A thong.
Her thong.
“It’s harassing me, not knowing what you look like,” he said, tracing the thong over the design on her shirt.
Was she supposed to feel sorry for him? At least he’d come. She hadn’t.
“Take this off.” Venturing forward, he cased her in. “Let me have something to remember, not imagine.”
And let you call me “beautiful” again, when I’m anything but?
“A look,” he coaxed. “Just a look.”
Sexual frustration peaked, and Bindi felt infused with…power. It intoxicated her, had her leading him to her suite. On her direction, he stood at the foot of her lavish bed.
She climbed onto the white-linen topped mattress, pranced to the headboard, faced the trio of framed coral reef prints.
Wind sighed against her skin as she drew the T-shirt over her head. “Just a look, you said.” When he moved to one side of the bed, she skipped out of his reach. “What are you doing? A look, remember?”
“Now I want a kiss.” He crossed to the other side fast—faster than she might’ve predicted possible. She dashed, barely avoided his grasp.
“Can’t catch me? Can’t kiss me,” she taunted. Only when he returned to the end of the bed did she flounce her way back to the center of the headboard. “Mmm-mmm-mmm. I taste victory. It’s delicious.”
A heartbeat of silence, then he lunged, clasped her ankles and yanked hard. Her squeak dissolved in a peal of laughter as her backside hit perfumed linen with an impact that made the mattress quiver.
The laughter faded in their kiss. It demanded, threatened. Would their lives, their agendas, be intact when they left this bed?
Get over it.
Right. She’d be crazy to let the playful risk of this moment mean more than it should. Worse—let Santino mean more to her than he ever, ever should.
But the craziest thing she could do right now was deny herself the zing of pleasure that penetrated her as his beard grazed her.
Permission? He didn’t request it. Warning? He deprived her of it.
Santino’s mouth tantalized her breasts, sucked at their tips. “What’s that you said about victory?”
“I—I—” A moan escaped. She was a moaner and had absolutely no chance of hiding it from this man. “I said…?”
“Mmm-hmm. Think.”
With his teeth scraping her nipples? Not likely. “Can’t.”
“Yeah, you can.”
Breathe now. Nothing to fake here. Nothing to rush.
“Oh… Victory’s delicious.”
Bringing her to the end of the bed, he spread her legs, then parted her folds with his tongue. “You’re mine tonight,” he said, so serious as he slid two large-knuckled fingers in deep.
The possessive, naked words, combined with the authority of his touch and the thoroughness of his mouth, pinned her still and baited her to recognize what turned her on…turned her inside out.
Her reaction to him was instinctual, as involuntary as a heartbeat. She clutched his head, but could neither push him away nor urge him closer. She wanted to watch, wanted to understand why a man who’d had so much taken away would be so giving. Only, pleasure pressured her to lie back, close her eyes and take—
Goose bumps rose on her arms and her nipples tightened as a breath of wind brushed her. “The windows! Shut the windows.”
“Rain’s stopped.”
So it had. When, she had no clue. “Shut them anyway. I told you before, I don’t perform for audiences.” She’d already played a risky game, wrapping her legs around him on the veranda.
“Someone’d have to hover in a helicopter to sneak a peek,” he reasoned.
“Someone might hear me.”
“Hear you?” Only then did he take his mouth away. “Hear you scream, maybe? You’re going to scream for me?”
“Not if all these windows stay open. It’s up to you.”
Santino’s response was to kiss the inside of her thigh, abrade her skin with his beard and nip her to draw a sharp gasp. “Hot, Bindi, but that wasn’t a scream. I’m going to get you to scream out these windows so the entire damn island knows you’re being done right.”
“That isn’t gonna happen.”
“No?”
“’Fraid not.”
Then his hands were holding hers and her feet were pressing into his shoulders. She was shaking with need, but stuck in a battle of wills. Fighting him, she fought herself, too. Control or be controlled—she didn’t know which to choose.
