Pretty Perfect Toy -- A Temptation Court Novel (Temptation Court, Book 2) (3 page)

That is only where the magic begins.

The alcove is aglow, though not by artificial means. A hundred white candles burn in ornate medieval candelabra, their stone bases carved with a menagerie of animals and—of course—angels. More candles are arranged in the center of a table set for two, with a plate of fresh meats, cheeses, and vegetables accompanied by a tall bottle of Italian red wine. Another plate holds an assortment of fancy desserts. The air is a rich mix of sinful and spiritual, the savory food blending deliciously with the tapers’ warm wax.

“
Oh
.” I gasp it before I can help it. While the museum tour has been wonderful despite Blythe’s bizarre behavior, this is the last—but absolutely best—thing I have fathomed as a grand finale. A medieval-style dream come to life, with my own gorgeous knight.

I
hope
that is what the
two
chairs mean…

Especially when Blythe lifts both brows expectantly at Cassian, then prompts, “Wellll?”

Cassian squares his shoulders. Sweeps an appraising look across the balcony. As a result,
I
do not stop gazing at
him
. Is he adopting “CEO Face” just for me? He knows what it does to me; I have
told
him in words of his own language—words borrowed from my best friend Vylet, a self-proclaimed “Americano junkie,” to make sure he understands the point, loud and clear.

Turn-on. Panty dissolver. Invitation to lick.

Without looking at me—another purposeful move?—he pivots his attention back toward Blythe. Waits through one more pause before speaking.

“It’s perfect.” He grins big, hauling the other man in for a one-shouldered bump. “Thank you, Blythe. Can’t express my gratitude enough.”

“Oh, you already
do
, Mr. Court.” Before I can decipher
that
bit of gushing, the man is back in professional mode, bowing to both of us with formality rivalling any Sancti Palais page from back home. “With that, I bid a fond
bon soir.
Simply pick up the red courtesy phone when you’re ready to depart. Security will phone your car to the front and let you out.”

“Outstanding.”

Blythe bows low over my hand before leaving completely, ensuring I stand in a pool of my own confusion as soon as he shuts the door and is gone. Though I direct my frown out toward the glistening waves and watercolor-bright sky, my unease has not escaped Cassian’s observance. Not that I expected it to. The man has been my personal mind reader since the moment we met.

“All right.” He demands it in a murmur against my hair, tucking me close to his body. “Out with it.”

“With what?”

“You
really
giving me that,
armeau
?”

“And are you really using
that
word…now?”

Armeau
. It is not a term he throws around lightly—because he knows that I do not. The Arcadian word for “gift” carries a double meaning, used to denote a person who is special above others in a person’s life. When used, it…
elevates
a conversation.

“Sure as hell am.” Though his reply comes without a skipped beat, he lets one pass while drawing up and re-locking our stares. “You’re troubled. Why?”

I wrestle my gaze away. Turn it back to the horizon, banking that the sunset will hold it still for more than a few seconds. The gamble was worth it. The sky is a palette of pink and orange, the river a collection of purple and gold. I walk to the balcony’s edge. For a moment, I can truly imagine we are a knight errant and his lady, enjoying a respite as day transforms into night. “There is no room for troubled here.” I hope my peaceful breath proves how much I mean it.

“You accuse me of pulling the
armeau
card, then use a line like that?”

Dismissive shrug. “Worth a try.”

Cassian chuckles hard enough to make me join in. Soothes my frayed nerves a little more by stepping behind me, caging me against the stone ledge, hands flattened just next to my elbows. “You weren’t comfortable during the tour.”

I shift a little. Enough to assure myself his warmth is real…

Including the stiff ridge between his thighs.

“Not true.” I curl one of his arms forward, around my waist.
More…
I want so much more. Though keeping our hands from each other would be a feat close to achieving world peace, his recovery from the shooting has stopped us short from being fully passionate for the last six weeks—meaning everything about his nearness coats my senses like a wizard’s spell. His scent, cedar and soap and musk. His muscles, now leaner but more defined because of the changes in his workouts. His masculine force, potent and stringent, as if trying to gash its way out of his body and into mine. “The tour, I was very comfortable with.”

“But…?”

