ForHisSakeBlankEditionHTML (4 page)

The Ferris & Hale seniors kept their game faces
on, but Obray, my lead, snickered openly. That was what I liked about the man.
Even-tempered to the point of seeming bland most of the time, Obray still loved
the fight. Put him in a corner, and out came the teeth.

Shaking his head of salt-and-pepper hair, Obray used
a red pen to slash through long paragraphs in the indictment while the
prosecutors watched with sour frowns. “These…you have no hope in hell of
proving.” Three or four more paragraphs, over several pages, got red circles
around them. “These you might get lucky with, on the right day and with the
right judge, so let’s take a break and then we can discuss.” From the pinched
looks on the faces of the ministry men, I suspected his bemused tone had them
seeing more red than the ink.

The attorneys all around the table rose amid the low
din of dissatisfied mutters and chair legs grating along the floor. While
others stretched and grabbed coffee cups and filtered out of the room, I
remained seated, gazing out the windows beyond the table at the Brazilian blue
sky.

“Not coming, Adrian?” Obray
asked,
his hand on my shoulder. He knew we were both playing roles, that he wasn’t
that amused and I wasn’t this calm. I had a lot to lose, and it weighed
heaviest on me in the quiet moments.

“No, some time to
myself
would be good,” I assured him. “And we both know you don’t want me talking to
those reporters out there.”

He inclined his head. “True. I’ll be back in a few
minutes.”

The negotiations only
really
began when I sat alone in the room—considering the deals I
would have to make with myself. The prosecutors wanted fifteen years of my
life, a nine-figure fine, and Ilha de Flor. What was my counteroffer? I rubbed
my hand against my rough chin and asked myself what I was willing to lose to
keep the island safe. To provide for Manuela and Luiz, the closest thing I had
to relations these days, even if the boy did consider me the devil incarnate.
Gabriel, my project manager… He’d be fine without me, but a phone call or two
might have helped him find a new job. I tried not to ponder what it said about
me that I had to count staff as family. But, really, who wouldn’t have wanted a
sharp-witted, strong-tongued beauty like Manuela as their grandmother? Surely,
no one could blame me for thinking of the woman as my
avό
…or
even a mother.

There had to be a way to make sure Manuela stayed on
at the resort.
Were
I to sell the development, I
could’ve included a clause in the contract requiring the new owner to keep her
on staff. Yes, the prosecutors might have let me do that in lieu of taking the
value of the resort into consideration when they confiscated the island. Either
way, I was
sure,
I was losing my tropical haven.

Suddenly so weary that I hardly felt myself move, I
rose from my chair and wandered over to the broad bank of windows. The district
buildings blocked my view, but I knew I was facing the ocean. Past the office
buildings and the resort hotels and the beach, out there in the water, she
waited for me, the island.
My
ilha
and memories of Chloe.

I came up short of breath as the first throb of a
headache pounded against my temples. There’d been times over the last couple of
days when I had completely blocked dear Miss Bloom out of my thoughts, but
there was a price to pay. When she did come to mind, it was always in an
overwhelming surge of smells and sensations…and regrets.

Funny, it was easier—it ached less—to face the
humiliation of losing my resort, my island, even my freedom than to relive
those sixteen days in March when Chloe Bloom had been my submissive and my
biggest problem was getting her to open up to me and swear she was mine. I pressed
the heels of my palms against my eyes, wondering if I still had a packet of
aspirin in my jacket pocket and where I could get a stiff drink to wash it down
if I did.

“Headache?”

My hands came away from my face, and my eyes flew
open. I had imagined that voice, willed it into being. She couldn’t actually
have been…

I twisted my head to look over my shoulder,
then
turned to face her.
Chloe.
In
a white blouse and conservative black skirt suit, but with all that wild brown
hair loose about her shoulders and her movements as fluid as though she’d just
come from the balcony dance floor after a samba lesson with Tia, she was a
vision of two worlds overlapping.
The serious East Coast
environmental lawyer and the sensuous submissive who always melted against me
when I pulled her hair and ground against her while calling her Miss Bloom.

“Chloe, what in God’s name are you doing here? Did…
Did the seniors bring you in on this? You agreed to that? I didn’t ask them to,
really.” I’d never have forced her to be a part of this.

She wouldn’t answer me until she stood no more than
a breath away, and I caught myself swaying so slightly toward her. Chloe gave
me a nervous, even guilty little smile then. “No, they don’t know I’m here.”

“Then why…?”

She reached up with those pale, delicate fingers and
began to rub little circles along my aching temples. The questions that were
backed up in my throat dissipated, until all that was left was a groan under my
breath.

“That depends” she said, “on how
you
answer
my
questions.”

The involuntary crook of my brow sent a flare of
pain through my head. “And those are?” I grumbled.

“Which of the allegations are true, Adrian? I need
to know.”

My eyes sank closed, unable to resist the warm
languor spreading out from her fingertips and through the muscles in my face. I
knew she shouldn’t have been here, but she was, and she felt so damn good just
touching me, just standing near.

“I did bribe a public official in Natal, over the
demonstration project permits, and I did file false environmental documents for
the
eco
park
.”

“But why?
You could’ve gotten those permits without resorting to bribery or falsifying
the environmental studies.”

Finally opening my
eyes, I trailed my fingertips along the back of her smooth hands and gave her a
small, chagrined smile. “Because with twenty thousand acres involved, that
could easily have taken five years, even ten. So we only did the studies for
the areas immediately surrounding the project sites, and I paid people to
overlook the discrepancies. I was… I was just too bloody impatient to take the
long road.” Too eager to prove I wasn’t my father’s son. And now it was going
to cost me everything. “This is my fault, Chloe, completely.” Not Penn’s or
Daniel
Vaz’s
. They might have been holding the gun to
my head now, but I had loaded it for them.

