She propelled herself into his arms, and the billionaire clutched her close against his bare chest. "Cara! What is it? Are you all right?"
There were no tears in her eyes, thank God—she wasn't as upset as he probably thought she was from the way she had come charging into his bedroom. She allowed herself to cling to him a minute longer, before pulling back with a sigh. Her throat definitely felt raw. She had definitely been screaming.
"Sorry, I… nightmare." It wasn't exactly a coherent sentence, but it would have to do. Cara was still only vaguely aware of where she was and who she was with. Her subconscious episode where she had been standing over Melinda's body was enough to make her long for the days when it had only been her memory of Simon visiting her at night.
The Englishman sat her down on the side of his bed and skimmed his hand across her forehead, pushing the sweat-tangled hair from her eyes. "Lord, Cara, you gave me a fright." She could see his chest slowing, and realized that he had been breathing as hard as she was. When he was done stroking her hair back, she slapped an embarrassed hand to her forehead.
"Sorry," she said again. "I guess I shouldn't look over crime scene photos and try and work things out right before bed."
"You had a nightmare about the murder?" he asked incredulously.
"Alleged murder," she corrected. "We're the ones doing the alleging."
"Cara, I can't have Melinda's death disrupting your sleep like this." He squeezed her shoulders, hard, and Cara winced despite herself. "If I'd any idea it would do this to you, I would have never involved you. I ought to call the whole thing off. In fact, I am calling it off, starting now. You aren't to look any further into this. We'll accept what the coroner has said and move on."
"Yeah, right." Cara pushed his hands off her to make her point, but she didn't want to completely give up her present closeness to him. "You should know me better than that, Simon. After all we've been through? I wouldn't be doing this at all if I wasn't one hundred percent certain it's what I wanted to be doing."
"I don't know, Cara." His finger returned to her hairline, stirring a yellow-blond lock of her hair. "I'm not sure I can stand to see you like this again."
"So we agree that it's you."
Simon lowered blue eyes to her, and Cara smiled faintly. She was only making a joke, but she was sure he got the message by now. Just in case, she decided to tell him pointblank: "I'm not going anywhere. And if I'm going to be here while you sort the most difficult part of your life out, I may as well make myself useful. Right?"
"You are the most useful woman in the world," Simon praised her. It occurred to Cara in that vast, darkened bedroom that she could find other ways to be useful… ways that she had been contemplating showing him before she had fallen asleep.
"Lie back on the bed," she murmured. Simon seemed surprised by the change in subject, but complied, shifting himself back onto the mattress. She followed after him, her hands sliding up the chiseled expanse of his chest until she could feel him shivering beneath her. "Why didn't you wake me earlier?" she whispered into the darkness. "Did you think I didn't want to spend the night with you?"
"You seemed tired." His hands alighted on her waist as she positioned herself over him. Cara had fallen asleep earlier in nothing but her T-shirt and underwear, and that was how she came to him now; she could see that the skimpy outfit was already beginning to have an effect on him. His drawstring silk pajama pants were starting to look conspicuously tight in certain areas of interest.
"Well, I'm not tired now," Cara offered. She smoothed her hands along his pectorals, and Simon sighed into the darkness.
"I can see that."
"Can you?" she asked.
"I could afford to see more of you, Cara." His hands smoothed up her exposed belly, playing a concerto on her ribcage and moving upward until they alighted on her breasts. "You're not wearing a bra," he noticed. He fondled her chest until her breathing became ragged. His dexterous fingers pushed and pulled and worked her voluptuous flesh until she could feel the aroused peak of each nipple pressing hard against the palms of his hands.
Cara made an appreciative noise in her throat and allowed her eyes to fall shut as she reveled in the sensation of his touch. Once he had satisfied himself, Simon slipped Cara's shirt off over her head.
"God, you're lovely," he intoned. She moved against his ever-growing erection, grinding against him through their clothes and inspiring his body to harden rapidly. "I can't look at you for long without wanting to shag the daylights out of you. You look like an angel, Cara. You could wear a brown paper bag and I would still fall to your feet and worship you like a princess."
"You're laying it on a little thick, don't you think?" Cara murmured with an upwards stroke of her hips. She lowered herself down, flattening his erection against his stomach and between the heated crevice between her legs. Simon groaned and went rigid beneath her.
"And you're being rather unfair," he gasped. "There's not a lot you can accomplish with our clothes still on, Cara."
"What is it that you would live for me to accomplish, Mr. Banning?"
Simon reached between them and yanked the band of his pants down. His manhood sprang free. "I'm not sure how to ask for it," he admitted. "That night at the mansion…"
"I know what you want," Cara assured him in a husky voice. She ran her tongue along her lower lip and made sure that he noticed; she thought she saw his Adam's apple bob when he swallowed. His eyes followed her descent back down between his legs. When his cock vanished inside her eager mouth, the billionaire groaned explosively and seized a fistful of her tousled blond hair.
