Jericho—supremely unworried—strolled up the stairs without waiting for her and stepped through the front door, leaving her standing there on the sidewalk by herself for a moment.
What the hell? Wasn’t she supposed to be his prisoner? Didn’t he care that were she any other girl, she might have tried to run?
From the top step, the Russian watched her, no expression at all on his face. Perhaps he was hoping she would run. Perhaps he wanted something to do.
Temple gave him a smile and pulled the coat more firmly around her, walking up the stairs and deliberately swinging her hips as she did, the stilettos making soft crunching noises as the soles scraped against the ancient, uneven stone of the steps.
He remained expressionless as she drew level to him. Then, as she passed, he said, in a low, rough voice, “I know what you are. You do not fool me.”
A shot of adrenaline surged inside her, but she didn’t let any of it show, didn’t bother to even look at him. He didn’t know what she was. No one knew. And sure, he might have sensed that she wasn’t one of the usual trafficked girls he normally dealt with, but he wouldn’t know anything beyond that. For all he knew she was a working girl looking for a way to make things better for herself.
Ignoring him, she stepped through the front door, coming to stand in the middle of a high-ceilinged foyer. An ornate and extraordinarily beautiful chandelier glittered above her head, illuminating a flagged stone floor and a grand staircase that spiraled up into the darkness of the next story. There was art on the walls, a sculpture in one corner, and the whole area was full of the kind of thick, heavy quiet that only a lot of money can buy.
For a moment, she stood there, staring around, a weird and completely alien feeling of being out of her depth filling her.
This wasn’t her world. She hadn’t come from this. She came from a shitty, rundown, blue-collar town in Michigan, where meth was the local industry, and good girls didn’t go to college—they went to the street. She’d left not long after Thalia had been taken, sure, and yes, she’d been in places like this before. Her latest contracts had tended to be rich assholes with more money than sense, who’d pissed off the wrong people.
So, really, it was strange for her to feel her poor-girl roots strongly now. Especially given she’d spent so many years putting them behind her.
“You like my house?” Jericho’s low, velvet voice came from her left, and she turned to find him leaning back against a set of double doors, his arms folded, watching her.
Jesus. He’d better not have seen her staring around like a fucking hayseed.
She shrugged. “It’s very nice.”
“You’re still wearing my coat.”
“It’s cold.”
“Not in here it isn’t.” His gaze was heavy-lidded, emerald gleaming from underneath thick, dark lashes. “Take it off.”
There was no mistaking the order, and it made a part of her bristle in response. Because he was right. She didn’t like being told what to do. At all.
Crushing the automatic response, she gave him a look. “So it starts now? Our deal?”
He only smiled. “Take off my coat, kitten.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Try it and find out.”
Asshole.
Come on. Do it. What’s one night? You can take it out on him in pain later.
Silently, she let out a breath. Then, in a fluid, sinuous movement, she shrugged out of his coat and let it fall carelessly to the ground, kicking it behind her and grinding it a little with her toe for good measure.
If that annoyed him, he didn’t show it. His gaze swept over her, glittering like the chandelier above her head, and again she felt that kick deep inside, like when he’d touched her in the limo. It made everything in her stiffen in denial, in rejection.
She did not want to be attracted to him. She did not want to want him.
His gaze rose to hers and stayed there. “The G-string too.”
Okay. Fine. She’d been virtually naked the whole evening. Being actually naked wasn’t going to make too much of a difference. And shit, if she won this stupid deal of his, it would make everything worth it.
Just think of killing him. That makes everything better.
Fuck, yes. It really did.
She didn’t look away, putting her hands on her hips and pushing down the waistband of the G-string, wriggling a little to get it down her thighs and then off. Stepping out of it, she straightened, the scrap of fabric dangling from one finger, then sauntered over to him, her heels making tapping sounds on the stone as she walked.
He remained where he was, his expression unreadable as she approached. He didn’t look down either, his gaze locked with hers. Which gave her another little flick of inexplicable irritation. What was the point of being naked if he wasn’t going to look?
She stopped right in front of him and extended her hand, the G-string dangling from it. “I assume you want this?”
For a moment, he didn’t move, staring at her, the look in his green-gold eyes enigmatic. Then he took the G-string from her finger, examined it a second before ripping it to pieces in a series of short, sharp, calm movements.
Another kick inside her, though surely it wasn’t fear. Because there wasn’t anything very threatening about the cold way he tore up the glittering fabric. It was just something a man like him would do. Destroy something pretty just to prove a point, to prove his power.
Jericho opened his long fingers, the remains of the silver material fluttering down between them, swirling like snow onto the stone floor. He didn’t watch it. He watched her, and there was such menace in those mesmerizing eyes of his. A threat she didn’t quite understand, but somehow, her body did. Because it made a part of her clench right down low in her gut.
“You’ve forgotten already, haven’t you?” he said, his mild tone totally at odds with the look in his eyes. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be in control. Not you.”
She tensed, the assassin in her gauging the threat.
Chill the hell out. He doesn’t want to kill you. He just wants to fuck you.
