped open again, still.
As always, her heart broke for him again.
Rae reached behind his head and steered his mouth down to hers.
His gentle kiss was just his lips caressing hers, but she tightened her arm around his neck and dragged him closer, kissing him deeper.
His arms firmed around her, and his lips became more insistent, sucking at her mouth. He drew back for a moment and asked, “Are you quite sure? It was just this morning.”
“You know what they say about pregnancy hormones,” she said. Rae grabbed Wulf around the shoulders. She was only four inches shorter than he was, so she fit her mouth to his and kissed him hard.
He growled in his throat and lifted her, carrying her to the bed. She had stopped protesting a few months ago but knew that the time was coming when he would have to stop doing it, probably in about two more months.
But for now, she was nestled in Wulf’s strong arms, kissing him.
He settled her on the bed, still mussed from her nap, and crawled on top of her, kissing her, and she ran her hands over his long, lean body, all hard muscle and glistening gold skin under that suit, and she wanted more.
He whispered near her ear, his breath wafting through her hair, “That headboard might be quite useful, considering all those iron bars. Perhaps I’ll revisit my Dom days and tie you to it.”
Close, but that wasn’t quite what Rae had in mind.
Even though she trusted Wulf, there had been a few precarious moments when the princesses had tilted her view of him and how his friends must see her, and she was more of the mind to lock him down, to remind him why a strong woman was more to his taste than a pale princess.
Rae bent her leg, planted her foot on the bed, and tipped Wulf over on his back.
He chuckled a hoarse grunt and grasped her wrists, obviously intending to wrestle her into submission, but Rae dodged him and grabbed his throat with her teeth.
He stretched his neck under her mouth, breathing a harsh gasp.
She switched her hands to grab his wrists, crawled on top of him, and pushed his muscled arms up until his fingers met the headboard. “Grab it,” she whispered in his ear. “Don’t let go.”
Wulf’s fingers wound around the twisted metal in the headboard. “I want to touch you.”
“Let me touch you.”
His deep moan that rumbled through his burly chest under her body sounded more like pain than passion.
Rae pulled off his clothes. She unbuttoned his shirt, letting her fingers drag over his rounded pecs, and shoved the crisp fabric over the thick muscle wound around his arms, telling him to let go of the headboard just long enough to pull his shirt over his hands. The richly inked tattoo on his back flashed into view—the black, green, and violent pink of the cherry blossoms swirling around the white dragon at the center where the gnarled scar tissue was too knotted to tattoo. Rae’s fingers strayed toward it, but sometimes Wulf went quiet if he knew she was exploring it, so she pulled her hands back.
She unbuckled his belt and gathered the cloth of his suit slacks, dragging them and his snug underwear down his long legs, stroking the heavy sinews in his thighs and calves.
By the time she had him naked, all six feet and four inches of him, his long, muscled body as golden as sunlight, his harsh breathing sounded like he had run a marathon. The stacked bricks of his abs swelled with each rough breath.
Rae straddled him, his stiff shaft nudging her, her knees on either side of his hips on the soft bed, and unbuttoned her own blouse. The small buttons slipped through the silk that was the dark blue of Wulf’s hungry eyes. His head was propped up on the pillow, and she swore that he didn’t blink the whole time she stripped for him. His knuckles whitened where he gripped the headboard.
Yeah, he wasn’t thinking about numbers or blood or princesses acting like horse thieves at all. She would have bet dollars to donuts that his head was full of nothing but testosterone-fueled fire.
She slipped off the bed for a moment and shucked her pants and underwear, and then she clambered back on top of him and stretched out on his strong body. Pressing herself against his thick muscles felt like lying on a dry riverbed of sun-warmed, water-smoothed stones.
He shuddered under her, his muscles straining with effort.
Rae mouthed his neck and the hard, round muscle of his shoulders, and each of his groans was more tortured than the last. Wulf’s natural male musk filled her nose and her mouth.
His arm twitched under her tongue.
Rae was sure that he had let go of the headboard for just a moment, but he had remembered himself.
Rae smiled, her breath warming the skin on his neck.
Yes, it is wonderful when a man takes control and you lose all yours, but sometimes, when a man gives up control and allows you to explore his body, to touch and tongue his hard flesh and the crenellations and rounded muscle of his abdominals and pectoral muscles, to have your way with him, even though he trembles under your hands with mastering his slender self-control, that’s a whole hell of a lot of fun, too.
And sometimes, you just want to get him so riled up that animal instinct takes over, so that even Wulfram Augustus Heinrich Ernst Georg Berthold Friedrich Wilhelm Louis Ferdinand Prinz von Hannover can’t think about anything except you.
