It was almost midnight when we arrived. Sergio, one of the footmen, was waiting at the entrance for my return. It was hard not to imagine myself the beloved princess returning to the castle. This is what it would be like if Jay Valentine were mine. If he loved me enough to keep me, I'd know the warmth of having people care about my well-being always.

On my way up the wide staircase, I drew the pins from my hair setting it loose. I was inexplicably all warm and fuzzy at being back where I felt I belonged, even though I'd lived there such a short time. Home wasn't the structure you resided in but the person you lived there with. I might come clean to Valentine in the morning and regale him with every disastrous detail of the botched date with Gianni.

I’d make it light and amusing but with the strong subtext to the anecdote being that I couldn't leave him. He was an ass and an arrogant bastard at times but there was no way of releasing his hold on me. There was something inside of him too, something holding us together and I could not walk away from him any more than I could walk away from my own self.

At the top of the stunning staircase, I turned to enjoy myself as a figurehead, standing above the spacious atrium. My arms were even starting to lift, when a figure barreled out of the darkness in the passage. I was grabbed in a painful hold around my wrist and I teetered on the top step, virtually toppling back down.

“I've been waiting for you,” a voice growled.

I was lead down the steps, my half unpinned hair falling across my face and obscuring my vision as I fought to not lunge over the obelisks on my feet.

Jay Valentine was almost deranged, his perfect hair out of place as though he'd been clawing at it for hours, his tie undone flapping loose around his neck. Half way down I stumbled and he turned to catch me. I noted how his face contorted with concern. He made sure I was stable, setting me right before pulling me on in his mad haste, but not before my foot twisted out of one of the giant platform shoes – the one I'd planned to knock GianCarlo into next week with.

When we reached the expansive foyer and I managed to recapture my balance on the single towering heel, I looked into his eyes and saw some mania had taken up residence there. I had never seen him like this, stressed, afflicted by torment- out of control. But he was still the man I was connected to.

“What happened?” I asked, resisting the unbearable urge to reach my fingers to his beautiful sculpted cheek.

“Where have you been?” he growled.

“You know where I was- at the dinner you set up with the Italian,” I replied.

What the hell was this about?

“Where did he take you?”

“I don't know, some mansion on top of a cliff between here and LA.”

Surely he could track his own helicopter.

“That's not what I meant.” His grip tightened on my already crumpled hand and he pulled me down the hall. “I've been waiting for you to come back. In your room all night.”

“You were in my bedroom?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“So you keep saying.

He pulled me into his office and kicked the door shut so hard, it shuddered in its solid frame.

“I don't-” I started to tell him nothing was about to change but Valentine’s hands gripped each side of my head.

His fingers scythed into my hair at the roots and pulled my face into his. Having expected ferocious chastisement for whatever had gotten him so incensed, I was unraveled at the delicious flooding of my mouth with his tongue.

Jay Valentine kissed like a demon, owning my mouth entirely with his, swirling his tongue in an erotic dance around mine, seducing, enticing and finally forcing me to submit to his deep probe. In and out he moved, drawing me into his mouth until I felt as though I could climb inside him. My breath was out of control ragged, my breasts heaving up and down against his solid broad chest, the nipples grazing in the bandage dress holding them.

Hardly daring, afraid to break my spellbind, I raised my arms and touched him. The electric jolt of my fingers on his powerful bicep, feeling it flexing under my palm made my knees fold in a collapse. If Valentine hadn't rammed me back against the door at that exact moment, leaning his weight into me, I'd have been a crumple on my knees in front of him. His chest crushed my swollen breasts against him as he worked his tongue deeper into me.

I opened my mouth wider, to let him in. I wanted to devour him and swallow him whole to keep him inside me forever. He held me balanced on a single foot, the one still wearing a shoe, six inches higher off the ground than the other. I'd been resting the bare toes on top of the shoe and now wrapped my foot around Valentine's leg, curling him into my embrace with every tentacle of my body. He ground harder into my chest, satiating my need to feel him and hard, before another flame ignited even stronger.

When he stretched my neck so as to trail his lips from my mouth, along the sensitive side of my neck, I shuddered with a sigh of deepest want. I trailed one hand across his broad shoulder, delighting in the firm strength under the armor of his suit jacket. The other I brushed along his arm, up his back, exploring his body, committing the impression of every sinew to memory for future recall. He would be with me permanently now, I'd always feel his presence, sense his needs thrusting into mine even if only in my mind.

“I was waiting for you,” he moaned into my neck.

“I'm here now,” I whispered, running my fingers through his lush disheveled hair and relishing the sensation of his cranium in the palm of my hand.

“I was waiting for you.”

“I won't leave you.”

Those words put him into renewed frenzy. His grip razed across me to cup the underside of my breast, squeezing through the fabric as though to pop the lush bauble free while his hungry kisses ravished the fleshy top. Valentine was completely deranged, like a starving man presented with a free buffet, he wanted all of me at once. He rose tall once more and took my mouth, drawing me in as though to suction my form inside with a vampire kiss. Then again, plundering a path of kisses across my face, neck and breasts.

What? Why? My mind clutched for a reason for his sudden turnaround before being subsumed in enchanted quicksand. He was touching me, more important- allowing me to touch him. I had longed for this withheld sense more than all the others he flooded me with. Finally he was in my hands, in my mouth, his whole body forcing into mine and the ecstasy was drowning out all thoughts other than; ‘Let this never end’.