by Naomi Niles
I knocked gently on the door and heard Tate call out, "Come in."
I entered the vast and luxurious suite, locking the door shut behind me. Tate was lying in the middle of the giant king-sized bed at the room's center, still fully clothed in his suit. I let my robe fall from my shoulders onto the floor as I strode across the room to him with a sexy gait.
"I found your note," I said as I climbed onto the enormous bed and straddled his waist.
Tate looked embarrassed as he said, "I'm afraid I gave you the wrong impression. I wasn't looking for sex tonight. It's been a stressful day. I just didn't want to be alone."
"That's okay. Let me help you relax." I leaned down and kissed his lips, gently at first, but our passion quickly grew.
He pulled the pins from my hair, letting it fall free to my shoulders, and ran his hand through it, gripping my head and holding me to him as our kiss deepened.
I tugged at his tie, loosened it, and peeled it from his neck, tossing it to the side. Then I unfastened the buttons of his Ralph Lauren shirt one by one, tickling his bare chest with my fingernails as it was exposed, and dotting his flesh with sensuous kisses.
When I came to his slacks, I peeled them from his body, along with his underwear, in one fluid motion, and crawled back up the length of his legs to put my mouth upon his most sensitive organ.
He was flaccid at first, and I knew he must be under a lot of mental strain. It didn't take long, however, for him to become fully erect as I made love to him with my hot, wet mouth. Soon he was groaning with pleasure and thrusting his rock-hard dick down my eager throat as I moaned with sexual excitement.
"I'm going to come," he warned, giving me a chance to move back – but there was no way I was missing out on the best part. Gripping his firm, round buttocks, I worked my lips with renewed vigor, sucking, lapping, thrusting, and deep throating until he exploded in my mouth. His hot, salty essence gushed down my throat, and I swallowed it all thirstily. Tate's muscles seized as loud groans of ecstasy ripped from his lungs and echoed off the walls. His hands gripped my hair, clutching painfully as he held my head down, keeping me locked in place. My entire body tingled with excitement, and I could feel myself flowing with satisfied pride that I had pleased him so.
"My God, that was amazing. I really needed that." He sighed with satisfaction. Then he flipped me onto the bed, so that he was on top of me, crushing me with the weight of his body. Grinning down at me, he said playfully, "Now it's my turn."
He went down on me, pleasuring my body with his delightful tongue until I was squirming and writhing on the bed. My hands gripped the headboard as my back arched and my muscles spasmed, thrown into the depths of a powerful orgasm.
My screams of rapture invigorated Tate, and I used my hands to massage him into a full erection once more. We rolled on the bed in a tangle of limbs. His mouth found mine as he sank his hard dick deep into my wet and ready folds. My legs wrapped around his waist as my nails raked along his strong back, and his hands cupped my buttocks, allowing him to drive more deeply into me
"Fuck me," I gasped between moans, urging him to thrust even harder. We were like animals, unleashing the strains of the day with lust, screaming and gasping as we writhed together in a tangle of arms and legs, finally coming together in a joint orgasm of sweet sectary that bonded us together as one.
When we were finished, we lay snuggled together, side by side on the bed, nestled tightly. I rested my head on his shoulder and put my hand on his chest, letting my fingers play across his chiseled abs.
"Feeling better now?" I asked.
"Much better." Tate grinned. He caressed my cheek lovingly and whispered. "You're an amazing woman. I don't know what I'd do without you."
"Good," I teased. "I like knowing I have job security."
"I hope you know I was talking about more than just your skills as a nanny." Tate brushed his thumb across my bottom lip as if he longed to kiss me. "Stay with me."
"You mean, in your bed tonight?" I clarified.
Part of me hoped he was asking me to live with him here in his mansion as his girlfriend, but the more logical side of me knew better. It was too soon for that. We'd only known each other a few months, and there was too much going on with the murder and Stuart, not to mention Missy having decided to stay now to be with Halle. My taking on the role of live-in girlfriend would just be way too much right now for any of us to handle.
"Yes," Tate responded to my question. I should have felt relieved – and I did – but there was a small part of me that was disappointed, too.
"Is that all right with you?" he asked, having picked up on my conflicted emotions. "The contract you signed was just for fun. You're not really obligated to have sex with me. You never were. To tell you the truth, that's not even why I want you here. I just like the comfort of having you next to me, but you don't have to sleep in my bed if you don't want to."
"No, I want to. It doesn't matter if we make love or not. I like just laying here with you, too."
"Good. You looked so unhappy for a moment, I was worried you didn't want to." He sighed with relief.
"It's just been a stressful day."
"No shit." Tate chuckled. "Tandy better get back to me soon. I can't stand having Stuart in the house anymore. It's driving me crazy. I just want to grab him and punch the shit out of him for what he did to Rose, and to you. When I think about how you could have ended up like her, I just..."
I could hear Tate's heart pounding in his chest. His pulse grew rapid, and his hands clenched into fists.
"It's okay. I'm alright, and soon Stuart will get the justice he deserves."
