AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Because he could tell himself that what was storming around inside him was temper. Sheer outrage. That he was tensed up and ready to fight, that was all. But in all his years of martial arts training to prepare for such moments, one part of him had never been tense. And yet somehow, it was his sex that felt the neediest in the wake of Annika’s performance.
All of that required him to stay where he was, seething and furious, until he got a hold of himself.
Only then could he go back into the conference room and attempt to salvage his meeting from her pink-planted wreckage.
When he got back to Tribeca that evening, Ranieri’s mood was precarious. He’d managed to negotiate the deal he wanted, but with a bit more in the way of concessions than he normally allowed.
It was entirely Annika’s fault.
He nodded at the doorman, then strode to his private elevator and tried to prepare himself for the woman who had not simply disrupted his morning meeting—in an epic fashion—but had haunted him the rest of the day. He’d kept thinking he could smell that faint scent, all hers. He’d kept remembering the feel of her body so close to his when he’d had that arm wrapped around her.
Ranieri had been distracted. He was never distracted.
At least he could take some solace in the fact that she was in no way comfortable in his home. Or so he assumed from the stiff way she moved around in it, always acting as if it was a great sacrifice on her part to live in one of the most sought-after addresses in the city.
She’d lived here a week exactly now, he thought as the elevator rose at its sedate pace, when he had never intended to cohabitate with anyone. In the past it had always been clear to him that was necessary to cut ties with his various mistresses when they’d made too many noises about wanting to move in, stay over, clear a little space for their things, and other such slippery slopes that led straight to all the places he did not wish to go.
But Bennett Schuyler had wanted them living together within a week, so here they were.
He could admit, when he got past the enduring fury of the plant incident earlier, that Annika had thus far been a perfectly reasonable roommate. He only saw her, generally speaking, in the evenings when there was an event. Usually it was her stylist he saw first, coming out of the guest suite looking militant. Annika came shortly after, always looking wary when she approached him. Though she always turned in a circle when he bid her do so, usually by spinning his finger in the air.
I certainly hope my latest outfit meets with your approval, she had said the night before, the mildness of her voice belied by the look in her eyes.
You would be no doubt about it if I did not, he had replied.
She either kept to herself or went out of her way to avoid him. He didn’t know which it was, and in truth, did not care. His staff kept him informed of her whereabouts and whatever they did not know, the tabloids were all over. Between the two sources, he knew that Annika had to battle a scrum of cameras every time she left his loft and every time she made her way back up to the Upper East Side to that museum of hers. Where she spent all day doing whatever it was she did, before returning to the loft in time for the evening event they normally had to attend.
If all marriages were so convenient and undemanding, perhaps Ranieri would not be so opposed to the very idea of the institution.
But he knew better. Marriage was not a good bet in his family. Not a one that he could think of in generations had lasted. His grandparents had remained married until their deaths, but had spent the bulk of their years living apart.The secret to happiness, his grandfather had told him, laughing uproariously, as prideful as ever.
Ranieri was cursed with the same pride as the rest of them. But he liked to win. Left to his own devices, he never would have married. It was a bad bet. He never would have started something he was reasonably certain would end badly. That had always seemed to him the very opposite of winning.
Annika made him want, a little too badly, to stop caring about things like pride, winning, and everything that wasn’t that better-than-vanilla scent.
He thought he might be more furious about that than the dahlia.
Tonight they had no events to attend. He hoped that would mean that Annika had locked herself away, as well she should. If he were her, he would be trembling in fear about what he might do to her here. Far, far away from any outside eyes.
The elevator doors opened up directly into his loft, and he had only taken a few steps inside before he stopped short. And realized that Annika had not taken the wiser course, complete with piteous trembling, as she should have done.
He looked around, trying to make sense of what he saw. But he couldn’t. There were...thingseverywhere. Disrupting the clean, stark modern lines he preferred. He moved toward the nearest one, and picked it up, scowling down at it as he held it in his palm.
He was not mistaken.
The infernal woman had covered almost every surface in his home with these...figurines.
His mind did not want to make sense of them.
They were egregious examples of ceramics gone wrong, some of them plump and round, others lean and hooved. But what they all had in common were the colors. Obnoxiously bright pinks. Offensive purples. Golds and pinks.
She had infested his house with bloodyunicorns.
Still gripping the plump figurine his hand, Ranieri tossed his briefcase aside and stalked off to find her.
She wasn’t in the guest room, or barricaded away in the guest bathroom, the way she would have been if she was at all wise. Though he did notice that the guest room, which had never smelled like much of anything, now held that same damned scent that had been haunting him all day.
He was already growling to himself when he climbed the spiral stair to the rooftop garden that transformed the top of the building into an oasis in the middle of this concrete city. His little taste of the Italian countryside, so far from home. Ranieri usually found it soothing.
