A Very Alpha Christmas Read online

He released me, all of a sudden, hands and mouth and all, and stepped back.

  “What?” I managed, the word sounding hoarse, strangled.

  “You win,” he said simply.

  Winning, losing—they all seemed the same to me now, in my dazed and frustrated state.

  “What do I win?” I demanded. “I haven’t won anything at all yet!” Except for more frustration.

  Dorian laughed as he drove me back—back toward the great glass wall that overlooked the sea. I tried to hold my ground, but it was no use. I might as well have tried to stop a freight train. He came on until I was pinned against the glass, his arms on either side of my head.

  “What do you want to win?” he asked.

  “Two things,” I said. “First, you have to take off some part of that damned three-piece suit. And second—you have to let me come. Really come.” I swallowed. “I mean it.”

  I tried to sound like I did.

  He pushed off the wall, stepping back far enough to give himself room, and he bent and pulled off his shoes with two tugs without bothering to untie them, then dropped them on the floor. Then he straightened and unfastened the single button keeping his suit jacket closed and tossed it aside.

  “Never say I’m not generous,” he said, shifting his broad shoulders under his dress shirt in a way that made my mouth go dry.

  Before I could respond, he had stalked forward again, closing the distance between us, and his mouth was over mine, his hands all over my body. There was nothing gentle in it—nor did I want there to be. His fingers found my clit, torturing its swollen hardness, pushing me to the edge and keeping me there my breath hissed between my teeth and I reached hard for the release he was holding just out of my reach.

  “You promised!” I said.

  “Patience.” His voice was amused, dammit. How dared he be amused?

  But just then, he tipped me over the edge, and my anger was seared from my brain in a pulse of heat. I struggled to brace my feet against the carpeted stateroom floor as the intensity of it blasted through me.

  His thumb kept up the rhythm on my clit, driving me hard into the depths of the orgasm even as two of his fingers slid roughly between my legs and into the aching heat there. I cried out at that, but rather than tempering his movements, he moved all the more roughly. I shuddered against him as I felt a third finger join the two, then a fourth. He was hurting me now, hurting me as I came around him, stretching my tender flesh to its limit with his cruelty.

  And I loved it. I was in no place to analyze the recklessness that came over me then. There was only feeling—pleasure and pain, so much of both that I thought my mind would burst as I rocked against him—rocked into the merciless thrust of his hand, seeking the edge, the limit.

  To the end.

  Finally, the climax eased, and he drew back his fingers slowly, leaving my clit last of all as I shuddered against his shoulder. There was no sense to what I felt, no logic, no rhyme or reason. But recognized it now for what it was, the darkness that I flirted with, the part of me, perhaps, that made the bond possible with a creature like him.

  3

  He caught my chin—with the hand that was still wet from me. I shivered at his touch, at how much I craved it, as he raised up my face to kiss me oh-so-softly on the lips.

  “Would you care for dinner, Cora?” he asked when he drew back as if he hadn’t just shattered my world.

  I gave one last shudder and I nodded because that was what I thought he wanted me to do. What I wanted then was more reckless, and I didn’t dare give voice to any of the darker thoughts that were swirling through my head.

  Twenty-four hours, he’d said. I wondered how many of those I had left. I wondered how much he would make me suffer during them. How much I hoped that he would.

  He pulled me back away from the glass wall, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. A few taps and the wall rolled back, folding like an accordion so that there was nothing between the stateroom and the bitter winter ocean breeze.

  I started shivering instantly, but he didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he stepped out onto the deck at the top of the yacht, my wrist a captive in his hand. I could follow or protest.

  I followed even as my shivering deepened.

  He nodded at the small square cut out of the deck. I looked down and realized that it was water, bubbling water, and steam was rising from the top.

  A hot tub.

  “Get in,” he ordered.

  “What about you?” I asked, even though I was already obeying. The tender parts of my flesh had already healed from his rough treatment, and so I only had to grit my teeth against the shock of heat after being out on the frigid deck.

