by Wren Weston
La Roux leaned against Lila’s desk and scrolled through the public playlists, smirking occasionally at the choices available. After making his selections, he slid the palm into a slot near her computer. Seconds later, soft jazz pumped through the speakers.
La Roux bowed theatrically with all the grace and charm of Bullstow, ratcheted up to near silliness, and kissed her hand. “Ms. Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph, would you do me the very great honor of a dance this evening?”
Lila giggled. “Very great honor?”
He shrugged and kissed her hand again with a loud, melodramatic smack. “Hush, woman, it’s tradition. I do know how much you love tradition. You did rush to become prime, after all.”
“I don’t recall dancing to jazz in any ball I’ve ever attended.”
“Ah, well, now you’ve seen my fatal flaw. My good humor only goes so far.”
“I think it goes just far enough.” Lila smiled, enjoying the man far too much for own good. It was the same with Tristan, enjoying a man she knew she shouldn’t get involved with, a man she’d never get to keep because of circumstance.
Oh gods, she was that sort of woman.
When had that happened?
La Roux grinned, wiping a thumb over the little frown that crossed her face. “I could change the music if you wish, but I dislike all that fussy piano music. This is a public list I created. I put it on in my office sometimes.”
“Just your office?”
“Sometimes other people’s offices too. Jazz is so much more expressive and evocative than classical music, don’t you think?”
Lila put down her glass. “I like anything I can dance to.” She slipped off her heels and placed them by the door.
La Roux joined her, toeing his shoes to line up beside her heels. “Ah, now, don’t they make a pair? At least for now?”
“They seem to,” Lila agreed, tugging on the edge of his jacket, hinting. He removed it, taking care not to crease it as he laid it across the end of her couch beside her crimson coat.
“They make a pair as well.” La Roux rested his hand on Lila’s waist and clasped her fingers, leading her around the room song by song. He handled her knuckles so delicately that she barely felt any soreness. With every note, every bar, and every verse, his grasp closed tighter and tighter. Eventually she realized that she’d placed her head upon his shoulder.
Perhaps La Roux’s good humor and charm had been behind it, or perhaps she was merely tired, due to a second attempt on her life and her fight with Tristan.
“Will you excuse me?” he said, jerking his head abruptly toward her bathroom.
As soon as the door closed behind the senator, Lila shook herself awake. She lunged at La Roux’s abandoned jacket and cycled through his palm. She scanned his contacts and found no one questionable. She scanned his messages for the last several days and found no smoking gun. She even scanned his logs and found no evidence of mischief, definitely nothing linking him to the Baron, Reaper, Zephyr, or Sergeants Muller and Davies.
What she did find was far more telling that what she did not. Evidence of the deed that Senator Dubois had mentioned, in nearly every message he sent and page he visited. Rather than planting traps in the BullNet to snag hackers, rather than attempting to snag a potential heir in some scheme, Senator La Roux had busied himself with crafting a resolution for inclusion into next year’s legislative session.
He only lacked a seat in the capitol.
La Roux was the anonymous scribe who had penned the Slave Bill. He wished to abolish slavery among the highborn, at least for those who had done nothing so criminal as plunge into bankruptcy due to a few business missteps. His claim was that it stifled innovation.
Though Lila only had time for a quick skim of La Roux’s proposal, his idea seemed sound, though far too progressive to pass the High House. After all, the highborn typically did not trust theories of obscure lowborn economics professors, and La Roux’s resolution had been built upon one. Even if his resolution passed, the High Council of Judges would never approve it.
La Roux had to know that.
Perhaps the man believed he could sway others to his cause if he crafted a good enough speech, if he managed to swing enough votes his way, if he depended upon the conscience of his brothers.
No wonder he’d never gotten out of Beaulac. La Roux really was an idealist. A rather naïve one if he thought the resolution would save his career. The only thing his resolution would do was make him a ripe target for any matrons who would balk at the idea of losing so many rebellious daughters to industry. Daughters less bold than Alexandra Wilson, who’d risked everything and lost in the end.
That wasn’t the only resolution he’d crafted. He’d also crafted the Slave Freedom Bill. He wished to give freedom to any slave who fought against the empire, no matter their sentence, no matter their crime. A family member could fight in place of one not old enough, strong enough, or healthy enough to carry the burden themselves.
He believed war was coming. He believed they’d need far more soldiers to win.
La Roux was probably right about that. The oracle had said as much. She and her sisters had been having the visions for too long.
Or so they claimed.
That didn’t mean his idea was sound, though. Any matron who heard about La Roux’s work might find it worth their time to get rid of him, for the amount of coverage both resolutions would generate in the press might destabilize all workborn throughout the commonwealth, generating a ripple of frustration among the masses.
The mere rumor of such bills had done enough already.
The fact of them might sound the death knell for all slavery in the Allied Lands.
Implicating La Roux in some sort of criminal activity would be one way to end the threat. Would her mother have found such sabotage worth her time? Would she have devoted resources toward silencing the senator?
