Chapter Sixteen
Sadie
“ D o you want to explain yourself?” he asks after a moment’s silence.
There’s no censure in his voice, no anger. Just mild curiosity.
Everything in me goes on high alert at that.
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant, Sadie,” Kingston says, stretching his long legs out in front of him. He’s wearing a suit. No doubt one that’s bespoke. And it’s devastating on him.
I’m beginning to think he’s just devastatingly gorgeous, no matter what he wears. But this one does things to a woman. It’s blue. Not banker blue. This is the darkest midnight blue that both manages to be classic and have an edge that’s utterly him.
Jesus. Next I’ll be waxing lyrical over his shoes. Or cufflinks, or— I stop.
“I’ve been thinking about why the tiara went missing in the first place.”
“Someone was careless?” He shrugs. “You tell me. You’re also working for her. You’re not the first. She hired my brother Ryder’s fiancée. Although for completely different things. Elliot’s not a high-end society criminal.”
I come back around to him and sit again. I don’t want to. I want to go stand at the other end of the library. Or in another room. Or another apartment. In another building.
And he knows that. So I sit next to him.
“You don’t think it’s odd?”
“The end result is the same. And yeah, I was thinking about this walking here after lunch with Jenson.”
I dip my head down, trying not to smile. He’s the billionaire who walks through Central Park in the early hours of the evening. He’s the billionaire I somehow forget is richer than all the gods. He’s an enigma in so many ways. Like, why do I want him so desperately?
That’s something I’ve been fighting. Something I didn’t know I was fighting, not on the level I have been, not until he said something to me a few minutes ago.
“That,” I say, “is the perk of being rich.”
“Walking?”
I laugh. “No, asshole, hours long lunches.”
“I’m pretty sure there are more perks than that,” he says, sarcasm rife in his words. “You should dream bigger, Sadie.”
“Did I mention you were an asshole?”
“I think so.”
Damn it. I like him like this. I force my mind back to why I’m here. Why I came early. I didn’t think he’d take as long from lunch to here, then again, I also didn’t think he’d walk.
“I had a late lunch because I had to drop in my office.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t answer for a long moment and my cheeks heat. “Have you been following me, Sadie?”
“Keeping an eye on you.” I glare at him and take a swallow of the tequila that’s the smoothest tequila I’ve ever had. “I don’t trust you.” He doesn’t say a word. “You’re the kind of rich idiot—”
“Asshole.”
“—who’ll barge in somewhere wearing too stupid to live badges.”
“I gave those up for lent.”
My mouth twitches, but I will myself not to smile. “You really are a Class A asshole.”
“Everyone needs to be good at something.”
This time I laugh. It bursts free and he grins, looking all levels of pleased with himself.
Then his smile vanishes. “How much is she paying you?”
My laughter dries up. And I look at him.
The air between us thrums.
“Would it matter if she is paying me?”
“Is she?”
“That would be telling. And the answer to that really needs to come from your mother.”
He sighs and puts his drink down. “That really depends on a few things. Like the capacity in which she hired you. If she’s trying to make me miss the deadline by hiring you to throw me off the scent, then I’d say that would matter.”
“I just asked if you’ve looked into her.”
This time, his smile is dark and electric. “You’re a smart woman, Sadie.”
“I don’t shoot myself in my own foot. From what you’ve told me about this whole thing, your mother trying to stop you finding the tiara would hurt you.” Faye’s words rush back at me. I’m to hold him up, yes, not stop him finding it.
“The company doesn’t mean shit to me, beyond what it can bring my name and smooth out certain paths. But I don’t need that. I’m already more than successful. And my mother knows I’m not really one for being fucked over.”
I shiver as he gives me a pointed look. I’m not scared, but the type of implicit threat hidden in his words sends a frisson of excitement through my veins that’s more dangerous than any strong arming could ever be. He’s offering a toe-to-toe battle with him, and that’s the kind of threat the reckless part craves.
Because who knows where that kind of battle will end?
I’m thinking sweaty and naked.
“Why do you care, then?”
“I don’t like being fucked over.” His gaze slides slowly over me. “Fucked, on the other hand…”
I can’t breathe as my stomach soars so high the room rocks around me. Finally, I get myself back under some semblance of control.
“I’m sure there are plenty of willing women begging to do that,” I say.
“I’m sure there are.”
I want to shake him for that smugness. Even though I taunted him into it.
And he’s right, we really are an interesting pair.
