The harsh orgasm slowed and then stopped.
Colleen fought her way out of the stupor blanketing her.
Tristan was watching her intently, his eyes as sharp as those of a predator. “God, you’re hot when you come like that.”
Her body was a trembling mess, and she couldn’t hold onto him anymore. He caught her limp form as she almost passed out. A grunt escaped her lips.
Tristan carried her over to the sofa and sat down, cradling her against his chest. He was warm and comforting as the maelstrom still spun in her head.
Her panties were soaked and cold against her skin down there. She parted her legs a little, trying to keep them from sticking to her, and wiggled to try to shift them.
He chuckled and shoved her shoulder, flipping her backward on the couch. She was too out of it from the brain-melting orgasm to wonder what he was doing.
Tristan grabbed her panties at the crotch, pulled them off her, and then shoved her thighs up to her chest like he had the night before, even rocking her slightly backward with the pressure of his hand on her knees. Then he licked her pussy and upper thighs, cleaning all her stickiness away.
“Oh God, you don’t have to do that!” she gasped.
“I like the sweet taste of you.” And he licked her more deeply, his tongue gently and then roughly slipping through her folds until the tension returned, tightened, and broke into waves of ecstasy through her again.
As she drifted back, the buzzing in her head did not go away this time, and her brain ceased to process anything except the insistent softness of his tongue between her thighs.
She drew a shuddering breath, and Tristan gathered her into his arms. She whispered, her voice rasping, “We’re going to be late.”
Tristan kissed her forehead. “Yeah, I know.”
“I have to stop in my room and get a new pair of panties.”
“Absolutely not. I want to be able to stroke or lick your naked pussy anytime I want. Now pick up your purse and notepad because it’s time to go.”
11
Switcheroo
Tristan
The meeting with Tristan’s wealth managers was held in the long conference room of their office.
Colleen and Tristan took their seats at the long table meant for at least seven participants on each side and waited.
He’d expected the business office of his wealth management agency to be decorated in California casual or Spanish modern decor, but the office was swathed in Late Ostentatious Tacky.
A neon-bright painting depicted idle people lounging with their Gucci handbags and talking on their diamond-encrusted iPhones while batting their impossibly long eyelashes and flashing their snow-bright teeth. The horror was bound in a gilded frame with silver frosting swirls, and it covered an entire wall. Just the subjects’ upper torsos and some of their faces were visible on the enormous canvas that towered over the room, so they would’ve been as tall and knobby as giraffes if they could’ve stepped out of the painting.
The shining steel furniture, neon faux leather, and glass tables with mutantly large, gem-studded fruit bowls as centerpieces looked like a life-sized tableau of the art on the wall. If the picture had been meant as satire, and Tristan hoped it had, the decorator had missed the point.
Tristan had been inside enough palaces and throne rooms lately to see the decor as trying obscenely hard for sophistication and missing the mark by a mile.
A party of finance managers wearing dark suits entered from a door on the opposite corner of the room. The managers, whom Tristan had met on one previous occasion, greeted him as if he were their best friend from high school, and he returned the performance, shaking hands across the table and grinning.
The sarcastic asshole who lived in the back of his head wanted to shout, What? I can’t hear you over the goddamn art!
One of the firm’s senior managers, Dr. Mayamiko Botha, had been Tristan’s primary contact from the very beginning. She stood at the center of the table with her hand extended and a prim smile on her lips. She was a petite woman, wearing an elegant black suit with a vivid red African print blouse and matching headscarf tied in an intricate knot above her high, rounded forehead. She spoke with lilting remnants of an Afrikaner accent. “Mr. King, it is most excellent to see you again. It has been three long years since we last met in Geneva, am I correct?” She introduced her four associates who flanked her on her side of the table.
Tristan smiled back at her. “Dr. Botha, it was indeed in Geneva. Your memory is excellent, as always.” An administrative assistant had probably briefed her before the meeting. Executives of her stature did not walk into meetings with clients of his level unprepared. “May I present my associate, Ms. Joann Myers.”
He gestured at Colleen standing beside him. On the ride over, he’d warned her that he’d give them a fake name for her. Jian had dropped them off and then taken the BMW back to the Nobu Ryokan Hotel to coordinate with the concierges, he’d said.
After greetings and handshakes all around, they sat.
