That shut me up. Not because he called me princess in a way that was meant to be insulting and patronizing.
No, because just by doing this job, I was putting him in serious danger. Putting the kids of those macho men in danger.
I swallowed lead. “Is there a way that Kitsch could connect their families to me?” I asked, voice small. “Will Greenstone protecting me put them in danger?”
If the answer to that was yes, I’d make my escape in the middle of the night. I’d climb out the fucking window and find my way to a pay phone, call Andre, and figure out another way. I might not like Duke, but I hated myself a lot more. And that self-hatred would become suffocating if a child came to harm, or if the man who murmured soft things to Rosie and looked like she invented oxygen was in danger of losing her.
I was a bitch. Sure. A narcissist. Definitely. But this? No fucking way.
I was so deep in my panic, I didn’t realize that Duke hadn’t answered and was staring at me again, brows furrowed like last time.
“Answer me,” I clipped in my best bitch-tone, uncomfortable with this probing gaze. “Am I putting them in danger or not?”
He jerked, ever so slightly, his face turned cold once more. “No,” he said.
I made sure to measure that single word, weigh it to find if I could see a lie. I couldn’t. Although, I thought Duke would be someone who could get away with a lie. So I measured who I considered him to be. A good man. One who helped people for a living, but wasn’t afraid to do some dark things. He loved his family, was good to his mother, respected his father, and adored his grandmother.
He wouldn’t bring me here if there was even a sliver of risk to those in this house.
“Okay,” I said.
Then I snatched up my bags and stomped into the bathroom, making sure to close and lock the door behind me.
It was nice, like the rest of the house. Expensive, but it didn’t scream at you like my bathroom did. The tile was gleaming. Two sinks, complete with little glass jars of guest soaps and cotton pads. Huge, claw-footed tub situated in front of a window that looked out onto the whole freaking ranch.
Walking over to it, it seemed like it looked over the whole freaking world. They said Montana was Big Sky Country, and for once, they weren’t full of cliché and bullshit.
I didn’t stare at the sky for too long. At its beauty. I couldn’t handle looking at that, at something so beautiful when I had ugliness simmering inside of me. So I took a shower in the large shower, used hundreds of dollars’ worth of products, donned silk, and commenced my lengthy skincare routine.
It was rude with Duke out there waiting. He likely wanted the shower just as much as I did. He had more rights to it.
But I was done being polite and considerate. I’d done that for a whole night. I was out of practice—meaning I’d never done that in recorded memory. It was exhausting.
Yet it felt...right. Everything felt right amongst Duke’s family. The easy conversation, the laughter, the smiles, Duke’s fucking hand on my thigh. Hence me having to wash that feeling off, and replace it with multifarious synthetic versions of me.
Once I felt enough like myself, I opened the door.
I didn’t know what I was expecting, an empty room, maybe? Duke sneaking off to his old room—lying to his parents about some fight—or maybe I’d find him sleeping soundly in the bed, owning all the pillows, leaving me to sleep on the large armchair in the corner of the room.
I deserved all those things.
He was sitting in that large armchair.
Shirtless.
Now, I’d had my experience with shirtless men. Handsome shirtless men. Not-so handsome shirtless men. Downright disgusting shirtless men. Most of those experiences involved a paycheck. And if it involved my pleasure, it was unfortunately a mixture of all three.
I didn’t always have the opportunity to pick men for pleasure.
But that was another story, one I had paid a lot of money to make sure no one knew.
Plus, Duke shirtless, in that chair, in this house was the only story.
Of course I’d known he was cut just by looking at him. And he was. He had a body that men in the business paid thousands for. A body that wasn’t from lifting weights or for impressing women. One that was for use.
But it wasn’t the body.
It was the marks on it.
The scars.
I usually sought perfection in men so I could pretend I was perfect too. People with scars and imperfections only reminded me of my own.
But Duke was beautiful. With all his pain. I liked that he wasn’t perfect. It made him not so terrifying.
He stood when I emerged from the bathroom, and just like I didn’t hide the fact I was checking him out, he didn’t hide it either. His gaze was physical, painful, from my head to my toes. It lingered on my boobs, where I knew my nipples were peeking out from the silk.
And not because it was cold in here.
He cleared his throat, met my eyes. There was still cold there. But there was something else. Hunger.
A hunger of my own crawled up from the most primal of places. A hunger I knew how to act better than anyone, but one I didn’t know how to feel.
We were attracted to each other. That much was obvious. That much, neither of us could hide. But you didn’t have to like or respect someone in order to be attracted to them.
I wished I didn’t like or respect this man.
Because then I’d have no qualms crossing the distance between us, pressing my expensive silk-clad body against his scarred skin and kissing him. The rest would sort itself out from there. He was a strong man, but he couldn’t say no to me. Just like if he did the same thing, I wouldn’t say no either. And I was an exceptionally strong woman.
But I did like and respect him, despite my best intentions. So anything that happened between us would be more than just sex. For me, at least.
For a long moment, that possibility danced between us. Crackled. So much so that my thighs clenched in anticipation.
“I’ll take the floor,” Duke said, breaking the moment, averting his eyes, and focusing on the area right above my head. He severed the moment brutally and quickly.
I glanced from the large, comfortable-looking bed to the wooden, definitely not comfortable-looking floor, then to the large, muscled and pissed-off man. I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a chaste Southern Belle, honey. As long as you don’t snore or wet the bed, I’m perfectly able to share a bed with you.”
I didn’t wait for him to agree or argue, I just walked to the bed, threw back the covers and crawled in.
In my mansion in Beverly Hills, along with my vacation homes around the world, I paid small fortunes to have the finest quality bedding in the world. The bedding royalty slept in. Presidents.
These were not the finest linens money could buy. They weren’t brand new. They were old. Not in a moth-eaten way, but in a different way. They smelled of laundry detergent and lavender. They were soft from all the times they’d been washed.
They were, quite simply, the finest sheets I’d ever felt.
I made a point not to look at Duke, hating that I didn’t have my phone. It hadn’t been so clear how much I’d used it as a shield, until I didn’t have it. Nor did I have the foresight to snatch up a book from the shelves on the other side of the room.
It would ruin the moment I’d created if I got up to grab one now. So instead, I acted like I was totally okay with lying in a bed that smelled of lavender, on a ranch in Montana, with a man who didn’t like me, pretending to his family I was his girlfriend, and not the witness to a high-profile murder he was trying to keep alive.