Her Perfect Gift, page 6
“Dinner first,” he said again and pulled a seat out for her.
Before she could even think to lie that she wasn’t hungry, her traitorous stomach rumbled its appreciation of the well-presented food.
“Thank you,” she said, taking a reluctant seat.
The linguine was just as delicious as it looked, and though she didn’t dare touch the red wine he’d poured for her, Lacey found herself relaxing and, once again, doing most of the talking, though she did keep trailing off to stare out at the lake.
“Sorry,” she said after she did it a fourth time. “It’s just…Lake Michigan is so beautiful, and I almost never get to see it at night.”
“Why not?” he asked.
She was surprised by the question, since he hadn’t asked one the entire time they’d been eating. “Well, you know, my hours are weird, so I don’t get much leisure time after the sun goes down.”
“You work too much,” he said.
She shrugged. “Obviously you make a lot of money doing high-end security, but paying for Sparkle’s schooling isn’t exactly easy for me.”
“Yet you refuse to apply for a scholarship.”
She lowered her fork and pasted a smile on her face. “Nope. There are students who need them more than Sparkle, and I don’t mind working. It keeps me busy.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Either that or you didn’t want to provide the school with your financial records, so you’re working what amounts to three jobs to pay her tuition.”
Her smile wobbled. That had been exactly why she hadn’t applied for a scholarship.
“Speaking of that third job,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to ask is there anything else you want me to do on the accounting side of things.”
He steepled his hands over his plate. “Anything else like what?” His onyx eyes met hers and it sent a small shiver down her spine.
“Tony calls it ‘creative accounting,’” she said, trying to keep the shakiness she felt out of her voice. “If I have to explain it, then you probably don’t need it. It just that you make enough to buy Tony’s business and pay for Sparkle’s tuition without blinking and I thought that might mean you were involved in something more than high-end security.”
His gaze kept her pinned. “If I was, would you think less of me?”
“I—I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it would depend on what exactly you do besides high-end security.”
He regarded her for a few seconds before saying, “You’re right, what I do isn’t as simple as high-end security. It’s highly specialized and very few other men in the world do it as well as I do, that’s why I’m able to live as comfortably as I do. Also, I inherited a substantial amount of money from my mother.”
“So your mom’s dead?” she asked, her heart going out to him because she hadn’t known they had this in common.
The same sadness that she’d seen in Montana flickered across his face then. “Yes. Less than fifteen years into their marriage, my father decided he’d made a mistake in marrying my mother for love and started divorce proceedings. You see, she is Chinese, and though her family was very well off in her country, my father’s family never approved of their marriage. Her answer to this insult was to take her own life, making him a widow, before he could throw her away. Technically the money should have gone to him, but my father held it in trust for me and gifted it to me on my wedding day.”
“That was nice of him,” she said, thinking of her own father, who had always put her best interests ahead of his own.
“No,” he said, placing his napkin on the table. “It was a manipulation, a gift for marrying the woman he had chosen for me and for assuming the role he designated for me in the family business. If he could have found away to take the money back upon our divorce, he would have done so.”
“So you and your father don’t get along?” she asked.
“No, but I remain grateful for his presence in my early life.” He gave her an up and down look that made goose bumps raise on her arms. “He taught me to be ruthless, and that quality has served me well over the years.”
The subject, she could sense, had changed. When he talked about his inherited ruthlessness, he wasn’t really talking about his father or even his current job. Something pulsed in the air between them like a tiger ready to pounce.
“Wow, would you look at the time?” she said, making a big show of checking her watch. “I took the El, so I should probably be heading out before it gets too late.”
He stood up and picked up his dish. “I don’t like leaving dirty dishes for room service. Will you help me rinse these off?”
“Sure. I guess so,” Lacey answered, feeling flustered but obligated to at least rinse a few dishes after he’d provided her with such a scrumptious dinner.
So she stood beside him, stiff and unable to provide her usual ramble, because though he had yet to touch her or even look at her in an amorous way, she could feel the sexual tension, thick as a cloud in the room.
He handed her a dish and asked, “What kind of girl are you?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“In Montana, you said you weren’t the kind of girl who had sex with a man because he bought her dinner. So now I’m wondering what kind of girl you are.”
A weird fear caught her heart in a tight lasso. “I still don’t understand,” she said.
He turned off the water and turned to face her. “You’re making it obvious you don’t wish to have sex with me tonight. You wore what looks like your workout clothes and you keep trying to leave. Why?”
She swallowed the hard lump of fear lodged in her throat and decided to just give it to him straight. “Because you scare me. Because I still don’t know why you paid Sparkle’s tuition, or bought my club, or why you’re here. But mostly because you scare me. I read guys for a living, and I can’t read you, and that makes me nervous.”
“Nervous,” he repeated. If she’d offended him, he didn’t let it show. Instead his eyes drifted down to her outfit. “Choosing to wear these clothes was a mistake.”
