Grievous (Wanted Men #5) - Nancy Haviland Page 0,10

you’re in a bad place right now.”

He held her eyes for a moment, then, totally throwing her, made two complete circles around her, looking her up and down. It was a demonstration meant to intimidate. She didn’t let it.

“I understand it may take you a few minutes to process the turn of events, Yasmeen. But in the future, I recommend you refrain from threatening me. I am not in the mood to deal with tantrums, but if I must, I am fully prepared to take you over my knee and spank your beautiful ass into submission. If there are witnesses to that event, all the better. Maybe then you will think twice about trying to assert your will where it is not welcome.”

Okay. She was intimidated. The lump rising in her throat got bigger as her lack of options grew smaller. She stood there, holding her useless phone and her cheap leather bag, but rather than fall apart, as was her right, she forced herself to think. She took a slow breath, relaxed her twitching muscles, and brought rational thought into the equation. Fine. He wasn’t in his right mind. She knew that. His brother’s death had fucked him up. She would go along with this for an hour or so, excuse herself to use the restroom, find the goddamn phone, and not tell him she was calling the police. He couldn’t spank her, and when the authorities arrived at his door, she and her furious ass would be taken into the nearest town and away from—

“Oh, and I should warn you,” he added conversationally. “If you do not settle into your role right this minute, I will send you home.” He slipped his hands into his pockets and bent slightly at the waist. “But before you arrive on U. S. soil, you will be blacklisted in the art world. I will make it so not even your local graffiti artists will want to associate with you.”

All hope of escape died right there. Predictably, he’d targeted her vulnerability. Her passion. Her life. He’d gone for the one thing he knew was important to her, because that was how he operated. Men like him didn’t fuck around with weak or-elses. They threatened the very thing their prey would do anything to protect.

How could she have felt sympathy for this man? How could she have thought she liked him?

She took a split second to seriously consider tossing her pride away and falling to her knees at his feet. She would beg him not to destroy what had taken her so long to build. Respectability. A career she loved and felt proud of. One that brought her self-worth because it was the beginning of a stable, comfortable living that she was solely responsible for. Where some used the words as an expression, in her case, they were nothing but the truth; her job was her life. Aside from her few friends, she had nothing else—

“Loki!” she gasped. “Oh, my God! Lucian, I have to get home.”

“The feline my staff found in your apartment is being taken care of.”

Possessive flames flared in her belly. “By who?”

“My staff.”

“No. He’s mine. I take care of him. No one else. Why? Because he’s mine.” If she was possessive of her job, she was obsessive about her rescue kitty. Her god of mischief loved her almost as much as she loved him. Or, at least that’s what she chose to believe. “What was your staff doing in my home? Going through my things,” she spat, pointing at the bag in Sorin’s hand. She didn’t have anything to hide, but those strangers had invaded her private sanctuary! “Who the hell do you think you are to steamroll into my life after two years and take over without so much as—?”

Her words choked off, and she stumbled back when he stepped into her with a dark, hungry expression swallowing everything else on his face. He caught her by the elbow before she could totally humiliate herself by falling on her ass.

“I cannot decide which I find more attractive; how possessive you are of what you consider yours or your lack of fear as you gear up to tell me off.”

She clenched her fists and jerked her arm away. “Neither are meant to be attractive. They just are.”

“Yes, draga. They are.”

She cringed as he misunderstood. “I meant, they exist.”

“This greed over what belongs to you; where does it come from?”

She sealed her lips, not about to share that she’d grown up