Order (A Romantic Suspense Royal Billionaire Novel)

by Blair Babylon

  Tattoo

  Dree

  Dree didn’t know how long she’d slept before she realized her hand was freezing and water was splashing inside the tent.

  She did the most obvious thing first. She pulled her hand inside her sleeping bag, zipped it up, and crammed her cold fingers under her armpit, thus solving that problem.

  But, for the other, it was too cold for rain.

  Any rain would be snow.

  Snow and ice.

  And she wasn’t wet.

  So, it couldn’t be some kind of a snowmelt flood, and if the tent were leaking rain, she would be wet.

  Also, the air inside the tent didn’t have the wet-dirt scent of petrichor.

  Citrus, balsam, and lavender hung in the air.

  It smelled really good.

  Really good.

  So, the splashing could not be rain.

  Why was good-smell splashing waking her up? she grumbled inside her head.

  Her eyelids were mostly dark, so there was not much light.

  It wasn’t going to be too bright when she opened her eyes to figure out the splashing.

  She cracked one eyelid open, squinting because even the flashlight on the dim setting was brighter than the Nepali night.

  Deacon Father Maxence was stripped to the waist, half-naked, wearing nothing but black, tight boxer-briefs and a smile.

  Well, she couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or not because he was facing away from her as he rubbed a small cloth down his arm, scrubbing his elbow and armpit.

  A shiny thermal blanket lay over his sleeping bag and under his bare legs, where he kneeled on top of it. Sharp-cut crevices ran between the massive muscles of his thighs. His toes peeked out from under his muscular butt, a pale shade of tan under the black cotton of his underwear. His black hair was damp and curled in loose spirals near the nape of his neck and the tops of his broad shoulders.

  His tawny skin was the color of a lion’s coat, but blue and burgundy bruises were beginning to rise on his ribs and above his underwear’s waistband.

  He twisted, causing the thick muscles on his back and around his waist to bulge, and soaked the washcloth in a small steel pot beside his sleeping bag. He didn’t wring it out but merely gathered the small cloth in his fist and squeezed with one hand, shaking the droplets off his knuckles. His forearm muscles tensed and stood out under the tanned skin of his arm.

  When he turned to rinse out the washrag, his back turned away from her, so she only got a glimpse of the black tattoo ink staining his skin. Again, her only impression was of delicate, shaded vertical lines running over the bulk of his muscles and the indentation of his spine down the center.

  She asked, “What’s that tattoo on your back?”

  Maxence didn’t startle at her sudden question. He just looked down at her and raised one black eyebrow as water ran over his knuckles and dripped back into the pot. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I woke up.”

  Maxence blinked and shook his head before he continued to run the washrag over the heavy rounded pectorals of his chest, getting himself glistening and wet.

  And her, too.

  Not that they could, you know, because he was a what-he-was and she wasn’t going to do anything about it because she wasn’t like that.

  Really, she wasn’t.

  Like that.

  Fine masculine hair lay thicker down the center of his chest and formed a darker line all the way down to the waistband of his underwear.

  She wanted to pet him.

  Instead, she said, “So, that tattoo. What is it?”

  Maxence leaned back as he stroked the washcloth down over the ripples of his abdominals, which forced the muscles of his torso to contract and made them stand out more.

  Jeez, that was like one of those sexy dance moves the male strippers did when they were on their knees, and he looked just like one of them.

  Dree’s fingers, now warmed, wandered down her sternum and stomach to the waistband of her underwear.

  She couldn’t.

  He would know.

  Hey, she was inside a completely enclosed mummy bag. Nothing except her face showed. If she could keep control over her facial expression and, to some extent, her breathing, he couldn’t know.

  Her fingers dipped inside her panties.

  Maxence was still looking down at the wet washcloth that stroked down the crevice between his abs and over the transverse lines that crossed his abdomen, and he said like he was just noting the weather and nothing sexy was going on, “My friend Arthur designed all our tattoos after we graduated from high school.”

