He dropped his arm so he could cup her beautiful face, and he grinned at her. Lazy, full of himself and dirty as hell.
“Yeah, I do,” he said. “Because that’s how you like it.”
She made a noise he’d never heard before. It sounded as if it was cracking open from deep inside her. Wild. Crazy. So insane and beautiful it nearly made him come, he liked it so much.
“I can’t do this,” she threw at him, loud. Like she’d forgotten there was a roomful of reality right down the hall.
“But here you are. Doing it.”
“I can’t give you what you want,” she said. He heard the echo of his own words in that.
Still, he smiled at her, his fingers sunk deep in all her clinging heat. “You can. You will.”
“How can I when I don’t know what that is?”
And that, finally, was raw. An open wound, scraping them both.
But it was real. And that was what this was. That was the whole point.
“You’re not going to know,” he told her gruffly. “Don’t you get it? You give everything. And I give everything. And it’s scary sometimes. And hard. And fucking worth it, Maya. That’s the point.”
“Charlie...” She still sounded like her words were being torn out of her. “You can’t say things like that. There are some things you can’t take back.”
“I don’t want to take it back. I didn’t fly all the way to Canada and subject myself to a room full of lawyers to take anything back. Catch up, Maya. This is already happening.”
And he couldn’t wait anymore.
He twisted his fingers, there in her sweet, hot pussy. And this time when he surged into her, he made sure to press down on her clit with each stroke.
And she went off like a rocket. She shook around him, shattering the way he wanted her to, her hips bucking wildly against his hand.
He still thought that watching her come was the best view he’d ever have, in this life or the next.
When Maya opened her eyes again, there was water and there was light, and there was something else, too.
She made that noise again, wild and untamed.
As if she’d been set free.
Then she surged up on her toes, claiming his mouth in a ferocious kiss that he felt like fire poured down the length of his spine. She kissed him hard, deep. And then she launched herself against him, wrapping her legs around him.
When he held her there, his cock lined up perfectly with all that soft heat and her back against the wall, she reached down and fought him to open his fly.
“Hurry,” she commanded him as he released himself and swept the head of his cock through all that sweet heat he’d made.
“Yes, ma’am,” he drawled, like the humble and polite cowboy he’d never been and never would be.
And Charlie slammed himself home.
For a long while then, that was all there was. The perfection of the way she gripped him. The sweet slide of all that heat.
Hot. His.
And this time, when he pounded her over the edge, he went with her, because this was the promise they’d made. This was the kind of vow he’d view as blood. Sacred. And forever.
He held her there, still deep inside her, as the storm passed.
And when she opened her eyes, so deep and brown, he thought she could see all the way into his battered soul.
But what the hell. He welcomed it.
And not only because she made him feel brand-new.
“Everything,” Maya said solemnly. “We both give everything.”
“Everything,” he agreed.
“Charlie...” She said his name in that way again, like a breath. And then this time, finally, she finished it. “I love you.”
It made him hard all over again, thick and deep inside her.
He grinned down at her, because she was perfect. Because he was an all-in kind of a guy, and this was the best all in he could imagine. The rest would work itself out.
He had absolutely no fucking doubt.
“Babe.” And he let his grin widen, because she felt like forever, she was entirely his and he planned to celebrate that the best way he knew how. “I know you do.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHEN SHE DECIDED to truly disappoint her family, friends and employers, Maya threw herself into it with all the focus and intensity she’d brought to every other part of her life so far.
She led Charlie out of that washroom and straight into her world, as if she’d always been planning to put him right there into the center of it.
And once she stepped off the track she’d been on all this time—mindlessly, desperate to live up to other people’s standards—Maya found everything she wanted was right there, waiting for her. Like international law offices in Rome that would love an attorney with her experience. There were options everywhere she looked.
It was possible she had only ever been as trapped as she’d wanted to be.
She used her parents’ traditional Christmas Eve party to introduce him to her family, employing that very particular smile her mother had taught her—because it turned out, using it on her mother was a delight all its own.
“I was expecting more of a rebellion,” she complained to Charlie after the party. “A big fight right next to the Christmas tree, you know. Something substantial.”
“Parents love me,” he said smugly, pulling her over his lap in the back of the car as the driver braved the frozen Christmas Eve streets.
“Mine love that you’re a St. George,” Maya corrected him, because of course they did. Her parents were nothing if not adaptable when it allowed them to be more mercenary.
“Whatever works,” Charlie said against her mouth.
And then used those wicked hands of his to risk arrest, right there in the back seat, where she had to bite his shoulder to keep the sounds she made inside.
