“Not afraid,” he said, reaching for his drink for the first time when I lifted my water. “Just know better now.”
I took a drink of my water. “You were burned.”
He finally took a drink of his scotch, that peculiar flash of vulnerability rolling through his expression again. He took another drink. “To ashes.”
The way he said it—the way he looked when he said it—made something in my chest squeeze. I knew that feeling. I’d learned that traits the human condition was trained to lean toward were usually the things we should be leaning away from. Commitment. Trust. Love. All conditions that should be replaced with caution, skepticism, and reason.
When I should have been keeping a wall between us, I found myself on the verge of commiserating with him. His damn good looks didn’t help the confusion either. I might have hardened myself against the species known as man, but I was not immune to them.
“Who was the man just here?” Twisting around in my seat, I searched the room, but he was gone.
“Ezra,” he said.
Waving, I waited.
“I’ve known him for a long time and trust him implicitly, so you don’t have to worry about him turning us in for what we’re discussing. He’s been a friend of my family’s since before I was born and serves as a sort of right-hand man for me now. In all facets of my life.”
“I wasn’t worried. Just wanted to know who he is.” I shrugged casually.
“And now you know.”
“Now I know Ezra’s name. But not yours.” From his accent and the way he looked as though he had descended from some Nordic king, Axel and Sven seemed like plausible options. From his personality, I would happily call him Jackass.
“You know my name.”
“Yeah, your last name.”
He cocked a brow like he was questioning why I needed anything more.
“Since you’re clearly the kind of guy who thinks he can just order a woman a drink and she’ll take it with a smile, let me clue you in on the type of woman I am.” I leaned forward, encouraged by the fresh anger I felt pulsing through my veins. He was less attractive when he was pissing me off. It encouraged me. “Not the kind who’s ever—ever—going to call you Mr. Sturm.”
He swirled his drink, back to studying me. “No?”
“Never.”
He set his drink down and slid it against my cup of water. He was testing me. I knew it, but I kept my water where it was. He could get his glass all up in my glass’s business for all I cared—that’s the only business of mine he’d be getting in.
“Well, Miss Burton, my first name is Max.”
Something spilled down my spine when he said my name like that. Like it was both a promise of something to come and a challenge.
“Max?” I said, not tempering the doubt in my voice.
He was in a suit that probably cost more than most people’s cars. He towered far above the average man. He looked like a fairy tale princess and a Greek God had gotten it on and he’d popped out nine months later. He oozed confidence that bordered on conceit, and I doubted it was the fake kind most men pretended they had. His confidence had been earned. Like hell he was “Max.”
“My given name is Maximilian Hans Xavier Sturm.” He cocked that same right brow at me. “However, my friends call me Max since the alternative is a bit of a mouthful.”
My thumb ran down the side of the water glass. “We just met. I’m not your friend.”
“You’re going to be my wife, so you can call me Max.” His mouth twitched at the same time his eyes flashed. “Or Mr. Sturm.”
“Funny,” I said with a fake smile. “Max.”
When he smiled, it did something to me it shouldn’t. I felt something tighten in my chest, and when his eyes slid back to mine with that smile still in place, I felt something else tighten farther south.
Shit. Not him. Not now. Not ever.
“Now that we’ve met, is there anything you’d like to ask me? Anything you’d like to go over?”
Besides everything?
We’d “met” online through a super-secret site you had to know a friend of a friend of a deity to know about—Kate had been my hookup in this instance. We’d communicated back and forth for the past couple of months, but about nothing too personal. It had felt more like a test of my commitment to following through with this than an actual attempt to get to know me. Other than knowing he was willing to pay a million bucks for a green card and that his emails were painfully formal, Max Sturm was a mystery to me.
Our emails back and forth had been focused on the guidelines and timeline of our “arrangement” instead of the getting-to-know-you facet. All business.
I supposed there were a million things I could have asked him about our arrangement. A million more I could have asked him about himself. But only one question was on my mind.
It hadn’t been much of a concern until coming face to face with him. Now? It was Concern#1.
“Just to clarify . . .” I felt like the chair seat had been stuffed with broken glass and nails. “There is no expectation, anticipation, or remote possibility that we would have sex. Right?” I had to look away. I couldn’t keep looking at him with the way his expression was changing. From business to pleasure in point two seconds.
“Why?” I heard the same change in his tone. “Have you changed your mind on that bullet point now that we’ve met?”
That welcome surge of anger flooded my system again. I liked it. I needed it where he was involved. When my narrowed eyes landed on him, he was grinning. Almost gloating. Cocky fucking bastard.
“No,” I said slowly. “Meeting you has only solidified my ‘no’ under that bullet point. I’d rather sleep with the first guy I met than you.”
“Ezra?” He laughed a few beats. “You’d rather have sex with a man in his sixties who’s attracted to men?” Another short laugh. “Well, good luck getting him to reciprocate the sentiment.”
My blood was heating. It encouraged me on. “A man twice my age who likes men is more my type than yours is, how about that?”
