Under His Sway (2 page)

I turned and leaned back on the counter beside the stove. “Is that a control issue, sir?” I dared to ask and let one corner of my mouth curl teasingly when he shot me an abrupt glance. “Manuela’s grandson, Luiz… He thinks you were behind him getting arrested. What was it, a couple of years ago?”

Adrian hesitated where he was bent over the copper pot about to taste the simmering broth of duck and cassava, earthy flavors dressed with bacon and tomato and onion. His stomach even growled, but he put the spoon back in the pot without sampling the stew and went back to stirring. “Not quite that long ago. But he’s right,” Adrian admitted without looking at me. “Manuela called me in a panic because she couldn’t get Luiz to come home and one of his many little girlfriends had told her his friends were trying to talk him into breaking into a dockside warehouse for an exporter getting ready to ship out a big order. I spoke to a friend of mine on the Natal police force.”

Folding my arms, I gnawed on my lip, turning the possibilities over in my mind. “Seems risky. What if Luiz had gotten hurt?”

Knight pivoted to face me now. “I made sure the police knew the boys were smalltime hustlers and street kids, not hardened gang members. They wouldn’t have had weapons, aside from maybe a couple of switchblades or a crowbar for getting into the warehouse.”

“But saving him from a life of crime by getting him arrested…”

“Yes, and then writing a letter to the courts on his behalf explaining what I knew of the trauma he’d been through losing his parents and having to move to Natal to live with his grandmother. I was sure they’d see he was just a teenager struggling with himself, a first-time offender with no violent history and with a family member and…
patron
who were willing to commit to keeping him in line. And I was right—three years of community service, no jail time. He has to do his service under
my
supervision and
my
rules.”

Even as unfamiliar as I was with the finer details of the Brazilian legal system, I had to wonder why the courts wouldn’t have considered it a conflict of interest to let Luiz serve community service under the supervision of a family friend. But this was Adrian Knight. I still didn’t know the history of his family line—though he did come from old money, I could tell—and had refused to let myself snoop, but I could well imagine Adrian pulling strings, calling in favors, even greasing palms. Any and all clichés in reference to wealth and influence securing special privileges.

After finally sipping at his broth, Adrian made a low sound of frustrated disgust in the back of his throat. He abruptly switched off the heat and shoved the pot back from the burner. When he turned to look at me again, his jaw twitching just slightly as it did when he was grinding his perfect white teeth, I suspected it was more than the stew exasperating him. “You don’t approve, Miss Bloom, I know. Just like you didn’t approve of me keeping Gabriel from getting that project management job with PPMI, even knowing what I did of their highly questionable business practices.”

“I never said that.” Though I hadn’t approved, at first. I’d assumed the worst of Adrian right up until he had explained, point for point, to me what a mistake it would have been for the idealistic project manager to move to Pritchard Project Management International.

Taking my chin in his warm, smooth fingers, Adrian tilted my head back so I’d look him in those burnished brown eyes. “You don’t have to say it, Chloe. Your body language does your talking for you.” When Adrian’s face moved over mine, his silhouette blocking out the light above the stove, his height and nearness and scent—citrus and warm spice—pervading my senses, I held my breath. Instead of folding my arms in judgment, I was almost hugging myself, willing myself not to tremble in want of his kiss.

Knight’s mouth hovered over mine, his plump, tanned lips slightly parted, his breath warm and moist against my face. He waited patiently, one second, two. “Miss Bloom?” he asked pointedly, and I gave up my muddled refusal to admit I wanted to be kissed. The hard line of my lips broke for a soft moan as he moved in to open my mouth with his.

It was such a bad idea, the first tattered thread to appear in my cunning plan, unraveling a little more every day now. I loved being kissed by Adrian Knight. It wasn’t just about the way his mouth tasted every time—now—all sultry heat with a trace of salt and copper and a subtle tang like a sour-sweet fruit. It wasn’t just the gentle but undeniable insistence of his tongue exploring the inside of my lips, the back of my teeth, the roof of my mouth like he was surveying and
enjoying
what was his. It wasn’t just that low growl in the back of his throat when the kiss deepened, a carnal vibration that spoke to my blood and my bones and left my sex tingling and burning with pulsing nerves.

