by Kitty French
“Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.” He handed her the champagne and shook his head. “Don’t tell me you don’t want this. I saw you in my office, the way thinking about that toy turned you on.”
“But I’ve never…” she eyed the vibrator with apprehension. “I’ve never really used anything like… like that…” she tailed off, flame-cheeked, and swallowed a huge mouthful of champagne. “It’s just not my thing.”
He laughed and came to stand behind her again. “That’s just the thing, Princess. I don’t think you know what your thing is.” His arm slipped around her waist, the silver vibrator in his hand. He flicked the switch and it hummed quietly into life.
Sophie stood stock still, knowing full well that she wasn’t going to stop him. Right now, he could do just about anything he wanted.
“You’ve lived your safe, vanilla existence.” He touched the tip of the vibrator between the swell of her breasts, and unclipped her bra at the same time in one swift movement. She gasped and went to hold onto it, but he was too quick and whipped it out of her hands.
“Stop hiding from me.” He moved her hair behind her shoulders to fully expose her naked breasts. “Look at you.” His eyes darkened with lust and he ran the head of the vibrator up her stomach. “You’re wasted on the occasional bout of missionary sex with a disinterested man.” He placed the tip of the vibrator against one of her nipples, and Sophie’s eyes widened at the new sensation. Lucien’s teeth grazed her neck as he moved the vibrator around her other nipple. Jesus. Sophie felt the erotic vibrations fizz from her pebble hard nipples to her groin, and she arched into the erotic waves of pleasure that lapped through her.
“I see you. Really see you,” he whispered, watching her eyes in the mirror. “I see the girl in there who’s greedy for more.”
He slid the vibrator down her body and nuzzled it in between her legs. “Are you still sure this isn’t your thing, Sophie?”
She shook her head and leaned back against him, reaching an arm behind her head to hold onto his neck. She wasn’t sure of anything apart from how damn good that vibrator felt as he ran it over the scant silk that covered her sex.
He moved his hands to hook his thumbs into the sides of her knickers as Sophie watched her bare, jutting breasts rise and fall in the mirror. He was going to strip her naked and fuck her with that big silver vibrator, and she couldn’t wait.
“You want this.” He eased her underwear down, then straightened to look in her eyes again. She chewed her lip and nodded slowly.
“Look again. See what I see.”
Sophie saw herself, naked apart from her hold-ups and high heels, and she’d never felt so profoundly sexy in her life.
“Kneel down.” Her eyes jumped up to his in confusion. “Here, by the mirror.”
He placed a hand on her shoulder and applied a little pressure to encourage her, and she dropped down uncertainly to kneel with her bottom resting on her ankles. Lucien looked massive standing behind her, and she could clearly see the swell of his erection close to her head. He looked like the world’s sexiest cowboy: all brawn and bare chest with a vibrator in place of a gun.
He lowered himself and knelt behind her, bracketing her legs with his own, the silenced vibrator on the floor next to him. He wrapped his arms around her body and held her close, and those few unexpected moments of tenderness overwhelmed her. Lucien’s arms were strong and warm, his lips gentle as they grazed her shoulder. Sophie looked at his bowed head, at the way he closed his eyes as he kissed her, and she melted for him again. Then he opened his eyes and gave her that crooked, sex god smile, and the moment was gone. Her pulse rocketed in erotic anticipation of what might happen next.
Lucien didn’t keep her waiting to find out. He placed his hands on her knees and parted her legs, then kept his hands on her kneecaps to still her as she instinctively tried to close them again.
“Uh-uh. Open.”
Panic spiralled in Sophie’s belly. Or was it excitement? The two sensations had been intertwined in her guts from the moment she’d set foot across the threshold of Lucien’s office and entered his presence. She wanted to close her legs, it was too lewd, both of them looking at her glistening sex in the mirror, but then… she didn’t want to.
