Silence Is Golden (Storm and Silence 3)

So, with that cheerful thought in mind, I reached back again and loosened another lace.

‘Mr Linton?’

The voice from behind me was as cold as ice and as hard as tempered steel.

‘Yes, Sir?’

‘Cease this immediately!’

My lips curved up into a smile. ‘Cease what, Sir?’

Come on! Say it out loud!

There was a pause. ‘These…these things you are doing.’

My oh my…Was Mr Rikkard Ambrose shy?

I opened another lace, just to find out. The noise he made didn’t sound shy at all. It did, however, sound rather strangled.

‘Is something wrong, Sir?’ I asked solicitously. He was my employer, after all, and if there was something wrong with his health, I should look after him, shouldn’t I?

‘Yes!’

‘Is there something I can do to help?’ I asked, casually undoing another lace. Blimey, this thing had a lot of laces!

‘If I were you, Mr Linton,’ his dark voice drifted over to me, ‘I would not ask that question again.’

When we stopped that evening Karim had already set up camp. He must have seen the glint in my eyes when I walked into camp, because he grabbed his hammock and fled into the jungle, in a desperate attempt to protect the innocence of his eyes.

That was fine. He was more than welcome to keep it. Mr Ambrose, however - now, that was another matter entirely.

He was right behind me still. I could sense him there, could feel his gaze on me the same way a gazelle could sense a hunting lion. Only that gazelles didn’t usually do what I did then.

Reaching back, I opened the last lace on my corset. The whole thing, which had been precariously perched on my hips for the last few hours, fell to the ground with a soft thud. Turning, I stepped out of it, towards Mr Rikkard Ambrose.

The look on Mr Ambrose’s face was like nothing words could describe. It was like an iceberg spewing fire, like a volcano frozen in mid-explosion, and yet something entirely other and far, far more. It was completely hard and empty, and yet underneath that…

No. I really couldn’t describe it.

It was Mr Ambrose. Pure and simple, and yet incredibly complicated.

I moved towards him, until I was just a foot or two away. With every step, I was incredibly conscious of the fact that now there was nothing between my skin and the outside world but a thin, flowing chemise. Air brushed against parts of me that hadn’t been exposed since I was four and my mother had dunked me in the bathtub. And all in all, that had been a very different sort of experience.

Mr Ambrose’s coldly burning eyes watched my every step as I approached. When I reached up to touch his face, his hand shot up with incredible speed, trapping my fingers in a vice-tight grip, keeping me from getting any farther. The growl that ripped from his throat was the rumble of a cracking mountain.

‘Are you trying to drive me mad?’

I lifted an eyebrow. ‘You’re still fully clothed in this heat. You are already mad, Sir. I’m just trying to make it a bit more fun.’

Tentatively, I tried to move my hand. His grip tightened, so I simply stepped towards him, into him, and leaned against his chest.

‘Hmmm…’

His whole body stiffened - and that’s saying something! For Mr Ambrose, it was perfectly normal to walk around as if he had an iron rod up his arse. Now, though, it was as if he himself were the iron rod, or a statue carved from bedrock.

All the better! If he didn’t move, he was all mine to play with.

Standing up on my tiptoes, I leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to the corner of his perfectly sculpted mouth. No matter that he was standing as stiff as a board - the skin there felt soft, and incredibly inviting. I bestowed another kiss, a little closer to the centre, nipping at his lip.