CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
“T RAFFIC WAS A NIGHTMARE ,” he said, beginning to loosen his tie.
“I know.”
And my adrenaline hit its peak.
Because this was what we’d been walking toward all day. This was the real show. The one no one else would see. The one no one else would ever know about.
Through the haze that was beginning to descend I did think to ask about practicalities. “The room is registered under...?”
“Neither of our names.”
“And you...?”
“Came in the back.”
Hades Achelleos was a man of aristocratic and noble blood. But he walked through staff-only entrances, fire exits and side doors in alleyways for this.
For me.
It would be tempting to take that personally. But I knew from experience that with Hades nothing was personal. Especially when it felt like it might burn me alive.
He was fire personified. He couldn’t help it if he scalded everything he touched.
Sometimes I told myself, if I could go back to the moment when I’d first ruined everything, ruined us, I would. That I would make a different choice that night.
Lose my virginity to a waiter or some random dude I met on the beach.
But in my heart I knew I wouldn’t.
Because doing battle with him in a boardroom was a high. But this was everything.
He crossed the room, his movements silken, like a big cat stalking his prey. Prey would run, though. And I wasn’t running.
When he closed the distance between us, the move was lightning fast, his lips crashing down on mine the moment he brought me up against his hard body.
Victory .
I had him under my spell as much as he had me under his, and so while I sometimes felt helpless, a junkie addicted to his brand of pleasure, I knew he was no better. And that sustained me.
We were the only two people on earth equally matched to each other. In business and in the bedroom.
He propelled me back against the wall, his hands rough on my curves as he tore at my clothes. My perfectly tailored suit that I’d been so careful not to crease. He wrenched it from my body and left it on the floor like it was nothing.
And revealed what I had on underneath. What I’d had on the whole time. The look on his face was feral. I hadn’t changed into a dress in the back of the car because it had felt too fussy, but what I hadn’t counted on was this moment. I was glad then that I hadn’t changed. Because this way he knew.
“You were wearing this the whole time?”
A corseted top with lace cups that were completely see-through and a lace thong to match. Garters and stockings. The sort of thing he’d said he found too elaborate to be practical when all he wanted was to be inside me.
I knew Hades well enough to know that if I did not oppose him, it wouldn’t be as thrilling. Sometimes I gave him what he wanted. Me. Bare beneath my clothes so that there was no waiting. And sometimes....
If it wasn’t rough, it wasn’t fun.
So sometimes I liked to goad him.
Push him. Find his limits.
I nodded slowly.
He gripped my chin and forced my face to tilt upward, to meet his gaze. “You are wicked, do you know that?”
“That’s what you like.”
He was kissing me again, and it was such a rush. Such a relief. To be trapped between the unforgiving wall and the hardness of his chest. To be in his arms.
It had been a month since we’d last done this. And every day since had been like torture. I’d thought of what we would do, and how it would be. What the room would look like. When I’d walked in and spotted the chaise, I’d known what he intended to do with that. He would put me on my hands and knees and use the shape of the lounge to make it easier for him to take me from behind.
Then the four-poster bed...oh, yes, I’d known his intent for that too.
I would likely spend the night tied to it.
But first...first this. This runaway freight train of desire. It had to be dealt with. It had to be satisfied. Hot. Quick. Fast.
I felt his own desperation matching my own.
He moved his hands down my body then up again to cup my breasts, his large palms rough as he held me, squeezed me, while he left a blazing hot trail of kisses down my neck.
I moved my own hands then, ripping at his tie, at his crisp white shirt. Shedding his layers as I shed mine. As he left me in nothing but the thong and stockings. His body was so hard, so muscular.
Over the years it had changed.
I could remember him at twenty-one. Ten years ago. Lean and lithe, and the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Obsessed with him. It had been embarrassing.
Back then I’d had the dirtiest sexual fantasies of any virgin alive because my fantasies had starred Hades. And even a virgin couldn’t make him innocuous.
He was broader now. Bigger. Harder. His chest had dark hair on it that extended down to his perfect, ridged abdomen.
My eyes met his and the breath left my lungs. How did he still take my breath away? Maybe more now than he had then. Maybe more now than ever before.
