She settled her chin on her hand. “You like to entertain, Alexander?”
“Yes.” Though entertaining was in the eye of the beholder at Accendos. “As for where I’d go? The Grand Canyon.”
Eric glanced at him as he poured more wine for Rebecca, which she did not need. “Grand Canyon? Seriously?”
Alexander took the wine bottle from him and corked it. “It’s the one wild place I haven’t managed to visit.”
“Speaking of wild.” Rebecca took another sip of wine. “It may be one of the few unique places left in the United States soon. It’s amazing to me how homogeneous the world is growing.”
Eric raised his glass. “To fighting homogeneity.”
Alexander met his toast, as that was something he could most definitely get behind.
Rebecca cocked her head at him as she also raised her glass. “Uniform is not something I could ever see you being.”
“Nor I,” Eric interjected. The man wore a half smile Alexander could not decipher.
“Well, gentlemen.” Rebecca put down her glass. “I appreciate the good food and conversation, but I really must go to sleep. I’m not the night owl I used to be.”
Alexander rose and eased out her chair.
“Still a gentleman, I see.” She touched his arm. “I’ll take my old room, that is if it’s still a bedroom?”
“It is, and I’ll be next door in the guest. If you need anything … ” Alexander dipped his head. Her face twisted as if she wanted to ask him something. He wished she would. He wanted to answer all her questions, but timing was everything.
“Goodnight. Eric, it was wonderful to meet you.” She held out her hand and the show-off raised it to his lips.
“The pleasure was all mine.” He held her hand a few seconds longer than Alexander liked.
“Eric, take whatever room suits. Get some rest. Work tomorrow.” The kitchen chair screeched across the floor as he pushed it back to the table.
“Thank you, Alexander.” The man had the wits not to smirk at him. He liked the guy, and he had no doubt of his professional abilities, but Rebecca brought out an uncharacteristic streak of jealousy Alexander had thought gone forever. Apparently not. Perhaps everyone was just overtired.
“Goodnight, Eric.” He followed Rebecca into the hallway. Tomorrow, he would take her for a walk, tell her all about himself—if he could wait that long.
11
Alexander threw off the sheet and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Sleep wasn’t happening. He stared at the scratched hardwood underneath his feet. He couldn’t blame his failure to sleep on the house creaking in the fading storm winds. Rebecca lay next door, and he still had so much to say to her. He also wanted nothing more than to wrap his body around her, skin to skin. Despite everything that had gone down, he still wanted her with a vengeance.
He stood and pulled on his trousers. He needed to work. Tomorrow’s to-do list became tonight’s action plan. At the top of his mental list was figuring out how to keep Rebecca close, at least not disappearing again, followed by designing a battle plan for Marston’s next counterattack. The man was entirely predictable. Eric could handle dispersing the contents of the house.
He swung the door silently open to the hallway. At the end, a glow seeped from under Charles’ bedroom door. Tell me Eric didn’t choose that room. His strides ate up the worn carpeting, and he didn’t bother to knock, instead throwing open the door with a loud bang.
Rebecca shot up from where she sat, fully dressed, on the bed. She held the photograph that he’d left in her hand. “Oh, God, Alexander. You scared me.”
“Can’t sleep?” Planning on running? That had been another thought he’d had as he’d tossed and turned over the last hour. He had the means to track down the most determined recluse but had hoped he wouldn’t have to where she was concerned.
“Not really.” She glanced down at the image of the three of them. “You kept it.”
“I did.” He stepped into the room and shut the door behind him.
Her eyes ran over his bare chest and then quickly turned to set the picture against the hobnail lamp. She ran her hand over the nubby Queen Anne bedspread. “It’s the same one.”
“Everything’s the same.” He joined her on the bed and took her hand. “Well, perhaps not everything. I apologize for my earlier emotion. Before Eric arrived.”
“Emotion.” She laughed a little. “You always were so polite. You had every right to be upset. We both do, actually.” Her eyes clouded in thought.
“One thing is the same, though.” He tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.
“My hair?”
“Your lips.”
She didn’t break eye contact. “You know, when you used to look at me like that, I believed you could see all my secrets.”
“Have many secrets?”
“A woman’s allowed some, isn’t she?” She twisted her fingers together.
He drew closer, laid his palm over her hands. “Tell me one.”
She smiled. “I looked you up a lot on Google. Not just once.”
A laugh jumped out of his throat. “I’m an easy man to find. You, however—” he raised her chin with his index finger. “—did a good job of disappearing. Now I know where you disappeared to, Miss Globe Trotter.” He couldn’t seem to stop touching her skin still freckled and smooth.
“I couldn’t seem to settle down in one place for too long.”
“Bad memories will do that to you.”
“The memories weren’t all bad. There was this.” She ran her hand over the bedspread again. “It was good, wasn’t it? Like magic?”
“It was better than good, but we were naïve, and I don’t believe in magic anymore.”
“What do you believe in?”
“Creating and then controlling your destiny.”
One side of her mouth pulled up. “An impossible luxury in my world. Nothing is in my control and my choices are limited.”
“My world is different.”
