Knight Nostalgia: A Knights of the Board Room Anthology(21)
It never failed to stir him, hearing it. But now he was getting an uneasy feeling. Best to let it lie, lest his extremely sharp-witted wife would…
Savannah shifted and propped herself up on an elbow. Her curtain of thick blond locks tumbled over one eye, but it didn’t diminish the sudden gleam in the visible one.
“Wait. That surprised you. I could hear it in your voice. What women?”
Oh hell. He cleared his throat. “I assumed you amended the scene plan.” It had fit in with his imaginings of her wrinkling her nose at the stench of the battlefield lingering on him. But he figured now was not the time to point out that his own efforts to get into the scene might have contributed to a serious oversight.
At her expression, Matt gauged how close anything sharp—or even just this side of not-too-blunt to use as a shiv—was to his very exposed sensitive parts. When Savannah slid off the bed, he manfully chose to snag his trousers and put them back on. He didn’t have time to tighten the laces, but he was at least covered by the time she rose, pushed her hands through her hair and pivoted to face him, a flush climbing into her fair cheeks.
“And exactly what did these women do?”
“Just bathed me and gave me a massage.”
He knew the spike in his gut when he’d missed a key piece of information. When it happened as a matter of business, there were usually ways to fix it. Plus, he had the help of four of the savviest businessmen he knew, in their respective fields of experience. In a relationship, reparations were quite a bit trickier, and he had no backup. As his mind scrolled rapidly through all the earlier prep and detail, his bad feeling increased exponentially. His shrewd wife reached the same conclusion only a blink before he did.
“I am going to kill Ben O’Callahan.”
A pair of robes hung on two hooks near the bed, one a feminine garment of textured white silk. She snagged it and swirled it around her like Wonder Woman about to take the battlefield. Matt barely made it around the bed in time to catch her elbow and keep her from marching out of the tent in search of his company lawyer. Who he might just kill himself, but there was judicial process to consider.
“Hold on.” He drew her back to the bed, keeping a firm grip on her. “Innocent until proven guilty.”
“Ha. That…man, has never had an innocent day in his life.” But Savannah crossed her arms, which created an interesting effect with the robe neckline parting to show her cleavage. The thin fabric outlined her nipples. Her color was high, her eyes snapping. He figured it probably wasn’t wise to try throwing her back on the bed and seducing her into forgetfulness.
Yeah. Savannah would merely pop back up after being thoroughly, repeatedly ravished, and ask if he had Ben’s head on a pike yet.
Keeping a light hand on her, he pressed the bell that summoned a servant girl. A blink later he realized he was totally off his game. Because the one who responded to his call was the redhead with the mouthwatering breasts, just as naked as before. And of course she knelt as close to his feet as she could get.
His wife was the most beautiful woman in the world to Matt. No woman could compare to her. That was what he felt and saw when he looked at her. But his wife was closing in on forty, and he knew what she was seeing. A nubile twenty-something, who might have had hands on her husband.
Since they’d been together, he’d encouraged Savannah to show her temper if things happened between them that upset her. He’d wanted her to know he wasn’t goddamn Geoffrey Tennyson, reacting with frosty disapproval if his carefully groomed ice princess didn’t keep every human emotion bottled up.
For the first time, Matt had a feeling he was going to wish he hadn’t made that helpful and loving suggestion.
“Slave.” He cleared his throat over it, but the rules were fairly strict about breaking scene while it was in progress. “Who instructed you to bathe me? Told you of the captive queen’s wishes?”
“Your Lord Seneschal, my lord,” the redhead said instantly. “He said putting such temptation in your way proved your commitment to your queen, confirming how strong and eternal your devotion and love to her would be.”
“And how does it do that?” he asked, hoping Ben had left him an out.
“Because you took nothing from what was freely offered by the both of us, and we are the most attractive and well-instructed of the pleasure slaves at your command. He directed me to remind you of this if you asked that very question. And he told me to say it word for word in the presence of the queen.”
“Does the Lord Seneschal have green eyes, dark hair and a manhood big enough for me to beat him to death with it?” Savannah asked pleasantly.
It startled the girl enough for her to look up, her expression wisely cautious. Matt figured they’d both acquired the answer from her face, however, so he dismissed her with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “It was a rhetorical question,” he murmured as he courteously guided her around his wife, keeping his body between them until the girl exited through the open tent flaps.
“You need a new lawyer. He won’t leave this island alive, and he’ll be severely maimed before he begs for death.”
She was pacing, her color still up, fists clenched. She glared at him. “I know you knew nothing of this, because you’re impossible to surprise, and you looked poleaxed. But how did he know you wouldn’t take advantage of ‘what was freely offered’?”