Ruthless straight through, and this time, Rory understood that the fear that made her shiver was as much anticipation as it was joy.
Sheer, unadulterated joy, in the middle of something that she’d expected would only ever be a game of charades to her. In theory.
Rory had expected Conrad would make her feel what she had that first evening, up against his wall. She’d expected he would give her more of that pleasure. She hadn’t anticipated that he would take so much in return.
Or that she would want so very, very badly to give it.
She felt as if something shook inside of her along a deep fault line she hadn’t known was there, sending out earthquake after earthquake, but she didn’t have time to worry about that. Not when all she had to focus on was him.
“How flexible are you?” Conrad asked, almost casually.
“Very,” she replied. “I do yoga at least three times a week. When I remember.”
The gleam in his eyes made her shiver.
“Put your ankles on my neck,” he ordered her.
“Yes, Sir,” she breathed.
And she didn’t have to ask what name to use here. Not now.
She arched up from the chaise, using her grip on the slats behind her to help lift her hips. Then she slid her legs onto his shoulders, locking her ankles around his neck, as ordered. And then, for a moment, they were looking at each other down the length of her body.
Rory felt as if she was nothing but a display for his pleasure. A piece of art in a museum, pinned to a wall and helpless to do anything but accept that edgy stare of his. Maybe that was the only time paintings—she—came alive.
That idea made her clit begin to pulse, dangerously close to throwing her over the edge already.
Before he’d done a thing.
“Lovely,” he murmured, as if he knew.
The way she imagined he would always know.
With one hand, Conrad reached down and slid his hand over the curve of her ass. She could feel the slickness on his palm and understood with one shaky breath that he’d used whatever was in that tube to make them that way. And in the next breath, she could feel his slick, blunt fingers probing the tight entry to her ass.
“I told you earlier,” he said, his voice not sounding precisely calm, but a distinct order all the same. “I want all of you.”
She tried to breathe out, not wriggle away, but there was nowhere to go no matter what she did. She was trapped by her own position, locked into place, and she watched his face as he waited for her to accept that. For that rush of panic to ease a little, and a hot, red flush to take its place.
When it did, Conrad calmly worked one finger, then another, deep inside her ass.
It hurt at first. A sting and then a duller sensation that wasn’t quite an ache. She moaned, not sure where the sound had come from—only that she needed to get it out. And it still stung.
But then, she suspected it was meant to.
Conrad looked even more savage and focused than before. He used the hand wrapped around her to lift her higher, so he could fit the broad head of his cock to her pussy.
His eyes found hers, as sensation pounded through her in time with his probing, demanding fingers.
“You can move your legs from my neck,” he told her. “But I want them on my shoulders. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she panted. “Yes, Sir.”
He bared his teeth in some semblance of a grin, wild and thrilling, and he slammed himself home.
And deep inside her at last, he pressed her down to the chaise, but more importantly, deeper against the fingers in her ass.
Sensation went through her like a bomb, too intense to catalog. Everything was him. Everything was Conrad and the way he took her in two places, making her entirely his.
Rory could do nothing at all but surrender.
Her legs were draped over his shoulders as he settled in, propping himself up with one hand, and began to teach her a deep, pounding, profoundly electrifying lesson about rhythm. Possession. And that the limits of her desire were his to push.
And hers to take.
Because every slick slide of his cock and his fingers made her...blossom.
Conrad thrust deep with his cock while retreating with his fingers, then reversed it. Over and over. Again and again, until she felt as if she was suspended between the two, penetrated and conquered and never in her life so beautifully taken.
Seen and sampled and claimed.
She felt as if with every thrust, pussy and ass, he made her new.
His free hand was next to her head, and then his mouth was on hers again, his tongue a new torment, as irresistible as the rest.
And she was coming again before she knew she meant to, or could.
Because Conrad filled her, and kept filling her. Her ass, her pussy, her mouth. He took all of her, demanding everything and taking more.
Rory lost any sense of herself. She was only sensation. She was only need.
He’d called her a fuck toy, and now she understood how glorious that was. How freeing and beautiful.
To be a receptacle instead of a sphinx. To give so much that it became her own kind of taking, there in the magic of this. He was in control, but she took back control and made it...this.
Joy.
Again and again, over and over, too much sensation that spilled over into a hint of too much, and then became joy.
All that perfect friction and rhythm, and the marvelous things her body could do with both.
With him.
Once again, she lost track of the difference between coming and coming down, between ramping up and falling over.
And when he came again, lifetimes later, she thought they both exploded—bursting apart into the night, like stars.
This time, Rory was wrecked in a different way.
There was the same slow surfacing, returning to her own body instead of the one they made together.
