All The Queen's Men (Fantasy Heights) (8 page)

Having so recently been satisfied, it took her longer to reach orgasm. It gave her time to appreciate and feel and experience and concentrate on what Josh did and what he liked. She was distracted from it by a surge in that warm, sweet ache that swelled up into her chest, across her back and down her legs.

Josh must have been able to feel her escalation. He let out a low murmur of arousal. His motions changed from erratic to determined, driving deep and hard. He came a moment before she did, when she broke into a fevered pulsing much faster and chaotic than usual. The sensations travelled up his shaft and tightened into a bright point once more, breaking open and leveling her all over again.

It felt like a year before she took her first breath. Josh was kissing the back of her neck, and she hummed, replete.

She felt him smile against her skin. “Apology accepted.”

They moved on to the shower, planning the rest of their day. The pair of them headed back to the resort to check on Scott’s progress with the computer system.

This was yet another block of time she couldn’t tell Gregory Hughes about. They’d found Beverly in tears, and Scott looking exasperated.

“I’m sorry,” Scott told Beverly. “If there were any other way, I’d try it. But right now, these DriveRate people have total access to everything. Payroll, scheduling, hell, even the psych evaluations. The only way to cut them off is to start over from scratch on an enclosed system.”

Beverly sobbed, but in this, Amanda knew she could be of use. She told Beverly, “I’ve been through some messy hacking stuff and software crashes at the bank. Scott and I will get this figured out. Please go home. Get some rest. You need a break.”

Amanda had picked up the phone to call security. She asked that Beverly be escorted home by an officer and someone from the spa to make sure she ate something decent, had a massage, and then went to bed.

It was only afterward, when she found Josh staring at her with a mildly amused, speculative expression, that she realized she might have overstepped her bounds by a few miles.

Josh said, “Kinda’ bossy.”

“Sorry, but someone has to take care of her. This place can’t function without Beverly.”

Her unplanned commands had their desired effect. Josh took Beverly in hand to make sure Amanda’s orders were followed. Scott seemed relieved to have her help, and in the two hours she spent listening to him prioritize their task, Amanda learned that Scott Milazzo had not ridden his father’s coattails into billionaire-ville. Though he sometimes expressed himself in unorthodox ways, he was probably the most logical thinker she had ever encountered. Also the most organized. But he was tired and run down. Pale. Once again, she got the impression that his health might not be wonderful.

Under the circumstances, she had to ask the obvious question. “Scott, have they tested your blood yet?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. I know how this looks, but it’s not from drugs. It’s the tail end of leukemia. I went into remission about five months ago, but I still get drag-ass tired when I overdo it. And I know you want to wig out on me right now, but you’re not going to. Because it embarrasses me and there’s work to do.”

She very meekly went back to work, though she watched him like a nanny hawk from then on out.

Dinner with Josh never came to pass. Even after Scott went home, she worked into the wee hours figuring out how Fantasy Heights was structured and how they handled information and workflow. The work might have been detail-heavy and complex, but she felt as if she’d come home. She hadn’t realized until then how much she missed the methodical, predictable demands of her old profession.

Scott had come and gone again by the next afternoon when Amanda sat in Beverly’s office, pecking away at scheduling problems. Her brain hurt by the time she realized she had an audience. Thomas stood in the doorway, silently watching.

Her reaction was complicated. Half of her had never been so glad to see anyone home safe. The other half was spoiling for a fight about Jerod.

Thomas looked thoughtful himself, but she never got a chance to ask why. He had decided to adopt the trainer role. “You realize you’re fifteen minutes late for your meeting with Ben.”

She’d forgotten all about it. And she knew the events of that afternoon, at the gamer-gig rehearsal, would be important to Mr. Hughes.

Much
to her relief, the DA asked a number of questions first about the audition process. He started to sound impatient while he made her reconstruct what happened in the days leading up to the Three Sisters Ball.

By the time he circled back around to ask about the dreaded rehearsal, Mr. Hughes looked and sounded almost desperate to get some straight answers. “I need you to tell me what happened at rehearsal between Thomas and my son.”

