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When I knew I was only
seconds from releasing myself down Chloe’s throat, I hurried to withdraw from
her mouth and pull her from her crouch into another panting, whimpering kiss.
Tasting myself on her lips nearly drove me over the edge. More than once, I
thought I’d seen Chloe for the last time, kissed her for the last time. Yet she
was here with me now, here
for
me. I
could almost believe she was meant to be mine.

“Right now, nothing
matters but this,” I told her, my tone leaving no room for doubt or argument.
“You’re mine—always, irrevocably. No one and nothing will ever take away this
moment.”

“Ever,” she agreed
breathlessly, her gaze steady on mine.

I pushed her back
against the table edge, quite intentionally this time. As she slid up onto the
polished surface, I reached under her skirt and traced my fingers along the
line of her warm cleft through her silken underwear. “No panties, Miss Bloom,”
I reminded her. Then I gripped them by the dampened crotch and ripped the wisp
of material from her body as she gasped and mewed.

Her knees spread, her
heels hooked along the edge of the table, Chloe sighed raggedly. “Please, sir.
Please, please.
Now.
I need you.” And she did. She
always had, almost as much as I needed her. Damn the world that she could only
admit it to me now.

A single stroke thrust
half the length of my cock into my beautiful submissive’s willing sex, and her
body hugged me tight and drew me deeper. “
Eu
te
amo
,” I groaned as I sank into
her full measure, part of me afraid she understood what I was saying and part
of me certain she’d known all along. From that first time, in the sauna, when I
thought I’d hurt her and felt my own heart sink.

If she’d been inclined
to swear her love to me in return, I cut her effort short by jerking open her
blouse and drawing her breast from her pretty white lace bra to my waiting
lips. I couldn’t resist using the pain-pleasure that drew her every muscle taut
and tight around me. Her gasps were like the notes from my piano, and I played
her with everything I had in me. While I sucked one pink, rigid nipple, my
fingers pinched and rolled the other, and she whined. I released the
pressure,
let the warm blood flow back into the tender nub,
just as I forced my hard cock straight to her core.

Even as her nails raked
the back of my neck and my shoulder through my dress shirt, even as my balls
tightened with my approaching climax, I refused to relent. Chloe arced and
squirmed and lifted her hips from the table, and still I drove into her and
sucked and teethed at her silky skin. She bowed back over the arm I used to
encircle her waist and went limp as a sudden orgasm shot through her flushed
body. And still I refused her mercy, fucking her through her climax.
Fucking her through my own release.

My mouth finally came
away from the full swell of her breast, and I groaned against Chloe’s chest.
“Not enough.
Never enough.
I’ll never have enough of
you.” Her arms abruptly closed around my head and clasped me tight against her.
She was still panting and squeezing her eyes shut, still beyond speech, I
suspected. I hoped. I
reveled
.

Hips pumping, I took
her harder, pounding my thighs against the end of the table. There would be
bruises later. A high whine began to build at the base of her throat, as first
one arm and then the other fell away from me, limp against the gleaming wood
beneath her. There wasn’t an ounce of resistance left in her. She was mine, her
body under my complete control.

“Say my name, Chloe,” I
rasped. “Who is your Master?

“You.
Adrian,” she sighed, nearly inaudible.

“Again,” I demanded.

“Adrian.”

The softer she spoke
the harder my cock throbbed, demanding she take me deeper, harder,
rougher
. I couldn’t get far enough inside her, no matter how
deep I thrust, no matter how much she took. More, I always needed more. I
always would need more with Chloe, long after she was gone, after everything I
was had finally pushed her from me.

And again I came inside
her, no condom,
no
hesitation. I filled her and
claimed her and spent…
myself
inside
her.

“Adrian,” she murmured
again, almost having caught her breath while I was still panting madly and
shuddering against her. One hand came up off the table, and her fingers
threaded through my hair, massaging my scalp. Heaven couldn’t have been better.

I was about to tell her
so when the doorknob rattled.

***

I twisted abruptly
where I lay on the conference table, my gaze fixed on the door I’d locked when
I slipped into the room to see Adrian. We were both on our feet in an instant,
and both of us tugging at my clothing, trying to preserve what was surely at
this point my nonexistent modesty. No one was going to see our flushed faces
and believe we’d been having an innocent conversation.

It was, I thought
distantly, kind of sweet that Knight tried to help me get myself in order
before
himself
. One of those small gestures from
Adrian that had always made me feel cared
for,
looked
after…cherished. Over those initial days on
Ihla
de
Flor, it had taken real effort to discount so many little instances of
consideration and kindness, to condition myself to believe them meaningless or
even accidental. If I could have gone back to those moments now, I’d have let
myself enjoy them.

“Adrian,” an unfamiliar
voice called through the door.

“Obray.
He’s my lead counsel,” Adrian told me, smoothing the thick waves of his
blackish brown hair back into place as I fiddled frantically with his belt.

“Mr. Knight?” That one
I recognized—Frank Ullman.

“I’m done for,” I
whispered as my hands and my breathing stilled and Adrian and I stopped to gaze
full-on at one another.

Knight shook his head,
his parted lips grasping for something to say and failing. In the end, he
kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I told him,
an odd calm settling over me now that I knew I’d been caught. “The choice was
mine.” The strangest thought occurred to me as I followed Adrian slowly to the
door. Had this been the way my mother felt all those years? She might never
have tamed my father’s wandering eye, but she had owned her love of him. She’d
accepted it.
Embraced it.
It had been
hers
—part of who she was—whether he had
been or not.

