“By the time I’m finished with it, we’ll have doubled it,” she said, suppressing another yawn. “I think I’m getting old. I’m feeling every ache from shoveling dirt.”
His gut knotted as he used the eye scan for quick entry. “Babe, why in the world, when you have such a big crew, would you be shoveling dirt? You oversee things, give orders, you don’t do manual labor.” He took her inside, closed and locked the door behind them.
“When we’re putting in those bigger trees, everyone has to help, Sevastyan. You get them in as fast as possible. It’s just safer that way.” She sounded offhand, a little distracted.
“Go on upstairs and start your bath, Flambé. The chef left our dinner in the kitchen. I just have to turn on the heat. I’ll be right up. Make the water hot. You know how I like it.” He brushed a kiss on top of her head. He’d already programmed the locks on the doors to open with her retinal scan.
“I’m going to wash my hair,” she advised him. “I’ll start filling the tub after I rinse off.”
He nodded and watched her go up the stairs. She was definitely exhausted, not just from her working day. That had started early, before light even, but most likely from the short, unexpected appearance from her female leopard. Her muscles had to feel abused by the contracting and expanding as the cat pushed against her frame, testing her strength. Shifting could be brutal when one wasn’t used to it. He’d forgotten that.
The house was large, and there were two smaller houses on the property for his men and other possible staff, but Sevastyan didn’t particularly want anyone around once the day was over. He liked his time alone and since he’d found Flambé, he wanted his time with her uninterrupted. More often than not, he knew he would keep their play in the master bedroom, where he’d set up his domain. With no one in the house and no way to be surprised, he wanted to be able to utilize any room in the house when the mood struck him.
He was pushing fairly hard to get the construction done on transforming the two garages into one massive greenhouse so they could have a tropical garden. He had been thinking about what types of equipment he would want hidden amongst the plants. He liked the idea of waterfalls and streams. He wanted to have very comfortable chairs to relax in and many places to inspire his imagination for tying on the ground as well as in the air. Flambé looked beautiful in ropes and, although new at erotic bondage, she was more than willing to try anything with him. He also wanted a place for the leopards to relax.
She was soaking in the steaming bathwater when he walked in, barefoot and naked himself. He simply stepped into the tub and joined her, sinking into the water opposite her so he could watch her face as they talked. The hot water was working its magic. Her hair was wet and piled on her head. Her face was clean and free of all lines of worry. She looked hopelessly young, as she did sometimes, and very relaxed. Her eyes were closed and she smiled faintly when he joined her, but she didn’t open her eyes.
He circled her ankle and picked up her foot to stroke her calf with strong fingers. “You were going to tell me about the conversation that had your crew so concerned, Flambé.” He kept his voice low, that velvet-soft, mesmerizing voice that played over her senses, the one she responded to the most.
“They were mostly giving me a hard time about the rescue operations. My team is bringing in a woman and her three children. She was caught on camera recently in her leopard form. Strawberry leopards are so unusual that they make huge headlines if they’re seen. She was seen in a big way because she had three kittens with her. Scientists are trying to prove why their spots are red, not black, and where the strawberry leopards come from. But there are so few because poachers want their furs . . .” She broke off, sighing. “It’s a big mess.”
He waited, not hurrying her. He pushed his thumb into her tense, tight muscle and rubbed until he felt it slowly give way and then massaged gently. There it was again. The truth. Misleading him. What was she hiding?
“They think I trust too much. Maybe I do, Sevastyan. The internet has made it so much more difficult for me to go anywhere without being seen. My father could slip in and out of a country and no one was the wiser, but now, if I take two steps somewhere, Franco knows or those people who put a price on my head are watching the airports and they know.”
That was all true. “Is that what these men were worried about?”
Her lashes fluttered and she frowned as she opened her eyes to look at him. “Sort of. It all kind of fits together. Are you sure you want to hear this? I haven’t really figured out if they’re right or wrong. They gave me a lot to think about.”