Shit. I focus back on the topic. One I need to tread carefully around, and one he’s trying to throw me off balance and into the middle of. “I’m not out to stop you finding the tiara, Kingston. And I doubt your mother’s going to go to those kind of dark lengths to do whatever it is you think she’s doing.”
“You think she’s doing something, too.”
“I asked a question,” I say.
“One that didn’t just appear from the ether.”
“It stands to reason to question everything and everyone. Your mother, Jenson, the postman. I don’t know, Kingston. I’m here trying to find something someone doesn’t want found. And that can be hard when it comes to stolen goods like this. When it appears, we can make a move. We being me.”
“We being we, you mean.”
I breathe out and toss down the rest of my drink. Then I get up, and he hands me his glass. I shoot him a dirty look as I snatch it, and refill the glasses, deliberately giving him some white Spanish sherry.
He laughs when he takes a sip. “Nice try there, Sadie, but this is quality stuff.”
“Asshole.”
“So you’ve said.”
I sit down and he slides closer, his arm on the back of the sofa. But he doesn’t make a move to touch me and I’m not sure whether I’m relieved, annoyed, or suspicious. So I settle on all three.
“You think it’ll turn up?”
“I don’t think last night was any kind of happy coincidence. So yes, I think something will happen. I’m just trying to get a jump on it.” And no one’s talking. Not even Damon’s heard anything, and he keeps his ear to the ground as a way to protect his clients. “An exceptionally expensive tiara is missing, but no one has gone to the police.”
“They might not be announcing it.”
“These things are recorded, there’s protocol. The book that must be followed,” I say. My tone’s joking, but I’m not and he knows it. “What if it isn’t real? What if the tiara isn’t worth much?”
“It has to be,” he says. “And when I get it back, I’m having it evaluated. Then you sell it. For me.”
“You don’t want it for the history or family meaning?”
“I’ve lived without it for almost thirty-six years, why should it matter?” He slides a little closer, setting his drink down on the side table, then focuses on me. “And why should it matter to you?”
“You’re thinking it matters to me because I want it for myself.” His expression doesn’t change. “You might be right. I like beautiful things. I like expensive things.”
He nods, but he’s still considering me. “You don’t live surrounded by riches, Sadie.”
“I know. But you’re not going to believe me if I say I want to help. Or I want to do this for the challenge.”
Kingston smiles and smooths a strand of hair from my face. “No, but my opinion shouldn’t matter. I think you do want it, but you don’t know what you’re going to do. And I’m not sure of the motivation behind that want.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know enough, Sadie. I know you’re going to help me and then try and do whatever it is you’re thinking of doing.”
My hand clenches on my thigh. We’re too similar, out for the money. But this tiara is part of his family history, a legacy, and as someone who doesn’t have one—not if you don’t count my father’s deplorable ways—it saddens me. Angers me. And he deserves me stealing it out from under him.
I haven’t done that before. Worked for people and stolen, but hey, there’s always a first time.
He slides his fingers down my cheek to rest under my chin. His touch is warm fire, and it burns soft down into me. “Don’t think you can steal from me, Sadie.”
“If I did, you wouldn’t notice.”
“I notice everything about you.”
I shiver and try to shift away, but there’s something in his gaze that pins me to this spot. “You want to cash it in. I thought you loved your family.”
He drops his hand but doesn’t move from me, keeping that closeness, and the something in his eyes turns up to eleven. It’s cold, dark fire that could combust into heat at any second. It’s dangerous and addictive and I wouldn’t move if someone paid me to.
“I do. I don’t give a shit about the rest of it. If there’s a legacy. What I care about is what it can bring me. I want the tiara and you’re going to sell it to the highest bidder.”
I shouldn’t care. I know that.
“So, you really want to go through all this just to sell it?”
He smiles. “It’s mine to do with what I want.”
“You have to get it first.”
“That’s why I have you.”
“You’re a cold, money-focused bastard,” I say deliberately.
His smile, already deadly, turns feral in all the right ways. “And you, my beautiful Sadie, are a common thief.”
The air between us crackles like lightning.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think.
All there is, is him.
And then he moves, slow and deliberate, giving me all the time in the world to speak, to run.
I stay exactly where I am.
Everything in me is humming and buzzing and alive with a deep, dark need.
“Sadie…” He takes my glass and places it on the table in front of us. His gaze doesn’t lift from mine.
And I’m so fucking alive I can barely breathe.
