Vengeful Love (23 page)

He wets two fingers in his mouth then moves them to my soaked sex, stroking my centre before sliding through my wetness into my entrance. He swallows my groan and rolls a thumb across my swollen clit, driving me wild.

“Always ready for me.”

He lifts me from my feet and pushes me back against the tree. I cry out as he brings me down on his hard cock. His growl fills my mouth as he draws slowly out and thrusts back into me, filling me.

“Harder!” My words are riddled with insatiable lust.

“Fuck, Scarlett, you always surprise me.” He lifts me and crashes me down onto him repeatedly as sweat beads form on his brow. I can feel myself building to an enormous climax.

He crashes me down again, somewhere between pain and pleasure. I feel myself rise to my peak. “Again! Gregory, again!”

“Fuck!” His bark is carnal, his eyes crazed, lost in need. He lifts me and thrusts then drops me down again, his sack slapping against my skin.

This isn’t love making, it’s hot, hard, frantic fucking. On another punishing blow, I scream his name as my climax tears me apart. My orgasm lasts an age, my muscles greedily squeezing his cock as he works me down with delicious controlled turns of his hips. My head falls forward onto his shoulder. I didn’t feel his release but he’s still throbbing inside me when I finally come to and my muscles begin to relax.

On our way back, rain starts to spit and the temperature falls to a little above freezing. Shivers have taken over my body by the time we park the Harley back in its space in the garage. Gregory takes my hands in his and blows hot air between them.

“That was unbelievable, thank you,” I say.

He brings my hands to his lips and presses his warm skin against mine. “The ride?” he asks with a wink.

“Both rides,” I say, pushing his shoulder away from me.

* * *

I bathe in a freestanding ceramic white tub with floor taps in the middle of the large, open marble-tiled room, which has original wooden beams running the length of the ceiling. As I lie in flickering candlelight, jasmine-scented bubbles cover my body to my neck, shielding me from the cold of the dark night. The sound of Billie Myers’s “Kiss the Rain” drifts up the staircase, I suspect from the lounge. I dry my body and slip into a black silk floor-length nightgown. Unleashed from a gold slide, my hair falls across one shoulder.

Candles and a roaring log fire light the lounge. Gregory is pouring two glasses of red wine on the rustic oak coffee table where he’s laid a selection of hors d’oeuvres. He’s washed and changed into a different pair of dark jeans. The candlelight shows the toned contours of his bare chest, his wet and slicked-back hair. He’s spread a thick fur throw in front of the fire.

Gregory stops when the wood floor creaks under my feet. He watches me as I make my way towards him and runs a hand down my neck, over my silk gown to the small of my back. He kisses me once and lets his lips linger on mine. With a glass of wine, I rest down onto the fur throw.

“I’m sorry in advance but, well, you made it so appealing to me, I Googled you.”

At first, I think he looks annoyed, then joins me and lies back, resting his elbow onto the throw and his head in his hand. He pulls two olives and an anchovy from a cocktail stick with his teeth.

“Despite the fact I told you not to?”

I shrug and playfully rest my index finger on my lower lip.

“Well, I guess that makes us even,” he says.

“How so?”

“I
Googled
you a long time ago, Scarlett. Rather, my security team did. I needed them to do a little due diligence before I let you work for me.”

I scowl in jest.

“So you dated Elise Alonso?” I ask, trying to mask my feeling of utter inadequacy.

Gregory sighs, takes a sip of wine, then rests back with his hands interlaced behind his head, his chest exposed and inviting. “We dated two or maybe three times, that’s all. The press blew that up into something it never was.”

“She’s, erm, she’s beautiful.”

“She’s a supermodel, that’s her job,” Gregory says, almost irritated.

“I guess. There was a picture of you with Princess Clara, too, and at the Cannes Film Festival no less.”

“Get here,” he says, encouraging me to lean back on one arm, my body resting on one hip, parallel to his.

He runs a finger along the silk covering my thigh, then slides it across my hip and continues his long, smooth stroke up my abdomen. He continues the path, through my cleavage, along my collarbone and down my back. My eyes close and my body relaxes into his touch.

