Page 11

“Me too. Not the work. I mean, I couldn’t sleep too.”

The corner of his mouth does the thing that isn’t quite a smile. He leans one shoulder against the doorframe, folds his arms across his chest, and watches me with those mossy green eyes I have been thinking about for four hours.

“Have you decided?”

“I haven’t.”

“Take your time.”

“I will.”

I put the rag down on the wood and move it in circles.

“You could just say yes to being my mistress, Tesoro mio.”

It’s those Italian words again. In that low voice. I looked it up, it means my treasure, something precious. But that’s not what I am to him.

Something in me snaps.

“I could just say yes to what, exactly?”

I turn. I hold the rag against my hip.

“A month? A week? A weekend? You haven’t specified. You showed up in your own kitchen for the first time in two years, kissed me like you meant it, gave me an ultimatum, and then walked out before you told me a single thing about what the terms are. So no. I haven’t decided.”

He steps into the room.

I keep polishing until he’s close enough that I have to stop, because he is standing on the other side of the desk from me now and the scent of him — clean shirt, warm skin, something dark under it — is in my nose again.

He looks at me for a long moment.

“You are talking back to me.”

His voice is extremely low.

Every rational part of me is telling me to apologize and tell him I’m going to be his maid.

My chin lifts instead.

“What are you going to do about it?”

He walks around the desk.

I don’t move.

He takes the rag out of my hand and sets it, very deliberately, on the corner of the wood. His palm settles between my shoulder blades — warm, wide, gentle — and turns me. Guides me, in one unhurried movement, forward and down, until my hip touches the front edge of the writing desk and my hands are flat on the polished wood.

I’m more curious than resistant.

Something about the smell of the polish and the warmth of his palm and the fact that he has not said one word since he moved me makes me — for one wild second — think he is going to kiss the back of my neck.

His thumbs hook into the waistband of my leggings and panties, slide them down my hips.

I open my mouth to say something, I don’t know what, my brain has stopped running proper English.

A palm strikes my butt before I have finished parting my lips.

I jolt.