A Million Different Ways (Horn Duet 1)

“You’ll wear them for me,” he interrupted, crushing further discussion on the topic.

He took them out of the case and gently placed them on my earlobes, then grasped my shoulders and spun me around to look in the floor length mirror. My hands flew to the earrings.

“I don’t want to ask but…but I have to ask…these are real, aren’t they?”

“You don’t have to hold them up,” he said, his lips quivering in amusement.

My hands wouldn’t stay down. They kept flying protectively back up to my ears. “I can’t wear these. I’m already petrified of losing them.”

“Then I’ll buy you another pair.”

I laughed nervously. “You’re joking?”

“I’m not joking. Look.”

He moved to stand behind me and motioned to the image of us reflected in the mirror. My cheeks were flushed and my mouth was the color of summer raspberries. Sebastian’s eyes sparked appreciatively, all sorts of erotic promises dwelling there. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into the warm shelter of his body. Nudging me with his hips, his impossibly hard sex twitched as it pressed up against my rear end. My body instinctively pushed back in answer.

Wet. Willing. Ready. Always, for him.

His body heat danced on the bare skin of my back. My lids grew heavy, drunk on lust, while a pleased sigh worked its way up my throat. I felt his smile on the side of my neck. His practiced fingers slipped under the flimsy silk jersey and skated lightly over my breast, tugging, teasing me into a state of blissed out incoherence.

Take it. Take anything you want. It’s yours. The devil knew me better than I knew myself. He had stolen behind my ridged wall of protection and seized what he wanted with no objection from me. As he continued the tormenting of the damned, our eyes met in the mirror. I couldn’t guard myself from his perceptive, amber gaze any more than I could say no to him. I could feel him looking into my soul and finding my weakness for him. That was the dark irony of our story. He hated himself for his weakness, and yet I was just as powerless to resist him. Maybe more so because I risked a hell of a lot more than he did.

His hand slipped inside the slit of the dress and teased back the folds of my sex. He played with my body like he owned it, working his magic, annihilating me with his patience. The experience was a master class in seduction. I screamed his name as I came, my head falling back onto his shoulder in total surrender.

“Look at me.” Our eyes met in the mirror again. He held me possessively, my breast, my sex. “You belong to me,” he affirmed quietly.

Those words sank deep inside of me and caused a riot, my heart simultaneously rebelling and rejoicing. A strong instinct for self-preservation insisted I pull away, but he released me before I got the chance.

“Come on.” Once again, I was dragged out of the apartment. My head was swimming. Between the orgasm and the conflicting emotions, I could barely string two words together by the time he had us both buckled into the Bentley.

“Where are we going?” I asked, my voice small and unsettled.

Glancing briefly at me, he answered, “You’ll see.”

What I couldn’t fail to miss was the calculated sharpness in his eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Three

We walked down a dark, deserted alleyway. No place I would be found without a well-muscled, two hundred pound sex god standing next to me to protect me. Gideon had taken the Bentley at the corner. The building looked industrial, and a mountain-of-a-man wider and taller than Sebastian guarded the entrance. He was dressed in a black suit, and had an earpiece he pressed with his index finger. As soon as his eyes landed on us, he moved to open the iron door. I glanced at Sebastian and watched him nod to the doorman. Clearly, they were not strangers to each other.

We stepped inside a dim, narrow corridor lined in deep purple velvet. It went on forever, leading into a small jewel box of a chamber. It was octagonal and covered in etched mirrors all the way around. Sconce lights sparkled off the mirrors, giving it a romantic luminescence. I stared at the different angles of our reflection with an odd feeling of detachment. As I watched Sebastian’s hand stroke up and down my bare back, it occurred to me that we looked like two people in love, two people that belonged together. If only.

The door opened, and a woman dressed in black with a veil covering her face stepped forward and handed us two masks. They were Venetian and covered the entire face. Mine, white. Sebastian’s silver. The woman turned around and motioned us forward.

“Put it on for now,” he whispered in my ear. Reluctantly, I did as I was told.