by Delka Beazer
Hunter rolled his shoulders in an effort to redirect his fast escalating need to wipe that smug expression off Joseph’s face. As it was his control, always iffy, was now hanging by a thread.
He pinned Joseph with an unrelenting stare. “I designed these buildings according to the dictates of the Bronsworts’ and your only job as my foreman is to follow my instructions, got it?”
Joseph’s eyes became flat, he opened his mouth … the roar of an approaching car brought them both whipping around.
Hunter stalked to the window. His heart stalled then went into free-fall.
Mina.
But he couldn’t let Joseph go without a stern warning. There was too much riding on this for both the Bronsworts and himself especially since yesterday.
He eyed Joseph stonily. “From now on, we’ll consult about every approaching phase of construction.” Joseph’s face turned ashen with anger, Hunter’s misgivings about the man’s competency blossomed further into reality. He held Joseph’s furious stare, and dropped his voice low, there were many listening ears, “this will be your only mistake,” he warned softly, then left.
Mina watched as Hunter’s long strides brought him to her.
His tall, raw body moved with a grace that would transcend the quality of any clothing, even the faded jeans and paint splattered t-shirts he seemed to prefer.
Heat blossomed in her cheeks, she tore her attention away from him and fidgeted with her fingers.
He stopped a few feet away. “Hi,” he whispered his voice surprisingly gentle.
She risked a glance, he was watching her keenly from beneath hooded lids.
Bolder, she faced him square on. Dark fire burned in his eyes, he was devouring her, soggy shorts and all.
She said the first thing which popped into her mind. “How has today been going?”
Immediately a guarded expression came over his face.
She tensed. “Is something wrong?”
His gaze flickered down to her mouth, then quickly back up to her eyes. The muscles in his jaw jumped, he moved back a fraction. “No,” he said flatly, “why do you ask?”
Mina snorted, “You’re lying.”
He sighed and ran a hand through his thick, ebony locks which glistened with dampened sweat. Would his hair feel clammy or would the strands feel like wet silk, smooth and sensuous beneath her fingers?
“Up until a few minutes ago, all I could think of was you,” he evaded softly.
Her wits scattered and she blushed. He was proving a deft hand at circumventing her questions with little effort. The heat of the day seemed to condense in the small space between their bodies and her mouth went dry.
“Have you thought of me, little Mina?” he whispered.
A jolt went through her at the carnality implicit in his words. She gulped down dry heat, tried to stay on her feet, withstanding the intensity in his eyes was the hardest part. “That’s why I’m here,” she sounded breathless.
“Really?” He sounded stunned, unsure.
It gave her back some confidence. She stomped her foot in exasperation, risked a saucy smile at him, “Hunter, please drop the brainless act!”
She moved off briskly in the direction he’d just come from, “do you mind?” she beckoned to him.
He fell into step beside her.
She stared straight ahead, aware of nothing but the man who walked beside her. “Please stop trying to force me to marry you.”
He muttered a soft curse. She ignored it. This was too important. “Yes. I do desire you but I don’t want to marry …”
“Me?” he asked, his voice a low, threatening growl.
She shook her head. “No … it’s not so much you. It’s this whole thing,” she stopped in the middle of the dirt road. “I won’t accept being given to you like … like a prize or spoils of war,” she said venomously, “I don’t love you and you don’t-“
“Stop,” Hunter held up hand, halting the flow of her words, his eyes had become hard, unreadable, “you don’t know what I want or feel,” he clipped.
She raised a haughty brow, “You want me.” She challenged unblinkingly up at him.
A lopsided grin split his mouth, some of the hardness fled from his eyes, a shard of tenderness returned. “Yes, I want you. All of you,” he said simply.
Every pore in her body seemed to contract under the impact of his blunt words.
She fought against the consuming sensation. “Why? I don’t understand. We’ve barely had a decent conversation in all these months.” She desperately needed him to put together some sort of explanation for his unwavering pursuit of her.
Hunter turned away from her scrutiny, stared into the greenery behind her. “That’s where you’re wrong. I was here months before I started working for you.”
Mina stilled. “You were watching me the whole time?”
Hunter laughed, but there was no humor in his dry voice, he looked down at her, the corners of his blue eyes crinkled charmingly in his tanned face. He was undeniably handsome.
An odd sensation washed through her. Did he really care for her?
Reaching out he skimmed a large fingertip over her lips, she trembled at the sudden warmth of his touch. She didn’t mind the roughness of his hands at all.
“I wasn’t watching you at first, it was only later … Your company was starting to crumble, you were struggling to pay your workers. I decided to help but I realized … I wanted you as much, maybe more than anything else,” he finished softly.
She should be frightened, outraged even but oddly she wasn’t. Her heart thumped frantically, trying to keep pace with her warring emotions. She felt faint. Nervously she shifted her feet, but inexplicably her body tilted closer to Hunter’s, not away.
Before she’d hated his eyes on her every time she’d come to the work site but it had been only because she had found it hard to look away.
With a flash, she now knew that some part of her had accepted him that day in her father’s office.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad.