He pushed his hands between my legs, where I knew he would find me wet and needy. How could I be anything else? There was no need for foreplay. We’d just had hours of it.
Watching him answer every question with ease. Using his sharp intellect to cut everyone around him, including me. I gave as good as I got, I always did. With everyone and everything, but most of all with Hades. Most of all with him.
I brought my hand down to cup his arousal and he growled, leaning in and biting my neck as he stroked me between my thighs. The pleasure was white-hot, so intense. More, better than it had ever been. Or maybe I just couldn’t remember anything but right now.
One blunt finger found the entrance to my body, and as he moved it inside of me, he kept his eyes on mine.
“This is what you wanted the whole time, isn’t it?” he asked, his voice rough. “When you were sitting there answering their questions all you really thought of was having me inside you.”
“It’s true,” I said, my voice a thready whisper. “But you were thinking of being in me.”
That earned me another growl, and then his hand went to my hair, gripped my bun, his fingers speared deep in my blond locks, as he tilted my head back and kissed me roughly.
My hair, which had been in perfect order, now ruined.
By him.
Praise be.
I arched my breasts into his chest, rough with dark hair, the sensation glorious against my sensitive nipples. He stroked between my legs, pressing a second finger inside me. Taking me to the edge before drawing me back, over and over again. I couldn’t withstand this. It had been too long.
Too long since we’d touched. Too long since I’d felt him inside me.
“Hades.” I said his name as a plea.
“You will get what you want when I am ready to give it to you,” he growled.
I wrapped my hand around his stiff shaft, squeezing him, knowing I could push him to the brink too. I let him take charge because I liked it. Because I enjoyed the feeling of all that strength being used to drive me wild. Because I relished his size, his firm grip.
But I knew full well that if I needed to, I could command his body too.
So I did. Moving my hand from base to tip in slow rhythmic movements until I felt his body begin to shake. He moved away from me for just a moment, returning with a condom that he deftly rolled on before returning to me.
He shoved my panties to the side, then gripping his length, sliding into me slowly. He filled me, made me moan with need before he withdrew and slammed back in hard.
It was rough. It was punishing. It was perfect.
The crescendo to the day.
The release we needed.
We both raced for it, our breathing fractured. We didn’t bother to keep quiet.
In the boardroom I had to wear a mask. Here... I was free. Even as he held me fast in his strong arms, I was free.
He whispered things against my mouth. Explicit things that made me shiver. And I cried out with every thrust.
When the wave crashed over us both, he growled and I couldn’t hold back a sharp cry, the cascading pleasure almost too much to bear.
After the storm we stayed like that. With me pinned to the wall. Him breathing hard against the crook of my neck. Finally we separated.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
“No.”
“I’ll order something.”
I nodded and looked around the room at our discarded clothes. This was the landscape of our lives.
Different hotel rooms. The same wreckage.
We never went to each other’s homes. The chance for espionage was too great. We didn’t...have a relationship. I didn’t trust him. I wanted him.
I had wanted him from the very first time I’d met him, with all the limited understanding a girl my age could have for such a thing.
I’d been predisposed to hating him, thanks to his association with his father. Thanks to my own father’s feelings on the matter. But I’d seen him and it was like the whole world had slowed down. I’d been fourteen and totally untouched, of course, and yet I’d wanted to know what it was like to kiss him. My fantasies had been fevered then, but romantic more than sexual even as fervent as they were.
By the time I’d been eighteen to his twenty-one, I’d known exactly what I wanted. It was an interesting thing. Our fathers had been rivals and yet they found themselves in the same circles, which meant I’d found myself with Hades. Often.
Back then I’d thought it was love, of course. Even though I’d never had a real conversation with him that hadn’t devolved into us being cruel to one another.
That, I’d thought, might be the start of love.
I’d been certain the rush of feeling, the way my heart pounded, had meant something more than animal lust. A virgin’s perspective, I realized now. And a protective one at that. Since I’d never wanted to be my mother—who bed-hopped with frequency, and worse, was always engaged in public, messy relationships that ended in court cases and lawsuits for alimony, palimony and child support.
I never wanted to be that.
