The Ultimate Seduction (8 page)

The mood and music came across as a lazy, exotic throb.

“No,” she said firmly, smart enough to be wary of his power once he got his hands on her. The way he’d felt her up on the dance floor last night had obviously been a spell of some kind.

“Downstairs it is. Shall we say one hour? I can shave and change in fifteen minutes, but you women need twenty just to find a pair of shoes.”

“He said,” she mocked, “demonstrating his vast experience with the opposite sex.”

“I won’t apologize. We’re adults. We can enjoy each other if we want to.” He moved forward to set a brief but profound kiss on her startled mouth. “Sure you don’t want to stay in?” he asked in a private tone that made her blood flutter in her arteries.

Oh, she was tempted, but she shook her head. “I’m not sure I even want to see you again.”

“Meet me downstairs, Tiffany, or I’ll come looking for you. But I don’t want to waste time searching. Set your watch.”

She shook her head. “I don’t like people thinking they can talk to me. I’d rather leave it on Do Not Disturb.”

“Set it so
I
can find you.” At her blank look, he gave her a head shake of exasperation. “Where is it? I’ll show you.”

A few minutes later she stood in her empty suite wondering how she’d gone from crying in the shower to having a date, one that made her feel more awake and alive than—this was dangerous—any other time in her life.

Oh, Tiffany, be careful. You could still fall for the wrong man.

No, she wasn’t that pathetic and vulnerable, she assured herself. Nor was she strong enough to stay in her room and risk his coming for her. Besides, she had enjoyed feeling normal. There was no crime in that, was there?

She liked even more the idea of making him see her as beautiful. Turning, she went to see what treasures the designers might have left her.

CHAPTER FIVE

R
YZARD
MOVED
THROUGH
the three-dimensional images of a
carnivale
parade. He had to be careful. There were real people,
Q Virtus
members and
petite q’s,
dressed as colorfully as the fake partiers, but for the most part he walked right through projections of extravagant floats and scantily clad women wearing beaded bikinis and feather headdresses. He stopped for a troupe of men in checkered pants and neon elephant masks when they began a tumbling routine in front of him, nearly convinced they were real.

His watch hummed, indicating Tiffany was close by, but
where?

His need to see her again, to know she’d come down here for him, was out of proportion to any normal sort of anticipation. He brushed it aside, thinking if he could have her just once more, he’d be able to forget about her. It didn’t matter that she’d revealed more about herself than he’d ever heard from all other
Q Virtus
members combined. Like most of the happenings here, their private conversation would stay locked in his own personal vault, not even to be revisited by him.

He especially refused to dwell on their comforting embrace when her mixture of grief and anger and self-blame had struck a chord in him. Even though, for the better part of a minute while he held her, he’d been at peace for the first time in a long time.

He stepped on a man’s hands and looked through the feet that would have struck him in the nose if the vision was real. Music blared, voices cheered, and the holographic players were so dense he might as well have been in a crowd on the street.

There.
All the hairs stood up on his body as he took her in.

She had her head bent to study her watch and pivoted as though trying to orient herself with a compass. The movement allowed him to take her in from all sides.

She really was strikingly beautiful. Tall and slender, but generously curved in the right places. He swallowed. She wore some kind of jumpsuit that clung from knees to elbows, then flared into ruffles down her forearms and over her shins. It had a subtle sparkle in its midnight blue color and clung to her ass so lovingly, his knees weakened.

He mentally recited the populations of Bregnovia’s cities, trying to keep hold of his control as he approached her. Sidling up behind her, almost touching, he inhaled where she’d left the right side of her neck bare, gathering her hair to the left so it covered the scars.

“What the hell are you wearing?”

Her head came up. “You don’t like it?” She jiggled the watch in her hand. “This thing was buzzing at me, but I couldn’t figure out if you were over there or over there.”

“I’m here,” he growled, wanting so badly to palm the firm globe near his crotch his hand burned.

“So you are.” She turned to study his mask from behind her own. “Hello again, Mystery Man. Buy me a drink? I’ve had a terrible day with the most arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerk you can imagine.”

Few people could get away with insulting him so openly, but he found her brashness refreshing. Maybe even reassuring. She wasn’t as vulnerable as she’d seemed in her suite. Good.

Testing the waters, he said, “I’m looking forward to one myself. I was stuck all evening with the most infuriating female, smart as a whip, but
blonde.
No offense.” He tugged one of her ringlets.

