“If you lose,” he began in a low voice, still looking at Emma, though he addressed her brother, “You can still have your money. I don’t need it. But you only get it at the end of thirty days. And for those thirty days . . . I get your sister.”
* * *
“You fucking asshole!” Emma shouted at Ben, certain she could be heard all over the building despite the booming bass downstairs and the clamor in the poker room. After his preposterous offer, Damien had given them the use of his office to have it out. Because Ben hadn’t fucking refused right away. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Emma, come on. You like the guy anyway. Why else did you show up here tonight dressed like that?”
“Liz dressed me,” she grumbled, tugging self-consciously at the hem of her dress. “And I don’t like him. Not like that.” It sounded feeble even to her own ears.
“He obviously likes you.” Ben actually began to laugh. “Who woulda thought?”
“Oh, shut up!” She was ready to hurl the first thing she could get her hands on at him. Stab him with one of Damien’s five-hundred-dollar pens or something. These men were horrible, horrible people, playing with others’ lives like fucking pawns. She’d kicked off her shoes and was pacing beside the couch she’d slept on last night while Ben actually perched himself in Damien’s executive chair and spun in lazy circles like a five-year-old.
“I don’t see the big deal,” he said. “He said thirty days. He won’t make it that long, Em. He’ll ship your nagging ass back home long before then. I give it three to five, tops.”
“This is terrible and depraved and—”
“And it’ll save my ass.” Ben straightened the chair and stared at her head on. “Either way it goes. Even if I lose, all he wants is you.”
“All he wants? Did you actually just say to me ‘All he wants is me’? Did you?”
“Calm down. Would it be so bad? What is he, a multimillionaire? You’d probably get a month off work and who knows where he might take you or what you might get to do.”
“I thought you hated him. And now you’re totally fine shipping your sister off with him?”
“You said you know him. Is he a bad guy? Would he mistreat you?”
No, she thought. Nothing like that. She didn’t think. But . . . “It’s the principle, Ben. How could I live with myself after this?”
Ben scoffed. “You poor thing. Give me the chance to jet off with a beautiful millionaire and see if I can live with it.”
“That’s you.”
He shrugged. “I promise you, that’s any man. But it could be you. Living the high life. No one has to know but us. I don’t think anyone heard him. And hey, what the hell is this? We’re talking like I have no chance. I can win this thing, you know.”
She didn’t have much hope of that. If they agreed to these stakes, the deal was as good as done. Benjamin would never beat Damien. Not in this life. But she didn’t need to let on she felt that way. “Ohhhh, you’d better win, Ben. No phoning it in because you think you’re off the hook. It’s my ass on the line right now and you’d better play hard for it.”
He leaned forward earnestly. “I will, Em. I guarantee victory. I can do this.”
“Right.”
“Are you agreeing?”
It felt like teetering on the edge of the world. Fall to one side . . . nothing changed. They would continue in their reality. Not a good one, but reality all the same. Fall to the other . . .
Who the hell knew what lurked in those depths. But her brother would be off the hook.
Emma perched on the edge of her boss’s couch. The man who wanted her. For whatever reason. For thirty days. His decor surrounded her, his art, his life. She did like him. She respected him. But what did she really know about him? What would she know at the end of a month?
“I can’t do this, Ben,” she said softly, even though she was closer now than she’d been since Damien made his indecent proposal. Sometimes she wished she could be like her brother. She wished she could not care.
“Maybe he’ll give us more time to think about it,” Ben said, a note of desperation creeping into his voice. Before, when he’d asked if she was agreeing, he’d sounded positively excited.
“It sounds like we don’t need to think about anything. Only I do.” Emma shot daggers across the room at him with her eyes. “You came in here tonight guaranteeing victory, you realize. You busted. I can’t trust anything you say. I can’t trust you not to get your money back, Benjamin, and go to another room and play it all. You’ll end up right back in this shape. No. I get the money. And you’ll tell me where to take it to get you out of debt. And believe me when I say that I will never, ever, ever bail you out of anything ever again. Ever.”
“That’s enough ever’s.”
“No, it isn’t. I want you up to your ass in ever’s. You leave me alone, you leave Mom and Dad alone. You’re on your own after this, Ben, or I will tell them what I’ve done for you, what you were willing for me to do for you.”
He didn’t hear a word. “So you’re agreeing?”
Emma got to her feet. “I want to talk to Damien. Alone.”
Benjamin practically hurled himself out of the chair in his haste to go get him. Emma resumed her feverish pacing, her body thrumming with a strange energy. Almost . . . almost elation, but that made no sense, did it? She pressed the tip of her thumb between her lips, gnawing the already bitten nail, and started when the door opened and Damien walked in, closing it behind him.
All the headway Ben had made nearly vanished in an instant at the man’s imposing appearance. She didn’t know what it was about him, could never quite put her finger on it. He wasn’t a big guy. Tall, but lean. He was extraordinarily handsome. But that beauty held a cold ruthlessness at its core, an impenetrable, frostbitten darkness. She wondered if anyone would ever chisel through it to any sort of warmth underneath. Did it even exist?
He strolled over to his desk as if it were any other day, crossed his arms, and leaned back against it, watching her expectantly.