I didn’t feel quite so
accepting of the subtle glare I got from Frank Ullman once that door was open
and he and Obray had a moment to look over my disheveled appearance and
Adrian’s. “Miss Bloom,” Ullman said dryly before he turned to the thinner,
gray-haired man. “This is one of the junior partners from our firm.” This
earned only a raised eyebrow from Obray, as Frank gathered me by one arm and began
to lead me from the room.
 
“If you’ll
excuse us, I need a few minutes to confer with Miss Bloom.”

Tucked away at one end
of the corridor, at a distance from the scattered clusters of people chatting
in the hallway, Ullman folded his hands thoughtfully at his waist and regarded
me for several silent moments. “I’m going to assume you didn’t just meet Adrian
Knight,” he said in a cool tone he reserved for serious fuck-ups. This was the
first time I’d heard it directed at me.

It didn’t help that he
was a full foot taller than I was, that I had to look up at him like a school
child regarding her principal. “No,” I admitted, “we met on his island during
my leave of absence last month.”

“I take it Mr. Knight
was the reason for your leave.”

And I nodded. “Look, I
can’t justify horning in on this case and showing up here uninvited, but I do
have information pertinent to Knight’s defense.
Names that
need to be followed up on because there is more going on here than meets the
eye.”

“Oh, I can believe
that.” Ullman’s dry humor again.

“Really, Frank, I know.
I know what kind of trouble I’m in with the firm for being here, but my
information is good. You need it.” I synced my PDA with Frank’s and gave him a
moment to review my notes.

With a deep breath, my
mentor—the man who’d taken a big chance pushing to get me named a junior
partner—focused hard on me with those steely gray eyes I’d found calming and
almost fatherly up until now. “Yes, this information definitely warrants
further investigation. I’ll have my clerk on it before lunchtime. And, yes,
you’re in it deep, missy. I’d suggest you do whatever is necessary to get back
to the offices before any more of the seniors find out you’re AWOL. You’re
going to need the time between now and the end of this case to prepare your
argument for why you shouldn’t be let go from Ferris & Hale for a good half
dozen ethical breaches I can think of just off the top of my head.”

“Sir,
I—.”
My protests faded in my mouth. There was no point.
I wasn’t leaving Brazil, not until I’d exhausted my every resource and Adrian’s
cause was either saved or lost. But telling Frank that, here and now, served no
purpose. If I had to burn this bridge—and I did—I could at least have waited
until we weren’t standing on it.

You
really didn’t think this through, did you, Chloe
?
Linda and Frank weren’t the only ones I was disappointing, and I hadn’t taken
that into consideration. There were friends and coworkers who wouldn’t be able
to understand what had gotten into me all of a sudden. A creeping sense of
shame climbed the back of my neck, as the voice of my little inner demon
taunted me over what I was throwing away because I couldn’t stop thinking about
Adrian Knight. Even right now. Was he back in the conference room having the
same kind of disappointed conversation with Obray? Of course, it was a little
different when it was Adrian’s name on the paychecks.

Finally, I just nodded
and told Frank I understood. Better than he did, but I didn’t add that part.
Then he walked away from me back into the conference room, shutting the door
behind him, and I stood there just a little lost, adrift as one more piece of
my pre-Adrian life broke away from me. What now? Back to the hotel for a quick
bite, then a call to see if Karl had turned up anything new based on the
information I’d given him a couple of hours ago? Without an office to report
to, without meetings dissecting my day into little easy-to-digest units, I
felt…too free. And I chuckled, perhaps a tad forlorn, at the thought that I
missed the way Adrian had laid out my duties at the villa. Again, he was my
security, my direction.
My purpose.

“Excuse me, miss.”

A warm, older male
voice drew my attention like a smile from a stranger. I was already turning to
face the direction it had come from when it occurred to me that he had a
British accent. Too friendly a tone for another Alexander, I observed with
relief.

He walked with a dark
wooden cane topped with a shiny brass handle embossed with the initials EMK.
Almost pure white hair, green eyes flecked with amber brown that reminded me of
Adrian’s, and skin impressively smooth and youthful for a man who projected a
presence of age and self-possession. No, he didn’t have the look of an
Alexander about him, but there was money—in the Italian shoes, the thin blue cashmere
pullover, even the square-cut manicure. His posture, though, and his earthy
tone suggested a scrapper, a doer.
A self-made man.

“Forgive the intrusion,
miss,” he said in a plain accent, workman’s British, being maybe a bit of a
northerner. “I thought I overheard you and the gentleman there speaking of an
Adrian Knight. Is that correct?”

I hesitated, knowing
that had been a privileged conversation, and I was in enough trouble. “Yes,
but…”

The elderly gentleman
held up one hand as though to indicate he understood, which he would have had
he heard much at all. “I don’t mean to pry. I’m just hoping someone can get me
a meeting with Adrian.
Nothing too long.
Just a few minutes with him.
It would mean a great deal to
us.”

“Us?”

“Forgive me. I should
introduce myself. I’m Edward Knight, Adrian’s grandfather.”

“Edward
Knight
?” I stumbled verbally over the
thought.
“His grandfather?
His…his
mother’s father, then?”
So Adrian had taken his mother’s surname when
he’d tried to distance himself from the
Alexanders
.

“Exactly so,” the man
agreed with a crisp nod.

“But you haven’t seen
Adrian in…”

“In
years.
Yes, quite right.
Since shortly
after his mother passed.”
The man’s bright expression dimmed as his
brows curled down at some private thought, a flicker of contained emotion. It
was a British thing, I knew well enough from watching Adrian. Passion they
expressed well enough, at least in
private,
and anger.
But anything else they kept close to the vest. “We’d lost track of Adrian for
some time, until this news. I’ve been passing a few weeks at the family estate
in Argentina, so I took the opportunity to… Well, to see if I could speak to
Adrian. It’s been a very long time, and this is a distressing development.”