After a moment of stillness, she walked to the limo, her steps graceful, tranquil. The crowds going and coming on the pavement parted for her, everyone turning to look in fascination at the gaijin woman who looked like a living splash of color among the mostly two-tone population.
When she reached the limo, he slid across the backseat, making space for her, and watched greedily as she lowered her lush, elegant body beside him. Her heat and scent enveloped him, made hunger writhe inside him.
She looked different today, yet another woman. Nothing like last night’s femme fatale. A working woman with practical clothes, a scrubbed-clean face and a prim ponytail. She could have been wearing the most outrageous lingerie or even been naked and on erotic display from the way his hormones hurtled in scalding torrents in his arteries.
He sat back and looked away before he dragged her over him or lunged and crushed her beneath him. Steve came in at once and, raising the opaque, soundproof partition between them, put the car in motion as per Raiden’s earlier orders.
After a minute when she sat staring ahead and silent beside him, he said, “I have an offer for you.”
“I’m listening.” The way she said the words, calm yet immediate, told him she couldn’t wait to hear his offer.
He couldn’t wait to make it, either. “I want you in my bed, every night, starting tonight. Until I get married. You can ask for whatever you want and its yours.”
Silence stretched between them after his succinct proposition.
Then she finally turned to him, drawing him to face her as if by sheer magnetism.
Her eyes emitted blue, hot fire in the limo’s semidarkness, the one-way-mirror windows dimming the bright lights of the city. What he could see of her expression was enigmatic. “Don’t you think a flare of passion is one thing, but an affair is another?”
He shrugged. “It’s not an affair. It’s an arrangement. A purely sexual one.”
Her lashes lowered for moments, before rising. “What about your engagement? Your fiancée?”
“Megumi only wants to honor her family by marrying the most influential man, producing heirs carrying his genes and accessing his power and wealth. She, like me, expects our lives to remain separate, with intimacies practiced only to acquire said heirs.”
“So have you started...practicing yet?”
He frowned. After the intimacies with her, the very idea filled him with outright revulsion.
He gritted down on the unwilling reaction. “Of course not. You don’t need to worry I’d come to you from her or another woman’s bed. As in the past, while I’m with you, I will be with you alone.” A vicious doubt twisted in his gut. “I don’t know what you did back then, but I expect the same finite monogamy from you now.”
“I was with no one else.”
And somehow, even though he now knew she seduced men for a living, he believed her.
Silence stretched again until he wanted to grab her and demand she tell him what she was thinking. Now that he knew she’d tell him, the urge to know her every thought almost overpowered him. He held back, reminding himself everything he felt was a by-product of intense lust. Once that was satisfied, curiosity, possessiveness and everything else would subside with it.
He inhaled. “Now give me your pledge that you will be at my disposal for the next ten weeks.”
At his terse command, her gaze clashed with his in mock surprise. “You mean you’d believe my ‘pledge’?” At his curt nod, she exhaled. “And I can ask for anything I want you say?”
“Anything.”
“Even if I ask for another fifty million dollars?”
“Yes.”
If she had any doubt how much he wanted her, she should have no doubt now. He didn’t mind letting her know. For the duration of the arrangement, he was giving in to his every urge, saying and doing everything that came to him the moment it did, no control, no premeditation. He’d plunge whole into this with her. It was the only way he’d purge her from his system, the only way he’d ever emerge whole.
For good measure, he added, “I will pay the whole amount up-front.”
Her gaze was more unreadable as she tilted her head at him. “How can you, the ruthless financier that you are, pay that exorbitant amount up-front? How do you know I won’t just take the money and disappear like I did in the past?”
“I know for two reasons. The first is that you did uphold your pledge to me once. You do seem to possess a code of some sort. The second and more important reason is because you won’t want to. I was there last night, remember? You were as starving for me as I was for you. I might despise you, might believe everything between us had been a lie, but I know the physical side was real.”
“You do?”
Her soft provocation hit him like an ax, snapping the last tethers of control. He gave in, dragged her over his lap, pressed her down on his steel erection.