by Susan Ward
Bludgeoning want surrounded me. Every cell in my body was alive in anticipation of him. Knowing the danger turned my want into aching agony.
My body clenched against the urge to surrender, my fingers digging into the walls because Cade was the only man I knew who could fuck the way hunters could.
“Cade. Take me upstairs now.”
With that, his body suspended its pleasure assault as I knew it would. I’d commanded him in a way that warned this wasn’t happening this way.
For the briefest moment, I regretted not dragging it out a bit longer to get a better feel for how Cade would finish this in his room, but I was there on the brink of letting loose and being willing to do something stupid. Like see through his seduction there on the street in front of the hotel.
As it was, I could do little more than cling to the sweaty stone wall until I regained my composure, battling to subdue the brilliant array of sensation pulsing through me.
My ability to speak slowly returned. “Do we go to your room or do I return alone to my own tonight, Cade? I should be angry with you for pulling that stunt on the street and send you off to bed by yourself.”
I waited for Cade’s razor-sharp arrogance that always made me smile, and that he didn’t answer surprised me. I wasn’t sure what game this was: his fervent pursuit of me, his heated assault followed by silence. A variation I hadn’t experienced with him before, befuddling but arousing nonetheless.
I yanked off the cover on my eyes and moved from between his body and the building, returning my attention to the door. “Okay. Okay.” I took in a deep breath. “I’m going to your room. Follow if you want to.”
For a second time, I pulled back the door and for a second time it was slammed before I could get it fully opened. The snap of the latch sounded harsh in the quiet and it was like a starting gun, causing me to swing around to face him.
I glanced up and amber eyes met mine. My breath caught. My first shock was that it wasn’t Cade, that I’d been held in the trap of a body, my senses believing it to be one man when in fact it’d been another.
Reeling from the surprise of that, it took a moment for my mind to register the unexpected change of my circumstance.
It was Zane.
He’d followed me from the café, not Cade.
It’d been him, carnal and heated in the darkness, bringing my body to raw wakefulness, stoking the feral in me in a manner he’d never done before. Zane was many things when we fucked. Primal wasn’t one of them. Or that’s what I’d thought before the preceding minutes.
My gaze was riveted to his face. His features were severely taut, and his eyes blazed with emotional shards that should’ve frightened me. In the darkness that night he looked different, the faint orangey-yellow light from the fourth arrondissement beyond the hotel casting him in a sinister glow that held me there.
My palms flattened against the door, banking my urge to touch him, to see if he felt the way he looked. As he stood there, his hand shoved deep into his pockets, vivisecting me with his eyes, the sight of him was like running smack into molten lava.
Zane.
A very angry Zane.
My heart raced in my chest. But I kept my gaze unblinkingly trained to his because the last thing I wanted Zane to know was that I’d thought he was another man.
Chapter Four
HIS ARM MOVED TO HOLD the door closed with his hand, caging me between him and the building again. “There’s a lot about me, Khloe, that you don’t know.”
The sound of his implacable voice catapulted me out of my daze. It was an odd statement, it didn’t fit with what we were or with what had just transpired, and I couldn’t determine why he said that to me. Either way it didn’t matter, not as I struggled valiantly to figure out the point of him asserting top-dog status with Cade, changing the direction of my night, following me to the hotel and putting me through that.
“Well, you’re not the first man to say that to me,” I replied with a hint of amusement. “And I doubt you’ll be the last. No woman knows any man completely. And I’m quite sure none of us would want to if we ever did.”
“You have a fast answer for everything. You have everything figured out in your head, always. Me. Cade. Our relationship. Men. What you want, what you’ll give, and what everyone else should want as well.”
Awareness of him prickled along my skin, but I managed a smile. He wasn’t the first man I’d had a relationship like ours with. He wouldn’t be the last. I’d never made a pretense with him that it could be otherwise.
“How egotistical you are,” he pronounced, startling me. “Is it because you think those billions your father put in trust for you gives you a right to be that way, or is it you’re so beautiful there isn’t a man on this earth who won’t take shit from you? I’ve always wondered. Do you believe it’s the money or how you look that gets Cade and me to put up with you treating us however you want?”
“Only a man would ask a question like that, think that a woman needs a reason to have enough self-assurance to live how she wants to. It’s men who obsess about both my money and how I look. I never give either a thought, not ever.”
He pissed me off further by laughing. “Do you think you can just keep this going, me and Cade, back and forth, until you decide you’re done with us both?”
Heat rushed my face like a burn. Zane was a potent force when he was angry, radiating male energy and heated sexual allure, and I felt that inexplicable pull to him from our moments in the darkness before I’d known it was him, instinctively hungry to answer it.
“I’m not having this argument tonight,” I replied firmly. “Can you step back and let me go into the hotel?”
I lifted my chin and met his eyes directly in challenge.
“Not yet, Khloe.” Zane caught me in his arms, their band pulling me up against him, and the electricity crackled to life between us, igniting my temper.
“Whatever this is, it stops now, Zane. Let me go.” I was pinned against him and that was enough get me ready to fight. Struggling in his hold, his arms only tightened when I demanded with my body for him to release me. If I could have freed an arm, I’d have slapped him. “What is wrong with you?”
