“You wore it,” he said, and something dangerously close to hope dared to surface inside him.
She nodded. “I told you I’d wear it for you. I keep my promises. Let’s go,” she said, pointing inside Sotheby’s. She walked quickly, guiding him up the stairs, down the hall, and into one of the sales rooms that was abuzz with activity. The hum of hushed voices filled the air, and the auctioneer presided over the podium at the front of the room.
She pointed to a row in the middle and he slid in next to her. As she sat down and adjusted her skirt, he dipped his head to her neck, and whispered, “All day long, Casey. All day long.”
She turned to him. “All day long what?”
The auctioneer spoke. “Good evening, ladies and gentleman, and welcome to tonight’s sale of modern art.”
“All day long I thought of driving you wild,” Nate said, finishing the thought.
She shivered against him, pressing her shoulder closer to him. My God, touching her was such a high. She was like a cat, arching her back to be pet. Every move of her body in response to even the slightest touch drove him mad with lust. He dropped his hand on her knee, tracing lazy lines across her bare flesh as the first item went up for bids. It was a lithograph by a Belgian artist, and nothing she was keen on. She showed him her paddle, and said in a hushed tone, “Would you like to use this on me later?”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess you’ll have to see,” she said, that taunting look in her eyes. It threw him off for a second; he wasn’t sure if she’d returned to their games of seduction. Was she playing a part again, that of the tease, the temptress? He had no interest in those roles anymore. He’d need to rid her of all interest in them too. One more night of driving her wild might do the trick.
“Sold for four thousand pounds,” the man said, and his assistants promptly brought a new work to the stage. “And now we have a sculpture from Franz Dubliner.”
Casey shot him a concerned look at the word sculpture.
He leaned in. “I’m fine. Don’t even think about it,” he said. To keep proving his point, he brushed his finger along the inside of her knee, heading in the direction he craved. The woman next to Casey had her gaze locked on the item on display at the front of the room, but he honestly didn’t care if anyone noticed that his hands were all over the woman in the emerald-green dress.
Casey’s eyes fluttered closed as his finger drifted north. He continued his travels, a grin working its way across his face at her reactions. The subtle hitch in her breath. The sweet, sexy sigh she tried to hide. The press of her thigh against his as she moved her leg closer, seeking any kind of contact as art buyers surrounding them bid on a sculpture.
“I can spend all night doing this,” he whispered.
“And the opening bid is five thousand pounds,” the loud voice boomed through the room.
The woman next to Casey raised her paddle, as Nate fingered the hem of her skirt. “Do you know what I thought when I first saw the picture of you in this dress? The one you texted me when I was in D.C.”
“What did you think?” she asked as their neighbor continued to raise the stakes.
“That you looked edible in it.” He traced the outside of her dress, skimming her thigh where she was pressed to his leg. “That the dress was like a goddamn temptation. When I saw you in it, my only thought was how much I wanted to push it up to your waist and slide my tongue over all the tight places in your body.”
Her hand shot out and grasped his, her fingers digging into the bones of his hand. A bolt of lust rocketed through him from her reaction.
“What would you do if I were against the wall right now?” she whispered, and he loved that she craved more dirty words. He had a whole arsenal of them to feed to her, to send heat between her legs, to turn her damp and hot and needy for him.
“If you were up against the wall, I’d fully expect you to hike up your skirt for me. Jut out your hips. Run your fingers along the outside of your panties and give me that naughty, wild look that tells me how much you love touching yourself. Then you’d need to dip your fingers between your legs. And once you do that, you’d better let me suck all that sweetness off them.”
She drew a quick breath, clamping her lips shut. He suspected she was trying to hold in a moan. Excellent.
“You’re good and wet already, aren’t you Casey?”
She nodded, breathing hard.
“So wet I could get down on my knees, spread those legs wide open and worship your perfect body with my mouth?”
A small pant emanated from her lips—those lips that had sent him straight into oblivion earlier today. “Yes,” she murmured.
“So wet that you’d be calling my name in less than sixty seconds, right?”
“Yes.” Her chest rose and fell with each breath. “I want that so much.”
He licked a quick path along the shell of her ear. “You fucking love everything I do to you.”
“Everything, Nate” she said, her voice all hot and wanton. She turned to him, firing up every synapse in his nervous system with the look in her sapphire eyes—they were hazy with desire, and she gazed at him like a woman in heat. Lust rolled through his body, chased by pride. He loved turning her on. He loved being the one who could get her in this state. She was so patently aroused.
“And now, we have a new painting from a rising star in the European art world. Miller Valentina. I start the bidding at three thousand pounds. Do we have three thousand pounds?”
She swiveled around, snapped to attention and thrust the paddle in the air. Damn, she was even hotter with her focus on the prize.
“We have three thousand in the room,” the man at the podium intoned, pointing at Casey, as he scanned the crowd, then quickly nodded to the other side of the crowd. “3,250 in the room,” he said from his post.
Nate followed the auctioneer’s gesture. A man in a pinstriped suit near the back raised a paddle too. His shoulders tensed. Casey had a competitor. Nate tried to size up the guy from a distance. Slick gelled hair, a too-tight suit, and a goatee.
Casey raised her arm again. “That’s 3,500 in the room,” the man called out, as the price rose in increments.
She turned to Nate, speaking in a voice laced with pure determination. “I’m not letting this slip away. I want a Valentina,” she said, having shifted from lust-struck to single-minded in seconds.