She never did find herself a new apartment in Toronto. She stayed in Charlie’s hotel room instead, where he taught her more things about herself, one after the next. And they both taught each other about intimacy, so shattering and full and impossibly bright that it was clear to Maya there was no way she could ever resign herself to black-and-white or gray again.
“Marry me,” he said, when he tied her up to the bed in his hotel room and made her scream. As usual.
“You mean someday,” she clarified later.
After she’d agreed, because she would have agreed to anything. And because she wanted to marry him, no matter how crazy that sounded. And after he’d made her come too many times to count, here in her deliciously ruined life that it turned out she liked. More than liked.
His mouth moved into that wicked curve that still made her heart pound. Maybe it always would.
“I don’t mean someday. I mean now.”
“Now?” she repeated, unable to pretend she wasn’t shocked by the notion.
It was Christmas morning. Outside, the snow came down relentlessly.
And his eyes were so blue she kept forgetting herself and imagining they were back in Italy.
“I love you,” he told her, with all the raspy solemnity of a sacred vow. “You can take five years to think about it if you want, but that’s not going to change. So why wait?”
Maya knew all the reasons to wait. Because it was smart. Because it was practical. Because it was realistic, most of all, to take one’s time before making such a huge decision—especially on the heels of the last marital decision she’d made.
But she’d already tried that route. She’d already lived that life.
And she loved Charlie a whole lot more, with every part of herself she hadn’t known was there, in ways she had never loved Ethan. Or anything else.
“Why wait?” she asked, feeling giddy.
And better yet, safe.
This time, without the atte
ndant panic.
Later that evening, at her parents’ house, she announced their intentions. And found she didn’t care, at all, when her entire family reacted with something less than the sheer bliss she felt.
Charlie held her hand, playing with the ring he’d put there, while her father lectured about caution, and somehow that gave Maya the patience and strength to smile her way straight through.
A real smile, this time. Because of all the gifts Charlie had given her, that was the one she thought she might love the most.
Whatever else they were, they were real. Together, they would always be real.
Her family might have given in to their dramatic side on Christmas, but they were Martins. And accordingly, a week later, they all stood there on New Year’s Day while Maya and Charlie pledged themselves to each other forever, as if this had been the plan all along.
Her frosty parents even rustled up a smile.
“You know you’ll come back here in a few months, wondering why I didn’t stop you from making this mistake,” Melinda couldn’t resist muttering after the ceremony.
Maya eyed her sister. “If I do, you don’t have to fix me.”
Melinda looked startled. “I don’t... That’s not what I meant.”
And Maya reached out and put an arm around her. “You don’t have to be my doctor, Melinda,” she said softly. “You can just be my sister.”
She told herself it was progress when all Melinda did was blink at that.
“Everyone thinks we’re crazy,” Maya said with a laugh when Charlie bundled her into the car, headed for the airport and the plane that would take them back to Italy.
Where, she’d decided on yet another whim, they would stay. Because they could.
Because her life had been plotted out from day one. And now it was hers to do with as she wished.
And what she wished, more than anything, was to make it theirs.
Bright blue, shot through with all that color, and as raw and intimate and perfect as the two of them could manage.
Charlie looked over his shoulder, then shrugged in that way that made her stomach turn over in glee as he looked back at her.
“Who cares what they think? All you have to worry about is what I think.”
“What do you think?”
“I think,” he drawled, all that Texas and fire threaded through his voice, “that we’re going to start with naked, work our way up to barefoot and pregnant, and figure out that happily-ever-after shit. In fact, I guarantee it.”
And Maya didn’t know how that would work. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know what the plan was.
So she leaned into Charlie. Her husband. And she melted into the arm he put around her, and let it all happen.
One after the next.
Just as he promised.
* * * * *
Read on for an extract from MY ROYAL SURRENDER by Riley Pine.
My Royal Surrender
by Riley Pine
CHAPTER ONE
Z
I GAPE AT my outfit in the gilded full-length mirror—if a fishnet chemise, red leather G-string and matching choker with the word slave bedazzled across the front in black crystals could be described as an outfit.
“Oh no. No. No. No. Not a chance in hell.” My vigorous head shake doesn’t budge a single strand of thick hair from my lacquered topknot. “I can’t step out of this room. Look at me! I’m practically naked.”
It’s not as if I’m a prude, either. On the rare occasion that I’m granted R & R, I’m more than happy to rock a skimpy bikini. But the French Riviera isn’t waiting outside these walls. Feather and I are in downtown London, and I can’t appear in public without proper knickers. I might be undercover...but I deserve proper underwear.
“But, love, that’s the whole idea, innit?” Feather, an avant-garde designer on the payroll of the British Intelligence Agency, smooths her asymmetric skirt while fluttering an impressive set of false eyelashes. “It’s the perfect cover. One look at your jubblies and no one in the Lion’s Den will imagine you’re a kick-ass secret agent. They’ll be too busy wanting to reach for a paddle. You look well fit.”