My head fogged, like a drug hitting my system, intoxication times a thousand. I had to hold on to something, to anything, even to myself, to keep from reaching out for Adrian. To keep from embracing him in a way that would leave no doubt his aloof submissive was becoming attached. I could fight my way back from this, I told myself. I really could.

When he was done sucking my tongue and teasingly nipping my wet lips, Adrian drew back just an inch, breathing faster and heavier. I could almost let myself think I affected him just as deeply as he shook me, but that was too dangerous a possibility to entertain, especially with him right here in front of me. He pressed himself forward, trapping me between his toned body and the dark wood kitchen cabinet. Despite myself, I groaned under my breath at the feeling of his erection straining against the thin cotton pajama pants and prodding my lower stomach. It seemed Adrian Knight could go from utterly engrossed in the day’s mail or a business call
or in cooking
one moment to fully aroused and ready to make hard use of me the next. He was insatiable, and I was twice as bad, eager for every session and daydreaming about the next almost as soon as we’d finished.

It was too much, again, unraveling me one stray thread at a time. It was this…this hedonistic need that got people in trouble, that drove young Luiz to rash behavior, that compelled me to put my real life back home on hold to live a three-month fantasy with the playboy of my dreams. The teenager was running away from the pain of losing his parents, reacting to the loss of security by throwing himself headlong into chaos. What was I fleeing? I had that security already, in a successful career and a growing professional reputation. Yet here I was, having let my role as Penn Ellison’s girlfriend drive me thousands of miles across the globe, losing myself in tending to Adrian’s villa and his itinerary and his sexual needs at precisely the time I most needed to reaffirm my identity as…

My identity as…

I reared back and huffed out a husky, mirthless chuckle, trying to wake myself from these thoughts and the daze of arousal that enveloped me like a warm fog. With the jerk of my head, I motioned toward the copper pot on the stove. For a second, the pungent smell of duck stew even overcame my acute awareness of the scent of Adrian Knight. “Are you at least going to let me taste it?”

“Why?” Another peculiar question, but perhaps not the one I thought it was, as he continued, “Why do you start to come undone for me, then clamp down tight again? Miss Bloom?” His voice dropped low, his tone softening. “Chloe?”

Exposed, panicked, like I believed he’d actually been inside my head, I put on a nervous, twitchy smile and grasped for a lighthearted answer to sweep away the whole issue. I wasn’t prepared for Adrian to step back from me or for how empty the space he had just occupied would feel, cold and exposed in comparison.

He took me by the hand, his grip unexpectedly light and tender. “Come on, Chloe.”

Back down the hallway, to the bedroom, flipping on a small sconce on the near wall. But in the doorway, he turned to stop me. “Wait,” he held up one finger and instructed in what I had started to call his Dom voice—firm, patient, but unflinching and uncompromising. Crisp diction, controlled tone. It made my stomach bob and churn inside me in equal measures of eagerness and dread, and I adored it, nearly as much as the moment that tone broke down into growls and groans and dirty murmurs.

Adrian strode ahead of me into the bedroom to strip off his pajama bottoms. Hanging at my sides, my hands tensed, fingers twitching as the need to touch him gripped me violently. Lightly tanned skin from shirtless runs on the beach and early evenings in the patio pool... Muscles along his upper arms, abs, pelvis, thighs clearly but gently defined… The hard angle of his member, rampant and just a touch ruddy above the swell of his smooth-trimmed balls…

He sat on the foot of the bed, knees spread and feet planted on the thick, woolly white rug. “Come to me, Miss Bloom.” I had only taken a step when he added, “On your hands and knees.”

I might have swayed, or the room did, like I was on the open water without my sea legs, but the waves were all in my head. Penn had made me crawl for him, regularly, and it had always bothered me that I liked it. The rough texture of the stained concrete floor scraped lightly at my palms and kneecaps as I obeyed, picking my way little by little toward Adrian. It was too much to ask that I slink along the floor, as I imagined his previous submissives had, sexy and alluring and gracefully feline. With my head and heart pounding and the cool evening air biting at my embarrassingly slick, bare cleft, I made my way to Knight’s feet. Still on hands and knees, without tilting my burning face up toward him, I peered at the striking Dom from beneath the meager shelter of my lashes.