  “I’ve only taken off my jacket and shoes so far,” he said, as if that were an explanation.

  Oh. So that was part of the game, now, was it? I raked my gaze over him, trying to guess how many articles of clothing he considered himself to be wearing. Would his belt be a separate item? Each of his socks? Not his tie pin, surely, or his cufflinks….

  My skin adjusted to the temperature of the hot tub, and the heat began its work of loosening my muscles as the jets burbled around my body. I leaned back against one of the vinyl pillows that had been thoughtfully attached to the side. One of two, I noted.

  Well, if he wanted to play this game, then I had no sympathy at all that I was the only one getting to enjoy the spa.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  Before I could answer, my stomach grumbled loudly. I’d missed lunch in the chaos of leaving the hotel and ordering my engagement ring—a ring that would be made to my design. I hadn’t realized that before Dorian had brought it up, but clearly, my stomach had forgotten nothing.

  “Not shy about answering, are you?” I asked it with a touch of resentment, looking down into the swirling water in my stomach’s general direction.

  Dorian chuckled as he sprawled, loose-limbed, on the cold deck, not showing the least indication that the freezing air was bothering him. “Good. Because I’ve ordered dinner brought up.”

  As if summoned by those words, there was a knock at the door. Rather than standing to open it, Dorian tapped his phone once. I scooted around the spa to look back into the stateroom just in time to see a man step through the door, a tray in his hands.

  My face flamed. “Dorian,” I hissed as he approached. “Isn’t Jane here?”

  Jane was my lady’s maid, and though I wasn’t exactly pleased with the way Dorian’s servants blithely traipsed in and out of rooms regardless of my state of dress, at least she was a woman who at least appeared somewhat close to my age.

  Dorian looked puzzled. “Of course she is. Whom do you think packed your clothes?”

  The man had passed through the open wall of glass, so rather than answer within his earshot, I just pulled my knees up to my chest. That and the bubbling water together should do a great deal toward concealing any bits I’d rather not have exposed to a stranger’s gaze—even that of one of Dorian’s thralls. But if the man had any reaction at all to my appearance, he gave no indication of it.

  “You dinner, sir, madam,” he said, bowing to each of us in turn over the covered tray that he held.

  Dorian nodded to a low table to one side of the deck, constructed of teak slats, and the servant dragged it to his side before setting the covered tray on top of it.

  “Thank you, Donnell,” Dorian said.

  “If that is all, I’ll just get the mess in the room, sir, madam,” the servant said with another small and perfectly polite bow to each of us.

  “Thank you, Donnell,” Dorian repeated.

  Donnell retreated back into the stateroom, folded our discarded clothes neatly on a chair and then picked up the champagne flutes and the stray pieces of glass and dabbed at the spilled champagne, all with the same perfect neutrality, before giving us a final bow at the doorway and stepping out of the room.

  “Who was that?” I asked. “And why didn’t Jane bring dinner this time?”
<
br />   “That was Donnell, my valet,” Dorian said, lifting the cover from the food. “And Jane didn’t bring it because this is my stateroom.”

  It took me a moment to unravel that statement.

  “Your stateroom—so your valet,” I said. I hadn’t seen a trace of him before that moment, but that made sense, seeing as we had mostly spent our time in my bedroom at Dorian’s house. And the times that we had been in Dorian’s bed…well, only one, really…Dorian had left early in the morning, before I had woken up. I wondered suddenly if Donnell had attended him then. He certainly appeared to know exactly who I was….

  “That’s right,” Dorian was saying. “Jane will still wait on you personally, of course, but for general needs, the stateroom falls under Donnell’s purview.”

  I considered protesting that it wasn’t exactly appropriate for a man to come around while I was stark staring naked. But I’d made an idiot of myself with Dorian’s staff before, and I didn’t want a repeat of that experience. If the stateroom was Donnell’s territory, it was Donnell’s territory, and I decided that my modesty—such as it was anymore, with Dorian—wasn’t worth whatever catastrophic insult I’d give him by demanding that Jane serve in his place.

