She didn’t pause to consider her answer. “Because dating someone would imply me meeting someone dateable.”
I felt myself wanting to smile again, so I tried to stop it. My smiles seemed to irritate the hell out of her. “And this is unlikely?”
Her shoulder lifted. “Only if you take my history into account.”
I shifted in my chair, constructing a follow-up question that wouldn’t earn me another glare she seemed to have no qualms about firing my way.
That’s when she tipped her head down the bar. “That woman’s still staring at you.”
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t even remember the color of that woman’s hair. “Probably wondering if I’m going to take her up on her offer.”
“Her offer of sexual relations?” She was teasing me—I could tell from the way one corner of her mouth was twitching.
“That woman had more than sexual relations in mind.” When she lifted a brow at me, I continued, perhaps against my better judgment. “She would have let me flip through every last page of the sexual kinkery handbook, and she would be an eager and willing participant.”
Her throat moved when she swallowed, then the faintest color spread up her neck. If she didn’t have such fair skin, I never would have noticed. I’d rattled her. Teased her right back to the point of making her blush.
Good. My blood heated with the acknowledgement that she wasn’t as immune to me as she let on.
“Yeah, well, out in the lobby”—she stuck her thumb over her shoulder—“there was a guy who was all over me. You should have heard the things he said he wanted to do to me.” She kept stabbing her thumb over her shoulder, and I had to take a drink to keep from smiling again. “Yeah. Totally wanted to do . . . things . . . to me.”
She didn’t shift. Her eyes didn’t dart away. She didn’t bite her lip. She didn’t give any sign that she was concocting the whole story, though I guessed she was. Not because I didn’t doubt some prick would hit on her wherever she went, but because she was innocent. I could tell. I’d gotten the faintest hint of it from our correspondence, but I could see it clearly with her sitting right in front of me.
“What kind of things?” I set my empty glass down and scooted to the edge of the chair.
She shot me the faintest glare. She knew I was calling her out on lying. “Things.”
Now I was thinking about how many men she’d been with. What way she liked to be taken. What she sounded like when she . . .
And shit. What is happening to me?
Thinking with my dick was off-limits, especially with this woman. I couldn’t mess this up. I couldn’t let things like urges and emotions get in the way.
She was the one who was going to help me earn my freedom in the country I loved. The place that was home.
Stop thinking about her mouth and her sexual preferences and get your fucking head in the game, Max. This whole arrangement needed to be approached from as emotionless of a standpoint as possible. This was a business deal and should be treated like all business deals—with confidence and cool removal.
“Well, I promise I won’t do ‘things’ to you,” I told her, giving my inner sexual deviant a chance to speak up. He didn’t, and I felt my whole body relax. There were plenty of women in the world. Plenty of them willing to share their body with me for a night. This woman could not be one of them.
“Like you even could do ‘things’ to me,” she huffed, gracing me with a look that led me to believe she thought me quite the Quasimodo.
“Believe me.” I waited for her eyes to meet mine again. When they did, the green in them actually looked molten. I didn’t blink as I stretched closer. “If I wanted to—if I put my mind to it, my body into action—I could do all kinds of things to you.”
Her face remained composed. But her body gave her away. Her chest started rising and falling faster, and that was when I knew she wasn’t immune to me at all. In fact, she was so not immune to me that was the whole reason for this cold act.
It made my chest move a little faster too. It made something else react. She was drawn to me in some primal way like I was drawn to her. Humanity had been trying to ascribe a word to this kind of attraction since its inception, settling on terms such as fate or soul mates, but that was a load of bull. There was no such thing as being fated to be together. No such thing as soul mates. I’d seen enough of life, lived enough of it, to know better.
Not that any of that attraction mattered since neither of us could act on it. Desire was natural, but that didn’t mean we had to give in to it. It didn’t mean we ever could.
She had been well on her way to hating me before I let my worse judgment get in the way. I needed to let her hate me. A lot. She needed to despise me or else I’d fuck this up. She needed to hate me for this marriage to work.
Those green molten eyes of hers narrowed at me even more. “Not before I could do things to you. Like kneeing your balls into your stomach.”
Good. She was back to the start. She was back to hating me.
What had I gotten myself into?
Not that it really mattered because it wasn’t like I could get myself out of it. Consequences of having a crapload of debt and little-to-no cash flow.
Maximilian Hans Xavier Sturm. I’d just met the arrogant asshole, had a total of one conversation that included actual verbalized words instead of the typed version, and I already knew him better than I’d known most people.