by Olivia Gates
He sat back and looked away before he dragged her over him or lunged and crushed her beneath him. Steve came in at once and, raising the opaque, soundproof partition between them, put the car in motion as per Raiden’s earlier orders.
After a minute when she sat staring ahead and silent beside him, he said, “I have an offer for you.”
“I’m listening.” The way she said the words, calm yet immediate, told him she couldn’t wait to hear his offer.
He couldn’t wait to make it, either. “I want you in my bed, every night, starting tonight. Until I get married. You can ask for whatever you want and its yours.”
Silence stretched between them after his succinct proposition.
Then she finally turned to him, drawing him to face her as if by sheer magnetism.
Her eyes emitted blue, hot fire in the limo’s semidarkness, the one-way-mirror windows dimming the bright lights of the city. What he could see of her expression was enigmatic. “Don’t you think a flare of passion is one thing, but an affair is another?”
He shrugged. “It’s not an affair. It’s an arrangement. A purely sexual one.”
Her lashes lowered for moments, before rising. “What about your engagement? Your fiancée?”
“Megumi only wants to honor her family by marrying the most influential man, producing heirs carrying his genes and accessing his power and wealth. She, like me, expects our lives to remain separate, with intimacies practiced only to acquire said heirs.”
“So have you started...practicing yet?”
He frowned. After the intimacies with her, the very idea filled him with outright revulsion.
He gritted down on the unwilling reaction. “Of course not. You don’t need to worry I’d come to you from her or another woman’s bed. As in the past, while I’m with you, I will be with you alone.” A vicious doubt twisted in his gut. “I don’t know what you did back then, but I expect the same finite monogamy from you now.”
“I was with no one else.”
And somehow, even though he now knew she seduced men for a living, he believed her.
Silence stretched again until he wanted to grab her and demand she tell him what she was thinking. Now that he knew she’d tell him, the urge to know her every thought almost overpowered him. He held back, reminding himself everything he felt was a by-product of intense lust. Once that was satisfied, curiosity, possessiveness and everything else would subside with it.
He inhaled. “Now give me your pledge that you will be at my disposal for the next ten weeks.”
At his terse command, her gaze clashed with his in mock surprise. “You mean you’d believe my ‘pledge’?” At his curt nod, she exhaled. “And I can ask for anything I want you say?”
“Anything.”
“Even if I ask for another fifty million dollars?”
“Yes.”
If she had any doubt how much he wanted her, she should have no doubt now. He didn’t mind letting her know. For the duration of the arrangement, he was giving in to his every urge, saying and doing everything that came to him the moment it did, no control, no premeditation. He’d plunge whole into this with her. It was the only way he’d purge her from his system, the only way he’d ever emerge whole.
For good measure, he added, “I will pay the whole amount up-front.”
Her gaze was more unreadable as she tilted her head at him. “How can you, the ruthless financier that you are, pay that exorbitant amount up-front? How do you know I won’t just take the money and disappear like I did in the past?”
“I know for two reasons. The first is that you did uphold your pledge to me once. You do seem to possess a code of some sort. The second and more important reason is because you won’t want to. I was there last night, remember? You were as starving for me as I was for you. I might despise you, might believe everything between us had been a lie, but I know the physical side was real.”
“You do?”
Her soft provocation hit him like an ax, snapping the last tethers of control. He gave in, dragged her over his lap, pressed her down on his steel erection.
Grinding up into her, drawing an involuntary moan from her and an answering grind, he touched his open lips to her pulse point. “Yes, I know. I know that I was the best you ever had. That you haven’t found anything near what we shared. That after last night, you’re burning for more.”
Holding him in her hypnotic gaze, she nodded, silently conceding everything he’d said.
Then in a low, raw whisper, she said, “Then give me more, Raiden. Now.”
“Yes.” The word escaped him on a scalding hiss as he freed himself. Then he bunched her skirt up before lifting her up to hover over his thick crown. His hands fisted at her hips as he tore her panties away, making her gasp.
His erection thudded against her molten lips, making her fingers dig in his shoulders. “Now, Raiden. Now.”
Everything in him surged at her tremulous urgency, tensed when she wrapped her fingers around him and positioned him at her soaking entrance, tried to bear down on him.
She was as tight as ever, what had always made him think he wouldn’t fit inside her. But their almost impossible fit had always made them incoherent with pleasure, driven them to pinnacles of wild satisfaction. It had again last night. It would always do so. The scent of their lust rose heavy and humid in the limo as he began invading her.
“So ready.” He groaned at the delicious agony as she opened to him, singed him with her heat and honey. “So right.”
Her eyes squeezed shut and she moaned as he forged into her clenching depths, stretching her beyond her capacity.
Pressing her lower belly, he slid his thumb between her drenched folds, rubbed her nub in slow circles, and she cried out, clenched tighter around his girth, taking him deeper. She opened her lust-heavy eyes and watched him feverishly.