She squared herself to face him, one leg propped up between them. “I’d like to know more about you. Eric and I did most of the talking tonight. What’s your life like in Washington? You have someone special? I should have asked before.”
“No, I don’t. You?”
“No. Hard to have a relationship when you’re always catching a plane.”
So neither of them had been able to replace the other. Sadness climbed his throat, and he was getting damn sick of it.
Rebecca leaned back on her hands. “Eric is kind. Respectful, especially given what he walked in on. How did you two meet? At a charity gala?”
He laughed. “I do considerably more than go to events, but Eric and I did meet at an art auction. Later, he became part of my circle. He’s very good at what he does.”
“You two have never? I mean, I see the way he looks at you.”
“And what way is that?” He reached over and grasped her wrists, pulling them to his lap.
“Like he wants to be where I’m sitting right now. That hasn’t changed, either. Everyone wants to be as close to you as possible.”
He intertwined his fingers in hers. “Do you like being this close to me again?”
“Yes.”
The way her delicate lips parted only strengthened his need for her. “Do you remember? Kneeling at my feet. Giving yourself to me?”
She nodded slowly.
“It was an honor, Rebecca.” His mind’s eye recalled her so clearly, sneaking innocent glances up at him from under lashes darker than you’d expect from a natural redhead.
She raised her hand to his chest, and her fingertip circled the small crescent scar on his right shoulder, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I should have done more.” Her chin fell and her hand slid back into his lap.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “The day of the funeral, when you heard the gunshot, you should have come to see if it was me security shot. It was. The cops put me in the ambulance, in handcuffs
, but you didn’t know.” He lifted her chin. “Don’t blame yourself. You were scared.”
“I did know, and Alice Wynter made sure I was too scared to do anything but cower inside.” She raised her gaze. “I’m not afraid anymore, though.”
“Good.” His hand came down on her thigh. “I’m not the fledgling Dominant I was when I met you.”
“I would never have called you a fledgling.”
He chuckled. “Compared to now? Consider the man you first met an amateur.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s my life. You need to know that.” He ran his fingers through her hair, and her lashes instantly fell. “If you need a penance, I could sit you in a corner on a vibrator and edge you for hours. Make you beg to come.”
Her teeth grasped her bottom lip, and she swallowed. “I probably deserve that.”
“Deserve or desire?”
Her eyes rose to his. “Both.”
“Still interested?”
“Yes, though it’s been years.” She flushed a beautiful, coral peach.
“Then spread your knees.”
She blinked hard. “I’m not … I don’t jump in … We can’t … I mean, Eric … ” Her gaze darted to the door. “He would hear.”
“He knows all about the kind of life we once lived, though not our specific story.” He cradled her chin in his palm.
She swallowed hard again. “I’m not that young girl anymore.”
“Thank God. You turned out as I thought. Elegant. Provocative.”
“And you did, as well.” She flicked her tongue across her bottom lip. “You’re … still dashing. Such an old-fashioned word, but it suits you.” A warm flush rose in her cheeks.
He lifted her chin once more. “Even after all this time, tell me you don’t want me. Say it, if it’s true.”
“I could never not want you, Alexander.”
“Then tell me you do.”
“I do.”
He arched an eyebrow. He needed more.
She gave him more.
She swung her legs over him so she straddled him. She mashed her mouth into his, and hell, he would take that as a resounding yes. He’d let her have this little topping victory for a few seconds because memories that he’d previously been stellar at tamping down broke through the dam. Flashbacks rose up hard and clear about how it felt to settle his weight on her in sheets damp from their sweat, Charles’ limbs entwined in both of them.
He took over the kiss, pushing her tongue where he wanted it, punishing her lips and letting his hands go where they’d wanted to for the last forty years. He explored every inch of her shoulders, palmed down her back to grasp her ass, and hoisted her closer. Her soft moan at the contact was all his cock needed to lengthen fully and press into her crotch.
He twisted her hair around his fingers and yanked her head back to break the kiss. “Next time you want to kiss me, you’ll ask me for permission, won’t you, mo rúnsearc?”
Her lips parted on a sigh at hearing his endearment for her. My secret love. Her eyes misted. “Yes, sir.”
She had been one of his greatest secrets, a female on the cusp of womanhood who he’d taken before he understood the more profound responsibilities associated with dominance and submission. He’d surely go to hell for his recklessness with her. He supposed he’d deserved her complete abandonment. He’d overwhelmed her senses. Now, he was older and wiser.
“Say it. I need the words.”
“I want you.”
12
His hand curled around the back of her neck. His large palm engulfed her head, held her captive. Captive, yes, please. She shuddered as he traced the shell of her ear with his thumb.
“If you could see what I do. The light in your eyes.”
She was then on her back. His body pushed her into the mattress, and her breath grew shallow under his weight. God, she’d missed that overpowering mass of a man covering her. All along her spine, her legs, nerves that had lain dormant lit up, and her hands could not stop roaming over all his hard male muscle.
His hand kept her neck captive, the other lazily trailed down her side to her thigh. He hitched her leg up around him. Her spine arched to meet him, her crotch seeking to rub against him, anywhere and everywhere.