"God, I hope so. I'm going crazy. I just have to stay as far away from him possible, or I'll lose my temper on him. That's why I wasn't at dinner tonight. I pretended to have work to do, so I asked Emma to bring me up a plate to my office. But even without seeing Stuart, I knew his filthy hands had touched the food, and I couldn't even eat it. I threw almost all of it away in the trash."
"Me, too." I giggled. "I wasn't in the dining room for dinner, either. I had Emma bring plates up to the nursery."
We laughed over how alike we were, and it made us both feel a little better knowing we weren't alone in our feelings.
"I guess the dining room's going to be pretty empty until that asshole is arrested," Tate mused.
"You may have to buy new dishes," I joked. "I don't think either of us will want to touch the ones he's had his hands on."
"Hell, I may have to remodel the entire kitchen." His eyes were dancing with amusement, but then they grew serious. "I may have to remodel more than that."
"What do you mean?"
"My gym, my pool, the dining room. Stuart's been an integral part of so much of my life. Not just meals, but exercise and recreation. I considered him a friend as much as an employee. I even talked to him about my sexual appetites."
"You told him details about us?" I was horrified, but Tate was quick to calm my fears.
"No, I never told him anything about us. But he knew about my playroom. I wanted his expertise on assembling weights and gym equipment when I installed my swing. I needed to make sure it was put together safely. Stuart showed me how to anchor it to a support beam inside the wall. He really did all the work himself. I just watched and handed him tools when he asked for them."
"Stuart knows about the sex swing? He knows how to open the bookcase to get inside the secret room?"
"Yes. Why? What's wrong?"
"Do you think he ever went there and used it when you weren't home?"
"God, I hope not. Why do you ask?"
"Because of the blood stains." I told him about the splatters of blood I'd seen on the floor beneath the swing the night we'd used it together and watched as the color slowly drained from Tate's face.
"Show me." He strode purposefully across the bedroom to the bookcase and activated the switch that opened the secret door. We walked into the hidden room together, straight to the sex swing. It was the first time I'
d been in that room since that fateful night when Tate had given me such incredible sexual pleasure in the swing, and then I had felt such paralyzing terror at having discovered the blood splatters.
"There. Look." I pointed at the offending spot of reddish-brown liquid long since dried and crusted into hard stains.
"You're right, that's definitely blood," he said with a heavy sigh.
"Is it yours?" I asked hopefully.
"No, I've never cut myself in here or been in here when I was injured. I've also never brought a play partner in here, except for that one night with you. The only way those spots of blood could have gotten there was if someone else were in here without my permission."
"Maybe when Emma was in here cleaning," I suggested, but he shook his head.
"No, not her. The only other people who know about this room are the construction workers who built it and Stuart. I brought all the workers in from out of town, so the odds of it being one of them are incredibly slim. Stuart, however, knows how to access this room. He has daily access to the house and knows when I'm out. He even knows how to use the swing since he was the one who installed it."
"Do you think the blood is his?"
"No," Tate said sadly. "I think it belongs to Rose."
"That's what I was afraid of," I said softly. "Do you think she was secretly having an affair with Stuart that you never knew about?"
"Either that or he was trying to win her back, so he brought her in here to try and seduce her. They may have had an accident, and she got hurt by some tragic mistake, or they had a disagreement, and he murdered her from passion or anger. Either way, he killed her, right here in this spot."
His words echoed my own suspicions, and I had to swallow down the urge to vomit. Tate put his arm around my shoulders protectively as we both stared at the stain, spellbound.
"The police said she died of blunt force trauma, so she must have hit her head on something during sex, or he hit her out of anger. Then he just dragged her dead body a few short feet out of this room and into your bedroom suite," I speculated. Envisioning the whole gruesome scene made me shudder.
"It explains why the police couldn't identify the fibers on her body. You can see the carpet in here is different than the carpet in the bedroom." Tate nodded. "Come on, let's get out of here."
"Yes," I agreed, feeling very anxious to get as far away from the crime scene as possible. Once we were safely back in his bedroom, I said, "I'll go with you when you to the station to tell Detective Miller about all this. I'm sure he'll want to ask me some questions, too."
"I'm not going to the police station." Tate sounded appalled.
"You're right. We should tell Tom Tandy first."
"I'm not doing that, either. Telling him about the shoes is one thing, but no one must ever know about this room. I'm not showing it to anyone, and neither are you," he insisted forcefully, but I refused to cower to him.
"You're being crazy. Detective Miller thinks you're guilty of murder. Revealing this room could clear your name."
"No, it would destroy my name." I frowned with confusion. Trying to explain, he said, "You saw how crazy the press went when a dead body was found in my bedroom. The scandal was on the front page of every newspaper, the cover of every tabloid, and the leading story on every gossip news program. With the constant press coverage tainting my image, I lost investors and clients pulled out of sales deals. My business took a significant blow. The drive for more stories and more pictures just kept getting worse. The paparazzi made my life hell. I couldn't go outside or even open the curtains."
"I remember. We were all made prisoners by the mobs of photographers," I said, recalling that horrible afternoon when the car was surrounded by paparazzi, trapping me and Halle inside. It had been so frightening, I had almost quit my job over it.