“Because you wanted me to wear something sexier?” she asked, her back going straight.
“No, because though I’ve lived in the States since college, I’m still very Japanese.”
She shook her head, confused. “What does that mean?”
“Have you ever seen Japanese porn?” he asked her.
She felt her cheeks heat. “Um, no. We get a lot Japanese clients coming through the club, but I haven’t explored the country beyond that.”
He began unbuttoning his shirt, “If you had ever spent any time in my home country, you would know the Japanese have a somewhat peculiar talent that your own country does not.”
It felt like her heart had moved from her chest and set up permanent residence in her stomach, but she couldn’t keep herself from asking, “What kind of talent?”
“Tentacles, baths, even simple conversation—we can make anything sexy. So while you were sitting across from me at the table, thinking I’d surely be turned off by your clothing, I was thinking what it would be like reach up under your shirt and take off your bra.”
To her surprise, his arms came around her waist, and he distracted her with a hot kiss as his hands snaked under the back of her t-shirt.
“And if you hadn’t worn such a simple bra, I wouldn’t have been able to do this…”
Before she knew it, he’d unclasped her bra and was pulling it off, taking the admittedly easy-to-maneuver straps down both her arms and stripping the bra off through one armhole.
She’d thought he’d strip her out of her t-shirt next, but instead his mouth closed over one of her nipples, lathing her breast through the worn material. Hot pleasure trickled from her chest straight into her womanhood. And she could feel her nipple puckering inside his mouth as her breasts swelled with instantaneous need.
“What are you doing?” she asked, unable to believe how hot the feel of a man’s tongue through her t-shirt was making her.
His answer was to let go of the breast underneath the I-G-L and move on to the one underneath the F-I-E. The cool air hit the now damp breast he’d abandoned, making for a heady contrast of hot and cold as he paid the same wet attention to her other breast. He tugged at it through the t-shirt with long, insistent sucks, and she could feel her pussy clenching in response. “Suro,” she moaned.
He stood up straight, his normally cool eyes now ablaze with heat as he took in the outline of her nipples highlighted through the wet spots he made on her shirt.
“Not good enough,” he said.
He picked her up.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, coming out of her sexual daze enough to be alarmed.
He didn’t respond, but he walked so swiftly toward the back of the suite that she soon got her answer.
He opened a door to reveal a bathroom and a hot tub roiling with heated water.
“So that was where he was when I came in,” she thought to herself.
And that was all she had time to think before he unexpectedly let her go, dropping her into the tub, fully clothed.
She came up from underneath the water sputtering, but then she saw what he saw in the bathroom mirror. Her heavy breasts were now completely on display through the wet material of her t-shirt, down to her dark aureoles.
She gasped and looked up at Suro, who was already in the process of taking off his pants and underwear.
“I can’t believe you—“ she started.
“We’re done talking,” he said.
“But—“
He sheathed himself in a condom and climbed into the tub. “We’re done talking,” he said again, pulling her into his arms.
And this time when she opened her mouth to protest her dunking, his was right there to swallow her words in a long kiss that blazed hotter than the water in the tub.
He was right, she thought, as she helplessly kissed him back. They were done talking.
He took off her shorts, but not her panties. Then he moved them to a nearby ledge, where he sat down before positioning her to face him with one leg on each side of his hips, so she could feel his erection against her drenched, panty covered slit.
But he wasn’t done with her t-shirt. He pushed it up from the bottom, until the front half rested above her now soaked breasts, exposing them in a way that felt impossibly erotic with hot water swirling around their bottom halves. She could actually feel his erection swell larger against her womanhood, and she groaned when he once again took her breast into his mouth, sucking on it so hard it blurred the line between pleasure and pain.
And then just when she thought it couldn’t get any more intense, he moved the crotch of her panties and he was inside of her, long and hard and completely embedded, so her clit rubbed against the top of his shaft every time he surged into her.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to stay in control. But there were too many sensations happening at once. The moving water, his hands on her breasts, his manhood all the way up to her womb.
She let out a helpless moan, trying to hold on, but then he stopped kissing her and said, “Let go.”
And she came apart, slamming her hand down on the edge of the tub several times, as the orgasm rocked through her. And he must have been waiting for her to submit to her climax, because he came soon after with an explosion of words she couldn’t understand as he throbbed to completion inside of her.
CHAPTER 9
THE next morning, Suro woke up late for only the second time that year. But this time, he wasn’t alone. When he rolled over, he found the woman who had been haunting his dreams for over three months, her pretty face covered in a curtain of long dreadlocks.
For a moment his heart lifted, thinking she had actually stayed on purpose. But then he remembered. She still hadn’t received her money. It had been the only thing that had brought her to his hotel room the night before and probably was the only thing keeping her there now.
As if to confirm his suspicions, she came awake with a start. “What? Where am I?”
