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His hand trailed lower, over the curve of my knee and down around my calf, slipping under the lower hem of my skirt andmeeting bare flesh. He gave me an inch of space as he pulled his lips from mine and half-lidded eyes met mine too close to focus on. “If you’re truly just here for a drink,” he said, his fingers tightening on the back of my neck, “you’re doing an awful job of ordering one.”
“It’s hard to orderanythingwhen my mouth is preoccupied,” I teased. “But I’ll take whatever is nicest.”
His digits traveled up the back of my leg, pulling the fabric up with it as it pooled on top of his jacketed arm. Slightly swollen lips pulled back into a far too cheeky of a grin, and for the briefest of seconds, his fingers brushed against the inside of my thigh, sending a wave of electricity through me.Higher,I wanted to say, but they disappeared as quickly as they’d come, and soon his hand was leaving me entirely and lifting up a bottle of red wine that must have been stored beneath where I was sitting. “Thisis the best bottle I have on the ship.”
I almost wanted to scream at him for teasing me just to get to a bottle of wine, but I took it in my grasp and turned it to look at the label. A hand-drawn design of some kind of estate house took up the majority of it, and beneath that, in faded letters, were the wordsCHÂTEAU LAFITE ROTHSCHILD, 2009.
I knew enough about wine from my father’s obsession with it to know that this was fucking expensive, and it was meant to be aged.
“Do you really want to waste opening aLafitefor one glass?” I asked, turning the bottle over in my hands.
“Let’s be honest for one second,” he laughed, plucking it from my grasp. He reached between my legs again, and my heart rate nearly doubled as he brushed against my inner thigh. Just like he had thirty seconds ago, he retreated, pulling out a multi-faceted corkscrew. “You’re not just staying for one drink.”
He cut away the top of the wrapping before I could protest and shoved the spiral into the top of the cork, twisting it down until it had almost entirely disappeared.
“Pass me two glasses, would you?” he asked. “They’re just behind your head.”
The moment his hand flexed, gripping the screw and leveraging it out, I gave up what little fight I had left in me. No going back now.
I spun around, reaching for the thin stemmed glasses with wide tops. Dad used to shout at me for grabbing the small ones whenever he had red wine, and for once, his training paid off. I passed them to Adrian—orJohn—and he carefully poured out two servings worth before handing me one back.
I stared at it for longer than I intended to, watching as it moved in the glass and painted the sides a clear, dark maroon. He watched me closely, his eyes lingering with far too much weight, and every second under that stare felt like a hurricane brewing far too close for comfort.
“Come on, pretty girl,” he mocked, clinking his glass against mine. “Even if it’s one glass, you have to at least try it.”
I wasn’t entirely sure how to tell him that I couldn’t give two shits about the wine and just wanted him to take me back to the bedroom Iknewexisted on this godforsaken sailboat, but I obliged, letting the heat of him calling mepretty girlsettle in between my thighs as I lifted the glass to my lips.
Fuck, it was good.
“There you go,” he said. He slipped between my thighs again, sliding his free hand around my waist and settling it on the small of my back. He pulled, and my rear moved along the slick surface, bringing my parted legs directly against his waist. Heat swarmed over my face, and I knew damn well it wasn’t from the one sip of alcohol I had taken.
“You shouldn’t have opened this one.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat and sipped at it again, my mouth salivating from the tannins.
He shrugged. “I’ve got twenty more at home.”
Twenty more. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I wasn’t supposed to think he was as wealthy as he actually was—not asJohn, at least, and not asLily. Lily knew him as a decently well-off travel expert and photographer, not the multi-millionaire head of a global events planning company. But Lily also wouldn’t know how expensive this wine was, and I wasn’t sure how exactly to respond in order to fit with the narrative we were both presenting.
“Besides,” he started, offering me a little smirk as he set his glass down and brought himself closer, his lips hovering against the shell of my ear, “I find it hard to believe that you’d willingly sit in a taxi for twenty minutes just to have one single drink with me.”
An electric current shot down my spine from the heat of his breath. Instinctually, my hand reached for him, landing solidly on the warmth of his shirt between the folds of his jacket, and his answering breathy chuckle only added to the sensation from my ear.
“So tell me,Lily,” he rasped. His hand found the bare skin of my knee again, and within an instant, he was lifting the fabric of my skirt further, dragging it up my thigh, his thumb caressing the sensitive flesh. “What exactly would you like me to do with you?”
The heat in my cheeks flared further.What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?Did he expect me to just be as forward as possible and ask him to bend me over the counter?
“You’ve been talking all night and you choosenowto lose your voice?” he laughed.
I swallowed again, forcing words to the front of my mouth and out from behind the vice of my teeth. I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “Do you have a bed on this thing?”
He pulled back from my ear, but his face hovered near the side of my face, his eyes locked on me. His hand moved just a little higher up on my thigh, just a couple of inches from dangerous territory. “I do.”
I clutched the fabric of his shirt and downed the last of the small glass of wine for an added bit of courage. “Then that’s what I want.”
His mouth shifted as he sucked at his teeth, his head moving further from me until he stood at his full height. With one hand, he lifted the opened bottle and poured me another serving, topping himself up in the process.
What…the fuck?
“How old are you, Lily?” he asked. It was so nonchalant, so absurdly irrelevant, that it left me dumbfounded for a second.
