Anthology - Behind the Mask Read online

  His gaze flickered over the loosened tendrils that she suddenly wished she had not drawn free of her usually impeccable twist.

  She pulled the briefcase off the table, a jerk of motion so he wouldn’t see that her hand was shaking. Men did not affect her that way. “I don’t know what this is, Matthew, but it’s not a business meeting. I’m leaving.”

  “Sit. Down.”

  The snap of his voice caused her to jump, which made her angry, frosted her voice. “I beg your pardon?”

  He straightened off the table, one lithe, quick movement, but his steps toward her were measured, the intent but slow paces of a wolf stalking prey. Or in his case, a shark, those dark glittering eyes promising no mercy.

  “You heard me. Sit your pretty ass down, now, or I’ll wear it out so you can’t sit for a week.”

  Shock gripped her, both at the words and at the serious intent in his eyes, which told her he very likely meant the astounding thing he had just said. She should be giving him a disdainful look, turning and making her exit, but she couldn’t make her feet move. As if his words were a lightning bolt that had immobilized her in a crackle of powerful current that charged her entire body, all the cells vibrated with apprehension and something else, something rising in her, responding to him and his ridiculous words.

  He took another step toward her. Then another. “You drive a man to distraction. Not just the sneaky bit of leg, but that drape of neckline revealing a tiny cup of lace just barely holding your breast in when you lean forward to make a point. The way you touch your hair just behind your ear, lightly, or moisten your lips when you talk.”

  “Stop it,” she whispered. “Stop.”

  But he didn’t. Not his forward movement or his words. “That’s the thing. You’re teasing my men, but you’re challenging me. From the first moment we met, you’ve known you were mine. Every negotiation has been a dare, a taunt. You want me to prove I’ve got what it takes to make you submit, claim what’s been mine all along.”

  Why was her pulse pounding like she was hearing a terrible truth instead of the ravings of a lunatic?

  “You’re a tough nut to crack, aren’t you, little girl?” He was almost around the table, and still she couldn’t move. His footfalls were silent, hushed in the carpet.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” He nodded, dark brows drawing down like the shadow of a hawk’s wings. “You’re not a little girl. You’ve never been a little girl. Groomed from birth to take the reins of your father’s empire. Daddy’s closer all your adult life, and then you stepped right into his shoes when he died. You’ve never allowed yourself to be vulnerable, never allowed yourself to be a woman, never daring to risk it. You’ve become so good at it you don’t even know you have a warm, wet, soft pussy, aching for a cock. My cock.

  “Tell me, little girl. What would you do right now if I turned you over my knee and gave you a spanking?”

  She’d gone from shock to fury, and she didn’t care what game he was playing or the fact her panties were soaked and her hands were damp with nervous perspiration.

  Yes, she had a subliminal awareness of what the slit of a skirt or a glimpse of cleavage would do to powerful men, had even enjoyed fleeting thoughts of them struggling to focus, though she’d never gone so far as he had intimated. She’d never imagined the crude reality of erections distracting them under the table.

  That subliminal awareness was part of the charge. Sex and negotiation. Power. Control.

  Her eyes widened at the connection, the understanding of her own body’s unexpected response. This was the same as a negotiation, only he’d taken it to a whole new level. A level on which she had almost zero experience, and he knew it.

  Her eyes narrowed and her lips firmed. He’d changed the game level, but not the game itself.

  She didn’t know what Matt was up to, but she’d beaten him before. She could beat him at this as well, whatever it was. Make it to a draw, with both parties satisfied. Business played the way they normally played it was as much of a rush as sex, and the line could get thin between the two. She understood that, gripped the truth of it like a lifeline to steady herself.

  “What would I do if you tried to spank me? I think I’d leave a nice set of scars down that handsome jaw of yours.”

  “You like to fight, don’t you? Let’s really fight, then.” His voice dropped to a rumble that sounded suspiciously like a growl. “Tear at me, leave behind the civilized façade that we pretend to have at this table. Go for it. Fight me. Because come hell or high water, I’m going to have you tonight. Take you right here in this room, and have you call me Master.”