Only when Chloe stepped
up flush with me and looked into my face did I realize I had bowed my head and
begun to recoil from her. “That’s it?” she asked.
“Out of all
the charges, those of the only ones with actual merit?”

“Yeah,” I breathed.
“But they’re enough, aren’t they?”

“In that case, I’m here
for you
, Adrian. We’re going to get
you out of this.”

I tilted my head and
peered hard at her, at those deep brown eyes rimmed with such thick black
lashes, at the determined line set between those lush lips. Then I shook away
thoughts that belonged back in the city where we’d said goodbye four nights
ago, that belonged on Ilha de Flor. “If the senior partners didn’t call you
here… Chloe, you’re going to get yourself in serious trouble, and I won’t allow
it.”

One corner of her mouth
curled upward. “Don’t raise your voice. It will make the headache worse.”

“And just how do you
propose to help me by losing your job and getting yourself censured?”

“I have contacts who
are working on unraveling what’s going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of
strings being pulled to fast track this prosecution, more than this case
warrants.”

“Tell me about it,” I
sighed. “Another perk of the family name, I guess.
Makes me a
bigger trophy.”

“It’s more than that,”
she insisted. “The man they say you bribed has family ties to opposition
leaders in the Brazilian government. You’ve given their political enemies a
free shot.”

“That would explain
it—why they named the wrong man.”

Chloe stopped rubbing
my head. “What? Then who did you bribe?” She quickly typed the name I gave her
into her PDA. “Did you tell the seniors this?”

“Yes, but it only came
up yesterday. I doubt they’ve had time to look into it.”

She nodded.
“Too much going on with the case.
I’ll take care of it.”

I gripped her by the
shoulders, and she let out a low breath and went limp against me, a reaction I
would’ve relished at any other time. “No, you won’t, Chloe, because you’re
getting on a plane back to the States this morning if I have to charter it
myself.”

“You can’t make me,”
she whispered, and there was both a definite challenge and the lilt of
anticipation in her voice.

“We’re…” I had to pause
to swallow down a hard, rough groan of emotion. “We’re not doing this. It’s not
going to work.” My thumbs traced the trembling muscles in her arms. I didn’t
know if I wanted to hold her close, until she stopped shaking, or make her
shudder harder.
Both.
“We had our chance, Chloe. We
couldn’t keep hold of it.” By the time I’d gotten her to open up to me, my life
had caught up to us. Penn, the bad choices I’d made, those essentially
irredeemable qualities that I couldn’t help wearing like some kind of badge.

Her eyes were damp and
gleaming as she responded, “None of that makes any difference to what’s happening
right now. I
know
I can help you.
Just let me.”

And before I could
scold the daylights out of her, Chloe came up on her toes and brushed my lips
with hers. My tongue slid into her mouth before I could stop it, and that
familiar taste of cinnamon and copper and honey that was Chloe
Bloom, that scent of iris and apple,
infused my senses
again. I had to run my tongue along every inch of the inside of her mouth, feel
the hum of her small moans against my lips and the juncture of her thighs
cradling the bulge jutting insistently from the front of my suit pants. I
pulled away only after I’d pushed her back against the conference table. She
had spread her legs for me, so naturally, so willingly, and I’d reached for my
belt buckle before I knew what I was doing.

“Christ!” I gasped for
a calming breath and pushed my hair back with my fingers. My head was still
pounding, but this time with more than pain.

“I remember,” she
whispered suggestively, “what used to take care of those headaches.”

My eyes flared when I
remembered, too, as she hooked her fingers in the waistband of my pants and
began to slide down into a carefully balanced crouch on her high heel shoes.
“Chloe, no,” I protested, but even I didn’t take me seriously.

“That’s Miss Bloom to
you, sir.”

My moment’s pause at
this little quip was all the permission she needed—my submissive needed—to
unbuckle my belt and unfasten my pants. But I caught her hands with mine as she
began to free my aching erection from my briefs. “Your timing could not be
worse, Miss Bloom. Does it get any more inappropriate than this?”

She gaze up at me so
calmly, her expression open and unguarded. “I’m not trembling anymore, sir. And
I bet that headache is starting to fade. Am I right?”

I didn’t need to answer
her aloud. She knew my response, or she’d never have asked the question. Chloe
was correct, of course, and I knew the point she was making. When I was her
Dom, when she was my submissive, the world shrank down around us until it was
just us two. The order I imposed as Master and the duty she accepted as slave
became our anchor amid the chaos of our lives and even the roiling power of the
hunger we shared. Our rituals of domination and submission were the only
security either of us had, especially right now.

When I released Chloe’s
hands, she freed my ready cock from the confines of my clothing and nuzzled and
licked it slowly, reverently. Within seconds, she had me reaching out for the
back of the chair to keep my balance. She had to work harder for hers, as my
free hand gripped her by the hair at the back of her head and directed her
mouth down over my swollen member.

“Yes, Miss Bloom, all
of it. Let me feel the back of your throat.
So deep.
So warm.”
I sucked my breath in through my clenched teeth
and resisted the urge to use her mouth roughly, if only because I was concerned
someone would hear her choking and gasping. As it was, the gentle pressure of
her hands cupping and squeezing my engorged balls had me biting back my own
growls of pleasure. I let my head loll and my gaze roll toward the ceiling as
she drew with increasing intensity on my lightly pulsing member, every nerve
ending alive and jerking with what felt like electrical currents.