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She leaned forward all of a sudden, losing her wariness, all business now. Her violet eyes were focused very intently on him. ‘Would you pay me? Once I earned back for the car? Could I have a proper job?’
Something shifted in Cristiano’s gut. Something that, again, he was intimately familiar with.
She was lovely. And he could imagine her looking at him just like that, with a pretty flush to her pale cheeks and a flame in her eyes and all the beautiful hair spread over his pillow. Hungry for him as he buried himself inside her...
A nice thought, but a thought was what it would stay. She’d never be one of his partners. Apart from the fact that the distance between them in power, money and just about everything else could not have been more vast, she was also much younger than he was.
And he was betting she’d either had some bad experiences with men or she avoided men completely.
Again, dealing with all that sounded like work, and he tried to avoid work whenever he could. He didn’t want anything hard, anything difficult, and he avoided complications like the plague.
This smallgatitawas certainly a complication, but he found he was willing to expend a bit of effort on figuring out why she was so familiar to him. After all, it had been a while since he’d let himself be interested in something other than physical pleasure. It certainly couldn’t hurt.
‘Do you want a job?’ he asked, teasing her a little just because he could.
‘Yes, of course I want a job.’ Her gaze narrowed further. ‘How much do you pay?’
A good question—though he was sure she couldn’t afford to turn anything down.
‘My staff are the best and I pay them accordingly,’ he said, and named a sum that made her pretty eyes go round.
‘That much?’ All her earlier wariness and suspicion had dropped away. ‘You really pay people that much just to clean your house?’
‘It’s a very big house.’
‘And you’d pay me that?’
It wasn’t a lot of money—at least it wasn’t to him. But for her it was clearly a fortune. Then again, he suspected that a five-euro note left on the street would be a fortune for her.
‘Yes, I’d pay you that.’ He paused, studying her. ‘Where do you live? And what are you doing on the streets at two in the morning?’
Instantly her expression closed up, the light disappearing from her face, the shutters coming down behind her eyes. She sat back on the seat, putting distance between them and glancing out of the window.
‘I should go home. My...mother will be worried.’
Which didn’t answer his direct question but answered the ones he hadn’t voiced. Because she was lying. Her slight hesitation made him pretty certain she didn’t have a mother and neither did she have a home.
‘I think not,’ he said, watching her. ‘I think you should come directly back to my house and spend the night there. Then you can start work first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘I don’t want to come back to your house.’
‘Like I said, I have quarters for my staff and there will be more than enough room.’
‘But I—’
‘There will be no argument.’ Because he’d decided now, and once he made a decision he stuck to it. ‘You have two choices. Either you come back to my house tonight or you spend the night in a police cell.’
‘That’s not much of a choice,’ she said angrily.
‘Too bad. You were the one who decided spray-painting my car was a good idea, so these are the consequences.’ He liked her arguing with him, he realised. Probably too much—which was an issue. ‘So what’s it to be,gatita?’
She folded her arms. ‘Why do you keep calling me that?’
‘It means kitten in Spanish.’
‘I’m not a kitten.’
‘You’re small and feral and you tried to scratch me—of course you’re a kitten. And a wild one at that.’
