bigger-ass bank account.”
I turned around slowly and leaned against the liquor cart. I raised my drink to my lips and watched her pant and gasp for air, cheeks flushed, brow glistening in the warm glow of my lamps.
“Has anyone told you that you have an attitude problem?” I asked.
The girl threw her head back and shouted at the night’s stars.
“Feel better?” I asked when she’d let it all out.
“Fuck you.”
I watched as she put down her martini glass, tossed my jacket over the back of the couch, dumped my wallet onto the floor from her purse, and spun on her heel.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
Just as she grabbed the handle to my bedroom door, I said, “You’re right, you know.”
The girl stopped, hesitated. My eyes were waiting for her when she glanced over her shoulder at me, her dark gaze half concealed by the curtain of long hair. “What do you mean?”
I gestured about the room. “This, I mean. All this. I didn’t deserve any of it.”
The girl licked her lips and turned just a hair back toward me. I sighed as I swirled an olive around my martini.
“That really eats away at me sometimes,” I said, my voice soft. “People out there struggling and here I am, everything I ever want or need just falling into my lap.”
The girl chewed at her lip, her narrow fingers still half holding onto the handle.
“So you admit it was an act,” she said. “This whole ‘I can teach you to get what you want in the world’ thing.”
I shrugged, still not lifting my gaze to hers. “I saw you at The White Room and I wanted you. There. That’s the truth.”
“And the other woman?”
“A ploy to make you jealous,” I said. “I told her I was filthy rich. I told her who I was. Why else do you think she jumped at the chance of getting with me?”
I glanced up just enough to see the girl had turned to face me, her back fully to my bedroom door. Her hands were heavy at her sides, the defensive posture gone.
“You wanted me?” she asked, the anger gone from her voice as well.
“Yes.”
“You thought you could just take me,” she said. “Take me just like you’ve taken everything else in life?”
I looked up to see her slowly making her way toward me. I admired the sensual swing of her hips as she moved closer, closer.
“You thought you were owed me?” she asked in a low voice.
I said nothing as I watched her eyes turn from deep brown to almost black.
“You thought there’s no way I would say no? Because nobody ever says no to you?”
Her breath quickened as she stopped directly in front of me. She was so close she had to raise her chin to look up at me. Perhaps a robe wouldn’t have been such a bad idea, I realised as blood rushed to my groin. I slipped one arm around her waist and she leaned forward, her breasts pressing earnestly against my chest. She stretched up onto her tiptoes to whisper something in my ear. Her breath was hot like a dry desert wind.
“Well, I’m saying no, asshole.”
Before she could pull away, I quickly whispered something in return into her ear.
“Breakfast.”
She jerked back and her dark eyes looked like black vials of poison. She arched a dark eyebrow. “Breakfast?”
Her words were the rattle of a snake’s tail, low and threatening. I responded by leaning back against the bar cart and sipping my martini.
“We’ll start our lessons at breakfast,” I told her. “You have much to learn, so we must get a good, early start.”
She laughed, but she no longer had the confidence of just moments ago.
“What—what you do mean?” she said, eyes searching mine. “You said there was nothing to learn.”
I grinned. “Look, love. I wanted you to stay. I wanted you to come very, very close,” I explained, brushing my fingers along her arm till she jerked it away angrily. “And I got what I wanted by being exactly who you wanted me to be, a lucky piece of shite who finally admits he doesn’t deserve anything. I told you what you wanted to hear, that life was so, so, so unfair. I did exactly what you watched me do to the woman outside The White Room and you came to me just like she did, like a moth to a fucking flame.”
The sting of a sudden slap stung so deliciously. I drank in the heat like a sip of the