He went over and slammed his hand against the light switch. Then he tripped over his boots in the dark on the way to the bed.
“Son of a—” He barely caught his balance and avoided crashing into the sharp corner of his desk.
“That’s why you always put your boots at the foot of the bed when you take them off, dumbass.” He shook his head at himself and finally made it to the bed. He dropped his back onto the mattress, making it squeak in protest. He wasn’t a small man.
He grabbed his pillow and pounded it a couple times to fluff it into shape and then he shoved it under his head and turned on his side.
He pulled the sheets and comforter over himself and resolutely shut his eyes.
Okay.
Good.
Now he’d go to sleep. The alarms would go off if anyone else approached the house.
Relax.
He concentrated on loosening his muscles.
Sleep.
Yep.
Going to sleep now.
What did her tits look like without that flimsy little robe on? Were they real? They’d looked real.
What the fuck? Stop it.
Nicholas smacked himself in the face. Hard. Then he did it again.
Sleep.
Fucking sleep.
Sheep. Count the fucking sheep.
…
…
Did she actually cum on camera or just make a show of it? Like those bad porn actresses who did those fake ass high-pitched screams that were so phony you could tell from a mile away? Did she—
Shit!
He groaned and rolled over so his face was buried in his pillow.
The position had his cock jammed against the mattress and seemingly of their own accord, his hips started grinding and seeking friction.
“Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit,” he groaned out. Maybe after this job he’d visit one of Vasiliev’s girls. He was just hard up. That was all.
He scrubbed his hand down his face again.
What the hell was he doing? He needed to focus. He’d make mistakes if he wasn’t on top of his game and mistakes were the last thing he could afford. Working for Vasiliev was a good gig—as long as you didn’t fuck up. Papa was famously ill-tempered.
This mission was an opportunity for Nicholas to move up the ranks… or end up on Papa’s bad side.
But Nicholas’s raging hard-on wasn’t going anywhere, and the more he tried not to think about her luscious curves, the more they popped up and emblazoned themselves on his brain.
He sat up against the headboard, staring out into the dark.
The truth was, he didn’t want some random pussy. Because it wasn’t just about sex.
It was about her.
Sloane.
He’d been attracted to her from the first moment he saw her. She was beautiful, sure. But she was funny too. And smart.
She wasn’t unaware of her looks. She knew she looked good. But she didn’t do that thing so many beautiful women did. The thing where they knew they had you by your dick, so they just toyed with you like it was all a big game.
Cassandra liked that game. He didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but it had all been one big game to her. He thought it was so much more. Love even. Fuckin’ stupid was what he was. Really she’d just been an older woman excited by the thought of some forbidden dick from the wrong side of town.
Two years of yanking his chain, submitting in the bedroom but then screaming at him and haranguing him the rest of the time. Then she got knocked up with some other man’s bastard and she had the nerve to come to him with her crocodile tears trying to pass it off as his when he hadn’t been in her bed for months at that point.
Naw.
If anything should’ve killed his boner, it was thinking about that witch.
But no, because in the background, Sloane’s smile flashed. The way she’d watched him shyly over the rim of her coffee cup. Like she was both nervous and about to bubble over with giddiness. How goddamned delighted she’d seemed at every little thing he did. She was the opposite of everything Cassandra was. She was genuine.
And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d met anyone teeming with so much… life.
Not to mention she was dead sexy.
Jesus, those legs alone… Damn, they’d be enough to keep any red-blooded man up at night.
Yeah so he wasn’t one of the guys who spent time with any of the girls in Vasiliev’s stable, and other than the occasional rub and tug session in the shower—and that only when he wasn’t too tired after a long day, which was less and less often these days—he hardly thought about sex.
He assumed it was part of getting older. Yeah, thirty-one was hardly old enough to qualify him for an old folks home, but he didn’t know how else to explain it. He’d been randy as hell when he was a teenager. All the time. Jesus. Fucking shampoo commercials used to make him hard.