His Fire Inside

Wow. I was not expecting him to admit he judged me unfairly. I’m questioning his sincerity, yet it’s there clearly on his face. Maybe he’s not such an asshole. Then I remember he’s waiting on a question. “How long would the assignment be for?”

“At least six months, based on Patricia’s assessment on how far along my mother is in her recuperation. However, a year would not be out of the question, I would hope for you.”

Even as I answer, I’m questioning what I’m saying. An entire year in close contact with Rourke Vega? I’m not sure I’d make it without giving in to the insane urge to lick his chin. “I’m open to a year. Where I’m concerned is if I come in and I’m only needed for a few months, then I have to turn around and find something else. It isn’t always easy.”

“I’m willing to sign to at least a six-month agreement, which can be reassessed at the end. You would still be paid for the six months, whether it lasts that long or not if it’s due to my mother no longer needing you. I’ve studied a few of these live-in companion contracts. You’ll have two days off as standard, those include the evenings when her current CNA will stay with her through the night. I’ll put you through my company to cover your medical insurance. You’ll be paid with everyone else on the last day of the month and the fifteenth. For the six months, your salary will be fifty thousand.”

I’m trying to follow him, but he’s talking so fast. I like the idea of him paying out the contract even if we don’t make it to the six months, and insurance I don’t have to pay for anymore is awesome...wait. What? Did I say that out loud? I didn’t because he’s still looking at me as if he’s waiting for me to agree. “Fifty thousand?”

He sighs. “I’m willing to go up to sixty thousand, but not a dollar more. Considering I’m taking care of your insurance and you don’t have to pay rent or bills.”

Now I’m flustered for a completely different reason. “No, it’s—I, it was a question. I’m—fifty thousand is good, it works for me.”

“You do realize you just talked yourself out of a higher rate of pay?” Crap. His mouth quirks up, just on one side. It’s not a real smile though. God, I would love to see him smile, or even better to hear him laugh. He barely has any laugh lines. It makes me sad, at thirty-nine he should have lots of deep laugh lines.

Dang it. “Oh.”

“As if I could tell you no now? You’ll get the sixty. Whether you meant to or not, I was ready to agree. If you would please meet with my mother, then join us for dinner so you can gauge if you two will “click,” as you say. We can get this settled today.” Okay, definitely arrogant, but maybe not as much of an asshole as I thought.

Oh, Olivia, when will you learn? Going to work for Rourke Vega is a bad, bad, bad idea. It seems like a good one, like buying a cheesecake, a little sweet heaven of pleasure, but not when those calories come home to roost on your fat ass. Except Rourke is so much worse than cheesecake—he’s dreams, he’s want, he’s need and desire, all the things that will be the ruin of you. Don’t.

I take a deep breath. Does he see the doubt, the fear? I think he’s holding his breath too. I exhale. “I’d like that, yes.”

Obsidian is back, glinting brightly at me. “Here’s her address. You go ahead now. I have a few things to clear up here. Why don’t you two talk, then text me what you’d like me to pick up for dinner on my way there.”

I love how he says things that sound like questions but aren’t. Nodding, I lean forward to take the yellow post-it from him. For a brief second, he doesn’t let it go. My eyes go to his and I get lost in them. Then he blinks and once again cuts the connection too fast, sending me spinning. I snatch the post-it, then get the hell out while I still can. I don’t look back.

4

Rourke

Long after the door closes on Olivia Casey I’m still staring at it. It closed with barely a sound, not the slamming I expected at the sudden flurry of movement from her as she snatched the post-it from me. If I hadn’t heard the soft click for myself, I wouldn’t have known it even happened. But I heard it because I was tuned into every sight and sound of Olivia Casey without my fucking permission.

