Finishing the pickle slice, she accepted the ice and pressed it to her face.
“Thank you...” He hadn’t said how she should address him, so she used what the Scarlet Auction staff had recommended. “Master.”
“Where’d you get the bruise?”
She didn’t respond. She was pretty sure he and Jake weren’t the best of friends, but she didn’t want to assume too much. What if he told Jake? What if Jake called off the deal and punished her for contravening what he had said? She had already decided she was going to gather as much evidence as possible so that she could nail Jake’s ass to the wall.
When she didn’t answer, Benji didn’t press. Instead, he went back to the kitchen and made tea using some fancy coffee machine. He brought over two steaming mugs.
“I’m not much of a tea drinker,” she said.
“Drink it anyway.”
Setting down the ice, she took the mug he held out for her. Ugh. Green tea. Her least favorite.
“Sit down,” he said as he took a seat on the sofa opposite her.
Sitting down had never felt so good. She had taken to shifting her weight from one side to the other to provide some relief for her poor aching knees.
“On the sofa,” he added when she plopped down on the floor.
She crawled onto the sofa and pulled up her knees to provide some coverage for her nakedness.
“What’s your name?” he asked after taking a sip of his tea.
She didn’t see many guys his age drink tea, especially when there was expensive alcohol around as an option. She noticed he had barely touched his bourbon. Jake had also mentioned he’d opted out of the Scarlet Auction. Why was that?
“Your real name,” he clarified.
Did that mean he wasn’t going to call her Slut #2?
“Montana.”
He raised his brows. “Don’t know many black women named Montana.”
She almost retorted that she doubted he knew many black people at all. To keep herself from saying anything, she sipped her tea and grimaced at the flavor. For a spell, he did nothing but drink his tea and watch her.
“There any coffee?” she ventured to ask finally, hoping to make him go into the kitchen.
“Tea’s better for you.”
Patronizing bastard. His gaze was at her tits. Looking away, he shifted on the sofa and cleared his throat.
“You mind if I get dressed?” she decided to ask, hoping that he wasn’t as big an asshole as Jake. “It’s a little cold in here.”
He deliberated for a moment before answering, “I’d prefer you didn’t.”
She clenched her jaw in disappointment. So much for him being the nice guy. When she met his gaze, she had the strange feeling he was testing her.
“You went to Nerd Nation,” he commented, eying her class ring.
She looked at him, startled. Most people didn’t know Stanford by that moniker.
“I was there, too,” he added. “For my MBA.”
That doesn’t mean we have anything in common she wanted to say. The people in the graduate school of business were a world apart from the activists and liberal arts undergraduates she’d hung out with.
“What did you study?” he asked.