Amanda wished the whole thing had never happened. For just a little while that day, at the beginning of rehearsal, the small group of performers had all gotten along.

She’d met with Ben first as directed to learn that he had chosen her to take Nicole’s role as princess. She felt a bit strange about it, but the casting made sense. As the kidnapped princess, she wouldn’t need to fight or talk much. And any chance to work with Ben was worth it.

She’d asked him about the gamer event. “What’s it like? Is it fun?”

“Sure. Can’t wait. Bunch of techno-wiseasses roll into a resort where a whole lot of sex happens. It turns into one full week of ‘set your dildos to stun’ jokes. It’s unreal. Every single one of these guys is convinced they’re the first to make that joke.”

She laughed, and Ben caught her around the neck, applying knuckles to her skull. She was still fighting off the noogie when Jerod and Marla came in, followed shortly by Eric. With everyone but Thomas assembled, Ben assigned the weapons and stage positions.

Amanda, perched atop a faux column, was the first to see Thomas come in, and it was the strangest thing: Even though he looked cross and thickly encased in the hated armor, inside she felt as if the entire room had just turned her favorite color.

A charge had run through her. Conflicted. She’d missed him. Could still feel the fire in her veins, thinking of the phone and his gift. But when he’d seen her in the office, he’d been so distant. So cold.

And then her eyes strayed to Jerod for a moment, catching the barest glimpse of a frown, and downcast eyes.

Guilt.

Jerod had told Thomas already. Thomas knew she’d found out, and now he was mad, for some reason. Still, he’d motioned for her to get down from her perch, and she took up her place beside him as he faced the group.

She had no idea how to explain what happened to Jerod’s father.

“I don’t even really know how it started,” Amanda told the DA. “Everyone on the stage was in the know about Thomas’s true position at Fantasy Heights. They all knew where he’d been, and they all went after him for good news. But of course he had none to offer. Someone asked him about Ridley’s condition, and he just… closed up like shutters.”

Ben kindly broke through the group’s pressurized scrutiny by handing Thomas a couple nasty-looking curved practice swords. “Best of five?”

Thomas had nodded, accepting Ben’s singular manner of stress relief.

She remembered watching Ben and Jerod spar once, awed by the ugly brute force of it all. Ben needed a vastly different set of skills to combat Thomas. What he needed, really, was to spend far less time on his back. Ben’s height and weight and strength left him lacking in balance. He could never land a blow before Thomas took advantage of that weakness and knocked his legs out from under him.

The third time Ben went down, he groaned out a laugh. “I hate you.”

Thomas tried to be nice about it. “You’re getting better.”

“Yeah. I maybe got some dust on your cuffs that time. I’m such a badass.”

“You’re just rusty, is all. I’m not.”

“No kidding. Go embarrass someone else.”

Jerod stepped onto the stage. “My turn.”

She told Mr. Hughes, “Jerod didn’t know Thomas was back in training with military intelligence. Maybe if he’d known, he wouldn’t have tried to take him on. Or let his temper take over. I mean, I’m sorry, but there was some really weird tension, there.”

Once again, Thomas had started out trying to be nice. But from the moment Jerod picked up his weapon to ‘spar,’ the gloves were off. Still, Thomas didn’t put Jerod on his back. He simply got behind Jerod time and time again, showing that he could have taken him down easily. Which in a way was probably worse than actually doing it.

After the fourth time, and Thomas and Jerod faced each other once more, Amanda had sneezed. Thomas glanced toward the sound.

As soon as he looked away, Jerod punched him. Belted him right in the face.

She raised her eyes to meet Mr. Hughes’s, who sat across the table waiting to hear all about it. If only she knew what Thomas had told him. Worse, she had no idea if Mr. Hughes was aware of the whole mystery client debacle, or his son’s role in it. What the hell was she supposed to say? And what choice did she have but to be honest?

Mr. Hughes sighed. “It’s all right, Amanda. You can tell me the truth without hurting my feelings. I know Jerod took a cheap shot, and it’s my fault. I’ve held Thomas up to my son as an example one too many times, I think.”