Lucien’s hands moved along her inner thighs when he was certain she wasn’t going to clamp shut on him. His fingers traced the soft skin, and she moaned when he ran one finger down her core. Up again, ultra slow. Sophie’s breath came in short gasps, and threatened to stop altogether when he moved his hands to cover her own and took them back down between her legs. His big warm hands over her smaller ones.
“Open yourself for me, Sophie.” She squeezed her eyes tight, and he sank his teeth into her neck almost hard enough to make her cry out.
“Don’t close your eyes. Watch.” He moved her fingers with his own, guiding her actions, forcing her to expose her inner self to them both in the mirror. “You see? Can you see how fucking gorgeous you are?” He touched his index finger against her clitoris, and smiled at the way she jolted and moaned with pleasure. “That’s better. Don’t move your hands. Watch. Watch my fingers.” She did as she was told, lost in the intensity of the feelings he’d unleashed. She wanted to come. She wanted them both to watch her come. Yes. Yes. Don’t stop. She licked her lips, lost in the way his big brown fingers moved on her in just the right way. And then he stopped, and she gasped in frustration because she’d been so close, so very, very close. And then she gasped again, but this time in apprehension, because he’d turned the vibrator on and slid it down behind her back. It buzzed rudely against the fullness of her backside, and then Sophie’s eyes widened as Lucien ran the tip between her legs. She could see its silver head throbbing, and she rocked her hips in an effort to move it closer to her clitoris.
“Greedy girl.” Lucien pushed it forward to give her what she wanted for the briefest of seconds. Long enough to make her squirm, too brief to let her come. He was her heavenly torturer, running the buzzing tip up and down her sex, never letting her have what she needed.
“Do you want it inside your cunt, Sophie?” He let the very tip of the vibrator slide inside her.
“Yes,” she breathed, horrified by the fact that his crude choice of words only excited her even more. “Yes.” She was beyond desperate for him to fill her up.
“Princess,” he murmured against her hair, and then he fed the throbbing vibrator all the way inside her in one long, languorous push. Sophie moaned with pleasure, unable to take her eyes off his hands as he worked the silver shaft into her. She started to shake, to physically tremble with bone-deep pleasure, and he kept her right on the edge of her climax, daring her with his eyes and his hands to go further for him than she ever had before.
“Yes…yes…” she moaned and he thrust the vibrator deep inside her to the hilt, then twisted it until the clit stimulator hit her sweet spot. He held it there.
“Fuck, yeah,” he whispered. Look at you…” Her body started to jerk. “Watch yourself come, Sophie.” He had her spread wide open and the stimulator held steady against her clitoris when she tried to squirm away from the intensity, making her convulse with the violence of her orgasm as it exploded through her. She could hear someone screaming with pleasure, and it took her several long moments to register the sound as her own. Her body had taken over control from her mind with an animal instinct that she was powerless to fight. Lucien Knight was feral, and she loved it.
Sophie slumped in Lucien’s arms as he gathered her close to his chest. She needed to be still, to let her heart stop hammering and her body stop shaking.
What was she doing? Aftershocks of shame crept over her, and she closed her eyes against the image of herself naked in another man’s arms. What had looked so erotic moments ago now looked shoddy.
What hold did this man have over her? He only had to touch her and common sense flew away, leaving her wanton and craving his touch. Even now, with the weight of shame on her shoulders, she couldn’t see him as anything but beau
tiful. It wasn’t his fault that her marriage was broken, and much as he might think so, letting herself be seduced wasn’t the key to mending it.
Lucien stirred behind her, but her bones felt too heavy to lift from the floor. She needn’t have worried. Moments later his strong arms slid beneath her and lifted her like a child, his chest warm against her cheek as he settled her against him. He crossed to the bed and laid her gently down, then tucked the covers around her lightly shivering body and smoothed her damp hair from her cheek.
If he’d been anything other than breathtakingly gentle, Sophie might have found the resolve to call a halt to it, but his tenderness unbuttoned her defenses. It stole away her shame and her anger, and left her with only a sense of inevitability and calm, and the weary ache of a satisfied lover. He stroked her hair, and soothed her with whispered, incomprehensible words. She strained to catch them, but they floated away from her on the coat tails of sleep. All except for one.
