Taunt Me (Rough Love 2)

He moved back to his desk, reached into a drawer and produced a tissue. He shoved it at me. “Stop crying.”

That was easy for him to say. I swabbed at my cheeks and tried to pull my shit together. He leaned and picked up my briefcase, and handed it to me.

I took it with a sense of relief, but also a sense of devastation. This thing between us was so ugly and so raw, and so unfathomable. I wanted to be over him, but I clearly wasn’t.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the polished handle.

“You should go,” was his only reply.

He went back behind his desk, avoiding my gaze. I wondered what he’d tell everyone when I was gone. Not a good match. She wants to make jewelry. My cufflinks shone at his wrists, elegant squares of polished silver. Someone as wealthy as him should have been wearing gold.

I turned and headed for the door. I heard him sit, then stand up again.

“What if we were professional?” he said.

My hand froze on the doorknob. I tilted my head so I could see him in my peripheral vision. “I don’t… I don’t think we can be professional.”

“I can be a fucking professional. I built this business. I can be professional when I need to be. I can help you. I would like to help you, Ms. Rouzier.”

The lazy mockery was gone from his voice. I turned and braced my back against the door, and stared at him standing behind his desk. He was a beautiful man, a tempting, powerful man. A man I wasn’t sure I could trust. “I don’t know,” I said.

“One hundred percent professional, I promise. I’ll give you the best internship any Norton student ever had. I know hundreds of designers in Manhattan. Big designers, small designers. I’ll help you meet them all.” He held up his arms in a helpless gesture. “What do you want out of this? Tell me and I’ll try to make it happen.”

“I just want to work and learn,” I said. “I want to focus on my career. I don’t want to be fucked with, especially after what happened with Simon, and then you.”

I could see by his expression that he couldn’t stand being lumped together with Simon as one of the men who’d fucked me over. Too bad. I didn’t want him to think this would turn out the way he wanted, that he could chip away at me until I fell back into his arms. It wasn’t happening.

Even if I desperately wanted to fall back into his arms.

“I’ll give this one week,” I said. My eyes were dry now. I recklessly tried to be the one in charge. “I’ll be your intern for one week, but if it’s not working out, if you’re not being professional the way you promised, I’ll go back to Norton and have my placement changed. And if they won’t change it, then I’ll drop out. I won’t graduate.”

I knew he’d never let that happen. I couldn’t understand a lot of things about Price, especially as they related to me, but one thing I understood very clearly was that, somewhere along the line, he’d become invested in my decision to change my life and go back to school. He’d given me a place to live, and apparently paid my way through Norton with his made-up scholarship. If I didn’t graduate, all of it was for nothing.

He gave a low, regretful laugh. “You and your threats.”

We glared at each other across the resonating space between us. There was so much emotion in that space, so much history and frustration, and unspoken desires. There was need and sadness and complication that seemed insurmountably fucked.

“Okay. One week,” he finally agreed. “One hundred percent professional, I swear.”

Price

I always intended to give Chere a legitimate internship, and her refusal to play games with me—really fun games—didn’t change that. Instead of fucking, I decided I’d use the time to get to know her better, to analyze her skills and talents and refine them to a razor point. If she wanted a design internship, I would give her a design internship. I was P.T. Eriksen, for fuck’s sake. They’d begged me to mentor Norton students for years, and now that I had one I was interested in, I planned to mentor the fuck out of her on a daily basis.

As for physically fucking her, there was time to work on that. I had all the time in the world now, an entire semester, if I could convince her to stay beyond the first week. The second day, I took her to lunch with a friend who worked at Chopard. The fourth day, I set up a meeting with a friend at Bulgari. By the end of the first week, she didn’t talk anymore about having her placement changed.