Sinful Attraction

by Ann Christopher

  Stretching across her, he opened up the nightstand drawer, knowing that Judah would have any guest in his home well covered. Sure enough, the drawer was deep and well stocked, with a vast selection of condoms, new bottles of lubricants, massage oils and gels of every flavor and description, and, yes, sealed boxes of vibrators in the lady’s choice of size, shape and speed.

  He suspected that if he kept looking, he’d find enough erotic toys to open a shop in the nearest red-light district.

  “Don’t worry, beauty. That was just the warm-up.” Some quick rummaging turned up a likely-looking foil packet, and he ripped it open with his teeth. “I’ll be inside you the next time. And the time after that.”

  She grinned, reaching for him as he sheathed himself. He smacked her hands away, determined not to shoot off like a Chinese New Year firework. He was so hard and ready—he could already feel his balls tightening down—that he knew he wouldn’t last long, and the last thing he needed was her stroking him with her soft hands.

  “Unfortunately, darling,” she purred with a smile, “I’m quite finished. So I’ll need a little rest-up before we take care of you. Perhaps in the morning...?”

  Not funny.

  With a low rumble, he grabbed her hips and yanked her farther down the bed, so that she was flat on her back and her head was off the pillow. Staring up into his unsmiling face, she stopped laughing. Breathless again, she began to pant.

  “Oh, God, Marcus—”

  “Mmm?” he said, settling between her thighs and lifting one of her long, long legs, and then the other, and resting them on his shoulders. She adjusted quickly and eagerly, thrilling him with her flexibility.

  “Hurry,” she said.

  “You know,” he told her, taking himself in hand with grim determination and looking up into her hot, expectant face, “I really like it when you call me darling. Did I mention that?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Yes...what?”

  “Yes.” She angled her hips in a silent demand. “Darling.”

  “Good girl,” he murmured. With a sharp thrust of his hips, he drove all the way into her and began to move.

  Chapter 13

  Claudia stirred and murmured something. Something was trying to pull her out of the most deliciously languid sleep she’d had in a long time, and she didn’t want to budge. She wanted to stay where she was forever.

  Hang on. Where exactly was she?

  For one fleeting second, her body tensed with the unfamiliarity of the situation. A strange bed with flannel sheets. Her body, sated, sore and nude. A male body, also nude, twined around hers as though they’d put a real effort into braiding their limbs together. Her head on his solid chest...his slow, steady heartbeat, which was the most comforting sound she could think of...the raw heat of her tender sex pressed up against his solid thigh...her leg crossed over his.

  What the—?

  Murmuring again—she had no idea what she thought she was saying—she tried to move and discovered that the man’s arms were wrapped around her torso and his hands were buried deep in her hair. In other words, she wasn’t going anywhere. Not if he had anything to say about it.

  “Shh.” Marcus’s low voice in the dark was drowsy but soothing. Melodic. “It’s okay, beauty.”

  Beauty. She relaxed again, smoothing her hand over his chest. She really could get used to the endearment.

  From somewhere in the utter darkness, her phone bleated again, and she realized what had woken her in the first place.

  Someone was calling her.

  No, not someone. Her brother, to whom she’d assigned the special ringtone that sounded like a pinging submarine.

  “I have to get that,” she said, trying to sit up.

  Marcus tightened his grip around her. “It’s not important,” he said, sounding more asleep than awake.

  Not important. If only that were true. Too bad he didn’t know that every moment in her brother’s life, and certainly every time he reached out to her, was a crisis of one level of severity or another.

  “Marcus,” she said, recovering some of her normal crispness, which was hard after having three bouts of sex and three—no, four—orgasms in the past several hours. “Let me go, darling. I need to answer my phone.”

  He sighed harshly, let her go and rolled over to his side of the bed. Then he clicked the lamp on.

  Wincing against the light, she dove for her white terry-cloth robe at the end of the disheveled bed, where she’d tossed it before joining Marcus in the shower. She found her phone in the pocket, all the while excruciatingly aware of Marcus’s dark and disgruntled gaze watching her.

  He took his time about getting adjusted, fluffing the pillows and propping himself up against them as he studied her face. She flushed, ducking her head. He was clearly irritated at being awoken at—she checked the phone’s display—2:38 in the morning, and he did not look as if he was in any mood to give her some privacy while she talked to her brother.

  Fumbling with the phone in one hand and holding the sheet up to cover her breasts with the other, she hit the button.

  “Yes, hello? You’d better have a good reason for calling me in the middle of the night, Charles.”

  “There’s a lovely greeting for your beloved younger brother.” Charles yawned hugely, his jaws cracking. “Luckily, I’m thick-skinned, so I won’t get my feelings hurt and think that you’re not happy to hear from me.”

  Claudia realized she was holding the phone in a death grip and tried to loosen her fingers. It didn’t work; the sudden tension thrumming through her merely transferred to her nerves, which tightened all up and down her body. As always, she found herself straining to hear what Charles wasn’t saying rather than listening to what he was.