Princess.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lucien sat in the chair beside the bed and watched Sophie sleep. She’d been out for the count for a couple of hours, and downstairs the club had come alive. He’d walked the floor beneath an hour back and found himself satisfied by the number of people flooding through the doors, every one of them bold-eyed and expectant. He loved their lack of inhibition, their courage to shun social boundaries and to be whoever the hell they wanted in this place that he’d created.
The Gateway Club was precisely what it said above the door. A gateway to sexual freedom for anyone brave enough to enter.
He looked back at Sophie again. She’d frustrated the hell out of him from the moment she’d sashayed into his office in heels she could barely stand up in, and she’d stunned him when she’d turned around and forced words out of her mouth that clearly mortified her. Her embarrassment had lost the battle with her pluck, and it impressed him. The girl was eighty percent kitten and twenty percent lioness, and he considered it his mission to make her roar. Sexual potential shone out of her like a beacon, and her insistence otherwise only made him want to prove her wrong even more.
Besides, there was the small matter of her husband. If there was one thing that really made Lucien’s skin crawl, it was men who treated women badly. His investigator had dug around and turned up evidence to prove that Dan’s other woman had been a permanent fixture in Sophie’s marriage for some considerable time.
How could the man do it? How could he tell barefaced lies to the woman he professed to love?
Darkness settled over Lucien’s heart as long-buried memories of his mother’s heartache swam through his head. Her only crime had been to love his father too much, and she’d died for her cause. Alone, save for a bottle of pills and a scrunched up photograph of her husband. She’d lived her life in the shadows of Lucien’s father’s deception, and for the most part she’d conned herself that she was happy. Right up until the day she couldn’t ignore it any more because it was shoved rudely in her face when she’d visited him at work and found him astride his secretary on the desk.
She’d been faced with the truth in all its ugliness, and it had broken her.
Lucien had been too young back then to save his mother, but he was going to make damn sure that Sophie didn’t get sucked down into that same cycle of destruction. She was teetering right on the verge of confronting her husband, and Lucien intended to tool her up for the fight.
In a small hotel room in Crete, Dan slumped in a similar chair next to a similar bed and watched another woman sleeping. What was he doing? This was the first time he’d spent more than twenty-four solid hours in Maria’s company, and the reality of being with someone other than Sophie around the clock had hit home hard. Meetings with Maria for clandestine dinners and afternoon sex sessions had become pleasurable fixtures in his life over the last eighteen months. From the moment they’d met at a work party, she’d made no secret of the fact that she fancied him. She was flirty. Sexy. She was fun, and she didn’t care if he forgot to put the bins out or left his washing on the bedroom floor. She was exciting in her unfamiliarity, and she wanted him. It took no effort at all to separate her in his mind from his marriage vows.
If anything, he told himself, screwing Maria helped his marriage. Maria did things that Sophie wouldn’t dare. He was a satisfied man, and in every other area than the bedroom his relationship with Sophie was ideal.
He’d compartmentalised his life in his head perfectly.
Sophie, his wife and best friend.
Maria, his twice a week lover.
It had been the ideal set up, until now.
Until this week.
Maria had been making noises about getting away together for months but he’d managed to dodge it. She knew his situation. He was a married man. But then events had conspired against him, and he’d found himself unable to get out of it this time. Maria hadn’t exactly said that she’d tell Sophie about their affair, but she’d intimated as much, and the threat alone was enough to have him packing his suitcase and telling his biggest lie yet.
Maria had met him at the airport, and from there on in, he’d known with utter conviction that it was wrong. He didn’t want to browse duty free with her, because buying Sophie a new bottle of scent was part of their usual holiday ritual. Being with Maria twenty-four seven had highlighted all of the differences between the two women in his life that he’d never taken the time to think about. Sure, Maria might not grumble about bins or dirty washing as yet, but the minutiae of temporarily living with her had exposed their incompatibilities more than their strengths. Or maybe he was being unfair. It probably shouldn’t matter that Maria slept on the wrong side of the bed, or that she preferred tea to coffee in the morning. It really shouldn’t faze him that she was the sightseeing type rather than a bake on the beach girl, or that she had no clue how to play poker on the balcony late at night.
