At the Billionaire’s Wedding (35 page)

“For whatever you want.”

He couldn’t be saying what she thought he was saying. Not so directly. But guys like him probably did everything this way. No one would tell them not to, and they probably always got whatever they wanted.

Which was exactly what he was offering to her now.

“Whatever I want?” she repeated.

“Anything. You call the shots.”

“Anything?” Apparently she could not find original words.

His smile went from tempting to devastating. He meant the kind of anything she’d been fantasizing about last night.

She couldn’t speak. This was her chance. A wedding party fling. A brief hookup. Simple, uncomplicated fun.
Release.

She sucked in courage. “I do have something in mind.” Straight from her dream.

“Do you?”

“I’d like you to feel me up over my jeans.”
She’d said it.
“Now.”

His Adam’s apple shifted under smooth, tan skin. His surprise was incredibly sexy. “That’s it?”

Her courage plummeted. “Yes. Why? Isn’t that enough for you?”

He came three steps forward, right into her space the same way she’d stepped right into his at the gazebo.

“I get to touch you,” he said. “How couldn’t that be enough for me?”

Why did he always say the right thing? Did he have a stockpile of lines to get women in bed?

Don’t think about it, Cali. Just enjoy.

He smelled like heaven. It was his outrageously expensive cologne, she knew. But it was also him. His scent. She recognized it already and it made her knees weak.

“Are you going to do it?” She sounded breathy. Like the ditz she wasn’t.

“Yeah. I’m going to do it.” He didn’t sound breathy. He sounded really certain.

Then his hands were sliding around her hips, strong and as certain as his voice. She gripped the counter to either side of her as his fingertips strafed her bare skin above the low-cut waist of her jeans, flicking under her camisole. It felt good—his skin against hers. It felt amazing. She liked his hands on her hips. She liked it how he held her gaze, as if he wanted to see how she enjoyed his hands on her.

“I have one condition,” he said in a low voice.

“You didn’t say anything about conditions.” His hands were curving around her butt, the way he might try out the steering wheel of a Ferrari for the first time. A Ferrari he knew he’d own soon.

“You’ll like this condition.” He cupped her butt on both sides, his hands encompassing her.

She liked it already.
“What is it?”

“I want you to turn around.”

“Turn—?” Her throat caught. There was a mirror behind her. The lights around it were some kind of softly brilliant bulbs, and they were all blazing now.

He wanted her to see him touch her.

She’d never made out with a man in bright light. Something about it seemed wrong. Embarrassing. But she’d never made out with a man as gorgeous as Piers Prescott either. She could just look at him and forget everything else.

When she shifted around and her thighs came up against the edge of the sink, she didn’t look at him, though. She was too floored by her own reflection. Cheeks flushed, lips soft, hair tumbling over bare shoulders where the silky shirt had slipped away, jeans riding her hips and nipples poking through the thin white camisole, she looked like a sex kitten.

“I hope you’re seeing what I’m seeing,” he said. “Because what I’m seeing has been making me crazy all night.”

“Do it,” she whispered, her gaze glued to his hands bracketing her hips.

His right hand slipped along the waistline of her jeans, the thumb toying with the silver button before his fingers traveled down the fly. His touch was so light she barely felt it. But she could see it, his tan skin against the faded jeans. His slow, uneven breaths brushed her ear. It made her wild inside.

He dipped south, between her legs. Not lightly.

She couldn’t hold in the feelings.
“Ohh.”
He stroked over her crotch and she moaned again. Her thighs parted. She moved into his touch, her eyelids drooping but her eyes on his hand moving on her, making her hot, making her throb so fast it shocked her. Through the denim he found her clit. He massaged it. Her knees buckled.

“Good?” he asked, his voice rough.

“Yes,” she whispered, astounded that she was allowing this with a total stranger. That she’d asked for it. That she wanted it to go on and on. “Incredibly good.”

He braced her, holding her against his hips with one strong hand, the other flipping open the button of her jeans and unzipping the fly. She felt him hard against her butt and it made her even hotter.
She’d made him hard.

“If you want me to stop,” he said, trailing his fingertips along the edge of her panties. “You’re going to have to tell me.”

“I don’t want you to stop.” She didn’t recognize her own voice. “Yet.”

His fingers slipped under the lacy cotton and he knew exactly where to go and exactly what to touch. She shuddered into it. He stroked and her joints were like water. A man she barely knew had his hand inside her jeans and her brain screamed a single word:
more
.

“California Blake,” he murmured into her ear. “I find you unbelievably sexy. And I want my tongue”—he met her gaze in the mirror and stroked a fingertip over her clitoris—“here.”

She gasped upon the jolt of pleasure. Then she closed her eyes before she could beg him to put his tongue there. But it didn’t stop the rush of tightening pleasure, or the knowledge that his hand was in her pants and she’d still have to see him tomorrow. She didn’t care now. It’d been ages since she’d felt anything like this—
never like this
—and she was so close, her breaths fast and hips rocking into his hand. He ran his other palm up her waist and covered her breast, passing his thumb over the nipple, and her body reacted with a delicious shudder, her eyes flying open.

It was even better watching, feeling his hands on her and seeing the heat in his eyes as his hand caressing inside her panties made her desperate. She arched her back, grinding against his hard-on, and her orgasm surged.

A knock came at the door. “Anybody in there?”

“Damn it, I didn’t—” Suddenly his hands were gone. Then he was at the door, flipping the bolt just as the handle jiggled. “—lock it.” He swung his gaze back to her. “Just a minute,” he said more loudly.

A minute? Another five seconds would’ve done it.

“Hey, man, I gotta whiz and the other johns are too far away,” came from the other side of the door. One of Duke’s tech boys. “Make it fast, will you?”