He shoved his face up into mine. “You. That’s what’s wrong with me. You, Khloe. You and this damn morass you have me languishing in because I love you. The lies you tell me. And the lies you tell yourself.”
So we were going there. Again. “I don’t lie to anyone. Ever. Lying is a pointless occupation. One I don’t have to bother with. Not with you. Not with any man. I live how I want. I do what I want. Always. I care about you. But I’m not interested in doing anything more with that than what we are. That won’t ever change, Zane. Our arrangement isn’t going to change.”
My outburst caused him to smile, sinful and sinister. His unconcern aggravated me further but, oh, his fury—that was doing a number on my body, and I suspected he intended it. I did have weaknesses, temptations that pulled me in wrong directions; anger mingled with lust from a man was one of them.
“Arrangement is too tame a word for what we have. Pretend all you want that we’re not more, but we are. You’ll leave me in the morning, head back to California as if I don’t matter, but when I show up in Pacific Palisades in a few weeks, you’ll come back to me and we’ll be a couple right up until Cade arrives on the scene so you can again use him to pretend you’re not in love with me. You’re in love with me, Khloe. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“Perhaps, but fighting with me on a Paris street isn’t going to entice me into being happy about that.”
I somehow got my arm free, but he grabbed my wrist, lifted my hand and kissed my palm.
His breath replaced his lips and he purred. “So soft. So sweet. I’d know the feel and taste of you if I were in a coma. What a shame you can’t say the same about me.”
A shiver moved through me, followed by raging anger nearly as intense as the heated ache my chest. There were times Zane was lethally sexy.
Purposely I widened my eyes and hoped my voice was steady. “I’m not looking for love. If I fell in love with you, we’d be over. That’s all loving you would do to us. End us. And I don’t want us to end. I like how we are, what we have. I don’t want more. Why can’t you just be happy with what we have?”
His fingers tightened on my wrist until it was painful. “Are you kidding? No normal person would be happy with this. Loving someone and letting them do as they please and being expected to take it. Listen to yourself. Do you believe that, or do you say it to hurt me?”
“I’m being honest with you, Zane.”
“Then come upstairs with me now and let’s end this holiday the way we should and fly home together tomorrow.”
I felt the anger in his body melt into something more seductive, and I lost my ability to think of my own self-preservation, the demand from his flesh almost a tangible force field.
I was appalled by how much I wanted to go to our room with him and equally fascinated by what would happen if I did. And, yes, tempted. He’d been so damn irritating this night my mind was spinning. Everything he’d done and said should have hardened my heart against him, only it hadn’t.
It was hard not to be moved while faced with such naked, earnest emotion. My eyes closed against the surge of want. My flushed face lowered to his chest until my forehead rested against his beating heart. “I’m going to our room. Don’t follow me. Sleep somewhere else tonight.”
His lips touched my hair. The gentleness of his hands caressing my arms made me tremble. We were so close I had almost no room to breathe. I was pressed full-body against him, painfully aware how much I wanted him.
Lowering his head, he took my mouth again, leaving me so willing and ready for him. Then I realized why I wanted him, and yanked myself away.
I tore inside the hotel, closing the door behind me, and scrambled up the narrow corridor of stairs. It took endless moments to realize that Zane hadn’t followed. I finished the trek to my suite at a hurried pace anyway and bolted our bedroom door.
Trembling and with my chest heaving, I waited, listening for footsteps beyond, totally oblivious that I wasn’t alone.
Chapter Five
I PULLED OUT MY CELL to text Cade a quick where are you? when something alerted me that I wasn’t alone in my suite. When I glanced up from the screen, my gaze riveted on a pair of amber eyes and a man even more striking than I could invent in my fantasies.
My breath caught and I almost dropped my phone. We’d never met before, but I recognized his face. It wasn’t one a woman would forget after having seen it even if he didn’t bear an uncanny resemblance to Zane. They were cousins and had the exact same shade of chestnut hair and golden-hued tiger eyes.
As he stood there, a brown brow quirked and his hands relaxed at his sides clearly waiting for something from me, my fingers clenched fiercely around my phone. The sight of him was overpowering without any effort on his part, even if every aspect of his casual arrangement of expression and stance was expertly designed to do the opposite.
He was impeccably dressed, as one would expect him to be. Gray suit, cream shirt, silver tie, and yet the rest of him seemed to war with the image he tried to project. His glossy hair was slightly too long and unruly, he had more sun color in his face than even Zane, and then there was how he held himself, the stance correct and bad-boy enticing rolled into one.
“Are you all right?” murmured the lone occupant of my sitting room. That he was alone was another shock. I couldn’t recall seeing security in the hallway, and enough of my awareness had been pulled from him to feel there was no one other than him in my suite.
He took a slow step forward then stopped. “You’re KK, right? Zane’s girlfriend?”
The sound of his voice was richly low and webbed with amusement. Enough so that I broke out of my daze to realize he’d called me KK, which told me how little he knew about me. Zane had shared very little with his cousin if he addressed me by a nickname and thought our association was anything as benign as the standard boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.
