Beautiful Secret (Beautiful Bastard #4) (17 page)

The noise around us seemed to return in a roar, reminding me that we weren’t alone in a hotel room. We were leaning toward each other, nearly kissing across the table.

“What are we doing to each other?”
he whispered.

I shrugged. “We’re . . . trying?”

He lifted his knife and fork, cutting into his steak. “I’m actually famished now.”

“Postcoital?” I joked.

“Not hardly,” he growled, taking a bite.

He looked up at me as he chewed. I watched his sharp jaw flex with the motion, his lips press together. How did he make
eating
sexy? Not even a little fair.

Swallowing, he asked, “What?”

“Nothing. You’re just a sexy eater. It’s distracting after what you just said about oral sex.”

He pushed his lips together in an adorably dubious reaction before asking, “Normal topic then?”

“Good idea.” Finally, I took a bite of my salmon.

“Favorite word?” he asked.

“
Cunt
,” I said without hesitation.

He gasped in mock horror. “You stole mine.”

I nearly choked. “I can’t even imagine you
thinking
that word, let alone saying it.”

Laughing, he shook his head as he cut another bite, chewed, and swallowed. “I imagine there are a great many things I think but never say. I love that word. It’s true I rarely say it aloud.”

“What’s your favorite context for it?”

Humming in thought, he finally said, “I like it as an insult in a game of footie, you know? Like, ‘Stop grabbing me shirt, yer cunt.’ ” He bent, taking a bite of green bean and oblivious to my wide-eyed
swoon at his thick northern accent when he said it. He swallowed, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and then said, “What’s your favorite context for it?”

I gulped down about half of my wine. “Probably something a bit cruder than that.”

“Yeah?” he asked, grinning in understanding. “I thought Americans hated that word.”

“
I
don’t.”

Niall lifted his wineglass to his lips, and took a long
swallow. “I’ll remember that.”

Niall

The playful banter slipped into something a bit quieter after we’d finished our meals. Conversation flowed as easily as did the wine. Ruby had youthful attitudes about sex, but surprisingly traditional attitudes about relationships themselves. She admitted, between dinner and dessert, that despite all the flirting, she didn’t like the idea of sex without some sort of understanding.

I studied Ruby—soft mouth, wide eyes, hands gesturing sweetly in front of her to punctuate every thought she shared—and marveled over how effortless it seemed for her. She was patient with my inexperience and hesitations. Indeed, they didn’t even seem to surprise her.

Our dinners finished, our drinks consumed, Ruby picked up her clutch and stood from the table. I watched her hands wrap around the leather, watched her neck stretch as she reached up and untangled her necklace from where it caught on the neckline of her dress. I watched her tuck her hair behind her ear and then turn to look up at me.

She caught me staring; I was mesmerized with every movement she made.

“That was delicious,” she said, giving me a cheeky grin.

Dear God in heaven
.

“Every bite,” I agreed, helping her with her coat.

“Do
you
bite?” she asked, making her way through the restaurant and out onto the street.

The air was bracing between blasts of steam from vents, and a cacophony of noises rose from the street.

“I imagine I might,” I began, and we turned onto Greenwich. “Depending on the circumstances.”

My skin hummed, my fingers twitched at my sides until, finally, I gathered the nerve to place my palm at the small of her back. Beneath my touch, she straightened and then shivered, before reaching behind her and taking my hand.

Her long, thin fingers weaved between mine and she pulled me into step with her. “Are you worried about work?” she asked quietly.

“About work . . . ?” I asked, confused.

“About
this
, and work.”

I felt my brow lift in understanding. “Ah. Well, no, not at the moment.” I raised a hand and hailed a taxi, holding the door for her. “I think we’ll need to be clear on what we’re doing, and then make sure that it doesn’t interfere with our ability to do our jobs but”—I followed her into the car, noticing her amused smile as I babbled—“I don’t think what we’re doing is forbidden according to company policy.”

“It isn’t,” she said, leaning into my side and looking up at me. “I checked forever ago.”

“ ‘Forever ago’?”

She pulled her lip between her teeth and bit down as she smiled. “Maybe four months ago?”

We drove in silence for a few blocks. “Four months ago I didn’t . . .”

