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  I didn’t have to look at Lachlan to know how he was taking this. He was furious. Vibrating with it. “This is utter and complete bullshit.” He cut a swathe through the air with the slash of one hand. “What reason could my father possibly have had for retaining you?”

  “This and that.” Attwood patted his briefcase again, and Elliott shifted from foot to foot looking terribly uncomfortable. Had this legal usurper bulldozed over him or swooped in without his knowledge? Either way, it didn’t bode well.

  Tired of the dueling egos and of playing the silent arm ornament, I cleared my throat and angled my body between Lock and the lawyers. “So, this is an interesting development, but surely discussion can wait until later?” I inclined my head toward a harried minister and Mandy/Candy/Something-y. “We should get on with the burial.”

  Attwood seemed surprised I was capable of speech, much less words with more than one syllable. Prick. But that surprise wasn’t to our advantage. He glanced from Lachlan to me and then back again, the expression on his florid face ugly with speculation. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Mr. Christie’s instructions were very specific. He wanted the first of his wishes to be carried out prior to his interment.”

  “Sod his wishes.” Lachlan scowled, turning to go and guiding me with him—whether I wanted to go or not. “I’ve no time for this shitshow.”

  “I’m sorry—” Elliott began, only to be silenced by a baleful glare. Lip service. Futile lip service at that. It was clear the family attorney was just Kyle Attwood’s introduction to us, not a player any longer. And Attwood was enjoying every second of it.

  “You’ll want to hear this,” he assured, reaching into his case. “Your father had certain conditions built into his new will in regard to distribution of assets and the division of his estate. Conditions for you in particular, Mr. Christie.”

  The snide, hardly respectful “Mr. Christie” was lip service, too. And Lock bristled. The hand not anchored to my waist curled into a fist. “You can shove your fucking conditions up your arse, shit them back out and choke on them.”

  “Lachlan...” I tried to soothe him, knowing it was fruitless. Dread had gone from pooling in my stomach to hardening like a stone. I didn’t want to know what Kyle Attwood Esquire was pulling out of his bag of tricks. I didn’t want to see it. I swallowed, blinked, braced myself for a sheaf of damning documents or dirty, Photoshopped pictures.

  In the end it was a single sheet of paper that emerged from the expensive black leather briefcase. Thick, off-white, better than printer quality. He handed it over like it was a check for a billion dollars. I knew it couldn’t be anything so generous. Especially when Lock’s face drained of all color and he crumpled the stiff page into a ball.

  “Fuck you,” he growled. Not the kind of growl tailored to turn me on, but the kind that made him a fearsome hothead both on and offscreen. “Fuck you and fuck him.” His father, he meant. Ranulf, reaching out from beyond the grave before we could even put him in it.

  “What is it?” I asked, softly. “What does it say?”

  Lachlan shook his head, his jaw tight and a muscle in his cheek leaping. He didn’t look at me, focused only on Attwood. “You cannot possibly think any of this will hold up in a court of law.”

  “I was afraid you might say that.” The lawyer tilted his head and chuckled. The sound made my skin crawl. Everything about him made my skin crawl. “Let’s just say that Ranulf made certain provisions for if you proved unwilling to abide by his terms.”

  What terms? What provisions? I wanted to ask, I wanted to demand, channeling the whip-crack dominant tone I’d tried out yesterday. “Naya, go to the car.” Lachlan used it instead, still without glancing my way. Only now I felt all of his attention, as well as his anger, worry and fear.

  I hesitated. Whip-crack or no, I wasn’t his submissive. Not yet, anyway. And I chafed against this command in particular because I didn’t want to leave him alone with Elliott Northridge and a weasel in human skin.

  “We’re leaving,” he clarified, for both my and the lawyers’ edification. “You can burn the coffin and piss on the flames for all I care. I’m done with the lot of you.”

  Oh, God. Whatever was on that piece of paper was worse than I could imagine. Blackmail, for sure. But what kind? About us? About the restaurant? My feet moved on autopilot while my heart skidded to a halt. This was bad. This was more than bad. Lock’s arm around my hips tightened like a vise grip, as though it was my turn to hold him up and keep him from stumbling. And I was glad to take on the weight of him, to carry part of this unknown burden.

