by CR Robertson
Deftly, I selected the remainder of what I needed. I would begin to cast the metal mounts as soon as I got home to Tuscany where all my equipment was located.
“Done?” Ash stood beside me.
I stared up and nodded without speaking because I was still too confused by my emotions and reactions.
“Seth, can you sort out all the paperwork for these and have them couriered to my business address?” Ash said, holding his hand out to me.
I put my hand into his and I noticed the heat that infused into me. His hand enveloped mine to pull me up beside him and his masculine spice swept over me. All I wanted was to wrap myself around him and hold on. Ash was the first person who’d helped me without asking for anything in return. His presence today had been more valuable than all of these stones on the table behind me.
“Thank you so much for your help,” I said as Ash tugged me out of the room.
Seth waved and the grin he gave me made the hairs at the back of my neck stand to attention. “The pleasure is all mine, considering you’ve just made me a lot of money.”
I dreaded to think about the amount of money I’d just spent. It was certainly more than Catarina’s shoe collection, and that thing was extensive.
“How much have I just spent?” I whispered when we got back to the car.
Ash shot me an amused look. “This is the business world, Lucrezia. No one deals in money anymore. Seth and I have an understanding that supersedes that. I have something that he’s wanted for a while and now he finally gets his hands on it.”
“Ash!” Horror and terror combined in my chest that he had lost something valuable because of me. “No, you can’t give something up because of me.”
“No worries, this is how our world works. Lucas should have taught you that from an early age.”
That was both the blessing and the curse of Papa. He protected and shielded us, but at the same time, that made us weak and vulnerable to the vultures at our door.
Jordan’s car was outside, and my heart nearly stopped.
“Looks like Jay is keeping your papa occupied,” Ash said. “If he asks, I took you to collect some girlie stuff Mum ordered for a party she’s throwing. Lucas knows that I hate having to deal with caterers, so he’ll believe it.”
“Look at how I’m dressed,” I replied, panic rising inside my chest.
“What? You positively radiate a business fuck-me vibe. Maybe that’s how you deal with caterers?”
A fuck-me vibe?
I wasn’t even sure what that meant.
Was it a good thing?
I slipped out of the car and all my carefully constructed walls began to build around me, a brick at a time. The fake smile that I’d cultivated curved my lips, and all my emotions were locked down until nothing remained but the outer shell that the world knew. Ash was the first person to look beyond that mask and search for who was beneath it.
Papa sat in the living area with Jordan, the two of them sipping cups of coffee.
“There she is,” Jordan said, his gaze meeting Ash’s. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” Ash gave him an easy smile. “I had to borrow Lucrezia today, Mum sent me on an errand for her latest soiree.”
“You never did like domesticity,” Lucas said. “It’s as well Lucrezia was here to help you. Coffee?” He nodded to the tray with a coffee pot sitting on it.
“I’ll get some mugs,” I said, disappearing out the doorway to try and catch my breath. Everything was moving too fast around me, and I was left feeling lost and confused.
My fingers were clinging to the edge of the kitchen counter as I tried to steady my breathing, when a hand landed on my waist that nearly made me jump out of my skin.
“Looks like they nearly drank all the coffee.” Ash set the pot onto the counter beside me.
He was too close, sending my emotions into a spiral. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
His fingers tightened on my waist. “I need your phone number to let you know when the shipment is ready.”
My eyes closed and I prayed for divine intervention because right now all my walls were crashing down around me. Ash should have a public health warning stamped on his sexy ass because he was endangering my sanity.
I slowly turned until my eyes were level with his chest and I held my hand out, one eyebrow arched. “Phone.”
His grin made my stomach knot, but he opened his phone and placed it in my hand, my name already typed in and awaiting my number. How could anyone be this confident? I held his phone out, my gaze meeting his.
“I promise not to drunk sext you,” he muttered.
The demon on my shoulder took control of the situation, wrestling it free from the angel urging caution. “My phone is always on.” I shrugged and went to lift the kettle, my heart pounding.
Ash spun me around, my back hitting the wall, his hand gently cupping my throat. Holy fuck, my panties were going to be destroyed. He stood between my legs and his eyes bored into mine.
“You need to stop fucking tempting me, Angel. Men like me tend to stake a claim and fucking ruin that person.” My mouth dropped open and his hand on my throat tightened. “If you keep leaving that mouth open, I’ll find you something to put in it.”
I tried to swallow but nothing seemed to respond to my command. Ash’s head descended until our breaths mingled and the side of his nose touched mine.
“You are a bad man’s fantasy and I really don’t have any good thoughts right now,” he husked.
My mouth opened and closed, my tongue flicking across my lips. “I’ve never been anyone’s fantasy before,” I whispered.
Ash tilted my head back until I stared into the deep blue of his eyes. “You’re definitely making an appearance in mine.”
Drowning. I was drowning in sensations, moisture gathering between my legs. There was something about Ash, a magnetism I couldn’t refuse. I remember him smiling in the past, but this smouldering seriousness suited him better than any other expression. He was a predator and I was his prey, and there was nowhere for me to hide.