She fully sat up in bed when she saw Suro. “Oh, no,” she said, covering herself up with the white sheet.
And though he had a reputation for maintaining his cool no matter what, Suro suddenly found himself saying, his voice tight with anger, “Don’t hide yourself from me.”
She drew the sheet up further as if his words only made her want to hide from him more. “I know I work at a strip club, but I’m not a stripper. I’m not all that great at sitting around naked in broad daylight.”
Somehow her soft words calmed his angry heart. He reached out and lowered the hand she had clenched around the sheet. “I want to see you,” he said.
The sheet fell away from her plump breasts and Suro felt himself getting hard again. She angered him like no other woman he had ever known, not even his ex-wife. But the sight of her pleased him, made him want things he’d taught himself to go without, like companionship, and a woman waiting for him when he got home from a job.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. Mostly because he didn’t know himself. Every day he wondered what he was doing here in Chicago, obsessing over this woman.
She studied him with real worry in her eyes. “Sometimes you get this look, like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders. Do you want to talk about it?”
His nickname in the world of assassins was “The Silence.” And it was well earned. For as long as he could remember, he’d never wanted to talk to anyone about anything, except for this one black woman who had somehow slipped under his skin.
He abruptly got out of bed. “I’ll order us breakfast.”
“I’m sorry,” she said behind him. He could hear her scrambling out of bed to gather her clothing, which they’d hung across two chairs to dry the night before. “My father always said I was too nosy. I shouldn’t have asked. You don’t have to order breakfast. I can make myself some when I get home.”
“I’m leaving town on business tonight and won’t be back until the Friday after next,” he told her.
He watched her carefully, but couldn’t tell if she was happy or merely surprised when she said, “Oh.”
“Have breakfast with me. Then I’ll give you your money and you can go.”
He didn’t wait for her answer before picking up the phone and putting in a breakfast order big enough for two people.
TWO WEEKS LATER, Lacey was still trying to figure out why Suro had insisted on having breakfast with her. Dinner, she could understand. He was trying to get into her pants, and she’d once again made it ridiculously easy for him to do so despite her claim she couldn’t be bought for a plate of pasta. But still, he’d insisted on her having yet another meal with him, which she spent telling him all there was to do for fun in Chicago.
He hadn’t touched her after breakfast, or asked her to help with the dishes, or even said goodbye when he walked her to the door and handed her an envelope filled with money. And though she’d earned her paycheck fair and square, she’d felt like a hooker when she’d taken the money from him and thanked him for breakfast.
Then nothing. No calls, no emails, no texts. Not a word from Suro, even though his presence seemed to follow her around throughout the day. She woke up in the morning thinking about him and no matter how much she tried to resist fantasizing about him, her dependence on her pocket rocket only increased after their second encounter.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, my butt. In her case, Suro’s absence made her treacherous body that much hornier. But she couldn’t afford to go there, she kept reminding herself. It was fine to fantasize about him, but she couldn’t let it go beyond that ever again. The stakes were too high for her to risk involving anyone else in her mess of a life.
By the time she woke up Friday morning, she’d made up her mind. Suro would be back in the office today, no more tiptoeing around him. She’d stand up for herself and let him know there would be no more dinners in his hotel room. From now on, they’d have a professional relationship only. She couldn’t afford to let herself become embroiled with a man again, not even one who set her on fire like Suro did.
But when she stormed down to his office before the club opened, she found the door still locked. He wasn’t there. He also wasn’t there when she tried back a few hours later, and then again during her dinner break.
Maybe he wasn’t coming back, she thought. Maybe he had gotten what he wanted and decided he didn’t want her anymore. The thought should have elated her, but instead it made her lose her appetite. She ended up only eating two bites of the sandwich she’d made herself for dinner, and a black cloud dogged her during the rest of her shift.
This is what you wanted, she reminded herself as she trudged up the stairs to her apartment. The only reason she was alive today was because she had learned to lay low at all costs and keep her life as simple as possible. No more kids, no men, no close friends, just work and Sparkle.
Another wave of loneliness stole over her. But now she only had work since Sparkle was away at boarding school.
She shoved the loneliness away. She was, despite everything, a happy person. She was lucky to be alive, lucky to have a job that paid her well. She didn’t need anything else, she told herself. And by the time she got to her apartment door, she was at least halfway to believing it.
But then she opened the door and found Suro Nakamura in the middle of her living room, doing some kind of flowing but lethal-looking martial arts routine with a long wooden staff, dressed in nothing but a pair of black silk pants.
“What are you doing in my apartment?” she asked, stopping short in the doorway.
He came out of Kung Fu mode and faced her, standing the staff in front of him. “Have you eaten yet?”
“What are you doing in my apartment?!” she repeated, louder and angrier this time.
He grabbed a glass of water from a nearby table and pointed to a sleek suitcase standing near the couch. “I’ve decided to move in.”