Rae crawled up to his ear. Her thick auburn hair fell around them, lying in long ribbons where that tattoo stained the heavy deltoid muscle over his shoulder, and she whispered, “You can let go now.”
Wulf shoved her off of him and rolled onto her, his mouth crashing down on hers and his hands finding her wrists to lock Rae against the soft bed. His satiny skin slipped over hers and he dragged himself on top of her, pressing her down with his weight. She caught a glimpse of his face as he tore himself away to breathe. Passion glazed his dark blue eyes.
His hands and mouth were everywhere, grabbing her and sucking on her flesh and breasts, and within minutes she was panting for him, but he wasn’t done with her yet.
Wulf flipped her over on her stomach and wrapped her in his arms, pulling her up to stand on her knees and lean against his muscled body. From behind her, his hands roamed her body, palming her breasts and sliding down her belly to her folds. Rae arched against him as he slipped against her swollen flesh, then massaged her, then his fingers slid inside her and stroked her until she writhed against him, trying to turn, but his arms clamped harder around her hips and breasts and he drove her, rubbing her inside and over the sharp points of pleasure, tightening the tension in her body but never quite letting her fall over the edge, until she cried out for him.
He pushed inside her, filling her at just the limit that she could take, and she held him around the neck. She tried to pull his body down to her, but Wulf watched her, his dark blue eyes blazing. His body glistened with fresh sweat. His nostrils flared with each breath like he was trying to control himself but failing.
Rae let one hand drift down to his cheek, and he didn’t look away from her eyes.
He pumped into her, a thrill running through her as his body rubbed against her. He said, “I would never have let you go.”
“I wouldn’t have left you.” The ripples were becoming waves as he thrust harder, and her head began to buzz.
He slammed into her, taking her hard. Her body pulsed with each thrust inside her, clenching, tightening, until she couldn’t hear her own breath and she broke through. Ecstasy shot up her spine, arching her body, and Wulf grunted through clenched teeth, strained into her, and crumpled against her body, panting against her shoulder, “I love you. I can’t let you go.”
The waves broke over her, still blinding her in their intensity. His heavy body pressed her into the softness of the bed while she shook.
As the swells subsided, she stroked Wulf’s hair, his blond strands slipping through her fingers, and he kissed her shoulder and the side of her neck.
Just as he was pushing himself away from her, an image of the three princesses rose again in Rae’s mind, any one of them a more appropriate, logical choice than a person such as herself, a needy, insecure commoner.
Damn. They had gotten under her skin.
She blurted, “Are you sorry that you didn’t marry a princess?”
Wulf chuckled, splayed on his back on the bed. His ragged breath still pumped in his burly chest, and he ran one hand through his hair, a sign of exhaustion for him.
He asked, “Why would I want to marry a princess when I have a Domme?”
Kidnapped
A Billionaires in Disguise: Rae and Wulf
Epilogue, #5
By: Blair Babylon
Discovery
Wulf von Hannover sat at his desk in his small home office, a bunker-like room deep in the center of his house, and clicked an icon on the computer monitor. The wide screen curved around his desk so that he could view hundreds of stocks trading in real time. The computer whined as it dropped to a low-power state.
He stretched hard, arms overhead. The mass of stiff scar tissue on his back didn’t allow his right arm to extend as far as his left, but he grabbed his elbow and forced another few inches out of it.
The flurry of stock position adjustments that morning had left him dizzy, but he was taking a week off—a solid week, he insisted to himself—to marry Rae in Switzerland, three days hence. It was just the religious wedding because they had been legally married in France a few months before, just before they had discovered that she was already pregnant and Wulf’s life had changed.
A small smile curved his lips.
Utterly, utterly changed, and it would change again in six months.
He wanted to compress a young life into that time for his wife because she seemed so very young sometimes, not yet twenty-two, but he wanted to slow down time and watch these few months, savor every moment, because he would never forget even a glimpse.
Wulf stretched harder, lengthening his back and the hard bricks of his abdominals as the computer screen dimmed, turning off. The curved screen was almost as wide as his spread arms, well over six feet.
He faced a solid week without the psychotic flicker of stock symbols and prices, without manipulating the world through the ebb and flow of currency and capital.
However would he survive?
He would have to find a suitable diversion.
Or some suitable diversions.
Wulf smiled in the dark as he rolled his chair backward to leave his small command center. One last glance at the lower, right corner of the screen before it faded to black confirmed that it was nearly two o’clock and he had missed lunch.
No matter. He had just enough time to finish packing his toiletries before the cars left for the airport and his leased plane that would fly them to Switzerland. Their wedding clothes had been sent ahead with his sister, Flicka, after the final fittings yesterday.
