At His Whim (3 page)

If I was a better man, I’d have decided then to step away from Chloe Bloom.  Let her heal.  Let her find someone…
nice
.  Like a young law clerk or an accountant.  Someone with a future and a little ambition.  But no old money.  No legacy.  No compulsive need to conquer every challenge that came his way—or the arrogance to feel he was entitled to it, no matter who it hurt.

But this was Chloe, the woman I had been wondering about for two years, and I was not a better man.

At her door, I took the key from her warm fingers despite her mumbled protest.  There was relief on her face when I held the door pushed back for her but made no move to step into her suite.  Still, she had to brush past me, so tantalizingly close.  The crotch of my slacks began to tighten and bind.  When she took hold of the door, I folded my hands in front of me strategically.

“You should pay a visit to the spa, to relax before dinner.”

This got me a wistful smile.  “I’d like that, but I didn’t get the chance to make reservations.  Your brochure says many of the best treatments have to be booked as much as two weeks in advance.”

I shook my head no.  “Not for you.  I’ll call down and tell them to fit you in.  Anything you want.”

Chloe raked her teeth along that lush pillow of her lower lip again, and my head filled with images of her doing that at the height of her pleasure, as my cock drove her to climax.  There was a definite sense of daring, even flirtation, when she asked, “What do you recommend?”

Ah, too easy, that.

“Deep Surrender.”

***

Despite the overly familiar behavior of Adrian Knight, and despite my dangerously wanton physical reaction to his practiced fingertips along my arm and his breath along my cheek, I couldn’t resist taking his recommendation.  Deep Surrender, I soon discovered, was a coconut milk and warm stone deep tissue massage.  It probably would have utterly broken the tension in my spine had my masseuse not been one of those improbably gorgeous staffers, the kind that had come to mind when I’d arrived.  Chestnut hair and green eyes and
very good hands
.

God, I hadn’t been touched by anyone but Penn in almost two years, and now this handsome stranger was working out the knots all along my back with such strong fingers while my insides were still melted butter from the heat in Adrian Knight’s voice.  Twice I caught myself tensing my thighs, almost…straining for something more, and I prayed the poor masseuse hadn’t noticed.  I’d have claimed embarrassment and asked for a female masseuse had I not been a late addition to the spa’s schedule.  I couldn’t compound the inconvenience by being picky over the service before it even started, though I knew that wouldn’t have stopped ninety percent of their clientele.

Just
try
staying in the moment, Chloe, I told myself.  A deep breath.  My eyes sank closed.  Little by little, flexed muscles relaxed and allowed me to sink against the plush towel spread beneath me.

“That’s it,” the stranger’s silky voice said from above me.  “Let go.”

Tight muscles.  Bobbing stomach.  And a distressingly insistent pulse from the sensitive pearl of nerve endings between my legs.  I swallowed a curse and gripped the upper edge of the massage table, then made myself uncurl my fingers.  My face turned in toward the towel, I hid a guilty, nervous smile.  Some libertine I was.

What was this trip supposed to do for me?  Ah, yes, it was an escape from Penn’s phone calls and gifts, the pitying looks from my friends, the whispers at the office.  But it was also supposed to be about going someplace no one knew me and…sex.  No strings attached, no emotional involvement, no exchange of last names sex.  An exploration of what it was men like my…like my father and Penn got out of sex divorced from love.

I had never once had sex with someone I didn’t care for romantically.  Even in law school, juggling classes and study sessions with a job as a law clerk, when I’d had no time for a bona fide boyfriend, I’d gone celibate rather than make use of the friends-with-benefits arrangements so many of my peers had.  I knew several of my female friends who were the same way.  No sex without love.  No love without sex.  But I also didn’t know a single man, among those close enough to admit as much to me, who hadn’t had numerous one-night-stands and short term flings.  Was it a gender thing?  Something hardwired in the brain?

No, I’d told myself when I walked away from Penn that last night in his penthouse, I refused to believe all women had to be slaves to their hearts while men got to be best friends with their cocks.  I could learn how to be like them, if I put my mind to it.  Just as I’d learned to mimic the manners and posturing of the real estate tycoons and energy company executives, the investors from Hong Kong and Dubai, the regulators from Washington who did lunch with senators and cabinet members.

