Page 30

CHAPTER 30

In the wee hours of the morning, Maarja half woke as Dante spooned her, his cock stirring against her bottom, his hand cupping her breast.

She moaned, not in ecstasy but because she’d really like to sleep some more. Between a hard day’s work moving art, being scared and threatened, screwing the lid on Dante’s bottle, running over half of Gothic in the dark, and being claimed on the bed and on the bathroom counter après shower—that marble had been cold—she was still tired.

He massaged her shoulders and back, pressed his arms under her belly and lifted her to her knees, stroked oil between her legs and buttocks, rubbed himself against her like a great cat marking his territory, and she moaned in a different tone.

What did she know? Maybe all men were like this, wanting and needing and coaxing and pleasuring. Her friends’ reports didn’t agree with that theory, and she enjoyed a moment of feeling special, a desire magnet, the woman that tugged at the powerful Dante Arundel and subdued the beast.

Yeah. Femme fatale, that was her.

She was enjoying that thought, and the pleasure of his touch, when—

The bedside hotel phone rang.

She jumped.

He swore viciously, thrust the covers aside like a man driven by a force outside himself, fumbled with the receiver, and finally answered. “It’s four thirty in the morning, and I’m about to get laid. What? ” His voice crackled with irritation.

Maarja slid onto her belly, closed her eyes, wishing last night had never happened, wishing it could all happen again, wishing he wasn’t so sure of himself he had to tell some contact in his book he was about to get laid. She might have told him no. She might have!

“Fuck!” Dante threw the phone across the room. He leaned over her, stroked her hip, and in a totally calm tone, said, “Come on, Maarja. Life is a bitch, and the bitch just had puppies.”

She didn’t sit up. “What happened?”

“My cousin Connor has been executed.”