Boss’s Heir Demand (Work Wives to Billionaires’ Wives #2)

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

D OMINIC L ANCASTER LEANED BACK , placing one elbow negligently onto silk cushions of the Roman-style couch he was lolling on, and debated pouring himself more wine from the jug that sat on the low table near the couch.

Not that he needed any more wine since he’d already had a few goblets and was feeling perfectly pleasant. Then again, it was a very good French red and this was a bacchanal and he was the host. What kind of bacchanal would it be if the host himself didn’t bacchanate?

Not that bacchanating was a word...but still, the point applied.

He held a bacchanal every year during midsummer, in the forest of his stately home, and it involved the usual—togas, masks, white silk pavilions in the forest, couches, grapes, wine—and then devolved into lots of sex.

People in his circle, the social elite of Europe, loved it and around the time the invites went out, the gossip columns were full of speculation as to who would be invited and who wouldn’t, and why. It was a very select group.

There was no rhyme or reason to the invitations. Dominic chose guests purely on a whim, because there was nothing better than messing with people’s heads, and he enjoyed the speculation and jockeying for position when invite season came around.

Tonight, though, was different, because he’d decided this would be the last bacchanal. Twenty years was long enough to retain ownership of his childhood home, and now was the time to get rid of it. Sell Darkfell Manor and the forest that surrounded it to anyone who would give him a good price, and then, with any luck, whoever bought it would raze the whole thing to the ground, thus saving him the bother of doing it himself.

Dominic surveyed forest from his couch, the white silk pavilion around him moving slightly in the night air. He’d had the pavilion put up to the side of the clearing and in the centre flamed a torch that leapt and flickered, casting strange shadows against the trunks of the ancient oaks.

More torches marked the paths that led to other small clearings, and other pavilions, all with couches and pillows, and wine and food. He could hear some of his guests laughing and shrieking, most of them already drunk.

A pity, really, to get rid of the forest—he’d had a lot of fun here after all—and maybe he could put a caveat on it or something. Or maybe not. Maybe it should go, along with the manor and everything else his father had touched.

Thoughts of his father never helped Dominic’s mood and he was determined to enjoy himself tonight, so he leaned forward and poured more wine into the thick pottery goblet he only ever used for his bacchanals. Then he leaned back on the couch again, sipping at the wine.

Beyond the darkness of the trees came a squeal, which could only be Marissa. She was a lovely French socialite and Cannes regular, who’d begged him for an invite in various inventive ways, and she’d made it clear already that if he wanted to make it a night to remember she would be happy to oblige him. From the sounds of it, she was already occupied. Then again, it wouldn’t be a bacchanal if he couldn’t join in.

He sighed, wondering if, in fact, he could be bothered. He liked a good orgy as much as the next man, but sometimes it could be such a faff. Not to mention boring. It was nothing he hadn’t done before, many times, and there were occasions where he couldn’t see the point. Sexual pleasure was nice while it lasted but it was always so fleeting, and it had been years and years since he’d lost himself entirely in sex. That had been a young man’s game, and he wasn’t that young any more.

Besides, sex was also beginning to bore him. Parties were beginning to bore him. Even Lancaster Investments, the investment business he’d started around fifteen years ago, after he’d sold the last of his father’s assets, was beginning to bore him. He had more money than he knew what to do with and when he sold Darkfell Manor, the last piece of his father’s poisoned legacy would be gone and, after that, what challenges were left?

Dominic lay back on the couch and stared at the white silk above his head. He could go into space, or maybe buy a submarine. Or perhaps build a bunker in Iceland and retire there in solitary splendour. He could get himself a camel and ride off into the desert like Lawrence of Arabia, or maybe go exploring in the Amazon...

Really, the possibilities were endless.

At that moment Marissa squealed again and then came bursting through the trees on the far side of the clearing opposite him, laughing breathlessly as she came to a stop in front of Dominic’s pavilion.

She wore nothing but a short white tunic and an owl mask, her long glossy black hair wild down her back, every bit of her long, golden body visible through the tunic.

A lovely woman.

Yet he wasn’t moved. He’d seen her body before, knew everything it could do in bed and the sounds she made and the things she preferred. There was nothing about her sexually that he didn’t know and nothing about the rest of her that interested him.

No one interested him, not these days.

So as she moved slowly and gracefully over to his couch, despite the flaring torchlight making her tunic seem half transparent, he remained...bored. He’d been bored for a long time, he suspected.

His lack of interest in her should have bothered him, but it didn’t. In many ways, it was even a relief.

‘Dominic,’ Marissa purred in her sexy accent. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ he said, surveying her as she walked over to his couch, hips swaying. ‘I’m still here, where you last saw me.’

She laughed, stopping before his couch, her blue eyes shining through the eyeholes of her mask. ‘Have you been waiting for me?’

‘Actually, I’ve been contemplating the mysteries of the universe.’ He smiled, trying to muster up some enthusiasm, since this was last bacchanal and he’d told himself he should be having fun. ‘Including the mysteries of the female gender.’