She was so beautiful draped over him like that, her lithe body straining against and around his, needing his occupation, his pleasuring. He already felt she’d always look like that. To him, she’d always be her, the one woman he craved, no matter what she looked like, or what she was.
“Perfect,” he bit out, his teeth grinding with the avalanche of sensations as he began to thrust up into her. “Always perfect.”
Her heat rose with his praise, and she became even wetter, letting him slide smoothly farther inside her.
“So hot and hard, so deep... You’re so deep inside me. Take me, Raiden, do it to me, all the way inside me... Raiden...” she keened, over and over, fidgeting around him to ease the edge of pain she’d confessed always accompanied his complete occupation. But he also knew it made her pleasure sharper, her release more explosive. Her body was corroborating his knowledge, rippling around him, squeezing, trembling on the verge of orgasm. And he hadn’t fully sheathed himself inside her yet. He was hovering on the edge, too.
Cursing, he knew they were too inflamed, would combust too quickly. But he was damned if he’d let them come without being inside her all the way, as she demanded, as he needed.
Gripping her hips, he leaned her backward, altering the angle of her descent, making her open fully for his plundering. A breathless cry escaped her as she took him to the root.
After waiting out the blinding sensation of being buried inside her to the hilt, he withdrew, dragging a soft shriek from her depths, along with his erection. He thrust back. And she screamed, came all over him, her body lurching in convulsions, inside and out. He rode her harder as she came, his grasp on her hips ferocious. Pleasure spread from where they connected to every inch of his body as he felt her finish, then without pause start to climb again up the spiral of carnal desperation.
“Please...” She lurched forward to press her gasping mouth to his, her fingers gripping his sweat-dampened hair as she rode him, begging him with body and trembling
pleas to end her renewed torment. “I’m coming again. Raiden, please, come with me....”
He lost his mind, the need to finish her and empty himself into her taking over completely. Tilting her, he angled his thrusts, pummeling against that trigger inside her. She at once tightened and shook, then exploded into another shrieking orgasm. Grabbing her by the nape, he fed her convulsions, his hips becoming a blur as he pounded into her, making her writhe and moan and come harder, her body heaving with every discharge of pleasure.
“Hannah!” His bellow of ecstasy sounded feral in his own ears as at last his orgasm tore into him, his seed scorching through his length and shooting into her milking depths in jet after agonizingly pleasurable jet.
Their mutual release raged on until he was fully drained and she collapsed on top of him, a boneless mass of tremors and satiation. She pressed her face to his equally hot, moist neck, her breath gusting to the same labored rhythm as his.
The limo undulated smoothly through the streets of Tokyo as they lay there, like last night, both fully clothed, only merged at their most intimate parts, which made it all more excruciatingly erotic. He finally brushed his lips across hers, as if comforting her in the aftermath of this mind-blowing interlude, what he again hadn’t expected or planned.
“Call me Scarlett.” Her whisper hit his cheek with her still-gasping breaths.
“Is that your real name?”
“No. But it...has meaning to me.”
What was that? And what was her real name? Where did she come from? Would she ever tell him? Should he demand to know?
No. Their relationship would remain at this sexual level, would never go any further. He’d once thought it could, would, but he’d been wrong. Now there was no place in his life for anything but his plans. And even without his plans, he had no place in his life for someone like her. He was sure she had none for him, either.
He carefully disengaged their bodies, even though he was already clamoring for round two, and tidied them both up.
In minutes, she was once again sitting beside him, looking so deceptively prim in her utilitarian clothes and ponytail, as if she hadn’t just combusted in his arms and wrung a new level of ecstasy from his every cell. He brushed damp tendrils of hair off her temples, cupped her cheek.
When she shuddered and pressed her flesh harder into his palm, his lips crooked in a smile. “I trust that was to your satisfaction?”
Her eyes went black. “To my ecstasy. Now I want more.”
Pride revved inside his chest. For he was certain she meant it. She couldn’t wait to have him again. Even if he didn’t already know that, she had no reason to exaggerate. He’d already offered her everything she might want up front.
“You only have to give me your word and you’ll have ten weeks’ worth of more. With a huge cash incentive. To put things in perspective.”
Her eyes grew opaque, making him regret those last words. Before he found a way to take them back, she finally nodded.
But before relief surged, she added, “But since it’s for a good cause, how about doubling that cash incentive to a hundred million dollars?”
Five
“Are you mourning parting with your nine-figure sum?”
Scarlett bent over the couch and slid her arms over Raiden’s seminaked body as she whispered the teasing question into his ear.
He remained unmoving, staring ahead through the floor-to-ceiling window at the spectacular Tokyo Bay at sunset.
Which was weird. For the past three weeks since they’d started their...arrangement, he’d always met her halfway as soon as she’d entered, always impatient, urgent, voracious.