Max’s brows pulled together. “My type?”
I leaned forward, not blinking. “Yeah, the kind that believes anything and anyone comes with a price tag.”
He leaned forward too, until his face was so close I could detect the heat of the scotch on his breath. “Well, you’re the one agreeing to marry me for money.” He didn’t blink either. “You must be of the same mindset.”
It took all of my willpower to keep my hands to myself. “I kind of hate you, you know that?”
His eyes challenged that. “I’m asking you to marry me, not like me. Hate me all you want.”
This wasn’t the woman I’d thought I’d find myself sitting across from tonight. There wasn’t a shadow of that fictional woman in the real one before me.
She was like no one I’d ever met. In this country, my home country, or any of the dozens I’d visited. She was attractive, but not in the way that screamed to be noticed. Her beauty made a person want to lean in to take a closer look, to inspect the details that made up the whole.
Her sense of style was unusual, for sure, but I had yet to determine if she just didn’t give a shit about style or if this was her way of expressing it. Her clothes were bright. Her more-red-than-auburn hair was bright. Her eyes were bright. Even her skin, as pale as it was, was bright.
In here a hundred people, a thousand distractions, all of them pining for attention, and I couldn’t take my eyes from her.
I didn’t know why. I wasn’t attracted to her in that way. At least, I didn’t think I was. She didn’t fit the mold of the girls I’d been with, and she certainly didn’t talk like them—firing insults instead of flattery.
Maybe that was why I liked her. Or found myself . . . drawn to her. She was making me earn it. Her respect. Her approval. Her friendship. She wasn’t like the others who had let the way I looked or dollar signs dictate their approval.
I was fascinated by her in a way that di
dn’t stem from how to get her below me in bed as quickly as possible. It came from some place else. A place I wasn’t sure I could name if I had a year to dedicate to the task.
I was staring at her again. I was pretty sure she was taking it as some play to assert my dominance, but it wasn’t—I simply couldn’t not stare at her. It would have been like staring at the wall above Mona Lisa. A person just didn’t not look at something that unique and different when it was right in front of them.
She was staring right back too. Though her stare was definitely an attempt to assert her own dominance. Now, that . . . that was one hell of a turn-on. In that way.
“Why are you doing this?” I reached for my scotch to distract myself, not because I actually wanted a drink.
She folded her hands in her lap and sat up straighter. “Because if I don’t, I’m going to lose my house.”
I nodded, trying not to show my surprise. Most young women who would sign up to marry a man for money had other plans for spending that kind of money. “And this is a bad thing?”
Her hands squeezed a little tighter together. “Yes. If you consider losing the only home you’ve ever known a ‘bad thing.’”
I took a sip of the scotch. I didn’t taste it. “Will you be able to commit to this? It will take three years to see this through.” I already knew her answer, of course—I’d spent the last few months confirming it with her online—but I had to hear her say it. I had to watch her say it.
“Yes.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard or seen anyone so convincing. This woman was committed to making this unusual relationship of mutual convenience work. I didn’t doubt it.
“You won’t be able to date anyone else while we’re together,” I said, repeating something we’d already gone over. Again, I needed to hear it confirmed with her sitting five feet in front of me.
“That won’t be a problem.” She sat up straighter.
I rolled the glass between my hands, wondering what she meant by that. “Why?”
She didn’t pause to consider her answer. “Because dating someone would imply me meeting someone dateable.”
I felt myself wanting to smile again, so I tried to stop it. My smiles seemed to irritate the hell out of her. “And this is unlikely?”
Her shoulder lifted. “Only if you take my history into account.”
I shifted in my chair, constructing a follow-up question that wouldn’t earn me another glare she seemed to have no qualms about firing my way.
That’s when she tipped her head down the bar. “That woman’s still staring at you.”
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t even remember the color of that woman’s hair. “Probably wondering if I’m going to take her up on her offer.”
“Her offer of sexual relations?” She was teasing me—I could tell from the way one corner of her mouth was twitching.
“That woman had more than sexual relations in mind.” When she lifted a brow at me, I continued, perhaps against my better judgment. “She would have let me flip through every last page of the sexual kinkery handbook, and she would be an eager and willing participant.”
Her throat moved when she swallowed, then the faintest color spread up her neck. If she didn’t have such fair skin, I never would have noticed. I’d rattled her. Teased her right back to the point of making her blush.
Good. My blood heated with the acknowledgement that she wasn’t as immune to me as she let on.
“Yeah, well, out in the lobby”—she stuck her thumb over her shoulder—“there was a guy who was all over me. You should have heard the things he said he wanted to do to me.” She kept stabbing her thumb over her shoulder, and I had to take a drink to keep from smiling again. “Yeah. Totally wanted to do . . . things . . . to me.”
She didn’t shift. Her eyes didn’t dart away. She didn’t bite her lip. She didn’t give any sign that she was concocting the whole story, though I guessed she was. Not because I didn’t doubt some prick would hit on her wherever she went, but because she was innocent. I could tell. I’d gotten the faintest hint of it from our correspondence, but I could see it clearly with her sitting right in front of me.
