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UNKNOWN: I don’t want Millers. I want you. I’ll wait.
I shoved my phone in my pocket. Sarah and Cher were both looking at me expectantly. I expected Cher to burst through her restraint first, but it was Sarah who spoke. “Winona, I talked to Cass a little more about him. If you’re worried about him being dangerous, he’s not. She said he was just… prickly.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“She didn’t say that. But I say, if you don’t want to sleep with him, at least take the money he’s throwing at you. He never expects anyone to owe him anything.”
Chapter 4
Mitchell
This wasn’t working.
I sat staring at a blank page, the same as every goddamned day before it.
Beyond me, in the kitchen of my house, the woman reached into her toolbox, her face tipped down so I could only see that messy knot of hair on the top of her head.
Last week, the whole time she was in my house and even after she left, the words had flowed from my fingertips onto the keys of the typewriter. The clack-clack sound was like water on some dying, parched part of my brain.
She has a name, asshole.
Winona.
This time, I had nothing.
Winona.
I’d lain awake that first night rolling her name over in my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d looked singing, before she saw me. That pure, unadulterated joy. Her hair flopping around and that streak of grease across her skin. Then, how quickly she’d snapped back at me, never missing a beat. How she didn’t seem impressed by my money, or scared of me, either, once she knew who I was.
That last part was refreshing as hell. Everyone back at LoupTeq HQ stiffened when I walked into a room. I might have not even considered going back to LoupTeq. But the merger with Zynstyr Technologies wouldn’t go through without me. And without the merger, I wouldn’t get the proprietary tech I needed to support the cutting-edge research my foundation was doing. The research had the potential to improve the lives of every adult on earth suffering from Alzheimer’s. Like my mom, who was living in a special home in Seattle. Without the merger, I’d probably eventually run LoupTeq—and it’s 50,000 global employees—into the ground.
If it weren’t for the research, I’d quit and write for fun. Not the highbrow literary fiction I was working on now—the only kind my father would think counted. I enjoyed reading it, but writing it was killing me. And I dreamed about writing what I used to as a kid. Scifi. Tech thrillers. Books that were fun.
But I wasn’t fun—that was for damn fucking sure.
I scrubbed my face into my hands. I should have gone back to Seattle months ago. I should have burned this fucking manuscript and chalked it up to a social experiment. Or an anti-social experiment. But no, I was here, trying to work out my goddamned father issues in a pool house by writing the Great American Novel.
I yanked the paper out of the machine with a whir and crumpled it up, tossing it at the wall. It hit it too softly for my liking. I kicked the trash bin for good measure.
I’d turned my desk to face the kitchen after she’d started setting up. I thought maybe I needed to have her in my line of sight for the words to come. But I realized that last week she’d been in the bathroom, where I couldn’t see her, and still the words had come. Right after she’d yelled at me, too.
That was it.
Last week I’d been fired up when I sat back at the typewriter.
I needed to talk to her. I needed her to… get pissed at me. Or make me pissed off. Something like that.
A moment later I was standing at the island, looking at her ass sticking out of the cupboard.
This wasn’t why I’d bashed the shit out of my pipes, was it? I’d done it to get her back here because her presence had somehow magicked words out of me. Not because I wanted to fuck her.
Because right now, I really wanted to fuck her.
I turned and cleared my throat, loudly.
She didn’t hear me.
“Hello,” I barked.
