about her career. She didn’t need to be rich. She didn’t care about wearing fancy clothes or living in splendor. She wanted safety and security, but what was safer or more secure than the arms of this man? She gave half her money to her sister anyway.
She froze and stiffened in his arms. Her sister. How could she forget the one thing that mattered most? She could take risks with her own life, but she couldn’t take risks with Kelsey’s—or Katie’s.
“Lane, stop.” She pulled away, but his arms were like iron, holding her like he’d never let her go. She looked up into his face and saw tenderness in his eyes, but there was determination there too—the kind of determination that could glue him to the back of a bucking bull for eight seconds.
She put her hands on his chest and shoved—hard. He let her go, but he didn’t step back. He still stood close, looking down at her with equal parts tenderness and amusement.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess this isn’t appropriate office behavior.” He gave her a charming, hangdog look from under his brows, then swabbed at her smudged lipstick with the pad of his thumb. “I’ll try to be good.”
She closed her eyes for a second, marshaling her defenses against the feel of his rough fingertip against her lips. She leaned back against the desk again, but there was no gripping the edge this time. She’d studied the body language of successful women and how to radiate authority, and clinging to the furniture was not the way to do it.
Folding her arms over her chest, she crossed her feet at the ankles and tilted her head, arrowing her brows down over her eyes in an expression she hoped was confident and commanding. Her heart was hammering double-time in her chest, but he didn’t have to know that.
“Lane.” She put a frigid bite into her tone. “I’m sorry, but I think you misinterpreted what happened between us.”
He stilled. “Really? What part of ‘You rip off my clothes and I’ll rip off yours’ did I get wrong?”
“I did not rip your clothes off.”
“You came damn close.”
He was right. Lane one, Sarah zero for this conversation. But she continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
“I know you’re used to getting what you want, but I think the other girls have spoiled you.” She tossed her hair and shifted slightly, propping one hip up on the desk and allowing herself a small, sardonic smile. “I think you overestimated my…”
“Enthusiasm?”
She cleared her throat. “I was going to say you overestimated my feelings.”
“Which are what?”
She lifted one shoulder in what she hoped was an eloquent shrug that precluded the need for words.
“Sarah, don’t bullshit me. You felt it too.”
“If you’re trying to woo me with your eloquence, you should leave out the references to animal excrement.”
“Like you never heard the word bullshit before. Like you never dished it out. Hell, you’re shoveling it on now, and you know it.”
He was right. She hated this side of herself, prim and proper and phony as hell. But it was her best defense.
She couldn’t look at him, so she pretended to study her nails—but her hand was shaking. She quickly folded her arms again. “It was fun, but it’s done. Come on. People don’t fall in love in one night.”
“Yeah, they do. I’ve seen it happen. A guy meets the right woman, and boom. It’s over.”
“Well, it’s not over for me.” She walked to the door, shoulders back, and held it open.
He stayed right where he was.
“Lane, please. My career is important to me, and I’m not going to ditch it for a man.”
“I’m not asking you to ditch it.”
She clenched her jaw to keep her chin from trembling. What was wrong with her? It had just been a fling. If she hadn’t deprived herself for so long, it wouldn’t have felt like such a cataclysmic event. She was being such a girl.
“How could I stay on here and date the boss’s brother?”
“Grit and determination. Seems to me you’ve got plenty of both.”
“Yes I do, and I’m using it now. A relationship with you is out of the question.”
The tenderness had completely faded from his face. The power that had seemed strong and comforting the night before now seemed almost threatening.
“The question is when you’ll let yourself relax and have a life.”
“That’s my decision,” she said. “The only question I have is whether you’ll break my confidence.”
Everything rested on that question. She’d just about finished the initial three-month