Kingston’s mouth comes down on mine.
Chapter Seventeen
Kingston
I kiss her because I want to. Because I have to. She’s a fever, a need, and she’s there.
This thing between us burns hotter than the sun, and continuously shoving it on some kind of backburner doesn’t work.
Sadie tastes divine.
Her mouth opens beneath mine and I slide down into her. She’s hot and wet and willing and I pull her to me as she wraps around me.
The need doesn’t dissipate, it grows and there are too many clothes.
The kiss morphs into carnal hunger and we’re at each other, pulling and touching until clothes go flying. I need her. Any way I can get her. I’m hard. Harder than I’ve ever been in my life and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anyone as much as Sadie.
She’s in her bra, a lacy black number that clings to those soft, sweet mounds and I push my hand in her short hair, grasping, pulling her into me for a hungry kiss, one she takes and runs with.
Her hands slide over me, to my belt and she sits up, breaking the kiss and she looks at me, eyes molten rivers, and the look she gives shoots down to my gut, and my cock throbs. She’s at the fly of my trousers and I help her. We’re both in each other’s way, consumed with the need for the other.
I pull at her jeans and she gets up and peels them off and then she’s on me, hot and lithe, her mouth seeking mine. I need her. It’s like air itself, that need. A beat and throb of such power I’m helpless to do anything but free myself to her hot hand, and she wraps about my thickness, my length, and begins to give me a hand job and she’s lucky I don’t come then and there.
She straddles me, her lace-clad pussy hovering above where she’s working me and I want every part of her exposed. I want to explore her mouth again, her breasts, but fuck, I really want that hot little cunt.
I slide my hand down, fingers curling, down between her thighs, pushing up both sides of her, moving along the soft, wet heat of her outer lips and she hisses out air, pushing her hips, her pussy to my fingers.
Obliging her wordless request, we look at each other as I slip a finger, then two, beneath the lacy edge of her panties and then up into her.
Sadie cries out, biting her lip and she half closes her eyes, riding my fingers, grinding down into me and she shatters, coming hard and fast, the clench of her muscles on my fingers pushing me right to the edge.
I pull out my fingers and sweep the fabric to the side, and with my other hand, I pull hers away from me and then I pull her down and I push up, right into that hot, tight center of her.
“Oh, fuck, yes…” She moans the words and her hands come to my shoulders as she begins to ride me in earnest. I let her, because those fucking breasts are right there, and I want my mouth on them. I rip the fabric away, not caring if I actually ruin it—I’ll buy her more. I’ll buy her a fucking store full if I can ruin them all while she wears them.
Her breasts are gorgeous. Soft and round, the nipples a dark pink and I suck one into my mouth, biting down as it forms a peak on my tongue and she cries out, fingers digging into my nape.
“More.”
I give her more. I want to fuck myself into her, so deep that no one else would ever dare touch her for fear of retribution. And then I lift my head and pull her down, and I take her mouth and I kiss her hard and deep and we fuck like that.
I need…I need more. I take hold of her and start working her on me and she’s with me, moving hard, making little sounds that fuel me. She’s the hottest thing I’ve seen, I’ve felt, and I need to mark her, claim her. It’s a reflexive thing, wanting that. Primal, and I bite her neck, suckling.
Sadie comes again, her convulsions setting me off, pushing me right into release and the orgasm that rips through me is a wild, feral thing, and my vision goes black as the sweet burst of intense pleasure floods me to the point I don’t know if I can survive it.
But finally, when the world comes to right, we stay there, her on me, slumped against me and… And I want to say that won’t happen again, but I can’t because I’m already thinking of fucking her again.
I’m trying to find the words to say. Me, a man who commands a company with a cool few billion, can’t find words.
How can one woman do that to me? A woman I don’t like?
I like her.
I like her a lot.
Sadie gets off me and starts to dress, but I take her arm. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“You know where it is.” I pull her back to me and she tumbles down into my arms and I turn so we’re lying on the sofa together, a tangle of limbs. “You’ve been through my entire place and we both know it.”
“Kingston…”
“You want me to let you go? I will.” Those words are harder to say than they have any right to be. Because I don’t want to let her go.
She sighs, her breath warm against me and I shiver. We’re both half-dressed, ridiculously disheveled, and I don’t want to let her go. I want to do it all over again. “What did we just do?”
I should laugh, but I don’t. I can’t. “I have no fucking idea, Sadie.”