He gently sucks my neck then nips my lobe. “I’ve never met a woman who’s beautiful and intelligent and makes me forget everything and everyone else in the world. I have this insane, insatiable need whenever I’m around you and when I’m not I just want to hear your voice, to see your face.”

My lungs are paralyzed and I allow myself to wonder, hope, that he might have fallen as hard and fast as I have. I place my mouth over his and try to tell him in that kiss just how bad I’ve fallen.

“I’d really like to go to the Cannes Film Festival,” I say when we open our eyes, both breathless.

He chuckles. “Anyone can get an invite to the Cannes Film Festival.”

“Oh, really, Mr. Big Shot?”

“Well, anyone who’s anyone.”

“You’re such an arse,” I joke, playfully flicking a hand at his chest. “This is incredibly surreal.”

“Because I’ve been to the Cannes Film Festival?”

“No, silly. Just, being here, with you. It’s...it’s surreal. One minute you’re being snapped by paparazzi and the next you’re lying on the floor of an old converted barn with, well, me of all people.”

“I know where I’d rather be,” he says, pulling me onto his chest.

I rest my head on his pec and watch the orange flames burn in the open fire.

“I can’t remember the last time I had nothing to worry about. The last time I thought, I don’t need to rush home.”

“You must miss him,” Gregory says.

“I do. Enormously. But...”

He nods but doesn’t speak as he tucks my hair behind my ear. Why is it this man can penetrate all my walls with no effort at all?

“I hate myself for evening thinking it, but... I’m pleased his suffering is over. I haven’t admitted that aloud to anyone. I wasn’t ready to lose him and it wasn’t his time to go. I can’t stand the thought of how terrified he must’ve been in those last moments. I’ll never forgive Pearson for what he did. I wish I’d been there at the last minute to hold his hand and tell him everything will be okay, better even, where he was going. But I think Dad was tired, sick of being ill and being dependent. I miss him, I miss him so much, but more...more my dad from before, before he got sick. That’s how I want to remember him and that’s how he would want to be remembered.”

Gregory presses his lips against my scalp. “I’m sorry, Scarlett. I’m sorry that your dad ever got sick, that I didn’t get to meet him and ask his permission to date you. More than anything, you’ll never know how much I hate myself for the way it ended and how I wish I could go back and stop him. I didn’t protect you. I should have and I’ll never forgive myself. This will end, Scarlett, and it’ll end the way my father deserves. I swear to you.”

The flames become blurred in the mist of my eyes and a lump forms in my throat. I wrap my arm around Gregory’s waist and hug tightly into his warm skin. I wonder where Pearson is right now and
how
this is going to end.

“Will you be honest with me if I ask you something?” I say after a long contemplative silence on both our parts.

“Yes.”

“Did you make my firm promote me?”

“No. I told them how good you are, which is the truth, and what a great job you did for me. I told them I’d stay with the firm on the proviso that you were the lead contact but I didn’t ask them to promote you. I actually found out about it because Amanda texted Williams.”

A half smile curls onto one side of my mouth but quickly subsides.

Procrastinating by rolling a finger around his chest, I finally mount the courage to ask my next question. The question that’s been bugging me and remained unanswered for too long. “What about Jack?”

Gregory shakes his head and sits up, knocking me from his chest. “Jack fucking Jones.” He pulls two hands through his hair and I know I’ve ruined the evening. He stands, hands me my wine glass and takes a gulp from his own then leans over the fire, one hand against the wooden mantel.

“That son of a bitch. He deserves everything he gets and more. I can’t...the thought of what he could have, what he wanted to do to you.”

“But he didn’t,” I whisper into his back as I rub my hands down his biceps.

“God, if he’d touched you, if he’d even—”

“Shhhh,” I say, turning him to face me.

“People shouldn’t cross me, Scarlett. And now, they really shouldn’t cross you, either. He’s lucky things ended the way they did.”

My body shivers despite the blazing heat of the fire. “Tell me.”

He sighs and relaxes under my palms.

“Jackson had the security team look into Jack. They threw up a load of old cases which had started to be investigated but been dropped, most because the victims were unwilling to testify or there wasn’t enough evidence.”

