Black Tie Billionaire

by Naima Simone

  But just as she reached for him, an implacable grip circled her wrist, stilling her frantic movements.

  “Not yet, moonbeam.” He lifted one of her arms and placed an openmouthed kiss to the center of her palm, the resulting feeling radiating straight to her damp, quivering sex. With a quick crush of his lips to hers, he swiftly divested her of her remaining clothes and shoes, leaving her trembling and naked before him, except for the decidedly unsexy plain, black panties.

  A burst of self-consciousness flared inside her chest, and she fought not to edge backward, away from the weak glow of the cell phone’s light. But as if he’d read her intentions, Gideon cupped her hip, preempting any movement she might’ve made to hide.

  “When a man stands before beauty like yours, there’s only one position he’s supposed to be in,” he murmured. Slowly, he lowered himself to his knees, tipping his head back to continue to meet her gaze. “You deserve to be worshipped.” He swept his lips across her stomach. “And pleasured.” Another sweep, but over the top of her sex. Heat coiled tight, and her core clenched at the tantalizing caress. “Give me permission to give you that.”

  It might’ve emerged as an order, but he wouldn’t continue without her go-ahead. She somehow knew that.

  “Yes,” she breathed, tunneling her fingers through his hair. Holding on tight.

  With a deliberate pace that had her internally screaming, he drew her underwear down her legs and helped her step free of them. Big, elegant hands brushed up her calves and thighs, and once more she wondered at the calluses adding a hint of roughness to the caress. But then she ceased thinking at all.

  “Gideon,” she cried out, fisting his hair, trying to pull him away or tug him closer—she didn’t know. Couldn’t decide. Not when pleasure unlike anything she’d ever experienced struck her with great bolts of lightning. Jesus, his lips, his tongue... They were voracious. Feasting on her, leaving no part of her unexplored, untouched. Long, luxurious swirls, decadent and wicked laps and sucks... He drove her insane with pleasure.

  Just as he’d promised. Just as he’d assured her she deserved.

  He spread her wider, hooking her leg over one of his wide shoulders, granting himself easier access. Like a ravenous beast, he growled against her sensitive, wet sex, and the vibration shoved her closer to the edge of release.

  “You’re so fucking sweet,” he rasped, nuzzling her. “So fucking sweet and pure. A man could get addicted to you. But you have more to give me, don’t you, baby? I’m a greedy bastard, and I want it all.” He uttered the last words almost as if to himself, and with one palm molded to her behind, he dragged the other up the inside of her spread thighs.

  Then he was filling her. Two fingers plunged inside her, and like a match struck to dry kindling, she sparked, flared, exploded into flames. Dimly, she caught his rough encouragement of “That’s it, baby. That’s it.” She loosened a hand from his hair and clapped it over her lips, muffling her cries as she came against his mouth, her hips rolling and jerking.

  Raw, dirty ecstasy, stripped to its barest essentials. That’s who she’d become in this moment as he lapped up every evidence of her desire from her flesh, from the insides of her thighs.

  “Please,” she begged, weakly pushing his head away as he circled her with tender but relentless strokes. “I can’t.”

  “That’s nothing but a challenge to me, moonbeam,” he rumbled, standing, his mouth damp. But when he lowered his head and took her lips in a torrid kiss that replicated how he’d just consumed her, she didn’t back away from the flavor of herself on his lips and tongue. No, she opened wider to him, turned on so bright it ached.

  Palming the back of her thighs, he hiked her in the air. On reflex she wound her legs around his waist. He crossed to the couch, and with each bump of her swollen, sensitive core against his stomach, that recently satiated heat flickered back to life, and she moaned with each caress.

  Her back met the cushions, and Gideon towered over her, half his face cast in shadow. That obsidian gaze never left hers as he removed a thin wallet from his pants pocket and withdrew a condom. He tossed it down, next to her feet, and then she watched, enraptured, as he stripped off his clothes. Her breath snagged in her throat. Jesus. He’d been stunning in a perfectly tailored tuxedo. But naked, the trappings torn away, all that thick, midnight hair falling around his face and broad shoulders... He was magnificent. Long legs, powerful thighs... Good God, she’d felt him, but seeing him... Like the rest of him, his erection was proud, beautiful. Perfect.