She would enter an arranged marriage. Hunter would finish the job on Jacobe Aisle, which until he came along had been postponed because they were broke. There were several other locations which were either closed or decrepit enough to warrant his skills.
She took a deep, sustaining breath. Beside her Hunter stilled, probably also sensing that what would come next would alter his world.
She searched his dark blue eyes, and immediately fought against staggering back and running for the hills.
The intensity burning from his gaze was almost crushing, it consumed her.
Hunter would consume her one way or another. And she had to decide whether she’d be able to come to grips with it.
She would try. “Let’s start afresh,” her lips trembled but she pushed on, “win my trust Hunter, then you may have my hand and my body.”
She was snatched up into an iron grip before the last words left her mouth. Relenting she gave in to the overwhelming cocoon wrapped tightly around her.
Burying her face against the thick muscles in his warm neck, she wrapped her arms around his massive shoulders which unbelievably trembled beneath her touch.
His heart was thundering. She smiled, perhaps this would work.
Perhaps.
Chapter six
The steel lid of the toolbox snapped home with a bang. Hunter stood up and worked the last kinks of the day out of his shoulders. The last of the workers were leaving.
He grinned self-consciously. Today had been awful … and incredible.
Mina had finally come around.
He still couldn’t believe it. His body stirred as he basked in the remembered feel of her in his arms.
He grinned. She’d felt it too. After her declaration she’d mumbled a hasty goodbye.
He gathered his toolbox and walked to his car.
His brows clouded. He needed to fire Joseph. How he would do that without alerting Mina to the full extent of his power, he didn
’t know.
He needed his ring on her finger before he revealed the fact that he wasn’t actually working for free, in a sense.
He owned Bronswort. All of it. Even her home, which Hermile had mortgaged in a desperate attempt to keep the company afloat. The fortune he’d accumulated over years as a hedge fund manager was now slowly being put to good use absorbing some of Bronswort’s larger debts.
The rebuilding of the ancient Bronswort line of hotels and resorts would make him even richer in the long run. But he needed time.
Did he love her? No, but he burned to possess her, to make her smile, to watch her develop the passion he felt for her.
Giving her back her company through marriage would do that.
He’d get her. She’d get her company. It was a fair exchange.
He checked his watch, six-thirty. An hour before Desiree’s dinner would start.
He sniffed his pits, winced. A long, hot shower was definitely in order.
His cell throbbed against his hip. He frowned, he wasn’t expecting a call.
“Roades.” He listened and all his carefully nurtured plans began to come apart.
“I won’t be threatened,” he replied coldly, he gripped the phone, his eyes black with growing rage. As the words flowed into him, an unfamiliar sensation he’d rarely encountered before inexorably began to suck away at the hope he’d just experienced. He was trapped.
He closed his eyes against a rush of hate even as his body tensed with pleasurable shudders over Desiree’s. Hunter slipped off her before the last ripples of his climax left his frame and rolled onto his back.
He stared with unblinking eyes at the timbered roof, hands clasped behind his head.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been manipulated, his mouth twisted with self-loathing, however it was the first time he’d lost.
Feeling her eyes on him, he turned.
Desiree stared confidently back, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed with satisfaction.
She reached for him, he caught her hand in mid-air and squeezed in warning. She paled, childish indignation leapt into her brown eyes. Hunter flung her wrist away and swung his legs off the bed.
“Hunter, it’s just sex.” The whiny pout had returned to her voice, his body shuddered for a completely different reason.
He would laugh if his situation wasn’t so pathetic, but he felt used, dirty.
He turned, his eyes narrowed. “For someone like you, I don’t doubt that’s all it is. I’m one in a very long line aren’t I?”
She met his gaze unflinchingly, “Yes, but you were by far the best I’ve had in a long time,” she licked her bottom lip sensuously.
He fumed, and turned away before he did something he’d never done in his life and strike a weaker being.
Desiree was not the first of her kind that he’d encountered. A woman who craved sex the way drug users pursued their next high. She had been willing to use her knowledge of his real identity to force him between her thighs.
How could he have fallen for her dinner party cover? At the picnic her face had scratched his memory but he’d dismissed it. He’d seen countless pretty blonds before.
Her phone call had confirmed that she wasn’t just one of the crowd. She’d slept with Rogan, one of his former business associates and one of the worst womanizers on the planet.
She was a cultured, well informed whore who got her kicks from screwing powerful men.
He lunged to his feet, naked and furious in the artificial light of her bedroom. He needed an acid bath.
Desiree scampered from the bed. She drew close, her eyes heating up once more, her breathing was hitched.
He recoiled, clenched his fists. He stared straight ahead unable to trust himself to look at her. “If you break your word and breathe a word of this to Mina, I will destroy you, your family, your friends, everything you hold dear,” his voice was deadly quiet.
She muffled a high pitched cry of distress, the sheet slid conveniently from between her fingers to the floor, bearing her naked body with jutting breasts to full view.
Eyes fastened greedily on him, she touched herself, rolling a nipple enticingly between her fingers. Her head fell back onto her shoulders, her mouth opened wide, tongue snaking languorously around her lips.