“That was a bad idea.”
“The worst.”
“I don’t even like you, Kingston.”
This time I slide her hair away from her face and smile. “I thought the same thing. About you. But then I realized that’s a lie. And you’re lying, too.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re in love?”
“No. I don’t believe in love. I like you and you like me.”
“I liked that.”
“Yeah.” I close my eyes a moment and the thump-thump of her heart is oddly soothing. “That’s putting it mildly.”
“I don’t regret it,” she says, trailing her fingers down my shirt she ruined. “A one time only deal—”
“This isn’t one time only. One night.”
“One night.”
We stare at each other and that beat is still in the air, that awareness and my cock stirs. Sadie shifts, very deliberately, against me.
“You play dangerously,” I say to her.
She smiles. “I know.” Then her smile fades. “We’d never last.”
She’s right there. We’re not for each other, even though that might have been the best sex in my life. “Sadie, I…” I stop, unsure what it is I want to say. “I want to say that came from nowhere, or we were drunk, but it’s not true. It’s been brewing. And I’m sober.”
“You and I don’t work. We’re too alike. We’re too different. We…this is just weird.”
Suddenly, I laugh and kiss her. It’s a slow, lazy kiss, one that doesn’t need to go anywhere, one that’s warm and inviting and full of gentle waves of pleasure. It could go places, if we wanted it to. If one of us was to shift or turn it up a notch. But she doesn’t do that and I lose myself in the sweetness of her mouth. The heat. The beauty of it. When I lift my head, I don’t want to laugh anymore.
Because everything she said is why it would never work, even if by some weird turn of events we wanted it to. “Why are we talking about it?”
“Because I like to analyze, and so do you.”
“This sofa is too fucking small,” I say, getting up and stripping down.
Sadie watches, eyes bright with hunger. I reach out, take her hand and draw her to her feet and start stripping her, too.
“I can do that myself.” But she doesn’t try to stop me.
I glance up at her as I kneel down, pulling her panties off, the final article of clothing. The definite article, if you will. She’s waxed bare, like she’s been waiting for me. It’s an incredibly erotic sight, her so exposed. And she’s damp from our sex, her lips swollen, the skin a little reddened from that ride straight to heaven.
Before I can think about it, I take hold of her hips and put my mouth there, sliding my tongue down over her clit, and she rewards me with a sharp intake of breath, her body quivering.
“Part your thighs, Sadie.”
She does.
I keep going. Sliding low, tracing my tongue along her slit, slipping into her, tasting the two of us, and the musk that’s her.
Sadie groans low. I tongue fuck her, down and up, always coming to her clit to tease, a steady beat of movements until she’s panting. Until she’s wetter than before. Until she’s pushing into my face. Her fingers are grasping at me and she’s chanting yes.
I stop, and rise. Her face is flushed and she’s shooting pure murder at me.
I drop a kiss on her mouth. “I think we should take this somewhere more comfortable.”
And because I want to, because I can, I pick her up and she wraps about me and I take her to my bedroom.
“Asshole,” she says.
In my room I drop her on the king bed and she looks good on the sea of navy and gray, splayed, open, inviting me in. She rises on her elbows, parting her legs wider for me and giving me that look that both dares me and tells me to go fuck myself, that look I know, that look which gets me hot.
Only this time, it’s saying fuck you and fuck me and I’m very much into the latter when that invite comes from Sadie Hess.
I go down, making my way up her sweet body, kissing and tasting, nipping her inner thighs, just above her clit, deliberately missing all those delicious parts that make her shake apart because I really am an asshole and I want to tease her into a mindless state, one where she can’t think, only feel.
Up I go, sucking a spot on her hip, biting her stomach, kissing her breasts, her throat, her shoulder, and then I take her mouth as I push into her.
This time we take it slow, a measured fuck that’s erotic, a test in patience, one we both lose as that urgency comes over me. Her, too, from the way she moans and pulls at me, how she pushes up to meet each thrust, how her hands bite at me, like she’s trying to get me further into her, and I want that.
It’s no longer a game. It’s a wordless merge, one of wild storms and high seas of need and pleasure that hovers, drawing me in. She’s tight, so tight. And hot. Her slickness takes me each time I pound into her and her sharp little gasps of air a symphony just for me.
I want to lose myself in her, so far I come out the other side, born and free of her.
And as she shatters around me, dragging me into that release, I don’t think I am.
Not at all.