  As if of their own volition, her arms lifted, beckoning him to her. He tore open the foil square and sheathed himself then came to her, moving the cell phone to the floor next to them. His hard body covered hers, and a sigh escaped her at the contact. For a second, she couldn’t smother the sense of never having felt so cherished, so protected.

  “Ready, moonbeam?” he murmured, raising off her slightly. Grasping her hand in his, he brought it between their bodies. As he’d done earlier, he wrapped her fingers around his thick length. “Show me,” he ordered, planting his palms on either side of her head, granting her control.

  Even if she harbored the smallest seed of doubt about this illicit encounter in the dark—which she didn’t—his gesture would’ve eradicated it. Her chest tightened, her heart thudding against her rib cage. But her hand was steady as she guided him to her entrance. Shifting her palm to his taut behind, she pushed as she lifted her hips, taking him inside. Fully. Widening her thighs, she didn’t stop until he was buried within her.

  She gasped, a ripple rocking her body. God, he was everywhere. Over her, around her, inside her. So deep inside her. The weight and length of him stretched her, burned her, and she flexed against him, her flesh struggling to accommodate the sweet invasion.

  His eyes closed, and he bowed his head, pressing his forehead to hers, his breath pulsing over her lips. Tension vibrated through him, strained the muscles in his arms, stilled his large frame. Long moments later, he lifted his head, and the effort to hold back was etched onto his features.

  “Gideon,” she whispered, waiting until he lifted his ridiculously dense lashes to meet her eyes. “Let go.”

  As if those two words sliced through the last threads of his restraint, he groaned and lost it.

  On the tail of another of those sexy snarls, he dragged his erection free, lighting up nerve endings like an airport runway, before snapping his hips and thrusting back inside her. Driving her breath from her lungs and a wail of pleasure from her throat.

  Oh God. She wasn’t going to survive this.

  Pleasure inundated her as he plunged into her body. Over and over, relentlessly. He hooked an arm under her leg, tugging it higher and impossibly wider. With a choked cry, she wrapped her arms around his neck, holding on, a willing sacrifice to his possession. He rode her, wild and untethered, giving her no quarter. Not that she asked for any. She loved it. Every roll of his hips, every slap of flesh against flesh, every rake of his teeth over her shoulder.

  In his arms, under his body, she transformed into a sexual creature who lived, breathed for him, for the ecstasy only he could give.

  Electric pulses crackled down her back, sizzling at the base of her spine. Every thrust intensified the sensation. When he slid a hand between them and rubbed her, an avalanche of pleasure rushed toward her, burying her, stealing her consciousness. But not before Gideon stiffened above her, his deep, tortured groan echoing in her ear, rumbling against her chest.

  “Camille,” he whispered, and it sounded like a benediction, a prayer.

  And as she tightened her arms around him before sinking under, she foolishly wished to be his answer.

  Four

  Gideon frowned, reaching out to shut off his alarm. Drowsiness still clung to him, a warm lassitude weighing down his muscles, and he wanted to savor it instead of drive it away. But that damn alarm.

  “D
amn it,” he grumbled, but instead of hitting the digital clock on his bedside table, he slapped air. No table. No clock. Hell, no bed.

  He sat up, groaning at the pull of muscle in his lower back. Tunneling his fingers through his hair, he dragged it back from his face, scanning the small room with a television, a long table against the far wall, a short row of gray metal lockers and the couch he was sprawled on.

  The blackout.

  Camille.

  As if her name released a floodgate, the memories from the previous night poured forward. Serving Camille dinner. Talking with her. Kissing her. Being inside her. In response, his body stirred, hardening as image after image of her twisting and arching beneath him, taking him, flashed across his mind’s screen like an HD movie.