Emma drew herself up and faced that cold darkness with all the courage she could muster. “One week,” she said.
“Thirty days.”
“Two weeks.”
“Thirty days.” He said it almost before she got the words out of her mouth. Exasperated, she figured she had nothing to lose.
“Three weeks! Three whole weeks, Damien. Twenty-one days. That’s plenty of time.”
He stared impassively at her for a moment. Just when she thought he might concede . . . “Thirty days.”
Emma threw up her hands. “Why so long?”
“I like nice round numbers.” Casually crossing his ankles, he gave a shrug. “Two weeks isn’t long enough but I leave for Vegas around the fifteenth for a tournament. Assuming we begin on the first of next month”—only a week away! her mind supplied as he glanced back at a calendar—“I figured we’d make a vacation of it.”
A tournament. Another bracelet, another few million dollars. God. “What about my job?”
“You always have a job here. You should know that.”
“What if . . . what if I can’t do it?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. “Why couldn’t you?”
“If we . . . if you and I . . .”
“If we fuck?” The crassness of it knocked the breath out of her for a second, the hairs bristling on her nape. It wasn’t the word itself—hell, they said it all the time around here—but never with we directly in front of it. The idea burned through her with startling intensity. “You wouldn’t be the first,” he said.
Oh. Well. Goddamn if that wasn’t reassuring. Not for the first time, she wondered how many times he’d nailed Stacia, probably on the very couch where she’d slept. Ew.
“I’m assuming, however, I would be the first to spend an entire month with you exclusively?”
“That’s true, but of little consequence. We’re both adults. I won’t push you into this; it’s entirely up to you. But the
offer is what it is. Thirty days, or he walks out of here still flat on his ass.”
Cold. Cold. Cold.
God. He might be a psychopath. “What, um, would you require of me?”
“Require?”
“That we fuck?”
The way she flipped the word back at him seemed to please him. He grinned his wolfish grin. “Nothing that you don’t agree to.”
“What if I don’t agree to any of it? Sex, I mean.”
“Then you don’t agree, but we have no deal.”
“So you’re doing this to get laid.”
“If you think this is what I have to do to get pussy, you’re sadly mistaken.” There he went again, throwing out words that shocked her system. But she refused to be shaken. She tipped her chin up.
“It’s what you have to do to get mine.”
That cold darkness flooded his expression again, replacing the smile of moments ago. But he cocked a mocking eyebrow at her, and she knew he saw right through her. Yeah, so he could probably have her six ways to Sunday on his desk right now, if he made the move. But he didn’t have to know that. She met his gaze as defiantly as she knew how.
People weren’t her thing. People were weird and unpredictable. Numbers were her thing; they always made sense, and if they didn’t, she’d made a mistake somewhere. Negotiating with Damien Larson made her feel dizzy and confused.
“Just don’t hurt me,” she blurted, and for maybe the first time since she’d met him, she thought she saw a fine crack in his veneer. He uncrossed his arms and braced his hands against the edge of his desk, knuckles whitening with his grip.
“One thing I can promise you with absolute certainty, Emma, is that I would never hurt you.” But then his heated dark gaze traveled the length of her body, from her bare feet to the tousle of her red hair. All her lady bits were covered but, somehow, he still made her want to cover herself. “Unless you give me permission to.”
Why would I ever do that? she wondered, ignoring the uncomfortable emptiness between her legs that had begun to bloom with that look. The look that made her want to leave this dress an emerald puddle at her feet and climb him right here.
But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She might give him thirty days’ free rein of her body, but her body was the only part of herself she was willing to give. Not her heart. Not her mind. If she could help it, not even her pleasure. “No one can ever know,” she warned him.
“Done, on my part. Who you tell is up to you.”
Of course he wouldn’t give a shit who she told. He had no shame. These fucking men. “Would I still come to work?” Or are you going to keep me chained up in your bedroom? And why did that make her a little hotter than she was already?
“If you wish.”
“So . . . I don’t have to?”
“For all I care, you can go out with your friends and shop all day. But the nights are mine.”
She chose to ignore the additional shivers that skittered down her spine. She couldn’t take much more of this. “How will we explain if I’m gone for a month?”
“We don’t have to explain anything. You’re on leave, but you’ll be back. End of story.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, her mind running a thousand miles per hour. What had she left out? There were probably so many things, because she sucked at this. At the core of it all, though, was one burning question. “Why, Damien? Why me?”
A muscle flexed in his well-defined jaw. “Maybe you have something to teach me about devotion.”
“You mean this is some sort of experiment you’re putting me through? A test to see how far I’ll go? Don’t you have better things to do with a month?”
He smirked, pushing off his desk and striding toward the door with that gliding gait of his. “No, not really.” Reaching it, he opened it and looked at her. “Do you agree?”
Moment of truth. She would’ve felt better if he’d had more assurances, if he’d told her everything would be okay, if he’d touched her . . . something. But except for that one tiny crack in his freakishly controlled façade earlier, he had showed her nothing.
He was going to make her say it. Now or never.