A noise in the hall startled me. Ash lifted the kettle and filled it with water as if nothing had happened. My heart beat erratically, and I tried to swallow.
“Hey.” Jordan sauntered in. “How did the meeting go?”
“Good.” My practiced smile was back in place even though I was a wreck inside. “Everything is sorted.”
“Perfect. My guy has most of your site designed. He just needs some pictures. Are they still on your tablet?”
I nodded and left the kitchen to fetch my handbag with all my stuff in it. My legs were shaky and my fingers touched the wall to steady myself. How was he having such an impact on me, and yet, he seemed barely affected and completely in control?
Jordan was laughing when I stepped back into the kitchen. “I would have loved to have seen Nigel’s face when you walked in with Lucy. The guy is fucking terrified of you at the best of times.”
Ash shrugged and put his hands into his pockets. “Nigel always did have a nervous disposition.”
The kettle whistled in the background and I handed Jordan my open tablet on the way past.
“I’ll email these across to myself and Ivan can use what he needs,” Jordan said, his concentration on the device in his hand. I was grateful that no one was looking at me right now because my walls were shaky and could fall at any moment.
On autopilot, I made the coffee, carrying it into the living area. The conversation around me didn’t register because everything inside me was shaking as if my centre of gravity had shifted.
When a respectable time had passed, I excused myself so I could go and hide in my room and analyse what had happen. As I turned to wave at the men, Ash’s eyes bored into mine and if felt like he could see inside my head. I could still feel the heat from his stare when I collapsed onto my bed, my skirt and jacket thrown over a chair. When my fingers dipped into my panties, I was soaking wet. Catarina openly talked in front of Sofia and me about giving
herself an orgasm.
I’d never tried before, but as my fingers circled that mass of nerves, I visualised Ash and bit my lip to stop myself screaming his name when I came.
***
Chapter Eight
Ash
The darkness of the Council chamber suited my mood. Two weeks ago, I gave in to temptation and revealed my feelings to Lucrezia. She didn’t need this sort of shit, and there was no way I was good enough for a goddess like her. My life was littered with problems from my family and I vowed a long time ago that no one would be dragged into my miserable existence.
Her number taunted me from my phone and her stones burned a hole in my pocket. I should just put them in the hands of one of my couriers and get it over and done with. The conversation was nothing more than white noise until Xavier kicked me under the table.
I gave him my full attention because I had no fucking clue what was going on. “Matteus was just asking about our stocks and shares.”
No one ever asked about the financial side as long as their profits arrived in their accounts. Dad was being a dick about something. “What do you need to know?”
His smile reminded me of a shark ready to bite. “I wanted to know about our vested interest in the diamond mines.” In other words he’d heard I was looking at diamonds with Lucrezia. He was on a fishing mission and doing it in a meeting to try and trip me up.
“Those financials aren’t available for another few months. You need something in particular?” Like a place beside Grandpa in the family crypt?
“No, there just seems to be a lot of interest in diamonds lately,” he replied.
“I’ll take your word for that.” My expression was neutral because I would never let him know he rattled me. “Want me to talk to some contacts if you think there’s a problem in the market?”
His jaw tightened because his ruse wasn’t working.
“Unless you’re planning on buying your lovely wife another ring, maybe we should move on?” Jordan suggested. “Although, I have heard that that snotty fucker Nigel Billingham has been dipping his fingers into blood diamonds again. Maybe I should put him on our watch list for a while. Thanks for the reminder, Matteus.”
Jordan had a knack of defusing situations. He also possessed the ability to turn nothing into a huge argument. It depended on his mood. The anarchist tended to outweigh the peacemaker.
Dad scowled at him and he gave him his best fuck-me grin.
I didn’t need this right now with all the shit with my brother Michael hanging over my head. I wanted to shake him until some sense got knocked into that know-it-all head of his. A kill order from the Council meant you were marked for death. We were all frantically trying to find ways to save him, but he kept making the situation worse.
“Are we finished?” Xavier asked. “Because we have a flight scheduled to look at some properties in Krakow.”
Xavier’s father Hugh waved his hand. “Of course, look at the time. Have a safe journey and I look forward to seeing the shortlist for the next hotel.”
While in Krakow, we were looking for the next property for the Midnight Rooms as well, so it would be a busy few days.
“I have to stop off and see Uncle Lucas,” Xavier said when we were outside. “He has a problem he needs our help with.”
I wanted to groan in despair and scream with joy at the same time. “I need to go past my place on the way to the airport and collect Lucrezia’s stones. They arrived a few days ago and I was going to private courier them.”
Xavier slid me the side eye. “You seem to be getting very friendly with my cousin. I know she used to have a thing about you when she was younger, but I thought she’d grown out of that.”
Jordan gave Xavier a huge mischief-filled grin. “Nah, the two of them could hardly keep their eyes or their hands off each other in the kitchen a few weeks ago when they were supposed to be making coffee.”
