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He was silent, for once.
“I’m not offended. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page. If I were to come to your hotel tonight—and I’m not saying I will—I just want to be very clear: it would be a one-night thing.”
A single brow lifted upwards.
“I don’t want flattery. I don’t want flirtation. I don’t want lies. I don’t want the pretense of a relationship when all you’re interested in is sex. And in the morning, I want to walk away without wondering if I’ll hear from you again. Let’s call a spade a spade from the beginning and say I won’t.”
His eyes skimmed her features. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but Maddie’s insides were soaring with victory. Not once had she taken the lead in a relationship, and it felt good. Better than good; it felt fantastic.
“As for the house, nothing’s changed—and sleeping together won’t change my mind, either. So, if you’re just doing this because you think you can win me over with your…skills…in bed, then think again.”
He let out a soft, husky laugh.
“I’m serious. I have no intention of selling the house to you.”
“But coming to my hotel?” He asked, the hand on her breast stroking her flesh once more, so she closed her eyes on a bodily tremble.
“I’ll consider it,” she said uncertainly, when mentally, she knew wild horses would struggle to keep her away.
“Determined to keep me guessing?”
“A little guessing will do you the world of good.” She reached down and unclipped her seatbelt, knocking his hand out of the way in the process. “Thanks for the lift, Rocco.”
Rocco drove back into Manhattan with a scowl etched onto his handsome face. It was a scowl born of an overarching sense of frustration because nothing about that had gone how he’d planned, even when parts of it had.
It wasn’t what had happened with Maddie, but rather the pervasive sense of her being very, very difficult to predict, contain, or control.
She was an unknown quantity. Wild, impulsive, unpredictable, rare.
And dangerous.
Rocco didn’t like any of those traits. He liked things, and people, to follow a formula. He was most comfortable when he could perform one action, confident in how it would be received and reacted to, and with Maddie, she was consistently surprising him.
Why wouldn’t she sell the house to him?
Why did she speak to him as though he were the devil?
Would she come to his hotel?
There were so many mysteries and enigmas wrapped up in her being that it was impossible to feel anything but frustrated.
Suddenly, the simple plan to seduce her into selling the house to him seemed as stupid as she’d made it sound. As if sex—no matter how great—could shake a person’s determination, when that determination was as iron clad as Maddie’s seemed to be.
Besides, it was no longer about the house.
That had been stupid. A facile, reductive attempt to marry two different desires.
Sleeping with Maddie was something he wanted. He’d thought he could conflate that with the purchase of the house, but that was wrong. He wanted her because of who she was—the fire and spark she’d shown him the night before, at the hotel, had been in evidence today as well.
Perhaps she was right, and they should treat this night like a slice out of time. A single night to indulge this pleasure, and then enable him to get on with the business of buying the house she so desperately didn’t want to sell. Because nothing and no one, no matter how beautiful and wild, would shake him from his goal. Rocco Santoro played to win, and he intended to do exactly that.
But with Maddie, maybe there was a way to have his cake and eat it, too…
In the end, Maddie decided to go to the hotel to tell him she wasn’t interested. While a no-strings fling sounded great in theory, she’d been badly burned by Brock—burned so badly that she realized there was no such thing as an easy one-night stand. No such thing as meaningless sex. No such thing as a relationship without the power to wound—even a short-term one.
While she had gotten changed after work, she’d deliberately chosen an outfit designed not to impress, because refusing someone meant not caring what they thought of you. She hadn’t even reapplied her perfume, she thought with smug satisfaction, as she glanced around the hotel bar, looking for Rocco.
It didn’t take long.