“I want the windows shut.” I think…
He answered her demand with “I want my tongue in you when you come, but nod if you want me to stop. Nod for me, all right, and I’ll stop right here and shut them. I’ll take my time about it, make sure they’re locked and everything’s nice and secure and private.”
What if this intensity couldn’t be recaptured? Would he make her want and wait on purpose—play with her again?
“Or shake your head no if you don’t want me to stop. Shake your head and ride out every moment of this.” He kissed her intimately, and she might’ve hit the damn floor if he wasn’t anchoring her to the bed. “Up to you.”
When she shook her head, growled out the word no maybe a dozen times for good measure, he grunted a laugh, then shattered her with the harshest orgasm she could remember.
Breaking for him, screaming because she couldn’t resist, she let him hold her hands and hold her down as she let go.
After her slow writhing and quieting moans revealed the last of the sensations were coasting through her, she felt herself being freed.
Releasing her hands, striding across the room to the large windows, Santino said, “You wanted these closed, right?”
“Before I screamed myself hoarse, yes,” she said, flipping onto her belly. The tingle on her thighs and V predicted whisker burn in her future. “So to get me to join you in the States, you’re bribing me with the promise of revenge sex?”
“Fun revenge sex.”
“Cute, Franco. But my decision stands. I’m not getting on a plane with you. Can’t give up another week in paradise for fantastic sex.”
“Fantastic sex is paradise. To some.”
“To you?”
“Tabitha was paradise.”
More like a mirage, but Bindi wasn’t going to dwell on technicalities. “She’s back in your head. I’m not mad about it.”
Tabitha’s footprints were all over this man—not that it came as much of a shock. According to Bindi’s mother, who’d strived to be a perfect Christian wife to her perfectly imperfect husband, from Eve to Delilah to Jezebel, a woman’s betrayal could leave some nasty damage.
She imagined love—the odd, complicated accessory it seemed to be—gave betrayal that extra something to make it slice deeper and hurt longer. Love, the same as fidelity and loyalty, were risks the men in her reality refused to let weaken their journeys to glittering success and enviable power.
“A person shouldn’t be your paradise,” she said.
“What we had going—ah, damn, it was so good. My life was good when we were solid like that. When she left, the good went with her.”
“I think she left hot on the heels of all that good you’re talking about. You were still in the NFL, the Slayers were still a Franco-owned team and Al was still a guy you could recognize as your father. When the tide turned, Tabitha turned.” Not all that keen on keeping up a discussion about a woman whose ambitions had once mirrored her own, Bindi sighed deeply into the covers. “I ate an illegal amount of chocolate, did naughty things with you on a piano bench, let you do very naughty things to me on this bed and screamed sex noises out the windows. All that’s left is for you to roll me up in these superfancy covers like a burrito and let me sleep through tomorrow.”
Or hold me. Be different.
The others had never held her. They’d called her beautiful and sent a car for her. Or they’d passed out, spent, and left her to shower and book it before they awoke.
>
Santino’s arm came around her, her back was to his front and she thought she might either cry because she so wanted to be held or freak out because this felt suspiciously like snuggling, and she wasn’t supposed to be the kind to let her ex-fiancé’s son snuggle her after a night of total-mistake sex.
She was the kind who ran like mad away from her mistakes.
“I— I’m not a…a, uh, cuddler.” Stuttering, really? “What I mean is, we can stay like this for a few, but it’s not something I do regularly.” At least the words were out there. Awkward as all get-out, but out there.
“And I don’t stay the night,” he said, nuzzling her shoulder. “But…”
But he’d spent the night with her.
What were they doing? What were they thinking? What was wrong with them?
“I have a question.”
Add it to the pile, man. “Yeah?”
“Why the Marvel shirt?”
She giggled. “Oh, that. My daddy went off the deep end for that sort of thing before I was born. Graphic novels. Comic books. He took me to ComicCon once, and we had the best time.” She liked to pretend he’d been her loving father—and not a monster—then. “He bought me the shirt. Much too large, but who cares?”