  “I think those giant balls you’re rumored to have are going to be rolling around the floor first.”

  “Hmm.” One black brow now arched and the dark eyes glittered like coal exposed to candlelight. “I’ve never heard you be crude, Savannah. But you probably don’t realize that’s not really your way, do you? You’ve been meeting someone else’s expectations so long you’ve never developed an identity of your own. Geoffrey engineered the perfect chameleon, straight from his loins. If you’d submit to me, maybe you could find out who you really are.”

  “Using personal insults to get a woman to spread her legs for you. That’s a unique come-on. I’ve got things to do, Matthew. Good night.”

  “You’re not leaving.”

  As he loomed over her, oddly she chose that moment to notice how white his shirt was, fresh and pressed. She knew how that would smell, the clean starch of a well-laundered shirt. The smell of him beneath it. His hair was shaved perfectly at the nape and she wondered how that would feel beneath her fingertips, how those big, restless hands would feel on her body, what he could do to her with that unsmiling mouth. She could almost feel her skin prickle in anticipation of the rasp of the five o’clock shadow.

  She was a chameleon. He was right about that. Tennyson Rule Four: Never show fear.

  She couldn’t go around him, and she had a momentary, dangerously appealing image of a desperate feint to scurry for the elevator. She quelled the ridiculous image and the apprehension that had fueled it, and set her briefcase deliberately back on the table. She faced him, her back straight, hands at her sides. “Fine, then. You’re right, Matthew. We’re two adults. We have a sexual attraction. It’s obvious. Let’s relieve it. We’ll have sex, get it out of the way. I’m sure you’ve indulged the itch as often as I have on a boring Friday night.”

  Coal became fuel with fire. She was reminded of that by the expression that flared in his dark eyes, even though his voice remained mild. Dangerously so.

  “That’s good, Savannah. Very good. But I don’t want to scratch an itch.” He closed that last step and his arm went around her waist, his other to her hair. He yanked out her barrette in a rough motion that sent her hair tumbling down, around her face and over one eye. She would have shaken it back, but he immediately had a fistful of it and yanked it, letting her feel the brute strength that was his to command. “You won’t make any more references to anyone you’ve ever fucked. You’re mine, Savannah.”

  “Go to hell,” she snapped, and gasped as his mouth came down on hers, hard, hot and hungry, his hands still tight on her hair and waist.

  At the first touch, she knew she’d lost the edge. He was pure male beast, heat and superior strength. All the images she’d fantasized late at night in her lonely bed, with him as the center feature, now flooded her senses. Fantasy combined with reality to make her weak, out of control. His tongue caressed hers with a skill that let her know what he could do with it elsewhere, but he wasn’t seducing her. He was taking over, demanding unconditional surrender.

  But you only surrendered unconditionally if you had no weapons left, and she sure as hell wasn’t there yet.

  She bit down on his tongue, got her hands in between them and shoved at his face to break away. When she wrenched away, he tore her blouse open, revealing flesh barely confined in the shelf cups of the lacy bra
, as he had described them. Savannah slapped him, used her nails with pleasure to draw blood. He caught her wrist before she could jerk back and, despite her struggles, he brought that hand back to his face, rubbed her fingertips in the welts. Taking three of the fingers into his mouth, he slowly sucked at his blood and her flesh, freezing her in place with the sheer ferocity of the gesture, the flame in his eyes as he did it.

  She had known he was fit, toned. She hadn’t realized he was so bloody strong. Catching her other wrist, he swung her around and pinned her against the wall, pressing his body against the full length of hers, lifting her. As he came up against her, he insinuated his knee between hers so her snug skirt rode up at pressure of his leg. With her toes stretched to hold onto the floor, her pussy was her center of gravity, pressed hard against the muscular length of his thigh. She automatically tightened her muscles to hold her balance, and the feel of that, the close relation it had to clamping her thighs around his hips, made her breath leave her. She yanked at her wrists, her legs thrashing, but he simply held her in place. She bent her fingers back into claws, prepared to strike if he gave her the chance.

