He could have her once a day and twice on Friday, but the urge would. Never. Cease.
Fuck it.
For a moment, he’d considered dragging this out, but he was already imagining the sounds she would make when he got his mouth on her, and that thought proved to be his undoing.
Kneeling on one of the steps, water sloshing around his waist, he buried his face in her pussy, a ragged groan escaping him when he got his first taste of her—like ambrosia on his tongue.
Karina had been so quick deny him—to one-up him—but when he had his tongue flat against her lips, all that dry humor fled as she arched farther, spreading herself wider, silently begging him to give her more. What started as a breathy sigh grew in volume, her answering moan making him immediately reach for his cock and squeeze, fighting off the urge to spontaneously combust.
He had learned very quickly just how to read her body and the signs that told him she was close. The way her thighs trembled, soft pleas falling from her mouth, and how she all but arched and tilted in a bid for him to get her there faster.
But if she wanted it, he was going to make her fucking feel it. His hand cracked down across her arse, knowing very well the red handprint it would leave and thrilling in the yelp that followed.
But it only made him lick and kiss and nibble at her faster and harder and more thorough.
Until she was quivering and her pleas came a lot louder.
“Uilleam, please—”
He spanked her again, sucking her clit into his mouth, one arm coming down over her back to hold her in place.
“Fuck.” The curse came short and low.
A desperate word from a desperate woman lost in the throes, giving him exactly what he wanted.
He loved her like this—desperate with filthy words that always charged the air around them. And now that she’d given him what he wanted … he snaked his hand up her thigh, using her spread position to push two fingers into her sopping wet pussy and curl them up.
That was all it took to send her head flying back, his name out of her mouth, and her screams echoing in his ears.
That was all it took before he was pulling away from her, shoving his boxer briefs down the rest of the way until his cock sprang free and he stroked it mercilessly before he lined himself up with her center.
One thrust was all it took before he was seated inside her—before the rhythmic pulses of her waning orgasm threatened to take him under. It felt too good to be civil, to ease his way into this.
He fucked her like a man possessed.
His grip on her thighs would surely leave bruises. The slap of her arse against him spurring him higher.
Time and everything else slipped away from him as he squeezed his eyes shut and lost himself with her—inside her—and when he came, her name a desperate plea now, Uilleam felt like the luckiest man in the world.
3
New Beginnings
In the blink of an eye, their secluded time away from the world was over.
Even as she packed her suitcase, glancing around the bedroom to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything, Karina wished she could rewind the past four days and start them all over again.
Experience the wonder she had felt at seeing this little slice of heaven tucked away in the mountains for a second time.
At least she had the memories. The beautiful, blissful memories.
“Ready?” Uilleam asked as he popped his head in the doorway, sounding as distracted as he looked as he knotted his tie.
Even this was another indication that their time here was over.
He was back in his signature three-piece suit. She’d grown to love the sight of him in cotton sleep pants and a faded T-shirt. Just the visual had made her smile like a complete idiot.
Now she wished she would have appreciated the sight a little more because the man standing in front of her was the one who liked to play chess with the lives of the people around him. Certainly not the man who had cornered her in a hot tub and made sure she would never forget the experience.
“It feels like we just got here,” she said just to fill the silence, wishing she didn’t feel as sad as she did at the thought of leaving.
Of course they couldn’t stay here forever, she knew that. They both had work—even if it was on two completely different ends of the spectrum—to get back to. Her vacation time was over, and if she didn’t report in soon, Camilla, her editor, would read her the riot act, and that was only if she didn’t fire her first.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t wish they could stay for just a little while longer.
Uilleam, who always had a knack for reading her moods, walked over with the gentlest smile on his face, coaxing one from her.
“The second I can, I’ll take you away again. Anywhere you want to go.”
“Is that a promise?” she asked, wondering how she had ever lived without him in her life.
“Of course.”
At least she had that, she thought as she finished zipping up her suitcase and set it on the floor next to her feet.
The promise of next time made it all a little easier.
“I think we should play again,” Karina said much later, once they had boarded the jet and taken off down the runway.
Upon reaching cruising altitude, the light for the seat belt had flickered off after several minutes.
They had four hours, at the very least, until they were touching down in New York, and while she could have spent that time catching up on current events back home to find interesting stories worth looking in to, she would much rather spend her time delving into Uilleam’s mind.
Whoever he had been texting was quickly forgotten as he locked the screen and pocketed the device, giving her his rapt and undivided attention.
“What do I win?”
She rolled her eyes even as she stood and walked over to the small cabinet where the chessboard was kept “Must you always play to win?”
“What’s a game without proper stakes?”
