by Naima Simone
A vise gripped his chest and tightened until the barest of breaths passed through his lungs. If he was a good man, he would release her, promise not to touch her again. Walk away from this whole plan that already ensnared her like barbed wire. She was right; he would probably end up hurting her, and if he had a conscience, he would warn her to protect herself from him.
But he’d never claimed to be good.
Still, he could do what she asked. He could make her forget.
“Kiss me,” he ordered in a low rumble. “Take what you want—what you need from me. And, moonbeam?” He lowered his head, pushing his thumb past the seam of her lips and into her mouth. Moist heat bathed the tip. “Don’t be gentle,” he growled.
She studied him, and as he watched her in turn, desire eclipsed the vulnerability that lingered in her gaze. He felt her teeth first, and the tiny sting arrowed straight to his lower body.
“Don’t be gentle,” he repeated, harder.
Her eyes still on him, she moved the hand on his neck so her fingers encircled the front. She squeezed just as her lips closed around his thumb, and she bit him.
“Fuck,” he groaned, the sting arcing through him like a sizzling bolt of electricity. “Baby.” Her gaze darted to the side, toward the front of the car and his driver. “The divide is soundproof,” he assured her, pulling his thumb free and rubbing the dampness over her bottom lip. Before repaying her with a nip of his own.
Another moan clawed free of him. Damn, he’d been aching—literally aching—to get his mouth on her. To taste her. Reaching for the console in front of the seat, he lifted the hood and hit a button, and another panel, this one smoke-tinted, slid across, concealing them.
“Are you good?” he asked. His dick throbbed, and he gritted his teeth.
He could wait until they reached their destination, but fuck if he or his dick wanted to. He needed to be inside her. From the moment he’d sat down across from her in that restaurant, he’d craved this. No, damn that. Longer. From the second he’d opened his private investigator’s file and laid eyes on her picture. Even as he’d spun his plans of revenge, he’d envisioned those hazel eyes gleaming with the arousal he’d stirred. Pictured her sweet body bowing and twisting for him. Wondered if she would take him slow and easy, or hard and wild. God, he’d almost driven himself insane wondering that.
She nodded, but he shook his head. “Tell me, moonbeam. You good?”
“Yes,” she breathed, giving his neck one last squeeze. She removed her hand, replacing it with her mouth, trailing a path up his throat, over his chin until she hovered over his lips. “I’ve set the rules,” she reminded him, kneeling on the seat so she rose over him. “Now follow them like you promised.”
She crushed her mouth to his.
The kiss wasn’t patient, wasn’t tentative. Her tongue thrust forward, parried with his, tangling and dueling. She took him as if she knew exactly what he liked, what he needed. It was...familiar. Something—a thought, a warning, maybe—tickled the back of his skull, but as she sucked on his tongue, drawing on him as if he were everything she needed to survive, that inkling winked out. Nothing mattered but the intoxicating, addictive taste of her. And in that instant, the question that had plagued him since he first gazed on her picture was answered: Shay would be hard and wild in bed. Or in the back of a Town Car.
“I want to...” She didn’t finish her request, but reached behind him, removing the band holding back his hair.
The strands loosened, and her heavy sigh differed from the ones she’d been emitting during their kiss. This one? It matched the delight that softened her beautiful features as she drew his hair forward and up to her face. Tangling her fingers in the strands, she tugged on them, and the prickle across his scalp tripped down his spine, crackled at the base. He clutched her hips, digging his fingertips into the soft flesh.
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
Only one other woman had ever called him that, and with that same note of awe coating the compliment. It’d shaken him then, and it did now. Once more that niggling sense of...something...teased him. But he shoved it away. Now, with his hands on Shay, with her storm-whipped rain and fresh roses scent embracing him, there wasn’t room for thoughts of another woman. Especially one that was a ghost. Shay was sensual, golden-bronze flesh-and-bone. She was hot, pounding blood coursing through him. She was his insanity, his hunger brought to vivid life.