Yeah, and before he did that, he wanted to feel like he had power over her first. Which must mean he felt threatened by her in some way.
Good.
“Hey, I’m just doing what you said.” She glanced down at the floor then back up again, watching him from beneath her lashes. “So do you want me to get down on my knees now?”
He gazed at her a long moment then, unexpectedly, he reached out, one long finger catching her under the chin, tilting her head up. And the breath froze in her throat for reasons she couldn’t have explained. The tip of his finger burned against her skin like a lit match, sending little forest fires of sensation chasing all over her bare skin, making her nipples tighten and a strange pulse of heat clench hard between her thighs.
“No,” he murmured, “I don’t want you to get on your knees. I have some business to do with some colleagues before we get to that.”
“That sounds … boring.” Her voice sounded unsteady, which was annoying.
“Perhaps it will be for you.” His thumb stroked along her jaw, sending more shock waves through her, making her have to work hard to keep still. “They’re important men, and they’re used to looking at something pretty. I think they’ll like looking at you.”
She blinked. So did that mean he was going to … display her? “You want me to sleep with them too?” Might as well ask. Because if that was the case then they’d be dead long before they ever got a chance to touch her. And so would he.
And risk never finding out what happened to Thalia? Didn’t you promise her you’d do anything to find her? Anything at all?
A sharp thread of feeling that didn’t have anything to do with Jericho curled inside her.
The night her sister had disappeared, so long ago now, she’d promised herself she’d do anything to find her. That she’d lie, cheat, or steal. That she’d kill. That she’d do things that would strip away the la
st parts of her soul. And she had. She’d done all of those things and more. What was sleeping with a couple of assholes compared to that?
Jericho’s tawny brows came down, and for the second time that night, she thought she saw something hot and fierce and golden burn through the cold green of his eyes. “You’re mine, Temple. Mine for the night. And what’s mine stays mine, understand? They can look, but they can’t touch.” His beautiful features were hard. “And if they do, I’ll cut off whichever body part is doing the touching.”
She shouldn’t have felt the small thread of reassurance that twisted through her. Shouldn’t even have been aware of it. Because what the actual fuck? He was the head of a human trafficking network who’d just made her strip in front of him, who was going to make her stand naked in a room with his supposed “colleagues.” So why she should feel reassured by the fact that he wasn’t going to let them touch her was simply insane.
Not that she needed anyone’s reassurance, not when she could cut off any offending body part herself. “Well, that’s something, I guess,” she murmured. “Lucky me.”
The hard look on his face faded. He ran his thumb along her lower lip, following the line of it as if it was an indulgence he was allowing himself. “Ah, kitten,” he said softly. “There’s no such thing as luck. If there was, you wouldn’t be here.”
She frowned at that, at the strange note in his voice, the one that sounded almost like regret. But before she could say anything, he dropped his hand from her and stepped back, pulling open the door. “Inside,” he ordered. “Time to prove yourself.”
* * *
“So, what is Jericho planning to do about the American situation?” Vassily Lychenko, head of the Russian mafia family who controlled much of the human trafficking in the Baltic region and as cruel an old bastard as Jericho had ever met, knocked back his third vodka of the night and slapped the crystal shot glass back on the table in front of him with a bang. “And I presume he does have a plan?”
The Lychenkos were Jericho’s least-favorite people to deal with—if he could be said to have favorites out of any of the connections he had with various European and Asian crime networks. The Russian family had been his most recent alliance, and he was still having issues with them. Mostly because they didn’t like the fact that he’d insisted on full control over the American market negotiations.
The tricky thing was managing them while preserving the secret of Jericho’s identity. He preferred to keep his negotiations through third parties whenever possible so Jericho remained a shadowy figure, but keeping tabs on people through personal meetings was also necessary. Especially with these Russians and most especially when he had to keep them happy.
So he often pretended he was a nameless lieutenant of Jericho’s, one authorized to give out information and to receive it, but not to act. No one he met face-to-face in any of these kinds of meetings knew he was Jericho and he wanted to keep it that way.
Anyway, he couldn’t let any of the alliances he’d painstakingly built over the years break apart, couldn’t let any of those people escape, not if he wanted to take them down with him when the time came. And he most certainly wanted to take them down. The Lychenkos in particular.
They were needlessly cruel and insufferably arrogant, and he would quite happily have crushed them under his boot years ago if he hadn’t needed them to pull in the Russian trafficking networks.
No stone left unturned, etcetera.
Beside Vassily sat his nephew, Anatoly, an unpleasant little prick who clearly wasn’t listening to the conversation, his gaze glued to Temple instead.
Jericho had gotten her to serve the vodka when the two men had arrived, and though Vassily had ignored her as if she was merely just another piece of furniture, Anatoly had been giving her openly lascivious glances for the past hour.
It made a little prickle of annoyance sit in Jericho’s gut for no reason he could see.
Having a naked woman present at a business discussion wasn’t usual for him—unlike some of his supposed business partners who considered it nothing more than advertising. But on occasion he sometimes got one of the prostitutes or strippers from the club to serve drinks and generally be there as some pretty eye-candy, having them there to either intimidate or attract, depending on what kind of discussion he was having or what point he wanted to prove. They were paid well for their efforts.
