Mine to win.
Mine to seduce.
Mine to ruin.
I burymy head in the books for the rest of the night to keep my mind from straying to what’s going to happen later. But the books aren’t working, so I’m faintly relieved when a knock comes at the door.
Remo doesn’t wait for an answer before stepping in.
“How are the bids coming along?” he asks, cutting across me to the list on the screen. A slow smile spreads across his face.
“She put her name down,” he points out, unnecessarily.
“I can read.”
“Thinks she’ll be able to pay off that asshole’s debt in cash?”
I don’t look up from the contract I’m preparing in readiness for my little pet. “I expect so.”
Remo steps further into the room, folding his arms. “Why is your name beside it?”
I don’t respond because he has a brain.
“You never touch your girls.”
The words on the pages in front of me begin to swim. Remo, more than any of my brothers, knows what I went through after I dropped out of school. He understands my perfectly rational hatred for Pfeiffer McAllister better than anyone.
“Who says I’m going to touch her?”
He lowers himself to a chair opposite and crosses an ankle over his knee. There’s a warning note in his words.
“If your feelings have changed?—”
“They haven’t,” I bark.
He’s used to frayed tempers in our family and he doesn’t flinch. In fact, he thrives on dark edges.
“She thinks being selected is her ticket out of here. That she gets some semblance of control over this situation. I want to make it crystal clear that this is not her fucking show. She’s undermycontrol now. She only gets to leave when I say she can leave.”
“Does she know who you are yet?” he asks quietly.
I pause, chewing over the question. “No.”
“So, she may not mind you touching her,” he says, a curl to his lips.
A flare of heat ruptures my chest, whipping my breath. “I don’t want to touch her.” I realise it’s a lie when I have to force it out through gritted teeth. “I just don’t want anyone else to.”
Remo watches me silently, a world of opinions on the tip of his tongue. But he surprises me with his one, sharp, targeted piece of advice.
“Be careful, brother. That sounds like jealousy. And jealousy is a dangerous thing. It makes men start wanting things they were never meant to have.”
I don’t look up again until he’s left the room, but the tightness across my shoulders lingers, telling me it might be too late for that.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pfeiffer
If I pressmy fingertips to my breast bone I can feel the throbbing of my heart. I was already on edge coming into this evening knowing—or not really knowing, to be more accurate—what I was walking into.