He flashed a self-deprecating smile that made my heart race. “Please confirm with a nod, so I know the concierge showed me to the right room.”
For a second, I debated telling him to get out, just to see his reaction, then my brain took over and stopped me. I’d handled this unexpected turn of my night badly thus far, and worse, he was enjoying it.
I stepped into the room and dumped my wrap, purse, and phone on a table. “Sorry. I wasn’t planning on you tonight,” I answered evenly. “Did Zane know you were coming? He failed to tell me.”
“That was rather bad of him. I can see I need to talk to my cousin about a number of things.”
There was no time to give notice to his obvious male appreciation of what he was seeing and to wonder what he meant about a number of things. Awareness of him licked across my skin—he had too strong a presence for such a small room—and whatever it was he radiated I was uncomfortably attuned to and didn’t want to be.
“Would you care for a drink? I think I’m going to have one.” I busied myself not to look at him, but as I rummaged through the bottles on the bar I felt his gaze slide over my profile and down my body. His reputation preceded him, and how he stared at me confirmed it.
“No, not that,” he advised, and I looked at what I was holding. It was rather good Kentucky bourbon, but I was with him. Not my first choice.
I reached for the vodka instead and made a slight lift with it. “Does this work? Or would you prefer scotch?” I didn’t wait for him to answer; I filled two glasses then tossed in some ice as an afterthought.
His laughter sounded behind me again, more like a deep breath than a thing of humor. It was sexy as fuck and impossible not to react to. He was impossible not to react to. He was just so much in the room, more in the room than I was sure any man ever could be...except perhaps my father...and as soon as that thought finished I felt my internal mess recede and a measure of my composure return.
I took a long swallow of my drink before I turned to face him. Rude, absolutely, but I wanted to get to the point where I could look at him without making an idiot of myself.
“Thank you,” he murmured as his hand reached for the glass I held, and we were suddenly so close that I was forced to look at him. It didn’t help matters that he’d selected my drink instead of the one untouched on the bar or that his mouth closed on my smear of red lipstick left on the rim as he took a neat sip. “Would you care to sit down?”
My chin lifted, and I managed a wry smile, since he was acting as if he were the host and I the intruder.
I stepped around him to the center of the room and sank down on the chair in front of the terrace door. It would give me a good vantage point to see him wherever he settled in the room, with the added benefit that it was distant and isolated from the rest of the seating area.
I waited for him to join me, or in the least say something, and when he didn’t, I murmured, “Would it be rude of me to ask what you’re doing in my suite?”
That earned me the flash of his knees-weakening smile and a slow roll of his impressively muscled shoulders. “Not rude. Just not interesting. I’m meeting Zane.” He paused in taking a sip to arch an eyebrow at me again. “That should be obvious. Why else would I be waiting here?”
He ran a hand over his head and it was then I noted I made him uncomfortable as well. It betrayed that he didn’t know what to make of me and I wasn’t responding to him in a manner he knew how to deal with. He remained with his back against the bar, slowly sipping and watching me.
“You should sit down. We might be waiting a long time for Zane,” I suggested.
“Why’s that?”
“It’s our last night in Paris. He never comes in before morning our last night anywhere.”
“Remarkable. Why do you tolerate it?”
“Uh...well...to be frank, neither do I.”
He frowned. “What?”
�
�Ever come in before morning our last night anywhere.”
It was obvious he didn’t know what to make of that remark, but the twitching of his lips gave away he was thinking quite a few thoughts about it.
“Would you mind sitting? It’s annoying having you lurking over there. No woman likes to be stood over.”
My body jumped when my mind caught up with the blunder of my last remark. Every muscle in me tensed in wait, but instead of going through the opening I’d left him, he pushed from the counter and sat on the sofa, obeying my request.
His beautiful face was impassive as he unbuttoned his jacket. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to lurk. It was a long flight here from Botswana. Standing felt good.” It was as if he expected that to impress me, but it didn’t. I lifted a single inky brow to let him know that. His elegant fingers ran through his hair again then he shook his head, annoyed with himself. “I apologize for my bad form. I’m not my best when things don’t unfold how I’ve come to expect them.”
My fingers curled tighter around my glass. “No disrespect intended, but I’m calling crap on that one, Damon. Nothing in life goes as expected, not for any of us. It’s a fantasy to believe for a second that it does. The expected is a false sense of security we conjure in our head; otherwise most of us would never dare anything.”
It was his turn to be amused. I’d used his Christian name without leave to do so and I’d just called him out on his ruse of false charm. “On that, you’re wrong. Everything goes exactly as I expect. Always. It’s a problem.” He lifted his drink as if in toast to me. “Except tonight.”
Ha. That was something we both had in common. Tonight was all kinds of unexpected for me when everything always went exactly how I wanted it. But, oh, not this night. Unexpected mutiny from our neat arrangement from Zane and Cade. That game Zane had put me through in front of the hotel. And now finding Damon Charles Arthur Deverell Saxe in my room without warning.