  Where was he? In a bar? She didn’t hear any telltale background noises, but that didn’t necessarily tell the whole story with Charles. Who was he with? What had he been doing that he shouldn’t have?

  Opening her mouth, she bit back the bubbling accusations and interrogations and tried not to be so suspicious without reason.

  “I’d be happier to hear from you if the sun was shining,” she informed him. “Why are you calling at this ungodly hour?”

  “I wanted to let you know I’d arrived safe and sound in New York so you wouldn’t worry about me.”

  “Well, that’s lovely, but you would’ve arrived hours ago. Why didn’t you text me then? What’ve you been doing?”

  Another yawn. “I’ve been getting settled at my hotel, obviously. And then I needed to unwind a bit. Nothing illegal or nefarious, I assure you.”

  “You assure me.” She rolled her eyes at Marcus, who was listening attentively, his expression unreadable. “I feel ever so much better, then.”

  Charles laughed, and then she heard the distant tinkle of what sounded like ice cubes in a glass. And was he swallowing something? Or was that her imagination? Yes. She was probably imagining it. He wasn’t slurring his words or anything.

  “So...where have you been?” she asked as casually as she could.

  “I went to check out a couple of my mates.”

  That was news to her. “I didn’t know you had mates in New York.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, sis. How’s Montana?”

  “Wyoming.”

  “Same thing. Have you seen any bears?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’re not going to show up with a rifle and one of those horrific moose-head plaques for the wall, are you?”

  “Absolutely not. How’s your hotel? Where’re you staying?”

  “At the Gansevoort. But I don’t know how long I’ll be here. It’s pretty expensive.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. “Well, what did you expect? Why not stay in one of the penthouses in the
Four Seasons and be done with it?”

  She didn’t have to see him to know he was shrugging the way he always did when the topic of money came up—as though he either couldn’t be bothered with such trifling details or thought of it as Monopoly money, with no real-world value.

  “It’s only for a night or two,” he told her. “I just wanted to treat myself. I need a little break.”

  “A break from what? Dropping out of school?”

  “Like I said before, I need to figure out where I’m going.”

  “Nowhere, as far as I can see,” she muttered before she could stop herself.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he barked.

  That was when she heard it—the hissing at the end of hell’s that officially made it, as far as she was concerned, a slurred word.

  “Oh, no.” Closing her eyes, she rubbed her forehead. “I’m a complete idiot, obviously. You’ve been out all night drinking with God knows who, you just stumbled into your room and that’s why you’re calling me.”

  “Jesus!” His voice rose to a ringing shout that was so loud she had to hold the phone away from her ear. “Why can’t you trust me for once in your perfect life? Why are you always such a bitch?”

  Charles had called her plenty of names before, so she should’ve been prepared for it, but she wasn’t.

  Stung and stunned, she floundered.

  Marcus didn’t.

  With a low growl, he sprang out of bed, snatched his robe off the nearest chair and jerked it on. Then he paced to the window and pulled the curtain back, staring at the glass as though he intended to put his fist through it.

  She was suddenly glad—very glad—that he and Charles weren’t in the same room.

  “This conversation is over,” she told her brother, her low voice shaking with anger and humiliation. “Goodbye.”

  “Claudia!” Charles yelled. “I’m sorry, but you always make me—”

  Click.

  Fuming, she tossed the phone on the bed. When it immediately rang again, she picked it up, turned it off and tossed it again.

  Marcus wheeled around and came back from the window, his expression shuttered. Whatever aggressive emotions she’d seen there a minute ago were locked away behind his concern for her.

  “You okay?” he asked gently.

  This open interest in her well-being from a man she was sleeping with was as unprecedented as a visit from a centaur, and it threw her for a complete loop.

  Naturally, she tried to spin the situation and make it seem less pathetic than she and Marcus both knew it was.

  “Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be? An insult can’t hurt me unless I let it, right?”

  His narrow-eyed stare plainly said he didn’t believe her for a minute. “Yeah? Well, you’re a better person than I am, because I’m not okay. It’s hard for me to hear another man calling my woman a bitch, even if it is her brother, without wanting to smash something.”

  She gaped at him, the precious words...my woman...my woman...echoing through her overwhelmed brain while she tried to decide how she felt about the designation.

  On the one hand, this was the twenty-first century, and she was pretty certain that owning people was illegal in most jurisdictions. So she should probably kick up a fuss.

  On the other hand, the men she’d dated had gone to great pains to never lay any claim on her that might later come back to bite them in the ass. One of them had, in fact, introduced her to his best mate via an offhand “This is Claudia,” as though she might be the cleaning lady, a census taker or any other random woman he’d stumbled across.

  Worst of all was the hard contraction in her heart—an achy physical demonstration of how much she needed Marcus to mean those words.

  “Am I yours, then?” she wondered.

  The question did not go over well, judging by his thinning lips. Raising a single brow, he divided his unsmiling gaze between her eyes, her body and the bed.

  Her cheeks went up in flames.

  “I don’t have any doubt about it,” he softly said, “but maybe you need another demonstration.”