It had never bothered him when his business partners wanted to do more than look, so he couldn’t understand why Anatoly was pissing him off quite so much now. But he was.
Temple was doing exactly as instructed, waiting silently beside the sofa where the two Russians sat, holding a silver tray with a bottle of horrendously expensive vodka sitting on it. He’d told her not to speak, her only task to fill up the glasses when they were empty, and she’d only nodded her head, ostensibly obeying him.
In fact for the whole past hour she hadn’t done anything to draw attention to herself except stand there naked, holding her tray, obeying him like she’d promised. So there shouldn’t have been any reason for his gaze to be drawn to her as inexorably as iron filings to a magnet. To the curve of her slender shoulders and the way her red hair cascaded over them. To her pale, milky skin dusted with little freckles like golden sand sprinkled over a fresh fall of snow. To her supple, lithe body, muscled and toned like a dancer’s. To her pussy, shaved bare as most strippers’ were.
He’d never been so distracted by a woman before. It was fucking annoying, because what he should be doing was paying attention to the discussion he was having with the Lychenkos and ignoring her the way he usually ignored any naked woman. The way he’d had no difficulty doing for the past decade.
Yet he found he couldn’t. And it wasn’t only due to her unconventional beauty. She was so slender and pale that she should have looked fragile and yet she didn’t. There was a power to her. And he didn’t know what that power was, but it burned bright, glowing underneath the surface of her beautiful, pale skin. It was there in the way she held herself, in the toned shape of her thighs and calves, in her flat stomach, in the proud jut of her chin.
It had been a long, long time since he’d seen a woman who burned like she did. A woman who wasn’t one of the lost, broken trafficked girls. Who wasn’t from one of his crime connections and who didn’t have money or her own personal army to back her up.
A woman who was powerful all on her own.
“Well?” Vassily demanded. “Am I wasting my fucking time here?”
Irritated with himself, Jericho dragged his attention from Temple and sat back in his armchair, unhurried.
What the hell were they talking about again? Ah, yes. They were talking about Fitzgerald and what the plan was now the bastard was dead. The Lychenkos were concerned about seeing a potentially lucrative deal go down the drain and were getting impatient.
Jericho met Vassily’s belligerent light blue gaze, swirling the vodka he was drinking around in his glass. “I’ll be taking at trip to the States in the next week or so to see to the situation personally. There won’t be any problems, I assure you.”
Vassily glared, clearly unconvinced. “And what about these rumors? About this so-called Elijah Hunt bastard taking over? You told us the negotiations with Fitzgerald were—”
“Fitzgerald’s death could be useful to us,” he interrupted, letting the edge of iron tinge his voice. “Whatever hold Hunt has on the operations over there is bound to be tenuous at best. After all, he’s only had a month or so to cement his authority, which won’t be nearly enough. Should be relatively easy to take it from him.”
Beside his uncle, Anatoly was lounging back on the sofa. He’d drained his glass and now held it up. “More,” he demanded in thickly accented English, looking in Temple’s direction.
Instantly she moved to obey, keeping her head down as she rounded the side of the sofa with lithe grace. Stopping in front of Anatoly, she lifted the vodka bottle and poured more liquid into it.
The younger man’s
gaze was all over her, and as Temple handed him back the freshly refilled shot glass, he reached out and put one hand on the back of her thigh, sliding it up to cup her ass.
Jericho tensed, the annoyance in his gut gathering instantly into anger. Who the fuck did that uppity little prick think he was? She wasn’t Anatoly’s tonight, she was his.
Temple herself had gone very still, but it didn’t seem like she was afraid. The tension in her posture spoke of readiness, wariness. Like an animal prepared to stand and fight rather than run.
Interesting, don’t you think?
Yeah, it was. And maybe on a different night, with a different woman, he might have wanted to explore that further, push her, test her. But again, for yet another inexplicable reason, he’d made her a promise that they wouldn’t touch her. That he’d cut off any offending body part if they did, and he didn’t know why, but he found himself wanting to keep that promise.
“Since when did I give you permission to touch my property?” he asked, keeping the question casual yet letting an undertone of steel color it. Pissing off the Lychenkos was a bad move, but the sight of Anatoly’s hand on Temple’s ass made him want to break it off.
Proving his complete stupidity, Anatoly ignored the warning, digging his fingers into Temple’s flesh, squeezing. “Ten thousand,” he said thickly. “For the night.”
Jericho shifted his attention to Vassily, meeting the other man’s icy blue stare. “Your nephew is in danger of losing his hand,” he said coldly. ‘I suggest he removes it.”
Temple remained still, holding her tray, the bottle on top of it not even quivering. She had her back to him and all he could see was her straight spine, her wealth of red hair, and Anatoly Lychenko’s hand on her ass.
Vassily’s gaze flickered. “Why?” he grunted. “It is just a woman.”
In Bed With the Billionaire Page 6