Too much like fun, she thought, but Uilleam liked his challenges, and it was one of the many things she liked about him.
“I think the same rules apply as before,” she said as she set up the board on the table, acutely aware of him the moment he stood and walked around her to the other side.
She could never forget the first time they had played, when it had been merely a means to get her to go out with him. She hadn’t known the odds were stacked against her then, that he’d already had a plan in place to ensure he got what he wanted in the end.
This time, she was playing for her own gain, and she didn’t care how the game ended.
“You can ask all the questions of me you’d like,” he said, even as he began rearranging the pieces on the board into the correction positions. “I’d tell you anything.”
“Even the sordid things?” she asked with a cant of her head to the side. “Would you tell me all the dark and depraved things you’ve done over years willingly?”
That managed to wipe some of his good humor away, his expression shuttering. “Why on earth would you want to know any of that?”
Because …
Because they were going back to New York not as just lovers but as something more. Something that transcended a title.
And back there, she was rather certain Katherine would be waiting, and the last thing she wanted was to hear details about the man she loved from anyone other than him.
It just didn’t seem fair.
“It’s a part of you, isn’t it? All those little details, even the ones you preferred I didn’t know? I want to know you, Uilleam, even the things you aren’t proud of.”
He didn’t answer right away, too busy making sure that every chess piece was on the board correctly, all in the very center on the checkered board where they were meant to go.
Little details like this, she knew, he used as a stalling tactic, but she wasn’t so easily dissuaded.
His gaze flickered up to hers. “And what if yo
u don’t like what you hear?””
She … honestly didn’t know how she would react to whatever he said. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
He made a soft humming noise in the back of his throat. “That leaves far too much to chance. Forgive me, but I’ve always played to win, and if there is a chance that I might push you away, I don’t consider that a win.”
Did the thought of losing her really bother him that much?
Was the thought really supposed to make her smile the way it had?
“What’s a game without proper stakes?” She repeated his question from earlier back to him.
He mulled that over, rubbing his hand over the light scruff on his jaw. She had always thought she liked him clean-shaven, but his rugged attractiveness made her blood race.
It could also very well just be the man himself.
“Fine,” he said after a moment. “I’ll play your game, but only if you give me something in return.”
“Only if you win?” she specified with a tilt of her head.
“Of course. Only if I win.”
“Then I agree.”
She realized too late what had just happened between them. “Wait, what do you get if you win?”
“Doesn’t matter, does it, poppet? You’ve already agreed.”
He could very well have the most outlandish of requests, and she had no choice but to comply because of semantics. It grew easier by the day to understand how so many lost themselves when they went against him.
Uilleam was exceptionally good at what he did.
“Shall we begin?” she asked, gesturing to the board.
According to the rules of the game, the black pieces went first.
He met her gaze a moment before he picked up a pawn and moved it across the board.
They continued like this, turn after turn, until finally, she captured a pawn he would have used to try to take her bishop.
She smiled at him fondly before asking the question that had been on her mind for a couple of days now. “What happened between you and your brother, Kit? No,” she said almost immediately when his expression changed. “Don’t close up on me now.”
He was uncomfortable. That much was written all over his face. She just didn’t understand why.
If he could avoid answering, she knew he would, but even as the topic clearly made him uncomfortable, he was also a man of his word. “My father wasn’t a very nice man by any stretch of the imagination. Cruel,” he said, dropping his gaze to the board, “would be a more apt description. When he wasn’t torturing the hell out of us as a means to prepare us for the world, as he liked to say, he tormented Kit obsessively.”
For a moment, he paused just as he had the other night when she had brought up his brother, but she only needed to reach the short distance between them and lay her hand over his in a small gesture of comfort to bring him out of his head.
“Anyway … when Kit was seventeen, our uncle came around and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. That very night, he left.”
Maybe she should have started with something else, to ease their way into it all, because seeing the expression on his face now made her regret even bringing it up. But it was there, his words lingering between them, and she couldn’t very well go back and unhear them. “How old were you?”
“Ten,” he answered. “It all happened just before my eleventh birthday.”
The game was momentarily forgotten as she squeezed his fingers. “Is that why you don’t talk to him now?”
His mouth twitched even as he turned his hand over, their palms flush now. “Not remotely. I’m just no longer a child with adoration for his older brother.” As quickly as his mood seemed to darken, he picked up another piece and moved it forward. “Besides, the Kit you’ll inevitably meet is not nearly as awe-inspiring as who he used to be. Trust me when I say you’ll find him extremely annoying and even a touch pretentious.”
She tried to imagine another version of Uilleam, this one older with similar features, but couldn’t quite imagine someone else like him. She didn’t think there was anyone else like him.