For a moment her mouth stayed flat and humorless, just long enough for doubt to creep over his conscience. Then her lips twitched and a pretty, feminine chuckle erupted, sounding a shade rusty, as if she hadn’t laughed unreservedly in a long time, but it engaged him in a way he hadn’t expected. He instantly wanted to hear it again.

“None taken,” she assured him breezily, turning to grasp his arm above his elbow, demonstrating how much self-assurance she possessed when she wasn’t paralyzed by self-consciousness. “Can you believe this parade? I thought it was real.”

Despite wanting to remark on the sudden change in her, he decided to go with it.

“The first time I saw this technology, it was a rain forest. It wasn’t as robust as this, but the rain effect was quite something.”

“You’ve been coming to these shindigs for a while?”

“This is my twenty-fifth. I earned a pin.” He lifted his lapel to draw her eye to the small gold button.

“Nice. What does it do? Beam you up? Shoot lasers?”

“It tells people I belong.”

* * *

Ryzard’s mouth tightened after he spoke, as if he hadn’t meant to reveal that, which piqued her curiosity all the more. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head, trying to dismiss her curiosity. “They have a live performance on the beach tonight. Shall we check it out?”

“Are you sensitive to not belonging because of the UN thing? You must know how slowly the wheels of political progress can turn. If the old boys’ network is refusing to pick you for their team, tell them to stuff it.”

His mask annoyed her. He was already pretty stoic, and now she had to try reading his emotions from the way the corner of his supersexy mouth flattened with disgust.

“I’ve learned to do exactly that, Tiffany. And it really doesn’t matter to me if I’m rejected or found wanting, but I can’t bear for my country to be discriminated against.”

Discriminated.
There was a big word. As a woman she’d been on the short end of that nastiness even in her own home in favor of her brother, but she couldn’t imagine it happening to a man who showed so few weaknesses. He wasn’t a typical representative of the people she understood to suffer the worst end of biases.

“When were you picked on? Why?” she asked, allowing him to steer her through the shower of candies that should have landed with a sting or crunched under her platform shoes.

He shrugged as if the details were inconsequential. “Different times. When I was a child and didn’t yet speak German. I was late to sprout and quick to fight, angry that I couldn’t see my parents. My temper was a problem. Getting a legitimate passport was a nightmare, so I was forever in a country illegally. That’s one of the reasons I picked grapes. Things like visas can be overlooked when the fruit is ripe and a transient offers to help. But when I tried to go to America, they wanted nothing to do with me.”

“So you went to Russia.”

“There are parts as wild as your early frontier. Misfits are the rule.”

“Which country’s passport do you travel on now?”

“Bregnovian,” he asserted, as if that should be obvious.

“But it’s not recognized? That still keeps you from entering America?”

“I wouldn’t be allowed into Venezuela.”

“But you’re welcome here.” She pointed at the floor of the club.

He nodded once, still seeming bristly.

She considered how that might feel, always being separated and left out. Being who she was had always ensured her entrée into virtually any situation. For all her father’s faults and detractors, he was still welcome everywhere. Even with her scars, she wasn’t locked out. It was her choice to stay home.

She looked up at Ryzard, wanting to ask how he’d come to finally go home and fund a war, but they had arrived on the beach. Bending, she removed her shoes and allowed him to take them so she could walk barefoot in the cool, powdery sand.

“That’s an excellent cover band,” she said as they moved toward the music.

“It’s the real band,” he told her, making her chuckle.

He looked at her and the corners of his mouth curled again, but his mask and the strobing lights made it hard to tell if he was smiling because he was in a good mood, or if he was laughing at her.

“I can’t get used to this,” she excused. “It’s a lot to pay just for an exclusive concert, isn’t it? The membership fee, I mean.”

“If you hadn’t been sulking in your room, you could have attended some of the lectures. There was an excellent one on the situation in Africa. Last quarter, I brokered a free trade agreement that will ease a lot of strain on our wheat and dairy production.”

She weighed that, seeing new value in these meetings and wondering if she would come to another. Maybe see him again.

Or see him with someone else.

The chasm that thought opened in her chest was so great, she quickly distracted herself by declaring with false crossness, “I wasn’t sulking.”

“You’re still pouting,” he claimed and took her jaw in a firm hand, nipping her bottom lip with the firm but tender bite of his.

A zing of excitement shot straight down her breastbone into her abdomen, then washed tingles into her limbs. Her hands instinctively lifted to his waist, but she held him off by proclaiming, “I’ve heard that all my life. I can’t help it if my bottom lip is fat.”

