“See? That wasn’t so hard.” Kingsley raised his eyebrows and tapped her under the chin.

Phoebe crossed her arms over her chest and glared.

“I don’t know who you pissed on, but they’re talking to everyone you know. Someone’s going to break.”

“Someone did,” he said with a cold smile. “Now are you going to be a good girl and stop causing me trouble?”

“I didn’t appreciate talking to your secretary.”

“You have my sincerest apologies. It will not happen again.”

“Good. Thank you.” She walked toward him and put her hands on his chest. “So...if I forgive you and you forgive me, maybe we can go make up in my bedroom?”

He gently grasped her wrists and kissed the back of each hand.

“I would rather go to prison labeled as a sex offender than spend one more second in your company.”

Phoebe slapped him.

Kingsley laughed. “If I knew you had this side to you...” he said. “No, I still wouldn’t want to fuck you ever again.”

He turned and strolled from her house and walked back to his. He needed Sam and he needed her now. Phoebe might be crowing that she’d scored some sort of victory against him, but Kingsley saw it differently.

If Fuller had put someone on Kingsley’s trail, knew who his friends were, knew who his contacts were, knew who he was fucking...that meant they were on to something. Kingsley scared Fuller and Fuller was fighting back. He and Sam needed to get to work right now digging as deep as they could. One of them—either him or Sam—was getting closer to the truth. No backing down now. It was the two of them up against Fuller and his massive army of Christian fundamentalists. He liked those odds.

Hopefully Sam had spent the night at his house. She’d promised that she alone would be his valet, putting his boots on for him. On the off chance she was up and about, he went in search of her.

On the second floor he heard her voice, and he followed it to a bedroom. The door stood ajar, and he glanced inside.

And there he saw Sam giving someone a kiss. She was dressed. The person she kissed was dressed. But the sheets were wild, which told him her night had been wild. And it should have been nothing seeing them kiss. He shouldn’t have cared. He shouldn’t have seen it, but it shouldn’t have mattered. But it did matter. And he did look, and he couldn’t look away. Although it hurt to look. God, it hurt to look.

Because Sam was kissing a man. And that man wasn’t him.

25

July

THE SUN HAD set an hour earlier, but the city still smoldered in the summer heat. Reluctantly Kingsley abandoned Felicia’s Bedford cottage. The two-bedroom house was hidden behind a veil of trees and offered the sort of privacy only money could buy. For the past month, it had become Kingsley’s second home as he and Felicia owned each other’s bodies night and day. But as good as the kink and the sex had been, Kingsley knew the main reason he stayed with her was his desire to avoid seeing Sam. But Felicia had to leave him to see a client in London, Blaise had gone to Washington and Kingsley knew he couldn’t hide forever.

Back at his town house he found Sam in his office, sitting behind his desk with a stack of invoices. She looked up from her work and smiled at him.

“Look at what the pussy dragged in,” she said. “Have a good night? And day? And night? And week? And month?”

“I need you to reschedule my appointment with Anita,” he said.

Sam glared at him. “Again? This is the second time you’ve rescheduled. I’ve never known anybody to cancel a massage. I mean...it’s a massage.”

“Reschedule it,” he said. He owed her no explanations, none at all. “I’m going to bed. You should go home, too.”

“Soon as this is finished.”

“You won’t see me much tomorrow,” he said on his way out of the office.

“Getting used to that,” she said half under her breath, half audibly.

Kingsley turned around in the doorway.

“You have something to say to me?” he asked, trying to keep his voice even.

Sam sat back in his desk chair. “I said I was getting used to not seeing you. You’ve been a ghost for the past month, which would be fine if you were busy and happy. But you don’t seem happy, and something tells me you’re avoiding me. It’s a little hard to be an assistant when you have no one to assist.”

“I don’t need assisting right now.”

“Don’t need assisting? You have this grand plan to open an S and M kingdom before the end of the year, and we don’t own a building for it yet. We don’t have renovation plans yet. We don’t even have a fucking name for it yet. And you’re telling me you don’t need assisting?”

“What’s with the ‘we’?” he asked. “It’s my club, not our club. There is no ‘we’ here.”

“Your club is never going to exist if you don’t start doing some work on it.”

“I’ll do what I want when I want to do it. And I don’t have to explain myself. To you or anyone.”

He walked away from her toward his bedroom. He should have fired her. Why hadn’t he fired her? He had every reason to fire her. No, he had no reason to fire her, which is why he hadn’t. She’d told him a comforting fiction when she’d said if she would be with any man it would be him. How many times had he whispered those sorts of seductive nothings into a woman’s ear before? You’re the best lover I’ve had...the most beautiful woman I’ve been with...if I could stay with you I would stay with you... He had no reason to be this angry still even after a month. And yet he was.