“Know I existed,” she finished for me, “I know. I think I was hoping to talk myself out of liking you,” she said, laughing. “Maybe I’d see it was forbidden and, well, that would be that.”

“Or maybe you’d want it more,” I said, and ran my thumb along the side of her jaw.

“Maybe,” she asked, turning into my palm. “When did you notice me?”

“The day Tony told me you’d be accompanying me in his place was the first day I
really
noticed you—”

She touched her finger to my chin, drawing my eyes back to her face. “You’re getting nervous needlessly here. I know you were oblivious to me before. It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”

I swallowed, studying her sweet, pink mouth, her calm, green eyes. “I wasn’t oblivious to you but, ah . . .” I struggled to hold her gaze. “You see, and this stays strictly between us . . . Tony may have suggested I use this trip to get a leg over.”

“ ‘Get a leg over’?” she repeated, shaking her head.
I stared at her and smiled wanly as realization struck and she burst out laughing. “He is such a pig.”

Her reaction calmed me immediately, until a thought occurred to me. “He’s never touched you, I hope.”

Tilting her head, she said, “No, he’s just a creep. The way he looks at me and Pippa sometimes . . .” She shook her head, shivering.

I grimaced, not wanting to confirm that much of the time I felt the same way about how he looked at women in the office. On more than one occasion I’d been inclined to carefully request that HR keep an eye on him.

“But I do love that phrase,” she said, blinking away. “ ‘Get a leg over.’ It’s hot in a crude sort of way. I like the idea of your long legs over mine, pinning me down.”

I closed my eyes, steadying myself with a deep breath. “I assure you his suggestion carried little weight with me. But I’m a man, after all. And even if he hadn’t said that, just knowing we would be traveling together would have sent me into a spin.” She laughed, and I registered again how well she seemed to know me, how much she had picked up simply by observing. “I ran into you in the lift and—”

“And I was a
maniac
.”

“Yes, you were. A menace, really,” I teased. “But I wanted to get out only because I felt somewhat disoriented being that close to you.”

“My derpy awkwardness overpowered you?”

“Without a doubt,” I murmured, reaching to tuck her
hair behind her ear. “You’re joking, but I’m not. Something about you . . .”

She closed her eyes and I let my fingers linger at her neck, drawing them down to her collarbone. Beneath my fingertips, her skin was cool from being outside, and so smooth. I could scarcely imagine how intense it would be to kiss her, let alone make love to her. I would likely tear her clothes, as she suggested only last night. I would most definitely bite.

“But I’d noticed you before. In meetings, we’d a shared look once or twice . . .”

Ruby opened her eyes again and her expression grew dubious, as if I’d begun to toy with her. “It’s okay if you didn’t notice me. It’s also okay if this is just an experiment in seeing someone other than Portia. I promise I have my big-girl pants on.”

“It’s not . . .” I started, but then stopped when the cab pulled up at the curb.

I led Ruby inside the hotel and into a crowded lift. We exited on our floor in silence and walked down the carpeted hall toward our rooms, our steps echoing in the quiet.

Once we stood outside my door, I told her, “I have never considered having a fling. One drunk, fumbling interaction aside, sex purely for the sake of sex is not interesting to me.”

She licked her lips and gave me an impish smile. “Then you need to have better sex.”

As she continued to look up at me with her patient, playful eyes, the moment grew heavy.

“I think without a doubt I need to have better sex,” I admitted quietly.

Her brows slowly inched up in suggestion and she tilted her head toward her hotel room door. “I had a really nice time at dinner . . .”

Ruby gave me another ten seconds to do or say more before she stretched to kiss my cheek, just barely missing the corner of my mouth. “Good night, my tentative, sexy, secretive crush.”

I watched her turn and walk the ten steps to her room. She let herself inside, and the door clicked shut quietly behind her before I murmured, “Good night, my beautiful, exuberant girl.”

“What brand of imbecile are you?” I asked my reflection in the bathroom mirror. “You could have kissed her. You could have
enjoyed
her tonight. At the very least you could have asked her in.” I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath through my nose. It felt a little as if my skin were on fire, and short of walking into the shower with all of my clothes on, or barging into her room and deciding once and for all to have a go, I wasn’t sure how the feeling was going to diffuse.