“You got a thing for red capes or bat signals or webs?”
“Okay, I did find Batman pretty damn intriguing. When I decided to dress up as him for Halloween, my mom suggested I be Batgirl or, even more appropriate, Mrs. Batman.”
“What’d you do?”
“Put on a Batman costume three Halloweens in a row.”
His easy chuckle mingled with her giggles, and the blended sound was strange. They didn’t laugh together. Tension and resentment had always taken up all the space between them.
“Anyway,” she said after a while, “I was more into supernatural abilities than any specific superhero or supervillain. Not the standard flying ability or abnormal strength.”
“I wouldn’t be against telekinesis,” he said. “What’d you want?”
“Invisibility. I wanted to be invisible.” She slid her eyes closed. “Before I matured and learned to be comfy in front of the camera—too comfy, if you want to count how many times I’ve ended up on somebody’s gossip page—I dreamed about disappearing.”
“From what?”
“My looks.”
“You’re beautiful. That beauty probably made your ride through life smoother than it could’ve been.”
Wrong!
Though few would cop to it, wealthy men, influential men, men with discriminating tastes saw her “beauty” as merchandise. She knew because she’d cashed in on it far too many times.
Feeling dirty, she lifted his arm, rolled away from him and sat up. “You should get downstairs, give the sofa a chance. I’m going to shower—”
“Again?”
“Yes.” Relieved when he went to the door without another word, she added, “First one awake fixes coffee.”
“Bindi—”
“Good night, Santino.”
“Good night.”
She locked the door behind him. It had been one hell of a good night. Now she needed to figure out how to move on from her hottest mistake ever.
But first, a shower. And another cleansing cry.
Chapter 5
Did roughly forty minutes of drifting, skulking on the rickety edges of awareness, count as sleep? Lying on a sofa that was a few inches too short to be accommodating, his eyes closed, Santino had remained vigilantly connected to his surroundings during that time and in the quiet, sluggish hours that followed.
He didn’t know what he waited for, didn’t legitimately expect his father to come banging on the door to do business with his ex. Had there been opportunities for Bindi to sneak a call to Al and warn him off? Damn straight. It was entirely possible for her to be in Santino’s arms one minute, then on the phone with his father the next.
Almost every particle of him believed she’d somehow played a part of Al’s disappearance. Suspicion had spread through him from corner to corner before getting here, so despite the glimpses of raw honesty he found in Bindi, he couldn’t force himself to trust her—or anyone—completely. The world he lived in didn’t allow it. But he wouldn’t accuse her of organizing his father’s escape from Las Vegas and enabling him to survive underground, because he didn’t think her involvement ran that deep.
Because even she didn’t know the role Al had assigned her.
A discreet, precisely planned and almost irresponsibly expensive vacation wasn’t something a man—even one with a slipshod grasp on his sanità mentale—paid for and forgot about. Gambling debt must’ve already begun closing in on him at the time he’d taken Bindi as his fiancée. Yet he’d spent what must have been a hell of a supply of funds to make a two-week stay in this paradise possible.
Then he’d canceled the engagement, but not the trip.
Why?
What was his gamble? What did he have to gain by approaching a woman he’d strung along in a tropical haven? Touring the Seychelles and entertaining strangers in the villa could eat up only so many hours, leaving dots of moments that were bound to find her alone—reimagining the villa’s garden or kicking up sand on a beach or lagging behind a crowd on a Victoria street. Those moments of isolation were taken for granted, and what if that was what Al was banking on?
Because isolated, Bindi was integral, necessary to Al. Was she a throwaway key to freedom he didn’t deserve? Or did he figure she owed him for the luxurious life she’d lived on his dime—and he was ready to collect?
That suggestion made Santino burn with an unfamiliar brand of anger that stretched inside him and settled.
