but never one who’s managed to disarm me as much as Sutton Mayfair. That makes him infinitely more dangerous.
Casually he trails two fingers up my calf and back down. “Yes.”
“Because you’ve been poor longer than you’ve been rich.” It’s made him hungry, and I can’t really blame him for that. I’ve known what it was like to be poor, painfully poor, in small, infinitesimal drips. In the space between my mother’s husbands.
“That,” he says, with a faint dip of his head. “And because I don’t underestimate you, Harper.”
I swallow hard, because I’ve been underestimated all my life. Is that why he told me the story about the little boy who everyone underestimated? Suddenly that strikes me as totally unfair. “You didn’t tell a secret about you. You told me a secret about a wild horse.”
A faint smile. “The secret is that I wasn’t the boy with a family and a ranch. I was the one who showed up with bruises. I was the one who tamed Cinnamon.”
“No,” I whisper.
“I told you, Harper. The story had a happy ending.”
Touching him is as natural as breathing, as inevitable as the ache in my chest. Bristles on his jaw brush my palm. “I wish that hadn’t happened to you.”
“Maybe the moral of the story is that I can tame wild animals.” He’s a little mocking, making fun of himself. I’m the one worried that it might be true.
I snatch my hand away. It would be a lie to say I’m not a wild animal, since I’m considering scratching him in response to the ownership in his blue eyes. “I’m not tame.”
There it is again, that warm persistence that has made him rich when he was poor. It earned him enough money and know-how to partner with Christopher, a man who, for all his many faults, is admittedly a business genius. Not yet, he seems to say without words.
And I’m not entirely sure he’s wrong.
The elevator down the hall dings, and in a startled rush I push down my skirt. I expect to see the disgruntled businessman who’s staying in the room beside me or one of the other occupants I haven’t passed yet.
Instead Christopher Bardot steps off the elevator, his dark eyes narrowing on mine immediately, emotions flashing across his face before he manages to put a cold mask over them all. But I saw them. For that brief second I saw jealousy and anger, and something that breaks my heart—hurt.
In front of me Sutton moves much more slowly, getting up as casually as if he had been sitting at dinner, taking the time to straighten his shirt.
Then, impossibly, he runs a thumb across his bottom lip. And presses it between his lips to savor the taste of it. Of me. It’s the most explicit thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and we’re both fully clothed and covered.
Christopher’s eyes flash. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I’m not the kind of girl that men fight over, am I? I didn’t think so, but there’s leashed violence simmering in the air.
“Do you need it spelled out?” Sutton asks in that drawl I’m coming to realize is a sign of danger. The kind of danger that most people don’t expect from a Southern boy.
“What are you doing here?” I demand, because we’re in front of my hotel room. And what the hell does Christopher think, showing up here at night? Embarrassment threatens to strangle me, but I remind myself firmly that I’m a grown woman. I have every right to do what I want… even though I possibly should have been inside the hotel room.
It’s a question of a few feet, so I hold my chin up.
“I came to talk to you,” Christopher says in a low voice.
There’s a small move, barely discernible, the way that Sutton moves to block me. As if protecting me from Christopher. “You can talk tomorrow. At the office.”
“This is personal,” Christopher says, his eyes locked on mine.
He’s waiting for me to send Sutton away, except I’m not sure that’s what I should do.
If that kiss had been only for revenge, only to crack Christopher’s cool veneer, then it already succeeded. But Sutton made it more than that. He made it about me and him, when I didn’t think it was possible for me to desire another man.
“There’s nothing personal between us. You made sure of that. There’s only money between us.”
For all his rough background, Sutton wouldn’t do anything as uncouth as gloat. He doesn’t say a word