Closing my eyes, I realize I haven’t blinked since she left. My head goes back against my chair. It’s the crack of the sniper fire, it’s the phone call shattering the soft laughter of Bethany as she whispered all the dirty things we were going to do in celebration of being done with finals, but the phone call interrupted that with the news of my father’s heart attack. The soft click of the door closing behind Olivia is her closing the door on my life before her. At least I recognize this moment, where I hadn’t before.

Simply thinking of her causes my whole body to tense as it had when she first came through the door. One look was all it took for my body to come alive in a way it never had before. Want, desire, need, boiled up hot and thick in my veins with the knowledge that only Olivia, the cause of it, could put out the fire inside me. I shake my head, as confused now as I was at the time.

I see her vividly. She’s small, maybe five five. Long brown hair in a ponytail that matches the soft chocolate brown in her wide, round eyes. Her nose is adorable, there’s no other word for it, small, pert over a wide, full mouth I wanted to taste the moment I laid eyes on it. Her heart-shaped face ends in a small, pointed chin I know would fit my hand as I cupped her face to pull her to me.

My whole body hardens at just how badly I wanted to pull her against me, to get lost in her soft, delectable little body. Lush, sweet, she made my dick so hard that my head swam so badly, if I had been standing I would have been knocked on my ass. A humorless chuckle comes out of me. Speaking of asses, damn, her plump ass had my fingers clenching to find out what it would feel like in my hands.

In the bright pink smock or whatever it’s called with various kittens on it, she should have appeared juvenile. She certainly looks younger than her twenty-eight years. Except I’m pretty sure she didn’t realize the way the top showed off her hourglass figure, revealing she’s no girl. Then there was her smart-ass mouth. Flippant, daring me, ready and willing to argue with me. No woman has argued with me in years.

I wonder if it’s because she’s nothing like my usual. While I don’t prefer blondes to brunettes, I do like them leggy—at six four, I don’t like feeling like I’m working to fit with a woman. I definitely prefer women with more experience than Olivia. It doesn’t matter that she’s been married. There’s an air of innocence to her that screams she isn’t experienced in the type of sex I have, short term without strings. No, getting involved with her would be the biggest mistake I could make, for the both of us. My attraction to her is an aberration and should be treated as such. It will pass; my interest in a woman never lasts for long.

My eyes drift to the file on her. I’m going to be looking for a new security company. They missed the mark badly. How had they not known the debt wasn’t Olivia’s, but her ex-husband’s? The thought of another man being able to call her his has bile rising to the back of my throat. I work to swallow it down. He didn’t deserve her, so he lost her. The bastard took her for so much more than her inheritance.

He took her innocence, not her virginity, but her belief in goodness and kindness and to trust those things existed. Connor Newton showed her people could lie to your face while they whispered words of love; he made her harder, made her fear the world and men and herself. Connor Newton is lucky he’s in jail right now for charges stemming from a robbery—the guy moved on to robbing businesses instead of people.

I imagine her at eighteen, bright-eyed but scared of the future. Without her mother or father or anyone to guide her through the good and the bad, to even be there to hold her hand. I’d been an asshole to judge her harshly. Even though I’d seen her mother’s death certificate, I didn’t really take in the date of death. All I saw was Olivia skipped college and got married. It didn’t make sense when she had worked so hard to earn the partial scholarship to Baylor.

At the time I read it, I thought she was lazy. Preferring marriage and letting her husband worry about paying the bills. I don’t know the whole story, but something tells me she didn’t make the decision not to go to Baylor lightly. Especially when she was enrolled in classes at ACC the very next semester. Whatever the

story, I didn’t have the right to judge her. It was none of my business.

I’d learned what I needed to: she isn’t financially irresponsible or likely to try and steal from my mother. She’s trustworthy, she knows her stuff, she’ll make an excellent employee. An employee who’s off-limits. That she’s an employee and off-limits is a given cast in stone, but factor in she’ll be living with my mother. My mother, who wants me married and with a half a dozen grandkids because it’s the perfect number, made Olivia Casey not just someone I kept my hands off, but my eyes off too.

****