“Oh.” I squeezed his arousal in my hand, causing him to hiss loudly. “Do I have time to take care of this?”
He raised a brow and I bit the inside of my cheek, wondering if I was being too bold but he smiled reassuringly and smoothed my hair in a surprisingly tender gesture that seemed so at odds with the in-command man of minutes before.
“Unfortunately, our ten minutes are up though I’m sorely tempted to forget business and whisk you back to my hotel room right now.”
I grinned and interlocked my hands behind his neck, pushing up against his erection. “Why don’t you?”
His eyes were electric with suppressed desire.
“Another thirty minutes, tops, and we will leave.” He pulled his phone out to check the time and grimaced. “We’ve taken too long already.” Swiftly, he leaned down to readjust my underwear and smooth the skirt of my dress. “Come on.”
“But, um.” The sex toy was still inside me. “Aren’t you forgetting about, erm, something?”
One eyebrow rose coolly. “I don’t believe so.”
Oh, okay.
So, he wanted me to walk around the party with a sex toy inside of me?
I thought about arguing with him but his aloof, almost daring expression and my warm glow dissuaded me.
“Okay, we should hurry to your meeting,” I said, taking his hand to lead him out the door.
He might have chuckled but as soon as I opened the door, the sounds of the party reanimated. After a minute of indecision at an oddly shaped corridor, he took the lead from me, gently leading me to the kitchen where he thought we might find Katarina.
“I’ll be in the room next to the library if you need me,” he said as we paused to the side of the kitchen doors, out of the path of the hustling wait staff. At my blank look, his lips twitched. “Kat will know the way.”
I nodded but the idea of being without Sinclair in the twisty-turvy house was unpleasant. Unlike my siblings, I had never been particularly good with large groups of people and outside of art showings and gallery openings I rarely went to parties.
“You’ll be fine,” he assured me, reading my thoughts. “You and Kat will get along brilliantly. Think of me, when I’m gone?”
There was a devastating twinkle in his eye, as if he knew something I didn’t. I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously but he only shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. When he turned to leave, he started to whistle. I watched him move through the crowded room with the grace and power of a wild cat, his broad shoulders straight and his long legs eating up the space. Women turned to watch him but he remained oblivious and I knew almost none of them would approach him, his carefully
controlled expression, almost cruel due to his hard features, would discourage even the most ballsy women.
With a sigh, I turned away from him. Sinclair was the sexiest man I had ever met, the kind of man that only inhabits women’s darkest fantasies and Hollywood movies and yet, here he was with me. It was enough to make any girl feel like a million dollars. Of course, my recent orgasm didn’t hurt either.
Chapter Six.
Santiago’s collection of art was staggeringly comprehensive and outrageously expensive. A room three times the size of my studio apartment in Paris was dedicated to the works of renowned Mexican painters like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo but it also paid tribute to local artists and some contemporary American talents such as Julie Combal.
“I know I’m in the minority, but I find Kahlo’s drawings almost more haunting than her paintings,” I murmured as I took in her 1926 sketch Accident, which depicted the artist bound in a body cast besieged by images of the car accident that had left her with multiple broken bones and life-long pain.
“Honestly?” Katarina had a thicker accent than her brother that made all her words run together like a song. “I prefer the American style.”
I smiled at her, once again struck by her likeness to Cosima. Though Katarina was not particularly attractive, she shared the same effervescent spirit that kept me smiling and laughing.
“My brother is much more interested in the arts than I am.” She shrugged. “I find it hard to understand beauty in living things. Planets are much easier.”
We moved along to another image, this one a satirical reimagining of a Del Montte ad by contemporary Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas.
Kat gave me a sidelong look. “I think we have been friends long enough now – what has it been, ten minutes? – for me to ask you about Sinclair.”
“What about him?”
She laughed at my coyness and shrugged. “If you don’t want to discuss him, I understand. But as I understand it, you are here alone. Sometimes it’s just nice to talk to a fellow woman about a boy, no?”
So true. I had been itching to call Cosima all day but there was no way she could really understand the magnitude of my holiday affair without knowing anything about the gorgeous, composed man that was Sinclair. Kat was a gift really, given to me by the man himself. I wondered if he had thought about just that when he paired us together.