“It sounded...it sounded...” Helpless with laughter, she gasped for breath. “It sounded like you want to hang an ornament on me.”
“Yeah, well, that, too.” His grin widening, he leaned down and dropped a kiss on her left breast. “Here. And here...”
He grazed her right breast, eased down to her belly.
“And here, and...”
“Dev!”
Pleasure rippled in waves across the flat plane of her stomach. She wouldn’t have believed she could become so aroused so fast. Particularly after that shattering orgasm. Dev, on the other hand, was lazy and loose and still flaccid.
“Don’t you need to, uh, take a little time to recharge?”
“I do.” His voice was muffled, his breath hot against her skin. “Doesn’t mean you have to. Unless you want to?”
He raised his head and must have seen the answer in her face. Waggling his brows, he lowered his head again. Sarah gasped again when his tongue found her now supersensitized center.
The climax hit this time without warning. She’d just reached up to grip the headboard and bent a knee to avoid a cramp when everything seemed to shrink to a single, white-hot nova. The next second, the star exploded. Pleasure pulsed through her body. Groaning, she let it flow before it slowly, exquisitely ebbed.
* * *
When she opened her eyes again, Dev looked smug and pretty damn pleased with himself. With good reason, she thought, drifting on the last eddies. She sincerely hoped he still needed some time to recharge. She certainly did!
To her relief, he stretched out beside her and seemed content to just laze. She nestled her head on his arm and let her thoughts drift back to his mangled French. He said he’d been trying to tell her that he adored her. What did that mean, exactly?
She was trying to find a way to reintroduce the subject when the phone buzzed. His this time, not hers. With a muffled grunt, Dev reached across her and checked his phone’s display.
“Sorry,” he said with a grimace. “I told them not to call unless they were about to slam up against our own version of a fiscal cliff. I’d better take this.”
“Go ahead. I’ll hit the bathroom.”
She scooped up the handiest article of clothing, which happened to be Dev’s shirt, and padded into the bathroom. The tiles felt cool and smooth against her bare feet. The apparition that appeared in the gilt-edged mirrors made her gasp.
“Good grief!”
Her hair could have provided a home for an entire flock of sparrows. Whatever makeup she’d started out with this morning had long since disappeared. She was also sporting one whisker burn on her chin and another on her neck. Shuddering at the thought of what Elise Girault would say if she saw the telltale marks, Sarah ran the taps and splashed cold water on her face and throat.
That done, she eyed the bidet. So practical for Europeans, so awkward for most Americans. Practical won hands down in this instance. Clean and refreshed, Sarah reentered the bedroom just as Dev was zipping up his pants.
“Uh-oh. Looks like your negotiators ran into that cliff.”
“Ran into it, hell. According to my chief of production, they soared right over the damned thing and are now in a free fall.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
Detouring to her closet, she exchanged Dev’s shirt for the thigh-length, peony-decorated silk robe Gina had given her for her birthday last year.
“It’s all part of the game,” he said as she handed him back his shirt. “Girault’s just a little better at it than I gave him credit for.”
The comment tripped a reminder of Elise’s disclosures at lunch. Sarah debated for a moment over whether she should share them with Dev, then decided he needed to know the kind of man he would be doing business with.
“Elise said something today about her husband that surprised me.”
Dev looked up from buttoning his shirt. “What was that?”
“Supposedly, Jean-Jacques sent some goons to rough up one of her former lovers. The guy had threatened to sell pictures of her to the tabloids.”
“Interesting. I would have thought Girault man enough to do the job himself. I certainly would have.” He scooped up his tie and jacket and gave her a quick kiss. “I’ll call as soon as I have a fix on when we’ll break for dinner.”
Sarah nodded, but his careless remark about going after Elise’s lover for trying to sell pictures of her had struck home. The comment underscored his contempt for certain members of her profession. How much would it take, she wondered uneasily, for him to lump her in with the sleaziest among them?
Still troubled by Dev’s parting comment, Sarah knotted the sash to her robe and stepped out onto her little balcony. She’d lost herself in the view before, but this time the seemingly endless vista of chimneys and gray slate roofs didn’t hold as much interest as her bird’s-eye view of the street four stories below.
The limo Dev had called for idled a few yards from the hotel’s entrance. When he strode out of the hotel, the sight of him once again outfitted in his business attire gave Sarah’s heart a crazy bump. She couldn’t help contrasting that with the image of his sleek, naked body still vivid in her mind.
The uniformed driver jumped out to open the rear passenger door. Dev smiled and said a few words to him, inaudible from Sarah’s height, and ducked to enter the car. At the last moment he paused and glanced up. When he spotted her, the friendly smile he’d given the driver warmed into something so private and so sensual that she responded without thinking.
Touching her fingers lightly to her lips, she blew him a kiss—and was immediately embarrassed by the gesture. It was so schmaltzy, and so out of character for her. More like something Gina might do. Yet she remained on the balcony like some lovelorn Juliet long after Dev had driven off.
Even worse, she couldn’t summon the least desire to get dressed and meander through the streets. Peering into shop windows or people watching at a café didn’t hold as much allure as it had before. She would rather wait until Dev finished with his meeting and they could meander together.
She’d take a long, bubbly bath instead, she decided. But first she had catch up on her email. And call Grandmama. And try Gina again. Maybe this time her sister would answer the damned phone.
* * *
Gina didn’t, but Sarah caught the duchess before she went out for her morning constitutional. She tried to temper her habitual concern with a teasing note.
“You won’t overdo it, will you?”
“My darling Sarah,” Charlotte huffed. “If I could walk almost forty miles through a war-torn country with an infant in my arms, I can certainly stroll a few city blocks.”
Wisely, Sarah refrained from pointing out that the duchess had made the first walk more than fifty years ago.
“Have you heard from Gina?” she asked instead.
“No, have you?”
“Not since she texted me that she was flitting off to Switzerland.”
She’d tried to keep her the response casual, but the duchess knew her too well.
“Listen to me, Sarah Elizabeth Marie-Adele. Your sister may act rashly on occasion, but she’s a St. Sebastian. Whatever you think she may be up to, she won’t bring shame on her family or her name.”
The urge to tell her grandmother