Marissa gave a little shiver—one of her trademark moves—then she reached for the small clasp on the shoulder of her tunic and undid it, letting the fabric flutter to the ground. ‘Well, here I am,’ she said softly, standing naked before him. ‘You can contemplate me.’

Since she was right in front of him, he could hardly do anything else. She was beautiful, he couldn’t argue with that. But he’d spent the last twenty-five years of his life contemplating the mysteries of the female gender and, as he’d already thought to himself, there was nothing about this particular example that intrigued him.

Perhaps that was why he felt bored.

There was no mystery in anything any more.

Dominic was an expert in the art of dissembling, yet Marissa must have picked up on his lack of interest, because she suddenly darted forward, leaning over him and brushing her mouth over his. Then she backed away, giving him a sultry smile. ‘You can have me if you catch me.’

Then she turned and ran off naked into the forest.

Maude Braithwaite stood in the darkness, pressed against the trunk of one of Darkfell Forest’s ancient oaks, and held her breath as the naked woman ran past her, barely a metre away.

The woman must not have seen Maude because she didn’t pause, giggling as she disappeared into the darkness.

Maude let out the breath she’d been holding, shivering a little in her bare feet and nightgown. It wasn’t exactly cold—it was midsummer—but it was still one in the morning and pitch black, so not quite warm either.

She’d been asleep in her little bedroom in the gamekeeper’s cottage right on the edge of the forest, and had been woken abruptly out of a dream by the sound of someone screaming.

Tonight was the night of the Midsummer Bacchanal, and while she’d been told that the guests had been warned to keep away from the cottage, she supposed some of them hadn’t followed the rules.

This was deeply annoying because, while hauling herself out of bed in the middle of the night to investigate wasn’t mandatory, management of the forest was one of her responsibilities and she did want to make sure that her employer’s rich friends hadn’t accidentally set fire to something they shouldn’t.

Maude was one of four women who ran Your Girl Friday, a company that offered speciality services to those rich enough to afford them, and her area of expertise was landscape design and forest management, anything to do with the natural world basically.

She loved nature, so when a groundskeeper contract for Darkfell Forest had come in, she’d jumped at the chance. Groundskeeper work had sounded intriguing, with the bonus of being responsible for the management of the forest. Her personal goal was rewilding a piece of land that her grandparents were going to leave her, and for that she needed, not only a touch more expertise, but also money. Handily, the contract she’d signed, which was for a year, paid exceptionally well.

However, what she had not loved was preparing a section of said forest for the bacchanal, since it involved turning a beautiful, wild place into what was essentially a party venue, i.e. making nature palatable for a whole bunch of rich people who didn’t care.

It was always this dichotomy that bothered her while working for Your Girl Friday. Despising the rich and privileged, while also taking their money. She’d early on decided that money would go back to her rewilding project, and in return the people who employed her could stand to have a few lessons in caring for nature. Most of the time they were grateful, so she couldn’t complain.

She was definitely going to complain about the drunken idiots currently cavorting around in these woods in the middle of the night, though. The forest wasn’t inherently dangerous, but the fools could hurt themselves and someone had to make sure they were okay. That someone being her.

Anyway, she hadn’t found anyone injured in the vicinity of the cottage, so she’d ventured a bit further into the forest itself, just to be certain.

She’d moved as many of the animals away from the bacchanal area as she could, but animals didn’t obey human rules and one of them could have strayed somewhere it shouldn’t and frightened someone. Not that she cared about humans. They could look after themselves. It was the animals she was concerned for.

The bacchanal was supposed to be a very private affair, with a specially curated guest list, and she’d been told—all the staff at Darkfell Manor had been told—that they shouldn’t go into the forest while the bacchanal was being held. Maude hadn’t wanted to anyway—she didn’t care about bacchanals—and she’d been on the pointing of turning back to the cottage when the naked woman had run by her and she’d been forced into immobility.

The sound of the woman’s progress gradually faded and Maude glanced back in the direction she’d come from to make sure no other naked people were in her immediate vicinity. Then she glanced back to the clearing beyond, where the torch flamed, causing dramatic shadows to leap and flare. A Roman-style couch had been placed artfully near the torch, beneath a pavilion of white silk, the curtains of which had been pulled back and held with jewelled ties.

A low table containing goblets, a bowl full of grapes, a jug of wine, and a platter of various finger foods had been placed near the couch, along with another low chair.

A man lolled indolently on the couch, on his back. He wore nothing but a white toga draped around a body that could have belonged to a Greek god, all hard, sculpted muscle and smooth tanned skin. A crown of golden laurel leaves rested in his hair.

He held a goblet in one large, long-fingered hand, the light of the flaring torch outlining the perfect lines of his face. Like his body, he was beautiful, but not in the way, say, Apollo or Hermes was beautiful. This man wasn’t a boy. He was Zeus or Poseidon, or even Hades. An older god, stern, ruthless. Utterly masculine and completely in control of the universe he ruled.

Straight nose, long ink-black lashes, high cheekbones. There were lines around his eyes and his mouth, and through his short ink-black hair—from the severe widow’s peak of his forehead all the way to the back of his head—ran a white stripe.

Maude’s breath caught.