Lila had to wonder if the Baron even existed. She’d always believed her mother when she claimed she didn’t have to resort to hackers and bugs, that a well-placed spy could tell you everything you needed or wanted to know. What if it turned out that she was the same as any of them in the end? What if she had led her own daughter by the nose? It was the chairwoman who had told her La Roux’s nickname. Perhaps she’d sent the article to them both, just so that Lila would fall into line as prime, just so she could get a troublesome senator removed from the senate in one shot. If she’d been the Baron all along, then she’d also controlled Reaper, which meant that she’d been responsible for Celeste and Patrick Wilson’s downfall.
Oh gods, why didn’t the whole plot seem far-fetched?
Whether or not her mother was behind it, La Roux would need protection. Moreover, Lila would have to find enough evidence linking her mother or another matron to the case. She’d also need to find evidence that the trap in the mental health registry had been faked. Lila had merely seen that the trap was crude and accepted the dates after a cursory scan, but she’d have to dig deeper now.
And if her mother was behind it?
What then?
Lila did not want to think about the consequences. If her mother really was behind the ruse and Lila gave the data to Chief Shaw, then she’d either have to take over as chairwoman of Wolf Industries or pick someone else to run it.
Neither idea appealed to her.
Who could she trust to take care of the family?
Her mother had posed the question thousands of times, over hundreds of cups of tea and glasses of wine. Now that the answer actually mattered, now that she would have to answer it, Lila balked.
That wasn’t even the worst part. Not only would she have to appoint a new chairwoman, but she’d have to lead her matron to the gallows.
Could she do that to her own mother?
In that moment, Lila understood Alex so much better. It was one thing to turn in famil
y for a slave’s term. It was another thing altogether to turn them into the executioner.
But if her mother had done what Lila suspected, she deserved the noose, didn’t she? She likely didn’t even care if Lila figured out her plan. After all, Lila would have to take up her position, and they both knew how she felt about that. Perhaps she’d gambled that her daughter would merely trade the knowledge for her mark, so long as she could retain her relationship with the family and seal her mother from BullNet for good.
The only thing she knew was that La Roux wasn’t the Baron. He didn’t have enough time to moonlight as a hacker. Besides, he was a senator of Bullstow. That might have given him opportunity, but where would he have picked up the skills?
The doorknob rattled, and Lila tucked the senator’s palm back into his pocket. She then picked up her wine glass and darted to the window, gazing out into the darkness as though she had been lost in thought.
La Roux didn’t seem to mind. He grabbed her hand and led her back to the center of the room for another round of dancing, hand light upon her back. She rested her head against his shoulder, but this time it had little to do with her own exhaustion.
The senator wasn’t a scoundrel after all. He wasn’t a criminal. He was a good man, despite being naïve and misguided. He was also funny, blunt, attentive, ambitious, and dedicated to his work. If she had to take a lover this season, she could have picked far worse.
And she did need to take a lover. She needed to get Tristan out of her head. She’d known it from the first moment they’d started sleeping with one another.
Lila lifted her face, wound her arms around La Roux’s neck, and joined her lips to his.
She felt a brush of skin at her side, felt a tug at her dress’s zipper, heard the pull of each tooth slowly giving way to the next as he worked it down. He didn’t pull it off in a rush. Instead, he slipped his hand inside and traced the planes of her back.
Lila responded in kind. She had always yanked off the clothes of highborn men in a rush, both her and her partners too hungry and too enflamed to waste time with button holes and bra hooks. Something had usually been ripped, bent, or broken. She’d never tried slow before.
Except with Tristan.
She’d learned that slow could be nice.
Apparently La Roux had learned the lesson too. He tugged off his cravat and slipped his button-down off his shoulders, letting it fall to the ground while Lila traced his chest and abdomen. He obviously spent time in the gym, even during his off-seasons, filling out his clothes to their best proportions. He wasn’t so large as to impair the tailoring; he just was large enough to hold a woman in a firm grip and not look brutish.
He had the same sort of frame as Tristan, just a tad more muscular.
La Roux unpinned her bun. Her hair fell to her shoulders, tickling her skin. One strap of her dress slipped off her shoulder as she pulled back the blankets on her bed. A silk negligee peeked out from under the blanket, something that could only have come from Alex. She tossed it onto the floor, losing the remaining strap of her dress.
She let the dress fall, pooling around her feet, watching La Roux as he watched her.
La Roux’s smile faltered, brows twisted. “What happened?” He gingerly touched her hip. Her bruises had already turned a dark red since the motorcycle accident.
It was something Tristan would have asked.
“It’s the consequences of owning a Firefly,” she lied, slightly embarrassed that his first thought after seeing her nude was concern rather than desire.
Perhaps she looked worse than she thought.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tonight.”
Lila looked up. That wasn’t something Tristan would have said.
“The bruises don’t bother me. I’m just worried that you’re unwell.”
Lila stared at the floor. That wasn’t something Tristan would have said, either. He would have been too caught up in the moment, only realizing he’d hurt her when she gave a moan of protest.