“Feel that?” He ground his steely erection into the apex of her thighs. “That’s what you do to me. That’s what you’ve done to me every moment for the last forty years when your memory came up.”
His words broke every latch around her heart. How foolish she’d been. He’d missed her. All this time she hadn’t been alone in those feelings. A hot tear escaped and ran down her temple. “I missed you. Every day.”
His blue eyes narrowed. “You want me, Rebecca? Want to serve me again?”
He wanted the words. She’d give them to him. “I never stopped.” She mustered as much courage as she could. “I love you, Alexander. Still.” From the second those blue eyes caught her outside in the pouring rain, any other choice that didn’t end with him, vanished. In his presence, it always did.
Perhaps that’s why she never gave into another man after him, never allowed herself to truly love another. She’d never stopped loving this man pressing her body into a mattress in the house where it had all begun.
He lifted himself from her, earning a small whimper from her in protest. For the briefest second, panic set in. He wasn’t leaving, was he?
“Facedown. Ass up.”
She twisted to lie on her stomach, and he yanked her panties down so they stretched across her thighs.
“Alexander.” His name came out as light as a breath.
He landed a sharp crack to her ass. As all the air in her lungs rushed out, and the sting traveled through her whole body, her clit roared to life. She fisted the sheets. “Sir.”
The honorific was the one bit of formality they’d adopted between them so long ago, back when protocol was scanty at best. She was now in even newer territory, but damnit, she would not stop whatever was happening. Alexander had been a god in her world. Then he was gone. Now, she was face first in a bed where …
“Rebecca. Stay with me.”
Had she been that obvious? He unfisted her hands from the sheet. His voice was in her ear, murmuring soft nothings as the sheet grew wet under her cheek. She’d begun to weep.
“You aren’t ready for this.” His voice was gentle, kind, and she didn’t deserve it. She didn’t want that. She wanted rough. She wanted the beast that lived under his polished exterior.
“No, no. Please, sir.”
“What is it you want, Rebecca?” His voice was stern, his breath hot against her neck. “Tell me the thing you don’t dare speak aloud. Give me the words.”
He was going to make her admit her need.
“I don’t know how … ” Liar. Coward. “Nothing’s changed since … ”
“Since I last took you from behind in this room? On the floor next to this bed while you took Charles’ cock in your mouth?”
Her muscles quivered with ripples of desire twisting her spine. “Yes.”
He yanked her hips up in the air, and when his mouth met her pussy, her jaw dropped open in a long moan. She took in a mouthful of sheet to keep from groaning too loudly. A red wash grew behind her eyes, a blind lust that had been banked behind acres of mental concrete and fear. He licked her deeply and thoroughly, his mouth sending one message—this body was his. It always had been.
A hot wave built between her legs, more intense than she’d ever been able to produce for herself. Wet sucking sounds filled the room, and she cried out as she began to crest. The devil knew it, too. He broke contact with her, returned her knees to the bed. She growled into the sheets in frustration.
He forced her knees wider apart, and a shameless trickle of her juices slicked each of her thighs. “Keep those wide, Rebecca. Show me what you have for me.”
Her breath was hot in her throat, and she had to keep swallowing to keep her mouth and throat occupied. She didn’t think this wa
s possible again, to feel so much lust, a bone deep, aching need to be penetrated in her pussy, her mouth, anywhere he wanted. His touch unearthed needs she’d buried long ago.
Dominance, flogging, bondage weren’t just part of her youth. They were front and center in her dreams, tucked away like treasured memories of when she could afford such luxuries as trusting someone so much you’d hand over your body to be used, pleasured, and worshipped. She hadn’t indulged in such things in decades, but God, the way Alexander handled her in the last three minutes? Please let this not be a dream.
The soft rush of fabric hitting the floor only made her desire grow. The bed jostled, and wiry hair hit the back of her thighs. She gathered fistfuls of the sheets again as the broad head of his cockhead barely breached her.
His large palms came down on her hips. “This is mine.”
“Yours.” She fought the urge to ram herself backward, to wait for him.
He pushed inside her inch by excruciating inch. He was so wide it hurt, as if he grated against a sunburn. She must have winced as he stilled with his fingers running up and down her spine. His mouth was on her neck, suckling and scratching her with his evening beard when she wanted him to just fuck her. She needed to be rubbed raw, filled, overwhelmed. She pushed backward.
“Stop.” His bark made her freeze. “Do that again and— ”
“I’m sorry, Sir. I won’t. I’m sorry, Sir.” Her rush of words was nothing but whispers.
He rammed into her to the root, and she cried out at the stab of pain. Yet the mental picture of him behind her, buried so deep inside, was enough to make her pussy weep uncontrollably. Her need for him in this moment was terrifying, overwhelming, but she craved it like a junkie. Despite his earlier bark, she pushed back against him, wanting more of his thickness to rub, scrape, force open her walls.
His voice rose over the pounding in her ears. “Do you deserve this? Me?”
How did he understand her so well? She clung to one tiny piece of disbelief that she deserved to be here. “I want to.”
Invincible (Elite Doms of Washington Book 6) Page 5