She drank another glass of water. She ate a bit more of the food he gave her from his own hand, and this time, he didn’t lounge there like the Lord of the Manor. He didn’t ask her questions or talk to her about rules and expectations.
Maybe there was nothing to say after something so profound.
That great, beautiful darkness that was in them both now. Part of them forever.
Rory kind of thought she’d grown new bones here tonight, and his name was etched on them all.
Neither one of them spoke, there on that chaise in the last of a night that had already lasted forever. In the hot tub again, he held her close and they soaked together like that until she started to get sleepy.
And when Conrad picked her up and took her out of the tub, then toweled her dry, Rory knew she had no choice.
She had to leave, and now.
The old version of her, the one who’d showed up here tonight, would have stayed. But then, she wouldn’t have been as altered. The version of her who knew she could never go back to who she’d been knew that she had to take stock of...everything.
And she couldn’t possibly do that when Conrad was in front of her, stealing all the light from the sky.
Even in the middle of the night.
“Thank you,” she said, holding his gaze as he brought her into the house again. “You didn’t have to let me in tonight. I’ll never be able to thank you enough that you did.”
Conrad only stared down at her, as imposing naked as he was fully clothed.
And she couldn’t say anything else, because if she did, she feared that he would see far too much. When she knew that no matter what, she had to see herself first.
Maybe for the first time.
“I’m going to go now,” Rory told him when he’d set her back down on her feet. Next to the chairs where they’d sat together what seemed like a lifetime ago. The floor wh
ere she’d knelt despite how much it had scared her. The little pile of the clothes that she hardly recognized, because she’d become a stranger.
His hand moved as if of its own accord and smoothed over her hair. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Are you worried about me?” It hurt to sound dry. Arch and amused. But she had to start building back her walls, or how would she walk down a street? The sensory input would kill her within a few steps. “You don’t need to be. I’m good. Really, Conrad.”
She wasn’t sure he believed her, not with the way he looked at her, all narrow and dark. But he only nodded, with his usual authority.
Maybe she wasn’t the only one who needed to find her footing.
He insisted on calling her a car. And when it arrived, he led her outside, wearing nothing but a pair of lounging trousers, low on his hips. He stopped her when she went to climb in, once again with his hand in her hair.
Then he held it—and her. Possessively, she thought.
Like her hair was a kind of leash, and her body responded by melting all over again, as if it could never get enough of him.
Rory doubted that could change. How could it change? Even her bones felt new, and they melted, too.
She thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t. He looked down at her, his mouth a stern, almost grim line. His gaze was harsher than she’d ever seen it and still, somehow, connected to all the parts of her he touched.
All the parts of her he’d changed.
“Be well,” he told her, making it a command.
Then he let her go.
And Rory did the only thing she could.
She fled into what remained of the night, hoping that when dawn came, she would find herself whole.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A WEEK AFTER that night, Conrad stood outside of one of Paris’s most decadent, exclusive clubs. A place he was well-known, having spent so much time there over the years. He knew exactly how the night would unfold if he went inside. He could have his cock sucked within the first ten minutes, as an appetizer, as he worked out how he should further indulge himself.
But he couldn’t seem to summon up the slightest bit of interest in going inside.
He’d thrown himself into work in the wake of that night with Rory and told himself that he hadn’t had time to indulge his usual appetites. Now he did.
But he’d been staring at the secret door, conveniently placed down at the end of a dark alley, and couldn’t quite bring himself to go in. His appetite wasn’t for a buffet.
He told himself it was an aberration.
Because he had done everything he should have done. He’d found her phone number and called two days later, to make sure she was still all right. It had been a strange, stilted conversation that had left him unsettled. Wound up with a bizarre energy he’d tried to work off in the gym.
I’m well, she’d said. You told me to be well and I am.
Miles and miles he’d run to try to dislodge those words from where they were stuck inside him, with no luck.
He’d thought a night out at his favorite club might do the trick.
But he didn’t bother to go in. A week later, it was the same.
Two weeks after that, Conrad was forced to accept that he simply didn’t want anyone else.
He came to this conclusion in the bright light of a late summer day, sitting in the office building that he walked to every morning from his own personal church. It was located in one of those lovely buildings that lined the Golden Triangle, where he could look out over Paris and be glad. La Tour Eiffel. The American Cathedral. The plush green trees that lined Avenue George V. And in the distance, Tour Montparnasse.
Usually having Paris at his feet was soothing.
But today he raked his hands through his hair, wondered what the hell had become of him, and called his best friend.
“I don’t understand the issue,” Dorian said after Conrad had laid out the scenario for him. Grudgingly, because still Rory felt like his. Only his. “So she’s brand-new. So what. If you don’t handle her, someone else will. How do you imagine you’ll feel about that?”