She thought of her mom and dad, working their fingers to the bone well into their retirement years. Their security was worth everything in the world. This wasn’t for Ben at all; it was for them. In fact, if she could take Ben’s money at the end of this and simply hand it over to them . . .
“I already told Ben this, but either way it goes, the money comes to me. Only me. I don’t trust him to do what he needs to do.”
Damien gave her a single, solemn nod. “Good. I would prefer it that way.”
His earlier question still hung heavily in the air as he looked at her, awaiting her reply. Emma shut her eyes to draw up the courage to force it past her lips. It felt rather like signing over her soul. “Yes. I agree.”
“Then let’s go do this.”
Yes, let’s. Let’s go seal my fate. When she maintained her frozen spot by the couch instead of following him, though, he turned to look at her again. “Aw, Emma. No confidence in your brother’s abilities?”
She drew herself up. “I hope he whips your ass.”
That only made him laugh, which was even scarier than his smile.
Chapter Five
The table was set. They agreed to start out with an equal number of chips in the amount of Ben’s debt . . . only Emma couldn’t help but stare at that stack at her brother’s elbow and know that in some way it represented her. Sitting here and watching it slowly make its way to Damien’s stack might be more than she could take.
And she couldn’t see. Damien didn’t want her seeing his cards. Ben didn’t want her seeing his either; her face might give something away (as if his wouldn’t). So the two men sat across from each other and she sat across from the dealer, eyeing the man suspiciously. All she could do was make sure everything appeared straight. But she didn’t really know what she was looking for; she only understood the bare bones of the game. Now she wished she’d listened to all of Ben’s blathering about it.
She decided the only acceptable thing to do in her situation was get rip-roaring drunk. A couple more tequila shots had done the job well. And then the dealer dealt.
Even though it was her brother playing for her honor, it was his opponent she studied mercilessly. His two cards remained facedown in front of him; he lifted their corners to take one disinterested glance and left them where they were, the values no doubt imprinted on his mind. She couldn’t have seen what he held if she’d been standing directly behind him. And then he stared down her brother, who was under the gun, which meant he had to make the first bet before the flop.
Ben folded. Damien slid his cards back to the dealer. Emma found herself wishing there were more players in this game. The ante and the blind bets would ensure it went fast. That could be a blessing, she supposed, but it could also be a curse; she would find out faster if she was about to be her boss’s high-priced prostitute for the next month. She signaled for another shot.
As much as she wished the liquor would send her down a spiral into oblivion, though, it only served to fan her flames of lust. Damien Larson might very well be the hottest man alive. And of course he would be. He was Satan. Emma chuckled at her own biting wit and threw back the tequila when it came. Ben frowned at her. Damien smirked and glanced at her tits. Imagining what they look like, aren’t you? Guess you’ll find out. Fucker, she thought. Would he be as controlled during sex as he was in every other area of his life? Would her naked body crack him the same way her plea in his office had? This tequila was some good shit. Maybe she should stipulate a bottle of Cuervo at her disposal every night for the next month. Was Ben’s stack even smaller? Goddamn. She needed to pay attention. She began fanning herself with her hand. When Damien noticed, he signaled at someone and a cool rush of air washed over the room. Ahh. That was better. Unfortunately, it did little to extinguish the heat between her legs. She wriggled against the ch
air.
What was so hot about a man playing cards? Well . . . not just any man. Damien was hot. Ben looked like a sweaty komondor. He looked like that sheep dog on old Bugs Bunny cartoons. What was his name, Sam? She laughed again.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” her brother snapped at her.
Hey, fuck you, Sam, it isn’t your pussy on the line. She thought it, but one horrifying moment later, she feared she’d said it out loud. Everyone stared at her for what seemed like an eternity before turning their attention back to the game. She hadn’t said it out loud, had she? She hiccupped and swayed on her seat.
And Damien . . . he was just a cool sonofabitch, wasn’t he? One glance at his cards, one look at his opponent, and she could practically see the percentages and calculations floating above his head. The numbers flashing. The probabilities. Strategies. Or maybe that was the liquor. Either way, it was dead sexy. A man who knew his numbers. Her kind of man. Maybe they would have fun. He was taking her to Vegas, after all. Hey, Ben, maybe you ought to lose. This man loves numbers. I’ll show him fucking numbers.
She didn’t say that out loud either, did she?
“Emma,” a deep, smooth voice intoned, and she tried to focus through the fog in her brain on Damien’s dark eyes. They burned the haze away until she could see him clearly. “Do you need to lie down?”
She shook her head, but that made the room spin, and she realized she was leaning half over the table, staring at the green surface. No, no. She was here for the duration. Unless she passed out. Or threw up all over the table. That might end the whole thing, right?
The dealer dealt. Over and over it went. Back and forth. Chips exchanged hands. Then they went back. It would never end, she thought. Her earlier assessment had been incorrect. She would be here all night. Until morning. Her forehead hit the back of her hand on the table. She would—
“All-in,” Ben said.
Emma’s head snatched up so fast her neck popped. What the fuck are you doing? she wanted to scream, though she had no idea what he held. Wouldn’t the best strategy be to play it safe? He was betting with a month of her life! Would he really go all-in if he thought there was any shot at failure?