She was here.
For him.
With a growl, he skated his palms up the sides of her torso, and the zipper of her dress abraded his skin. Desperate to discover if his imagination matched reality, he impatiently tugged it down and wasted no time in pushing the material over her shoulders and down her arms. She obliged him, freeing his hair and joining him in getting rid of the clothing.
“No.” The word escaped him before he could trap it.
“No?” she repeated, and he caught the hint of insecurity that crept into her voice. She started to lift her arms toward her torso, but he latched on to her wrists, lowering her arms back down before she could cross them.
“My imagination doesn’t match reality. Doesn’t even fucking compete.” He cupped a breast and hissed at the delicious weight of her flesh filling his palm. Warm, soft, perfect. Reverently, he whisked his thumb over the nipple, watching in fascination as it beaded. No, she wasn’t the first woman he’d touched like this, but none had been her. He tore his gaze from his hand on her to meet her eyes. “Nothing or no one could fucking compete.”
Her lips parted, but no words emerged. Good. He was saying enough for both of them, and he needed to stop that before he took them somewhere they had no place being. Bending his head, he sucked a tip deep, flicking his tongue against her flesh before drawing hard. Shay shuddered, her hands cradling his head, holding him to her with a strength that telegraphed her passion. That and the nails pricking his scalp.
Switching breasts, he treated the other to the same devotion. She writhed against him, as if seeking to get closer. Cooperating, he fisted the hem of her dress and shoved it up her thighs. With a whimper, she straddled him, dropping down and pressing them sex to sex.
He growled around her flesh, suckling harder. And she rewarded his attention with a dirty grind of her hips that had him throwing his head back against the seat, eyes squeezed closed. Her panties and his pants and underwear separated them, but none of those inconsequential details mattered. Not when her hot, wet heat rode him. Not when each drag of her flesh over his cock shredded his control.
“Give me your mouth again,” he ordered, in a voice so guttural he barely understood himself.
But she must’ve translated it, because she gave him what he asked for, her hips still working over him. She didn’t stop, and the thrust of her tongue and pull of her lips mimicked each stroke below. Even as she yanked his jacket open and attacked his shirt, damn near ripping buttons loose to get her hands on his bare chest, she didn’t lose him.
They groaned into each other when she touched him. Those slender, clever hands swept down his chest, lingering over his tattoos, tracing the ink with almost worshipful strokes.
“How is it possible that you just get more beautiful?” she whispered. He parted his lips to tell her she was the stunning one, not him, but she ripped away his ability to talk by brushing her fingertips over his nipples, rubbing them. His hips bucked into her. Live wires connected from her touch to the tip of his dick. He swelled, throbbing, hurting.
“I need to be inside you,” he rasped against her mouth. He abandoned her breasts and burrowed his fingers in her hair, gripping it, holding her still so he could stare into those slumberous eyes. “Are you going to let me?”
“Yes,” she breathed, trailing a route of fire over his clenched abs to the band of his pants.
“Are you going to take me like this?” he pressed, thrusting upward so she fully understood what he meant. “Take
me like you own me?”
“Yes.”
Almost too rough, he released her, reaching into his inner jacket pocket for his wallet. Quickly withdrawing a condom, he tossed the billfold to the floor. Within moments, he had his pants opened, his erection freed. Her swift intake of breath preceded the hot, tight clasp of her fist around him by seconds. His back bowed under the whip of pleasure, and his free hand wrapped around hers, so they pumped his flesh together. For several torturous and blissful moments, they stroked him, pushing closer to an ending that wouldn’t include him balls-deep inside her.
“Enough,” he muttered, and, removing their hands, tore open the small foil package and slid the protection over him. Above him, she fumbled under her dress, trying to push black lace panties down her hips. “Fuck that,” he growled.
