She takes a deep breath and then opens her eyes, fixing me with a sassy look. “Are you going to fuck my mouth, my ass and my pussy every time I come here? I hope you can keep it up.”
Oh, I can keep it up. My girl is fucking heaven and just as horny as I am. I groan as my orgasm floods through me.
My fiancée.
My bride.
I don’t want to say goodbye, but I have to. Thirty minutes later we’re standing at the front door of Balzac House, me in my suit and Sachelle dressed in her nightshirt with her coat over top.
Two men in City Guard uniforms are standing by the front gate. There are two more in the laneway out back, and they’ll guard Sachelle while I can’t be with her.
Sachelle gazes up at me, her lips still pleasingly red from all the kisses I gave her.
I cup my hand around the nape of her neck to pull her to me, and then I kiss her. “I wish I could stay by your side all day.”
“Haven’t you had enough, you beast?”
“Of you? Never, Lady Sachelle.” I kiss her again. A beastly kiss. A wild kiss. Reluctantly, I break it. “I’ve got a long day ahead of me, trying to find out who sent you that envelope and tracking down the driver of that truck.”
Sachelle is still gasping a little from my kiss and takes a moment to realize what I’ve said. “Hm? We know who sent it. You did.”
“Little fox, of course it wasn’t me.”
She stares at me, her eyes wide. Then her mouth snaps closed. “I don’t believe you.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“Yeah, sure. Later you’ll find reasons not to talk.”
“The best reasons,” I say, and slant my mouth over hers again. She makes a buzz of irritation in the back of her throat but kisses me with as much desire as she did when we were between the sheets in the dark.
I brush the backs of my fingers over her cheek, gazing into her beautiful eyes.
15
Sachelle
Jakob goes on staring at me so tenderly. I’ve never seen this vulnerable expression from him before.
I reach up to take his hand in mine, but he grabs my wrist and growls, “If you do anything stupid today, you’ll get a spanking ten times worse than the one you had last night. I’ll make sure you can’t sit down for a week.”
My eyes widen and I pull my wrist from his grasp. “For heaven’s sake, Jakob. You can’t just threaten me and sp—” I glance at the guard a dozen feet away and lower my voice “—spank me and expect me to do whatever you say. Husbands and wives actually communicate.”
Not that I’m going to marry him. I’m just trying to drive a point through his very thick skull.
“Watch me,” he growls.
“If you want me to stay at home like a good girl as you put it, you’ll have to explain yourself. If it wasn’t you who put together that recording and took those pictures, who was it?”
“Your friends with the smoke bomb, of course.”
Tieman doctored that recording and took those photos? It doesn’t make sense. “Not possible. Why would they do such a thing?”
“To confirm what they suspected. That you’d get scared and run right to me.”
“I ran to you to accuse you!”
“Do you suppose that’s what it looked like to your so-called friends?”
I stare at him, trying to piece together what he’s saying. Was Tieman testing me? Was I supposed to run to him? The only reason I ran to Jakob was because I felt so betrayed.
And yet here I am standing on the front steps of Balzac House, kissing him for all to see. Tieman or one of his people could be watching us right now. God knows what he must be thinking. Probably that I’ve betrayed him.
“I suppose you think that it was my friends who tried to kill us last night?”
“I do,” Jakob says, his mouth a grim line.
“They wouldn’t. It must have been someone else. Someone who wants you dead, not me. I’m sure there are dozens of people in Paravel who’d like to hit you with a truck.”
“And they all wait outside your house?”
He has me there, but I won’t believe it was Tieman who wanted me dead. Louis, on the other hand? Maybe. But sarcastic comments are a world away from cold-blooded murder.
Jakob gazes at me bleakly. “Is it so hard for you to believe that I might know more about this than you do? That I really do give a damn about this country, and about you?”
“I believe that you think you know what’s best.”
“Good enough for now. In the meantime, I’ll just have to work doubly hard to keep you from landing yourself in trouble. It would be easier if you’d move in with me. You’re going to be my wife, after all.”