  He stroked the washcloth across the lowest lumps of his abdominal muscles, rubbing away the sweat and salt and faint male musk of his skin that she remembered on her tongue. Her face had been right where that rough washcloth was, breathing and tasting him as he shoved his cock down her throat with wild exultation in his dark eyes.

  Her fingers stroked across her folds, and one fingertip slipped inside to graze her clit. The dirty pleasure of it spiraled through her. “So, are your tattoos the same as your friends’?”

  Maxence said, “No, the ones on our back don’t match. These do, sort of.” He extended his arm where the three shields were tattooed around a triangular design. “The ones on our backs are all different, but Arthur designed all of them.”

  Her finger circled her clit just like his tongue had when they’d been in Paris. “You said Arthur was the—introvert? And the one who left the suits in Paris that you wore?”

  Maxence smiled and looked up at the ceiling, emitting a sexy chuckle. He flung the washcloth across his back and stroked the cloth over his heavy flesh and ink. “He pretends not to be, but I’ve seen him walk into his computer office and not come out for eighteen hours without talking to anybody, and then do that for weeks on end. And yes, he designed them. I told him what I wanted, but he made some adjustments before he gave the design to the artist.”

  “What did you—want?”

  “I wanted an illustrated cross, a monochrome outline of a cross filled with Celtic knots or some other patterns. Sort of a graphic illustration. Arthur told me that he had altered the design substantially, and part of the project for the three of us was to have his art with us wherever we went. I keep thinking about finding a design of a Celtic-knot cross for my pectoral.”

  He smoothed his hand over his heavy chest, presumably where he would allow someone to touch and carve the design into him.

  As his fingers brushed over the round part of his pec, the memory of his hands on her breast, grasping and pinching her, filled her mind, and her finger grazed her clit again. She rolled her fingertip around the sensitive spot.

  Maxence continued, “The tattoo looks like falling lines of water at first glance, like a waterfall, but it’s not. The surfaces of Arthur’s designs always hide his true intentions, which may be the best description of Arthur himself that I’ve ever thought of. He said that the overall pattern that you recognize at first glance was water rolling down my back as I emerged from the sea.”

  He turned, showing her his entire back.

  Trails of real water trickled over his thick muscles and down his spine like she wanted to do with her fingers and tongue. With him turned away, she rubbed deeper between her folds. Pleasure awoke in her, and her body began to tighten.

  “But that’s not what the real design is,” he said.

  He rinsed out the washrag again in the little pot of water beside his bedroll, squeezing it again in his strong fist. Rivulets of water trailed from between his fingers and across his knuckles, falling back into the pot.

  The tension in the knot between her legs was tightening, almost at a peak, but she couldn’t move her hand enough to finish herself because he would see.

  The water ran down his fist.

  His underwear was a dark line around his tight, rippled waist, and his skin glistened because he was wet.

  “Aren’t you going to,” she gasped a little,
“wash anything else?”

  His head turned, and he stared at her.

  She pressed her lips together and barely inhaled through her nose, but her heart was racing, and she felt her eyes flutter, rolling just a bit.

  Maxence’s voice was deep, almost hoarse, as he whispered, “Harder.”

  “Wha-what?” she whispered.

  His voice was a growl, and he didn’t look away from her eyes. He moved forward so that he was close, nearly hovering over her, and he whispered, “Don’t come yet. Rub your fingers harder against your clit and roll them. Feel how slick you are. Slip one finger inside yourself and press forward, pinching your clit from the inside.”

  She did, and she couldn’t look away from his dark, knowing eyes as he watched her.

  “Harder,” he said, his whisper and breath sliding over her lips and throat. “Now two fingers inside yourself, and stroke yourself deep and hard, the way I want to bury my cock in you. Don’t come. Don’t let yourself. Fuck yourself like it’s me taking all of you, like my cock is rubbing inside and fucking you until your clit is so raw that it hurts not to come.”