I swore I could remember every time she smiled tonight, or her openmouthed laugh, head back, eyes closed. Ruby seemed to enjoy every tiny instant of her life. There was something about her that made me want to be near her, put
her up on a pedestal, bask in her energy and uninhibited sweetness.

Say something filthy
, she’d said.
Tell me the craziest, dirtiest thing you can think of. Render me speechless
.

Walking to my closet, I pulled off my jacket, my tie, my shirt. I hung up all of my clothes, feeling overheated and sensitive and wound up to the point I thought I might burst. And I felt stupid, really. Ruby wouldn’t have said no had I stepped forward, cupped her lovely face, and kissed her. She wouldn’t even have said no if I’d simply asked her, “Come inside, show me how to do all of this for real, now? I’m afraid I’ll bungle it.”

Because, sincerely, I’d never taken a leap like this. Professionally, yes: I put myself out there, drove for what I wanted. But my personal life had sort of fallen easily into place. When we were sixteen, Portia found me in the woods near my home and suggested I kiss her. When we were eighteen, she informed me that she was ready to make love. Being Portia, she was unable to resist telling her mum what we’d done, and being Windsor-Lockharts, her parents had immediately
suggested
we marry. From there, it all unfolded rather obediently: a grand wedding, a flat her father loaned us the money to buy (and which I repaid in under four years), a car, a dog, and a marriage built on suggestion.

Things I never wanted again.

A new plan, then. I would take this
side of me—the secret side that had long been dormant: romantic, passionate, desperate to find adventure with someone just a touch wilder than I could ever be—and not let it slide back into politeness, into convenience, into routine.

If Ruby wanted me to open up, I would do everything I could to do it.

I would ask for what I wanted with her.

I would learn how to play.

I would show her that I could give her what she needed.

With this sorted, an unwinding sense of relief passed through me and I sat down in my boxers at the desk, intent on going through my piles of voice mails from the London office. Pulling out my small voice recorder, I set to making notes after each call: which required immediate follow-up, which I could have my assistant attend to, and which only provided information of note. But after only fifteen messages, my mind wandered back to dinner.

Ruby’s habit of smiling with her tongue trapped between her teeth combined with the sweetness of the pineapple sorbet she had made me nearly dizzy with curiosity: Was her tongue cold? Cold and sweet? Did she like to have her tongue sucked and licked?

What would it feel like if she tasted her sorbet and then licked me, her tongue chilled, sliding around . . .

I let myself imagine Ruby at my door, in her tiny silken sleep shorts and tank, her breasts hard at the tips, the curve of her hips narrow and smooth.
She steps inside, holding a glass of ice water in one hand and using the other to press on my chest and walk me backward to the bed
.

“Don’t sit,” she warns me
.

Wordlessly, I nod. I’m wearing only my boxers, and she doesn’t say anything else, she doesn’t even kiss me; but she traps that pink bubble-gum tongue between her teeth, smiling up at me, and slides to her knees, pulling my pants down as she goes
.

I slid my boxers down my hips, letting the fantasy build.

I’m hard, jutting thick toward her, and watching transfixed as she takes an ice cube in her mouth, sucking it, sliding it down my stomach, over my hips
.

“Ahh,” I gasp as she slides her free hand up the inside of my thigh, cupping all of me—testicles and cock together in her grip—holding me crudely. I’m finally brave enough to put my hand on top of her head and then slide my fingers into her hair. It’s soft, just like I imagined, and she gasps a little when I fist it, when I tug it
.

She didn’t expect that. She lets the ice cube fall from her mouth
.

I wrapped my hand around my cock, pulling down and tight, groaning. “Lick it,” I managed, my voice feeling oddly loud in the empty room.

Ruby’s eyes go from bright and mischievous to half closed and sweetly obedient. I can feel her pull against my grip in her hair, struggling to reach me
.

“You look so bloody gorgeous,” I growled, moving my hand faster, imagining how
it would feel for her to wrap her fist tight around the head of my dick, and swipe that soft, cool tongue around and around . . . I groaned. “Go slow,” I hissed. “I want your tongue to play with me before you show me what you look like when you beg for it.”