Page 62 of Drawn Together

“I guess you’ve only ever worked with submissive clients before!”

The rain was falling so hard that I had to raise my voice for him to hear me. I was shivering, the storm having blown in an icy wind, which, adding in the fact that I was soaked, was not a pleasant combination.

“This ends here…” he said, more to himself than to me. “It ends here. I can’t keep doing this.”

I looked up in surprise. “What is it that you can’t keep doing?”

Sebastian stared me in the eye, and I didn’t like what I saw there.

“I’m not going to keep being your bodyguard. I’m not going to keep doing this job under these conditions.”

At those words, my heart stopped.

“What conditions are you talking about? A few minutes ago, you said that your job was the most important thing…”

“It is. That’s why I have to quit.”

I clenched my jaw. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Sebastian looked at me as if I were an idiotic little girl who had to be indulged. “You’re too used to getting your way. You don’t respect me. I can’t do my job if you’re going to do something stupid every chance you get. I try to make you understand the danger you’re in, but you continue to think it’s all a big joke.”

That pissed me off.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Sebastian. I’m aware of what’s happening, although you don’t seem to want to tell me much more, like I’m some moron. I’m the one who got kidnapped, remember?”

Sebastian ran a hand over his face, wiping away the excesswater, and looked down at me, cold and distant. “Then why do you make it so hard for me, dammit?”

I held his gaze. He was overreacting. That was just how I was, and he knew it.

“You don’t want to quit because I went out alone at night without letting you know. You’re just scared now because you’re under the same roof as my father, your boss, and you don’t want him to find out what’s going on between us.”

There. I’d said it, I couldn’t keep it inside any longer.

Sebastian didn’t blink. “There’s nothing going on between us,” he said coldly.

“You can keep telling yourself that if that makes you feel better.” I turned my back to him. I didn’t want him to see how much his words had hurt me. I didn’t want to give him any more power than he already had.

He spun me around to face him. “I already apologized for what happened. We agreed it wouldn’t happen again.”

I laughed sarcastically. “We agreed?” I repeated. “I don’t remember that part…”

Sebastian cursed under his breath without taking his eyes off me. “You can’t have everything. I’m just a toy to you, but you have no idea how—”

“A toy?” I said, raising my tone and cutting him off. “You think you know me, but you have no idea. You see what I have, but you don’t know who I am, what I want, what I desire…”

“I know that if I stay with you much longer…” But he didn’t finish the sentence, and a part of me knew what he was going to say.

I took a step forward. “If you stay with me much longer… what, Sebastian?”

He shook his head, refusing to look at me.

“Why did you run your hands through my hair on the flight? Why did you do it? I didn’t ask you to.”

He didn’t answer, so I stepped closer and shoved him. He barely moved.

“You know how I feel about you. You know it, and you don’t care, but then you go and do things that make no sense, like when you took care of me after the tattoo or when you worry that I haven’t had dinner and you make me something healthy to eat. You like touching me, Sebastian. You may not even realize how often you do it, but I’m aware of it every single time you brush past me. Do you think I don’t notice that you take every opportunity that presents itself to put your hands on me, even if it’s fleeting and totally innocent?”

He clenched his jaw so tight in response that the veins in his neck seemed like they were about to explode from the pressure.