If I hadn’t thrown that goddamn condom away in my office, I would have walked in there and fucked her over the sink. I would have bent her over and pushed my fingers in her perfect hair and ruined it while I slammed into her pussy until her makeup ran down her face. Consequences be damned, I’d never wanted anything more in my entire life.
Fuck, I needed to leave before I did something I regretted. I stepped back noiselessly and slipped out the door, letting the knob ease into place without a sound. My blood pumped hard, pooling almost painfully in my groin. I couldn’t think of anything save the sight of my fiancée on the bathroom floor with her fingers between her thighs.
I needed to get a handle on myself in the next twenty minutes or tonight was going to be a problem. Striding down the hall, I ducked into the nearest bathroom and locked the door. I needed to take care of the throbbing pressure in my cock or it was going to get hard every time I remembered seeing her touch herself and I couldn’t have that happen tonight. I needed us to both be calm and collected.
I jerked off, washed up, and left the bathroom to have a cigarette on the balcony down the hall from her room. The air was cool and smelled of rain and it helped the heat around my collar dissipate.
Whatever I had expected my fiancée to be, it wasn’t this. I had never imagined that after years of feeling nothing but apathy for the idea of her, all it had taken was the sight of her mouth against a cup of coffee to send me spiraling. Maybe I was just carrying far too much tension from years of celibacy.
I heard her door open behind me and I expelled a stream of smoke up into the night sky. Her heels clicked down the hall and a prickle went down my spine. God, the sound of her shoes was going to get me hard again.
Duran was right. I desperately needed to get laid.
When I turned around, it took everything I had to keep my face an expressionless mask. She’d picked the red dress from the clothes I’d left in her room. It was a silky, slippery thing that clung to her curves and showed the faint traces of her breasts above the dipped neckline. When she drew near, I caught the reflection of her naked back in the window behind her and my cock twitched in my pants.
“Are you ready?” I asked, keeping my voice cool. “You look lovely, by the way.”
“I’m a little hungry,” she said.
“We’ll have dinner there,” I said.
She blushed a little and shifted, almost as if adjusting her bra beneath her dress. The image of her on the floor of her bathroom in her black lace undergarments burst into my mind. I glanced down at her hands, at the perfectly manicured nails that had worked between her thighs just minutes ago. God, what was it about this woman?
The silver Tesla was parked at the foot of the stairs. I kept my hand on her elbow, guiding her as she walked in her towering heels across the driveway, and opened the door so she could slip into the passenger side. I took a moment before I opened the driver’s side to gather my thoughts and ensure my eyes were guarded before I got in.
We sped out of the driveway and out onto the back road to the Romano’s mansion. The night was beautiful and the sky was clear with a heavy spattering of stars and a crescent moon. My chest tightened as I thought about the evening ahead, of having to face Romano, of having to speak with him as though he hadn’t destroyed me. Broken me into a hundred thousand pieces and left me still scrambling on the floor trying to put them back together.
I looked over at Olivia and she sighed and leaned back against the seat. Her throat was so lovely, bent back and exposed like that. It woke something primal in me, something I hadn’t tapped into in a long time. My eyes skimmed lower, to the rise of her thigh beneath the silky red of her dress, and down to her exposed calf.
Her legs were crossed and her calf slid down to a slender ankle, fragile with the faint traces of veins running beneath the skin. She wore a pair of heeled sandals and her toes were delicate and manicured like her nails. For some reason, her lovely, arched feet got me hard.
That was a first.
I frowned, pressing down the gas and the engine gave a satisfying purr as the lights of the Romano house appeared in the distance.
“I need you to be comfortable being on your own if I need to leave you to speak with anyone there,” I said. “Romano will want to dance with you, so be aware of that. Keep your chin up, your shoulders back, and don’t shrink when any of them look at you. Understood?”
Her dark eyes darted up, running over me from beneath her feathery bangs. “Why?”
“Because it’s never just a party. It’s a game, it’s a…chess match,” he said. “And if you’re going to be my wife, you need to learn how to play.”
Chapter Four
Olivia
I frowned, unsure what he meant. “I can play chess,” I said.
His eyes flicked to me and then back again as he pulled into the driveway. “Men are like rooks, we have to face our enemies straight on. But women, they are the queen, they are deadly, and they can move any way they want.”
“I hardly think I’m the queen,” I said.
“You will be when I’m done with you,” he said.
Before I could answer, he got out of the car and circled it on his long legs. He helped me out of the car and the valet took his keys and I paused at the bottom of the stairs. I’d been to the Romano house once and it was as large and impressive as ever. When I’d visited as a child, I’d been convinced it was castle with its high, pale stone walls and dozens and dozens of glittering windows. Inside, it was even grander than the Esposito mansion, although a hundred times colder.
Lucien stayed close as we climbed the stairs and entered through the great front doors. The main hallway was carpeted in red and the ceiling overhead was hung with heavy chandeliers. The light caught on the glossy floors and the mirrors hanging on the walls in a dizzying array of color.
“Lucien.”