Just like the day before.
It wasn’t that he didn’t take care of her. He just took care of someone else, some other Lila she’d never be. He didn’t notice the one beside him—one who lived on a highborn estate.
One he hated, if he could ever be honest with himself.
“You’re not used to someone saying something like that, are you? Perhaps it’s time you spent the night with a different sort of man.” La Roux placed a gentle kiss on her shoulder before returning to her lips.
Lila unbuttoned La Roux’s breeches and slid her hand into the hunter-green boxer briefs, the color of Beaulac. He bit down on her lip gently, groaning at the contact as she traced his cock. It responded, hardening at her touch.
Lila lay back on the bed, watching him.
La Roux’s breeches hit the floor, and he joined her, finding her lips once again, sucking gently while he tugged down one strap of her bra, and then the next. He abandoned her lips for her neck, managing to raise her desire at the first stroke of his tongue, her collarbone, her chest, and finally her breast.
Her body responded to him, and he unclasped her bra and tossed it aside.
The rest of her clothes joined it.
La Roux had not been lying when he claimed expertise in dallying. As he sucked her nipples, he let his hand roam, tracing her neck, her unattended breast, her belly, the inside of her thigh.
Lila gasped, then moaned as he stroked her clit, mouth not letting up on her breasts. The pressure built up with each passing second, and his fingers slid inside her.
There was no pain this time. She had healed from the surgery, after all.
Lila tugged at his boxers, hinting, and he complied.
“Who doesn’t want to dally now?” he said, and kissed her eyebrow.
“I’m not rushing. I just thought you were overdressed for the party.”
“Is that so.” He kissed his way to her neck, to her breasts, down her chest, to her hips. Finally he reached her slit.
She needed this. Not the sex, of course; she just needed someone to banish Tristan from her thoughts, finally and completely.
Lila came soon after La Roux’s warm tongue touched her clit. She called out…
Words. A long string of them, meaningless syllables rushing in a furious jumble.
La Roux did not stop. His busy tongue lapped and sucked at her clit until the pressure built and released in another inarticulate wave.
And then another.
She kept reaching for a headboard that didn’t exist, for wooden dowels that hadn’t been strong enough for her grip. But her headboard was a bare piece of wood, elegant in its plainness.
She wrapped her thighs around La Roux’s shoulders. Seconds later, the senator’s mouth fastened onto her lips. His cock slipped inside her, filling her differently than Tristan.
“Fuck,” she moaned, back arching as he pushed inside. “Fuck me.”
La Roux did as he was bid. He moved past gentle and cycled into harder strokes, but it wasn’t enough. Lila grabbed hold of his ass and thrust him into her, angry and frustrated and unfulfilled, her eyes closed to the room and the bed.
The pressure rose anew. She moaned and came, calling out again in a fury.
He joined her seconds later.
Gasping, he collapsed in a sweat, rolling onto the bed beside her, gathering his breath.
Lila opened her eyes.
La Roux stared back at her.
“I needed that,” she said.
“I think we both did,” he replied, taking her mouth once more. Locked in a sweaty embrace, she sucked at his lips, at his neck, let her hands rove across his body.
He rose again.
Lila hopped atop him this time, straddled him, rode him, vowing to give back as good as she had gotten. He matched her stroke for stroke, barely keeping up as she drove him insi
de her again and again. She smelled the light scent of whiskey, felt a touch at her back, and then he caressed her breasts.
Neither reached for her hips. When they dropped to grip her, he lingered on her thighs.
She came as he finally moaned his last. She didn’t pull away, though. She just flopped her head upon his chest, his cock still lost inside her.
The smell of whiskey was gone. She only smelled Sangre.
La Roux struggled to catch his breath. “That was…”
“Bad?” Lila panted.
“Just a little rougher than I’m used to. Different. Not different bad, just different.”
Lila lay down beside him. “Sorry.”
“I’m not complaining.” La Roux chuckled, tugging her back to his chest. “I have to ask, though…who were you having sex with just now? Who were you thinking about?”
“I was thinking about you.”
“No, you weren’t.” He pushed back a lock of her hair and kissed her forehead, his thumb trailing her cheek. “It’s okay. I’ve spent entire seasons dreaming that the other person in my bed was someone different. I know how it is sometimes. You have your lovers, but sometimes duty lies in one direction while your heart strains in another. Some say it’s the mark of immaturity, but I disagree.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, really? Then who’s Tristan?”
Shit.
Lila shut her mouth, realizing it had been open for several long seconds. “Tristan who?”
“I asked first. You called out his name the entire time. Tristan… Tristan… Tristan…” he mocked gently.
“Did not.”
La Roux rolled on top of her, held her down, and laughed. “Tristan… Tristan… Tristan…” he called out, his thumb tickling her hip.
“Get off,” she squealed, jerking in his grasp, twisting, trying to get free.
Trying not to laugh.
“I did get off—a number of times, to my delight. “Tristan… Tristan… Tristan…” he sang out, humping her playfully. “Tell me. Who is Tristan?”