"And that was just from the speculation over a member of my staff being murdered, with no real proof that I had done anything wrong. Just imagine what would happen if there was hard evidence that I was a depraved sex fiend?"
"I think you're overreacting," I tried to soothe him. "It's not like you're a rapist or a pedophile."
"No, but society won't see it that way. All they'll see are images of a reclusive billionaire with a secret sex dungeon hidden in his bedroom, where his nanny was killed. Every sick story they've ever heard of monsters raping women held in captivity will come to mind, and I'll be associated with them all. No one will be able to look at me the same or respect me. I'll become a joke."
"You'll become a joke if you're convicted of murdering Rose Landon," I pointed out, startling Tate from his self-pity. "So what if you have a kinky side? The press might take pictures, the talk show hosts might make jokes, and you might lose a little business; but so what? You're a brilliant businessman. You'll recover the lost finances with new ideas that are probably even bigger and better.
“Isn't your freedom more important than your pride and your image? Doesn't Rose deserve justice for her murder? You can't let Stuart get away with what he's done and force Halle to grow up without a father while you spend twenty years in prison for something you didn't do. You've got to do the right thing and tell Detective Miller about that room – no matter what anybody else thinks."
"You're right." Tate sat on the edge of the bed with a heavy sigh. "But even if I do, Halle might end up without a father."
"What are you talking about? I'm sure the forensics team will be able to determine that Stuart was the one who killed Rose in that room and your name will be clear."
"Yeah, except the forensics team has already been to my room twice searching for evidence and collecting samples – and not once did I mention the secret room. Detective Miller has interviewed me multiple times, and I never shared my suspicions that she had a relationship with Stuart. When he wondered how the body got to my room and why the carpet fibers didn't match the floor, I never once revealed the secret room and said, Maybe she came from in here."
"So, better late than never; right?" I shrugged, but Tate's face just grew more intense as he struggled to make me understand.
"So, I'm in deep shit. Impeding an investigation, lying to the police, withholding information, hiding evidence, being an accomplice after the fact… By the time Detective Miller is done stacking up all the charges against me, I could do as much time as if I really had killed her."
My stomach fell as I realized Tate was right. It was no secret Detective Miller didn't like him. I had a feeling he'd be more than happy to prosecute Tate for all those crimes.
Standing tall, I gripped Tate firmly by the hand and said sternly, "So, lie."
"What are you saying? That I let Stuart get away with murdering Rose?"
"No, I'm saying that you lie to the police. Tell them you go into that room so rarely that you forgot it was even there. Tell them you were so distraught over Rose's death you had temporary amnesia. Say whatever you have to say to keep yourself out of trouble – but still reveal that room."
"What if it doesn't work? What if Miller knows I'm lying?"
"It's a risk you'll have to take. You can't keep this room a secret. Miller has to see those blood stains. He has to know Stuart's been in the room and was having an affair with Rose. Just telling him about the shoes may not be enough. You have to reveal everything. If you keep silent, then you're letting Stuart get away with killing her."
Tate got up from the bed and paced the room for a moment. I could tell he was weighing all sides of the dilemma, so I just kept silent and let him think. I was dying to say something, but I'd already made my opinion clear. Now it was up to him to do the right thing; after all, it was his future, his freedom, and his conscience that were all stake.
Finally, he came to a stop. "Alright. First thing in the morning, I'll do what I have to do."
Exploding with happiness, I threw my arms around him and kissed him with all the passion I felt in my heart. Tate lost his balance, and we fell back onto the bed together. Covering him with my body, I kissed his neck sensually w
hile my hands caressed their way downward in search of his cock.
"Whoa, what are you doing?" He grinned with surprise. "I should get some rest. Tomorrow is going to be a tough day."
"Yes, but the morning is a long way off, and I've got all night to show you how proud I am of you."
Chapter Forty-Four: Tate
I awoke slowly to morning sunlight dappling through the curtains. As I stretched my arms, I realized I wasn't alone and a smile of contentment spread across my face.
Rachelle was in the bed beside me, having slept there all night after hours of passionate lovemaking. She'd made me come again and again, and I lost track of the number of orgasms I'd given her. Making love with a woman had never been as incredible for me as it was when I was with her. She brought a passion and a fire out of me that was explosive and yet kept burning hot for hours. My interest in her never fizzled or dampened like it had with other women.
I never grew tired of exploring her body, and the more I kept learning about her, the better things just kept getting between us. She had this spot on the nape of her neck that drove her wild when I kissed her there. She liked to have her nipples flicked better than pinched. And if I moved my tongue clockwise on her clitoris, it warmed her up, but then if I switched and moved it counterclockwise, I could push her over the edge into a fiery orgasm that made her entire body erupt with pleasure.
Nothing made me feel greater than when I could bring Rachelle to orgasm. The expression on her face was the most beautiful, and the feel of her body at that moment was erotic. Then, when I came inside her, with my rigid organ plunged deeply into her most intimate folds, enveloping me with her sensuality, and we climaxed together as one, it was the most thrilling, the most intimate, and the most satisfying feeling. It was a feeling I craved again and again, and yet I could be completely happy just lying by her side, watching her sleep without even touching her.