Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

A small smile touched her lips.

"That sounds exhausting."

"I’ll carry most of the burden."

"How generous."

"But I won’t lie to you or myself again." His eyes held hers. "I want you."

Then Park leaned in and pressed a slow kiss to her cheek.

It was not the courteous brush of lips he could dismiss as teasing. He let it remain beside the corner of her mouth for one warm, deliberate second.

Quinn went still inside his arms.

Park felt the small tension of it move through the whole line of her body. The tiny catch in her breath. The half-degree shift of her hips in his hand as she tried, and failed, to remain composed against the exact place her attention had just gone.

He noticed all of it.

’Christ, Quinn,’ he whispered inside him, reverent, ruined. ’You are wet, aren’t you. Right now. Standing in your suit in your master’s private wing with his mouth beside yours and a hand on the small of your back, you are wet, and you would rather die than admit it, and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever felt against my palm.’

Park began to draw back.

Her fingers closed around his wrist before he could move far.

He froze.

Quinn kept his hand against her cheek while she studied him — her thumb brushing once across the inside of his wrist where his pulse jumped like a caught bird beneath her touch.

"That," Park whispered, "felt suspiciously like encouragement."

"It was."

Quinn’s grip shifted from his wrist to his collar. She drew him closer — not enough for their mouths to meet, but enough that her breath touched his lips.

"You asked me to tell you if I felt nothing," she murmured. "I didn’t."

Park’s arm tightened reflexively around her waist.

Quinn did not object, instead, she turned her face and placed a slow, deliberate kiss against his cheek — almost touching the corner of his mouth exactly as he had done to her.

Park went completely still.

The kiss lasted less than a second.

Every nerve down the left side of his body woke up as though she had trailed a fingertip along it. Every muscle in his stomach clenched. His grip on her hip tightened by one small involuntary degree, and Quinn felt it, and did not step out of it.

When she drew back, there was color in her cheeks — but no embarrassment in her eyes now. Only a calm, newly awakened confidence that made Park understand the terrifying truth he was only now beginning to grasp.

Quinn had not been lacking desire.

She had simply been disciplined enough to keep it chained.

And the chain, tonight, had been unlatched.

"That," she said softly, "was me being careful."

Park stared at her.

Then his grin arrived, slow and helpless and slightly stupid. "I think I may be in love with careful."

"Do not become reckless."

"Too late."

Quinn’s fingers remained hooked lightly in his collar. Her knuckles rested against the base of his throat where his pulse was still, apparently, in mutiny.

"You should not surprise members of your protection detail."

"I warned you."

"You asked me to stop you."

"And you didn’t."

"No." Her eyes dropped to his mouth again — this time without pretending otherwise, and this time she let them linger. "I did not."

’Quinn, Quinn, Quinn. You are going to ruin me. In slow careful strokes. With that same clean administrative discipline, you use to run a security detail. And I am going to write you a letter of commendation afterwards.’

Park carefully slid her glove back into its correct position at her wrist, smoothing the leather along the fine line of her forearm with the deliberate slowness of a man dressing something he had not, ultimately, been permitted to undress.

His arm remained around her waist.

Quinn made no attempt to remove it.

"I’m not confused about what I’m doing," he said. "I find you breathtaking. I’ve wanted you longer than I was brave enough to admit, and I intend to flirt with you shamelessly until you either give me a real chance or finally throw me bodily through one of those very expensive windows."

"That is an irresponsible promise."

"It’s still a promise."

She searched his face — briefly, seriously — for the withdrawn young man she remembered.

Whatever she found instead made her expression soften into something small, private, and entirely new.

"You have changed."

Park’s thumb brushed once over her gloved knuckles.

"I nearly died..."

Quinn’s gaze flickered toward the dressing hidden beneath his hair. She raised her hand again and gently smoothed the displaced strands back over it, her fingers lingering against his temple before travelling, slow and deliberate, down the side of his face. The pass of her fingertips across his jaw made a small pathetic sound leave his throat before he could stop it — half exhale, half surrender.

Park turned his cheek slightly into her palm.

"...I’d rather change than waste the life I kept."

For a moment, Quinn said nothing.

Then she placed her hand back over his heart entirely of her own accord.

This time she did not remove it quickly.

"You will have the wound examined again tomorrow," she said.

Park smiled. "Is that an order?"

"Yes."

His arm tightened slightly around her waist. His mouth found the small vulnerable place just below her ear as easily as if it had been waiting there for him his entire life.

"I like it," he murmured against the warm skin of her throat, "when you order me around; it’s hot Ms. Guard."

The blush returned — deeper this time, no longer confined to her cheeks but travelling openly down her throat toward the collar of her blouse.

Her fingers curled into his shirt, and she leaned closer, her lips hovering close to his ear.

"You may discover, Park," she murmured, low, unhurried, and dripping with a quiet menace that had absolutely nothing to do with security detail work, "that I enjoy giving orders considerably more than you enjoy receiving them."

Park’s heart stumbled so violently beneath her hand that she felt it. She felt every hurried beat of it. And her mouth, close to his ear, curved slowly and privately against the shell of it in an expression he could not see but would remember in exquisite detail for the rest of the week.

’She’s going to eat me alive. She’s going to eat me alive, and I am going to thank her.’

Quinn’s smile deepened.

Then she stepped out of his arms at last, leaving warmth behind in every place her body had been.

"Get some rest, Master Park."

She turned toward the sitting room with the calm, unhurried stride.

Fuck...

Her spine was, impossibly, more perfectly aligned than it had been on the way in.

Park watched her go, one hand still resting over his own hammering chest.

Halfway across the room, Quinn paused. Not to look back — she did not give him that — but to smooth, once, absently, with two gloved fingers, the front of her jacket where his palm had left the faintest impression against the fabric.

The small private grooming gesture nearly undid him, yet she did not look back and simply resumed her walk and closed the towering carved door behind her and left.

Park exhaled a laugh that was almost a groan, dropped himself into the leather sofa and let his head fall against the back of it.

’She is going to be an event.’

Outside the doors, three corridors away, at exactly the point in the wing where the security cameras did not reach and the household staff had already retired, Quinn stopped and placed one gloved hand flat against the cool paneled wall.

She closed her eyes and drew a long, unsteady breath through her nose.

And felt, in the quiet indignity of her own body, exactly how thoroughly the young master had unhinged her.

She stood there for a full ten seconds before she remembered who she was, straightened her jacket, and continued down the corridor with her spine perfect and her composure restored to the two people who could see her from either end of it.

’The accident might genuinely have been the luckiest disaster of my life.’