“It’s good enough for me and you,” The Sparrow snarled. “But not her.”
“I know that,” Lucas said.
The quiet, simple response made the Sparrow ratchet up his volume. “Do you? I know all about you and the things you’ve done to get where you are. You use people and leave them struggling to survive wherever they happen to land. You’re a cold-bl
ooded bastard without a heart.”
The material Lucas had been toying with slipped from his hands, and he straightened in his chair, fury coiling his body tight. The Sparrow dropped a hand to the knife sheathed on his thigh.
It was as if the world stopped rotating. The only sound in the room was the blood rushing in her ears. “That’s enough,” she said, her voice a stone weight, slicing through the air in the tension-filled room. “You know his reputation, but you don’t know him.”
The Sparrow’s tone softened. “And you do?”
Did she? Her brain said no, but some underlying, more primal instinct said she did, that they were more alike than either of them cared to admit. “I do.”
The Sparrow opened his mouth to respond but the dining room door burst open before he could. Antoine, dressed in head-to-toe orange strolled in with a three-person entourage, oblivious to the tension sparking in the air.
“Madame and Mademoiselle Macintosh,” he called out in his truly horrible fake French accent. “I cannot express how excited I was to receive the call. You know how I adore weddings, even the last minute kind.”
“I’m so sorry about that.” Ingrid quickly got out of her seat and hustled around the table to the designer. “But you know what a hurry young love is always in.”
“That it is.” Antoine delivered a pair of air kisses to Ingrid and then turned to face Ruby and Lucas. “Now stand up, my dear, and let me get a good look at what we have to work with.”
Surrendering to the fact that her life was becoming one awkward moment after another, she sighed and stood up. Because of the hand-binding chain, Lucas stood up with her, taking her hand in his like a good fraudulent fiancé should. What wasn’t fake was the sizzle of desire that rushed across her skin from even that simple act of intertwining her fingers with his.
Antoine’s gaze dropped to their joined hands, and his face light up with joy and he clapped. “I love that you are following the old traditions. Oh the stories I’ve heard about what happens during the hand-binding.”
“It was supposed to stay on until dinner, but obviously we’ll cut that short so you can get what you need from Ruby for her dress,” Ingrid said, her words spilling out in a rush as the two talked as if Ruby and Lucas weren’t even in the room.
“We can’t have that,” Antoine exclaimed. “We will work around the hand-binding, and after I get the measurements, we can send the happy couple on their way to do whatever it is they want to do while I sketch a design.”
Chapter Nine
An hour later, Lucas couldn’t get the designer’s words out of his head.
Whatever it is they want to do.
Lucas doubted the designer had meant suffering through tragic, brain-draining levels of sexual frustration staring at the thin silver chain curled around the partially-opaque, glass brick wall separating him from where Ruby stood naked under the shower spray.
What Lucas should be doing at that moment was banging his head against a wall until he figured out a way to separate Rolf Macintosh from his encrypted phone long enough to get the location of the arms deal. Short of getting the crime boss to let the meeting information slip, which he was too smart to do, Lucas was circling the drain on ways to get the date in time to stop the exchange. He’d pressed Ingrid as much as he could for information, but she hadn’t added anything. He had to think of something before it was too late.
That’s what he should be doing.
Instead, he stood in the bathroom, gripping what was probably the shredded remains of his special hand-binding shirt in one fist and holding one arm aloft inside the shower—the one chained to Ruby—while fighting every urge he had to touch the woman who was wet, naked, and within reach. He clamped his jaw down hard and finished grinding down the top layer of his molars. He couldn’t see her, well, not exactly. Any time he stupidly opened his eyes, his gaze was drawn to the vague outlines of her body as she moved under the spray. His memory of last night filled in the details. The peach color of her nipples. The full roundness of her tits. The flare of her hips. The rise of her ass. The curve of her thighs.
That was it. His jaw wasn’t the only thing aching. Shifting his stance to accommodate the tightness of his pants, Lucas stifled a groan. At least he meant to. Of course the bathroom’s acoustics exaggerated his quiet, unfulfilled misery.
His chained hand jerked upward as if Ruby had tugged her arm closer to her body to cover it from prying eyes, and she gasped, as if she’d forgotten he was waiting outside the shower.
“Now who’s the one making noises,” she teased, unable to cover a husky tremor to her question.
Remembering that sound she’d made as she came all over his tongue made his cock jerk against the confines of his pants. Fuck. He never should have tasted her last night. Now he couldn’t forget her sweet taste. She’d brought color into his black-and-white world. That was dangerous to his mission and his very precise, self-prescribed life.
The mission.
His life was only about the mission.
This one.