Lucius continued his sensual assault on her neck, gently nibbling at her soft skin and then soothing it with his warm tongue. He kissed her skin fervently, eliciting a soft moan that escaped her lips. Leah bit her lip in embarrassment upon hearing the involuntary sound she had just made.
"I want to hear it again," Lucius whispered, nibbling on her neck with more intensity, prompting a soft gasp accompanied by a moan from Leah.
Lucius released his grip on her and swiftly turned her around to face him. A satisfied grin played on his lips as he admired his handiwork on her neck.
"The next time you roll your eyes at me like you did a few moments ago," Lucius paused, his gaze fixed on her flushed face, "I will tear off your underwear and make passionate love to you until you lose all sense of control."
Leah's eyes widened in shock as she glanced at the people in the room, before turning back to Lucius with a horrified expression. His voice had been too loud, and she feared that they had overheard what he said. Despite the maids not looking their way, she knew that it was still possible for them to hear. She suppressed the urge to glare at Lucius, instead holding herself back.
"Go get ready, we're going out in forty minutes," Lucius said, his expression already serious and a bit morbid, causing Leah to wonder how quickly his demeanor changed. "And I don't want you hiding this little gift." He glanced at her neck before walking past her, striding towards the door, which opened on its own.
Leah turned around and stared at his back with a slightly annoyed look. "I don't feel like going out. I have plans to spend the day with my puppy," she said, causing Lucius to stop in his tracks and turn to face her.
"How about I help you change your clothes," Lucius suggested, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. "I've heard that women love it when their men help them change their clothes. I'm sure that could motivate you," he added, with a cunning smile tugging at his lips.
"First of all, you are not my man. Secondly, those women who would want a man to dress them up are crazy," Leah said matter-of-factly.
"You have thirty minutes to get ready," Lucius said, completely ignoring what she had just said. "If you're not ready after thirty minutes," Lucius paused, glancing at the maids in the room who still had their heads down. His eyes rested on a particular one who had short hair tied in a ponytail. "I'll kill that maid over there," he added with a wicked smirk before he walked away.
Leah glanced at the maid Lucius had been staring at with a pitiful look in her eyes, realizing that the woman must have heard what Lucius said as the woman was now trembling slightly. Leah sighed before leaving the dining room and heading to her room to change her attire and do her hair.
As she stood in the foyer, Leah sighed for the umpteenth time. She had been standing there for more than ten minutes, waiting for Lucius, but it seemed like he was purposely taking his sweet time getting changed. She was wearing a simple yellow gown that stopped just above her knees, with a coordinated yellow scarf around her neck. She had purposely used the scarf to cover the hickey that Lucius had left on her neck.
She had thought about his instruction to leave her neck exposed when she decided to use the scarf, but she didn't care about it. She would literally die of shame if she went out with her neck exposed. After what seemed like an eternity, Leah saw Lucius coming down the stairs with gentle steps, tapping on his phone with little to no care.
He was donning a black suit with a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie that complemented his dark, shiny hair, which had been perfectly smoothed back with a brush. His suit jacket was tailored to fit him snugly, emphasizing his broad shoulders. His black leather shoes gleamed as he walked.
He looked so handsome...so devilishly handsome. But at that moment, Leah wasn't even paying attention to his looks. There were other thoughts running through her mind. For some reason, she kept inwardly wishing that he would fall down the stairs and sprain his ankle, or that something worse would happen to him. There were little whispers in her head that she couldn't identify, but they felt like they were fueling hatred towards Lucius.
Her gaze were slowly turning to hateful glares. Leah immediately broke her gaze away from Lucius, shaking her head when the whispers started to get louder, causing the voices to stop and the initial hatred that she had just been feeling towards Lucius to disperse.
"Can you give me two reasons why you were glaring at me like that?" Lucius asked her with a calm face, immediately he got to where she stood.
He had noticed her hateful glare before, even though his eyes had been focused on his phone screen.
There was a moment of silence as she didn't know what to answer him. Should she tell him that some voice had momentarily poisoned her mind against him?
"You kept me waiting for eternity and I hate you. Are those two reasons good enough, or should I give you more?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest.
Lucius advanced closer to her, his face betraying no expression or emotion. Here's a grammatically corrected version of the text with a few word changes:
His gaze locked onto her eyes as if he was searching for something within those green orbs that had started to glare at him again as he advanced even closer.
"Good reasons," Lucius finally said as he shoved his phone into his jacket pocket.
His gaze lingered on the scarf around her neck for a moment before he began to walk away. Leah sighed softly before following him.
Together, they walked to the area where the cars were parked. Ten vehicles were parked in the lot. A lean man was standing by the side of a black car, which Lucius was heading towards. When they arrived at the car, the man greeted Lucius and Leah with a slight bow. Lucius opened the back seat door for Leah and gestured for her to enter. She first gave him a suspicious look before entering the car.
Lucius and the man stood outside discussing for a few moments before Lucius finally moved around and entered the car, sitting in the back seat with Leah. The man got into the driver's seat and started the engine.
Throughout the ride, Leah chose to ignore Lucius, and luckily for her, the man was not in the mood to tease her. He was completely engrossed with his phone.
Leah's mood began to lighten up as they drove past the designated area of the manor. The bustling streets of Rome were refreshing to her.
The car eventually stopped in front of a salon. Leah looked at the building for a moment before turning to Lucius with a questioning expression, wondering if they were actually going to go inside the salon.
"What are we doing here?" Leah asked, her tone quizzical.
With the way he was formally dressed, she had assumed that they were going to somewhere important or to see someone important.
Lucius put his phone away before turning to face Leah.
"We're here to remove that black dye from your hair," Lucius replied nonchalantly, as if it was a topic they had already discussed.
"My hair?" Leah asked again to make sure that her ears where working properly.
"I was going through your older pictures last night and I couldn't help but notice that your hair was brown." Lucius words sounded more like a statement than a question.
Leah stared at Lucius with an alarmed look. "Did you do a background check on me?"
"Yes," Lucius replied. "You looked really cute when you were twelve," he added with a small smile.
"Y-You creep," Leah stuttered, not believing that he had taken out his time to dig into her old files.
Those files had been hidden very well, she was very sure of that. Even the police did not have her old photos; they only had the ones that she wanted them to have. All her information from after her eighteenth birthday had been perfectly altered.
"There is nothing wrong in getting to know the woman I'm interested in better," Lucius said. "Stop looking worried. It's not like you were a murderer in your teens."
Leah glared at him before looking outside at the salon again with a distant look in her eyes. Now that Lucius had gone to dig up her old files, there was little possibility that someone else would not do the same thing. That was just how things worked; once you stirred up something, it didn't easily go down.