His Terms - Jenika Snow Page 0,2

this. She knew he had gone through four other secretaries before Sorcha had started working for him. So, it wasn’t just her, because this man brought infuriating to a whole other level.

“You…” She bit her tongue, and stood, staring at him as hard as he was staring at her. He cocked a dark eyebrow, clearly waiting for her to finish.

“Something on your mind, Miss Case?”

She bit her tongue when she saw him smirk ever so slightly.

“Just do your job, or I’ll find someone who can.” He turned from her before she could respond, and slammed the doors shut behind him.

“You asshole,” she said under her breath and sat back down. Thank God it was Friday, because her friend, Cora, was taking her out for a good, hard drink.

2

Rian had heard Sorcha call him an asshole, and he couldn’t help but grin despite his anger. The woman infuriated him, but not because she was incompetent. She was the opposite, and always had everything in order. To be honest Rian had never found a secretary that picked up as fast as Sorcha had. But he didn’t want to think of Sorcha Case as anything more than what she was, because wanting her in his bed, under him, and his cock buried in her curvy little body was not a line he even wanted to cross.

What annoyed him was this attraction he had toward her. He knew he was a difficult man, but that was how he had gotten to where he was in life. A weak man wouldn’t own and run what he did at only thirty-seven, and he wasn’t about to change to appease anyone. He walked over to his floor to ceiling window and stared at the bustling city of New York below. Sorcha had been working for him for less than a year, and even though he had been romantically involved with a few of his secretaries in the past, that had always led to disastrous situations.

Clasping his hands behind his back, he stared at the sight before him. There was an overcast sky, and it matched his fucked-up mood. After some minor drama with some news tabloids he was in a pissy ass mood. The buzzer on his intercom went off, but he didn’t turn around.

“Mr. Hartford, Lawson Trainfore is on line one,” Sorcha said, and when he didn’t respond the line clicked off. He turned and faced the phone, knowing that if his PR rep was calling him this early then it was because of the paper and the article he had read about himself this morning. He sat at his desk and picked up his phone.

“Lawson, hello.”

“Rian, have you see the paper this morning?”

Rian breathed out and rested his head against the back of his chair. “Yes, unfortunately.”

“Seems like another one of your past lovers leaked incriminating information about you.”

He rubbed his eyes. “There were only a few that were disgruntled, Lawson, and that wasn’t because I was an asshole to them. They knew what I wanted, and that a relationship was not in the future for us. It is hardly my fault that they grew attached after only a few nights of sex.”

“Rian, I’m not worried that Miss Virginia Harrison is claiming that you made her ass so red she couldn’t even sit down for several days after that…”

Rian grinned.

Lawson cleared his throat. “Well, I won’t get into the specifics, but having your name splashed across the newspaper because you like spanking your sexual partners with fervor is bad for your image.” So Rian liked a little smack on the ass of the women he fucked here and there. It wasn’t like he was a fiend for it, and he certainly didn’t do it every time he had sex. “Maybe I shouldn’t have spanked the ass of Senator Harrison’s daughter, but she was so prim and proper that I couldn’t help myself.”

Lawson started speaking about technicalities, and Rian looked out his window again. “Anything I did with any of my sexual partners in the past, present, or in the future, was and always will be consensual. I only skimmed the front page, but is Miss Harrison claiming otherwise?” Maybe Rian should have cared more, or been more concerned that yet another one of his past partners had gone to the media. But he wasn’t. This wasn’t the first time someone he had fucked had come out and said what they had done, and most likely wouldn’t be the last either.

“No, she says everything you two