He drew back enough to sweep a gaze of masculine appraisal across her masked features, then bent to take a slower, more detailed tour of her mouth, allowing them both the luxury of a small feast. Absently she shuffled toward him, knees and thighs shifting so he could fit their frames together. His erection pressed into her stomach and her breasts ached as she flattened them to his chest. The music seeped through her and he began to rock them in a slow dance.

More like making love to her in public again, but who cared? No one even knew who they were. God, he felt good under her roaming hands.

“Come to my room,” he intoned against her good ear.

She had her hands fisted in his shirt beneath the jacket of his tuxedo. Everything in her wanted to hang on to him forever. It was such a dangerous precipice to stand on, so threatening of a bad fall. But she couldn’t escape how good it felt to feel wanted and beautiful and capable of giving him pleasure.

Without even doing much soul-searching—just like last night—she offered a shaky nod and let him guide her back into the club then into an elevator where they kissed with barely schooled passion. A minute later, he thumbed the sensor that opened his door and pivoted her into the foyer of his suite. It was grander than her own, but he
was
a twenty-five-visit member. Still, she barely saw it. One second later, she was in his arms.

Knocking off his mask, he dipped his head and kissed her again, discipline abandoned as he let her know with the thrust of his tongue exactly what he wanted to do to her. His hands roamed over her restlessly and he finally jerked back to say, “What the hell is this thing? I can’t find a zipper.”

Which was why she’d chosen it, she recalled dimly. Even the neckline was a difficult entry point. She didn’t have the courage to be naked with him, but she wanted to make love to him.

Smiling secretively, she fingered open the buttons of his shirt and gazed appreciatively at the sleek bronze chest plate she revealed. A narrow line of hair delineated the center of his chest and outlined his squared pecs, which were flat, firm statements of strength.

Above his left nipple, a scrolled phrase in blue ink gave her pause. Some of the letters were oddly accented, but she thought she read the word
Bregnovia.
Framing it with the finger and thumb of her splayed hand, she asked, “What does it say?”

Tension stole through him. He seemed to expend a lot of effort drawing in a pained breath. “Luiza, Martyr of Bregnovia.”

“Like our Lady Liberty?”

She drew a circle around his nipple and he jerked, making her smile.

“Yes,” he rasped. “She’s revered—damn. By all.”

Other questions crowded into her mind, but she was too distracted by his gorgeous physique. Her hands couldn’t resist smoothing over the hot satin of his skin. “You’re so perfect, Ryzard. It’s intimidating.”

“Take off your clothes,” he urged, plumping her breasts through her spandex suit.

Cruising her hand from his waist to his belt and lower, she explored the shape of him. He grunted with pleasure and was so hard against her palm, her internal muscles clenched in anticipation. She swallowed and used her other hand to fumble his pants open.

He tried to remove her mask, but she pulled away and shook her head. “Not yet.” She was too intent on being the anonymous Tiffany, the one who followed impulse and seduced a man if she wanted to. Lowering his fly, she managed to expose him, and
oh.
She went to her knees because he made her so deliciously weak.

“Tiffany,” he groaned raggedly.

She was barely touching him, too new at this to do more than brush light fingertips over him. His breaths were audible hisses of anticipation, his erection jumping in reaction to her caresses. When she smoothed her lips against silky skin over steel, the weight of his hand came to rest on her head. The other stroked her exposed cheek, fingers trembling.

An experimental lick imprinted her with the taste of him. This was new territory for her, something she’d always been curious about, but it was so much more enthralling than she’d expected. She could sense how much power she had as she learned his shape with her tongue and open-mouthed kisses

When she took the tip into her wet mouth, he growled a string of foreign words, guttural and tortured, but sexy and thick with pleasure. If she could have smiled, she would have. Instead, she focused on finding his sensitive points, wanting this to be something he would never forget.

She never would.

* * *

Ryzard managed to hitch his pants back into place, but wasn’t capable of much else. His head was swimming, his muscles trembling, and he was too wrung out to properly close his fly. He needed the wall to keep himself upright.

Water ran in the powder room, but he was barely aware of anything else. What Tiffany had just done to him had blown his mind. Her inexperience had been obvious in her tentative touch and first nervous licks, but after that she’d been so generous and given over to what she was doing, he’d lost it completely.

The door latch clicked and he turned his head. She walked out of the powder room with her clothes and mask in place, but there was an adorable self-conscious flush on her exposed cheek and an even more exquisite glow of arousal coming off her like an aura. Her nipples were pencil tips beneath her second-skin jumpsuit, and the way she walked held the hip sway of the sexually aroused.