  “Okay, then,” I said with great deliberation. “So what’s for supper?”

  Dorian lifted the cover, but I couldn’t see onto the tray from my angle below the level of the deck. He smiled down at me with an expression I did not entirely trust.

  “Just a few light dishes, it appears,” he said. “Fortuitous that it will not dampen our appetites for…other things.”

  “If it’s oysters on the half shell, I’m out,” I said quickly. “Call me a chicken. Call me whatever the opposite is a of a gourmet—”

  “Opposite of a gourmand,” he corrected easily. “And…philistine will do, I believe.”

  “Fine, call me that,” I said. “But raw shellfish is just something I have no interest in.”

  “Your fears are unfounded,” he said. “There are no oysters at all, cooked or otherwise. There are, however, these.”

  He lowered a plate, bone white china with a golden filigree band and what I now knew was Dorian’s crest in the center. Scattered across the plate were bite-sized scallops, each seared to perfection with some kind of light brown sauce drizzled across them.

  I sighed at the sight of it—and my stomach, rather less delicately, rumbled again. “I guess I should have given your chef more credit,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “I’ve been told he engaged in quite a frenzy of ordering when he got the news of our departure. Nothing could excite him more than the idea of a captive audience to the greatest excesses of his talent.”

  “In that case, I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.” I grinned and reached a hand out of the water to take the fork that Dorian held out to me.

  The cold air chilled my skin instantly, and my hand started shaking so hard that I missed my first stab at a scallop.

  “Here,” Dorian said, his voice tinged with amusement as he took the fork from me. “Allow me.”

  My fingers were already too stiff to resist, and I hurriedly immersed my arm back in the heat of the spa’s water again. Deftly, Dorian skewered one of the scallops.

  “The sauce, too?” I suggested, hoping that I sounded charmingly plaintive rather than just demanding.

  Apparently, I did, because he chuckled as he dragged the scallop through the sauce before presenting it to my lips on the end of the fork.

  Rather self-consciously, I nibbled it off, afraid that I’d feel like a baby being spoon-fed her meal. But when I lifted my eyes to Dorian’s, my throat went so dry that the glorious taste of the food hardly registered on my tongue, for with his gaze, he was devouring me far more thoroughly than I was the meal.

  I didn’t feel childlike. Not even remotely.

  And there was clearly something seriously wrong with me now because as Dorian speared the next scallop and offered it to me, I realized that my body was responding to this bit of foreplay every bit as much as to the challenge with the champagne.

  When he offered me the third bite, I shook my head.

  “You should have some, too,” I said.

  I didn’t even have the grace to feel guilty about my own ulterior motive, the voyeuristic thrill I got as he raised his eyebrows and took one of the scallops from the end of the fork with his teeth and lips, his gaze never leaving mine as he chewed it slowly and then swallowed.

  This definitely wasn’t fair. I was getting flustered when he fed me and flustered when he fed himself, and he seemed…merely amused. Oh, yes, there was that darker glint in his eye, the one that told me that absolutely everything that was happening was perfectly deliberate. But I was feeling overheated, and it had nothing to do with the spa…which I realized now was effectively a prison because there was no way I was going to cross the deck naked and dripping in this weather. I’d freeze to the boards.

  This was another challenge, then, one he hadn’t even bothered to present as such. And I wondered how this one could possibly end.

  We finished the plate in six more slow bites, and Dorian set it aside.

  “Want more?” he asked—a world of meaning loaded into that word.

  “What do you think?” I shot back.

  He just chuckled. “According to the card that the chef sent with the meal, these are truffle empanadas with wild mushrooms and a cilantro pesto sauce.”

  “Chocolate and mushrooms?” I asked blankly, trying to wrap my mind around it.

  He laughed again. “Other kind of truffles,” he explained.

  “Oh,” I said; then, as I realized that he meant the fancy mushroom kind, I said, “Oh!”

  “Oh, indeed,” he agreed. “The scallops had za’atar in the sauce. I’m sensing a pattern. Mediterranean fusion, perhaps?”

