Page 399 of Filthy Elites

I made a note of its position, the site of the scuff marks, and possible fingerprint all the same. There was no such thing as beingtoothorough. If I’d learned anything in my studies and experiments at putting those studies to practice, it was that you never knew when a seemingly random detail might become the key to victory.

It’d been overcast during the day, and the lingering summer heat had vanished quickly with the darkness. A cool breeze licked over me. I folded my arms over my chest, wishing I’d brought a jacket, and hustled back to the street where civilization still reigned.

I hailed a cab rather than calling an Uber so that I could pay in cash. I wouldn’t put it past Marcel Rosano—or various other members of the Hell Kickers—to be tracking my credit cards and any other accounts they could manage to hack into. Anything that connected to the internet could become a liability.

I had the cab drop me off a few blocks from the house and slunk the rest of the way through the stately streets of Carroll Gardens on foot. The thin nylon rope I’d used to rappel down the side of the house was hanging exactly where I’d left it. I watched the streets around the corner brownstone for a few minutes, and when I got an opening with no traffic in sight, I darted across the street and immediately clambered up to my bedroom window.

It was a little slower going up rather than down, but I made it to my open window without provoking any shouts of alarm. I hefted my leg over the ledge, rolled the rest of my body inside, and was just straightening up with a swipe of my hand over my hair when an unexpected voice stopped me in my tracks.

“We do have doors, you know.”

I froze in place, my gaze darting to the spot the voice had come from. The room was dark, only hazed faintly from the streetlamps down below, and the figure standing by the door was little more than a silhouette. Still, I recognized the lean frame and even voice well enough to identify him based on nothing else.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Yes. Like the one for my bedroom. Which you seem to have ignored.”

Lucan took a step forward, bringing his pensively handsome face into slightly sharper focus. His dark brown eyes bored into me. “It’s my house. Every room is my room if I happen to want to be in it. Where did you go that you wanted to keep such a secret?”

I cocked my head. “Here’s the thing about secrets: they stop being a secret if you start telling people about them.”

Lucan’s expression tensed. I was pissing him off—good. It’d pissedmeoff when he’d just stood there watching while Darius practiced his seductive skills on me this afternoon.

Way back when, I’d always felt a little more connected to the middle Rosano brother than the other two, as much as I’d thought I’d gotten along with all three of them. Lucan understood the appeal of books and absorbing knowledge, like I did. He said what he meant without posturing or sly asides, which had been a relief after all the politicking even within the Noble family back home.

At least, I’d thought he’d said what he meant. He’d clearly been hiding some things from me and lying about others, or we wouldn’t have ended up here.

The frustration—no,anger—stirred up by that thought propelled me across the room.

“If you’re not going to come clean, I can tell my father that you were sneaking around and hiding things that could be dangerous to the family,” Lucan said.

I came to a halt just a couple of feet from him, watching the way his chest rose with an abruptly drawn in breath, the way his hands closed at his sides. As if my being this close affected him. As if he were holding himself back from touching me.

I smiled sweetly up at him. “Is that what you’ve lowered yourself to, Lucan? Are you Daddy’s lapdog, running off to him to yap about how the mean lady wouldn’t answer your questions?”

“Or I could do whatever it takes to get the answers out of you myself,” he retorted.

“And what’s that?” I pressed my advantage, seeing his reactions, remembering how I’d gotten Felix off balance. Leaning forward, I slid my hand down his chest. “Maybe I’ll enjoy it.”

Lucan’s voice hardened. “Not as much as I will.”

He pushed me backward without warning, crowding me until I reached the edge of the bed. Rather than let him call the shots any farther than that, I took charge in the only direction I was sure I could compel him—grabbing him by his shirt collar and yanking him down with me on the mattress.

He caught himself on his hands, braced over me, his pale eyes flaring in the dimness. Before he could pull away, I tucked my knee between his legs and slid it against the hardness behind his fly. “Youareenjoying this quite a bit. What a depraved man you’ve become. But I’m not a kid anymore either. You can’t play me the same way you did back then.”

“Playyou?” Lucan sputtered before he clenched his jaw. Instead of jerking away, he dipped closer, his gaze fixed on my face. “This is all a game to you, of course. Except you can’t help getting off on it too. Are you as wet now as you were for Darius?”

I fluttered my eyelashes at him. “Are you brave enough to check and find out?”

I hitched my knee a little faster, provoking a tic in Lucan’s cheek. He shoved his hand down my leggings to finger my panties, and I bit my lip against a gasp.

For all the roughness of his words and the initial motion, he stroked over the admittedly damp fabric with shocking tenderness. It woke up way too many of my nerves to tingling alertness. As he increased the pressure, I felt more slickness seep out of me.

Lucan smiled, but it was a cold smile, all cruel satisfaction. He rocked his hand against me, studying my reactions with the analytical gaze that missed so little. Heat tickled across my cheeks, but I managed to keep my face impassive, my lips shut.

It shouldn’t feel this good, but it did. I wasn’t sure how much it was his fingers rubbing up and down over my pussy, his thumb pushing down on my clit with each pulse of his hand, and how much the feel of him hard against my leg, knowing I hadhimheated up too. I could bring him to the brink, and as soon as he made a move for more, I’d leave him with the worst case of blue balls in the history of the universe.

I adjusted the strokes of my leg to make sure I was working him from base to head, brushing his balls each time I lowered my knee. A flush was creeping across his face too, and maybe a faint sheen of sweat at the top of his brow. His hand flicked faster against my sensitive flesh, and I swallowed down a whimper. Pleasure was spreading all through my core along with an urgent need for more, but I couldn’t let him see how much he’d affected me.

“I’m going to make you come undone, but not the way you want,” he promised, but there was a faint waver in his voice, as if he wasn’t as sure of himself as he wanted to sound.

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