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“Absolutely not.”
She marches up to my desk. “Don’t be a big baby.”
“You can’t get everything you want just be being a stubborn irritation.”
Her lashes flutter, and she laces her fingers behind her fluffy mess of a skirt. “Oh? Can’t I? I think I can. When you don’t have any boundaries, people stomp all over you, pet. I can make you lie down and roll over if I want. I can even convince you to do it gleefully. With enough time. The kind of time I’ll have, now that we’re living together.”
“Doubtful.” I plant my palms on my desk.
“I’ll click-train you with good boys until you fall right into line. It’ll be grand. You won’t have to think anymore.” Her head tilts. “Just make your cute little posters and bark when I say so.”
“You aren’t the only one familiar with mind games, princess.”
“Perhaps not. But am I wrong to assume I’m the only one familiar with beating them?”
Reaching, I fit the heat of her chin against my palm. My thumb traces the soft line of her jaw as her muscles ease. Some depraved part of me wants to take her up on this challenge. The concept of abuse to the point of submission is nothing new.
But she’s terrifying in all the ways I’ve never known before.
The way my parents controlled, hurt, and scarred me left me grappling for a place to exist where I wouldn’t find agony around the next corner. I relished outgrowing their physical training, even though it meant I’d perfected becoming the emotionless husk they wanted. Briar makes me want to push back, prove her wrong, watch her confidence shatter.
I want her to apologize and relent.
I want to make her concede.
I really must be my father’s son.
“We are not sharing a room. That’s final.”
“We are. That’s final.”
Exasperated, I say, “This isn’t a game. I appreciate that you don’t find me threatening, but—”
“You do?” she asks, voice soft, eyes somehow sincere.
“Why would I want to be the kind of man a woman fears, in any setting? That is the last thing I want.”
Calculations stream through her beautiful blue eyes as she lifts her hand to mine. Hesitant, her fingers skim the pulse in my wrist. “Please? You’re asking me to live in an unstable place with weapons everywhere.” When she blinks, a fragile glass tear traces down her cheek, and my innards turn over, knotting. “I feel safest here with you.”
Her tear dampens my thumb and dissolves my willpower—along with my logic. “Fine,” I mutter. “We can share my room. I’ll get a cot moved in there. Somehow. Discreetly. We will not be sharing a bed. I don’t trust myself.”
Every speck of emotion drains out of her as she twists my hand off her and pops up onto my desk. Checking her nails, she says, “That is the problem, isn’t it?”
Did she just…
Sagging into my chair, I scrub a hand down my face. “What is wrong with you?”
She beams at me over her shoulder. “Nothing.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“Sweetheart, I could sell you chewed gum, and you’d happily buy it.”
The throb of my headache is swiftly removing my will to live. “I mean it, princess. I do not trust myself. If you have anything resembling a soul, don’t make me become the kind of man I hate.”
Leaning across my desk, she grips the arm of my chair and drags me up to her. Our lips inches apart, she whispers, “It sounds like you’re ready to blame me for actions you’d commit.”
“You aren’t exactly acting like an unwilling temptation. I would never ignore your no. It’s the yeses that concern me.”