  She rubbed her fingers inside herself and brushed her knotted clit more lightly and to the side because he didn’t want her to come yet, and she wanted his deep voice to tell her what to do. The tension was unbearable, and the tent spun.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  She nodded, and her teeth biting her lip was delicious pain that kept her from dying.

  “Do you want my cock?”

  She nodded harder.

  “Now,” he said. “Pinch your clit and let yourself come.”

  His permission was all she needed to fall over the edge, and the tight pressure around her clit and her fingers inside made the waves keep rolling through her like he was pushing her down on a bed and taking her hard.

  As she let up, the tiny tent around them drifted into her view. She whispered, “Did I make noise?”

  He was leaning forward, his fists braced on his knees, and his eyes were ablaze with dark fire like anger. “No. You were utterly silent.”

  “Oh, good. I thought—well, I was worried. Because I wouldn’t want to cause questions for you.”

  He settled back on his heels, but his muscles wrapping his body were still taut as steel cables. “It won’t be a problem.”

  The ripples of her orgasm ebbed.

  Inside her mummy bag, she was stifling hot and sweating.

  Maxence dried himself roughly with a towel like he was angry at his skin. He tossed it up by her ski suit at the rear of the tent and slipped inside his sleeping bag. He grabbed at the flashlight and clicked it off, filling the tent with darkness.

  Questions ran through her head, whether he was mad at her or whether she shouldn’t have done that, but she didn’t ask them.

  There was, however, one thing she did want to know.

  “If it’s not a waterfall, what’s the real design of your tattoo?”

  His voice was rough like he had been shouting. “It’s wings. Long feathers and strong hollow bones, but the feathers are black, and the bones have been snapped. Arthur’s design is of the broken wings of a fallen angel.”

  Dree woke up the next morning after a long deep sleep that was truly refreshing. She was kind of embarrassed about how she had managed to get that deep sleep, but she felt a lot better that morning that she had for several days.

  Hey, Paris had been weeks ago, and she’d had no privacy since.

  Maxence was thoroughly casual toward her when she finally crawled out of the tent. If anything, he seemed to be a rerun of the kind gentleman he’d been acting like for the last few weeks.

  There was just no deviation in his demeanor.

  It was pretty impressive.

  She almost wondered if she’d dreamed it.

  As she sat on a warm rock holding her plate of eggs and fresh flatbread and began eating, Isaak looked up at her with a grin and said, “Happy Christmas.”

  Dree forced herself to swallow the large bite of eggs in her mouth and said, “I lost track of what day it is. Is it Christmas?”

  Alfonso said, “Christmas Eve. It’s December twenty-fourth. Father Booker will offer a Mass for us tomorrow morning because it is a holy day of obligation.” His voice was a little drier as he said, “It is fortunate for us that we have a priest along who can make sure none of us skip Mass, not even once, not even a little.”

  Father Booker paused his eating with a spoon in his mouth to glare at Alfonso with one raised eyebrow.

  Dree laughed at him. “Guess we’re just lucky.”

  After breakfast, they struck the camp and rode to the village’s possible site for the construction of the NICU micro-clinic, which was again unsuitable in several ways.

  Isaak said a sheet of shale was running under the surface soil of the village, so the earth was unlikely to pass a perc test for the septic system. He also glared at the shadows of the mountains and noted that the entire town seemed a bit too new, which may have something to do with watermarks high on the rocks that may have indicated a recent flood.

  Alfonso said, “None of these sites are perfect, but are some of them good enough?”

  “No,” Isaak said. “All the sites have fatal flaws.”

  “Then what are we supposed to do? We are perfecting the design for specialized incubators for premature babies, and we have premature babies being born in every area of Nepal. Why can’t we just save the lives of some premature babies by giving them access to incubators?”

