The Secret (The Evolution Of Sin Book 2)

by Giana Darling

  Chapter Twenty.

  He took my breath away.

  Standing at his panoramic office window in three quarter profile, Sinclair had never looked so unattainably gorgeous. His mahogany hair waved back from his broad forehead in a perfect sweep that I was already dying to run my fingers through and the midnight blue, perfectly tailored suit highlighted the depth of his tan, the starling blue of his eyes when he turned to look at me. But it was his smile that seduced me completely, the slight but genuine tilt of his firm lips and the way it pleated the skin beside his eyes. That expression meant more than all his gifts combined.

  “Mon dieu, you are a vision.”

  I smiled at his breathy compliment, smoothing a hand down the deep plum colored dress. It was short with a flirty hemline and a high, collared neckline. The torso was sheer and I wore only a flimsy purple balconette bra beneath it.

  “You look like a very classy school girl.”

  That was the goal, so I rewarded him with a smile and a small twirl so that the skirt floated out and above my lace topped stockings.

  He groaned.

  “You make it incredibly hard for a man to behave himself, Elle.”

  I lifted one shoulder. “You once told me that you were neither a saint nor a gentleman.”

  He crossed the room in three massive strides so that he was only a breath away from touching me. “With you I feel like a savage. I want to throw you over my shoulder and have my way with you. I want to handle all that creamy skin with rough hands and brutally push into you before you’re quite ready so that you’ll feel my mark for hours after I’ve left your body.”

  My head tipped back on my weak neck, lips blooming open to make way for my heavy breathing. Less than a minute in his presence and I was already soaking wet.

  He stared down into my eyes, looming over me in a way that was both threatening and incredibly sexy. The tension between us grew unbearably taut and vibrated like a struck wire. I was just about to push myself into him, unable to endure the physical space between our bodies, when he broke into a gorgeous smile and began to laugh.

  At first, I frowned but I quickly followed him into giggles when his arms snaked around my waist, tugging me into the air and up against his chest.

  “You crazy, sexy, amazing woman. You intoxicate me,” he laughed against my cheek as he pressed our foreheads together.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and leaned back in his embrace to smile into his face. “That’s probably an apt description. Like alcohol or drugs, I’m not the best choice for you.”

  His features slammed shut but I smoothed his frown with my fingers so that he would know I was in a good mood despite my words.

  Carefully, he set me down and ran a hand over my hair. “Do not talk like that tonight, d’accord? I want this evening to be about you and me only, no ghosts or skeletons from the closet will be joining us. Can you do that for me?”

  I nodded because he was asking me for what I was desperate to have.

  “Good.”

  His hand slid down my arm to lace with my fingers and he tugged me towards his desk. “If we were dating, we would meet here often. I work too much, usually seven-thirty to eight or nine every evening Monday through Friday and frequently over the weekends.”

  He stopped us both before his desk, pressing my thighs into it and his front into me. I sighed as his hands came around to clasp over my belly.

  “That would stop. Or, at the very least, I would work from home so that I could look up whenever I wanted to watch you paint or sleep or just breath, whenever I wanted to.”

  I tilted my head back against his shoulder, settling into the fantasy.

  “But at least once a week, we would meet here before I took you out on the town. I want to show you off, you understand? I want to show the world that I am the man that captured a siren.”

  He pressed a chaste kiss to my cheek and squeezed me closer to his body.

  “Sin,” I breathed, not because I had anything to say but because I was full to the brim with emotion and the only way I could think to release it was by saying his name.

  “I wanted to show you a new acquisition I made,” he said, tipping my chin up with two fingers so that I was looking at the previously empty space between the two wide bookcases behind his desk.

  One of my paintings, Solitaire du nuit, now occupied the space. It was a large canvas dominated by a purple black sky over the tiny lights of Montmartre and the moonlight-gilded dome of Sacre Coeur. A waxy, opalescent moon hung in the deeply bruised night sky like a grotesque pearl. It was one of my first paintings under the mentorship of Odile Claremont at L'École des Beaux-Arts and the first to be sold at my opening gallery showcase. Stefan Kilos, the gorgeous Greek I had met in Los Cabos, had informed me that he owned the piece and now here it hung in Sinclair’s office.

  I turned in his arms to gape at him.

  He was smiling slightly. “You mentioned that Kilos had bought it. I didn’t like the idea of him staring at it while he slept and I wanted something of you close to me.”

  I swallowed convulsively.

  Sinclair had just made my painting the only personal touch in his office.

  “You are very good at this whole wooing thing.”

  The left side of his smile lifted further. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a compliment. I feel overwhelmed by you,” I admitted.

  “And you didn’t before?”

  “Touché.”

  He took my hand, bringing it to his lips in order to kiss my fingertips. “These are very talented fingers. They move my body with your touch and my soul with your art.”

  I pressed my hand to his chest. “Stop. I don’t need pretty words.”

  “Just because they are pretty doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true,” he said, reminding me with my own words of our conversation on Tuesday when I’d called him a God.

  “But okay,” he conceded, sensing my discomfort. “Let’s go see the amazing Miles Davis. We can talk afterwards.”

