“What are you doing?” Audrey hissed at me as she quickly closed the door behind her.
The man I had stabbed let out a groan and collapsed to the ground as I removed my force blade from his heart and released his shoulder. Dull thuds echoed into the room as his limp body hit the marble floor.
“He’s some kind of gardener’s assistant and he saw me messing with the side door,” I answered while letting my force blade disappear.
As if on cue, the dying man twitched below me.
Audrey’s sharp eyes flicked from his body to my face and then towards the side door that I had found. Irritation flashed across her features as she shifted her attention back to me.
“You didn’t have to kill him! You could have just made up some bullshit excuse about being lost or something.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh I’m sorry, is your conscience bothering you?”
“That’s not what I meant,” she snapped, and flicked a dismissive hand at the now very deceased man at my feet. “I don’t care that he’s dead. He’s nothing to me. I care that we now have a dead body. In the parliament building!”
My gaze drifted to the corpse and the small pool of blood that had spread on the floor. I supposed she did have a point.
Whirling around, she cracked the door open and peered out. A soft snarl ripped from her lips as she closed it again. “There are people out there now.”
“So? What were you going to do? Drag the corpse out through the front doors?” I motioned towards the side door while holding her furious gaze. “We just carry him out into the garden and bury him there.”
“In broad daylight? The building and the gardens and this whole damn hill are crawling with people who work here.”
“Good point.”
She forced out a sharp breath between her teeth and crossed her arms over her chest while glaring at me. “We can’t just leave him here. They’ll know something is wrong and it will ruin our element of surprise at the ball.”
“Fine. We wait for nightfall and then bury him in the garden. I’ve already messed with the lock on that door so that we can get in and out whenever we want.”
“Wait? Wait where?” She stabbed a hand towards the man’s corpse. “We can’t just sit here with a dead body on the floor and wait for someone to blunder in and find us.”
“Of course not. We need to hide while we wait for nightfall. But I didn’t think I had to actually specify something that obvious.”
She clenched her jaw in anger before grinding out, “Where?”
I just jerked my chin towards the two closet doors on my left.
The room was bare apart from the twin storage closets set into the inner wall. If I had to make an educated guess, I would say that this room was only used as an emergency exit in case of a fire or something similar. My little unplanned murder aside, I’d say that this investigation had revealed the perfect spot for us to use when abducting Lance Carmichael.
While shaking her head in annoyance, Audrey stalked over to the closets and yanked open the doors. Two empty, but very narrow, spaces stared back at her.
“Let’s get to it then,” she snapped as she strode back to me. Wrapping her hands around the dead guy’s ankles, she lifted his legs up and then arched her eyebrows expectantly at me. “Grab his shoulders.”
That had sounded an awful lot like an order, but I would get her back for that later, so I just bent down and hooked my arms underneath his armpits. Walking backwards, I started towards the closet. Audrey stepped around the pool of blood that had formed on the floor and then followed me. Her eyes still flashed with anger, so I shot her a smirk to make it even worse. She narrowed her eyes at me but said nothing.
After backing into the closet, I dropped the dead man on the floor. Once Audrey had released his legs, I stepped over him and turned so that I could pull him up and lean him against the back wall. He wasn’t really helping the effort by being dead and unwieldy, but I managed to get him into position eventually.
The sound of ripping fabric came from behind me.
Frowning, I turned around and stepped out of the closet to find Audrey tearing off large swathes of her skirt.
“The hell are you doing?” I asked.
Instead of answering, she just shot me a death glare and then dropped to her knees. Realization, and a hint of approval, blew through my mind.
Using the strips of fabric, she mopped up the blood until the marble floor looked at least passably clean again.
When she was done, she gathered up the pile of bloodied cloth and pushed to her feet. Her dress now ended in a ragged line at her mid-thighs, and it swung around her as she stalked over and threw the scraps of her skirt into the closet with the dead body. The wet fabric sailed through the air before landing in the deceased gardener’s lap.
Turning back to me, she jutted out her chin and raised her eyebrows expectantly. “You can share his closet. I’m taking the other one. This is your mess after all.”
I moved towards her and the doorway as if I was about to follow her ridiculous command. When I reached the spot in front of her, I stopped and let a condescending smirk stretch my lips. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m not—”
Grabbing her by the throat, I yanked her body sideways and then shoved her into the empty closet. While she stumbled backwards into the wall, I slammed the other closet door closed, leaving the dead guy to his lonely hiding place.
“Don’t you dare—”
Before she could finish, I strode into the closet she was in and then closed the door behind me.
Darkness enveloped us. I blinked a few times while my eyes adjusted to the gloom. A small stream of light seeped in from the gap underneath the door, which helped me make out my surroundings once my eyes had gotten used to the poor lighting. What I found was a furious poison mage.
“If you ever do something like that again…” she began in a voice dripping with threats.
I snorted. “You’ll do what exactly?”
The storage closet was barely big enough for us to stand opposite each other, and it certainly wasn’t wide enough to allow her to get past me to the door. My shoulders brushed the sides of the closet, leaving me blocking her way out.
Glittering green light suddenly swirled around her arms. “Or I will finish what I started back in my room.”
I shifted my hand slightly, bringing the force blade I had summoned the final bit forward so that it pressed against her ribs. Her eyes shot down to it for a second, but she didn’t flinch. That both annoyed me and impressed me.
Grinning down at her, I raised my eyebrows in silent challenge.
She huffed out a mirthless laugh and then let the poison magic dissipate. My force blade disappeared a second later. We would have to settle this when we were back in the privacy of our house instead.
