was still clearly coming from a complicated place. “Then it sounds like you have a busy day ahead. I’d like it if you came back, but I’ll understand if you don’t.”
“And you’ll be okay?”
She hooked her very long, very supple legs around me and drew me towards her. “I’ll miss having you near me.” Her hand slid under the shirt I was suddenly painfully aware I’d slept in. “I’ll miss touching you.” She kissed me again—this was getting more like the Tara I was used to. “I’ll miss your taste in my mouth and your scent on my skin. But I don’t want your loyalty, Kate Kane. Just your trust.”
I was suddenly much, much less convinced by that it would be inappropriate to beg her to fuck you idea. “I trust you,” I told her. And I did. Which was weird because I trusted basically nobody. I hadn’t even entirely trusted Julian, although I’d hoped she’d have my back anyway. Boy had I been wrong on that one. But for all Tara Vane-Tempest had her flaws, for all she was a domineering, controlling, arrogant ball of primal instinct wrapped in a couture frock, she’d never lied to me. She’d never let me down.
“Good.” She sat up sharply and swept back her hair. While I appreciated the view of her body the gesture gave me, I’d been enjoying the bit where she was lying down with her hands on me. “Then when you next visit, we can build on that.”
Yeah, she was back on form. “Oh come on you can’t be all my mouth my skin one minute and then all kay thanks bye the next.”
“Sorry, remind me which one of us is running around the city fucking anything in a skirt?”
I literally facepalmed. “I banged one estate agent.”
“As I understand it you’d only met one estate agent.” She was already dressing and ringing for breakfast. “I’m not sure you get credit for only having sex with one other woman in the twenty-four hours you were out from under my roof.”
Okay, she had a point. And now I was looking more closely I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t been right the first time. She was making a good show of it but I doubted that either of us wanted to be getting that level of physical while Tabitha’s flayed corpse was still in the garden. “You’ll call if you need me?” It was half a question, half a promise that I wouldn’t flake. “For business stuff, not sex stuff. Well—you could also call me for sex stuff—but I am actually on your side on this one.”
Tara had changed into a sparkling white gown that made her look like royalty is supposed to look, instead of how it looks in real life, which is some variant of bald, scruffy, gawky, drunk on gin, or surprisingly similar to Emperor Palpatine. “You’d better be, since everybody on the other side seems to want to torture you to death.” She sat on the bed beside me and took my hand. “But thank you. I’m choosing to believe you’d be with me even if it wasn’t in your naked self-interest.”
The serving person arrived with the tray. I still wasn’t completely sure that steak so rare it should have been on the IUCN Red List was quite the breakfast-of-champions Tara seemed to think it was, but I was definitely appreciating the bacon, the eggs, and the pastry. I was also appreciating her, and not just in a wanted-her-to-tear-my-clothes-off-and-eat-raw-meat-off-my-naked-body way. But in a she-was-a-nice-person-to-have-breakfast-with way.
“I would never have the guts to eat meat that bloody in a dress that white.”
Tara licked a variety of juices from her lips and fingers in a gesture that was too indefinably classy to be pornographic but too unabashedly sensual to be entirely safe-for-work. “I’ve had practice.”
“And also you don’t have to do your own laundry.”
“Also that, although Mrs Duckworth can be quite scornful if she feels you’ve soiled your garments unduly.”
I could see that. It couldn’t be much fun to spend your professional life scrubbing blood and female ejaculate out of a series of expensive gowns. “You know I’m very tempted to wipe my hands on you.”
She smiled. “Such an act would warrant severe punishment.”
“And you think that makes it less tempting?”
“Do you remember we have an actual dungeon.”
I leaned back. “You know, I think the difference between an actual dungeon and a sex dungeon is mostly attitude.”