She loved doing this to him. There was nothing that stoked Cara's own pleasure quite like watching Simon Banning, English sex god, transported to new heights by the mere touch of her hand or mouth. She grasped his member by its root and ran her mouth down it, tasting him with a clean sweep of her tongue. Simon cursed and bucked himself toward her mouth, but the hand on his pubic bone pushed him back down into the bed again. She loved the silky feel of his shaft, and the fact that he tasted like nothing. How could she resist sampling him?
But Cara wanted more than a sample. She licked the tip of his penis, tasting the salt-sweet bead of precum, before wrapping her lips around him and lowering her head once more. "Oh fuck me, Cara!" Simon exclaimed. She knew that she would fulfill his request eventually, but right now, the man seemed more like he was ejaculating curses in an effort to prevent himself from ejaculating elsewhere.
Not that she would have minded. In fact, it was on Cara's bedroom bucket list to suck Simon Banning dry. One of these days.
She loved giving head, and Simon was the best possible subject she could have asked for. She sucked him deep into her throat, relaxing the muscles that would allow her to swallow him utterly. She knew the sensation of being buried deep inside her mouth would feel amazing to him, but she also knew what would be more amazing. Cara pulled him in and out of her mouth, again and again, fellating him until the man's tense grip on her hair signaled that he couldn't take anymore.
"Cara, stop," he warned. She released him from her mouth with an audible pop! and grinned wolfishly when she noticed how flushed his face had become.
"You don't want me to stop," she said as she climbed up to the pillow to join him. Her talented tongue found the breathless part in his lips and slipped its way inside. She felt his hands pressing against the swell of her waist, guiding her down to sit on his chest as his thumb hooked and pulled the elastic of her panties down. The head of his penis slipped inside her, and Cara gasped as he forced her down onto him fully.
"I love you, Cara," Simon groaned as they came together. The heat of his words made her shudder, and she realized that they had never made love before, not like this, with the word love alive and present between them.
"I love you too, Simon."
CHAPTER 26
Gerald drove them to the hotel, where a valet took over parking the limousine for them. The butler came around the side of the
car, and Cara stepped out first.
She was dressed in her tight black number, and she felt both frightened and thrilled to be showing it off again once more. It clung to her every curve like a sleeve, or a second skin, terminating short inches above her knees. She wore no tights or nylons of any kind, and her long, supple legs were fully presented to the world; a pair of black pumps completed the look below the waist.
Cara generally didn't bother with a lot of makeup, mainly because she was a student and didn't have the time, money, or inclination to doll herself up before her last minute morning runs to class. She had done up her eyes heavily for tonight's occasion, offsetting her brilliant eyes with a smoky blue eyeshadow and carefully tapered wings with her eyeliner. She had rouged her cheekbones on the car ride over, and applied a fire engine red lipstick that Simon had been insistent on kissing off of her with almost every application. She had been forced to wipe his mouth clean with a napkin every time so he could avoid showing up at the party looking like he had just gotten out of clown college.
Beside her, Simon looked absolutely brilliant in a three piece suit and tie. Cara felt like she was walking out onto the Hollywood red carpet the moment Gerald let her out the door and her heels touched down. She had never felt as 'power couple' as she did with Simon. Whoever was here tonight with the intention of causing trouble had better look out.
"You look beautiful." Simon dropped the whisper in her ear as they wound their way toward the entrance of the hotel. "Have I said that already?" Cara laughed.
"Yes. Only a hundred times on our way over here!" Not that she particularly minded looking beautiful, and it was certainly good to hear that she had achieved the intended effect from a man who was used to attending these events.
"We still haven't decided on a backstory for you," he reminded her as they revolved together through the glass doors. "How good are our accents? Because if you can come across as passably English, that could be fun. At the very least you should be Australian."
"Why should I have to be anything?" Cara demanded. "Are Americans somehow considered unsexy and you didn't tell me?"
"I thought it would help to keep our mind off the other people in the room," Simon said as they walked through the lobby. Cara definitely noticed heads turning to follow them as they passed. "You never know who is going to show up to these sorts of things.
"How about the people you invited?"
"Only half the people invited originally RSVP, and half of those ever actually do wind up coming. Everyone else is just rich enough, and just curious enough, to make their way in to see what the fuss is all about."
"But aren't most of these people friends of the Pembrooks?" she reminded them. They made their way to the hotel bar, which also happened to be where the dining room and stage were located. The room was packed surprisingly full of very young and very beautiful people, and Cara suspected that her question had been ill-conceived.
"See, you would think that, wouldn't you? Considering that the Pembrooks were the ones with ultimate power over whose name wound up on the guest list," Simon agreed. "Except someone must have gotten hold of it in the press somehow, so now every millionaire an billionaire with nothing better to do is here. What a disaster."
"It's not a disaster yet." Cara spotted the Pembrooks over by one of the dining room tables, talking to cluster of people and occasionally glancing about nervously. "Look, there they are. Just go over and talk to them. It will look bad if they aren't the first people you speak to. Reassure them that the attendees they don't recognize really are here to honor their son."
