AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She sounded calm, but he saw that she hadn’t put on her shoes.
“You’re not ready.”
Catarina’s face was a blank. “Ready for what?”
“Look, it’s barely seven in the morning. That makes it a little early for riddles. Maybe things start early in your school, but—”
“It isn’t my school. Actually, it hasn’t been for a long time. I should have left there three years ago.”
Jake dug his hands into his trouser pockets and rocked back a little on his heels.
“Strange. I could have sworn I collected you there just yesterday.”
“You ‘collected’ me,” she said, “because my guardian wouldn’t let me leave.”
“You’ve got that wrong. It was your parents’ will that wouldn’t let you leave.”
“Put it any way you like. I was kept there, enrolled in useless courses—”
“Sewing,” he said, with a little smile.
An arrogant smile, but she wasn’t going to let him rattle her. She’d considered her options carefully and reached a simple conclusion. If you behaved like a supplicant, you were treated like one. The only chance she had of getting Jake Ramirez to listen to reason was to stop pleading for understanding and start demanding it.
“The point is,” she said calmly, “those days are over.”
“The days you studied sewing?”
“Do you think this is a joke, Ramirez? I assure you, it isn’t. It’s deadly serious to me.”
Ramirez? Jake thought. Hadn’t he told her to call him Jake? Not that he gave a damn; what she called him was her business. And hell, no, this wasn’t a joke. This was a bad dream and he was only trying to make the best of it.
All he wanted was her cooperation and, okay, maybe he wasn’t encouraging it with this little session of give-and-take, but who was she kidding with this lady-of-the-manor routine? Was he supposed to be impressed?
The only thing that did impress him was the way she looked. Her hair, loose and wild, had seemed a disaster area last night. Now that she’d given up trying to tame it, it was…
Okay. Sexy was the wrong word. Pretty. Her hair was pretty. Yeah. That was lots better.
So were her eyes, snapping with anger. Her cheeks, flushed with color. That dress, that god-awful dress, was still ugly, still wrinkled, still the garment of a child—except now he knew it concealed the body of a woman. And what was he doing, thinking about that again?
She was a kid. An innocent. A virgin straight out of a convent school.
She was his ward. His defiant, furious, impossible ward, and, yes, all right, his gorgeous and sexy-as-hell ward, too. So what? None of that changed the fact that he was stuck with her.
No way was she going to make him out to be a monster.
“You’re right,” he said briskly. “This isn’t funny, and it isn’t a situation you can talk your way out of.” He moved past her, grabbed her satchel, then picked up his case. “We have a plane to catch.”
“No.”
“Look at it this way. The sooner we get to New York, the sooner we can get started on ending this relationship.”
“We can end it right now,” Catarina said quickly. “All you have to do is—”
“You’ve got that wrong. All you have to do is behave yourself.”
Catarina stared at Jake. His face was stony, his eyes cold. Whatever little game he’d been playing with her the past few minutes was over.
Panic coiled in her belly.