“I’m not in the market for feelings,” Conrad said darkly.
Dorian laughed. “You can control anything, brother. But not that.”
Conrad sighed, glaring out at Paris and seeing only Rory. And the things he wanted, even when he knew better.
“The trouble is,” he said, “even if I thought it was appropriate, I don’t know if I have it in me.”
There was a pause, then. Conrad could hear Berlin street traffic. The muffled sound of conversations in animated German.
“Listen,” Dorian said after a moment. “Marie Jeanette wasn’t a referendum on your life. I know that your narrative is that she changed, but she didn’t, Conrad. She lied.”
Of all the things he thought Dorian might have said, it wasn’t that.
And Dorian wasn’t finished. “She never wanted the things you did. She wanted a meal ticket. When’s last time you saw her and Claude in any kind of scene? That’s not part of their life.”
“Many people take their play private,” Conrad said. “Including, as an example, you.”
He regretted it the moment he said it, given said private play involved his sister these days.
“But it’s still a huge part of my life,” Dorian said, then laughed at the expression on Conrad’s face he must have sensed was there. “Though I will spare you the details.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Conrad said dryly. “My understanding is that you and Erika both took holy orders.”
Dorian only laughed again. “Marie Jeanette didn’t want to play, ever. Now she doesn’t have to. She used you, you rightly scraped her off, and I don’t think you should allow the memory of that situation to inform what you do now. You’re allowed to care, Conrad. That’s not a detriment to who you are as a dominant or as a man. It’s what makes you both of those things.”
Because, though his friend wouldn’t say it, Dorian had never been among those who thought Conrad was heartless.
And it was with his best friend’s words ringing in his ears, whether he wanted them to or not, that Conrad told his secretary to hold all his calls and cancel his appointments, because he was going out.
He assumed that Rory might be anywhere, really. The whole city was available to her, after all, since she went about cleaning people’s houses. He assumed she would be off intruding on the privacy of others—and why did he now find that amusing?—but when he went to her flat, the chatty man in the boulangerie below was only too happy to inform him that Mademoiselle Morton did not work on Tuesdays.
Conrad hadn’t quite believed where the man had said she was instead.
The truth of the matter was, he had never heard of a cat café.
But when he stalked his way down the street and to the very edge of her neighborhood, the evidence was impossible to ignore. Sure enough, there was a cat café.
A café. With cats.
And not merely a motif of cats, as he had convinced himself on the walk over.
But a café in which there were actual cats. Roaming about.
Conrad wrenched open the door, looked inside, and was not the least bit surprised to find Rory sitting at a café table, a coffee at her elbow, a white cat with a smushed-in face in front of her and a giant ginger one on her lap.
There were cats everywhere. They were covering all the surfaces, climbing up and down trees made of furniture, presumably put there for that purpose.
If you do this, a voice in him that might have been himself all those years ago, flush with certainty after ending things with Marie Jeanette, you can never tell yourself later that you didn’t know what you were walking into.
Because, when he stopped to think about it, of course Rory wouldn’t be in a typica
l café, like every other tourist and Parisian. Of course, though she was in Paris, she was here.
Rory shifted in her chair, the enormously fat orange cat on her lap, and glanced over. And she didn’t startle. She didn’t look at all surprised. She kept her gaze on Conrad as if she’d been waiting for him to come.
That, too, felt very nearly inevitable.
He made his way to her table, distantly amazed that the place was doing a brisk business. All these people, gathered here to...pet the cats, apparently?
When he arrived at her side, he claimed the only empty chair—as the others were occupied, by cats—and sat down. And for a moment, he and Rory stared at each other. The cat in her lap stared too, and Conrad could not have said in that moment which heavy gaze on him was more disconcerting.
And this was all so deeply absurd, so comical and yet somehow perfectly Rory, that Conrad might have sat there forever.
But Rory shifted in her chair again, hugged the lummox of a cat in her lap closer still, and surprised Conrad completely by smiling.
It was like sunshine breaking through the clouds, when he knew it was a perfectly pleasant day outside.
He felt his chest tighten and resisted the urge to rub at the place where his heart seemed to beat triple time.
She was even more beautiful than he remembered, even here. Even though he found himself surrounded by animals, literally, mewling and butting up against his leg. He gazed down at the two below him, and they both flattened their ears—but stopped.
When he looked at Rory again, her smile had faded from her mouth, but was still there in her lovely eyes. It made them gleam.
“Conrad Vanderburg in a cat café,” she said, and shook her head. “This must be a dream.”
“It is certainly not my dream,” he replied darkly.
And he couldn’t help himself. He reached over and took her hand. Maybe because, once he did it, he wanted to see if it was still there.
That spark. That kick.
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