But the fact was, all these things did bother him, because they rammed home the fact that she just wasn’t Sophie. She wasn’t the woman he loved, the woman who knew him inside out.
Did Sophie know about Maria? How could she not?
Christ, he hoped not.
He dropped his head in his hands, feeling trapped. He wanted to go home.
CHAPTER NINE
Sophie opened her eyes. Warm, subdued lamps lit the room, and she was incredibly comfortable. Fragment by fragment, the memory of the past few hours clicked back into place as she woke, and a glance under the covers confirmed her fears. She was naked. She hadn’t dreamt it. She really had let Lucien do those things to her.
Where was he? She sat up in bed, the sheet clutched against her nude body. He must have heard her movements, because a second later he appeared in the doorway.
“I’ll take it as a compliment that you slept so well.” He leaned against the doorframe with his arms folded across his chest. Sophie frowned, wrong-footed by the fact that he’d changed his clothes. She hadn’t seen him in anything other than business dress, but right now, in soft, battered jeans and a faded black t-shirt that clung to his well-defined body, he was a brand new kind of gorgeous.
“What time is it?” she asked, disorientated by the darkness and Lucien’s nearness.
“Almost midnight.”
Sophie squinted at him. She’d been asleep for more than three hours. Oh God. She was in a sex club. Heaven only knew what was happening beneath her.
“Lucien. This is wrong. I shouldn’t be here.” Her voice came out hoarser than she’d expected.
He shook his head and disappeared for a few seconds, then returned with a tray. He placed it down on the bed next to her, then sat down alongside it.
“Eat. You must be hungry.”
Sophie glanced down at the array of food. Delicate sandwiches. Bowls of fruit. Chocolate truffles.
She looked up at Lucien again, wondering how he could expect her to sit there naked and snack. She was his PA. He was her boss.
“Is this how you welcome all new staff, Lucien? A trip to a sex
club, a quick fumble, and a sandwich? It’s not very classy.”
She’d aimed to offend, but he just laughed off her rudeness.
“That wasn’t a fumble, Sophie. It was a prelude.”
She’d been half-considering eating a sandwich, but the idea lost its appeal at his words. “A prelude?”
He nodded and helped himself to a cherry from the bowl.
“A prelude.” He sank his teeth into the dark, glossy skin of the cherry and ripped the flesh from the stone.
There was always an element of surprise in conversations with Lucien; he was as unpredictable as quicksilver. Sophie watched him in silence and waited for more.
“I have a proposition for you.” He reached for another cherry.
Sophie shook her head. Where had her reality gone? She suddenly understood how Alice had felt when she’d tumbled down that rabbit hole. Had someone plucked her out of her own life and dropped her into a fantasy? She was naked in a sex club watching a Viking warrior suck on a cherry. This was not her average Tuesday evening. She couldn’t speak. She didn’t know any appropriate words.
“Stay with me this week.”
Whoa. She knew the answer to that one.
“What? No!” He might be gorgeous, but he was clearly crazy.
“Give me one good reason why not,” he said, then stretched out next to her on the bed and dangled another indecently big cherry over his mouth by the stalk.
“Because… because I don’t want to, for one thing.”
“Of course you do, you’re just afraid to admit it.” Lucien laughed and bit the cherry in half. “A better reason, please.”
Sophie shook her head. “You are the cockiest man I’ve ever met.”
“Yada yada yada.” He gestured for her to move on, and she stared at him, frustrated. She was trapped. Her clothes were strewn across the other side of the room, and the sheet was pinned beneath his body. Short of treating him to a strip show there was no getting away from this conversation, and he knew it perfectly well.