Shoving her dress higher until it encircled her waist like a band, he fisted the front of her underwear and jerked it to the side. For a couple seconds, he savored the vision of her bare, glistening sex and the erotic beauty of her silken thigh-high stockings against silkier skin. But then the lure of that feminine flesh proved too enticing, too much.
He slid his finger through the dark cleft, moaning at the wetness coating his skin. The sound dragged from her echoed his, and her head tipped back, shuddering when he circled her, applying minute pressure. Just enough to have her shaking like a leaf, but not enough to catapult her over the edge. That honor belonged to his dick.
Hands grasping his shoulders, she eased down his length, and though the drugging pleasure had his eyes nearly closing to savor the tight, smooth fit of her sex, he kept his attention on her. Because nothing—not the rippling clasp of her body, the quiver of her thighs, the sight of her taking him—could compare with the slight widening and darkening of those beautiful eyes. Those eyes conveyed how much she craved him, needed him.
Those eyes gave him all of her.
And greedy bastard that he was, he wanted it all.
Except for the very fine tremble of his tautly controlled muscles, he held completely still. Allowing her to claim him at her own pace. Even if each interminable second she took to inch down threatened to send him careening into insanity or orgasm—whichever came first. Finally, she sat on his thighs, and he was fully embedded inside her. And still he wouldn’t free her from his gaze. Not when, in this moment, surrounded by her sweet flesh, everything clicked into place. He finally knew this gaze.
Knew her.
“Fuck me, moonbeam,” he whispered. “And don’t look away from me.”
Sliding her hands over his shoulders and into his hair, she grabbed fistfuls of the strands and glided up his length. Air kissed his tip before she sank onto him again, swallowing him in the firmest, but softest heat. Again. And again. She released him, took him. Eased off him, claimed him.
She rode him, rising and falling over him, driving them both toward the rapidly crumbling edge of release. Her cries mixed with the litany of his own and still she continued to look at him. Letting him see what he did to her. Gifting him with that. Electric pulses zipped up and down his spine, crackling in the balls of his feet. He couldn’t hold back much longer. He wasn’t going to last.
He loosened a hand from her hair and tucked it between their undulating bodies and slicked it over the top of her sex. Once, twice. A third and a pinch.
She flew apart with a scream, stiffening, her sex gripping him, milking him. Daring him to dive into the abyss with her. Grabbing her hips, he slammed into her, plunging so deep he almost doubted he would ever find his way out of her.
She fucking leveled him.
Her arms closed around his shoulders, cradling him as he bowed his head, groaning out his release into her neck. He inhaled her thick, heady scent as his body calmed and his breathing evened. His senses gradually winked back online after pleasure short-circuited them.
Silence filled the interior of the car. Carefully, he withdrew from her, disposing of the condom and righting their clothes. Shay didn’t look at him, paying undue attention to pulling down her dress and settling it around her thighs.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice seeming overly loud even to his own ears.
“Yes,” she said, still not glancing in his direction.
Camille.
The name shivered on his tongue. He almost said it aloud just to see if she would respond. If her reaction would give her away. But he swallowed the name of the woman who’d haunted his thoughts since the night of the blackout.
The woman who was one and the same as Shay Neal.
It explained the nagging sense of familiarity. The feeling that they’d met before. Sinking into her body had sealed the knowledge for him. How had Shay thought she could continue to fool him once he was deep inside her? How could she believe he would ever forget the too-tight and utterly perfect fit of her?
She’d lied to him. All this time, she’d recognized him—how could she not?—but she’d kept the secret of her identity from him.
Why?
Several reasons entered his mind—embarrassment, protecting her reputation—but one kept blaring in his head, gaining validity.
Had meeting him at the Du Sable City Gala been a setup? Not the blackout, of course, but had she gone to the gala with a plan to meet him? To get close to him? Yes, he’d approached her, but what would’ve happened if he hadn’t? Would she have found a way to get close to him? Found a way to get him to talk to her, to reveal information?
Had Trevor sent her to the gala with that purpose?