  We couldn’t escape Attwood, though. His voice drifted over our shoulders, reedy and full of mockery. “The will is legal, binding and witnessed. You can’t run from it.”

  As Lachlan swept me into the back of the limousine once more, I knew one thing for certain: We were about to try.

  * * *

  Mind-numbing rage descended over him like a fishing net, snaring him for the duration of the ride back to the brownstone and even for the trip to the airport. He could barely speak, barely acknowledge that Naya sat at his side, her lovely face flushed with worry. Not when everything in him was saying go and run. As if he could erase the scene at the cemetery, forget the blow that red-faced son-of-a-bitch had delivered.

  Approximately forty minutes into the flight, Lachlan unclenched enough to realize that he’d overreacted a bit...but it was too late to turn back and pretend that all was well. No worries. Just a little blackmail. Nothing that can’t be easily remedied. He could hardly say all that, now could he? But he needed to say something, to explain the bizarre scene at the graveyard and his reaction afterward.

  He was known for his hot temper on television, but in private Lock prided himself on his control. Not even a full day with Naya back in his life and he’d lost his bloody head. Fuck. And, no doubt, that was what Ranulf and his new crony had hoped for. To catch him vulnerable and unaware. To set him back with that stupid piece of paper he’d crumpled like an empty crisps packet. He didn’t want to know the terms. He didn’t want to hear the details of the will. It would all be a game. His father’s last game—likely a long one.

  How could you be so naive? Lachlan thumped his head against the cushion of the captain’s chair he’d taken across from Naya’s refuge on the sofa. Naive. Reckless. Idiotic. Of course the blackmail would continue. Of course Ran would’ve made preparations for after his celebrated demise, seen to contingencies. No doubt Naya’s mother had received a letter as well. God forbid any of them finally escape the old man’s reach. They’d given it the ol’ try, though. Divorce. Distance. Wealth. Fame. None of it mattered.

  In an instant, he was back to being the ten-year-old who’d seen his best mate’s father fired and sent away because Ran thought Ephraim was “a weak-livered ponce” and his young son a bad influence. He was again the teenager who’d flourished in boarding school and lied about it on his holidays so Ranulf wouldn’t suspect he actually cared about something. He was the budding star chef who’d let them take Naya the first time. And now they wanted to steal her from him again. Fuck.

  He dug his hands into his hair, tunneling through the already hopeless mop. Lock knew he ought to speak up, reassure Naya, explain. But the words were caught in his throat. And giving voice to them made them real. How could he tell her that his father had made their bond ugly and dirty? How could he describe to her the circumstances that had forced her to school abroad? How could he tell her what her mother—her best friend, really—had truly suffered at the hands of Ranulf Christie?

  He’d never truly understood his father’s obsessive pathology until Ranulf spied Jyoti Kopekar across a ballroom, on the arm of some Italian soccer player at a charity gala. Four years before he would manipulate her into marriage. More than a decade after he’d seen her for the very first time. “I’ll have her,” he’d told Lock. As if Jyoti was a thing to be won. “This time, I’ll have her.”

  The declaration hadn’t made sense to him,
fifteen and just crystallizing his goals to attend culinary school. This time. How could his old-fashioned steel-tycoon father have encountered a Michelin-starred celebrity chef who helmed a successful fusion curry house in London? Jyoti was vivacious. Confident. Independent. Everything Ran despised in a woman. How on earth had he set his sights on her?

  Ranulf told him. The man had never pulled any punches, so why start then? He’d ordered Lachlan a scotch from the open bar, continued to watch the beautiful woman across the room, and commentated as though they were watching a sporting match. Jyoti had been a girl of nineteen, training under “that fucking brilliant frog” Francois Moreau at Le Chateau, one of Ran’s favorite haunts. He and several business associates went there twice a week, dropping thousands of dollars for the best plates and the best service. “And the bitch thought she was above me,” Ran had recalled. “High-handed. Proud. Thought she could snap her fingers and make us all fall in line.”

