Page 26 of Handsome Devil
I own you.
What are you going to do about it?
A chill ran through me. I’d always found his beauty disturbing. Those green eyes were like a cocktail from some infernal cauldron. Witch’s brew.
Damnation disguised as a fairytale.
“Good morning,” I forced out, looking him over. His chartreuse tie, which was the exact color of his eyes on a sunny day—which I would never admit aloud that I had noticed, even to save my life—had been loosened, and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt. He leaned over the desk, on his fists, arms spread wide. Like some diabolical ruler studying a map of his newly conquered domain.
Too angry, too cold. Too not-wanting-to-be-here-at-all.
Then why was he here?
I glanced at the many papers smothering the desk. The iPhone and the wafer thin laptop. The suit jacket that could be auctioned off and probably feed a family for a year, casually flung on the chair. All his, obviously. It was like Janelle had never been here at all.
She wasgone. Like, unemployed.
My boss had been fired in the blink of one evil green eye. The same day this man came to town. She’d told me so; that he called her to another meeting late last night, here at the office, had her get her things and had his security guys walk her out.
And yes, I felt a twinge of fear.
No matter what ups and downs I’d lived through in this office, I’d never felt anything like this; this uncertainty about whether or not I still had my job.
I hated the man standing in front of me right now more than I’d ever fathomed I could possibly hate him, in all the time I’d already spent hating him.
He looked down at the papers, not at me, when he finally spoke. “You’re late.”
I was. A little. “We usually roll in by nine,” I said carefully. “It’s standard.”
“Not anymore. Sit.”
Fuck that. He was standing.
Finally, he looked up at me again. I was still standing back, just inside the door. “Harder for the executioner to land the ax,” I said, “if I don’t stick my neck out.”
“But not impossible.”
I glanced through the window, into reception, and saw several of my coworkers vanish in a blur.
I shut the door behind me.
“Are you planning to keep pretending you don’t remember me from high school?” I inquired.
Or were you just that popular that you actually don’t?
“I remember you,” he said cooly, his eyelids lowering. He definitely seemed to be in a much worse mood than yesterday.
But yes, he fucking remembered me. He probably remembered every moment that ever passed between us, because there were very, very few. I made sure of that. And surely, a girl who didn’t worship him in the halls of Beaumont Academy was notable. There were so very few of us.
“Do I still have a job?” I asked bluntly, unwilling to play this game his way. If he was here to threaten my job, or to take his sweet time informing me it was already gone, he could say it to my face, right the hell now.
“Of course,” he said. “You’re this agency’s top-performing agent.”
Okay… Not what I expected to hear.
Was I? Really?
I wasn’t sure. I’d been waiting to hear those words for a long time. And yet I couldn’t fully absorb them… coming from him.
