At His Mercy (3 page)

Christ, there it was. I
was
jealous.

“Fight me, Chloe,” Adrian muttered against the hard line of my clamped lips. I smelled champagne on his breath and couldn’t decide if I wanted to lick the inside of his mouth or bite him. “Fight me all you want, but you
will
open up. You’ll beg.”

Then his rhythm rose to a frenzy again, and all I could do was keen and toss my head. When he was ready to come a second time, he straddled my chest, still holding my arms above my head with one hand. He used the other hand to guide the head of his thick member to my mouth, sliding the silky tip against my lips, glossing them with pre-cum.

“Open, Chloe,” he commanded, and I did.

All my senses collapsed down to a few details—the unbearable sensuality of Adrian’s parted lips as he panted through his orgasm, the aftertaste of cinnamon in the back of my throat as I swallowed, the mix of musk and spiced soap in his scent, the sheen of sweat glistening on his tanned skin by the lamplight, and the distant roar of the ocean matching this furious crest of satisfaction.

By the time Adrian rolled off me, then stretched out beside me to claim a kiss, my anger lay in shreds, limp and weak. It was hard not to appreciate a man who seemed to revel in kissing a woman who had just swallowed his seed. His warm, insistent tongue swept the inside of my mouth before he drew back to suck and scrape my lips with his teeth.

“Beg me,” he said again, softly, against my moist cheek. His skilled fingers found my nipples and the twitching nub of my clitoris again. “Beg, and I’ll make you come.”

“Please,” I whispered, low and reluctant despite the need holding my every muscle tensed.

“Please what?”

Louder, I pleaded, “Please, sir, let me come.”

And in an instant, Adrian was sliding down my body. His lips were on that little bundle of nerves, sucking, teeth pinching gently, his fingers probing deep into my sex again. I squealed and gripped the short, downy waves of his hair in my fists as my climax slammed into me. Like one of the relentless massages Adrian was always insisting I get at the spa, it pummeled me, twisted my muscles, wrung every last drop of pleasure and wrath and energy out of me. Until I was whimpering and pushing his face away, too tender and raw. Until I was curled trembling and shuddering in a little ball, encased in Adrian Knight’s embrace.

We could have slept then. He could even have withdrawn from me as he had that first day when I’d refused his attempt to test me and alter the terms of our agreement. Instead Adrian lay awake behind me, whispering into my hair.

“Tell me what you’re feeling.”

“Spent,” I sighed, barely audible even to myself, my eyelids heavy.

“Did it scare you that I took you so hard? Did I hurt you?”

“No,” I answered in the same moment I realized it. “No, not at all.”

“What does it feel like when I make you beg?”

“Like…” I didn’t expect my thoughts to go where they did. Nor was I prepared for the sudden knot of emotion that bobbed in my throat.

“Like?” he prodded. “Say it, Chloe.” When I remained silent, concentrating on keeping that hard sob from bursting out, Adrian added gently, “That’s not a request. It’s an order.”

“Like you’re trying to humiliate me and break me but—.” The words rushed out of me in a high-pitched gush, a confession, and I took a hard, deep breath to stem the flow.

Adrian’s tone sounded odd—distant, guarded, even wounded—when he coaxed, “But…”

My sigh was my surrender, sudden and draining. I was tired, overemotional after the session with the collar and the incident with the blonde. After Penn had proved me a romantic fool so like my mother. “But also like you’re trying to make me give myself to you, trying to bind us together.”

It took everything I had to suppress the shiver that ran down my spine when Adrian nuzzled the back of my neck and let his warm breath out against my skin. I squeezed my eyes closed and clenched my fists in the pillow under my head.

“Why did Nina upset you so much?” I wasn’t going to answer that. I refused to think about it anymore. But Adrian persisted. “Why were you jealous, Chloe?”

I doubted that he believed I was really asleep, but that was my ruse, and I was committed to it. In truth, I didn’t fall asleep for some time. It felt like several hours, time spent listening to the sound of his breathing and batting back that last lingering question.

***

Despite the fact that it was only just light when I sighed and blinked and came awake, Chloe was already out of bed. Empty space beside me. I stared at the wrinkled sheets where her body had been when I’d fallen asleep. This was the way I’d always preferred it, wasn’t it? Waking up alone. Almost always.

