Page 20 of Midnight Secrets

“Fuck off!” I snapped. “I was helping because Nigel was being a dick and trying to take advantage of her.”

I didn’t know who I was trying to kid. That woman had played a starring role in every single fantasy I’d had since her sexy ass had sauntered into my life. I’d visited the Midnight rooms a few times since she flew back to Tuscany, but apparently my dick was on strike and refusing to work unless I was fantasising about a certain woman who had stared up at me as if I was her saviour and smelt like a meadow of wildflowers on a summer day.

We climbed into Jordan’s Range Rover and made our way across London to collect our bags. Since we were flying to Tuscany on Xavier’s private jet, I could bypass a lot of the Customs’ red tape to get those jewels to Lucrezia. Seth had organised all the paperwork and was now the proud owner of a 1985 McLaren F1 LM. He knew I had an extensive private car collection and had always lusted after that particular car. It was as well I had two of them since I won the one he knew about a few years ago in a poker game.

The smug fucker refused cash and was now driving around London like a teenager who’d had sex for the first time. There came a point when you had so much cash that it didn’t have value to it anymore. Another million in his account meant little to him, but that car made him purr with happiness.

The black velvet box was in my safe, all the stones carefully placed on layers of velvet in rows. I grabbed it and put it in the compartment in the bottom of my bag. My passport and currency wallet sat on the top shelf with everything I needed in it to travel. I tucked it into the inside pocket of my jacket and lifted the clothes I’d set out earlier. One business suit, a few clean shirts, and some casual clothes for when our meetings ended. I quickly changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and a hooded jacket before jogging back downstairs.

Jordan and Xavier had similar holdalls for our journey in each of their homes. I could predict what was in each of theirs since we always travelled together and were closer than brothers.

The closer we flew to Tuscany, the more my mind wandered to the woman who lived there. I should never have looked at her, never mind touched her. Xavier should have sorted her supply problem out instead of me sitting here with a king’s ransom worth of jewels instead of a car.

Lucrezia had burrowed under my skin and created an itch that only she had the nails to scratch. There was something about her innocence that beckoned forward the beast that dwelt inside me. He wanted to bind her in silk and hang her from a frame so that only we could admire her before ravishing her until she screamed.

There was a reason that I was a business partner in The Midnight Empire, and it wasn’t just because I was good with figures. Between the three of us, we’d travelled the globe and experienced every pleasure we could find. Inside every man in a business suit was a deviant just waiting to come out and play. We had and it left an appetite for certain sexual urges that we catered for in our business.

Every day, we expanded and our clientele demanded more, needed excess. Our fantasy rooms were booked out for months in advance, and there was a constant stream of requests for new role play situations from solo clients who came to us to experience what no one else could provide for them. Kink-shaming was the latest form of bullying. If you didn’t lie on your back and stare at the ceiling, you were a pervert. Women wanted more, demanded the orgasms they lacked in the past, and were finally exploring their sexuality. We were there to aid them in that pursuit.

Jordan typed on his phone and Xavier sat sipping a glass of scotch, staring out the window. He’d been quiet lately and lost in his own thoughts. I would swear he’d met a woman, but he’d only been to the Midnight Rooms lately. He took me as a wingman last night, but I gave him five minutes and left again to go and sit and drink in the bar upstairs. I needed to get myself under control because there was no way my dick was going anywhere near Lucrezia Black. She was the official no-fly zone for men like me.

Her father would mount my balls on the mantelpiece for even wanking to her image in the shower. If he ever suspected I wanted to spread her wide and fuck her senseless, he’d leave my cold body in a shallow grave.

My dick argued that it would be worth it.

To distract myself, I went and poured myself a drink. “Want to talk about it?” I asked Xavier.

He was my oldest and closest friend. We were toddlers that our fathers dragged along to the Council creche so we would meet other kids from their special club and bond. We didn’t befriend the others, but the two of us became closer than siblings. Jordan joined our club a few years later at boarding school. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for Xavier and right now he looked like he needed someone to vent to.

“Nah, it’s all good, man. I met someone in the Midnight Rooms and there’s something about her that I can’t seem to walk away from.”

I sat beside him on the sofa beside the bar. “That’s not the most conventional place to meet someone.”

He stared at me and downed the remainder of his glass. “Tell me about it.”

I was the last person who could scold someone for bad sexual behaviour since I had control issues. There was an unwritten law that no relationships were to be started in the Midnight or Twilight Rooms, but sex involved emotion, and when those pesky feelings got involved then laws were broken.

I filled his glass. “You know what you’re going to do?”

Xavier lifted the glass to stare into the amber depths as if the answer was lurking there. “Nope.”

“Why not just see where the road takes you?”

He stared at me but didn’t reply because Xavier tended to live in his head and think everything through before he made a decision.

“What do you think Lucas needs us for?” Jordan asked in a loud voice from where he sat near the front of the jet. He tended to always sit close to the cockpit as his trust levels were zero and he was a fully trained pilot. I was never sure if he expected the pilot to have a heart attack or jump out the window.

“Who knows with Uncle Lucas? It could be anything from some asshole pissing him off or the gardener looking at Catarina the wrong way.”

It was true. Lucas Black was the most complicated man I knew. Xavier sat on his seat on the Council while he claimed he was too involved raising his daughters since their mother’s death years ago. In his “spare time” he ran his distilleries and the biggest criminal organisation that I knew of. Yet, he came across as nothing more than an indulgent father. Good luck to the first man who laid a finger on one of those daughters.

Technically, that could be me… I wanted to lay so much more than a finger on her.

“Is he wanting us to prune his gardener’s ambitions?” I asked with a twitch of my lips.

Jordan glanced up from his phone. “He’d want us to fertilise the flower beds with him if he went anywhere near the girls.”

I knew his reputation. Lucas Black wouldn’t think twice about killing me and making it look like an accident. Maybe I was a sadistic asshole, but something about the challenge excited me. Add in the fact that I hadn’t been able to get Lucrezia out of my head and I was stupid enough to push my luck and defy every piece of sanity I possessed for the prize.

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