“Ex-wife,” he repeats, and for some reason, it sounds just as intimate as when he said the word wife. Maybe it’s his voice, which has always been husky and deep, or maybe it’s the way he’s looking down at me, his eyes searing hot trails down my dress and then back up again. “You look lovely tonight.”
“You look handsome.”
It’s true. Even with a white mask over the top half of his face, he is the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. He’s always been the handsomest man I’ve ever seen.
I try to regain my footing. “Lorne. What are you doing here tonight?”
“What, a simple lawyer can’t come to the Constantine masquerade?”
“You’re not a simple lawyer,” I reply. “You work for an environmental nonprofit that’s probably sued half the people here tonight.”
He lifts a shoulder in a rakish shrug, still smiling. “I’ve never minded mixing business with pleasure.”
“I seem to remember a lot less pleasure when we were married.”
I’m too busy arguing about this to argue about him leading me onto the dance floor, which is how we end up facing each other in the rustling whirl of dancers.
“And whose fault was that?” he murmurs, pulling me into his arms. His hand settles on the small of my back—intensifying the prickling there—and I’m so close to his chest that the fabric of his tuxedo lapels glides against my bodice. Under the tulle, my nipples harden. “Hmm?”
I want to say it was his fault, but of course, I can’t. I was the political one, the ambitious one, the work all day and work all night one. I was the one too haunted by my past to relax enough to enjoy the present.
And of course, there had been one other difference between us.
One too vast to bridge. Too deep to even try.
“Morgan,” he says firmly. “Answer me. Whose fault was it?”
I glare up at him. “Mine, if that’s what you want to hear.”
He spins me gracefully around, and the prickling of my dress feels like full-on burning now. But the silky underthings are doing their job too, and I’m very aware of the silk cupping me between my legs as I dance, of the delicate garter belt around my waist. Of how my nipples push against the tulle of my dress.
“It’s not what I want to hear, little witch,” he says, his voice going a little rough, a little possessive over his pet name for me. “Because you’re wrong, you know. It was my fault too.”
I’m so surprised by this concession that I don’t know what to say.
He just gives me another small smile. “Morgan le Fay struck speechless. I never thought I’d see the day.”
And I’m speechless still. As we dance, the burning on my bottom is reaching the point where I imagine flames dancing along my skin. And then Lorne’s hand slides down from the small of my back to grip my ass hard.
Pain—sharp and fiery—singes my skin. And then right behind it, right on its heels, are contrails of wet, achy pleasure. My cunt kicks hard enough with need that I gasp and stumble, although Lorne keeps us gliding effortlessly through the steps.
His hand stays though. A handprint-shaped sizzle of pain right on my ass.
“Lorne,” I manage. “You can’t—there’s something wrong with my dress.”
“There’s something wrong with your dress? Not ‘Stop, we’re divorced’?”
I blink up at him. I try to say stop, I really do. But that stubble and that mouth and those amber eyes behind that mask…
“It hurts,” I whisper instead. “When you touch me there.”
“Does it?” he asks. “So, if I reached into the slit in your skirt, I wouldn’t find you wet?”
My mouth parts. No one talks to me that way. I talk to people that way.
And yet—
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.