  Isaak said, “There’s a good chance that every ten years, this village and your incubator and your micro-clinic are going to be swept away by a flood. There hasn’t been a hundred-year flood in Nepal for a long time, so those high watermarks must mean that more common floods produce high-water marks in this region.”

  Dree stepped back. She was glad that Maxence hadn’t been the one to start this argument with Alfonso. There seemed to be something else going on behind their debates.

  Alfonso shook his hand, gesturing at the marks on the rocks. “How do you even know that those are flood marks? You can’t correlate the age of the houses with that. There was a major earthquake in Nepal in 2015. Whole villages were leveled. That watermark, if it is a watermark, might have nothing to do with the fact that this village has a bunch of new houses. It might have been fifty years ago. It might not even be a water mark.”

  Isaak’s voice rose. “We can’t install a basic septic system in this location because of the shale. There isn’t enough direct sunlight in this valley for months out of the year to run solar panels here, or in any of these villages due to those damn mountains. Nepal isn’t the right country for your NICU micro-clinic project, Alfonso. It’s not going to work.”

  Dree caught Maxence’s eye. He was watching the argument closely but didn’t look like he wanted to jump in.

  She sure as blazes didn’t.

  Alfonso said, “We can make it work. We’ve made other projects work.”

  Isaak rolled his eyes. “We’ve thrown money at other projects that never panned out. That doesn’t mean the problems were solved. Throwing money at problems doesn’t make them go away. It just makes the people keep coming back for more, and then other, more successful projects don’t receive adequate funding. Back me up here, Maxence.”

  Alfonso raised his hand toward Maxence in a typical stay-out-of-this gesture as he said to Isaak, “But this is a problem we know exists. Premature babies in these rural villages stand an eighty percent chance of dying. If we saved half of them, it would be an enormous step. Back me up on this, Andrea Catherine.”

  Oh, crap. Dree said, “I’m not here for the technical specifications. I’m just here to be medical personnel feedback.”

  Beyond where Isaak and Alphonso were arguing, Dree saw Batsa elbow Father Booker. “Looks like nobody is asking our opinions about this.”

  Father Booker shook his head. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  Isaak told Alfonso, “The incubators h
ave too many technical challenges. No one here will be able to run them. They will break, and no one will be able to fix them. Max, tell them I’m right.”

  Maxence stepped forward.

  Dragging him backward probably wouldn’t keep him out of the argument, so she didn’t.

  Max said, “I know you planned to involve the locals in the construction of the micro-clinics, Alfonso, and that is the best practice. However, that just means they’re going to be able to fix the walls and roof. They aren’t solar power technicians for when the panels go down. One good hailstorm can destroy an array.”

  Isaak nodded so hard that his blond hair flopped around his head.

  Max continued, “And you don’t just stuff a premature baby in an incubator like a Christmas fish into an oven for them to finish baking. Premature infants often need complex medical procedures to keep them alive and not cause further damage. Many of them must be intubated or need IV lines run. There are no doctors here. There are no nurses or nurse practitioners or other basic medical professionals, let alone NICU specialists, as Dree can tell you.”

  He gestured toward her, and she slouched.

  The men were just determined to drag her into their catfight.

  Dree sighed and said, “The people here need basic medical care. They will not be able to operate neonatal incubators.”

  “We’re designing the incubators to be simple. They’re essentially a turnkey operation. Take the preemie, walk into the micro-clinic, place the preemie in the incubator, and enter weight and vitals. The computer will calculate the oxygen saturation, temperature, and so on, and then the baby can be treated properly.”

  Dree’s nursing bullshit detector was clanging with all its bells and whistles. There was something very wrong with Alfonso’s plan.

  She asked with a low voice, “Who’s going to take the baby’s vitals, Alfonso, and where are the tanks of oxygen going to come from?”

  “Fine,” Alfonso said. “So, when there’s a premature baby born, they can call down to the Chandannath city, and the medical center there can send a doctor to take the vitals and treat the baby in the micro-clinic.”