It was one reason I kept a solid barrier between my desire for Hades and my real life.
Sex, not a relationship.
Sex, not screaming in the streets.
Sex, not headlines.
I didn’t let it affect my life outside these rooms. That was how I was different from her. It was why I was successful. A CEO and not a woman who spent her days on a fainting couch in my Lake Como estate paid for by my myriad exes.
Not that I was proud of this. This messy, screwed-up connection we had.
There were reasons we kept it secret beyond my mother being my own personal cautionary tale. Our rivalry was storied in the media. Our companies’ competitors. Our personal entanglement would be seen as a conflict of interest, as collusion. It would be...disastrous. Especially for me.
Evidenced by the line of questioning at today’s event. What would I do if I lost? What would he do if he won?
I would be absorbed by him. If ever there was a public merger of our...persons, he would be the one who existed, not me. I would be his partner. His lover. My achievements would become his, somehow. I couldn’t have it.
Even now that our fathers were dead—or perhaps even more now that our fathers were dead—it had to be secret.
And secret it had been, from the moment I’d slipped him a note with a dry mouth and a pounding heart at a massive charity event on my eighteenth birthday, asking him to meet me in one of the suites.
I’d begged my father for my own room, even though his room had plenty of space. He hadn’t questioned me. I wondered sometimes if he’d had an idea that I’d wanted privacy for nefarious reasons, but hadn’t minded as long as it hadn’t become an issue for him.
That was my dad. He didn’t want to know more about me than he had to, because then he might have to contend with something complicated.
That was fine in many ways. I was always grateful to have one parent whose sex life I didn’t have to read about in tabloids. I knew too much about my mother. Very little about my father.
Neither of them knew me.
But whatever my father’s reasoning, I’d gotten my own suite. And my plan had been set in motion.
Hades had come, his dark eyes glittering. He hadn’t trusted me fully even then.
But I’d been thinking about that moment for years. Every time we’d fought, or even looked at each other across a crowded room.
You know what I want.
Do I?
Hasn’t it been obvious all this time?
I’d been so afraid he would reject me. Send me away.
Instead, he’d undone the top button on his shirt.
I know what I want.
He’d said it as if it was a question. Making sure we were on the same page. We were. Oh, we definitely were.
I want the same thing. And it’s my birthday.
I’d heard that first times were awkward. That they were painful, messy affairs. Yes, it had hurt right at first when he’d thrust inside me, but there had been nothing awkward about it at all. It had been fire. And so had we.
He had been annoyed with me, though, that I hadn’t told him I was a virgin.
I’d tried not to be hurt by it, but I was eighteen and the man who’d just turned my world on its axis was acting something other than completely thrilled with me.
Who else would it have been?
He’d paused then, and looked into my eyes.
Ten years on, Hades looked very different, but that intensity in his dark gaze was the same. He looked at me now as he had then, and maybe that was why he kept me bound to him. Ten years after that first time.
So many times in between I couldn’t count them.
A blur of different hotel rooms, different pieces of torn clothing, different curses, promises and dirty words.
“They’re bringing you a cheeseburger, agape .”
My heart hit my breastbone when he returned to me. Those words were hardly poetry, and yet they were.
Agape . He called me that. I knew it didn’t mean he loved me. I knew it was just a thing he said because it was Greek and exotic and it turned me on.
“Thank you,” I said. I realized it was now the time for me to offer to get my own room. “I don’t have to stay. I can leave after dinner.”
This was a game we played.
He shrugged one shoulder, then went to put his pants on. To deal with the room service, I supposed. “It makes no sense for you to go.”
Which meant he wanted more sex. Well, so did I.
I was careful, though, with the blurred lines that existed between myself and Hades. Careful to keep them as unblurred as possible.
“The debate went well,” he said. He moved to the bar and picked up a bottle of scotch, pouring a measure for himself.
“Is that on the table to discuss?” I asked.
“We were both there.” Meaning there were no potential secrets being traded between us.
“It wasn’t a debate, really,” I said. “It was meant to be an informative session with the two leading minds in the industry. That’s us.”
“Mmm.” He lifted his glass and drank it all, then poured himself more.
“Are you worried?”