  He whipped around, scanning the room with new eyes, searching for any sign of her. But only his clothes and the empty dinner plates littered the floor. No Camille.

  Adrenaline streaked through his veins, and he snatched his pants from the floor, dragging them on. She couldn’t have gotten far. Weak morning light trickled into the room through the high window, so it still had to be pretty early. And with the house still locked down...

  No, not locked down. For the first time, the low drone of the small refrigerator in the far corner reached his ears. Power had returned, which meant the blackout had ended. Still, how much of a head start could she have? He had to find her.

  Just as he swept his shirt off the floor a Queen song erupted into the stifling room. It’d been this that he’d initially mistaken for his alarm, but it was his mom’s special ringtone. He strode the few steps required to recover the phone from beside the couch, arching his eyebrows in surprise that it still had power.

  Only 3 percent, he noted, swiping a thumb across the screen.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said in greeting, fastening buttons as he spoke. “I have very little battery left, so I can’t talk long. But I’m okay—”

  “Gideon,” she said, and her solemn tone cut him off. Anxiety and the first spike of fear speared his chest. He’d come to associate that particular note with one thing. And as she murmured, “It’s Olivia,” his guess proved correct.

  Closing his eyes, he straightened his shoulders, bracing himself. “What happened?”

  “She’s in the hospital. I had to take her in last night.” Her sigh echoed in his ear; the weariness and worry tore at him. “Gideon.” She paused. “She saw the news about Trevor Neal’s engagement.”

  A familiar anger awakened in his chest, stretching to life.

  “I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Gideon exited his sister’s private room on the behavioral health floor of Mercy Hospital & Medical Center, quietly shutting the door behind him.

  Behavioral health. Fancy words for psychiatric ward.

  Scrubbing a hand down his face, he strode through the hall to the waiting area where his mother and her parents perched on chairs. The three of them zeroed in on him as soon as he entered the small space with the connected seating and mounted television. God, it reeked of sadness and exhaustion. The same emotions etched in his mother’s and grandparents’ faces.

  “How is she?” his mom asked, rising.

  Frustration, grief and anger choked him, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. Instead he gathered his mother in his arms and hugged her close. Ai Knight had been his rock—his family’s rock—since his dad died when Gideon was nine years old. Though his grandparents were here now, that hadn’t always been the case. When she’d married Gideon’s father, they’d disowned her. As immigrants from Kaiping who’d settled in Canada in the 1960s, they’d wanted their only daughter to marry a Chinese man from the “Four Counties,” not a Caucasian from Chicago. But Ai had, and after she’d moved to the US with him, she and her parents hadn’t spoken for almost ten years. But since then they’d reconciled, and his grandparents had even moved to Chicago to be closer to Ai and their grandchildren. Which Gideon was thankful for, since his father had been a foster child, and so his mother’s parents were the only extended family he and his sister had.

  “Gideon?” his mother prompted.

  Sighing, he released her. God, he hated seeing her here in this room, the gravity of her daughter’s illness weighing down her delicate but strong shoulders.

  “Sleeping. They have her heavily sedated at the moment,” he replied. Which wasn’t much of an answer.

  “How long will she be here?” his grandmother inquired, stretching her arm out and clasping her daughter’s hand.

  “I’m not sure, Po Po,” he said, using the Taishanese term for maternal grandmother. His grandfather—his gung gung—remained silent, but settled a hand on his wife’s thin knee. “The doctor said definitely the next seventy-two hours. Maybe more.”

  They remained there, silent but connected through physical touch. After several moments, he squeezed his mom’s shoulder. “Can I talk to you out in the hall?”

  She nodded, following him out of the waiting room—and out of earshot of his grandparents. They might be a tight family, but there were some things even they didn’t know, and Gideon preferred to keep it that way when it came to his younger sister.

  “What happened?” he demanded, softening the hard tone of his question by enfolding her hand in his.

