Billionaire Bad Boys of Romance Boxed Set (10 Book Bundle) (6 page)

Was I... was I actually getting
turned on
by this?

I was. I
was
getting turned on. I must be a secret exhibitionist!

Now I can no longer tease Felicia about her public sexcapades in good conscience,
I thought to myself. Good thing I don't
have
a conscience.

Bowing my head, I put my hands on the waistband of my jeans. My hair slid over my shoulders, sending a shudder through me, and when I unbuttoned my jeans my fingers were trembling. With a shove, I pushed the denim down over my hips, letting it fall past my thighs to my knees, and I stepped out of my pants, the cool air pebbling the skin of my body. Now only my underwear remained, cheap, practical black cotton panties I'd bought on sale. Old habits die hard. I hooked my thumbs into the waistband and prepared to pull them down.

My hands wouldn't budge.

I bit my lip.

“Can I, uh, keep my underwear on?” I asked through the screen, cursing my cowardice as I did so. Couldn't even take it off for a photo shoot? What kind of artist am I?

“Sure.” Ward's voice floated around the screen, deep and rich. “Whatever you're comfortable with.”

Hating myself, I picked up the white satin and wrapped it around my body.

The fabric was long—very long, and wide, like a bridal train. I wondered where he'd managed to get it, but then I pushed the thought out of my mind. What did it matter? He was rich. He could get anything he damn well wanted. Taking a deep breath to brace myself, I slipped out from behind the screen, the fabric trailing over the floor behind me.

Ward was peering at his camera, adjusting some setting or other, and didn't notice me for a moment. I would have been content to watch him frown for an hour, but my reactions were starting to severely unsettle me, so I cleared my throat instead. He looked up. His cherry wood eyes widened.

“Wow,” he said.

I gave him my best
bitch, please
eye roll. I may have been susceptible to his charms, but I liked to think I wasn't
that
susceptible.

His mouth turned up. “I meant that you look different in white,” he said.

“Different from what?” I asked him. “We've known each other less than twenty-four hours. You haven't seen me in
anything.”

“Black,” he said immediately. “And if I had to guess, you really like to wear black.”

“Of course I like to wear black. It goes with everything.”

He smiled, as if he knew something about me that I didn't, and I scowled back at him. “Let's just get started,” I snapped.

“Sure,” he said, and gestured for me to step onto the black backdrop, in front of the blinding lights.

Tossing my head back, I did so, dragging the stupid satin cloth behind me, keeping it wrapped around my chest so that it would cover the important bits. When I reached the center of the dark rectangle on the floor, I turned and flung my hair over my shoulder, giving him my dirtiest look.

Ward snapped a picture.

My mouth dropped open. “What the hell?” I demanded. “Aren't you going to warn me when you take a picture?”

“Well, you'll be on your guard now,” he said affably, inspecting the photo he'd just taken on his camera. “That was my only chance to capture the most raw you.”

For some reason, that made me even angrier. “Who said you could take pictures of the raw me?” I said. “That's personal!”

He blinked. “Isn't that what art is?” he asked. “Personal?”

“Personal
for you.”

“You
are
personal for me. I find you fascinating.”

The fists clenching the satin around my body tightened, and as it did so his sharp cherry wood eyes honed in on it, and he lifted the camera again.

“Wait!” I said.

He halted and tilted his head at me. “Yes?”

“Just why do you find me fascinating? I know it's not because of my looks or whatever.” I mean, I
hoped
it was for my looks. I wouldn't mind being Felicia. I wouldn't mind being beautiful to someone.

He lowered the camera and appeared to think about this for a long moment, and the longer it stretched out the more nervous I got.

“I suppose because you are alive,” he said at last.

He really had a way of confusing me. “Everyone's alive. Except dead people.”