Over the far crash of the morning waves, I caught the sharper sound of splashing and got up to peer through a gap in the shutters. She was out in the patio pool, quite naked. I shook my head, both irritated and perplexed by the woman, not sure at all right now what I thought of her. My groin ached vaguely and my erection stirred at the sight of those smooth curves, the gleaming brown hair clinging wet to her bare shoulders, drops of water coursing over her rounded cheekbones and bee-stung lips. My body, unlike my head, was absolutely clear in its reaction to her.

From one of the wardrobes, I grabbed a pair of jogging pants and a tan cashmere hoodie, intent on a run to focus my thoughts. As I dressed, I noted Chloe had already started looking after her duties for the day. The letters I had drafted on my laptop day before yesterday were all printed out, stuffed into envelopes, sealed. Except for one that lay folded beside its empty envelope.

I finished tugging the hoodie over my head and leaned over to see which one it was—the Pritchard Project Management International letter—and frowned. They had inquired about Gabriel, and I was giving him a poor recommendation. That wouldn’t have sat well with Chloe, I knew, especially after I’d told her the lengths I’d gone to poaching him from his job with the Brazilian government.

My face heated when I felt the urge to go out and explain myself to Miss Bloom. Gabriel Silva was a damn good engineer and a man who believed strongly enough in sustainability that he’d hamstrung his federal career almost as soon as it had gotten started, earning himself a reputation as an idealist and a troublemaker. Just the man I needed but not the reason I was sabotaging his attempt to find work elsewhere. He might have bristled having to argue every point with me, but we wanted the same thing. Not so with PPMI. If one followed the trail of subsidiaries and shell companies back far enough, there they were at the top of the chain, my father’s family. The first time Gabriel took a stand against slipshod practices at PPMI, they’d either have fired him or started to work at him, wear him down, warp him into someone who could see things their way. I was saving Gabriel from PPMI. But I wasn’t bloody going to tell Chloe that, because it wasn’t any of her business.

Worked up into a mood now, I took the side path down to the beach so I wouldn’t see her. Even as I did so, it irked me. The island was mine, after all. The resort, the villa, even Chloe—for the moment—all mine. It occurred to me then that what was really bothering me was her distance, the fact that I’d woken up alone. Perhaps I should have stipulated in our agreement that if I was in the villa, she was required to be in attendance of me, but that seemed…obsessive. Dependent. I just detested being ignored. A holdover from my childhood, I supposed.

Enough. I needed a good run. Before I’d cleared the trees and hit the beach, though, I already had a call being routed to my cell via the communications office. I answered the buzz with, “It’s too damn early for this.”

“My apologies, Mr. Knight,” the operator said, her voice smooth and professional—obviously not the first time she’d had to deal with me this early. “There’s a Mr. Rego on the line for you. He insists it’s urgent.”

Rego. The island broker who’d sent me enough letters about his client’s interest in purchasing Ilha de Flor that I could have papered the villa walls with them. “Oh, he
is
insistent,” I snickered and agreed.

“Mr. Rego is calling from the morning ferry run, sir, enroute to the island now. He is asking to speak to you about setting up a meeting today.”

Now I had a headache, which was the primary reason I didn’t like taking calls first thing in the morning. There was something wrong in the universe if I could own an island, if I could be standing on a rainforest path with a view of the pale yellow beach and sky blue waves, and have my cell phone buzzing at me about deals I didn’t want to make with men I didn’t want to meet. For a second, I wondered if I could buy the ferry service, buy
all
the ferry services in Natal, and prohibit the operators from selling passage to Ilha de Flor to anyone in a business suit.

“Mr. Knight?”

“Yes, I’m here. Instruct the front desk to set Mr. Rego up in one of the west wing suites, since he’s come all the way from Sao Paulo. Then tell him I’ll meet him as soon as I have a gap in my schedule.” Between managing holdings on three continents, conference calls to Rio, beach runs, and my infatuation with Miss Bloom, that would give Mr. Rego about fifteen minutes with me sometime in June. If I was lucky, he’d get tired of pestering the switchboard and head back to Sao Paulo and business deals with more potential after a couple of days at most.

