The air around me suddenly felt cooler than before. We were outside. No, not just outside—we were on the top floor of theRuby.I saw an opening to what looked like the second floorof a penthouse suite, and I quickly surmised we had arrived at his place.Hisplace. Not just a place, not just an outlook spot reserved for private rich folk.
Cassius Vale’s place.
I suddenly felt an overwhelming heat washing over me, the heat of erotic thrill that came in the buildup just before something intoxicating was about to happen. I all but felt his hands running over my shoulders, then my hips, then… between my legs… then…
I turned around. Cassius had not moved. He still had that smug smile on his face.
“This is your house?” I said, immediately feeling stupid. Home, maybe. A house? The moment had gotten to me and made me stupid.
Cassius chuckled.
“Part of my home,” he said. “Take in the views, Sarah. You don’t get views like this every day.”
Not like you do,I thought, but this time I kept my mouth shut, afraid of saying something stupid.
I suddenly became aware of the soft jazz music playing through speakers I could not locate. The floodlights were dim, somehow able to create an intimate feeling a hundred and one stories up. Beyond, the glittering lights of the Las Vegas Strip provided the backdrop.
It was such an unreal experience, so far beyond anything I’d ever had before—so far beyond what I even expected tonight—that I barely bothered to ask why Cassius had brought me here. If he’d done so to seduce me, it was working. I was willing to submit to a moment like this. Maybe if things escalated, I might hit the pause button.
But for now? After the coldness of leavingThe Red Court?If nothing else, at least Cassius was looking at me once more with a smile and not an icy stare.
Cassius stood still, watching me take it all in. At one point, someone in a tuxedo came over to him and whispered something, but I was too far to hear even if the man in the tux had spoken at a normal volume. He looked like a waiter, not like one of Cassius’ brothers, but I had long learned never to make assumptions.
A minute after the man left, Cassius walked over to me, slower than he normally would, but not so slowly it could be mistaken as a deliberate tactic. An accidentally deliberate one, perhaps. Then again, Cassius never left anything to normalcy.
“Join me for a drink,” Cassius said. “Come. There’s a table right there.”
I looked back where he nodded his head toward. There had not been one there before, but now, respite with a white tablecloth and what looked like roses in the middle, was a table with two wine glasses. It had all happened without me noticing.
That, I supposed, was the power of Cassius’ wealth. Not that he could buy things that multimillionaires couldn’t. But that he could do so in an effortless manner that made him look invincible.
“Looks delightful,” I said.
Cassius extended his arm. There was something so much more thrilling, so much more hair-tingling about him doing it here, in the privacy of his rooftop, versus on public display for the cameras and the paparazzi. There was also something strangely more intimate and gentle about it; he wasn’t doing this to show off his power or the type of woman he could get. He was just doing this for…
Me.
I walked over to the table, taking care to steady my walk and not show any nervousness. Just because the moment seemed more intimate, perhaps even sweeter, didn’t mean I could let myguard down. Letting Cassius show any weakness was the fastest way to get run over.
The waiter—butler? Servant? I was not rich enough to know—pulled back the chair, and I took a seat. Cassius sat across from me, the warmest smile on his face he’d had yet, and nodded.
“Pleasant, isn’t it?” he said. “I like to come up here at night and host. It’s a quiet retreat from the craziness of the world below.”
“All the women you must bring up,” I said.
But though I had just meant the remark as a joke, perhaps a poor one but humor nevertheless, Cassius growled at the remark.
“I host people I care about, Sarah,” he said.
He said nothing more, but the unstated assumption rang loudly in my head.I’m one of the people he cares about. He would not have said something like that by mistake.As if to double down on the moment, when the waiter came back with a bottle of red wine—unmarked, but undoubtedly a bottle worth thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars—Cassius himself poured my glass.
Now this was going past the point of sweet to suspicious. Maybe we’d already sailed well past that point, but I couldn’t take my curiosity any more.
“What is this really about, Cassius?” I said.
He stopped his pouring and looked into my eyes. Tempting as it was to just give in to those eyes—and damn was it fucking tempting—I held my own steely gaze. Both of us stared the other down, but I would not be broken.
No matter how badly my body tingled with fire and warmth.
