In His Service (3 page)

In the bath, I sat in the soap-silky water and hugged my knees and lingered over the anxiety knotting my stomach. Was this what I really wanted, to feel this overpowering combination of adrenaline and dread and anticipation flooding through me every minute of the day and night? My life back home was set, rigid, controlled, predictable. Yes, even as I had watched my career as a
valiant
defender of the environment, a liaison between big business and best practices, fade and warp like a melting record into nothing more than the profitable defense of careless corporations, it was at least predictable.

So why did the thought of walking out of the villa, away from Adrian Knight and back to the familiar confines of my office—dark wood and leather-bound books and a window with a view—leave me feeling nauseated?

Back in the bedroom, I found my suitcases sitting at the foot of the bed but no Adrian in sight. Sounds at the other end of the villa suggested music or maybe a television. I resisted the natural instinct to dress and wandered cautiously and still wet-headed down the dim, wide hallway toward what I supposed would be the living room. The walls of the low, cool passage bore framed art made of pressed orchids and tropical leaves, interspersed with paintings of wild natural settings that could easily have been still representations of real life places on Ilha de Flor. But no family portraits to record the legacy that culminated in Adrian Knight. No hints about siblings or hobbies or prior girlfriends. No photos with friends playing polo at university or skiing in Aspen or gambling in Monte Carlo. Curious. Or was I just assigning too many of Penn’s traits to Adrian?

In the cream-on-dark-wood living room, he was playing the piano, and I came up short at the sight. Wet hair and fluffy white robe and deft fingers trailing over the keys with practiced confidence. I kept my distance, frowning, because it was wrong. It was a sleek brown baby grand when it should have been a small, battered upright. A playful Beethoven bagatelle that should have been Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Adrian Knight sitting where my mother should have been. It was an…an intrusion into private memories I held sacrosanct, beyond the reach of anyone else. I wanted to rush across the room and make him stop, make him kiss me, tug open his robe and straddle his lap and make us both forget what he was doing.

I might have acted on that urge had the front door not slammed just then. By instinct, I stepped back into the shadows of the hallway, hugging the wall, as the hard, quick click of high heels sounded around the corner in the entry way. A moment later, a stunning older woman in a slate blue floral dress and gorgeous, old-fashioned 1940’s heels pushed a service cart into the room, interrupting the music. I found myself drawn to the woman’s beauty in the same way I’d been drawn to my mother’s. In her sixties maybe, she reminded me of a Brazilian Sophia Loren with those prominent cheekbones and sensual lips above a strong chin. The muscles in her bare arms, her skin light caramel, flexed subtlety as she pushed the obviously heavy cart and compensated for one uncooperative wheel.

“Bom dia, Manuela,” Adrian said as he pivoted on the piano bench to face the woman where she had started unloading dishes onto a round table beside the shutter-wall that opened out onto the stone patio. When Adrian had told me that he’d forgone hiring a pretentious resort chef in favor of the homey cooking of a Brazilian grandmother, I hadn’t pictured a woman who looked like she belonged in Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Still, there was a definite maternal authority to the way the woman straightened up from her work and fisted her hands on her hourglass hips. “Good morning, he says.” She narrowed her dark eyes at him as her words rolled out of her mouth with a strong Portuguese accent. The soft curls of her carefully styled, silver-streaked black hair brushed the top of her shoulders as she shook her head at him. Adrian, looking at turns bashful and mischievous, stood at the table stirring sugar into a cup of hot tea and regarding her from beneath his lashes. “You suddenly take up with a girlfriend and move her into the villa, and all you say is bom dia? Where is she? You’re supposed to introduce her. And she better not be that skinny blond biscate!”

This made Adrian choke on his tea. “Language, my lady!”

“I’ll show you language,” she threatened, one dark brow arched at him, but the purse of her red-lacquered lips suggested a suppressed smile.

“Peace, Manuela. Let the girl get her footing. I promise you’ll meet Chloe soon enough, but she’s shy, so don’t scare her away, bem? Okay? Manuela?”

“Shy?” the woman repeated, though she softened her confrontational stance and finished setting out breakfast. “Then she’s definitely not your little puta.” She paused as she started to roll the cart away and looked over her shoulder at him. “What’s she doing with you?”