  He held my hand.

  In theory, it seemed like such a trivial thing. People held hands all the time. Friends held hands, mothers and daughters, linked lines of camp children and people assisting the elderly. It was really no big deal. But I fixated on our clasped hands the entire evening and not even the incredible Miles Davis nor his bold, brassy music could pull my gaze away from the sight. Sinclair’s hands were beautiful, broad palms topped with long, lean fingers all covered in golden skin and lightly dusted with reddish hair. There was a scar on the back of his right hand, a small whitish burn mark that I compulsively ran my thumb over.

  We parted for ten minutes at intermission so that I could use the washroom and for those few minutes, my hand felt almost alien to me. I imagined what it would be like to let myself acclimatize to him the way my body so clearly yearned to do; how it would feel to greet him at the door of our shared apartment at the end of each day and wrap my arms and legs around him koala bear-style, to wake up in bed with my body pressed like a flower between his body and the bed.

  His hand was waiting on the armrest, palm up and fingers unfurled when I returned. He smiled at my involuntary sigh when we reconnected and gave me a reassuring squeeze.

  Afterwards, we were both quiet as we filtered out of the theatre and stood before the iconic fountain. I had a feeling Sinclair had things to say but our companionable silence had created a bubble around us and we were both happy to stay in it for a while yet.

  So of course, some asshole had to come and pop it.

  “Daniel Sinclair,” a loud voice boomed from behind us.

  Sin clenched my hand hard in his before letting it go to slowly turn around. I took a deep breath before doing the same.

  An older man with graying blonde hair and a beautifully grey cashmere overcoat was striding towards us with a tight smile and a very unhappy Margot on his arm. I sucked cold air in through my teeth, bracing myself for the confrontation.

  S
inclair’s hand found the small of my back in a surprising show of togetherness.

  “Dean, Margot, it’s a pleasure to see you. Did you have the gratification of seeing Miles Davis tonight in the Rose Theatre?”

  Dean looked down at Margot, expecting her to respond. Instead, she continued to glare at me.

  “Not a fan of jazz music, to tell you the honest truth. We were watching the ballet.” He leaned closer conspiratorially. “Fucking hate the ballet too but this one loves it and you know what they say, happy wife, happy life.”

  Sin and I laughed politely.

  “Now, who is the gorgeous redhead on your arm?” Dean asked, dropping the bomb into the middle of our tiny group as if it was a discarded gum wrapper.

  I stared at the ground where I imagined it to be, a huge ticking machine with an angry red count down to explosion. 2 minutes 30 seconds.

  “This is Giselle Moore,” Sinclair said smoothly. “She is a Parisian transplant and a very talented artist at the gallery. Her showcase is coming up in January, I think you would be a fan of her work.”

  “Oh wonderful. You know how I’m always looking for the next big thing. Are you it, Giselle Moore?”

  I smiled but I could still feel Margot’s crushing censure and it took everything I had not to flee from it. “I’m happy to be the next thing, if not the biggest. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity.”

  “The accent, it’s not quite French.”

  “I was born in Naples, actually.”

  “Enough,” Margot spit, finally roused out of her murder plotting and into action. “This is ridiculous small talk. Sinclair, what are you doing here with her?”

  Her. If I decided to be with him, this man I loved, I would have to get used to hearing that. There were a lot of words for a woman in my position: slut, whore, home wrecker, mistress, and adulterer. And yet, until now, I had never known a pronoun could be so vicious. Her; that woman who stole her own sister’s boyfriend.

  Revulsion rolled through me.

  “I enjoy spending time with Giselle, as you well know,” Sinclair was saying in that implacable way of his.

  It only made Margot incensed.

  “Fuck that.”

  “M,” Sinclair reproached at the same time that Dean gasped, “Margot!”

  She shook off her date’s arm, stepping forward to press a finger to Sinclair’s chest. She vibrated with righteous indignation. “I was supportive of you in Mexico. I stayed away and let you have a torrid little holiday fling. But we are living in the real world now and fantasies like this,” she waved her hand in my direction as if indicating shit on the sidewalk, “they don’t exist in real life for a reason. Sure, she’s pretty but have you even thought about the consequences?”

  She wasn’t finished, I could tell. But something had shifted in Sinclair’s posture, a subtle broadening as his own anger infused him with strength and superhuman intimidation. His anger wasn’t even directed at me and I felt my knees weaken under the pressure of his gaze.

  “I wasn’t living in reality, M, I was living in the fucking matrix. Nothing had meaning to me but the next meeting, the next deal, how people perceived me in the business world. Have you ever known me to make a decision lightly? Don’t come at me like a scorned woman for falling in love with someone other than you or Elena. I’m fully prepared to reap the consequences but only from the people who were really wronged. You can’t plan for something like this. It happened. It’s done.”

  There was a pregnant silence. Sinclair’s hand slipped from my back to the curve of my hip. He tugged me close to his side where my body settled easily like a puzzle piece. We both sagged slightly into each other.

  “I’m happy with my decision,” Sinclair said softly.