His voice vibrates along my ear. I swallow, struggling not to let that fire course through the rest of me…but as my toes burn with it, I embrace the defeat. “But Blythe…”

“Blythe?” He jerks back. Just a little. “You’re in a twist about
him
?”

“He…” My lips purse. Borrowing serenity from the sky, despite how the man swirls heat through my belly with tiny circles of his fingers, I push on. “He…wants you, Cassian. In
that
way.”

He resettles behind me. Expands the caresses, playing at the top of my panties through my light cotton dress, while teasing my neck with a soft chuckle. “Is that all?”

I take my turn for a little jerk. “Is that
all
?”

“I’ve known the man for years, Ella. And he isn’t subtle.”

“Isn’t—? Wait. You mean he’s…tried to…”

“
Tried
.” He has the nerve to chuckle about it. “Long ago.”

“
How
long?”

“Long enough.”

“And—and did you—errrm—
return
his—his—”

Another chuckle, huskier and sexier, before he dips in to nip at the space beneath my ear. “What do
you
think?”

I squirm. Battle through the steam he has thickened through my senses with his oh-so-talented fingers and lips. “I think you are a man of many passions—”

“
Specific
passions.” He trails that incredible mouth down, lining my shoulder with tingles of perfect heat. “Most particularly, for strawberry blondes with the sky in their eyes and heaven in their kiss.” One of his hands sprawls across the front of my throat, compelling me tighter against him. “Oh yeah…and accents. Ones that remind me of Mediterranean islands with trellises full of possibilities…”

Even in my confusion, I smile. His reference to the night of our first kiss, when he scaled a trellis to get onto my balcony then into my bedroom, can bring nothing else. “But only one of us in that room was still a virgin, Cassian. And I can accept that, even if I do not understand all of it—”

“And I don’t want you to.” His voice, deepening with new solemnity, sends vibrations of emotion through me. And confusion.

“But—”

“Ssshhh.”

“
Cassian.
We have been open with each other since the start—” When we had to negotiate the terms of the contract that brought me here. Forty million of his dollars. Six months of my life. And the possibility of having exactly this. A connection my spirit has never felt with anyone…

“And I’m being open with you now.” He turns me back to face him, stroking tendrils of hair from my face as the wind kicks up—and pointedly clearing his throat as our lower bodies fit against each other again. “As a matter of fact,”—his brows jump and his nostrils flare—“if I’m any
more
open about things…”

Against my better instinct, my lips tip up. Against the same intuition, let him see the shudder claiming me as we mesh, soft to hard, woman to man…
perfection
. “I…I do not want you to think I am prying. It is not my place. In just four months—”

He does not allow me to finish. Correction: commands me not to, in the form of a kiss bordering on punishing. His mouth is so incessant, half the air punches from my lungs. The other half funnels strength into my arms, seizing him by both biceps as our lips crush and meld and ravish each other.

A cacophony of heat and heartbeats later, he draws back, gaze thick with sage smoke. “I’ve imposed few rules about this whole thing,
favori
,” he utters. “But right now, I’m invoking a new one.” His hand moves in, spreading across the back of my head. “No more countdowns.” His fingertips curl in, pulling at my hair. “I need to have this.” Tightens even harder. “Just this. Just…you. Okay?”

He yanks a third time. I let my head tilt, succumbing to the bite of pain. Slide my eyes closed for an instant. “Okay.”

His grip eases a little. “So we’re good?”

“Good.” I manage to volume into it. “Yes. Of—of course. We are good.”
Just do not stop holding me like this.
“We are completely…squalid.”

He chuffs. “You mean
solid
?”

“Oh. Hmm. That makes sense.”

He brushes his lips down over mine again. Raises back up enough to murmur, “You sure about that?”

“About what?”

“Me. Making sense.” He dips both hands back down—pulling me harder against him, making my legs widen for him. “Maybe I need to
show
you solid, instead of just telling you.”

“
Ahhh
.” It spurts out on a gasp as my limbs shudder, my skin tingles, and my sex pulses. My head falls back again, whirling in a new vortex of color and feeling, letting Cassian completely take over again. I am lost in his ruthless strength, as he lifts me to the balcony’s thick brick ledge. Engulfed in blood red, in the sunset that bathes his taut, sharp face. A delighted quarry of joy, without sorrow or penance. If we
are
in hell, I gladly relinquish my rights to heaven.