“A fair question,” Adrian agreed, though with less teasing in his voice than Manuela’s.

She was still shaking her head as she exited the way she came. She left behind questions that tugged at the back of my thoughts. A skinny blond? A little puta—whore, slut?
Adrian’s
little puta? Was that the annoying pull of jealousy in the pit of my stomach? If it was, it had no business being there, so long as I wasn’t helping Knight cheat on a
current
girlfriend. That I would not have abided.

“You can come out now,” he called softly, without turning from the table.

I realized that rooms felt larger and more open when crossing them while utterly naked. It was an effort to seem casual, to make my arms relax at my sides and my fingers uncurl from their fists. “She’s not what I expected.”

Adrian pulled out a chair for me, though he never settled. “That’s going around lately.” He was looking at me sidelong as he made this remark, punctuating it with a moment of stillness and silence. How was I not what he expected, I wondered, when he hadn’t expected me at all?

My questions faded from mind, however, as the smell of the food finally wafted up into my face. While a Brazilian breakfast wasn’t necessarily a big meal, Manuela apparently believed in providing a generous range of choices: tropical fruits, cakes, rich tapioca, grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, bread with butter and cheese and a selection of jam, with sweetened coffee and tea, juice, hot chocolate. It put the cruise ship fare to shame.

I caught an approving glance from Adrian as I started into a small mango with knife and fork, knowing it was rude in Brazil to eat with my hands. “Really?” I breathed out, flushing pink, I could tell from the warmth on my cheeks. I glanced away and back, trying not so much to flirt as to fight the urge to giggle at myself. “Cultivating my wild side doesn’t mean I’m a barbarian.”

“Fair play,” Adrian remarked, finally alighting in the chair beside me and pointedly digging into a grilled ham and cheese with his hands. His expression, eyes hooded and chin jutting in challenge, dared me to laugh as much as it begged to be kissed.

I watched the slow, deliberate working of his jaw, the quick dart of his tongue along his full lower lip, the subtle gleam of mirth in his eyes. “Scandalous,” I said, my posture artificially high and tight. Not ravishing a stranger in a sauna or out in the open on the moonlit beach. Not keeping a naked mistress in his villa. But eating with his hands. The rogue.

“Indeed,” he agreed, heightening what could have been a light, relaxed moment between us by pointedly admiring the flush across my bare breasts.

It was impossible to ignore the weight of Adrian’s gaze through the meal, though I bravely
suffered
the attention over a breakfast of mango and honey cake and two cups of hot chocolate. I made the mental note that I’d better not try to eat this way the whole three months, assuming he kept me that long.

Carefully setting knife and fork aside, I finally met Knight’s gaze with mine again. “So what do I do now?”

He had his response all too ready. “You learn my rules.”

***

Everything was disorder and the demands of appetite with Chloe here. For the first time in a week, I had risen at the normal time for my morning run, and I needed it. Needed the time away from Chloe, or more specifically, the distance from the constant need to watch her, touch her, kiss her, feel myself inside her.

I took the steps down to the beach three at a time—in great, laboring strides. Not at a jog but a full run. A thighs pumping, lungs burning, chest heaving, sweat and sand run. It felt good to get back to the routine, the rules of my day.

Learn my rules, I’d told her. Right. Then I’d lost all semblance of discipline in six straight days of
her
.

Chloe Bloom was a closed bud that refused to blossom and give me her scent, and it was irritating me no end. A pebble in my shoe, an insect buzzing at my ear, an itch somewhere
inside
my head. Even the women I’d never grown too serious with had that very female tendency to open up and rattle on about their lives, their friends, their interests, even if they had no more depth than a toddler’s wading pool.

Not Chloe. It seemed she didn’t even want to admit she took pleasure in the way I touched her. My feet pounded hard into the sand as I poured my mounting frustration into moving my muscles that much faster, that much more furiously, my thoughts returning over and over to the way I’d taken her the night before. Her knees hooked over my shoulders, my face an inch from hers. When she’d moaned and whimpered, it had been from behind her clenched jaw, closed eyes. When I’d ordered her to tell me she wanted this, she had rasped it low and secretively.