Odd, his housekeeper Rosamunde hadn’t called him for lunch when Rae should have arrived home from her meeting with her professors. Rae was working on independent study projects over the summer, one research paper on behavioral interventions in autism spectrum disorders and one on multiple personality disorders, and these evidently required numerous consultations, even one on the very day that they left for their religious wedding in Switzerland.
Outside the door to his office, he followed the hallway that turned toward the main rooms.
Usually, cleaning of some sort was carried out in the afternoons, but the light brown furniture in the vast receiving room stood silent in the unoccupied space. Enormous potted plants, his belated addition to try to add some Black Forest lushness to the desert colors, waved in the air conditioning that poured cool air into the space, beating back the desert sunlight that blazed through the high wall of windows. The pool and courtyard outside warped subtly through the thick, bulletproof panes.
His stomach rumbled, and Wulf pressed his abdomen through his white shirt. He hadn’t worn a tie this morning and his collar was unbuttoned. Rae’s Southwestern casualness was rubbing off on him.
Lunch was his first order of business.
He turned past the grand staircase and meandered toward the kitchen, still peering around the conversation groupings for his staff.
Someone should be around.
Worry prickled the nape of his neck. His computer room was hidden, and staff weren’t allowed in except for basic cleaning in the evenings. He had been locked in since around four in the morning. Due to insulation and the separate cooling system in there, it was practically a bunker.
He might not have heard anything if something had gone wrong.
Wulf stopped, listening to the silence hovering in the formal entertaining room for footsteps or the metallic click of a gun cocking.
The high walls around the room were unblemished. The bulletproof glass was transparent, uncracked. The pool outside glittered blue in the sunlight.
No signs of violence.
His own footsteps tapped the cool marble floor as he walked toward the kitchen.
Murmuring traveled through the door before his fingertips touched it, and he relaxed fractionally. He pushed the door open, hesitating before he walked through the frame.
Inside the kitchen, his staff sat at tables and leaned against the counters, arguing very quietly.
Over by the coffeemaker, one of his most senior security people, Hans, sucked down coffee like he was drowning his sorrows. He poured himself another cup and turned, catching sight of Wulf standing in the door.
Hans announced, “He’s here.”
His staff swiveled and caught him in their stares.
Rosamunde, his house manager, stood over by the stainless steel ovens with her arms crossed, a scowl twisting her face. Most of the other housekeepers had lines of worry between their eyes.
Hans and Luca, the security men who should have been guarding his wife at her university, hunched their shoulders in their black suits.
God, no.
Wulf shoved everything away, and his heartbeat trod steadily in his chest, as calm as if he were on a ridge with a rifle in his arms.
He raised one eyebrow. “What happened?”
“We’re not sure,” Hans said.
“How are you not sure of what happened?” Wulf stepped into the kitchen. The door swung closed behind him.
Luca set his coffee on the steel counter and straightened. “We maintained a short distance, as Ms. Stone requested. Ms. Stone was approached by a college-age female, approximately five feet-eight with dar
k blond hair and wearing a long skirt and white blouse. After a very short conversation, Ms. Stone followed the female into the dense crowd between classes. We pursued, but they got into a white, older-model sedan, license plate A-K-G dash four seven nine. The other female drove away. Our car was parked in another lot, so we were unable to continue to surveil Ms. Stone.”
Wulf breathed naturally, watching the concerned frowns and tense body posture of his people. He tugged his phone from his breast pocket inside his jacket, but he had received no texts nor calls from her.
He tried calling her mobile, but it went to voicemail before the first ring.
Rae never turned off her mobile, ever. One of the few things that she had splurged on—and she did consider it a financial splurge, which had amused him no end—was a variety of cell phone chargers: car, rapid, and solar, and even an external battery that she kept in her old dorm room, just in case.
He texted, Are you all right? Call home or security line.
Wulf looked up at his people, and their guilty expressions told him that they had already tried all those easy options. “Have we tracked her mobile’s location?”
Hans said, “We are unable to receive a signal from her cell phone.”
“I see. What are our options?”
“We wait until she calls us, I suppose,” Hans said.
“Other options?” Wulf asked.
Luca and Hans glanced at each other.
Hans said, “General rule is that one has to wait three days to file a missing person report for an adult.”
Wulf tightened his hands. “I am aware of the rules that pertain to other people. I asked what our options are.”
Hans and Luca looked at each other again. “We can call her friends.”
“On the contrary,” Wulf said. “We’ll call our friends.”
Liars
Two Hours Earlier.
Hester’s beat-up car clattered like a pile of paint cans as it rolled over the parking lot speed bumps and merged with the speeding traffic.
Billionaire Ever After Page 8