Obscenities blur, steaming from Cassian as he clamps lips to my neck and suckles his way down, down, down… “God
damn
,” he echoes, twisting free the buttons at the front of my dress then nosing aside my bra…to find my erect tip awaiting his attention.

As his mouth closes in, a strangled choke bursts up my throat. We are not officially “in church” but might as well be, with hundreds of spirits, saints, and martyrs immortalized in art below us. My cries of arousal cannot be any more welcome here than in a real house of worship—though that is exactly how I feel right now, as Cassian licks me, laves me, and adores me, his attention not skipping a single inch of my breasts, now jutted up at him in twin spikes of need.

“Cassian.” It is a whisper of desperate, burning need. I shove a hand beneath his shirt, seeking his nipples too…repeating his name as I pinch them both. He hisses then grimaces, letting the pain jolt through him, before crashing his lips atop mine again.

Inside my mouth, his tongue is a vengeful animal. He tackles, twirls, punishes, penetrates. Scrapes my lips…and sucks out my breaths. By the time he is done, my hands have circled to his back, scratching down his shoulders and spine—

And his hands are under my dress…toying with my panties.

“Tell me they’re white.”

I smile against his mouth. How this man can enchant
and
empower me, in the space of but four words, takes my breath away again. Is it something all men feel about the woman they’ve deflowered—and their panties? And does the answer really matter…as long as I only care about what
this
man feels?

And how I continue to make him feel…

And
oh,
all the things he continues to make
me
feel…

Especially as I whisper in reply, “Yes, Cassian. They are white.” I jot in one of my mental journals, which by now have begun to outnumber my physical ones:
buy more white panties
.

He growls in approval. Drops a stare of the same intent down over me, while working his hands around my hips…then beneath the very garment responsible for pumping both our lusts higher…

and higher…

“
Fuck
.” The stunned flare in his voice is mirrored in his gaze. “Ella…your sweet parts…”

Before I can help it, a giggle overflows. “My
sweet parts
?” It is interesting to be the one
not
fumbling for words. Is Cassian Court, the man with a thousand dirty synonyms, suddenly out of golden prose? And why is stunned and awkward just as stunning on him as commanding and knowing?

“They’re—” His breath hitches again, as he explores my mound more thoroughly. “They’re so—”

“Trimmed?” I barely get it out at full volume. As he slips fingers past the neat patch of hair then further, between my intimate lips, my most sensitive button shivers. Heat races through my sex. My hands tighten, gripping the ropes of his muscles. My body arches, lifting toward him…blooming for him as if it is the first time he has stoked this sparkling fire in me. In many ways, it is. We are not the same two people who burst into our first kiss, in the shadows of my bedroom on Arcadia, two months ago. Now, he is much more than the riveting billionaire come to strike a deal with my father—and I am not the virgin girl melting in his arms. I am a woman. The woman who knows what the zenith of his passion looks like. Tastes like. Feels like. Who has been without it for so long…
too
long. Who needs it so badly, I am dizzy from the need.

“When did you do it?” His question, just as much a demand for
why
I did it, is rough along my cheek.

“You mean tame the forest?” I quip. “Yesterday. You had the big meeting about the Singapore power grid integration, so Kate and I took a long lunch. She might have mentioned something about how you like…things…this way.”

His brow knits. “How the hell does
Kate
know about—”

“Because she has been your trusted friend since college?” I am glad for the chance to tease a little more—and wrestle my libido to a semblance of control. “And…she might have mentioned that you chattered about it during a night of excessive drinking. And…I might have coerced her into taking me to the spa, once I knew. It was
my
idea,
not
hers, so place the blame properly. I just wanted to please you.”

“Mishella.” A subtle growl advances up his throat. He resettles me with harsher jerks, fitting our crotches back together again. “You please me just by being here with me. You please me with the brilliance of your mind, the challenge of your spirit, and the music of your laugh.” His stare slides to my mouth. “And you
definitely
please me with your passion…”