I finished the path and strode out onto the beach kicking sand and muttering under my breath about what a popular destination Ilha de Flor was lately for surprise guests. Rego today, Nina yesterday. I immediately ground my teeth at the thought of the trouble that little blond minx had caused with Chloe. The Talbot heiress was getting careless as she hit her thirties. A couple of years ago, when we’d started playing our intermittent game of master and slave, she’d have been mortified at the idea of someone—besides servants, who didn’t count to her—finding out she was being a dirty little girl for the likes of me.

Nina was one of the few people who knew the surname I’d been born with, before I legally changed it to my mother’s. It turned her on to know she was debasing herself for the wayward youngest son of possibly the most hated billionaire in Britain, a liaison that would have turned her into gossip fodder for years to come, that might well have driven her father to disinherit her, and that got her juices flowing like no proper match to some hedge fund manager ever could.

Whatever Nina had said to Chloe, probably quite a bit more than the blonde admitted to me, had well and truly set her off. The way Chloe had flinched from me, sassed me, fought me… I found myself stalled, standing with my arms folded, pushing sand around with the toe of one running shoe. Wondering why it bothered me so much when Chloe had said she was here to explore sexual submission without emotional attachments.

“Shouldn’t bother me,” I said aloud and shook my head as though the physical reinforcement made a difference. I wasn’t trying to woo Chloe Bloom, not any more than was necessary to compel her sexual surrender to me as a submissive. Once she had opened up to me, given me total ownership of her body, her mind, her desires—I noted approvingly to myself that I didn’t include her heart—then it was time for Penn Ellison to
happen
upon the discovery that “the one that got away” was on her knees
for me
.

If Chloe’s continued emotional detachment rankled… Well, that was just typical, wasn’t it? Typical of a woman like her not to be swayed by money and influence. Typical of a compulsive competitor like me to want whatever she wouldn’t give me. I chuckled to myself, thinking that if the woman actually fell for me, I’d probably lose interest. On to the next conquest, the next thing I supposedly couldn’t have. That was the nature of men like me.

The goddamn cell phone buzzed again, vibrating against my hip. It took me a moment to shake myself out of these thoughts, and another to restrain myself enough that I wouldn’t throw the phone into the ocean, before I answered with a low, clipped, “Yes.” The ferry should only have arrived a few minutes ago. What did Rego want now?

“Sorry, sir,” that same courteous female voice trilled through the speaker. “There was a guest at the front desk who demanded to see you. A…Mr. Daniel Vaz from IBAMA. They told him you were not in your office yet, but he said he would not be put off. He is on his way to your villa now.”

I disconnected without responding and bounded back up the path, unsure which spiked my adrenaline more—the mention of the Brazilian environmental police or the idea that this Mr. Vaz was about to barge in on Chloe. She was just climbing out of the pool, squeezing the water out of her hair, as I arrived to scoop up a huge towel off a patio chaise and swaddle her in it. In her surprise, she clung to me, steadying herself with her hands on my shoulders. The feeling of her leaning on me, depending on me… Had the circumstances been different, I might have put off my run to forget the morning’s frustrations with her, to erase the awkwardness that had risen between us since yesterday.

“Adrian, what—?”

“No time, Miss Bloom.” I dragged her into the villa and sent her scurrying down the hallway just as the front door came open.

“Knight?” The voice was masculine, though not as deep as mine, and had a sharp, scolding tone that I immediately related to a high-strung primary school teacher. “Adrian Knight?”

I met Mr. Daniel Vaz as he barged into my home and rounded the corner into the living room. A lean man, mid-thirties, narrow face, light tan from a combination of field hours and office work, but with a fashionable cut to his caramel brown hair and a better suit than I’d expect of someone who did not at least have the title coordinator in front of his name. Unless he was planning on arresting me, which would have involved federal authorities, his breaches of Brazilian etiquette were unforgiveable. I’d seen it before, of course. It came with the assumption that American and European businessmen, if they were being difficult, only respected and responded to John Wayne-style aggression.

“Mr. Vaz,” I said as he nearly ran into me. I stood unflinching, with my hands clasped in front of me in a pretense of patience I certainly didn’t have. He skidded to an awkward stop and took a moment to recover.