  She didn’t—couldn’t—answer. She’d never been anybody’s before, and heaven knew no one had ever been hers. Not really. Not even her father. Especially not her father.

  “Claudia?” His expression softened and warmed, as though he now fully understood how much this conversation was freaking her out. “I’m yours, too. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Umm,” she said, distracted by the soaring joy in her chest.

  “Come here.”

  She went and he met her halfway. And then they were in each other’s arms, rocking together, and he was murmuring in her ear in that deliciously comforting way he had.

  “So...” he said, breathing deep, his nose pressed to her hair.

  “So.”

  “This is all new to me. I don’t want to get it wrong and blow it before we even get this thing off the ground.”

  “Very wise of you.” She turned her face into his neck and rested it there because the spot seemed to have been created for her dimensions. “Any wrongness will be severely punished.”

  “But I can’t stand by and quietly watch—” he swallowed hard “—your brother be abusive to you. It’s against my nature. You need to know that up front.”

  “Really, it’s not that big a deal,” she began, the deflections and excuses coming easily after long years of practice. “He’s a hothead at times, but he’ll calm down—”

  “I can be a hothead, too, and when it comes to you, I’m not going to calm down easily, I can tell you that right now. And, by the way, I’ve never called a woman a bitch, and I never would.”

  Guilt started to work on her in nibbling little bites. The vast difference between Charles’s loutish behavior and Marcus’s drove the point home in a more striking way than usual: she and Mum had failed spectacularly when it came to raising the only male in their household, and since Mum was now dead, that left only Claudia to take the blame for Charles’s glaring failures.

  Because, really, the bottom line was that Charles’s failures were her failures.

  And now, three seconds into their relationship, Marcus would see what a mess she really was.

  Typically, she lapsed into defensive mode. “Okay, you’ve made your position very clear. My brother’s a terrible person as far as you’re concerned—”

  “I didn’t say that. But he has a drinking problem, right?”

  Pulling free, she turned and paced away, running her hands over her head and scratching her scalp in frustration. “What? No, of course not. Well, I mean, he drinks, naturally, but what young man doesn’t throw a few back every now and again? That hardly means there’s a problem, does it?”

  Marcus stared at her, his face still but his eyes troubled. His iron restraint was almost palpable, as though the tension between what he allowed himself to say and what he really wanted to say was making the air vibrate.

  “I know I’m new on the scene, but is there any possibility,” he asked gently, “that you’re too close to the situation?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped, wrapping her arms around her middle.

  “Just that...maybe you’re in a little bit of...denial about...”

  That did it. She’d wondered the same thing herself, millions of times, and wondered if she was the problem rather than Charles, or if she was as much of a problem as Charles was. But she didn’t want to hear someone else say it.

  That being the case, she lashed out. “Forgive me, darling, but is this really any of your business? Who knows if you’ll ever even meet Charles—”

  Marcus winced. Hurt shadowed his eyes, but she didn’t let that stop her.

  “—so don’t you agree it would be best if I han
dled my own brother, whom I’ve known all his life?”

  They stared at each other. One of the hardest things she ever did was keeping her gaze level and defiant while meeting his searching, vulnerable one.

  Finally, a lightbulb seemed to go off over his head. He smiled crookedly, with what looked like amused comprehension, and that made the situation even worse.

  “You’re all bravado. Stubborn pride and bravado.” He nodded, satisfied with his diagnosis. “I see through you, Claudia.”

  Yes. She could see that he did.

  That was what terrified her about him.

  Turning away because she could no longer stand the glare of his intense attention, she dropped the sheet and reached for her robe, covering her body even if she couldn’t cover her thoughts.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Marcus,” she said coolly. “But I think it’s best if I go back to my room for the rest of the night. I don’t know what time Judah’s servants wake, and we don’t want them finding us in the same room, do we?”

  A beat passed.

  And then, to her secret, shameful dismay, he crossed the room without a word and opened the door for her, that knowing smile still firmly in place.

  She wasn’t foolish enough to think she’d won the war, or even this opening battle.

  With a heroic effort, she kept her chin from trembling as she swept out, knowing that this painful end to the most amazing night she’d ever had was, like everything else in her sorry life, entirely her fault.

  Chapter 14

  “This is you, Ms. Montgomery,” said the limo driver’s voice over the speaker.

  Claudia, startled out of her brooding thoughts, focused on the scene outside her window for the first time since the drive in from LaGuardia, and discovered that they were, in fact, pulling up in front of her apartment building in Chelsea.

  “So it is,” she said absently.

  The driver rolled the vehicle to a smooth stop in front of the brownstone. To no one’s surprise, Judah’s limo, which he’d dispatched to pick her up at LaGuardia, turned out to be a stretch Hummer. At half a block long, with running lights, spinning rims, a full bar, booming music system and seating for about a hundred of Judah’s closest friends, the thing clearly doubled as a party bus when the band was back in town. At the moment, though, she and Marcus were its only occupants because Cooper had flown off to San Francisco for another business meeting.