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The longer she stared at me with her vulnerable eyes, the less relaxed I was anyway. I wasn’t the man she was looking for. I didn’t want to be.
Liar.
“Are you close?” She skated her nail over my collarbone and I nearly hissed at the renewed blood flow in my dick. Some parts of me might be searching for sense when it came to Grace Copeland. My cock wasn’t one of them.
“Keep that up and I will be.”
“What?” She frowned, glanced at her hand then gave herself a little shake. “Oh. Sorry. Really? Your collarbone is an erogenous zone?”
“It is when you’re stretched out on top of me.” I spread my legs enough for her to fall into the gap between them and my growing erection nudged her hip. Her lips parted on a sigh.
There, that was better. Keep things in the arena where they were supposed to be. Work. Fucking. Maybe even a kind of uneasy friendship. But no more.
Nothing personal. There couldn’t be.
“Are you close?” she asked again, a moment later. “You and Sebastian.” She slid her gaze back to her finger tracing over my skin. She understood my diversionary tactics all too well. “You and your father.”
“My father is dead. God rest his stupid black soul.”
Her head snapped up. “How can you say that about your own father?”
“Easily. He was a stupid motherfucker who played with things he shouldn’t and got his head blown off. It was no kind of loss, not for any of us. Did you miss the part where he screwed around with his cleaning lady while he was married? That wasn’t the first time either. He did it other times too, but not all of the women got pregnant. That was his MO. He hired women to work for him, and he took advantage—”
I fell silent, but she was already shaking her head. “Don’t. That’s not like this. I came to work for you under a ruse. I never intended to get a job in your company. Never intended to like it. To love it.” The heat thrumming through her voice didn’t do anything but piss me off. I didn’t need her to defend me about anything.
She didn’t know it yet, but I’d done things that were indefensible. I was my father’s son. As much as I might hate myself for it, the facts were the facts.
“How do you know it was the first time?” I asked softly, deliberately pushing her away. She was too warm, and it was too easy for me to curl into her, to confess my whole sordid life story to her in the waning hours of the night. Because I had this sick idea she would understand and not judge. She should be judging me. I didn’t want her viewing my actions in anything but the correct light.
An asshole I might be, but I would never pretend to be someone else.
“I don’t.” Her voice, her expression, hell, even her body had cooled. But she wasn’t moving away. “I don’t know much about you when it comes right down to it, now do I?”
“That’s for the best. For your own good.”
“Yet I let you tie me up a little while ago. Sounds an awful lot like I trust you, which makes me a colossal idiot, huh? If not for the fact that you played my white knight just a few hours ago. You shot a man, and you were protecting me. Lie to yourself all you want. Don’t lie to me, Blake.”
I already have. So many times. That it was getting harder to do meant nothing other than I needed space. She wasn’t the only one who was blurring the lines of our arrangement, and it had to stop.
“He was in my house. Mine, Grace. I might fuck you, I might enjoy the hell out of it, and I might even let you tie up my dick because it gets off your kinky little soul. But don’t mistake what I am. What this is.” I nudged her off me and rolled off the other side of the bed. Staring at the wall, I said words that ripped my throat as I uttered them. “You were my assistant. Now you’re not even that.”
Then I walked out of the room.
It was only when I stepped out on the porch to grab the morning paper that I realized I hadn’t told her about the class. More important than how I’d met her grandmother, that class had been how I’d met Grace. How I’d fallen in love with glass.
And I couldn’t ever tell her, because then she would know how hard it was becoming for me to separate the two.
Four
I expected her to leave. Any other woman would have, probably while throwing a few pieces of expensive statuary at my head. I wouldn’t have blamed her either. I’d been cruel, moments after she’d cried over her grandmother.
What kind of man was I?
Oh, that’s right. I was a blood-thirsty, heartless, ruthless bastard from the streets who’d fought and clawed my way out of them. I wasn’t going to forget my roots and play the role of Grace’s white knight. Not now, not ever. I might delude myself when I needed to come that she belonged to me. That when I had a gun in my hand and her behind me that I would die to keep her safe. But in the light of day, she was just a woman, and I was just a man surrounded by the scattered pieces of a family who barely even acknowledged me and a company that I’d sacrificed everything for to create. I wouldn’t be diverted again.
When she came downstairs around lunchtime in just a short silky robe with her hair loose and wet from the shower—apparently she enjoyed bathing more than once a day—I didn’t even look away from the financial reports scrolling on the TV. She’d probably come to tell me she was leaving, and I had no intention of reacting one way or another. She was free to go. I was having my security people head to the Marblehead house today to fit the property with a state-of-the-art system, so beyond gathering the rest of her things, she wouldn’t be in danger since she would no longer have free lodging there. Her days of sneaking onto the property were over. As difficult as it was, she needed to let go of the past.
So did I.
