Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (25 page)

I took the silken tie of the dressing gown in one hand and tugged gently, unfastening the bow. Then I put a hand on either side of the silken material and drew it slowly apart, and there she was.

“Stay there,” I told her. “Don’t move.”

“Hemi.” Nothing but a breath. Protest or invitation, I didn’t care. I was drawing the tie out from the loops of the dressing gown, and she was watching me do it until, at last, I had it in two hands, and I stood to face her. The pink tint was rising in her cheeks, her breasts lifting with each panting breath.

When I eased the dressing gown off her shoulders and it fell to the ground in a whisper of fabric, she drew in a breath. And when I passed the wide silken tie between her legs, her blue eyes opened wide.

“It’s been too long,” I told her. “And you need this, don’t you?” I pulled the tie up, gave it an exploratory tug, one hand to the other, and she gasped.

And then I started to play.

Hope

When Hemi told me to stand up, I very nearly couldn’t. And I when I opened my eyes to see him sitting there, looking his fiercest, commanding my obedience…well, it worked. What can I say.

I was on my feet, rocking some, breathing hard, too aroused to think of anything but my need to be touched, to be finished off. And knowing that nobody could do it like Hemi. Then he pushed the robe off me, and I knew I was naked, there in the open air, and somebody might see, and I didn’t care. I was aching, and he still hadn’t touched me right, and didn’t he know how much I needed it?

Then he passed that length of silk over me, the lightest abrasion, as rough-gentle as his tongue could be, and kept doing it, and I wasn’t able to be quiet anymore. He was going faster, and I was spiraling, then he was slowing down and letting me fall back, when that was the last thing I wanted to do.

“Hemi,” I said when he gentled the touch and slowed so the fabric was barely dragging over me, pure silken torture. “Please. I need…” My legs were trembling, and so was the rest of me.

“What do you need?” he asked me, his voice as rough as I needed the silk to be.

“Please,” I said, not caring that I was begging.

He smiled. “Eyes open,” he told me. “Watch me.”

I wanted to close them when he started up again. I needed to. But I didn’t. His hard, dark gaze held mine as he stood there, imperious as an Ottoman emperor, and drove me to the brink, then back again, over and over. Until my legs were shaking hard, and I was panting.

“I can’t,” I managed to say. “I can’t…Hemi.”

He didn’t smile, and he didn’t soften. Instead, he dropped the silk tie between my feet. “Turn around,” he told me. “Bend over and hold onto the edge of the table.”

I did it. Of course I did. I needed the orgasm as much as I’d ever needed anything. I was aching, pulsing, throbbing. I
needed
it.

A few seconds, and I could tell by the rustle behind me that he was stripping. I wanted to look at him, but my position, face-down, staring at the stone floor of the terrace, was even more exciting than seeing him would have been. I knew it was too open, too vulnerable, and much too subservient. And I loved it.

He didn’t warn me, and he didn’t go slowly. He lifted my hips in two hands and shoved home, and I cried out.

“Too…short,” he gritted out. “Too…tight. Ah…no.”

“Wh-what?” I asked, but a tattooed arm was already shoving dishes aside, and he was pushing me forward, so my body rested on the table and my hips hung off the edge, and then he was plunging home again. He had hold of my hips, the raised lip at the edge of the table was catching me in exactly the right place, my hands were hanging onto the other side, clutching for dear life, and I was keening.

When one of his hands let go of my hip and came around to rub…I went over, just like that. One moment, I was calling out, squirming against his hand, his thrusting body, and the next…I was gone. The spasms shook me, my hands tightened painfully around the edge of the table, and my hips would have bucked if Hemi hadn’t been so heavy over me. But he
was
heavy, and I was going on and on with no letup for what felt like minutes. The minute I crested and headed down the other side, his fingers and the unbelievable pressure inside me, the way he hit every spot exactly right, were sending me up again.

Cold, hard glass under me, hot, hard man over me, and I was caught between them. Hemi was merciless, but I didn’t want mercy. I wanted this. I wanted it all. And he gave it to me.

It took him a long time afterwards to move off me, but I didn’t want him to. I wasn’t comfortable, but I was exactly where I needed to be. And when he dragged his lips across the sensitive places down my spine, I shivered and wanted it all again.

“Insatiable,” he said with a sigh, but I could hear the smile in his voice. He was standing, then, pulling me up with him and down into his lap again.

You’re thinking it’s weak to want to be held as much as Hemi held me, and you’re right. But you have to understand—he was my man, and nobody had ever been mine like that before.

My soul was my own, and I knew it, and so were my mind and my body. I wasn’t his slave, but I sometimes felt as if I were. The only good part about it was that I could tell he felt the same way. That I dragged him to me, willing and unwilling all at once, made him open up in a way that scared him, and took him past his limits in exactly the same way he did to me. It was fierce, it was irresistible, and it was ours.