That stripe was famous. She didn’t keep track of celebrity gossip and barely even checked social media. The world of humanity didn’t interest her. Yet even so, that stripe marked him.

Dominic Lancaster, one of Europe’s most notorious playboys, if not the most notorious. Owner of Darkfell Manor and the forest that surrounded it.

Also, her boss.

She’d never met him, only one of his assistants. She’d seen a few pictures of him—she didn’t much care about the people she worked for, it was the landscape that mattered—but those pictures hadn’t done him justice.

This was the first time she’d seen him in the flesh and...

Maude stared at him, transfixed.

If he’d picked up a thunderbolt and thrown it at her, she’d have let that bolt go straight through her.

It was baffling. She’d never felt that way about a man before.

She’d always been the odd one out, even with her closest friends, the other three of the Your Girl Friday team. Irinka, the team’s secretary, who came from a Russian family and provided the rest of them with the connections they needed to the rich and powerful. Lynna, who was from Wales and had been raised in Greece, and who could make magic with food. And Augusta—known as Auggie—the sole American in the team, and who’d recently done a stint as a stewardess on a plane.

None of the others liked plants or forests the way she did. None of them liked communing with nature. And she knew they all considered her a little odd.

She was okay with that. She liked being odd.

She’d spent most of her early years in a Scottish commune with her mother, which had involved living very close to nature and not much in the way of schooling. Then her maternal grandparents, disturbed by the way she was being brought up, had forced her mother into giving Maude to them to raise. They’d tried to tame her with urban life, with concrete and rules and TV and homework instead of bonfires and storytelling and dancing.

Maude had found it tough, but eventually she’d managed to behave the way they’d wanted her to. Except for the fact that nature had got deep in her soul and now it was so much part of her, nothing could get it out.

It was nature that commanded her attention and, really, it was more normal for her to stop and stare like this at a tree, or a magnificent flowering shrub, than a man.

In the clearing, Dominic Lancaster put down his goblet and sat on the edge of the couch. Maude tensed. Perhaps he was going to run after the woman, in which case staying put was probably a good idea. She didn’t particularly want him to find her creeping around in the forest, especially when she’d been told not to intrude.

He didn’t move for a moment, the torchlight running over his skin and the carved lines of his torso revealed by the loose toga, bathing him in gold. Then he rose from the couch with a deliberate muscular grace that had Maude’s heart racing, and walked slowly to where a white scrap of fabric lay in the leaf mould of the forest floor. Bending, he picked it up then continued over to where the woman had disappeared into the trees.

‘You forgot something, sweetheart,’ he called as he tossed the white fabric into the trees. ‘You also forgot that I never run after a woman.’

A shiver ran unexpectedly over Maude’s skin. His voice was deep and velvety and rich, with a darkness threading through it that seemed to connect with something inside her.

He stood very close and he was much taller than she’d expected. Much taller than she was. The crown of laurel leaves on his head, gleaming in the torchlight, and the way he held himself, as if he were indeed king of the gods, made her pulse begin to beat in a hard, insistent rhythm.

Men hadn’t featured in her life. She hadn’t met one she’d been even remotely attracted to and wasn’t interested in meeting one. Men as a whole didn’t interest her.

So this man, this complete stranger, shouldn’t have warranted a second glance.

Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

She couldn’t even take a breath.

He’d gone very still, as if he was listening, and Maude wouldn’t have been surprised if it was her heart he’d heard thumping like a drum within the confines of her ribcage.

Something whispered in her brain, something dark and seductive, that was drawn to the man standing so close. A deep part of her that couldn’t stop looking at the broad width of his shoulders and his powerful chest. That wanted her to run her hands across his olive skin, feel the prickle of crisp hair and then move further down, to the corrugated lines of his stomach left bare by the drape of the white fabric, the only thing that clothed him.

The forest bowed to him, the darkness in her head whispered. He was the king here. He was primal and raw, and if he wanted to chase a woman, she had no chance. He would bring her down onto the rich earth and take her, connect her so deeply to this forest and to him, she’d never escape.

There was an ache between Maude’s thighs, an insistent ache she couldn’t recall feeling so intensely before. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to.

‘But you,’ he murmured without turning his head, the velvety texture of his voice deepening. ‘You, I might just make an exception for.’

He couldn’t be talking to her, could he? No, it wasn’t possible. She was hidden in the shadows of the trees, in the darkness, he couldn’t know she was there. In the forest, she was unseen. She was always unseen.

He’s a god, remember? He could find you anywhere.

Her palms were damp, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She should melt into the trees and slip away, go back to bed. Pretend she hadn’t seen him.

Yet...she didn’t.

He turned his head slowly, looking in her direction. His face was shadowed, but somehow she could see the gleam of his eyes, black in the night. It wasn’t possible for him to see in the dark, yet she was certain all at once that he knew she was there.

She had no idea how he knew, because she hadn’t made a sound. Just as she knew that if she ran the way that other woman had, he would follow.

He would chase her through the forest until he caught her and then she would be his.

And he would be yours.

It came over her unexpectedly and very suddenly then, a wild thrilling rush of adrenaline, and before Maude was even conscious of doing so, she’d turned and had started to run.