Complete Me (Stark Trilogy, #3)(88)

He shudders, still deep inside me, and I reach between us, my fingers rubbing his cock as I stroke my clit, faster and faster until I come, too, and my muscles tighten around him, pulling from him the last waves of the orgasm that still rocks through both of us.

Finally, we sink to the ground, breathing hard, our clothes and limbs tangled around us.

When the ability to move returns, I prop myself up on my elbow to look at him “Do you want to tell me what that was about?” I ask softly.

He reaches for me, then cups my face, his thumb stroking lightly over my chin. “Nobody f*cks with what is mine.”

I frown, not understanding. “What’s yours? You mean me?”

He doesn’t answer, but the darkening intensity of his eyes tells me what I want to know.

“What happened?”

“I paid a visit to Giselle earlier. You won’t be working with her again.”

His words propel me to a sitting position. “What the f*ck?” I think about her text. “Goddammit, Damien, quit talking in riddles and tell me what’s going on.”

He lifts his hips so he can readjust his clothes. Then he stands. I scramble to do the same, and follow him back to that glass wall. “She was in the ATM footage. I confronted her, and she confessed she leaked the story about the portrait so she could get cash to help keep her business going after she and Bruce split. She also sold the story about Jamie and the Ferrari, not to mention the bullshit about our little love nest in Malibu.”

“What? No.” But even as I say it, I think about the intensity of her expression when I told her Jamie was staying in Malibu. And I think about all the financial trouble that she told me she was having as a result of her divorce.

Most of all, I think about that text. It was a confession, I now realize. A confession and an apology.

“But she’s the one who told me about the article in the Business Journal.”

“Camouflage,” he says. “She sells the story, then tells you. You’re both surprised together, and she looks innocent.”

My head is spinning. “Wait a second. You fired her? She was doing my walls in my office. If anyone was going to fire her, it should have been me.”

“I told you,” he says. “No one f*cks with what’s mine.” There is an edge to his voice that I rarely hear. The edge that reminds me that, yes, Damien has a dangerous side. A ruthlessness that helped him win game after game of tennis in his youth, and then claw his way to the top of the corporate ladder without even breaking a sweat. He is not a man to be f*cked with.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t him Giselle was f*cking with. Maybe the articles were about the two of us, but she’d slipped her way into my office, into my life.

Damien is studying my face, and he’s obviously seeing my temper rising. “It’s done,” he says. “It’s over.”

“How is it done?”

“I explained to her that my lawyers were more than capable of dragging out multiple actions for defamation and invasion of privacy. She’s a businesswoman at heart, so she understands that I can keep a litigation going forever, but she’s going to have trouble finding a lawyer whose hourly rate doesn’t break her. We came to terms.”

“What kind of terms?”

“She turned over all right, title, and interest in her galleries to me. She’s relocating to Florida. And good f*cking riddance.”

I press my palm against the glass, as if the coolness will ease the bite of my temper. “You don’t have to fight my battles, Damien.”

“I love you, Nikki. I will always fight for you.”

His words are heavy with meaning and ripe with passion. They knock me backward and steal my breath. “You love me,” I say stupidly.

The corner of his mouth curves up. “Desperately.”

I swallow back the knot of tears that has formed in my throat. “You haven’t said it,” I say. “Not for weeks now.”

He closes his eyes as if my words have hurt him, but when he opens them again, it’s not pain that I see, but love. He reaches for me and pulls me close. I lean against him, breathing in the scent of soap mixed with sex. It’s heady, and I want to get lost in it. Lost in this moment.

“I love you, Nikki,” he repeats. “I say it with every touch, with every look, with every breath that I take. I love you. I love you so much it hurts.”

“Me, too.” I brush a kiss across his lips, then meet his smile. “But you can’t protect me from everything, Damien. And you sure as hell can’t protect me by keeping things from me. You should have told me about Giselle. Hell, who knows what else is out there you’re keeping from me. So just stop it, okay? It doesn’t protect me, it just pisses me off.”

“All right,” he says evenly. I think that’s the end of it, but then he continues. “Sofia sent the photos.”

I have to rewind his words in my head, because what he is saying makes no sense whatsoever. “The photos in Germany. Sofia is the one who sent them to the court? I don’t understand. Why? How do you know? Did you talk to her?”

He moves away from the glass wall to the center of the room. He paces, not like a man trying to solve a problem, but like a man who already knows the answer and doesn’t much like it.

“I discovered a discrepancy in one of my father’s accounts. Small amounts siphoned off to an account that I don’t have access to. In excess of a hundred thousand dollars, and yesterday I learned that money was filtered to Sofia.”