  “All I care about is that it’s good,” I said, smiling up at him.

  The first empanada came on the end of a fork, the stuffing—truffle and mushrooms, I supposed—wrapped in a translucent pastry skin. I took it with a slight bit of hesitation, since there was often a small difference between ‘delicacy’ and ‘weird.’

  But it wasn’t weird at all. It was good, insanely so, woodsy and buttery with just a small kick from the cilantro. I made a happy noise, rolling my eyes back as I chewed.

  “He’s trying to outdo Komi,” I finally said when I could speak again, referring to the exclusive restaurant where Dorian had first taken me to dinner.

  “Has he succeeded?” Dorian asked with a hint of amusement.

  “I’d say so,” I said. “Oh, my God.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “If that’s your reaction to food, I must not be up to snuff.”

  I pushed a small wave of water across the spa, but it got tangled in the bubbling of the jets before it could reach him. “You know that’s not true.”

  “I’ll trust that you’re going to convince me of that later tonight,” he said with another one of his insufferable smirks.

  “That depends on you, doesn’t it?” I grinned at him from the safety of the hot tub.

  He popped one of the empanadas into his own mouth, and his eyebrows rose. “It’s good, I’ll grant you,” he said grudgingly after he had swallowed.

  “So you have a lot to live up to,” I teased.

  “Wine?” Dorian offered rather than rising to that bait.

  I turned onto my belly in the water so that I was at a better angle to sip it from the glass.

  “Mmm,” I said after sniffing it and then sloshing it around my mouth as pretentiously as possible before swallowing. “Let me guess. A fine…white wine of some sort, probably dry, because most white wines are dry. I think.”

  He showed me the bottle, which had a very long name written in Italian, not one bit of which meant anything to me.

  “A rather good Orvieto,” he said. “Not my first pick, but excellent nevertheless. And it’s a medium-bodied wine, not dry.”

  “But it’s white,”
I pointed out. “I got that part right.”

  “It is white,” he agreed. “Excellent color-distinguishing ability you have there.”

  “I made great grades in kindergarten,” I said. “So let me have some more of that medium-not-dry Orveto, then.”

  “Orvieto,” he corrected.

  “Whatever,” I agreed.

  He handled the wine glass with the same finesse that he handled everything, including, I would be the first to admit, me. I took another long sip and leaned back against the pillow again, then greedily accepted the next two empanadas.

  What, exactly, had come over me? I wondered as Dorian ate the last one from the plate. Less than a full day before, I had fled from this man as if for my life. And now I was engaged to him and alone with him in the middle of the ocean—or near enough to being alone—teasing and joking as if I were perfectly comfortable, even though I was so keyed up behind my show of bravado that I was practically humming with tension. And in the middle of a twenty-four hour bet that would surely push me to the edge before the time was up, too.

  I had no common sense whatsoever, I decided as he brought down the next tray of food. And no sense of self-preservation.

  Preserving myself was, frighteningly, almost the furthest thing from my mind.

  “No surprises with the dessert course,” he said lightly. “Or the fruit course, if you choose to call it that.”

  “Oh?” I craned my neck as he brought the dish down for me to see.

  He was right. On one side of the dish was a pile of fruit—blackberries, raspberries, hulled strawberries, and sliced peaches and nectarines. On the other was a shapely mound of whipped cream.

  “Lemon-infused whipped cream,” Dorian noted. “According to the menu.” He scooped a small dollop onto his finger and offered it to me.

  “Subtle,” I said. Delicately, holding his gaze, I licked it off.

  I had to admit in all honesty that my version of “whipped cream” mostly came from a can. This was something else entirely. I might have no palate at all when it came to wines, fine or otherwise, but this was full of flavors of real foods that I could tease apart. The brightest note was, of course, the lemon, which was sweetened with what had to be real sugar in the whipping cream, but there was a richer note underneath. Brown sugar? A touch of molasses? Something that gave it depth, along with just a touch of sour cream.