“Me?” He arched a dark brow.
“You’re drinking a lot.”
He frowned and I knew I’d crossed one of our invisible boundaries. Something like that, acknowledging that over the past ten years of being his dirtiest, secretest secret I might have acquired some intimate knowledge of him, was strictly verboten.
Then it hit me.
“Oh. Hades. It’s...it’s your father’s birthday.”
“It isn’t. Because he’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I don’t know, for not acknowledging it sooner?”
He cleared his throat. “And when, Florence, would you have done that? At the event where it was required that we tear strips off each other’s flesh? Or here, when I tore strips off your clothes?”
“We don’t have an audience here. You can calm down.” I moved over to him and stole the glass out of his hand and was gratified when his dark eyes moved over my partially clothed body, the lust there apparent.
“There is nothing to say. He died as he lived. A difficult bastard. You know that.”
I did. Our fathers had been brilliant, complex men. I loved my father and I wanted to make him proud, but I had felt the weight of not being the son he wanted keenly. The need to never, ever make a mistake—particularly one that might be perceived as a gender-based mistake—drove me. Like a demon.
It was one reason Hades had always felt both so dangerous and so desirable.
It was a horrible thing to think, but I’d grown up rich, and if I’d ever wanted for anything, it was my father’s attention. The truth was, I’d been denied little. But Hades had been off-limits. So I’d never wanted anyone more.
I’d never wanted anyone else at all.
It was his deepest secret, but mine too. If my father had ever known...
Our fathers’ rivalry had not been friendly. Not even close. They’d hated each other. I wanted to hate Hades. Part of me did. For all the things he made me feel. But never quite all of me. He drove me insane. I wanted to punch him sometimes. But... I wanted him.
That first time it had been like we were inventing sex. We’d had a four-day event where we were turned loose. We’d had each other everywhere we could find privacy, in every position. I’d gone from novice to experienced very, very quickly, with his hands, his mouth, his body to guide me.
After I’d gone home I’d done my best to accept that it would never happen again. That by the time I saw him next he would have a new woman on his arm and in his bed. And it would be for the best, I knew it. I tried to find a boyfriend. I went on several dates, all ended without so much as a kiss. I couldn’t bring myself to want anyone but him.
And when we’d next crossed paths six months later at a scientific symposium in Geneva, I’d expected him to barely acknowledge me. Instead he’d taken me into the nearest single person bathroom and locked the door. He’d had me on a highly polished marble countertop and I’d had no regrets whatsoever about it.
It had taken two years for me to accept that this was how we were.
We were each other’s vacation. Each other’s outlet. Each other’s rebellion. Whenever we met, whatever was happening in his life didn’t seem to matter. If he had other girlfriends I didn’t ask, didn’t want to know. When our paths crossed, that was all there was.
Then his father had died abroad on holiday. I’d been certain that he wouldn’t want anything to do with me after that. Now the company was his. Now my father was his direct competition. At the same time, I’d been taking on more and more work for Edison and had been responsible for all the speaking engagements my father would have taken at one time.
We were both speaking at a think tank for the up-and-coming executives in different travel and leisure companies.
We’d been waiting in the same green room, waiting to be introduced, and he’d reached out and grabbed my bun, tilted my head back and held me steady while he kissed me deep and hard. I’d been dizzy when we’d gone out.
I’d gone back to his room that night. And he had been like a violent storm. He hadn’t been like that before. He’d been more like that than not since.
I knew the subject of his father was a tricky one. And we didn’t cover tricky subjects. The death of his father felt so...random. He’d been a vital man, even if my father had hated him, I could recognize that. The news had said he’d suffered a medical event and it had seemed a shock to me that such a larger-than-life man could have been taken by something so...common.
Part of me wanted to talk to Hades about it. Comfort him. But that wasn’t us. This was dark for him. I could sense the changes in his moods. Hades’ moods were like tides. They shifted everything around them. Rearranged the landscape of anyone who got in their path.
It was lucky then, that I’d fashioned my personal landscape into a rock garden a long time ago.