But he shook his head. “No. Not so. In that entire room of people last night, you were the only person who stood out to me against the crowd. You were
alive
.” He lifted the camera again and stepped in, closer and closer, crouching so that his camera was level with my breasts and honed in on my hands clutching the white fabric to my chest. I prayed he wouldn't notice how rapid my breathing became with his increasing proximity.

I licked my lips as he took a picture of my pale-knuckled hands. “That still doesn't make any sense,” I told him.

He backed up, and looked at me. And for a strange moment, I felt as though he was the only person who had ever really
looked
at me before. Looked, and saw.

“Then perhaps I recognized you,” he said. “From a past life. Perhaps we are bound together by the red thread of fate, as the Japanese say.” He paused. “A red thread. Red ribbon. You would look beautiful bound in red.”

His words sent shivers through me. “Would I? And would you be the one doing the binding?”

Those dark cherry wood eyes glinted at me. “Would you like me to?”

I didn't know what to say. He was a man who could make me speechless. I
always
know what to say, how to send people off balance, and yet I seemed to have met my match in Malcolm Ward. I opened my mouth, my whole body vibrating with something dark and sweet, as though I were a string on an instrument and he had plucked me, made me sing.

He snapped a picture of my parted lips and wide eyes, my hesitation and desire, a woman standing on a cliff side on the fifth floor of a Manhattan mansion.

“Perhaps,” I said at last. “If you wanted.” Another rush of heat bloomed between my legs at my frank admission, as I thought of all the ways I wanted him to tie me up.

For the first time, I saw a crack in his serenely nutso exterior. His Adam's apple bobbed as he gulped. “I might,” he said. “Will you turn around?”

Mouth dry, I did so. The soft sound of our breathing and the click and whirr of the camera were the only sounds in the room. The noise of the city outside barely registered with me. I felt his presence, hot and hovering, just behind me, like a caress on my skin. The muscles of my back tightened and wound up, and my spine arched, thrusting my breasts out. The clicking of the camera came faster, and I began to move, tossing my hair, letting my head fall back on a limp neck, my arms growing heavy as I lost control of them beneath a wave of drunken desire. I posed artlessly for him, my thoughts running wild with the fantasy of skin on skin, breath to breath, his fingers on me, in me, his tongue tasting my body as I devoured him, bit him, dug in my nails and pulled him inside.

My need must have shown on my face, and though there was a camera between us, I knew he saw it. From the corner of my eye, I watched his shoulders grow tense and tight as I threw everything I had into seducing him.

His breath was coming hard and fast by the time he knelt beside me, aiming the lens of his camera upward, and I lifted an arm and turned my face from his, letting the fabric slip from my grip to reveal one pert breast with a nipple as hard as a pebble.

He hissed between his teeth as he snapped the picture. The sound made my knees go weak, and I sank to the floor, letting my limbs go limp as I lay down, swathed carelessly in white satin against black, my hair fanning out around me, my breasts freed at last.

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was harsh with want. “Yes, like that.”

I tossed my head, writhing in the throes of some imagined ecstasy, and through it the camera clicked on, capturing me with complete honesty. Malcolm stood again and straddled my hips so he could get a good view of me from above, and I thrashed beneath him, like a pinned butterfly.

I wished I'd taken my panties off, but now that he was above me I really had no way of removing them discreetly, so I threw caution, and my satiny shroud, to the wind. His sharp inhalation as I bared myself almost completely to him was all I needed. Reaching down, I worked my panties over my hips, grateful that the black cotton would stand out against the white. Malcolm took a thousand and one pictures as I slid them down my legs, twisting and turning so he could get the maximum number of angles. Sliding one foot out, I cocked my hip and slowly stretched the cotton out, pulling at it as though it were inextricably hooked on my other foot. When at last the elastic snapped over my toes and rebounded into my hand I was almost moaning. One of my fingers had found its way into my mouth and I bit down on it as I tossed the panties away.

Malcolm sank to his knees, still straddling my legs. The camera clicked, a rapid staccato beat as I arched my back, completely bared to him. “My god,” he whispered, rough and low, and then my hands found his thighs, burning hot through the thin flannel pajama bottoms.