  With his gaze never leaving hers, he brought one set of those sharp fingertips back to his face.

  She stopped struggling, realizing she was just wasting energy she might need when he shifted his grip and gave her another opening. It was senseless to fight him on ground where he had the advantage. She had to wait for the weak moment.

  At least that’s what she told herself, to explain why she suddenly went so still, like a frozen rabbit, as the hunter took her hand into his mouth again, stroking the tender crevices between her fingers with tender touches of his tongue, down to the palm. Down to the sensitive pulse point of her wrist. Her hand now curled over his eye and nose, her nails within a lash length of his vulnerable brown iris, and she could not make herself move. Her heart hammering against her ribs, she could only stare at him.

  “This is rape,” she managed.

  “No, it’s not. You’re not trembling because of that. You’re the type of woman who’d fight a mugger to the death to keep his filthy fingers off your Rolex, and just be pissed off if he pulled a gun.”

  He feathered the knuckles of his free hand down her cheek, startling her. “If there’s one thing about you that scares me, Savannah, it’s that.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re afraid I’ll make you do and feel things you don’t let yourself feel. You’re afraid if you expose your throat, I’ll rip it out. You don’t believe you can trust anyone, especially a lover.”

  “We aren’t lovers, Matthew.”

  “You are such a liar.” The offensive words were spoken softly, like a caress against her skin, putting her further off balance. Pressing her up against the wall, he rubbed his thigh, slow and strong, against her mound. Her feet left the floor, his grip on her wrists her only way of staying upright, a precarious position that made her thighs clamp harder around his, increasing the pressure of her clit against lean muscle. “We’ve been lovers since the moment we met, the first time we sparred at a conference table.” His face and lips had somehow gotten closer, so his cheek was now almost against hers, his five o’clock shadow sliding along her jawline, his breath tickling her ear. “Every offer and counteroffer has been a thrust and withdrawal, a teasing foreplay that you felt as much as I did. You think I didn’t notice when you’d lean back in your chair and cross your legs, like you were listening to me make a point, but I saw the slight tightening of your thighs. You were aroused and indulging the sensation, giving your pussy a sweet, secret squeeze.”

  Savannah drew in a shuddering breath as he pressed his lips just beneath her ear, his hair brushing the side of her face. Her hands balled into fists of need rather than anger.

  “Or that time you stood at my shoulder, leaning over to point out something in a report. You had your hand on the back of my chair, and your blouse fell open just a bit, like the petals of a flower, showing me that ripe breast. I inhaled the smell of your perfume, imagined you touching yourself there with the wand of your perfume bottle first thing in the morning. When I let out that breath, the heat of it touched you. Your nipple got tight. When you straightened, I saw it pressing against your blouse, even through your bra.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She jerked her head away from his mouth and swung, knocking him smartly in the temple. Seizing his ear between her teeth, she bit.

  He snarled and she twisted, thrashed, threw them both off balance. She managed to scramble off his thigh, but her heel twisted and she went to one knee. He was on her in a second. Amazingly, she thought she heard him chuckle, but that turned into an oath as she palmed her fist and elbowed him in the chest when he tried to pounce on her. She spun to her feet and had a flash of that clean white shirt she’d admired earlier as he caught her by the hips and lifted her, maneuvering her onto her back on the slick surface of the table. Keeping himself between her thighs, he locked her wrists down with his hands as he leaned over her, breathing hard.

  The position rucked her skirt all the way to her hips and his eyes coursed over the lace thigh-highs, the swatch of white lace panties. “Class and elegance, wrapped in a fuck-me-if-you-got-the-balls package. So what about it, Savannah?” He moved against her, and his hard cock rubbed the damp crotch of her panties through his trousers. “Have I got the balls to fuck you, make you scream for me? Whether you want to or not?”