“Try the bushes out back,” Piers said, the edge of his mouth curving up as he held her gaze.

“It’s raining,” the guy complained.

Cali sucked in breaths and shook her head. The moment was over, the pleasure scattering in embarrassment and guilt.
What had she been thinking?
Having tawdry fun—or any fun of this kind at all—wasn’t for her. This was just a sign that proved it. Her shaking hands fumbled on her zipper. “It’s over,” she whispered.

Piers came to her, grabbed her hip with one hand and dragged her to him, and cut off her protest with his mouth. He kissed her powerfully and possessively, like he had at the gazebo, so real and raw that his hand slipping beneath her panties now seemed perfectly natural—his fingers stroking, urging, exactly what was supposed to happen.

His words came against her lips. “Let me get inside you.”

She clutched his hard biceps. “Yes.”

He pushed up into her. It had to be two fingers. She was stretched deliciously, dying as he thrust.

“Oh, yes.”

He was
doing it
. And she was
letting him
. Pleasure spiraled, intense, desperate. Higher. Tighter.

She climaxed in a sudden, jolting shudder. For a moment she couldn’t breathe; everything was suspended—thought, action, sense—his arm around her holding her up. She gasped for air.

He said so close to her lips she could feel the words, “Now it’s over.” His hands fell away from her and he stepped back. With an utterly confident grin, he unlocked the door and went out, closing it behind him. She heard him say something to the waiting guy, then his footsteps receding.

She zipped her jeans, turned on the faucet, and splashed her face with cold water. She was hot all over, inside and out. And thoroughly, completely
relaxed
. Relaxed like she hadn’t been in memory.

Head ducked, she opened the door, said “Um, hi,” to the tech boy, and practically ran to her room.

Brampton House & Environs

He’s looking for you everywhere.

I don’t give a rat’s ass.

After a pause, Piers’s secretary texted back,
Pardon me, Mr. Prescott?

He typed,
I’m sorry, Mrs. Crowley. Put my grandfather off as well as you can. I’ll be home Sunday. Thank you
.

Piers jammed his phone into his pocket and descended the hill from the gazebo toward the house. He was far too edgy.

After midnight the night before he’d spent two hours at a makeshift basketball hoop nailed to the side of the old stable, teaching Harry Compton how to shoot. When Mark appeared and revealed he’d been a walk-on during his Princeton days, Piers challenged him to a pickup game. Anything to burn off the state that California had put him in with her sighs and moans and thorough willingness to be fucked in a public restroom.

It hadn’t worked. Afterward he’d nearly gone to her room. But he couldn’t. If he wanted even half a chance with her, he needed to show her he had something on his mind other than sex.

Because he did. The sparkling smile, the devotion to her sister, the charitable work, the brain, the nervousness around him as if she weren’t used to men, and the sweet little body all pointed to one certainty: sex wouldn’t be enough. Sex would be great. He’d bank on that. But it was only part of what he wanted from California Blake.

So today he would do things differently. Today he would hold himself in check and speak with her like he respected her and wanted to know more than what she had in her pants. Then, when he’d shown her he was good for more than a quick orgasm, he would tell her about his interference in her life. He hoped she would understand that he’d intended it for the best, and that he could trust in her discretion about the donation.

When he reached the house, he went straight to her room. Scraping an oddly unsteady hand through his hair, he knocked.

“Just a sec!” She opened the door. Her eyes popped wide. “I thought you were room service.”

“Depending on what you’re hungry for, I could be.”

Her cheeks turned brilliant red.

Damn.
Fail right out of the gate. But her hair was rumpled, and she clearly wasn’t wearing a bra beneath the thin T-shirt, and her very short sweat shorts revealed her very lithe legs.

This was going to be tougher than he’d thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t well done of me.”

She crossed her arms over her breasts. “I’m not sure why you think so. I should really be the one apologizing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well.” She shifted from one bare foot to the other. “One of us did the other a favor last night, and the one who did it wasn’t me.”

Aha. Right.

“That’s not how I operate, California.”

Her dark eyes retreated. “Operate?”

He really was an idiot. New concept. Felt not good. “Poor word choice. I mean that I don’t consider sex in terms of an equal barter economy.”

“More of a free trade system?” She offered a tentatively playful smile. He felt it in his chest.

He’d never before felt a woman’s smile in his chest. Never.

“Something like that.”

“Do…” She swiped her hair back from her brow, a nervous habit he’d noticed she had. It made him want to thread his fingers through that drape of hair and kiss her until her nervousness dissipated. He wanted to taste her again and make her sigh.

“Do you want to come in?” she said uncertainly.

“No. I want you to come out.”
Success.
He could, in fact, control himself. “There’s a public stable a few miles away and I’d like to take you horseback riding.”

She blinked. “Horseback riding?”

“Do you ride?”

“In all my spare time when I’m not skiing in the Swiss Alps or sunning on the Riviera? Yes. Definitely, I ride.”

He withheld his smile. “The weather is clear and I’d like to spend some time with you away from the others. Will you come with me?”

She stared at his chest, then into his eyes. “I don’t have boots. I’ll have to see if Roxanna or Jane brought a pair in my size.”

Now he did smile, in relief and because she’d done the hair-swiping thing again, which momentarily revealed the tight peak of her breast that he’d touched the night before.

Now he was salivating over a clothed breast. Thirty years old, but he felt like a teenager with this woman.

He backed away from the door. “I’ll meet you downstairs.” He would be the perfect gentleman, keeping his suggestive comments and his hands to himself. He would succeed in his goal of getting to know her and letting her get to know him.

Twenty minutes later when she appeared in the foyer wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt that revealed every contour of her body, Piers knew he was doomed to tragic failure.