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She gulped, hoping he couldn’t hear it.
“Do you know what my job is?”
How was this relevant? “Um . . . you’re a rancher?”
He snorted. “Not that. What is my job when it comes to our arrangement?”
“Well, I imagine, is it to keep me alive?”
“I keep you alive. What’s your job?”
“To feed your brothers?”
“Jesus, she still doesn’t get it,” he muttered to himself.
“There’s no need to be rude.”
He narrowed his gaze. “Didn’t see the attitude before. Couldn’t understand how you’d survived what you had, but it’s there. But there’s one thing you haven’t learned.”
“What’s that?”
“Your job is to obey me. I keep you alive. You obey me. Got it?”
What she got was that he was an ass. An arrogant jerk. Handsome, sure. But that didn’t make up for him being a cretin. And he thought she had attitude? He should look in the mirror. Not that she had the balls to say that to his face.
“Got it, Calamity Jane?”
She ground her teeth together. “Got it.”
“You’re gonna stay in here and you’re gonna stay quiet. You can’t do that, tell me now and I’ll get my handcuffs out and cuff you to the desk.”
She looked over at the enormous desk that probably weighed five times what she did. Knowing what he was, she probably wouldn’t be the first woman to be handcuffed to it.
She wanted to tell herself that the hot poker that fired through her gut was disgust. But it wasn’t, it was jealousy. She did not want to be jealous of any woman who had been with the macho, maddening Alec Malone.
“Don’t think the cops will be too happy to find me handcuffed to your desk,” she pointed out.
“They’d never find you.” He turned his back on her, as though completely confident she would toe the line like a good little girl.
Which, unfortunately, was exactly what she was going to do.
“They would if I yelled,” she muttered, not exactly meaning him to hear.
“What makes you think I wouldn’t gag you as well?” he called back. Then he opened the door and turned to grin at her. An actual grin. One that even reached his eyes, that turned them from hard and cold into melt-in-your-mouth chocolate. “And with my reputation, babe, anyone finds you bound and gagged in my office, they’re gonna think you want to be there.”
He left. Shutting the door quietly behind him. And she was left standing there with absolutely no comeback to that. She was so totally out of her league.
She slumped down onto the leather sofa and looked around her. She started to feel a bit better as she realized that while she might have just been told to stay out of sight, like a naughty child not allowed to go to the adult’s party, she’d also been left, alone, in the most interesting room in the house.
She shouldn’t. It was wrong. It was an invasion of privacy.
But when was she ever going to have an opportunity to snoop like this again?
Twenty minutes later, she was lying on the sofa on her back, staring at the ceiling when the door to the office opened. She didn’t even turn her head as she felt him approach.
He stood next to the sofa. There was silence. A lot of silence.
Aw, shit. She hated silence. Say something smart. Something that will show him you don’t give a shit about him and his orders.