  Knowing Jyoti as he did now—as well as his own proclivities—Lachlan related very deeply to that approach. But his father hadn’t been able to bear the snub. Especially when she took up with one of his business rivals, an up-and-coming tech whiz from Chennai. The dalliance had lasted just long enough to form a life-long grudge...and to gestate Naya. Naya, who’d never known her father, never seen her mother as anything but powerful.

  No. He couldn’t speak of all those things. He just wanted to look at her like this a little longer. To drink in her lovely face. His instincts had told him to run, to hide. And for just a short time, he wanted to hide in Naya’s warmth. Surely he was allowed that small mercy before his life went to shit once more.

  Chapter Eight

  Less than forty-eight hours after I’d left Europe, I was headed to South Asia. I could hardly believe it. I hadn’t even had the time to recover from jetlag, and here I was on a private jet headed toward Mumbai—with one very pissed off millionaire chef sprawled out on the black leather couch beside me. It all made a sense of sorts if you considered that the chef in question was my former stepbrother, and the whirlwind trip was less an impulsive vacation and more an attempt to put as much distance as possible between us and his father’s funeral. What didn’t make sense at all was why.

  Lachlan hadn’t spoken one word in the car as we sped away from Green-Wood Cemetery except to notify his pilot to file a flight plan and have the plane fueled and ready. We’d stopped at the brownstone just long enough for me to put together a bag from the contents of the luggage I hadn’t even unpacked yet—and to put on some underwear, since he’d shredded the pair I’d donned that morning. “Pack light,” was all he’d said. “We can buy anything else you may need.” Afterward, he’d stared out the tinted windows of the limousine and brooded.

  Most people thought Lock showed too much emotion. There were countless YouTube montages and soundbytes of him yelling at unruly kitchen staff or game-show contestants. But I had a front-row seat for his ability to hold it in...and his ability to push me away. I’d tried to draw him out during the drive to the airport, but after three or four unsuccessful attempts I’d been reduced to playing app games on my phone.

  Now, he was still disinclined to tell me what had him so worried. What had been on the paper the lawyer handed to him? What were the terms of his father’s will? The questions were still at the forefront of my mind, but he showed no sign of wanting to address them. He’d loosened his tie and unbuttoned his cuffs; his jacket was tossed over a captain’s chair across the aisle. Even distant, angry and nursing a tumbler of scotch he was the most spectacular man I knew.

  “Where are you?” I wondered, undoing my lap belt and scooting closer to him. “Come back to me, Lock. Don’t shut me out.”

  He looked up, blue eyes so pale and haunted that I flinched. “Never,” he said, fiercely. “I am always open to you.”

  Maybe he and I had different definitions of that word. “Really? Because judging by the last few hours, I could write more dialogue for a mime.”

  I surprised a laugh out of him. A short, sharp, sound but a laugh nonetheless. Good. Maybe I didn’t tell people their risotto looked like dead maggots in the sun, but I’d penned a decent one-liner or two in my time. Lachlan was the one who’d fostered my sarcastic sense of humor. Like he’d fostered my curiosity, my creativity...and my kinks.

  “Will you always do what I ask, Naya?”

  “Mostly. I wouldn’t eat spiders for you. Or, like, haggis.”

  “Don’t worry, love. I would never demand you eat spiders. We’ll come back round to haggis.”

  Back then he never would’ve used the term “kink,” too determined to keep me innocent, to keep us innocent. What was the hold-up now? “We’re alone,” I pointed out as I toed off my shoes and tucked my feet up beneath me. “Weren’t you going to make me scream? You have promises to keep.”

  “And miles to go before I sleep,” he quoted automatically, before wearily dragging a hand through his already thoroughly mussed hair. “Darling, I am so sorry. When I asked you for patience, this is not what I had in mind.”

  “What did you have in mind?” I was happy to steer him to a pleasing topic, one he might actually feel like expanding on.

  He took another swallow of his Lagavulin as he mulled the question. He’d offered me a drink when the pilot said it was safe to move about the cabin, but I’d turned him down, wanting one of us to be clearheaded after the debacle in Brooklyn. “You,” he said, just when I figured he wouldn’t respond. “You’re always at the center of it.” His voice was rough, his gaze rougher. “You. Naked for me. At my feet. Waiting.”

