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“Yet you married my father for exactly that.”
Heat crackled up her spine. “So what if I did? Would you even care?”
“Brutal honesty.” He cracked a thin smile. “How refreshing, coming from you. I was beginning to think you were still the consummate liar.”
“Unless you’re a twin or can astral project, I’m not the only one. I saw you coming back last night. You looked like you were meeting someone.”
“So youwerespying on me.”
“I thought watching was your thing.”
It was the first time she’d hinted, even obliquely, at the power she held over him. The power to make him want; power that she could deny. His mouth tightened and she caught a glimpse of whatever lurked behind that controlled façade. The passionate violence of it scared her.
If she was a consummate liar, he was a feral brute.
“My, my,” he said, taking a slow step closer. “What sharp teeth you have.”
Donni hugged the box tighter to her chest.
But then he strode past her to the fridge, leaving her breathing in lime and vetiver and something a little too sharp to be fear. “What are you doing?” she asked, not even bothering to hide her irritation as he began removing things from her fridge.
“Making pasta salad. Want to watch?”
“Look,” she said. “If you’re going to stay here, there’s going to have to be some rules. No more sneaking around, no going through my things, no manipulating me,” she ticked off on her fingers, “and no more living in the past.”
“Are you sure you know what you want?” He filled one of the stove pots with water. “You asked me to stay. And then you asked me to fuck you. You called me begging for my money and now you’re telling me that you don’t. Now you’re throwing up walls in the house you’re supposed to be saving and claim to care nothing about.” A rough laugh escaped him. “Who are you?”
“Stop trying to shrink me.” She hated the desperation in her voice. “Just because you’re staying here, that doesn’t give you the right to run roughshod over me.”
That made him look up, a speculative gleam in his eyes. She imagined how many women her age would be delighted to have a younger man cooking for them, still half-dressed from a wild night, with the sleepy gaze of a jaguar. Maybe that had been his intent, coming down like this.
Maybe she wasn’t the only actor here.
“I don’t want us to be enemies,” he said unexpectedly. It tore at her a little, how vulnerable he looked then. “I’d like for us to be friends.”
“Friends? We can’t be friends. Friends don’t demand sex for favors. They don’t try to justify their obsession by painting it as some higher purpose. I’m your whore, Rafe. If you see us as enemies, I’m afraid that’s all on you.”
“You’re not my whore,” he said. “Iwantto take care of you.”
“For a price.”
“Yes, well, you claim to be above wanting money now, so I don’t think you need to worry about that. Besides, I can’t imagine my price is all that much higher than my father’s.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why I married your father is none of your business.”
“You should know better than anyone that it’s not easy to give up the past. Hatred can be as addictive as love is, and unlike love, it’s self-sustaining.”
“So you’re a poet, as well as a therapist.”
“I’m a lot of things to a lot of people. But I might be a poet for you.” He slid a knife from the block so smoothly that it sang. “Can I borrow the Mercedes?”
Jarred, she said distantly, “Why? You have the Prius.”
“The rental’s almost up. I only had it for two weeks. I was planning on driving it to one of those lots for pick-up and then taking a taxi home. I still have a day or so on the lease, but I want them to have plenty of time to send the photos over. Bureaucracies, you know?”
“Where are you dropping it off?”
He arched an eyebrow. “Here.”
