“The difference is whether or not you’ve worked for said shedloads.”
He expected Jenny to stiffen, but her expression only turned rueful. “Unlike me, you mean.”
“Not everyone is born rich.”
“And not everyone born rich is automatically evil,” Jenny replied. She squeezed his hand as she held it. “Something you’re going to have to come to terms with should you create a new generation some day. Will they grow up pampered and spoilt? Or will they learn they have a responsibility to do what others can’t?”
He found his thumb moving back and forth over the back of her hand. “You don’t make money at what you do, do you?”
“Of course not. I’m a career volunteer. It’s what makes swanning off to Australia on a whim possible.”
She peered past him into one of the salons off the hall, where a scrum of finance types were boozing it up like they were down at the local, except what they were quaffing would qualify as a mortgage payment in some places. All she did was smile, but Dylan was suddenly uncomfortable. He’d been there once, in the first flush of his first million. And the notion that Jenny might have looked at him then as he was looking at the pack of them made something twist inside.
“That’s the trouble with money,” he said darkly. “If you’ve never had a lack of it and don’t understand what a gift that is, you don’t cherish it. You grow complacent.” He nodded toward the pack of idiots, but pulled her along past their room. “And you find yourself using it to help yourself feel things you wouldn’t otherwise.” Like entertaining the wrong women for years because the right one was permanently out of reach. But he remembered himself. “Like leaping out of planes, which the lot of them like to do on the weekends. Regularly. But no one’s a thrill junkie if they can feel things on their own. They wouldn’t need it.”
Jenny was looking up at him again as they walked, that rueful expression turning to something more pointed. “Have you already become bored? So quickly?”
“I don’t believe in boredom,” Dylan told her, growling it out as if she was hitting hard into the very heart of him. “That’s one more privilege I never had.”
“You seek thrills for the hell of it, then.”
She wasn’t quite frowning at him, but there was a challenging light in her eyes. And Dylan didn’t want to debate class differences with the one person who had always treated him as if there weren’t any. As if he was grand as he was, always and forever.
And she was going to leave him, soon. He didn’t want to tell her that she was his model for how a very wealthy person ought to behave, because he didn’t want to admit how much he thought about her, felt about her, changed himself for her. Start discussing one part of it and who knew where he’d end up?
Jenny never hid her wealth, but she never flaunted it, either. She gave back quietly, without fanfare. And she was unfailingly kind. He fell short of these things daily, but she was always there as a goal. He was good at goals.
But then, there were other, more attainable goals tonight. He could work on being a better version of himself in all the lonely years ahead of him.
Dylan stopped at the next door they passed, seeing the discreet green light that indicated it was empty. He coded them in, then leaned back against the door when he closed it. And locked it.
“Does that mean you don’t feel anything?” she was asking, paying no attention to what he was doing as she walked into the lounge area, then turned back to him. “And, crucial follow-up question, if you can’t feel anything, are you really the best tutor when it comes to sex?”
“Jenny.”
“I’m no expert myself, but I did think it had a lot to do with sensation,” she said, shaking her head at him. “Feeling. All those things you just said—”
“There’s only one thrill I’m after,” Dylan told her.
He hauled her into his arms, where she belonged, and he got his mouth on hers once more.
And this time, in private.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IF JENNY HAD ever had the slightest idea that kissing could be like this, her whole life would be different.
Dylan was addictive.
The scrape of his tongue, the way he moved that hard jaw of his... She couldn’t get close enough. Her whole body was flushed, hot, ready.
She felt needy, filled with greed, and some part of her thought that this experiment was going to take a bit longer than planned. Because she could kiss him forever. Calling what he was doing kissing seemed to do it a disservice, in fact. He tasted the way she imagined heroin must feel. An impossible, magical lift, and then a beautiful storm.
And she felt dizzy, but it took her a moment to realize it was because he was moving her, backing her up until something prodded her at the hips.
She pulled away from him, which made her want to cry. But she looked around, and realized they were in a sitting room of some kind. There was the door to one side discreetly marked with an embossed WC. There was the door they’d come in, and then a third with no markings.
“Is this a hotel?”
“After a fashion,” Dylan said, in a perfectly normal voice that was at complete odds with the ferocity in his gaze. The contrast made her skin feel too tight. “These are considered day rooms. They are most properly used for members fighting off jet lag when they come in on one of those early flights. A nice place to have a bit of a sleep, freshen up and then head straight to a business meeting.”
“Are we having a business meeting?” Jenny asked, there where he’d backed her up against a sturdy little antique secretary.
But he only smiled. Like a wolf. And then he was shifting, going down on his knees before her.
And suddenly, she didn’t care what took place in this building. All she could see was Dylan, his eyes blazing and his face set. Hungry. Very nearly feral.
She felt the same. And she wanted to ask him what he was doing, but her mouth was too dry.
Then his hands were on her. He smoothed his way over her hips, then went straight to the fastening of her jeans.
