At His Mercy (4 page)

“Mr. Knight, I would apologize for the necessity of this visit and my intrusion, but you have been ignoring my correspondence for some time now. One cannot simply
put off
an IBAMA investigation, sir.”

Motioning toward the round table by the patio door, to the coffee and tea set out with sugar, when I really wanted to toss the man out by the collar, I said, “Please, sir, be seated. A coffee.”

Vaz took a step back and straightened his fitted black blazer, a hesitation I read as surprise that I maintained a professional façade when pressed.

Once he was settled, sipping sweet tea, I continued, “You are mistaken, Mr. Vaz. I’ve received your inquiries regarding the permits and activities on the undeveloped sections of the island, and my assistant has been forwarding our documentation to you promptly. Have you not received it?”

“It is incomplete at best, Mr. Knight. How can the handful of permits and surveys you have provided comprise more than a fraction of the environmental documentation required for a holding of this size? The dates bring up more questions. There simply wouldn’t have been time to survey such a large area for flora, for fauna, for water resources, to draft and review all the reports, to obtain the local and federal approvals, to—.”

I held up one hand. “Please, Daniel. I think you are under the impression that there is a great deal more going on here on Ilha De Flor than is the case. Have you come prepared to stay a day or two?” The investigator put his cup down with exaggerated care and nodded slowly. “Good. I would suggest then that you take some time to settle into our accomodations.” A quick glance up into his hard, dark eyes. “The Presidential Suite, perhaps?” Small blessing that Nina had decided not to stay. “You can have breakfast and get changed into field clothes, and I will show you exactly what we are doing. I’m sure I can put these concerns to rest.”

Vaz relaxed back into his chair, smoothing down his tie. Much more calmly, he agreed, “Yes, I am sure. Two hours then?”

“Two hours.”

I showed him to the door, quite certain now what kind of man I was dealing with and why he was here.

“Are there irregularities in the permits?” she asked.

I should have expected Chloe to listen in. As she padded barefoot into the room, I pivoted to face her. Inclining my head at her, I eyed the towel, and she let it drop from her body—bared again, as she should have been, always.

“Better,” I said. “The permits are in order. A little unorthodox, perhaps, but that has more to do with how little actual development I’m planning for an island this size and absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Vaz’s real reason for being here.”

“Which is?”

“He’s fishing for a bribe.”

Her brow knit. “How can you tell?”

“That suit is too far out of his pay grade, among other things. And he wouldn’t have agreed to stay in the Presidential Suite otherwise, for fear of the appearance of impropriety.”

I might have expected another woman to question my reasoning, but Chloe was a lawyer, an observant woman, and she knew her way around the culture of international business.

“Are you going to pay him?”

“Absolutely not. There’s a… Well, let’s just call it a parasitic edge to Mr. Vaz. He’s eager to play in the big leagues. Compelled. Addicted. I never throw money down a bottomless hole. So I’ll just find another way to…make friends with the man.”

“Because you’re so good at making friends,” Chloe muttered under her breath, gaze darting away in what looked suspiciously like a roll of the eyes.

The back of my neck tightened. So she was still mad, was she? Tenacious little brat. I’d have spanked her if it would have modified that attitude, if I thought she’d have let herself enjoy it.

“Something you have to say, Miss Bloom?”

A frown played against that pink bow of her lips, disappeared, then hinted around the corners of her mouth again. She was debating her answer, I assumed.

“Gabriel isn’t going to be feeling particularly friendly toward you if he finds out about that letter.”

I folded my arms and nodded and ventured slowly forward until I was standing over Chloe, looking down into those deep brown eyes set above that determined arc along her mouth. “I’d chastise you for being nosy if I didn’t recognize that’s just in your nature.” Other than looking nonplussed, she didn’t react. “And I
don’t
owe you an explanation, but I’ll give you one anyway, because dealing with Mr. Vaz already has me exercising my generosity today.”

“No, sir, you’re correct. You don’t owe me anything.”

Chloe had a gift for making “sir” sound like “fuck off.” And to imagine, up until meeting her, I hadn’t thought defiant submissives were to my taste.