“Oh, joy.” My gaze connects with hers in the mirror and my whiskey-brown eyes narrow in mock ferocity. Feather’s bright blue lipstick matches her eyes as she winks.
I don’t return her saucy smile because lighthearted tone or not, Feather isn’t joking. And while ridiculous, this situation isn’t remotely funny. The Lion’s Den is London’s most notorious kink club, and in less than an hour I’ll be walking through its depraved black doors, all my goods on full display.
This is what I’ve wanted. Plotted for. Dreamed of.
But in these dreams, I was always fully dressed.
“Come on.” Feather clicks her tongue like a scolding schoolteacher. “Don’t be a brat.”
I exhale a frustrated breath, but damn it, she is right. I have to suck up my reservations for the good of the mission—and in this case that means going undercover to help British Intelligence as a BDSM aficionado. It’s a far cry from last week, when I sported a chic Chanel suit and nude Louboutin heels while running the Hong Kong office for the Order, a top-secret international agency whose mission is simple: protect the world from itself. Order agents are carefully curated and come from all nations and walks of life to prevent wars, dispose despots and foil terrorist attacks. Sometimes we help out partners such as the CIA, Mossad or, in this case, my home country of jolly old England.
No one in mainstream society knows the Order exists, and it’s better for everyone that way.
I’m a trained assassin, fluent in seven languages, an expert in poisons and knife play. I’ve worked my currently bare arse off to become a powerful, take-no-shit woman. Not someone who enjoys wearing a collar and parading about like an overprimped lapdog.
“I was instructed to pass along the final mission briefing after you were dressed.” Feather hands over a sealed manila envelope. It’s marked with a black marker slash—Z. That’s how I’m known in the Order. All agents are assigned a random one-or two-letter name, our true identities protected even from those we work with. The name I was born with, Lora Summers, only daughter of a Cornwall couple whose boat sank off the coast of Calais, doesn’t exist anymore. My records were purged right down to my birth certificate.
I’m a ghost. I’ve been one for years.
To work in the Order means to sacrifice the individual for the good of the group. Husband. Children. Simple Sunday mornings doing crosswords and eating leisurely breakfasts. Lives civilians take for granted, little acts of normalcy, have been denied me for the better part of two decades. But as I enter my early forties I can’t help reconsidering my place in the world.
Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, but the thought niggles like an itch that I can’t scratch.
What if I want a new life?
“I’ll fetch you a glass of cab sav,” Feather mutters, the pucker between her plucked brows revealing a twinge of annoyance at my recalcitrance. “I know it’s your favorite, and you need to loosen up before the Dom arrives.”
My heart skips its next beat as the room’s temperature seems to rise ten degrees.
The Dom. The Dominant. The man who is supposed to play the role of my master.
I try to snort and roll my eyes. As if.
Feather snickers and I know I’ve played the part she expects. Agent Z is a wordly badass.
Little does she know.
As Feather clicks out the hotel room door in her high-heeled boots, I rip open the envelope with shaking hands. The mission brief is printed in a pale green ink, sourced from the Nightshadow plant found only on the southern coast of an islet off Sumatra. The Nightshadow ink will fade in a few more minutes...leaving the paper utterly blank and these words undectable.
Mission: Lion’s Den
It’s not until I finish reading the mission that I taste the metallic flavor of blood. I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek so hard that I broke the flesh.
The sight of Dante Price’s name will do that to a person.
Me more than most...
Dante Price is the baddest of bad guys. He makes a business out of chaos, profiting from human misery. Now he is mine for the taking. Not that this is a surprise.
I’ve waited to get him for years. It’s finally time, and I’m ready. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy. In fact, this will be the hardest mission I’ve ever done in more ways than one.
“Fuck me,” I mutter, dropping the note to the floor.
“Sorry, love, it appears that will be my job,” a deep voice growls from my left, and just like that the balcony door slides open, and in steps a blast from my past. The moment I’ve been waiting for with equal parts anticipation and dread.
He’s over six feet tall and built like a swimmer, all broad shoulders and a trim waist; his flat abs are shown off to perfection by the tight tee over a pair of faded, low-slung black jeans. His close-cropped dark hair is flecked with strands of silver that match the small, sharp spikes gleaming along the arms of his leather jacket.
“Max?” My voice is nothing but a squeak. Not exactly the sultry, bored intonation I’d been rehearsing for weeks in anticipation of this encounter.
“Agent X,” he corrects coolly, his icy expression traveling my exposed body. “Nice to finally meet you in person...Agent Z.”
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