It had become her nightly ritual, and whenever possible a midday one, too, coming to his penthouse, to which he’d given her full access. He’d gotten this apartment in the first place for her, acquiring it the very next day after she’d agreed to his proposition, to be a few blocks away from her apartment. This, and everything else he did continued to be in the service of her convenience, and to make the most time for each other, wasting as little as possible commuting.
Before she came here every evening, she passed by her place and prepared an overnight bag. When she departed before his housekeepers came, she left no evidence behind to betray that Raiden shared this place with a woman.
She also went home first to shower. He showered as soon as he returned home and was always starving for her at the end of his workday, and she couldn’t let him take her to bed fresh, or not so fresh, from hers. She’d been flying back and forth daily to the areas still affected by the last earthquake and tsunami in the northeast of Honshu island, and the fieldwork she’d been doing had been grueling. Over three hundred thousand people were still in temporary housing, and over ten thousand of those were orphaned children, the focus of her work. She’d been going all out setting up their special shelters. She needed to get things up and running before she left.
Her departure had become even more imperative now. The day, the hour her time with Raiden was up, she’d leave Japan and never come back.
Till then she’d spend every possible second with him. And Raiden was beyond generous with his time. Her days, as per his decree, were hers—if he couldn’t get away and meet her back here. Her nights were all his. She was so very okay with that.
Then in the mornings they left separately, and they never met anywhere else. There were no lunches or dinners or evenings out. They’d been taking every precaution to make sure their arrangement remained a secret. She was even more careful than he was. When she left this time, she wanted to leave him nothing but good memories, and no lasting damage of any sort.
That was, nothing more than the hundred-million-dollar-shaped new hole in his pocket.
It still flabbergasted her that he could so easily part with that much money. But he had, without batting an eyelash. Right there in his limo, he’d just produced his checkbook from his hand-tailored jacket, and had written the check. Payable the very next day.
At her incredulity that he’d done that when she didn’t have the blade of exposure held to his neck this time, he’d shrugged, saying he considered having her those ten weeks as vital to him as keeping his secrets had been. She’d insisted he hadn’t needed to give her anything, that what she wanted was only him. And he’d only said he knew that.
But he’d still been ready to part with such a staggering sum. To put things into perspective. So she wouldn’t mistake this for anything permanent.
She could have told him there’d never been any danger of that.
But she didn’t tell him. Nor did she talk about anything else of note, either. Their time together was about indulging in each other. Ten weeks of pure pleasure.
Not that she thought it would be really that long. There was no way he’d be with her right up to his wedding day.
Swallowing the lump she had no right to have perpetually in her throat, she ran her palms over his chest and abdomen, luxuriating in his velvet-encased steel flesh, tracing every bulge and ridge and groove of his chiseled perfection.
Then she went lower, afraid she’d find more evidence of disinterest to go with his unprecedented preoccupation, and her breath left her in a ragged sigh as her hand closed over his mind-blowing potency, fully, dauntingly aroused.
Her lips shaking in relief, she bit his earlobe as she squeezed him. “I need you to be doing far better things than staring out into the horizon like that. Like taking me right here, right now.”
“Scarlett.”
That was all he said as he flung his head against the back of the couch, exposing his face and neck to her worship.
But he hadn’t moaned her name in pleasure, or in sensual threat. But as if he was...trying to understand it.
Suddenly the whole world turned upside down. He’d grabbed her and flipped her in the air, bringing her dow
n across his body.
Breathless with shock and with awe at his sheer strength and prowess, she gaped up at him. It had been effortless for him to catapult her like this. His hands hadn’t dug hard in her flesh to secure her, then he’d applied what felt like antigravity to her descent in midflip so that she landed with the softest of impacts on his lap.
Sealing her open mouth with a kiss that breached her essence, he finally withdrew to look down at her as she lay cradled in his arms, nerveless still with surprise and sheer delight. She would have stayed like this forever if she could.
He lifted a thick lock of her long hair to his lips before winding it around his hand, giving a tug that sent a million delicious arrows shooting everywhere through her body.
One of her various addictions to him was to how he gave her pleasure with every touch, every action. But when he plundered her, he had her screaming with it, tethering her by her hair, harnessing her to make her submit to his every demand. It bordered on savagery, and was pure perfection.
She wished she could ask him to grow his magnificent hair longer, so she could grab it as she held on to him, as he pounded into her, drove her beyond her limits and herself and the world.
But she had no right to ask anything of him, even if his indulgence of her knew no bounds. And even if she did ask, and he didn’t have to keep it cropped for his image and grew it out, she wouldn’t be around long enough to enjoy the results.
Megumi would. She knew he believed his fiancée would endure intimacy with him only for the purpose of making their required heirs, but Scarlett believed any woman he touched would crave him forever afterward. As she did.
“It’s too obvious,” he suddenly said. “To pick Scarlett because you chose to be a redhead in this incarnation.”
It was as if he was continuing a conversation he’d been having with himself. Was that why he’d been lost in thought? Searching for explanations as to why she’d chosen that name?