Adrian reached down with one hand, then two, cupping my cheeks and urging me upward until I was kneeling. My fingers splayed restlessly on my thighs. He still held my face when he asked, “Did he ever make you do that?”

My heart pulsed hard, a thump against the inside of my chest, a roar in my ears.

“Who?” I rasped.

“The man who introduced you to sexual domination.” Penn. “The man who locked you up tight and kept the key.”
That
, I thought distantly, was probably my father.

Instead of answering, I closed my eyes—hid in the comfort of darkness—and rubbed my face against Adrian’s hands.

***

Her body followed me eagerly. Sometimes her heart, more reluctantly. But Chloe Bloom’s mind fought me every step of the way.

Despite the fact that I was quite enjoying the sight, the feeling, of Chloe rubbing against my palms like an eager little cat, I shifted my hold until I had her under the chin and by the hair at the back of her head. Those gleaming cinnamon eyes came open and finally met mine, but the loose line of her sensual lips hardened into a pout of a frown. She never liked it when I called her on her little ploys, her diversions and avoidances. I couldn’t say I’d have enjoyed it, having my defenses stripped from me no matter how small, but that was the power and privilege of being the Dom in this situation.

“Answer me, Miss Bloom. Did he make you crawl for him?”

“Yes, sir,” she breathed, her glare and the sharp angle of her jaw suggesting an undertone of resentment that her whisper wasn’t strong enough to express. I’d said it in the kitchen; Chloe spoke with her body, and always the truth.

“Did you like it?”

Again, so softly, came the unwilling response. “Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

This time her sigh was hard, ragged, and she dipped her head down despite the fact that I had a fistful of her hair. “Do we have to—?” she began to ask, the words rushing out of her as though through a breach, a web of fissures in her defenses. I’d been waiting so long for Chloe to break, and the possibility that it was happening now tightened my jaw, my stomach, my groin.

“Yes, Chloe,” I muttered against her hair, leaning over her. “Yes, we have to.”
I have to
. “Tell me now.”

“I liked it…” The words forced their way up her throat and out of her mouth in a halting grate, husky with emotion that I hadn’t seen from her before then. “I liked it because it made me feel dirty and…brazen and…like he owned me. It… It excited me that he liked it when I was his dirty little girl.”

Penn. It had to have been Penn. That phrase—his dirty little girl… I’d heard it before, from someone who shouldn’t have been saying it. From someone who certainly shouldn’t have said it for Penn Ellison. But it was Chloe who mattered now, only Chloe. That she was crawling
for me
, confessing her darkest desires
to me
. That every day she was a little more mine and a little less his.

“Stand up, Miss Bloom,” I commanded, and she complied, her face still bowed as she avoided looking at me. I clenched my fist for a second, to still a slight quaver along my hand, before sliding first one and then a second finger into the silky heat of her core. “Yes,” I said, and it came out almost a groan, “you do like it. So wet.”

Chloe’s jaw fell open, her head back, as my fingers pushed their way slowly but insistently into her tightness. Her moan was high and urgent and made my hardened cock twitch with the demand to penetrate her.

I crooked my fingers to search for the special spot inside her, that subtle change in texture along the hot, satiny walls of her sex. When she bit her lip to muffle a squeal and flailed out unthinkingly to grip my shoulder, I knew I’d found my target.

“What else did you do with him, Chloe?” With her eyes squeezed closed, she shook her head wildly back and forth in denial. I shot to my feet, bent over her, my fingers still inside her and my lips at her ear. “You’re going to do for me all those things you did with him, because now you’re
my
dirty little girl.” Everything she’d felt for him was going to be mine. I pulled her head back hard, made her arch, and took her lips in a rough, mouth-fucking kiss that left both of panting. “What
else
, Miss Bloom?”

Her voice cracked with the strain of reaching out for her release, her whole body stretched taut and thin to grasp at a climax hovering in the distance. I wondered if she realized she had come up on tiptoes, that she was clinging to my shoulders, digging her nails into my skin. The little pinpricks of pain found their match in the prickling of heat along my rigid cock and through my balls.