But really, it wasn’t a one-to-one comparison, was it?  My whole life had been about how smart I was, such a source of pride for my mother.  Academic awards and scholarships that took me clear across the country to study at Stanford, debate team trophies, praise from the firm partners over journal articles I’d published or mitigation reports I’d drafted.  It was hard not to absorb the atmosphere and start to resemble the privilege that surrounded me.

Doing something like seducing a handsome masseuse—I smothered a silly giggle in the towel—was a different story.  There wasn’t a class for that, and I didn’t hang out in bars enough to naturally pick up the skill.  Maybe I just wasn’t the casual sex kind of girl.

I told myself I wasn’t going to worry about it anymore tonight, as I gathered my thoroughly relaxed, slightly tingly limbs from the massage table.  After wrapping myself in a fluffy white robe and pinning up my hair, and
not
making a pass at my gracious masseuse, I headed down a tile corridor to something called a eucalyptus sauna.

My. God.  I’d never felt anything like it.  With the sauna all to myself, I perched on the top of three graduated wooden steps that lined the room and sank into the voluminous folds of my robe, half my face hidden in the collar.  The steam heated my skin to a rosy glow while the eucalyptus penetrated my lungs and made the inside of my body feel like I’d been steeped in mint.

I had to admit it.  I had closed my eyes and was thinking dirty thoughts about Adrian Knight, about his hands massaging and prodding me under my towel, when I heard the sauna room door creak open and hiss slowly closed.  Intending to give my anonymous companion the same privacy I wanted, I didn’t so much as raise an eyelid.  Not when bare feet padded across the room.  Not when the weight of someone sitting nearby on the same section of bench shifted the wood under my butt.  Not until a very male sigh sounded from right beside me.

When I peeked, I found the devil himself sitting next to me in his own white robe, head tilted against the wall at our backs, feet planted firm and wide apart.  I closed my eyes before the sight really registered in my mind, but they sprang open again a moment later.  By then, Adrian Knight had turned his head and was smiling softly at me.  Rather like a polite hawk about to greet a lone chick.

“Miss Bloom.”

Though I’d just spent an hour-long massage coveting the male ability to enjoy sex without attachment, though I’d just been daring to fantasize about this man tracing his fingers along the swollen lips of my sex, though I was even now pressing my thighs together while my pussy contracted in anticipation, I frowned at Knight.  It should only have been about half past four.  What were the business hours in Brazil?

“Aren’t you…?   Aren’t you working?  The resort doesn’t have a problem with you…with you using the amenities during the day?”

He cocked one thick, brooding brow at me and nodded.  “Oh, they might if I didn’t own it.”  He shrugged.  “Sometimes, I get a whim.”

I sat up straighter, my back stiffened by a surge of annoyance.  “But you said you were the manager.”

So slowly, he shook his head as that smile spread over his face, deepening the GQ contours of his sculpted cheeks.  “I said I managed the resort, and I do.  The two roles aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.”

A quick bit of math in my head—private island, tropics, twenty thousand acres—told me the man had laid down at least eight figures for Ilha de Flor, and that was assuming he’d built the resort after the purchase.  The permits, the building, the infrastructure all would have doubled the price, to be conservative.  Again, I found satisfaction in the confirmation of my suspicions.  The man was money, a lot of it.  Again, I felt a bone-deep irritation that there was something else to Knight, though, that wasn’t quite right.  And
again
, I found myself attracted to a wealthy playboy.  Or was it just Casanovas I couldn’t stay away from, be they heirs of industry like Penn or blue collar charmers like my high-school drop-out of a father?

I was working myself into a temper when Adrian added, “Owner or no, it could be a problem, however, were I to lock myself into the sauna…all alone…with a woman…if she found the attention unwelcome.”

My mouth worked soundlessly around the shape of words that wouldn’t come out of my mouth.  For a full ten seconds, I wasn’t sure if I was trying to curse this man, call for help, or moan.

“Is my attention unwelcome, Miss Bloom?” he pressed, and when all I did—all I could do—was snort out a sort of indignant breath, Adrian Knight leaned over and kissed me.  His mouth lingered a hairsbreadth from me for a heartbeat before full, silken lips fitted themselves perfectly to mine.  There was a moment when I groaned my hesitant disapproval, then mewed despite myself as his lips opened mine wide and his tongue lapped slowly and sensuously into my mouth.  He tasted of the sweet lemon tea he’d had with lunch.  I could at least hope I tasted of honey and chocolate.