“Oh, please, Miss Bloom. I insist. You work in environmental law. Surely you heard about that whole kit fox debacle in Central California seven or eight years ago, with that massive freeway project and questionable environmental reports and the delayed opening when one of those darling little animals
that supposedly weren’t there
ran across the roadway the day before it was due to open for traffic? Or that leaky billion dollar tunnel in France? Or the three hundred thousand dollar bridge repair in Baghdad four years ago that somehow turned into a fifty million dollar contract? PPMI, every single time.

“Of course, the French project was AraTec, but that’s owned by PPMI, and the American company involved in the Baghdad project is owned by a corporation that’s owned by PPMI, but you see where I’m going with this, I’m sure. All roads lead to Rome, and they all have the same imperial corporate culture. Really, I’m surprised they didn’t tap you or your partners to defend them for the Senate hearing I’ve heard they have brewing in the backrooms.”

I nearly bit my tongue when this came out of my mouth. Chloe hadn’t actually told me she was a lawyer or any of the details about her job in environmental law. I recovered before she could react, asking, “How happy do you suppose Gabriel would be working for them? You think they’d tag him as management material?”

The smug line to her lips faded by degrees, but she didn’t look at me. I’d made my point. At another time, with another woman, I would have said that was enough, but I wanted an apology from Chloe for jumping to conclusions
again
. I wanted her to say I was right to look out for Gabriel. I wanted her to recognize that it wasn’t even really my responsibility, but I did it anyway. I wanted her to admit she had misjudged me and tell me I wasn’t the man she had assumed, not like Penn Ellison at all, but a man she could admire and respect. I wanted…that to be true, despite the fact that it wasn’t.

Catching myself staring at her lips, at the way her hair fell in sensual tangles down her shoulders and curled about the dark buds of her nipples, I took a rousing breath and stepped away from Chloe Bloom.

“I have to get ready to babysit an environmental investigator on the take now,” I told her. “I’ll trust you to manage things here.”

She shook her head as though she didn’t understand. “You’re really just going to play along with Vaz? Can’t you at least…record your conversations or…or…?”

“Don’t worry about it, Miss Bloom,” I said, and I turned and made for the door. “It’s not your concern.”

***

It couldn’t have been more infuriating if Adrian had told me not to worry my pretty little head about what went on between the men.

Nothing riled me more than outright criminality. Not the situations where companies got in over their heads on a project and overpromised environmental benefits they had trouble delivering or the penny-pinching over mitigation banks. But the bribes, the kickbacks, the blatantly inflated cost estimates, the fraudulently understated environmental impacts. These were what made me consider switching to the other side of the aisle, prosecuting instead of defending corporations that considered themselves untouchable. The fact that my partners tended to shunt the legitimate mitigation work my way kept me happy enough that I never acted on the temptation.

In the bedroom, I kicked a pair of loafers Adrian had tried on and left in the middle of the floor. Then I had to rearrange the neat line of shoes they hit and sent askew. The man was worse about his collection than any girl I’d ever known.

Worse than Penn, who had two kinds of superbly expensive shoes he preferred. He owned three pairs of each, two in black and one in brown. And why was I thinking about that, about him? Except to beat myself up again about going against my instincts when I’d met him. I didn’t date clients, I’d said. But his father was the client—of the firm, not actually mine. I didn’t approve of the Ellisons’ fast and loose philosophy for interpreting governmental regulations. But it wasn’t sinister, Penn had insisted, just the inevitable messiness of multi-million dollar projects that sometimes took as long as a decade from inception to build-out. I had let him convince me. And I’d been wrong.

I stewed about it all day, as I sorted Knight’s mail, as I set his clothes out for laundering, as I prioritized his phone messages. As I straightened the chair that Mr. Vaz had left out of place and distributed the fresh orchids that had been left at the door among the vases in each room of the villa. As I spritzed Adrian’s suit for the evening with the barest hint of that citrus and champagne and rum cologne he ordered directly from the designer in Italy.

