A Ruthless Proposition

A Ruthless Proposition Page 14

With that he lifted his head and planted a deep, hungry kiss on her lips, and Cleo happily opened up for him, drinking him in, wanting him desperately. Every hot, hard, sexy, arrogant, unlikeable part of him.

She whimpered, once again fighting with that reasonable part of her that kept trying to insert itself into her business. She dragged her lips from his, a little shocked she could get this turned on from just one kiss.

“I thought we weren’t going to do this again,” she whispered, and for a moment, while he continued to nuzzle and suck on her neck, she thought he hadn’t heard her.

“But that would be a waste of some perfectly good sex, dulzura.” He ran his large hand down her naked back as he said the words, and Cleo found herself purring like a kitten in response to the caress.

“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?” She hummed, doing a bit of her own nuzzling. She loved the feel of his expensive silk shirt against her pebbled breasts and lost all inhibition, blatantly rubbing them against his chest, wanting him to start focusing on the important stuff now. He complied, shifting until she was flat on her back and he was sitting on the side of the bed, with the upper half of his body bent over hers. His hot gaze traveled from her face down to her breasts, and with a shaky groan he lifted his hands to cup and caress the pretty little mounds. He plumped one up to receive his mouth, and when he tugged at the aching nipple with his lips, Cleo nearly came out of her skin. She’d always had unbearably sensitive breasts, which Dante hadn’t paid much attention to the night before but seemed to be taking great delight in now.

“Can you come from just this?” he asked huskily. “From someone playing with your breasts?”

“I haven’t yet,” she managed to wheeze out, and he gave her a rakish little smirk.

“Ah. Another challenge,” he said, before bending back down to her breasts. “Well, dulzura, allow me . . .”

More than an hour later, Cleo lay on her back, chest still heaving, body still shuddering, and an arm draped across her eyes to block out her embarrassment at how completely uninhibited she had been with the man snoring gently beside her. She could now check the whole “orgasming from just breast play” thing off her bucket list. He had certainly risen to the challenge there. He hadn’t cheated once, no sneaky hands drifting south, and when she’d attempted to hasten things along with her own hands, he had firmly moved them back up to his chest.

After all that delicious foreplay, she had been more than ready for him to move on to the main event, but nope, he had made it his duty to find as many of her erogenous zones as possible before finally claiming her body. As before, once he finished, he simply rolled off her and fell asleep. This time in her bed, which was a little annoying and meant she would have to retreat to the spare room. She got up and tugged on the huge, white fluffy robe the hotel provided and padded toward the door. She didn’t really know what the protocol was in this situation, but knew he wasn’t the type to sleep through the night with a woman.

She threw a resentful look back at the inconsiderate ass sprawled across her bed and then sighed a little at what a fine ass he actually had. He lay in absolute naked magnificence, facedown, one leg bent at the knee and the other straight. His arms were up above his head, and his face was buried in a marshmallowy pillow. As she watched, he turned his head toward her so he could breathe easier. She paused, riveted by how vulnerable he looked in his sleep, how much younger.

She reluctantly admitted to herself that he was a remarkable man. To take his family’s ailing hotel brand and turn it into this multi-billion-dollar corporation in less than ten years was an almost unheard of feat. He was only thirty-three, and to achieve so much at such a young age, he would have had to be ruthless and cutthroat.

“Play hard, work harder” was his motto, or at least that’s what the newspapers and tabloids often quoted him as saying. Even if she wanted more from him, Cleo knew she didn’t stand a chance of being much more than a lay to this powerful, handsome man. But that was fine; she didn’t want more from him since he was nothing more than a fantastic lay to her. As long as they both understood that, everything would be fine.

She turned away from him and slipped into the huge, elegantly furnished living room that spanned the distance between their rooms. Her eyes immediately fell on the service cart standing in the middle of the floor. She moaned, her appetite roaring to life with such ferocity that she almost swayed with hunger. She lifted the domed lids off each dish and almost cried at the congealed mess that was all that remained of what had once been a beautiful dinner. She padded over to one of the ornate sideboards and reached for the telephone to call room service and order another meal.

It was nearly one thirty, and she felt invigorated after all that glorious sex—not tired in the least—and as she stood at the floor-to-ceiling window and stared down at the sparkling city lights below, she wondered what adventures were to be had out there. A reckless desire to go exploring surged to life and she tamped it down, knowing that wandering around in a huge city like this on her own, in the middle of the night, would be stupid. She sank into one of the massive Bakokko armchairs angled toward the window and folded her legs up in front of her, wrapping her arms around them and resting her chin on her knees.

“What are you doing in here?” A few minutes later, Dante’s sleep-roughened voice startled her, and she squeaked slightly before turning her head to watch him enter the room.

“I didn’t think you were the type of guy who liked to wake up next to the night’s casual shag, so I retreated. Since you were passed out in my room, I thought I’d take the spare room tonight.”