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This would’ve been a good time to call a stop, to slow things down. This would’ve been a good time to pray for mercy. Not that it would’ve mattered. Whatever deity the man from Tara revered didn’t do compassion. It was the last coherent thought she had.
The way he shifted their bodies, laying by her side, his pelvis jammed against her hip. The way he kissed her, while he popped the stud at the top of her jeans, and slowly tugged the zipper down, and searing heat of his palm on her abdomen overwhelmed her. She forgot to touch him, she went rigid with expectation.
His fingertips played with the edge of her underwear, flicking the elastic so it pinged her skin, making her body jump. “Tell me I can do this to you?”
He wanted an instruction and she couldn’t remember the question.
“Ah fuck, woman. What a time to pick to make me stop.”
A voice said, “Don’t stop.” It didn’t sound like hers. It was drunk on desire.
“Not even when you beg.”
His fingers were under the trim of her underpants, and then they were inside her. She arched off the couch. She so wanted to move, to shed her jeans to spread her legs, to give him greater access. He was having none of that. Constriction was his design. He made her squirm, sharp sounds of shock and longing coming from her throat. He made her jolt in his arms, knocking against him, shuddering in answer to the thrust and roll, drag and twist of his fingers.
His kisses were deeper, longer, wetter. His rhythm rocking her closer and closer to an all encompassing implosion. It was passion as punishment, lust as leverage, a skilled gift of release from the turmoil of inner tremors that built and built to shattering proportions.
He made her come, a rolling wave of sensation that peaked and fell and peaked again. And when she thought it was over, and she was safe from the seismic shift of it, he moved. He changed the nature of his clever play, and she rose and fell again with shouts of surprise and relief, murmurs of incomprehension and wonder, her face hooked in the curve of his neck drinking in his heat, his scent. Revelling in his mastery.
She thanked him on a slow, soft, languid kiss and reached for him. It was his turn, her way.
He caught her hands. “No.” More instructions, but not said in game mode, he was the boss again. “That was for you. You don’t need to return the favour.”
She swiped his top lip with her tongue. “But if I want to? And I do want to.”
He pulled away, rolled her so she was on her side, spooned into his body. “We don’t always get what we want.”
“What happened to asking for it?”
His stubble caught her cheek. His voice was low in her ear. “I’m one of those rich bastards who takes what he needs and fuck what anyone else wants. And I need you to sleep now. I’ll wake you before they come for us.”
Darcy’s whole body hummed with fatigue. He’d found his jacket and draped it over them. In the comforting heat of his arms, and the heaviness of her exhaustion, she closed her eyes and slept.
7. Shangri-La
“To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.” — Confucius
Darcy stood in the entrance hall of the suite with her mouth open. This was Shanghai, not Shangri-La. A city of twenty-four million people, not an exotic mystical paradise. But so far everything about China was an unearthly dream.
She’d been detained in a room inspired by arctic blandness. Released suddenly with no explanation or apology, and now she had a suite that was bigger than her rented Surry Hills terrace. She’d arrived in a chauffeur-driven top of the range Audi after spending five hours with a man she’d bantered with, shared dinner with, danced with, and who gave her the most erotic experience of her life.
Her adult promiscuity had gotten the best work-out it’d had in years.
And she didn’t even know his name.
Of course she’d asked his driver, a man of indeterminate age and no apparent English. She might as well have asked him for the secret to eternal life. He’d have smiled at her the same way, like he had all the answers, but she was unworthy of receiving them.
Tara had to be behind the suite. The paper had flown her cattle class and the only reason she was booked under the paper’s name in this five-star hotel at all was because it was walking distance to Parker’s head office on the Bund. They’d have had her in a laundry room if that was the cheapest possible option. So when the clerk on reception mentioned she’d have her own butler, she knew a mistake had been made.
Much confusion, rapid computer screen toggling. No mistake. The Palace Suite had been fully paid for. Her butler had drawn a bath and awaited her instructions about unpacking and refreshment.
Men you meet in visa irregularity detention didn’t normally go around arranging suites for fellow detainees, did they? They didn’t normally make you writhe with sexual tension and give you a rolling series of body rocking orgasms either, did they?
They certainly didn’t do all that without expecting something back.
Darcy ordered a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich and a pot of Irish Breakfast tea, and watched to see if her butler would flinch at the ordinariness of the request. His expression made her ready to believe he thought her taste in food, cheap crumpled clothing and grubby battered luggage was the essence of privilege and good breeding.
She wandered around the suite barefoot on thick, creamy carpet. You could wander, that was the right word for it. It had a dining room that would seat eight easily. In another room a baby grand piano stood ready to play. There was a dressing room. In the expansive wardrobe her paltry clothing was already arrayed on four padded coat hangers. The butler had even hung t-shirts, placed her work shoes in a special rack. Somewhere in this room he’d stowed her wheelie bag. There were so many cupboards and storage spaces she might never find it.