  Margot stared up at him with large unblinking eyes. Sinclair’s words had cracked open her hard exterior, leaving her open and vulnerable beneath our scrutiny. I could see the truth of her love in the glazed stare, the trembling lower lip, but I could also read her determination to support him in the way she squared her shoulders, nodded her head curtly at him before turning to me.

  “I hope you’re half as brave as him. He deserves a lot.”

  “I know,” I said, because she was right on both accounts. Sinclair was the bravest man I knew, pursuing what was right for him – which was somehow me – despite all the obstacles, moral and physical. Being with him, taking that final step in the betrayal of my sister, wasn’t about me being a villain, it was about me a heroine, his heroine.

  This is going to kill you, this has been killing you all along, but I’m going to pull you out of this hellish situation and I’m going to love you more than anyone ever has every day after to prove to you how much that pain was worth it. We are going to resurrect each other.

  Sinclair’s words from our lunch date reverberated through my head.

  I straightened my spine, skated my hand under his coat and around his back so that we both clutched each other. “I’ve always appreciated your take on the situation, Margot. What you’ve said, what you are saying, isn’t wrong. But neither is this.”

  Her lips rolled under but after a long moment of intense staring, she shifted on her feet and nodded at me. “Okay. Good luck then.”

  She turned back to Dean, who was standing with soggy shoulders a couple feet behind her. She hesitated before reaching up on her tiptoes to press a kiss to his cheek. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  He nodded but his eyes were on Sinclair. After Margot moved out of hearing distance, he took a step forward to extend his hand to Sin, his eyes sad despite his smile. “Sorry about my girl. You know how she can be, fire and ice and all that.”

  “I don’t know,” Sinclair said firmly, deliberately. “But I’ll take your word for it, Dean.”

  The older man smiled again at both of us, dropping the handshake tiredly before putting both hands deep in his pockets and taking off after his wife.

  Sinclair and I stood there for a minute or two after they left before he wrapped me up in both arms and hugged me tightly. I giggled into his coat because his affection made me giddy.

  “You are so beautiful to me,” he said into my hair.

  I smiled when he buried his nose in it and inhaled, knowing I smelled like lavender.

  “Did you mean what you said?”

  I pulled back within the span of his arms so that I could stare up into his electric eyes. “Yes. The affair was wrong, keeping it a secret compounded that, I think. A lot of people – our friends and family included – are going to hate us and they might never stop.” I reached up to run my fingers through his lush hair like I had wanted to do all night. “But I would take all the hate in the world if it meant your love.”

  Sinclair’s face broke into a colossal grin, his teeth exposed and shining in the city lights. I grinned back at him, my happiness rushing through me, pushing against my tongue so that I almost gagged with it. Instead, I laughed. And after a moment, he laughed with me, great rolling guffaws that shook our bodies and made my belly ache. It was silly and it made me feel like the teenager I had never been, impulsive and full of impossible fire.

  I moaned when Sin swooped down to capture my smile between his lips. My body melted against him, his strong hold the only thing keeping me steady as he kissed me deeply. I tried to pull away slightly, aware that we were in a public, albeit fairly deserted place, but he only brought me closer with a low growl. He gathered my wrists behind my back into one of his hands and pulled me tightly against him. I wiggled against his hold, tilting my hips back and forth over the erection I could feel against my belly.

  “Come back to my hotel room,” he murmured against my skin. “I have a surprise for you.”

  I giggled, thrusting my breasts into his chest as I wiggled my eyebrows salaciously. “I don’t think it’s much of a surprise at this point, Sin.”

  He blinked blankly before chuckling. “Your dirty mind always surprises me.”

  A few weeks ago, I would have blushed. Instead,
I pried one hand out of his hold in order to cup his rigid length through his slacks. “Pleasantly, I hope.”

  He groaned when I squeezed him. “Most definitely. But that is not actually the surprise I was referring to.”

  When I pouted, he smiled. “I promise it will be just as fun.”

  I widened my eyes comically and grabbed his hand to drag him along behind me as I marched to the curb to hail a cab. “Just as fun as sex? Okay, this I have to see.”

  Chapter Twenty One.

  Sinclair had the Royal Suite at the St Regis. It was ridiculously beautiful, with heavy velvet drapes, a black marble fireplace and luxurious furnishing. Yet I could barely take my eyes off of Sinclair as he competently removed our coats, hung them up in the closet and called down to the reception for a bottle of wine to be brought up. He moved through the world with a confidence and discipline that awed me especially given the way he had grown up before the Percys had found him.

  “Please take a seat,” he said with a wave towards the two sofas.

  “Did you take finishing classes?” I asked, plopping onto the couch with a smile of glee at how comfortable the fabric was beneath my palms.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was just wondering if you took finishing classes, or the male equivalent, whatever that may be. You went from a French orphan to a Governor’s son practically over night.”

  “I had a private tutor and I was enrolled at Trinity.” At my blank look, he explained, “It’s the best prep school in the country. The summer they brought me over here, I spent every day perfecting my English, learning Spanish and improving my standing in every other academic arena. Willa took me through the more delicate etiquette of high society herself.”