Focusing back on the game, as it was her turn, she contemplated her next move, only to realize he had backed her into a corner. No matter which piece she gravitated toward, anywhere she went would result in him taking one of them to set along the side of his board.
“Turnabout is fair play, poppet. Let’s not keep us in suspense.”
His tone was too playful for her to think he hadn’t done this intentionally. “Do you ever turn it off?” she asked with a light laugh, accepting the inevitable.
She had been so distracted by the question she wanted to ask and the way he had responded to recognize he was playing the long game.
While she had been thinking one step ahead, he was already four in front.
“Ah, I think that would cost you another win,” he said before he took her rook and placed it in line with the rest of the pieces he had taken from her. “For now, I think it’s my turn.”
“Fine,” she said with a slight gesture of her hand. “Get on with your question.”
“I have a better proposition.”
She should have been afraid because anything could very well come out of his mouth. Yet she only felt a flutter of anticipation. “Okay?”
“I’m going to tell you certain facts about yourself, and for each one I get right,” he said with a tilt of his head at her chest, “you’ll unbutton one of those.”
“How is it that you manage to find a way to get me undressed?”
“I like to think I’m lucky that way.”
“Fine,” she said with a nod. “I’ll play your game, but they can only be facts that I haven’t told you before.”
“Agreed.”
Once the deal was struck, he sat back in his seat, steepling his fingers in front of him with that all too familiar calculated gleam in his eyes. She would have almost imagined he could read her thoughts with the way he seemed to stare through her. Anxious didn’t begin to cover the way she felt as she waited for whatever he would say next.
His gaze trailed over her like a physical caress, from the top of her head, to her lips, then down farther until the table that separated them blocked his view. “You’re not originally from the States.”
If she hadn’t had careful control of her expression just then, Karina was sure it might have mirrored the way she felt at that moment as her heart bottomed out in her chest.
But before she could comment, he continued with his observation. “You sound American to the untrained ear, but your word choice at times, the way you carry yourself, and even the way you take your tea—it’s the little things really. Am I right?”
He might have tacked on the question at the end, but she could see from the way his brows rose and the smile playing at his lips that he didn’t need her confirmation to know he was right. And all too quickly, she was reminded of the dangerous game they were playing.
She had to be careful because while she couldn’t exactly tell him the truth, she refused to lie to him either. Her only recourse was to walk that gray line between the two.
“My mother was British,” she said, mindful of the past tense she’d used. Deliberate, considering Katherine wasn’t any longer—there was that Count she’d married. She’d ultimately given up her citizenship, but Karina also knew that Uilleam wouldn’t begin to guess as much.
He would think her mother was dead and gone, and she wasn’t in any hurry to correct that fact.
Before he could think to tack on any other qualifying remarks about that—or worse, ask her more about it—she reached for the topmost button and gave it a little twist of her fingers to pop it free.
All too quickly, her newly exposed strip of flesh stole his attention.
“Go on then, tell me something else.”
“You’re close with your sister—”
“Does that really count?” she asked. He was probably able to guess as much considering the last t
ime she had been on the phone with her.
“But,” he went on a moment later, “you weren’t close with your mother or whatever parental figure you had growing up.”
“How on earth did you reach that conclusion?” she asked, a little baffled herself. She knew he could deduce things about people—that was what made him good at his job—but she couldn’t discern how he could know any of that since they had never talked about her mother.
And as far as he knew, she wasn’t even living.
“It’s clear you love your sister. Your body language betrayed that when you were talking to her the other night, but when you referenced your mum just then, you got that little notch between your brows that you get when you’re uncomfortable.”
He was still watching her, analyzing, and a part of her didn’t like that he could read her so well.
And worse, if she had to guess, he wasn’t even really trying. This was child’s play for him.
She could only imagine what all he could learn about her if he actually tried.
“Two buttons then,” she said, already snapping them both open. “I’ll give you two for that.”
Not only had he managed to state two facts but she was also starting to want to get this over with as quickly as possible.
“You know,” she said conversationally, hoping to steer this conversation in another direction. “I thought you would give me cute, clever things. Like my favorite color and—”
“Blue.”
He didn’t even have to think about it, and he wasn’t wrong. “Or my favorite book?”
“Varies depending on what you’re in the mood for, but paranormal romance seems to be a favorite of yours … when you’re not reading mid-century literature, of course.”
She smiled because maybe, just maybe, she had him beat. “That wasn’t actually an answer, though, was it?” He hadn’t, even in that bit he’d said, actually named the right genre, so she could very well have something he couldn’t get right.
“The Da Vinci Code.”
Karina slapped her hand down on the table, glaring at him even as he laughed. “How could you possibly know that?”
White Rabbit Page 5