Simon nodded. "Good thinking. If you'll excuse me, I shall return." He detached from his arm and made his way over to the group of invited guests. Cara watched him. Something was bothering her more than just sympathetic nerves.
Someone must have got hold of it in the press.
How? Cara knew that information escaped its intended channels, but she also knew that the more money you had, the more you could protect yourself against this sort of thing happening. Was the press in London really that good? Well, they had been waiting a very long time for the return of the prodigal son.
She watched as a man in a suit stepped to the front of the group and shook Simon's hand. She turned and when to sit at the bar. She hadn't forgotten what Simon had told her about the legal drinking age in England, and she was sorely tempted to order something for herself now, but she was feeling a bit nervous all of a sudden, and she didn't think that alcohol would necessarily help matters. Less than five minutes later, Simon sat down on the stool beside her.
"You're back already?" Cara looked puzzled. "I thought you would talk with the Pembrooks a bit longer."
"Their lawyer is here!" Simon said sharply below his breath. Cara turned, and once again identified the man in the suit, who looked slightly out of place at the perimeter of the group.
"Wait, are you serious? What did he say to you?"
"This was a mistake. This was a terrible mistake," the man at her side was muttering repeatedly. "I need to call my own lawyer. I need backup, and legal representation."
"Calm down," she said. "And don't call your lawyer." She looked over her shoulder again. "I do think that's strange, but the mood of the evening will totally shift if you meet them on their level. This is so weird!" she said suddenly. "I thought you said you guys were starting to interact better around each other. And I mean, you didn't have to set this evening up for them."
"What do I do, Cara?" Simon asked miserably. She laid a sympathetic hand on his elbow, before noticing Gerald exiting out of the kitchen with a tray of drinks. She met his gaze as he moved to serve the Pembrooks and their guests, and his eyes dropped to Simon's slumped form from across the room. The old butler nodded as if he understood.
"Stay here," she said, "and don't talk to them any more unless you absolutely have to. Make them come to you, and set the terms of your discourse—if you don't want their lawyer around, make that clear with your body language. I don't think you can tell them to send him away, but you don't have to engage in anything you don't want to with them, either."
"Brilliant." Simon was running a distraught hand through his hair, and it broke Cara's heart to see the styling job he had done going to complete waste now. She squeezed his arm again.
"Listen, I think Gerald is going to bring you a drink as soon as he's finished over there. I'm going to run to the restroom real quick."
"I love you, Cara."
The simple words arrowed through her. She rose up out of her chair, cupped his face, and kissed him. Simon didn't move from where he sat, but submitted to her affection as if it was the draught he had come to the bar for in the first place. She realized then that much of her own nervousness had stemmed from being there with Simon; now, she didn't care who saw or guessed what their relationship might be.
She broke away and smiled. "If you think it's a good idea, you can take me over and introduce me when I get back. I'm excellent at breaking the ice." Simon returned her smile, and she departed the room to go and look for the bathroom.
It took her longer than she had hoped to locate it. She refreshed her makeup with a compact from her purse, and then checked her phone out of habit. She had several new e-mails pertaining to Melinda's death, and she decided to thumb through them hastily. The biggest development was that the poison that Melinda had "administered" in her "suicide" had been discovered to be of foreign origins.
Cara squinted at the name. She had never even heard of it before. She would have to do more research on the subject when she got back to the mansion, but this was starting to smell fishier than it already had been smelling for the past week. When had Melinda last been out of the country? If she was one of Simon's oldest employees, then he was certain to know the answer. For the first time, Cara felt secure in the fact that she was on the right track. This was the best development that she could have possibly hoped for, one with the potential for a tangible answer, and she would pursue it until she arrived at a conclusion.
She exited the bathroom and found her way back to the bar a lot easier this time. She was surprised to discover that everything was not as she had left it.
The moment she entered the dining room, she heard the spray of glass across the floor. Someone had dropped their drink and it had shattered; not that unusual. But when she saw that someone was Simon, Cara's heart lodged in her throat.
Quite a few people had turned their attention in his direction, and quite a few more turned when they heard the noise the man was making.
Simon was laughing.
CHAPTER 27
Cara didn't know what was going on, but she knew that she needed to get him out of there, and quickly, before anyone with a press connection decided it would be a good idea to snap a photo with their phone.
She crossed to the bar rapidly and lay a gentle touch on his shoulder. Simon turned, blue eyes shining when he spotted her. She noticed that his face looked flushed beneath the bar light.
"There she is! There's my favorite American!"
"Don't call me that." For some reason, the endearment sounded unnatural to her. She could deal with being called "minx" or "cheeky girl", but a public space wasn't the place to try out a new nickname. It felt superficial and strange.
She was confused by his attitude, and her confusion made her sound angry, so she tried again more softly. "I already know I'm your favorite."
"Yes. Yes you do." Simon revolved awkwardly on his stool, and for a moment she thought his elbow would slip off the bar. He already had another drink in his hand—what was he drinking? And how many of them had he had already? She had only been gone for a few moments! "There are all sorts of ways I let you know it—"
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