“I’m going to feed you,” he told her, and his voice sounded thicker. Darker. “But first, I need to taste you or I’m not going to make it.”
She wanted to laugh at that, because it seemed like the right thing to do. To make this less intense. Less overwhelming. But he angled a look up at her when he said it, green and hot, and she was terribly afraid she might shatter.
And she didn’t know if she meant she would come—or come apart. Or both.
There was a noise in her ears, some kind of ringing. And maybe that was her breath, heaving in and out of her.
Dylan unbuttoned her jeans, then worked her zipper down.
And she wanted to tell him not to bother. That she’d never cared that much about this thing that all women were supposed to find so delightful. That in her experience, it was always a bit messy and embarrassing. The boyfriends she’d had were always so proud of themselves, so bound and determined to prove something, that she’d felt nothing but enormous pressure to scream and carry on and make out as if she was transported. When really, a person’s head was between her legs while an endless spiral of anxiety traipsed about in her head—
“Hey. Jenny.”
Dylan’s voice snapped her out of the cycle, and she found his gaze. There was something in the way he was looking at her, then. Some kind of charged patience. As if he knew exactly what she was thinking. His hands were busy, even as that gaze of his was still. He tugged her jeans down over her hips, and she would have protested, maybe. But his hands were so big and they skimmed over her legs easily, and it was easier somehow to let him tug one leg free.
And besides, she liked it when he touched her.
His gaze caught hers, almost stern now. “This is for me.”
“What?”
“This is for me,” he told her, and there was that p
atient thing there in all that green, and a light she didn’t quite understand. “This is what I need. All right?”
She nodded, because she couldn’t speak.
“Good.” His mouth seemed stern, then, too—a word she never would have used to describe Dylan. Her Dylan, so funny and happy and bright... But she liked this side of him. Something about that hard line of profoundly male lips and his finely cut jaw made her shudder inside, and her pussy feel wet and swollen. “I want you to think about that, please.”
“Think about what? What you want?”
“I told you I was hungry.”
He smoothed his hands up to her hips again, and pulled one leg wide as he went, making space for himself. He kept going up her thigh, until he reached the edge of the panties she wore.
And when he flicked his gaze to hers again, she understood that both of them were feeling that same wild heat. She was lit up with it. With him. His palms were against her skin, and as he knelt there, she could feel his breath against the lace that covered her pussy.
“I’ll buy you more,” he growled, and she had no idea what he meant.
Until he tore her panties off her.
And she couldn’t help but gasp at that. She even rocked forward with the jolt of it, up on her toes.
Dylan’s hands moved around to grip her ass. As if he owned it. And her. Then he pulled her forward, straight on to his mouth.
He didn’t seem to care what she did with herself. Where she put her hands or how she was propped up against the secretary. He dipped his shoulder so that one of her legs fell over his back, and his hands gripped her, holding her right where he wanted her.
And he ate at her as if she was a ripe fruit, and he didn’t give a shit if she ran all over his face.
She tried to brace herself against the secretary behind her, but he was too intense. His tongue, his teeth, that jaw.
It was like he was truly feasting on her. Eating his fill, and so wholly focused on the task, so deeply unconcerned with her reaction, that she felt herself...unravel. Or let go, at last.
She dug her hands in his thick, dark hair, and stopped trying to anticipate which way he would rock his head, or angle that chin.
And all the while, he licked into her. He scraped at her gently, and then not so gently, too.
And it was his intensity that rocked her. His total focus, and his fingers digging into the flesh of her ass, kneading gently from time to time to increase the sensation.
Jenny didn’t have to do a thing. Dylan wasn’t checking to see what her reaction was. He’d told her he wanted this, and he was taking it, and she believed that he truly didn’t care about anything but pleasing himself. He was hungry, she was his appetizer—
And that was what threw her over the edge.
She’d had orgasms before. Some quite delightful ones, she would have said. By her own hand, with a partner—they’d been sweet little finishes, like a cherry on top.
But this was nothing like that.
This was a gut punch.
This was a seismic event.
She felt everything in her seize, and this had nothing to do with cherries, and she was shaking everywhere, inside and out, and a noise was coming out of her throat that scraped.
And she heard a deep, male rumble, that she knew—though she’d never heard anything like it before—was the sound of his pleasure. His satisfaction.
That made her come even harder.
And he didn’t stop.
He kept going. He sucked her clit into his mouth, making her arch and sob, and she couldn’t get her head around the fact it was Dylan.
Or what her body was even doing. She thought her eyes were closed, though she couldn’t tell for sure, and there was moisture leaking out of them. And she could hear the sounds he made, and the sounds he made her pussy make.
And everything was bright red, muscular and physical, and she was too hot. But she couldn’t seem to stop the noises she was making, or the way she lifted her hips toward him. Because she wanted more. Because she couldn’t think. Because she didn’t know what was happening to her, how she was expected to survive this.