Only that last task made me pause. The scent affected me the way Adrian himself did, when he leaned near, when he was breathing against the crook of my neck. My fingertips skimmed the buttery-soft, tailored dress shirt where it hung on the wardrobe door waiting for its owner. My…owner.

Short-term owner.
It’s purely temporary, Chloe
, I reminded myself. I was temporary. The me who spread her legs three, sometimes four times a day for Adrian Knight, who knelt and sucked him hard on command and wore a collar in his bed, she was a passing phase. An experience to look back on later. The me who was learning to indulge her sexuality without confusing lust with love—she was coming home with me.

When Adrian returned from spending all morning and all afternoon chauffeuring the IBAMA investigator around the island, he hardly said a word to me before retreating into a hot shower. It was the first time since I’d been here that he hadn’t spent a majority of the day with me, and I fought the urge to pout. Of course he couldn’t spend all his time with me. He had a resort to run, and more assets to manage besides this, I was sure. But I was standing at the wardrobe with my face a half-inch from his shirt, sniffing that scent that was uniquely Adrian’s, when he surprised me by coming back out of the bathroom after a much shorter shower than usual. And he didn’t even notice what I was doing. I should have been relieved.

“It isn’t going well with Vaz?” I asked as I watched Adrian dry himself. He dropped the wet towel on the bed, and I frowned and grabbed it to hang it on the rack.

“Not really,” Adrian admitted as he began to dress for dinner. “I feel like I’m just giving him a guided tour of all the points in the project he can try to target if he wants to bring his influence with IBAMA to bear. He’s playing it much closer to the vest than I thought he would.”

As he talked, a few damp strands of his hair fell rakishly over his forehead, and I had to fight the temptation to smooth them back into place. My fingers twitched with the sensory memory of the softness of Adrian’s hair.

Distracting myself, I held up two long chiffon dresses, and Adrian nodded toward the powder blue one with the cap sleeves. As I slid into it, I asked, “What did you expect?”

“That I’d find his special weakness. That thing he’d give everything else up to get. Or maybe I’d get lucky and convince him of the value of the eco park.” He looked up from knotting his tuxedo tie. “It worked with you. But failing that, I’d prefer he just lay out his terms so I know whether to negotiate him down or threaten him within an inch of his life.”

I whirled from slipping on a set of strappy cream heels. “You’re joking.”

“Of course I am. I’m not negotiating with the man.”

I blinked and gaped at Adrian until he finally tossed me a playful wink. “Always believing the worst of me really does make you easy sport, Miss Bloom.”

He almost got me to smile with that one, but I didn’t want to encourage him or acknowledge that he’d already caught me twice now doing exactly as he’d charged.

As Adrian led me in to dinner, the meal arrayed as usual on the upper balcony amid the laughter of guests and the playful rumble of samba music, he leaned near. “Be your charming self with the guests, Miss Bloom, but keep your distance from Vaz. I have a bad feeling about him, and he’s still too much of an unknown quantity.”

And I wouldn’t have wanted to get in the way, I grumbled to myself. I was only a lawyer, an environmental mediator. Surely, I couldn’t have been
an asset
to Knight at a time like this. True, he hadn’t asked what I did for a living, precisely, but he was acting like he assumed I was a legal secretary. That was hardly likely with my understanding of the environmental process.

“Understood, sir,” I muttered and slid my arm slowly, meticulously,
pointedly
from his. Then I clacked quickly across the balcony to find one of Manuela’s honey cakes, chastising myself along the way. I really couldn’t blame anyone but myself if Adrian didn’t take me seriously as anything but a playmate. It might have felt like sin and bliss submitting to the domination of a strong-willed lover, but it was pleasure at a price. I don’t think Penn ever quite treated me the same after that first time I’d let him dominate me—on the roof of his penthouse under the stars and the influence of too much wine. But I’d wanted it, tipsy or not.

I had asked myself more than once over the last few weeks how large a role our bedroom activities might have played in Penn’s cheating. Had my submission made me seem weak to him? Dirty? Leaning against the stone balustrade and eyeing the couples among the crowd, I wondered about the power balance in all those relationships and forced myself to nibble slowly at the honey cake, so I’d be less likely to go through three or four of them for dinner.