“Jack? I just. I can’t believe it. I mean, he’s, he... Jack? I mean, I knew. He could have—”

“Jackson was irate when he found out but I think he was worried about telling me, worried about what I would do. He left it a day and asked his friends to get the details of the victims. Then he told me. I wanted to rip his fucking head off. Men like that deserve to go to hell. But Jackson kept telling me, and I suppose behind the anger I knew, that I couldn’t deal with it the way I wanted to. We couldn’t trust—”

“Me. You thought if you hurt him I’d know and you couldn’t trust me.”

“It’s not the way it sounds. We just. I’m in the public eye enough as it is. We have to be careful.”

I try to put this all together. The way Gregory lives and deals. His dark world. But his reasons are...right.

I lift my palm to his cheek. “You can trust me.”

His face contorts and his eyes shift, soften, like that little boy. He shakes his head. “Jackson said there had to be another way. He went to see some of the girls, told them about you, us but they wouldn’t testify.”

“I can’t believe Jack could do that, that any human being could do that. There were so many times, so many nights when we were working together. I just thought... I don’t know what I thought, I didn’t think. I just can’t believe it’s actually true.”

Gregory takes my hands in his. I’m instantly safe. “We didn’t have a choice in the end. The only way was to make him confess, so that’s what we did.” He lifts my hands to his lips. I watch as he moves. His usually perfect hair falls forward, a strand covering his eyes as he gazes up at me.

“What did you do to him?”

“No more than he deserved. Men like that make me sick. Fucking dregs of society. Men like Jack deserve a fucking bullet between their legs. I’d never have let him go free once I knew. That’s the choice we gave him. Live in prison or die.”

“Shit, Gregory, that’s—”

“He’d have been dead if he ever laid a finger on you again. He got off lightly.”

“Kiss me,” I whisper because I don’t know what else to say or how I feel about his confession.

He does. He kisses me slowly, in a way that liquefies me in his arms. He runs a hand up my right thigh, lifting my gown, then winds my legs around his waist.

He lays me back onto the floor and runs a finger from my hip, across my stomach and up to my chest. The feel of his touch through the silk is smooth, elegant, not like the man he just described.

I struggle to reconcile the two versions of the same man as he peels my nightdress from my breasts and places his lips around my nipple, sucking and biting with precision. On a groan, I push his shoulders and he lets me move him to one side, then moves to lie on his back. I undo his belt and pull down his bottoms. I slide down his body in my silk dress until I can take him in my mouth. He moans as he pushes himself deeper to the back of my throat, gripping my hair and pulling it tight.

“Jesus, Scarlett.” He lifts my chin so I look up at him through my lashes. “Fuck me. Let me feel that delicious cunt around my cock.”

His words shock me and turn me on more than any man has ever done all at once.
He wants me.
The thought has me dripping.

I place my knees either side of his hips and slowly pull my dress over my head. Grabbing my arse, he lifts me forward onto his length. His hands cup my breasts, his smooth rotations reflecting my own rhythm as I work around him, my muscles desperate, clamping down on his length.

“You know exactly how I need you,” he growls. “Right there, baby. Just like that.”

He sits up, taking my breast in his mouth, drawing blood into the charged end, his shaft driving further into me. Dropping my head back, I pull my fingers through my hair, feeling like a woman, a seductive temptress, as he groans his pleasure. He takes my weight, lifting me up and down, building pace until I can feel and think nothing but sheer bliss.

The pressure of his thumb rounding my clit takes me to the precipice. He powers into me as he yanks me down and I see sparkles flying, bright colours bursting.

“Gregory!”

I lie on his chest in front of the fire whilst he kisses my brow and I swirl my index finger around the few hairs on his pecs.

“What was it like growing up in South Africa? I mean South Africa the country, you know, not home life.”

“Hostile. Grenades, car bombs, shootings. I was there in the eighties and nineties. There was a lot of fighting. Blacks against whites, states against states, whites with whites, blacks with blacks, camps for and against apartheid. I was there when Mandela was in prison and when he was released. I don’t really remember everything about it, just bits, but I remember marches. I remember people being scared, my mother being scared. I remember the first day black kids were allowed into my school.”

“Black children couldn’t go to your school?”

“Not at first. The headmaster said education was reserved for children who could make use of it, white kids.”