“Fuck off!” I snapped. “I was helping because Nigel was being a dick and trying to take advantage of her.”
I didn’t know who I was trying to kid. That woman had played a starring role in every single fantasy I’d had since her sexy ass had sauntered into my life. I’d visited the Midnight rooms a few times since she flew back to Tuscany, but apparently my dick was on strike and refusing to work unless I was fantasising about a certain woman who had stared up at me as if I was her saviour and smelt like a meadow of wildflowers on a summer day.
We climbed into Jordan’s Range Rover and made our way across London to collect our bags. Since we were flying to Tuscany on Xavier’s private jet, I could bypass a lot of the Customs’ red tape to get those jewels to Lucrezia. Seth had organised all the paperwork and was now the proud owner of a 1985 McLaren F1 LM. He knew I had an extensive private car collection and had always lusted after that particular car. It was as well I had two of them since I won the one he knew about a few years ago in a poker game.
The smug fucker refused cash and was now driving around London like a teenager who’d had sex for the first time. There came a point when you had so much cash that it didn’t have value to it anymore. Another million in his account meant little to him, but that car made him purr with happiness.
The black velvet box was in my safe, all the stones carefully placed on layers of velvet in rows. I grabbed it and put it in the compartment in the bottom of my bag. My passport and currency wallet sat on the top shelf with everything I needed in it to travel. I tucked it into the inside pocket of my jacket and lifted the clothes I’d set out earlier. One business suit, a few clean shirts, and some casual clothes for when our meetings ended. I quickly changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and a hooded jacket before jogging back downstairs.
Jordan and Xavier had similar holdalls for our journey in each of their homes. I could predict what was in each of theirs since we always travelled together and were closer than brothers.
The closer we flew to Tuscany, the more my mind wandered to the woman who lived there. I should never have looked at her, never mind touched her. Xavier should have sorted her supply problem out instead of me sitting here with a king’s ransom worth of jewels instead of a car.
Lucrezia had burrowed under my skin and created an itch that only she had the nails to scratch. There was something about her innocence that beckoned forward the beast that dwelt inside me. He wanted to bind her in silk and hang her from a frame so that only we could admire her before ravishing her until she screamed.
There was a reason that I was a business partner in The Midnight Empire, and it wasn’t just because I was good with figures. Between the three of us, we’d travelled the globe and experienced every pleasure we could find. Inside every man in a business suit was a deviant just waiting to come out and play. We had and it left an appetite for certain sexual urges that we catered for in our business.
Every day, we expanded and our clientele demanded more, needed excess. Our fantasy rooms were booked out for months in advance, and there was a constant stream of requests for new role play situations from solo clients who came to us to experience what no one else could provide for them. Kink-shaming was the latest form of bullying. If you didn’t lie on your back and stare at the ceiling, you were a pervert. Women wanted more, demanded the orgasms they lacked in the past, and were finally exploring their sexuality. We were there to aid them in that pursuit.
Jordan typed on his phone and Xavier sat sipping a glass of scotch, staring out the window. He’d been quiet lately and lost in his own thoughts. I would swear he’d met a woman, but he’d only been to the Midnight Rooms lately. He took me as a wingman last night, but I gave him five minutes and left again to go and sit and drink in the bar upstairs. I needed to get myself under control because there was no way my dick was going anywhere near Lucrezia Black. She was the official no-fly zone for men like me.
Her father would mount my balls on the mantelpiece for even wanking to her image in the shower. If he ever suspected I wanted to spread her wide and fuck her senseless, he’d leave my cold b
ody in a shallow grave.
My dick argued that it would be worth it.
To distract myself, I went and poured myself a drink. “Want to talk about it?” I asked Xavier.
He was my oldest and closest friend. We were toddlers that our fathers dragged along to the Council creche so we would meet other kids from their special club and bond. We didn’t befriend the others, but the two of us became closer than siblings. Jordan joined our club a few years later at boarding school. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for Xavier and right now he looked like he needed someone to vent to.
“Nah, it’s all good, man. I met someone in the Midnight Rooms and there’s something about her that I can’t seem to walk away from.”
I sat beside him on the sofa beside the bar. “That’s not the most conventional place to meet someone.”
He stared at me and downed the remainder of his glass. “Tell me about it.”
I was the last person who could scold someone for bad sexual behaviour since I had control issues. There was an unwritten law that no relationships were to be started in the Midnight or Twilight Rooms, but sex involved emotion, and when those pesky feelings got involved then laws were broken.
I filled his glass. “You know what you’re going to do?”
Xavier lifted the glass to stare into the amber depths as if the answer was lurking there. “Nope.”
“Why not just see where the road takes you?”
He stared at me but didn’t reply because Xavier tended to live in his head and think everything through before he made a decision.
“What do you think Lucas needs us for?” Jordan asked in a loud voice from where he sat near the front of the jet. He tended to always sit close to the cockpit as his trust levels were zero and he was a fully trained pilot. I was never sure if he expected the pilot to have a heart attack or jump out the window.