That’s love, I think. That’s trust. And it’s precious.

So, yes, it frightened me, the way I felt about him, but it soothed me, too. My life with Hemi was all contradiction.

Right now, he was stroking my shoulder, soothing again. “All right?” he asked me.

“Mm…yes.” I sighed. “But you know, for a man who gave a good impression of somebody who didn’t want Karen to go off by herself a little while ago, you took some pretty fast advantage of her being gone.”

“And you didn’t want me to.”

“Now, did I say that?” I pressed a kiss to the muscle at his shoulder, then gave him a soft bite there. “I wanted you to. Did I mention that I loved you?”

“You may have done. And I’ve got Eugene coming in a bit for my workout, so we’re going to have to get up out of this chair, or you’re going to be very embarrassed indeed. But first…” He reached for the manila envelope Josh had handed him, which was shoved to the edge of the table now, along with everything else, and handed it to me.

“What is it?” I asked. “A deed to a diamond mine? A contract saying I agree to have sex every day, any way you want it? What? Give me a hint.”

He was smiling for once. “Open it and see.”

I’d teased, but I was nervous. I didn’t want anything to spoil this moment.

When I opened the envelope, pulled out the single piece of paper inside, and scanned it, I actually gasped, and then I sat up straight and read it again.

“Hemi,” I said helplessly. “Why?”

“Because,” he said, “I thought it might help. I thought it might make you feel better. Make you not feel trapped. You told me a long time ago that I didn’t understand how close to the edge you were.” His hand was smoothing down my back again, and there was healing in his touch. “I wanted you to know that I heard, and that even if I forget it sometimes…I know you’re free. I wanted you to know that you always have a place to go. And I wanted you to have your mum.”

“I…” I blinked back a few stubborn tears that wanted to leak out. It wasn’t my most coherent moment, but then, how could you expect it to be?

It was a receipt. A receipt for a year’s worth of rent, to be exact. On my apartment.

“I left the furnishings as well,” Hemi said. “After a year, it may be easier to let it go. Maybe you’ll feel by then that your mum’s in you and not in that place. Maybe you’ll be able to see it.”

My throat had closed, and I couldn’t have spoken if I tried. I just lay against Hemi’s chest and let his arms enfold me while I cried.

I cried because I couldn’t show my mother what a good man I’d found, and how happy I was. I cried because I’d never thought I’d have this life, and because I’d never thought I could give it to Karen. I cried because Hemi made every dream come true.

“Is it good?” he asked after a minute, and I shook my head, then nodded, tried to laugh, and grabbed for a napkin from the table.

Before Hemi, I’d never cried. Now, it seemed like I did it way too much. But it didn’t feel terrifying, the way it had used to. It didn’t make me feel like I was falling into the pit, when I needed all my strength just to stay upright on the surface. Now, I had strong hands to pull me back up, and I could afford to let go.

“Yes,” I said at last, taking his face in my hands, kissing him, and trying to smile. “You are the most wonderful man in the world, and I love you way too much.”

“Well, good,” he said. “That’ll give me some cushion for the next time, then.”

“The next time what?”

“That I stuff up. And come on.” He lifted me with him and set me on my feet. “Eugene. We’ll do the washing up, and then you can meet my trainer and know that you and Karen have doubled the number of people in the world who tell me exactly what they think, no matter what I want to hear.”

Hemi

When Eugene walked through the door half an hour later, Hope was dressed again, but in workout gear this time, because I’d suggested that she might want to use the gym while I was in there.

She’d smiled at the idea, a teasing light in her eyes. No matter what we did, she came back saucy every time, as if it were all a game, and she was loving playing it with me. “You just think I’ll be turned on by seeing you all sweaty,” she’d said.

I’d said, “Maybe I want to see
you
that way,” and had given her a smack on the bare bum that had felt very nice indeed. She’d laughed at me some more, and then she’d dressed in stretchy workout shorts and a tight little T-shirt that reminded me of both reasons—well, three reasons, really—that I wanted her in my gym with me.

There was even a noble reason amongst them. I could see how tentative she still felt in the apartment, and I hoped that by stamping it with her presence, she would begin to feel like she belonged there. And a less noble reason as well, the one she’d guessed: that I did enjoy seeing her dressed like that, and the thought of her on a hand and a knee on a workout bench, lifting a dumbbell, wasn’t bad at all. Not that I’d imagined it much. But if I looked at her taut little body in those tiny shorts and thought about stripping them off her and having some urgent, sweaty sex with her on her elbows and knees, my hand at the back of her neck? Blame it on how good it had felt to have her sprawled across my breakfast table, shaking underneath me, losing her words and coming hard. Not to mention the way her knees had trembled when I’d finally pulled her off of there.