And yet.
He’s not wrong. And the heat along my backside is sweetly mirrored between my legs now.
It’s something about this particular pain... just burny enough to keep me on edge, but subtle enough that I can keep dancing, that I can savor the feel of Lorne’s powerful arms guiding me through the steps.
But I’ve never been one to turn down a dare. I lift my chin and look right into his eyes. “Do it and find out,” I dare back.
I think I’ve called his bluff. I expect him to scoff, to back down, to smile again in secret amusement but do nothing else.
But then he does it. Right there on the ballroom floor, right there under the wisteria and roses, he pushes his hand into my skirt and finds the heart of me. Even through the silk panties, I’m embarrassingly wet.
He makes an impatient noise and moves the silk to the side, his fingers searching out my clit, my entrance. And I know what he’s doing. I know because I’ve done it a thousand times with my own submissives. He’s checking to see if my clit is swollen, he’s discerning for himself how wet I am at the source. All while we keep dancing. All while he keeps me held fast in his arms.
Panic hits me, fast and cold. “Lorne, you can’t, there are too many people—”
“Are any of them looking?” he asks, his eyes on mine while his fingers keep probing me. “Are any of them staring at the pretty fairy with the hand between her legs?”
Swallowing, I swivel my head and check around us. The party is in full swing—the night is rich with lust and booze—and everyone is too caught up in their own ecstasies and dramas to notice the vice president has her ex-husband’s hand up her skirt. And we’re masked anyway…
But—
“I’m supposed to meet someone later,” I blurt. “A date. Mark Tintagel set me up with a date.”
This seems to bother Lorne not at all. “And you don’t want to meet this date with a wet cunt, is that it?”
“I—”
“I don’t mind making you wet for another man,” Lorne says, bending low to whisper in my ear. His fingertips glide back over my clit and begin working it. Small circles. Slow pressure. “As long as you let me. And you are letting me, aren’t you? You’re letting your ex-husband play with you in the middle of a ballroom because you need it so bad?”
His voice is…it’s different. Not sharp, because Lorne Lothian doesn’t cut, he doesn’t slice—not even in the courtroom, not even on the other side of a conference room table about to sign the papers for his own divorce.
No, Lorne is like the aged whiskey echoed in the color of his eyes. He pours himself inside you; he burns on the way down. He intoxicates you and thrills you and coaxes himself inside your veins, and before you know it, you’re drunk. You’re drunk with his convictions, his passions, his utter presence, and you’re stumbling with it all, you’re falling down. You’re trying to close your eyes to make the spinning stop and it won’t, it won’t, it won’t.
It’s enough to make a woman beg for sharpness instead. Because a blade will dull over time—but whiskey? Whiskey only gets stronger with age.
And neither of us are young anymore.
“Lorne,” I say. “Stop.”
He stops, although the minute he’s no longer stroking me, I wish he was. Especially when he brings his fingers to his mouth for a taste.
I feel like I can’t breathe. “You’re shameless,” I whisper.
“Better than being ashamed, Morgan le Fay.”
“Don’t call me that name,” I say.
I miss you calling me that name; I miss it every day.
“And I’m not ashamed.”
We’re still stepping and spinning, but at some point, Lorne maneuvered us to the periphery of the dancing. “I think you are,” he says. “I think you’re so ashamed that you can’t even speak your desires out loud. I think you’re so ashamed that you’d rather divorce a man than admit you want him.”
I stop dancing, glaring up at him. His hand is still on my ass. “Is that what this is about? The divorce?”
A smile under his mask. “Not the divorce, no.”
“Sure feels like it,” I mumble.
“Can’t a man dance with his ex-wife? Can’t he play under her skirt a little?” To emphasize his point, he pulls me close—close enough that my thighs have to part around his. And the pressure of that muscular, tuxedo-clad thigh against my pussy nearly undoes me. I slump against him and pant like an animal in heat.
This was why I divorced him. He makes me drunk, and he makes me senseless. He slides into my soul and whispers my secret desires back to me. He wants my control—my surrender—and I can’t give it to him. I can’t give it to anyone.
Except you want to, don’t you?
That’s what you couldn’t admit in the car.
After all these years, you want something different, and you’re afraid.
“Come here, sweet witch,” he says, releasing me from his arms, but taking my hand in his and guiding us to one of the mossy alcoves in the ballroom. Living branches arc above us, hung with lights and flowers, and a gauzy fabric hangs like curtains around us. We aren’t invisible, but we are mostly hidden, and it’s hard not to feel that we are in some kind of fairy glen, alone in a forest.
But I can’t be alone with Lorne, I think as he turns and faces me. I can’t, I can’t, because I will drink him all down, I will tumble right into those scotch-colored eyes and drown.
“I can’t do this,” I say, my voice shaking. “Like I said—I’m meeting someone, and I can’t—”
I can’t get lost in you again. It terrifies me.
“Why are you meeting someone here, at a party in Bishop’s Landing?” Lorne asks, folding his arms and leaning against the ballroom wall behind him. “Why, Morgan, when I know you could ensorcel any Lyonesse submissive you wanted into bending the rules for you?”
I don’t want a submissive.
“I don’t fuck club subs,” I say instead.
Lorne levels a look at me like he sees right through my deflections, which he probably does. He always has. “So instead of literally any other option, you asked a former assassin to set you up on a date.”
“Mark is the most discreet person any of us know, and anyway, it’s not like there’s a hookup app for vice presidents.”
Lorne’s posture doesn’t change. His voice stays the same. And yet there’s something different when he speaks. “You could have called me.”
I try to mirror his posture and lean against the wall too, except the damn wings—and fuck—my dress. With a hiss of pain as the burning and prickling renews itself on my backside, I straighten up again. “I didn’t call you for a very obvious reason.”
“That we’re divorced?” He gives me an expression like I’m being very boring and prudish right now.
“No, Lorne,” I huff. “Because I’m not a submissive.”
“I never said you were.”
“But you wanted me to be.”
His eyes darken then. “I only wanted you to be yourself.”
“But that’s the problem with you. When I was with you, I felt like I was being myself. I felt like I wanted it, but I couldn’t have. I can’t want that. I don’t want that.”