His kiss was…the best I’d ever had.  No one had ever used their tongue like that, filling my mouth, sweeping the insides of my cheeks and the back of my teeth, warm and soft but constant and insistent.  I felt penetrated, more intimately than if his member was between my legs, and I grew just as slick as if he were fucking me.  My own wetness wept from my sex and coated my inner thighs as I squeezed them tight.

I jerked back with a strangled cry and broke the kiss when I felt his fingers sliding between my knees through the opening in the robe.  No aptitude for casual sex, wasn’t that what I’d concluded?  But no reason I couldn’t learn, I remembered the argument went.

Adrian’s breath had warmed and thickened as much as mine, I noted with an uncharacteristic thrill of…of power at the idea that I was turning on this incredibly handsome man.  A man of wealth.  And sophistication.  And skill.  I just stared at him for what seemed like minutes, at the slightly exaggerated rise and fall of his chest, at the deep black pupils dominating the irises of his eyes as they studied me every bit as intently.

Another kiss, harder but brief, and Adrian Knight spoke with his lips grazing my mouth.  “Spread your legs,” he said, each soft word smoothly but painstakingly enunciated under his heavy breath.  His hand shifted to grip my leg but did not venture higher, and not just because I was clutching his wrist.  He pulled his head back to look me in the face.  Voice a little steadier, a little firmer, he said, “Tell me to go, and I will.”

My gaze sank to my hand clamped around his wrist.  He obviously couldn’t leave if I didn’t let go.  And I didn’t let go.

Lips at my ear, and more insistently this time, he commanded again, “Spread your legs.”

Something pulled at my pit of my stomach, like the vibration of a cord tied right to my core.  It was the same sinking, swooning feeling that came over me whenever Penn had gotten forceful and demanding in bed.  Like I was suspended, swinging loose by that tether of sensation, unable to find purchase to steady myself.  I didn’t release Adrian’s hand, but my knees parted, and his fingers slid up immediately to cup my smooth-shaven mons.  His middle finger traced my slit, and when I gasped, his mouth took mine again.  With his other hand, he pulled my hair and my head back for this onslaught from his lips.  Pins jerked free, and my hair looped down in mussed tangles over his fist and along my sweat-dampened neck.

One finger plunged inside me, and Adrian finally dragged his mouth from mine.  “You’re wet, Miss Bloom,” he rasped as his lips traveled along my jaw to my ear.  “Very, very wet.”  A second finger joined the first to punctuate the statement.  My pussy ached and clenched hungrily around the sudden invasion.  When my fingernails dug into his wrist, just as I gave a little involuntary buck, he added a third.

“Oh, god.”  I bit my lip, afraid I’d just screamed.  I sounded so loud to myself, but he didn’t seem startled or concerned.

Adrian’s tongue flicked against my earlobe just as his fingers pulsed deep and hit my G-spot.  “Who are you wet for?”

I tried to bow my head, at a loss, unwilling to admit I’d been fantasizing about him minutes before this, but Adrian’s hold on my hair wouldn’t allow it.

“Is it Brian?” he pressed, looking down at me, scrutinizing my reaction.  That had been my masseuse’s name, and the back of my neck tightened as my gaze drifted to Knight’s.  Would he have arranged for the handsome masseuse to handle my massage?  Why?  To…to see if it would affect me?  To
prime
me for this encounter?  I suddenly felt very much like prey, and the brief shift in Adrian’s expression told me he felt the quiver that passed through me at the thought.

“Or are you wet for me?  Thinking about how I touched you today, how close I was?”

“Yes.”  I surprised myself with the sighed confession.  Even with Penn, even as I submitted to commanding sex with secret relish, I wasn’t one to admit my desires or reactions aloud.  It made me feel bared and vulnerable in a way that even this improbable situation, this shameless risk, did not.

“Then I’d best deliver, hadn’t I?” Knight taunted in a ragged chuckle before his fingers started moving in earnest, started playing that perfect spot with deep, relentless strokes that opened and stretched me.

My head lolled even further back, and Adrian’s lips followed the column of my throat down the neck of the robe.  “Open it,” he ordered, his hands still occupied, and I did.  That sinfully skilled tongue of his lapped a hot, wet circle around one peaked nipple before he drew it into his mouth.  His teeth sank lightly into the soft flesh around my areola, and he sucked and gnawed in time with the pulsing of his fingers up my aching sex.