Satisfied that she wasn’t going to start a fight right now, I leaned back against the closed door and then slid down it until I sat on the floor. Kicking Audrey’s legs apart, I stretched mine out as far as they would go, which wasn’t much. I still had to bend my knees as I rested my boots on the back wall, but it was more comfortable than standing up.
“Sit down,” I ordered. “This is going to be a long wait.”
Audrey was standing with her feet on either side of my knees, and she didn’t look at all inclined to sit down. When I locked eyes with her, she only clicked her tongue and flicked a dismissive hand, telling me that she wasn’t going to be taking any orders from me. Oh, we’d see about that.
“I said, sit down,” I repeated while grabbing the back of her knees and yanking them forward.
A yelp slipped her lips as her legs buckled and she crashed down on top of me. Since my knees were bent, my legs created a slope, and she slid forward until her chest slammed into mine. With her knees resting on the floor, she straddled my hips while her tits pressed into my chest. I had to admit, I quite liked her in that position.
“You fucking—” she snapped.
“What was that?” Grabbing her chin, I forced her head back so that she met my gaze. “Are you asking me to fuck you?”
She reached up and smacked my hand away. I let her. Lowering my arm again, I rested my hand on the floor next to me instead.
Audrey placed her palms against my shoulders and pushed herself backwards. It didn’t work. Because of the steep angle of my legs, she just slid right back down again.
A low snarl ripped from her throat.
Even though it was useless, she tried the same thing several more times. The result was always the same. Once she had come to that conclusion too, she crossed her arms and glared up at me where she sat right on top of my cock.
“You can always stand for eight hours while we wait for nightfall,” I offered.
For a moment, it looked like she might actually do that out of pure spite, but then she forced out a sharp breath. “The minute the light disappears from under the door, we get the hell out of here and bury that guy in the gardens outside.”
“Deal.”
She stared up at me for a few seconds before continuing. “So, this is the room we’ll use to kidnap Lance Carmichael.”
“Unless you found something better on your side?”
“No. There was a private library kind of thing, but there was no door. And the ground slopes downwards that way so the drop from the windows is too high to jump.”
“Alright. Then this is the room we’ll use.”
Silence fell.
For quite a while, we just sat there. Waiting for the hours to pass so that we could bury the damn guy who had seen me from the gardens while I fiddled with the lock on the side door that I had opened for like ten seconds. Ten seconds of bad luck had led to eight hours of boredom. In a closet. With Audrey fucking Sable.
She was staring at the wall above my shoulder as if making a point out of not looking at me, and that arrogance and anger she usually directed at me still lined her cheekbones. But despite all of her insults and her rage, she had still stayed. When she saw that I had killed that gardener, she could have just walked out and left me to deal with it. Instead, she had carried a corpse into a closet, ripped apart her dress to wipe up the blood, and then agreed to spend eight hours with me in a cramped closet so that we could then haul the dead guy out the side door and into the gardens, find a couple of shovels, dig a deep hole, and then bury the bastard in it. Not a lot of people would have agreed to do that. And certainly not for an enemy.
It worried me that I didn’t hate her as much anymore. I might even go so far as saying that I found her tolerable from time to time. And that was unacceptable. I had to do something to reset the power balance between us.
My eyes drifted down her body.
A wicked plan formed in my mind. This was the perfect opportunity to get back at her for that stunt she had pulled when we shared the horse on the way here.
While watching her face intently, I rolled my hips.
Her mouth dropped open and a small jolt passed through her body.
I did the same thing again.
She jolted slightly once more. A lethal smirk curled my lips as she turned her head to face me while narrowing her eyes. I rolled my hips again, making her suck in a sharp breath.
“Callan,” she said in a low and vicious voice.
“What?” I taunted.
Since she had ripped off part of her dress to wipe up the blood, there wasn’t enough skirt left to cover her legs, which meant that the only fabric between her pussy and my cock was her panties. And my pants, of course. But the friction was a lot closer for her than it was for me.
I rolled my hips once more, making my cock shift against her entrance yet again.
Closing her eyes, she clenched her jaw as another small tremor passed through her body. While she still had her eyes shut, I placed my hands on her hips and forced her body harder down against mine. She snapped her gaze back to me, but before she could say anything, I moved my cock against her pussy again.
The words died on her tongue, and she sucked in a shuddering breath instead.
“Tell me to stop,” I challenged while I continued the motion over and over again.
Her hands shot to my shoulders. I paused briefly as she dug her fingers into them, but when she remained silent, I started back up again. Pleasure washed over her face and her eyes fluttered closed once more. It made blood rush to my cock, and it strained against my pants.
Still keeping her hips in a firm grip, I rubbed my hard length against her entrance again.
A soft moan made it past her gritted teeth.
I continued teasing her, building up the pleasure inside her, while she kept her eyes stubbornly closed and squeezed my shoulders hard. Another dark moan escaped her. I kept grinding against her.
When I could tell that she had almost reached the edge, I stopped abruptly.
Her eyes shot open.
There was a slightly dazed expression on her face as she blinked a few times and then looked up at me. I cocked my head and arched an eyebrow at her.
“Do you want me to make you come?” I asked while a wicked smile slid home on my lips.
She opened her mouth slightly, and for a moment, it looked like she was about to say something. But she didn’t.
When no answer was forthcoming, I drew a hand up her neck and brushed it over her jaw before taking her chin in a firm grip. Leaning forward, I slanted my lips over hers in an almost kiss before pulling back slightly and locking eyes with her instead.
“Then beg me for it,” I finished.
Rage flashed in her eyes. Blowing out an angry breath, she knocked my hand aside and then crossed her arms over her chest while pointedly staring at the wall next to us instead of my face. I let out a dark laugh.
Oh, I wasn’t worried.
I knew that I would make her beg and submit to me completely in the end.