  He was taunting her, and she wanted to hate him, be repulsed by him. “I’ll scream if I want to scream. You won’t have anything to do with it.”

  She bit back a gasp as he released her wrists and caught her by the back of the neck, one large palm supporting her skull as he lifted her up against his chest, bringing them eye to flashing eye.

  “You’ll scream for me, even though you don’t want to. You’ll beg, despite the fact every cell of your stubborn, rebellious mind will be telling you not to do so. Before this evening is over, you’ll belong to me, heart, body and soul, and you’ll be cursing me, even as you accept that you’ll never be free of my claim on you again.”

  “Stop it, Matt.”

  “No.” But his tone gentled, as if, by her use of the shortened version of his name, she had alerted him to her desperation, the sudden vulnerability that leaked through her armor and made her doubt herself.

  “You know what I fantasize about sometimes, Savannah? I’m sitting at the head of that table, listening to my team give me a report on something… Hell, anything. Could be the weather in Shanghai, for all I care.” A light smile touched his lips, simple, startling her with its ease in comparison to the intensity of the past few moments. “I have you sitting on my lap, and you’re completely naked, your arms bound behind your back. That tight little ass of yours is squirming against my cock because I’m fondling your breasts, just idly stroking the curves, caressing the nipples, pinching them, watching you get more and more aroused.”

  He slid his arms around her back, anchoring her against his chest, banding her to him with those long arms. His mouth took hers again. She pushed against his shoulders with the heels of her hands, but he only deepened the kiss, widened her mouth with the pressure of his, delving deep into her, his tongue exploring every moist crevice. She could have pulled his hair, twisted, done several things to buck the embrace, but being in Matt Kensington’s embrace did not suggest battle. It screamed for surrender.

  Savannah ignored that path, but compromised with a momentary cessation of hostilities to experience the most potent mouth she’d ever tasted, or been tasted by. Not that she’d really tasted many, but this one had to be exceptional. She came to that conclusion from the simple realization that if there were men’s mouths more potent, there would have been reports of women dying from experiencing them like this.

  When he lifted his head and they stared into each other’s eyes, his lips wet with her mouth, she could not say her body was her own. It seemed to have melted into soft pli
ancy against every hard curve of his, and her pussy throbbed against the hard reminder of his cock. A disturbing reminder, a return to the reality of what he wanted from her today. The impossible.

  She was making more of this than there was. Her hormones hadn’t been indulged often enough, and Matt had hit the right buttons. She repeated it to herself fiercely, though her mind screamed that she had just drop-kicked Rule Two, always be honest with yourself, right out of the ballpark. Or was it Rule One?

  As if he were reading her thoughts, his voice dropped to a rough whisper. “You said a moment ago you’re willing to have sex. Why are you fighting me?”

  She managed a shrug, not an easy body language to pull off with her body shaking and her chest heaving with the exertion of their struggle. “If you want to fill tonight’s dance card, then I had to make sure you worked for it.”

  His lips curved up in something that would have been a smile if it wasn’t so cold and deliberate. “You deny there’s anything special between us.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “That’s your arrogance talking, Kensington. Nothing is between us but lust and about a hundred million in costs in three start-up ventures. You want me, and it’s the hunt that’s got you so worked up. Tomorrow, when we’ve sated it, you won’t even remember. We’ll get an equal thrill from seeing that steel prices went down.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to show you that, even though your body can be pleased in other ways, your mind and heart have only one avenue to fulfillment. I’m going to straighten up now and lay your wrists on the table on either side of you.” He unfolded her arms from her chest between them and did just that, stretching them out and placing her wrists against the smooth table surface. “I want to unfasten your bra and see your breasts. If you move your wrists, lift them from the table, I will spank you. I’ll turn you over, pull those pretty panties to your knees and make your ass rosy with the palm of my hand. I’ll enjoy it.” His voice lowered, his eyes glittering with purpose. “So do me a favor and disobey.”