She filed that one away for future processing, and told him everything she could remember, or at least a diligently sanitized version. Thomas hadn’t retaliated. Later he would say he probably had it coming, but in the moment, he hadn’t been allowed to respond to Jerod one way or another. While her eyes were still wide and her mouth still open in outraged surprise, Ben had started to yell.

She had never seen Ben angry before. She hoped never to see it again, either. It was easy to forget his size and strength when he was his usual jovial self. Anger him, however, and he would be glad to remind you. Ben ejected Jerod from the set. Rehearsal had ended and Amanda was left staring at Thomas, watching the whitened skin around a small purple mark on his cheekbone begin to swell.

In a dry sort of voice, she’d said, “Welcome home.”

That earned her a wry lift of a brow, followed by a quick inhale and a twitch at the pain in his cheek. She hustled him out, and he took her home to his place, a smallish cottage on the fringes of town, secluded and shaded by trees. They went in through the back door into the kitchen, where she deposited him at the table and hurriedly rooted around for a plastic bag, dishtowel, and then some ice for his cheek.

As she’d pressed the makeshift icepack to the swelling wound, Amanda noticed something. He was avoiding eye contact, and had been ever since they’d left the resort.

“Thomas, what is it?”

He leaned back and pulled her hand and the icepack away from his cheek. The dark eyes that met hers at last were starkly confrontational. “How long have you known?”

There was no pretending she didn’t know precisely what he meant. “Since yesterday. Jerod sat with me during the Washington-State interview. It was his soap. His elbow. And there really weren’t too many other candidates. I knew my mystery client had be an insider who knew everyone involved. It all just sort of clicked together, finally.”

“Did he try anything?”

That caught her up short. “What do you mean, try anything?”

“I mean what happened? Were you mad? Were you… not mad?”

“Oh, my God. Did you think maybe I dragged him off to Haynes House for a reunion?” She put her hands on her hips. “I told him to stay away from me until I’d figured out how to feel about it. And you know how I feel right now? Pretty God-damned mad.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a dick. I just don’t know how you feel about him. Was it work sex with him, was it… not work sex?”

“I won’t deny I had fun with him on set, but that’s as far as it goes. I don’t like what he did with Steph to take West’s job. I definitely don’t like that he punched you. And not to make matters worse between us, but why do you have absolutely no trouble turning Neil into the oral-sex delivery fairy and then gifting me to Josh as an apology, but you snarl at the thought of me with Jerod? It wouldn’t be that you’re jealous, would it?”

Thomas’s brows dipped into that devilish formation of ill temper. “Jealous?”

“Jealous.”

The icepack got dropped onto the table with a disgusted-sounding sigh. “I told you I was bad at this. And you’re right. To me, Neil isn’t a threat. You don’t take him seriously. And Josh is different. I trust him not to cut me out. Jerod, though. I wouldn’t trust that kid as far as I could punt him. Not with you, anyhow. Now can we stop this? I missed you. I just want to be with you for a little while.”

It turned out to be more than a little while. She felt herself ignite from the inside out, remembering how it had all played out. She’d gotten to her knees between his. His arms had closed around her, and they’d stayed that way, just looking at one another. Steeping. Letting the chemistry have its way, awakening nerve endings, fueling appetites. Eventually her gaze had affixed itself to his mouth, and she’d leaned in to see what sort of response she would get.

A heated one, of course. The first kiss was not gentle. It was forceful and lingering, neither of them eager to break the contact. But it was just the one kiss before Thomas cast a meaningful look to their left.

He did a good job of sounding guileless. “Oh, look. A table. Didn’t we have plans for one of those?”

She wouldn’t have trusted herself to speak. After a while, she managed to breathe out a shaky, “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to trust me.”

She actually thought about it, first. It surprised her to find that even after months of working together, months of secretly fantasizing about playing the captive to his savage, she could still hesitate. But what he did on set was only an act. This was the two of them, in private. No fantasy. The real thing. She thought about handing all control over to him, to let him pleasure himself with her, any way he saw fit. Thomas was much more experienced. He had developed more sophisticated appetites. Oh, he’d make sure she was satisfied by the time he was through with her. Thomas was Thomas, after all, but that didn’t mean she would reach that point unscathed.