Minutes ago, Gideon would’ve said no. But with the haze of pleasure quickly evaporating and leaving him with a clearer mind, he couldn’t know for sure. First and foremost, Shay was a Neal and her loyalty belonged to her brother. Hadn’t she been willing to surrender to blackmail and sleep with the enemy—literally, now—to save Trevor? Gideon couldn’t see her going so far as to fuck him in that dark break room for her brother. As she’d defiantly told him before, she didn’t whore herself out for anyone. But...doing a little subterfuge on Trevor’s behalf? Maybe that wasn’t out of the question...
He studied her proud profile, waiting to see if she would tell him the truth now, after she’d allowed him back inside her body. Maybe she’d explain her reasons for deceiving him.
But she didn’t.
Her silence was a punch-in-the-gut reminder of who she was—who they were to each other. She said she wanted to forget. But they never could. Especially when forgetting for even a moment meant letting his guard down and the enemy in.
And that’s who she was.
The enemy.
Thirteen
Shay shrugged into her suit jacket, studying herself in her room’s cheval mirror. The slim fit of the gray, pin-striped jacket and pencil skirt were flattering, emphasizing the curves of her waist and hips. The cream blouse with the throat-to-waist ruffle lent it a feminine flair. She’d gathered her hair into a loose bun and fastened a pair of her mother’s favorite diamond studs to her ears. The whole look was professional, fashionable...
And armor.
Yes, she needed it today. Hopefully, no one looking at her would guess that the previous night she’d had hot, wild sex in the back seat of a car.
God. She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose. What had she been thinking? But that was just it. She hadn’t been.
Groaning, she turned from the mirror. It would’ve been so easy to stay in bed today and burrow under the covers. Just pretend last night hadn’t happened. After all, that was her forte lately. Pretend to be in a relationship. Pretend to be in love with Gideon Knight. Pretend she hadn’t just thrown all common sense and family loyalty out the window and screwed the man who was blackmailing her.
Regret weighed down her chest, so she couldn’t inhale without feeling its bulk. Not regret about the sex. It had been as cataclysmic as the first time, and though it’d been foolish to give
in to him, she didn’t have remorse over experiencing passion.
No, it was what happened after that earned her regret. For a time, she’d forgotten that Gideon hated everything and everyone associated with the Neal name. That he planned on taking down her brother if she didn’t capitulate to blackmail. That they stood on opposite sides of a Hatfield-and-McCoy-esque feud.
But as soon as the pleasure ebbed from her body, he’d returned to his aloof, distant self. She’d practically felt the wall slamming up between them. He’d been gentle when he’d shifted her off his lap and adjusted her dress, but unlike the hands that had cupped her breasts, tangled in her hair and stroked between her legs, his touch had been cold, almost clinical.
Other than asking if she was okay and wishing her good-night when he’d dropped her off at home, he hadn’t spoken. And she’d never felt so vulnerable, so...alone. Not even after the night of the blackout.
And to think she’d been so close to telling him she was Camille. That would’ve gone over well. Not.
Well, lesson learned. Last night was a mistake she wouldn’t repeat. She refused to let herself be vulnerable to him again. Get through the next six months. That was her goal. Protect Trevor from Gideon, come into her trust fund, then leave RemingtonNeal to concentrate on her own business.
The days of being under the thumb of the men in her life would come to an end.
To achieve the dream of independence, she could endure six more months of Gideon Knight.
With a sigh, she glanced at the clock on her bedside table. Well, no time for breakfast, and she could grab coffee at the office. If traffic cooperated, she would just make her nine o’clock meeting with the event planners for RemingtonNeal’s huge annual holiday party.
Grabbing her coat and purse, she descended the steps, her mind already locked on the multiplying items on her to-do list today.
“Shay.”
She halted at the front door, shooting Trevor a hurried smile as she set her purse on the foyer table to slip into her coat.
“Morning, Trevor. I’m sorry I don’t have time for breakfast. I have a—”