A bitter chuckle burst from beneath my panting breath as I beat a path down the smooth, wet strand of deserted beach. It was like I was her dirty little secret instead of the other way around. And why not? Only two kinds of women ventured into my life these days. First, and most plentiful, were the gold diggers looking for their ticket to front row seats at fashion shows and first class travel to a summer home in London and a winter chalet in the south of France. Less common, but certainly not rare, were the heiresses who wanted to enjoy the occasional discreet rendezvous playing dirty girl for one of the black sheep of the jet set. I made both kinds earn their keep, crawling, begging, displaying themselves for my amusement.

Chloe fit neither description. Her outburst of temper at the idea that I’d pay her to serve me had been both disarming and enflaming. At the most inane of moments, she would balk and challenge me, showing me fire that crackled in my gut and hardened my cock, reminding me that she had not granted me access to her
real
life and had no intention of doing so.

Sometimes I wanted to spank her for withholding herself from me, or hold her down and take her so rudely, so roughly, so completely that she’d dare not deny me anything short of her mortal soul. Sometimes I told myself it would be better to tease her affections out of her, win her with soft words soothing over the hard grip. But I never did. Instead I used my hold on her wrist or her hair or her willing libido to draw her back by slow degrees whenever some stray comment or innocent action made her withdraw from me, brown eyes narrowed under those sinfully thick lashes, pouting lips pursed around thoughts she refused to voice to me. But I only ever held the ground she’d already surrendered—by mutual agreement. I never gained an advantage with her.

Stopping to catch my breath, standing calf-deep in the surf and bending to scoop up water to wash away the slick layer of sweat building on my face and chest, I reminded myself the idea was not to become emotionally invested in Chloe Bloom. I wasn’t the kind of man who made
that
sort of woman—a woman of substance—fall for him. Not any more than Penn Ellison was.

And
that
was what this was about, really. I came from a long line of men with money in place of character, but Penn’s line was longer. Mine was an infamous family known for using wealth and influence to place themselves above the law, but the Ellisons’ investment was far larger, as was their reputation for spectacularly underhanded business dealings. My father didn’t really want me and saw me as a source of constant disappointment, while Penn was a chip off the old block—one of three chips, actually—and
exactly
what the Ellison patriarch wanted in an heir. If there was someone less suitable for a woman of Chloe Bloom’s quality than I was, that man was Penn Ellison.

So why had Chloe given Penn what she seemed wholly uninterested in giving me? The quiet whispers, the tender moments, the unguarded intimacy that had made them an actual couple? That is, until the little sociopath had been idiotic enough to let someone take cell phone photos of him fooling around on her at a party. Like those never went public. Penn’s indiscretion would have been perfect for Page Three of the Sun, as I’d noted when my assistant brought the gossip blogs to my attention.

Wiping my hands on my jogging shorts and starting back toward the villa at a more hesitant gait, I reminded myself it wasn’t the first time Ellison had thrown away a woman far better than he. Or maybe my memory was just being kind to people I hadn’t seen in over a decade. Back when Penn and I had competed for captain of the rowing team—he’d won. Or when we’d vied for president of the fraternity—that went to me. Or over who’d had the best grades or the most friends—a battle fought semester by semester. The last contest between us was one I hadn’t realized we were waging until I’d lost.

And Chloe was my rematch.

Back at the villa, I found she had yet to return from her trip to the spa. A massage with exotic milks and fruits, sugar scrubs, a facial, a half-hour in the sauna… I required the routine every other day. It wasn’t just about how silky she felt against me after two hours of pampering. She always came back with her shoulders relaxed, the muscles in her arms and legs weak and…
pliable
, her mind still and calm as illustrated by her tendency to sigh against me so much more openly when I gathered her into my arms or pulled her down onto the bed.

I took the opportunity to kill a few minutes at the piano, my version of a spa retreat, remembering what a waste my father had considered the practice despite his acquiescence to my grandmother’s insistence on lessons. I was, in the end and in purely medieval terms, the unnecessary third son, and by a second wife. The heir and the spare were really all he’d needed. It only just then occurred to me, making me hit the piano keys with a tad more force than I should have, that this put me in the same place in birth order that Penn Ellison inhabited. Whereas I had endeavored to live up to my father’s indifference, Penn had excelled if for no other reason than to displace his older brothers. Press clippings and gossip columns had given me no real clues over the last few years as to how he’d fared in that respect. It was too bad I couldn’t just ask Chloe.