One mess at a time. Yeah, that was going to happen. He was presently juggling close to a dozen messes. This one just happened to be his pet project.
She rose to her feet, sophisticated perfection dressed in a short, navy silk skirt and jacket with a creamy-colored silk blouse beneath. She was buttoned up, composed and disapproving.
“You’re going to have to get your men into social training.” She paced over to his desk, her regal expression a challenge.
“Jess, not right now,” he growled.
Her lips lifted into a condescending smile. “Yes, your plots and schemes are so much more important at the moment.” She braced her hands on his desk and leaned forward. “Tell me, Jonas, what are you going to do when everything and everyone you’ve manipulated backfires on you?”
His brow quirked. That was an interesting scenario.
“Enjoy the battle?” he queried with faint amusement.
A frown snapped between her brows. “This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“Jess, I’ll tell you what, you do your job, the legal mumbo jumbo you enjoy so well, and let me do mine. I won’t tell you how to argue a case and you don’t tell me how to conduct my missions. Agreed?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I can’t wait until you fall.”
“Join the club,” he snorted. “I’m going to start charging for that particular membership. Now, why don’t you get back to covering our ass on that latest strike against the purist camp and I’ll get back to my job.”
“Manipulating people?” She straightened, staring down her aristocratic little nose with haughty disapproval.
“I do it so well.” He grinned. “Can I get back to it now?”
“You do that, Jonas.” Her shark’s smile would have made a lesser man wince. “And I’ll consider your defense in case you get caught. Of course, you could always plead insanity.”
He growled warningly. Not that the rumbling of danger affected Jess in the least. She smiled back at him complacently, turned and sauntered back to the sofa.
Damn woman. Thank God she hadn’t turned out to be his mate; they would have killed each other.
CHAPTER 9
She couldn’t allow him to ever touch her again. She wasn’t going to allow him to touch her again.
What the hell had happened? Since when did Scheme Tallant allow her hormones to drown out her common sense?
The next evening, her head propped on her hand, Scheme watched what had to be the sixth hour of some insane rerun.
Of course it wasn’t any more insane than the urges she was fighting within herself. The need to join Tanner on the couch, to stretch out along his hard body and run her tongue over every inch of his golden flesh.
Instead, she was forcing herself to watching some incurably deranged sitcom.
Gilligan’s Island? It had been ancient even when she was a child. Not that she had ever watched it. Her father hadn’t considered television a productive form of entertainment for his child. But sometimes, at the girls’ academy she had attended, the other students had watched it.
Scheme had managed to drown it out then while she studied. There was nothing to study now. Except Tanner.
He was stretched out on the couch, his feet crossed at the ankles, his arm thrown behind his neck as he watched the show with a quirk on his lips. He was impossibly relaxed despite the obvious hard-on filling out his jeans. Despite the tension building inside her.
“CNN is much more informative,” she finally said, dazed from yet another of Gilligan’s bumbling accidents as well as her own arousal.
“CNN is depressing,” he grunted with a spark of amusement as he kept his gaze on the television. “I’m pretty up on world affairs. And this is my vacation. I don’t watch CNN on vacation.”
“Do you do anything besides watch television while you’re on vacation?” she asked, frustrated. “As long as I’ve been here, I have yet to see you do anything worthwhile.”
“I f**k while I’m on vacation too,” he answered, not taking his eyes from the television. “Want to provide that little entertainment for me? We had fun with it last night.”
She glowered back at him.