Page 95 of Sweet Nightmare

“I asked a question.”

“And I recognized a stupid one.”

I blink.

“What?”

She sighs and mutters something about people with low IQs.

I’m fairly certain I’m the subject of her little lecture.

Well, shit.

I’m being insulted in my own damn house, and instead of throwing her expensive ass out into the snow, I’m standing here entertaining her. Maybe I’ve finally lost my fucking mind.

“I was told this was supposed to be a professional collaboration,” she says, looking me up and down. “Forgive me for expecting a little professionalism.”

Ah. There it is.

The entitlement.

Mommy probably arranged the whole thing, handed her a plane ticket, and promised she’d get whatever she wanted.

And now she’s here expecting me to roll out the red carpet.

Not happening, princess.

“This is going well,” a woman beside her mutters.

I glance over. I’d been so busy trading insults with the Ice Princess that I hadn’t properly acknowledged her companion. Tall. Pretty. Alert.

And wearing the kind of smile that tells me she’s enjoying this shit far too much.

The bodyguard, presumably.

She stands close enough to the icy-blonde to intervene if necessary, but relaxed enough to suggest she doesn’t expect to need to. Most men underestimate women who look like her. I’m not most men. That woman looks like she could rearrange my internal organs and sleep like a baby afterward and judging by the amused glint in her eyes, she’d enjoy every second of it.

Yeah.

Definitely the bodyguard.

Her client, meanwhile, looks like she’d rather be anywhere else on earth.

Tough shit.

She’s the one who showed up at my mansion two days early with thirteen suitcases and an attitude sharp enough to cut glass.

She reeks of entitlement. And somehow, against every ounce of common sense I possess, I can’t stop looking at her.

Fuck me.

Why the hell can’t I stop looking at her?

With the full face of makeup, designer clothes, and that ridiculous white fur coat, she should look completely ridiculous to me.

She doesn’t, though. She looks…ridiculously beautiful.

Not the polished, manufactured kind of beauty I see plastered across billboards and magazine covers. I’ve met enough models to know the difference between a pretty face and someone who can make a room forget how to breathe. There’s something colder about this woman. Something that makes me believe that winter itself decided to become a woman, and developed a personal grudge against the entire human race.