The barrier of the camera broke, and his hand found my stomach, rough and wide, skating down the skin of my belly to the soft mound of my pussy, still trapped between my thighs. Without parting my legs, he slipped a rough fingertip between the lips of my pussy and found my creamy slit and aching clitoris.

His touch was electrifying, sending sparks dancing across my skin, and I thought at any moment they might catch, fan into flames and consume me, but as his hand picked up a slow, rough rhythm, fucking me with the pad of his finger, I failed to combust. Instead I gasped as he dragged his fingertip against my clit, drawing a moan from my mouth as my legs tensed and my toes curled. My hands ran over my skin, up into my hair where they curled and pulled, then down over my breasts, pinching and pulling them into taut peaks. Above the sound of my gasps, I heard the camera clicking madly, but I didn't even care.

Let him take pictures,
I thought fiercely. I wanted him to see me in all my abandoned glory. If I was alive like no one else, then I wanted everyone to know it. Then he dipped his finger inside me and I forgot all about the whirring camera as the world condensed to my quivering cunt and his strong, insistent finger. Deeper and deeper he went, then curled his finger inside me.

“Ah!” The sound ripped from my lips, a noise of pure surprise and shock, as though I had never been touched before. My hands clawed their way up my throat, spreading over my face as I tried to stifle my cries at the slow, inexorable fuck he was giving me with only his hand.

Something cold touched my wrist, and I opened my eyes—when had I closed them?—to see the camera resting against my arm. He was holding it out to me.

I took it.

His hands freed, he moved down my body, his other hand alighting on my thigh, sending fiery shivers through my body, racing up my leg to curl in the small of my back. “Open for me,” he said, his voice dark and hard. “Let me taste you.”

My thighs parted for him almost of their own volition, the cool air of the studio hitting my heated flesh like a splash of ice water. I hissed between my teeth, and then the heat of his mouth descended on my pussy and all discomfort was obliterated. My fingers tightened on the hard plastic camera in my hands and it gave a creak of protest as his tongue flicked over my clitoris, lapped and licked down the inside of my labia, dipped inside my tight channel. Glancing down, I saw that the screen on the camera was still on, and I could see him through it, licking my pussy, his eyes half-closed in pleasure as his hands slowly massaged my thighs. He looked lost in desire, and strangely vulnerable.

He was beautiful.

I took a picture.

Immediately his eyes flickered up to mine, and he smiled at me, that devilish grin contrasting with the tiny frozen moment on the camera screen where he sleepily licked my clit with his long, delicious tongue. Then his grin faded as he opened his sensuous lips wide and sucked my entire pussy into his mouth, labia and all. The pull of his lips sent my head spinning. My legs curled, my heels finding his back and digging in as my hips bucked off the floor and into his face. He seemed to be encouraged by this reaction, and he chuckled, my pussy still in his mouth. The vibrations sent my eyes rolling back in my head and I twisted, my thighs clamping down on his head to hold him in place. I didn't ever want him to move.

His hands, trapped between his head and my legs, slipped out, circling around my thighs and then down to my ass. There they spread out, massaging, squeezing, and I moaned as he dug his fingers in and then pulled his head away from my pussy with a loud
smack,
the suction releasing in one great pop that echoed around the empty studio. Then he returned and sucked my clit back into his mouth before pulling away, again and again. The soft, wet sounds of his mouth on my pussy clicked and clacked against the walls, until the whole room was full of the echoes of his mouth lavishing attention on my intimate places.

In the pit of my belly, I felt my climax begin to coil, like a snake about to strike, but abruptly he pulled his head away and dropped me. Rearing back on his knees, he knelt between my thighs, and through the haze of my thwarted orgasm I saw his erection—huge, my god—straining against the fabric of his pants. He must have been wearing no underwear, because it bounced freely with his movement. Precum stained the tip dark.