As dawn breached the dark, he was glad to unfold himself off the sofa and fix the damn coffee. To be the first one awake, he would’ve had to sleep first. But he wasn’t about to let his restlessness and a trivial technicality spark another go-around with Bindi.
Something infiltrated his strongest defenses when his temper met hers. It didn’t stop and end with lust. If it did, he could cease the self-inflicted sweet torture of reliving the sight of her, the sound of her, her scent and touch and taste. Getting hot, getting hard and getting off didn’t happen for him often—but it did happen, so that wasn’t what made her exceptional. And it didn’t make him cured. It was the intimacy she’d offered and he’d selfishly taken, as she rode him, came for him and let him hold her while she talked about superheroes, that got to him.
Damn, did she get to him—in ways that had nothing to do with his libido. If he never put a hand on her again, she’d still get past his barricades and occupy too much space in his head. Last night had been a mistake. Odds were it would happen again if they found themselves in another mistake-making mood. Self-restraint failed him, so yeah, let distance step in.
Santino had given her too much, and that fact made her reminiscent of Tabitha. But he’d taken just as much from Bindi, and he couldn’t leave this island without taking one more thing: answers.
If she came close to satisfying his questions as completely as she satisfied his body, then ambushing her on this island wouldn’t have entirely counteracted his purposes.
And those questions wouldn’t be satisfied if he pissed her off about a pot of coffee.
Figuring out the futuristic-looking brewer was a distraction he appreciated. Leaning over a counter, mumbling a few curses, he got some relief from suspicion and erotic memories. On the other side of the windows lining one of the kitchen walls, an oasis-type terrace tried to lure him. Leafy plants swayed. Birds called out.
He poured a cup, drank down the steaming coffee without flinching. One of the worst moves he could make involved giving in to any temptation to hang around here when he knew he should leave. What he should’ve done was left Bindi alone last night—no unlocking her, no kiss, no sex, no wanting her with a ruthlessness that was as damaging as it was healing.
Get out, Franco. Walking away seemed easy enough. He’d make himself scarce, take a lo
ok around the island, send an “I’m alive, be cool” response to his brother’s text messages. All better options than chillin’ on Bindi’s borrowed terrace, waiting for the smell of coffee to draw her out of her hiding place—no matter how much it killed him to wonder if she’d come stumbling half-awake straight to the brewer or waltz in bright eyed and on guard.
Either way she’d be hot as all hell.
With that realization echoing around his head, he got out of there, shoving his phone and wallet into his pockets and swinging open the front door.
A shard of a second too late he remembered the place was armed with a security system that would, if rigged with typical entry and glass-break sensors, fill the estate with ear-stabbing noise and send out a signal to authorities.
Except…nothing happened. A veranda decorated with rain-drowned tea-light candles and the peaceful whispers of the early morning greeted him.
A quick scan revealed no controls panel, but he didn’t need to see it to confirm the system hadn’t been activated. Being with him wasn’t the only risk Bindi had taken last night.
Step back. Don’t start caring. Quit gambling what you can’t afford to lose.
As he made fast tracks for his rental truck at the edge of the property, Santino passed Villa Soleil’s carport. A powder-blue convertible slept behind the wrought iron gates. The cool, calming color was starkly different from the sunshiny yellow of the Lamborghini he’d gotten used to finding parked in his driveway. Both vehicles were part of Bindi’s illusions. She’d rented the convertible from the same Cora Island company that had provided his truck. The Lamborghini had sold well at an auction, and she’d bought a forgettable gray crossover that was easy to overlook on any Vegas street.
Almost invisible.
Invisibility—that was what she told him she’d wanted. Could be she wanted it again after what his father had put her through. Could be she’d find herself willing to make a devil’s bargain to get what reality denied her.
Navigating the open island roads and allowing his periphery to take in clear waters and jungle-coated hills, he regretted that he’d even tried to bat away suspicion. Because now he prayed for it to catch hold again, choke out empathy and let him breathe.
Mine Tonight Page 7