  Oh. My skin tingled. My soul tingled. Just the words made me damp. It was easy enough to get out of my dress: one tug of the hidden side-zip and a shimmy. My bra and panties were off in a blink. I sat bare as the day I’d been born...and didn’t move. “Two out of three ain’t bad,” I purred, stretching my arms out across the top of the sofa and thrusting out my breasts. They were irresistible tits, I’d been told. Heavy and round, topped with chocolate kisses. “Come and get me, Sir.”

  I watched his throat work in a tight swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He tried to look disapproving, tried to look harsh and controlling, but he couldn’t tear his gaze from my body. Not even as he grumbled, “Why do you call me ‘Sir’ if you don’t respect my authority?”

  “Because it gets you hard.” And he was. The crotch of his suit pants boasted a sizable bulge. For me. It was all for me.

  He sat up straight, his eyes going dark with challenge. “Why do you want to submit to me?” he asked, in that soft, dangerous way that sent shivers down my spine. “Why do you think this has always been an element of what’s between us?”

  “Because it turns me on.” I knew that wasn’t the right answer from the Good Little Submissive’s Handbook, so I elaborated. “Because giving you what you want turns me on, too.”

  “No.” The whip-crack had returned. Sexy and decisive. He shook his head. “Wrong on both counts.” His tone left no room for imagination in terms of what happened when I was wrong.

  And I was ready for it. So ready.

  I knew it was treading a line to keep sassing him. But this was who I was: the Naya from ten years ago and the Naya of now. “Is that so? Then tell me, oh wise Master, why do I want this?”

  He shrugged. “Because you trust me.”

  And then he closed the distance between us.

  * * *

  She was glorious. There was no other word for her. Baked golden to perfection, soft in all the right places, and topped crown and cunt with the darkest, silkiest, ganache. He wanted to sink his teeth into her. No, he wanted to swallow her whole.

  Lachlan couldn’t remember why he’d waited, why he’d wasted the past few hours in his own head when he could’ve been lost in her body. He came over her, trapping her between his arms as he braced against the curved wall of the jet. “Do you trust me?” he demanded.

  His earlier silence had upset her. She wanted to know what happened in Brooklyn,
what that little shite Kyle Attwood held over him. He couldn’t tell her now. He didn’t want any of it said. It was selfish, but also self-preserving. Because acknowledging that piece of paper meant acknowledging its outcome—and cutting out his own heart. Why do that when his heart could beat for Naya right now?

  “Yes,” she answered him without hesitating, “of course I trust you.”

  “Then get on your fucking knees.” He loved the catch of her gasp. How her eyes dilated and her legs parted. She was wet already, of that he had no doubt, and though he wanted another taste of her, he wanted her acquiescence more. Her acquiescence, her belief that he could and would give her what she needed.

  “...but I want you to be my first kiss, Lock.”

  “Being your first isn’t as important as being your last.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Only because you’re still a kid.”

  “Just wait till I’m older.”

  “I will still know best.”

  For a moment their gazes warred, like she was a queen and he a harem stud stripped for her inspection...and then she smiled and slid to the carpeted floor. She bent her head, folded her hands at the base of her spine. A perfect pose. The picture of subservience. Except for the beautifully cheeky smile lifting the corners of her lush mouth. “Will you want this every time we play? Or just when we fuck?”

  Someone had taught her well. Lachlan didn’t know whether to thank that someone or wring their neck. Because it was clear that Naya was not just a sub, she was more likely a switch. Happy to play both sides...to give up control but also to wield it. She was going to be the death of him, and he would savor that last breath.

  “I’ll want it when I ask for it, darling.” He wrapped one hand in the loose coils of her hair and tugged. “And because you’ll do it.”

  Kink was about give and take. He’d tried to lay the groundwork years ago, but now they were thousands of miles high. Flying in more ways than one. The lessons of yore were meaningless when she was nude and teasing. When he was dancing on the edge.