“What kind of things?” I set my empty glass down and scooted to the edge of the chair.
She shot me the faintest glare. She knew I was calling her out on lying. “Things.”
Now I was thinking about how many men she’d been with. What way she liked to be taken. What she sounded like when she . . .
And shit. What is happening to me?
Thinking with my dick was off-limits, especially with this woman. I couldn’t mess this up. I couldn’t let things like urges and emotions get in the way.
She was the one who was going to help me earn my freedom in the country I loved. The place that was home.
Stop thinking about her mouth and her sexual preferences and get your fucking head in the game, Max. This whole arrangement needed to be approached from as emotionless of a standpoint as possible. This was a business deal and should be treated like all business deals—with confidence and cool removal.
“Well, I promise I won’t do ‘things’ to you,” I told her, giving my inner sexual deviant a chance to speak up. He didn’t, and I felt my whole body relax. There were plenty of women in the world. Plenty of them willing to share their body with me for a night. This woman could not be one of them.
“Like you even could do ‘things’ to me,” she huffed, gracing me with a look that led me to believe she thought me quite the Quasimodo.
“Believe me.” I waited for her eyes to meet mine again. When they did, the green in them actually looked molten. I didn’t blink as I stretched closer. “If I wanted to—if I put my mind to it, my body into action—I could do all kinds of things to you.”
Her face remained composed. But her body gave her away. Her chest started rising and falling faster, and that was when I knew she wasn’t immune to me at all. In fact, she was so not immune to me that was the whole reason for this cold act.
It made my chest move a little faster too. It made something else react. She was drawn to me in some primal way like I was drawn to her. Humanity had been trying to ascribe a word to this kind of attraction since its inception, settling on terms such as fate or soul mates, but that was a load of bull. There was no such thing as being fated to be together. No such thing as soul mates. I’d seen enough of life, lived enough of it, to know better.
Not that any of that attraction mattered since neither of us could act on it. Desire was natural, but that didn’t mean we had to give in to it. It didn’t mean we ever could.
She had been well on her way to hating me before I let my worse judgment get in the way. I needed to let her hate me. A lot. She needed to despise me or else I’d fuck this up. She needed to hate me for this marriage to work.
Those green molten eyes of hers narrowed at me even more. “Not before I could do things to you. Like kneeing your balls into your stomach.”
Good. She was back to the start. She was back to hating me.
What had I gotten myself into?
Not that it really mattered because it wasn’t like I could get myself out of it. Consequences of having a crapload of debt and little-to-no cash flow.
Maximilian Hans Xavier Sturm. I’d just met the arrogant asshole, had a total of one conversation that included actual verbalized words instead of the typed version, and I already knew him better than I’d known most people.
That was the result of reading a damn bible of all things, Max.
At the end of our “meeting” last night, he’d left me with a folder the size of my old high school calculus book. Inside were pages of questions and answers—basically a biography—of the first twenty-nine years of Max’s life. It went over everything.
Everything.
I’d never known such intimate details about another person. Not even my grandma, the person I’d been closest to in my whole life.
I understood the point of it, but it still felt like some giant i
nvasion of privacy. Like I was sitting behind a one-way mirror and observing someone else’s life.
I now knew what country he was from originally—Germany—what he did for a living—he was a day trader . . . whatever that was—and just about everything else. He’d grown up in Bavaria with his parents, Hans and Anya Sturm, and had one younger brother. He went to private school, was top of his class, and was captain of both the hockey and swimming team (which no doubt had exacerbated his arrogance, if not being the root of it), studied business on a student visa at not one, not two, but three Ivy League schools here in the States, before graduating with his doctorate at the age of twenty-four. So the arrogant a-hole was an overachiever too.
Awesome. Just fucking awesome.
Page after page it went on, until I flipped to the last section . . . which made me promptly slam the folder closed. There was such a thing as TMI, and he’d crossed it when listing his first sexual encounter as being with his former nanny at the ripe old age of fifteen. I couldn’t decide it I was more grossed out or appalled by that factoid.
I’d stayed up most of last night thumbing through the Encyclopedia Maximilian—save for that final part I’d sectioned off with imaginary red tape—so I didn’t know why I’d brought it into work with me tonight. I told myself it was so I could memorize as much of this stuff as I could. When we had to sit before the review board before he was issued his green card, our stories needed to be as watertight as a frog’s butt. That wasn’t really it though.
It had more to do with how fascinating I found his life. How astounding I found it that he wasn’t thirty and had lived as full a life as he had. How he’d already visited all seven continents, shaken hands with three Nobel Peace Prize winners, published a book on commodity trading, and attended Shakespeare in the Park every summer since he’d come to the States.
Sure, I was six years younger, but even if I turned on the turbo boosters and had an endless stream of money at my disposal, I’d be lucky to accomplish a tenth of what he had by his age.
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