Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 68249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68249 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
“Of course,” I replied.
I opened my car door—Geoffrey knew by now I liked to do that type of shit myself—and stepped onto the sidewalk, my focus on the door at the top of the stairs, lights on in the hall beyond it.
“Stick around,” I said to my driver. “I’ll be back quicker than a spider catches the fly.”
“Yes, sir.”
I strode up the front steps, opened the door, and walked down the hall. The studio was relatively silent. The classes had ended for the day, so why hadn’t Riley come back to the apartment?
The thought of her here, in danger, sent spirals of dread through me. Fuck, this was bad. It wasn’t enough that she moved like every man’s wet dream. She was strong enough to stick to her guns, to put off selling to me though she had to know it would end up that way.
If I couldn’t have her studio, I’d have her body. Shit, I probably already had her soul.
“You little bitch.”
I froze and listened hard.
The voice had come from down the hall, in the same studio I’d first found her.
“You think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you? You think you’re going to defeat me?”
What the hell had I walked in on? Some kinda dancer spat? Game of Thrones, studio version?
“You’ll never get me down.”
It was one voice, and it was the same one that’d stiffened my cock each night this week. Riley. Someone had pissed her off.
Red-hot anger swept through me, and the muscles on either side of my spine stiffened and corded. I charged down the corridor, my footsteps thundering on the carpet out here, and shoved open the left door of the dance hall.
Riley stood inside it, her hands wrapped around the center pole in the room, hazel-flecked gaze focused on the roof above her. She wiggled the pole. “I can’t believe I spent money on you.” This time she joggled the pole from side to side, then wrung her hands, strangling the cool metal. “Useless piece of bitch, dick, you—”
“Oh yeah, I love it when you talk dirty,” I said.
Riley let out a shriek and spun toward me, breathing hard.
“Not so much when you’re talking to inanimate objects, though. Or, shit, wait, were you talking to yourself? Because that’s kinda out of my wheelhouse. I could call someone if you’d like.”
“What are you doing here?” Riley asked.
“That’s your favorite line. Every time I arrive you ask me why I’m here. You didn’t complain when I arrived on top of you last week.” I chased my thumb down my jaw, scratched beneath my short-trimmed beard.
Riley’s nipples pressed against the fabric of yet another sports bra. This one was powder-blue and suited her complexion so perfectly it choked my sense of time. Good god, she was unbelievable.
I’d seen my fair share of women. I’d hired some of the most beautiful dancers in Miami, fuck it, in the whole United States, to dance in my clubs, and none of them had had this effect on me. It was a sweet combination of strength and vulnerability. Of confidence and innocence.
She wasn’t a dichotomy. She was an enigma.
Which was trouble, since that was what other women had called me.
I was the enigma. I was the powerhouse.
Riley stared at me, speechless. “Did you break in?” She asked. “Because if you broke anything, you’ll have to pay for it, and I’m seriously not in the mood to—”
I raised a palm. “Your front door was wide open. Literally speaking, this time.”
“Shit,” she muttered. “She should’ve locked it.”
“Who?”
Riley shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s past time I leave now.” But she didn’t budge from her spot. Instead, she studied me, her head tilted to one side, her chocolate hair escaping from the messy bun atop it.
“Good, so you haven’t been sleeping in the studio.”
“No.”
“Then why haven’t you been taking the car I send for you?” I asked. I didn’t do well with asking too many questions, simply because I expected people to do what they were told. It wasn’t an arrogance thing—Shit, who was I kidding, it was one hundred percent an arrogance thing. That, and I’d been raised in a world where disobedience ended with pain.
“There’s charity and then there’s… I don’t know. It didn’t feel like a gesture of kindness,” Riley said. “It felt like you were trying to prove a point by sending that car. Like I’m your property or something.”
“No,” I replied. “You’re not my property.” Yet. “But I want you kept safe.”
“Why? You don’t know me.”
“I know every inch of you,” I said. “Intimately.”
Riley rolled her eyes at me and focused on the pole again, clouds scudding across her clear expression.
“So, I take it you were cussing out the pole?”
“Yeah,” she said and wiggled it again. “I paid this guy to install them all, and he assured me that because they’re permanent fixtures there wouldn’t be any problems. I mean, they’re bolted to the ceiling and the floor, which means he either didn’t install them correctly, or he lied to me. And that makes me so angry I could scream.”