He grimaced in horrified distaste, and looked away. She’d begged him to suck and bite her breasts, among other throat gagging instructions, urging him on with words that could only come from the most hardened nymphomaniac.
He’d blocked her out and only gave her the rutting she’d begged for. She peeked sideways at him. Noted his look of distaste, dropped the act and without a backward glance, flounced from the room.
Hunter closed his eyes against another, far more dangerous lie that he’d have to perpetuate. And it was immeasurably worse because as he’d pounded away inside Desiree’s body, her shrill screams of delight ringing in his ears, he’d seen the tiny truth which had managed to evade him for weeks.
He could easily love Mina Bronswort. Had sensed this even as she’d heaped insults and anger upon his head. None of which had gone quite far enough to hide the small, vulnerable girl beneath.
He buried his face in his hands. He was sicker than Desiree because he wasn’t about to give up Mina, not when he was so close to winning her.
He hated himself for that.
Chapter seven
An upturned root loomed in her path. Mina hiked her dress to her knee and stepped over carefully. A whistle came out of nowhere, she shaded her eyes against the shards of light which arrowed down through the canopy of leaves overhead.
Hunter loomed in the foreground, tall and commanding.
Her breath went haywire inside her chest. Why had she never noticed how beautiful he was before? Had she simply been too stubborn to allow herself to accept it?
Her pulse began fluttering frantically at the base of her throat.
Bare-chested with a dusting of black, curly hairs racing across the breadth of his wide shoulders, he had long, yet sleekly sculpted arms and legs which fleshed out his formidable physique.
Encased in only a dead black swimming trunk, he was giving her hot flashes.
The natural emerald pool behind him winked invitingly.
He grinned roguishly at her, then turned and dived in.
She became still. This was a good idea. The pounding inside her heart wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
She was in control of this situation but … ever since she’d invited Hunter to one of her favorite abandoned spots several days ago, she’d been rushing around in a nervous panic.
Breakfast this morning had been a catastrophe.
Who would’ve thought a bowl of breakfast cereal could’ve proved so tricky to eat?
Hermile had noticed.
“Are you coming down with something?” He asked casually, scooping up a forkful of sunny-side eggs.
Caught off guard she flinched, dropped the spoon and sent tiny streams of milk splashing onto her dress. With a grimace she’d concentrated fiercely on cleaning up the mess.
Hermile wasn’t put off. “Is it the flu? Doc Matthews is visiting some relatives in the country, a stop here won’t be an inconvenience.”
“I’m fine, just a little nervous about an upcoming meeting,” she muttered, then stilled. Darn, keeping her mouth shut was proving harder than she had anticipated.
“What meeting?”
She thought furiously. Hermile would know already if she was meeting with one of their regional managers. Besides wasn’t her voluntarily spending time with Hunter his idea?
“With Hunter.” She met his eyes sternly, warning him to contain whatever jubilation he felt.
Uncharacteristically Hermile’s face went blank, and instead of delight, a careful look clouded his emerald eyes. “Be careful Mina.”
She snorted. “Now you tell me to be careful, after I’ve bought into your heartless trade?”
Hermile shifted, his eggs forgotten, focused on the small breakfast
table covered with a pristine white tablecloth. “You don’t have to forgive me, but please believe that I love you more than anything.”
“Then why can’t you say those words to my face. Why do you look so guilty, so trapped?”
He turned and she tried to read his expression but he was a closed door. He had become more like this since his divorce from Josephine.
He shrugged and picked up his fork, took another bite of eggs. “We both want the same thing Mina, for Bronswort to survive,” he watched her and his eyes were filled with a deep, sad knowledge, “the time will come when you’ll find that your life is bound to Bronswort’s existence no matter what happens.”
Continuing to the pond, she suppressed a shiver. That was exactly why she was here, so that she wouldn’t become an old, cynical spinster with nothing but a business to brighten her life.
She needed to feel something other than failure or abandonment.
Fond memories of childhood afternoons spent splashing in the pond and eating the half-ripe figs made her smile.
She stopped at the circular lip of the pond. A hundred feet across, it was a natural catchment for the spring rains.
She bent and dipped a hand into the green water. Hunter shot up inches from her hand, she jerked backwards, lost her balance and landed with a thud on her bottom.
Hunter chuckled sheepishly, water draining from his face, “Sorry.”
He launched out of the water and towered over her for a split second before he was on his knees in front of her, his hand outstretched.
She glared at his proffered hand, his eyes became wary.
She checked the flash of irritation. She’d forgotten how to have fun. Sucking in a ragged breath she leaned back and smiled widely into his face.
Hunter paused, then remarkably toppled backwards onto his butt. He hooted with raucous laughter.
Her smile trembled then fell away. Embarrassment washed over her, then hot fury.
How dare he laugh at her? She was trying to be approachable.
She chewed her lip furiously. Perhaps smiling like a deranged monkey hadn’t been the right response.
She must’ve looked like an idiot. The thought made her giggle, and suddenly her lips stretched naturally and she was dissolving beside Hunter.