Dylan was eating her alive. He was devouring her.
He’d tripped off a series of explosions, and they didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. One led into the next, and everything was wet, hot and just this side of painful. All the places he wasn’t touching hurt, too. And the hurt was an ache, and it bled straight down into the center of her, hurtling its way through her and into her clit, and he knew it.
Oh, yes, he knew it.
Because he teased her. And he took her. And he consumed her with that voracious mouth of his, making a mockery of her belief that this was something she didn’t like. Because this wasn’t about like, it was about need—
And she came so hard again then that she saw stars, but she couldn’t make any more noise. Because everything was too bright and searing. And it was all shattered to pieces.
Jenny was only vaguely aware of him moving, pressing a kiss against her inner thigh, and then leaning her back against the secretary she’d forgotten was even there.
She had to breathe, but it was hard to make her lungs work. She had to concentrate on the act of breathing, and only when that had gone on awhile could she take notice of her surroundings. And the fact Dylan had slid her back on the secretary when he was done with her, leaving her slumped there with her jeans at her ankles, like a crumpled doll.
An image that surely should have horrified her, but instead made another spear of bright, thick heat wind its way through her.
It seemed to take an hour or so, and enough effort to climb a mountain or two, to turn her head to the side and watched Dylan as he bent over the sink tucked into the wall outside the WC. He splashed water on his face. Then he ran his hands through his hair. And when he looked at her, clearly completely aware of her and what she was doing, Jenny thought her heart stopped.
She wanted to say something arch. Amusing.
But all she could do was slump there, entirely wrecked, until the corner of his mouth kicked up a bit.
He reached down below the sink and pulled out a fresh towel, then he moved over to her. She expected him to hand her the towel, but he didn’t. He cleaned her up instead, with a brisk efficiency that made her breathless. There was something about how at ease he was with her body. As if every inch of her was his. It made her a bit light-headed.
When he was done, he tossed the towel in a basket, then set her on her feet. She was boneless and useless, so she did nothing when he squatted down, fed her foot back into the leg of her jeans, and tugged them back up. And she was only aware that she’d kicked off the flashy new heels she’d found in a boutique this afternoon when he slid them back onto her feet.
“Are you with me?” Dylan stood, then buttoned her jeans. Then he held her hips there, looking down at her.
All she could manage to do was nod.
“I’m going to need a word or two, I think.” He lifted one hand, and ran his thumb beneath her eye, collecting that moisture she couldn’t seem to keep from spilling over.
“I’m with you,” she whispered.
Though in truth, Jenny didn’t know what that meant. Or where they were. Or her own damned name.
Dylan smiled, but it wasn’t that friendly smile she knew so well. This one was darker. And far more satisfied.
He laced his fingers through hers again, and led her out of the room. And she couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. Not really. It was like a dream. He was leading her down another hall, then into a lift. And all she could think about was his hand in hers, and how sensitive her pussy was now, swollen and still molten, brushing up against the seam of her jeans because he’d left her with no panties.
He ushered her out of the lift, and then to a table on a rooftop patio festooned with walls of plants, heaters and
clever lighting that managed to make every table seem private—even though she was fairly certain there were other people about. And it wasn’t until they sat down, and she looked out at the stunning, sparkling view laid out before them from the Harbour Bridge to the Opera House and the skyscrapers of central Sydney, that she could place the way he touched her.
It was proprietary.
Something inside of her curled up at that, shivering in delight.
Dylan didn’t ask her what she wanted to eat. He had a quiet word with the waiter. Another thing she wanted to find a little outrage about, and yet when the food arrived she was not only ravenous, she couldn’t have chosen better for herself.
“Good?” he asked, sounding far too entertained.
“Surprisingly, yes.”
“What’s the surprise, Jenny?” And he sounded like her Dylan again, lazy and careless, but she couldn’t quite believe it anymore. Not when she’d seen what lurked beneath. “I’ve known you a donkey’s age or two, haven’t I?”
She ate what he’d ordered her, but she kept getting distracted by thoughts of him feasting, on her. Watching him eat food seemed like a sensual act. His green eyes seemed so amused, lit up in a new way, as he watched her. Jenny ordered herself to make clever conversation. The way she always did, in her role as her father’s hostess. But for the first time in as long as she could remember, the words didn’t come.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, when their mains had been cleared away. Dylan picked up her hand again to toy with her fingers, and that didn’t exactly help. “It’s as if I lost the power of speech.”
“You’re welcome.”
And surely she shouldn’t have found such smugness appealing. She heard herself laugh. “Why would I thank you? I thought that was all for you. It had nothing to do with me.”
“You can consider it an object lesson, then. I’m greedy. I want what I want when I want it.”
He was playing with her fingers, making her right hand feel like an erogenous zone. She leaned closer to him, propping up one elbow on the table. “Is this it? Is this the famous speech?”
Take Me Page 8