He didn’t want to tell her that he was the only one she needed to figure it out with, but it was the truth. If he didn’t get a satisfactory answer from her, he would be talking to all three of the men, one at a time, until he was satisfied. Something in the way they were acting really bothered him. He kept his fingers relaxed as he switched to massaging her other calf.
“Bounce it off me.”
“The woman, Shanty is her name, insisted on meeting only with me when she’d never met me. My team was going to extract her, but she wanted me to go to South Africa myself to escort her and the children to the United States. I have a perfectly good team and they explained to her that it was impossible for me to come. When she balked, I had to tell her that if she didn’t go with them, we couldn’t pull her out. For some reason, all three of the men didn’t like that she was insistent I go to her. They thought it was strange.”
He kept his gaze on her face. He didn’t allow his heart to accelerate or any change to his breathing. If these three men thought there was a problem, there most likely was a problem.
Her teeth sank briefly into her lower lip and then she sighed again. “My father didn’t want me to continue with rescuing. He said it was becoming too dangerous.” She made the confession in a little rush. “I disagreed with him. It was the only thing we argued about right up until he passed away. I have a team of investigators and they’re very good, but maybe the men are right and I hurry them because I’m so afraid of losing someone. I need to be more careful.”
Or not do any more rescuing. Sevastyan didn’t say it aloud. He was going to consider how to keep her safe and not sound like a dictator. Clearly, she felt passionate about what she did. To just tell her she had to stop when she wouldn’t do it for her father wasn’t going to work. He needed a better solution.
“It’s nice to know the men who work for you also look out for you,” Sevastyan said, his voice mild. He was going to make certain he knew everything there was to know about them. He hoped to enlist their aid. He also wanted to talk to her investigation team and find out about this woman, Shanty.
“Don’t fall asleep yet, baby. You need to eat. You haven’t been eating much at all lately.”
11
SEVASTYAN lay awake for a long time, his body burning hot. Flames licked over his skin and ignited like gunpowder in his veins. It seemed that every time he woke now, Flambé beside him, his body woke first, already in a state of need. He always savored the buildup of heat and fire. He let it happen rather than trying to suppress it the way he had for years. Now, there was his woman.
She lay curled up in a ball the way she did, making herself so small in the middle of their bed, that red hair of hers already spilling out of its braid, proclaiming to him that she couldn’t be tamed. She always turned on her side, away from him, as if she could get away in her sleep, but he slept with his body around hers, his arm anchoring her to him, one leg thrown over her so there was no way she could possibly escape.
He enjoyed lying awake while she slept, imagining her tied in various ways. Seeing erotic images of her with the different ropes against her skin. She had such perfect skin for ropes, for the various colors and textures of ropes. She was extremely limber and she had done what he’d asked and stretched every day, several times a day, taking care to get her body into the best shape possible for the rigorous demands needed to be a rope model.
With Sevastyan, she wasn’t just his rope model. She was his partner in bondage and sex. He would demand all kinds of difficult erotic things from her that meant she needed to be in top physical condition. He took her training seriously and he was very grateful that she did as well. He studied her face for a long time while she slept. She’d been very quiet, nearly falling asleep in the bath the night before.
Sevastyan had insisted she eat, and she had, but very little. She had been seductive as she readied herself for bed, but he had been aloof, settling himself in a chair across the room from the bed with a book until she finally gave up. She threw herself on top of the covers and almost immediately fell asleep. Denying himself had taken discipline, but she needed rest and he needed time to figure his woman out. He also knew that he had to be the one controlling the sexual situations between them at all times. He was missing something big and if he didn’t figure out what that was soon, he might lose her altogether.
There was a problem with her leopard—or with her. He couldn’t decide which one it was. Her female was in her first cycle. Male leopards were known to their male counterparts almost from the moment they were born, but it wasn’t the same with most shifters. Often, women had no idea if they even had a leopard until she made herself known when their cycles united and she was ready to emerge. That was an intense time for the human female and extremely disorienting, at least based on everything he had observed from Ania’s experience.