They also held an expression of distant composure that drove him insane. He stared at her in baffled fury. He was as hard as a rock from wanting her, and everything he had done to bring her to the peak of sensual awareness and desire—it had vanished as if it had never been.
“Are you ready?” she asked. She came to a stop beside him, and those breathtaking luminous eyes of hers narrowed on him. “What is it?”
He glared at what he held in his hands. It was a leather custom-made knife sheath with a leg tie.
He said between his teeth, “You’re so goddamn beautiful it’s about all I can do not to throw you down on the floor and take you right here and now, and even I know that’s not acceptable behavior.”
Dead silence. He shot a glance at her from under lowered brows. That fine clear skin of hers had gone white, the expression in her eyes turned stricken. Then she flushed a deep betraying red and her stricken look turned into a scandalized sparkle. She clapped her hands over her mouth and giggled.
Giggled. What a foreign, feminine sound. And he loved it.
One corner of his mouth lifted in response, and his fury dissipated and blew away on an intangible wind. He threaded the knife sheath onto his belt and buckled it. When he bent to fasten the leg tie, her hands came over his.
“Let me do it,” she said. Her voice was breathless.
He froze and then straightened slowly as he stared at her.
Her eyes dancing, her piquant face alive with mischievous sensuality, she put those sweet, delicate little hands on his thighs as she sank into a kneeling position in front of him. She tilted her head back and looked up at him.
Holy fuck. His abdominal muscles clenched and the blood in his veins transmuted to slow-moving lava.
She reached between his legs. Her slender wrist brushed against the heavy muscles of his inner thighs. He broke into a fine sweat, his thinking crumbled into a wasteland, and his rigid cock strained toward her plump, smiling lips.
She pulled the two lengths of leather around his thigh and tied them together. “We’re supposed to be upstairs in five minutes,” she whispered. “We have no time right now. But when we do—”
She leaned forward to put her arms around his hips. His hands fisted in the air above her head, and he broke into a fine trembling as she nuzzled the pulsing bulge at his crotch. She rubbed her cheek against his cloth-covered erection, and it was such a happy, sensual, affectionate thing for her to do, he almost fell to his knees in dumbfounded worship.
He gasped her name, an incoherent hymn.
“When we do have time,” she said against him, her breath warming and moistening the cloth over his cock, “I want it to be just like this.”
The penthouse suite was just three flights up from their floor, but one needed a key to access it by elevator. Rogers was still doing guard duty in the hall. The tall policewoman offered the penthouse key to Niniane as they stepped out of the suite. Niniane paused to have a brief exchange with the other woman that had Rogers’s pleasant freckle-sprinkled face alight with pleasure.
He didn’t pay attention to what the females said. He was too busy struggling to get his raging hormones under control, to actually let Niniane walk away from the hotel suite and not drag her back inside, throw her on the floor and do what he had threatened to do. Each step they took down the hall was an uncertain, hard-won triumph.
Then his brain started working again, really working, and he began to think about the attendees of the upcoming meeting.
Not one of those elegant elderly piranhas was going to welcome his presence, and wasn’t that just too fucking bad. There wasn’t a Power on Earth that could keep him from guarding Niniane’s back.
One of the two guards at the stairwell already held the elevator open for them. They stepped inside. After Niniane inserted the key and pressed the button for the penthouse floor, he took her hand and threaded his fingers through hers. She gave him a startled smile that faded as quickly as it had bloomed. Her sparkling sensuality had vanished again, leaving her a pale, sober stranger.
The elevator purred to a stop. He reached out to punch the door-closed button, and she looked at him in surprise.
“This time you listen to me, faerie. Everything will be all right,” he said to her small, tense face that was turned up to his so trustingly. “No one who will be in that room will hurt you. We go in as a united front, and we leave as united front. Got it?”
She nodded. “Got it. Thank you, Tiago.”
“You’re welcome.” He smiled at her, let go of the button, and the doors opened.
He couldn’t have been more wrong on all counts. They walked in to the penthouse, and their united front got slaughtered.
NINE