Page 6 of The Broken Wolf's Redemption

That her nostrils pricked and her body leaned slightly to the side, sinfully craving his nearness even though she’d never admit it, made her want to cry even worse than the dread of what she was there to do. He was a male and he was wolf, and that was all her body cared about, but her body was a traitor. Her body could go to hell and so could Rome, with his conquering and his contracts.

“The world can burn for all I care.” He didn’t back down an inch. His voice was cold and dead.

It still lured her in. She was like a fish, helplessly wriggling in a net, drawn ever closer to her doom.

She’d dressed in layers. Black leggings, velvet dress, boy shorts and a sports bra underneath, a light sweater overtop. She’d tied her shoes extra tight, like those laces could buy her time.

It wasn’t going to save her. She was in the lair of the beast now.

A beast who would breathe fire over everything, set the world to destruction. Except… he hadn’t. He’d built this business. He appeared to thrive despite whatever happened to make him a lone wolf in a human world. He hadn’t yet unleashed his fire.

“Except?” she prodded, hardly daring to breathe. If she inhaled, she’d only take more of him in.

“Except… my daughter. She needs a place. She’s the sole reason I care about anything.”

She shook off the black spell he cast so effortlessly over her traitorous body. It was a wolf thing. It had to be. The human in her would never crave or yearn like this. The animal in her appreciated Rome’s blatant, dangerous sexuality. He was no alpha, but he was entirely alpha male. At the same time, the wolf in her would never dream of submission. It was the human part of her that put her name on that contract.

“Now that we’ve established you’re not a classically trained psychopath, can we please just get this over with?” She crossed her arms and stepped to the side, freeing herself from his sphere.

Laughable. She wasn’t free. He dominated the entire space.

He said nothing and she was forced to continue. “Or did you want to stand here trading insults all night? I’m not giving you extra time. An agreement is an agreement, lawyers or not.” She’d signed and he’d signed, and they’d agreed that if the contract never saw the light of day, it would be best for both of them. She’d never live down the shame of her parents finding out that she’d done something like this. It would have been easier to handle if it was a soul contract.

Wasn’t it, though?

It might have only specified that she’d spent one hour on Monday nights between seven to eight, but anyone could fill in the blanks. One million dollars in exchange for her time. Eight hours on Sundays, one hour on Mondays. What the hell else would she be doing to pay back that kind of money?

“Where do you want it?” Her face heated and she damned Rome’s black soul for goading her into having to ask.

“Where do I want you? In my office. Away from the windows.”

“It’s good to know you want to be the sole voyeur.”

“I don’t like to share.” Possession. His tone dripped with it, like he already owned all of her and not just her body.

She fumbled for something to say, but a terrible truth lodged in her throat, cutting off her air. How could anyone be so physically beautiful and so ugly in every other way? “You share this space.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“I don’t belong to you.”

“For the next six months, you do.”

Approximately two hundred and sixteen hours. She’d done the math with an average of four weeks in a month. She didn’t want to look it up to find out how many extra Sundays there might be in that time. Two hundred odd hours was already bad enough. It wasn’t a lifetime. She could get through this. There was a word for what she was doing, but she pushed that to the back of her mind. There was also another word, one she preferred—she was surviving. She was doing what she needed to do, and she was making the choice herself.

She had to because she had no other choice. The penalty for a broken contract was that she handed sole ownership of her company to Rome.

If she thought this was bad, being under his thumb this way, she couldn’t imagine what it would be like with him as owner of her business. It would be a reminder for the rest of her life that not only had she failed, she’d shamed herself, ground herself into nothing. Weakness was not an option. Not this time.

“The office. You’re not going to make me go into the garage and spread-eagle myself over some godforsaken machine or stick tools up into forbidden places?”

“That would harm you.”

“As if this doesn’t,” she snapped. Don’t pretend you care. Don’t pretend you’re not the devil himself.

“There are different kinds of harm. Acceptable levels.”

Acceptable levels? What did that even freaking mean?

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