  “Since the announcement of Trevor’s engagement, I’ve tried my best to keep her protected from the news. Even going on her computer and phone and blocking those society sites. But I knew that was only prolonging the inevitable. And last night, she found out. I heard her sobbing all the way from downstairs, Gideon,” she whispered, the dark eyes she’d bequeathed to him liquid with tears. “I ran to her room and found her curled up in a ball on the floor of her bedroom, crying uncontrollably. Unable to stop. I was afraid. So I called the ambulance.”

  He ground his teeth together, an ache flaring along his jaw as he struggled to imprison the blistering stream of curses that would not only offend his mother but would be pointless.

  Nothing he said could ease his sister’s anguish. And no amount of release could extinguish his hatred toward Trevor Neal, the bastard responsible for shattering the kind, loving, fragile woman who’d given him her heart. A heart Trevor had trampled, then tossed aside like trash.

  It’d been a year ago, but to Olivia, Trevor’s betrayal might as well as have been yesterday. She’d kept her love affair with the CEO of RemingtonNeal, Inc. from Gideon, because he and Trevor had no love lost between them; they’d been rivals and enemies for years. Gideon had never hidden his hatred toward the other man.

  Which explained why Trevor had targeted her in the first place.

  He’d romanced Olivia, manipulated her into falling in love with him, making promises of a future together. Then, out of the blue, he’d cruelly dumped her. But that hadn’t been the worst of it. Olivia had been pregnant with his child. Trevor hadn’t cared. He’d even ordered her to get an abortion, which she’d refused. But in the end, it hadn’t mattered. She’d miscarried, and the loss had sunk her into a depression that had begun to lift only a couple months ago. Seeking to protect her from any further hurt, Gideon and his mother had kept the information about the engagement to themselves.

  But now this had happened.

  “I’m sorry.” His mother interrupted his thoughts by cupping his cheek. “I know this has to be difficult for you, too. This whole engagement thing. How’re you doing?”

  He covered her hand with his and then pressed a kiss to her palm before lowering it. Schooling his features, he submerged the jagged knife of pain and humiliation beneath a sheet of ice. “I’m fine, Mom. I’m not the one who needs your worry today.”

  She didn’t immediately reply, studying him. “I’m a mother. I have enough concern to spread around evenly,” she said, and amusement whispered through him. “She was your fiancée, Gideon,” she pointed out, as if he didn’t know. “Cheating on you
was hurtful enough, but this? And with him of all people?” She shook her head. “There’s no way you can possibly be ‘fine.’”

  “Let it go, Mom,” he murmured, sliding his hands into the front pockets of his pants and slightly turning away from her incisive gaze. “I have.”

  Lies.

  He would never forget Madison Reus’s betrayal. Or forgive it. Not when the man she’d cheated with had been Trevor.

  The other man had made it his mission to bring Gideon down a peg. And this latest stunt—pursuing Madison, fucking her and now marrying her—had been a direct hit. Anger at his enemy and his ex swelled within him. Both were selfish, narcissistic and uncaring of who they destroyed.

  Especially Trevor.

  Gideon had been unable to protect his sister from him the first time. And now she still suffered from his cruelty. It sickened Gideon that he’d failed her, despite the fact that he hadn’t known until it was too late. As her older brother, the man in the family, he should’ve been there. Should’ve asked questions. Should’ve...

  Damn it. He ruthlessly scrubbed his hands down his face.

  Never again. Trevor Neal wouldn’t get away unscathed this time.

  He would pay. Pay for them all.

  Five

  Shay approached the dining room entrance, pausing just outside, preparing herself for the first meal of the day. It was breakfast; it shouldn’t be an event worthy of deep-breathing techniques. But depending on her brother’s mood, it could go either way—calm and pleasant or tap dancing on her last damn nerve. Sighing, she straightened her shoulders and entered.

  “Good morning,” she said to Trevor, pulling out her chair to his left. As soon as she lowered herself into it, Jana, their maid, appeared at her elbow and set a plate with steaming hot food in front of her. “Thank you, Jana.” She smiled at the other woman.