Maybe it was the function of never being quite right for my mother or my father. Maybe it was the necessary result of figuring out how to be what I needed to be to take over Edison, while also being able to smile at the woman who had given birth to me over mimosa brunches. I had a core of steel to make sure that, even as I flexed on the outside, I didn’t lose my shape within.
“Perhaps you should dress,” Hades said, breaking through my memories. “Unless you are planning on tipping the delivery person.”
“I did not plan to be anywhere near you when the food arrived. I intended to hide under the bed.”
The idea that I would be seen with him was ridiculous. And he knew it.
“Of course.”
I gathered myself and my clothes and went into the bedroom, where I did not dress.
A few moments later, Hades appeared in the doorway, shirtless, wearing only those dark trousers, holding a tray of food. His dark hair was a mess now, thanks to my hands. His body a perfect testament to the masculine form. Sculpted muscular shoulders; a deep, broad chest; ridged abs.
I could look at him forever and never get tired of it. But looking at him only made me hungry. And not for food.
“You will be upset if you let your food grow cold,” he said, pushing away from the doorframe and walking into the room to set the tray at the foot of the bed.
“Who said I was going to let my food get cold?”
“Your expression was asking me for more.”
I shrugged, because I knew it would irritate him. “I was looking at the hamburger.”
“Of course you were.”
It was strange. How I knew this man, but didn’t know him. How I liked him sometimes, but didn’t. How in some ways he was my longest, closest relationship.
Perhaps that spoke to a measure of loneliness in my life. Or maybe I was lonely in part because of him.
I had a friend, Sarah, who worked at Edison, though there was...
I couldn’t help but feel it was my fault that I wasn’t as close to Sarah as I wanted to be. Because nobody knew about Hades. Nobody. I had never told another living soul.
I had made up mystery lovers. Because there were a couple of times that Sarah and I had been on the same business trip, and I’d disappeared overnight. So what could be said? I had fashioned a lie that made me sound maybe more adventurous than I was. I acted as if it was never the same man.
Of course it was. Distressingly, always the same man.
And with this man, there was only ever one way it could be.
I had imagined conversations with Sarah about it in my head before.
“And what is your plan?” Fake Sarah would ask. “To be with him like this forever? Until you both die alone and are buried with this secret?”
“I was thinking so,” I would reply.
And in my imagination, my friend did not tell me that was ridiculous and sad.
There was of course, always the possibility that I would meet a man who made me feel half of what Hades did, but who made up for that by filling the other half with care, attention, soft feelings. Romantic feelings.
Not this hard and sharp need that made us both lose control at every opportunity.
I didn’t need that. Not forever. It was just that I had never even met a man who made me feel half.
I could give this up. Someday. But surely half wasn’t too much to ask.
I stretched across the bed and grabbed my plate.
“When will you next be in the city?” I asked the question casually, because he often worked in Europe, but the time he spent in New York was one of the few times we were able to meet up when we weren’t at a special event. And maybe, sometimes, I found excuses to go and work in the London office of Edison so that it was convenient for us to meet up there.
A couple of times a year. But that was all.
“I will be there for the next month,” he said.
The words hit me low. Hard. A month?
I imagined that. Going to his temporary residence more nights than not. Gorging myself on him. We never had that kind of time.
It would dovetail into the Christmas season and everything would be decked out. It would almost be...romantic. But we weren’t romantic.
Undoubtedly he would be busy, but our toxic trait—one of the many, really—was that we always made time for sex. Even if it was just an hour of time, we would find a way.
I’d once met him on the tarmac when we’d been in the same city for an hour while his plane refueled and he’d taken me in the luxury bedroom on board. Then I’d deplaned trying to look like we’d been having a meeting.
Our level of determination and opportunism combined with that length of time was... Dizzying.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“You will not,” I said. “You’ll text me an address.”
He chuckled. “You never know if the media is listening in on phone calls.”
“Not mine. They know that I’m terribly boring.”
I took a French fry off my plate and reclined against the pillow, giving him a full view of my naked body.
“Terribly boring,” he repeated. There was something strange in his expression. I couldn’t read it. But then, when it came to feelings, I could never quite read him.
“Finish eating,” he said. “I want my dessert.”
That expression I could read.
Familiar and thrilling. My darkest secret.
One I was happy to keep forever.