AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When she shuddered and pressed her flesh harder into his palm, his lips crooked in a smile. “I trust that was to your satisfaction?”
Her eyes went black. “To my ecstasy. Now I want more.”
Pride revved inside his chest. For he was certain she meant it. She couldn’t wait to have him again. Even if he didn’t already know that, she had no reason to exaggerate. He’d already offered her everything she might want up front.
“You only have to give me your word and you’ll have ten weeks’ worth of more. With a huge cash incentive. To put things in perspective.”
Her eyes grew opaque, making him regret those last words. Before he found a way to take them back, she finally nodded.
But before relief surged, she added, “But since it’s for a good cause, how about doubling that cash incentive to a hundred million dollars?”
Five
“Are you mourning parting with your nine-figure sum?”
Scarlett bent over the couch and slid her arms over Raiden’s seminaked body as she whispered the teasing question into his ear.
He remained unmoving, staring ahead through the floor-to-ceiling window at the spectacular Tokyo Bay at sunset.
Which was weird. For the past three weeks since they’d started their...arrangement, he’d always met her halfway as soon as she’d entered, always impatient, urgent, voracious.
It had become her nightly ritual, and whenever possible a midday one, too, coming to his penthouse, to which he’d given her full access. He’d gotten this apartment in the first place for her, acquiring it the very next day after she’d agreed to his proposition, to be a few blocks away from her apartment. This, and everything else he did continued to be in the service of her convenience, and to make the most time for each other, wasting as little as possible commuting.
Before she came here every evening, she passed by her place and prepared an overnight bag. When she departed before his housekeepers came, she left no evidence behind to betray that Raiden shared this place with a woman.
She also went home first to shower. He showered as soon as he returned home and was always starving for her at the end of his workday, and she couldn’t let him take her to bed fresh, or not so fresh, from hers. She’d been flying back and forth daily to the areas still affected by the last earthquake and tsunami in the northeast of Honshu island, and the fieldwork she’d been doing had been grueling. Over three hundred thousand people were still in temporary housing, and over ten thousand of those were orphaned children, the focus of her work. She’d been going all out setting up their special shelters. She needed to get things up and running before she left.
Her departure had become even more imperative now. The day, the hour her time with Raiden was up, she’d leave Japan and never come back.
Till then she’d spend every possible second with him. And Raiden was beyond generous with his time. Her days, as per his decree, were hers—if he couldn’t get away and meet her back here. Her nights were all his. She was so very okay with that.
Then in the mornings they left separately, and they never met anywhere else. There were no lunches or dinners or evenings out. They’d been taking every precaution to make sure their arrangement remained a secret. She was even more careful than he was. When she left this time, she wanted to leave him nothing but good memories, and no lasting damage of any sort.
That was, nothing more than the hundred-million-dollar-shaped new hole in his pocket.
It still flabbergasted her that he could so easily part with that much money. But he had, without batting an eyelash. Right there in his limo, he’d just produced his checkbook from his hand-tailored jacket, and had written the check. Payable the very next day.
At her incredulity that he’d done that when she didn’t have the blade of exposure held to his neck this time, he’d shrugged, saying he considered having her those ten weeks as vital to him as keeping his secrets had been. She’d insisted he hadn’t needed to give her anything, that what she wanted was only him. And he’d only said he knew that.
But he’d still been ready to part with such a staggering sum. To put things into perspective. So she wouldn’t mistake this for anything permanent.
She could have told him there’d never been any danger of that.
But she didn’t tell him. Nor did she talk about anything else of note, either. Their time together was about indulging in each other. Ten weeks of pure pleasure.
Not that she thought it would be really that long. There was no way he’d be with her right up to his wedding day.
Swallowing the lump she had no right to have perpetually in her throat, she ran her palms over his chest and abdomen, luxuriating in his velvet-encased steel flesh, tracing every bulge and ridge and groove of his chiseled perfection.
Then she went lower, afraid she’d find more evidence of disinterest to go with his unprecedented preoccupation, and her breath left her in a ragged sigh as her hand closed over his mind-blowing potency, fully, dauntingly aroused.
Her lips shaking in relief, she bit his earlobe as she squeezed him. “I need you to be doing far better things than staring out into the horizon like that. Like taking me right here, right now.”
“Scarlett.”
That was all he said as he flung his head against the back of the couch, exposing his face and neck to her worship.
But he hadn’t moaned her name in pleasure, or in sensual threat. But as if he was...trying to understand it.
