Page 132 of Never Submit

I won’t back down, despise my wolf rising to the surface, prepared to exert my will over her. “You’ll call me fuckingsirif you want to talk to me, and I’ll call you Ms. Wexler.”

“I’m not your employee,” she snaps back.

“You wouldn’t make it past your first day if you were.”

My heart leaps into my throat. It's a mistake to engage with her. Yet here we stand, and I’m too powerless to kick her out the door.

“There’s a thing, Torin, simmering between us. I know you feel it.” Then she slips her gaze over me. “Or maybe you don’t. Your name really doesn’t suit you. It belongs to a wild man, not a buttoned-up throwback.”

A lead weight drops through my chest. “I’m not a throwback. I just like women who do as they’re told. And you don’t fit the bill.”

“Like Catarina?”

Fucking Ren.She’s pushing me towards the edge.

“Not you,” I repeat, pulling in a deep breath to calmmyself, but I instantly regret it because the air is just full of her scent. I tighten my jaw against it.

“Fine.Sir.If you say so.”

The fucking mocking gets to me, and like a damn idiot, I stalk over to her and take her by her hair, pulling her head back. Her cheeks flush, and she looks at me like she can’t wait to have me.

It grabs me, that look, strokes over my libido, jerks it right off. Using my grip on her to bring her in closer to me, I say, “Stop playing with fire.”

“Then stop letting it get to you.”

Her words slide through my senses, and my own squelched response burns the back of my tongue.

I let her go, pushing her from me, and she stumbles.

I head toward the cabin’s small wooden desk. My laptop computer’s shut, and I pick it up, shoving it into the nearby leather satchel. If Ren won’t leave, then I’ll go out—to a bar, to a hotel, anywhere but here.

“Really,sir? Is that all you’ve got?”

There’s something in how she twists the word that scrapes those nails over me again, only this time it’s along the growing rigidity of my cock.

“You don’t want to know what I’ve got,” I reply scathingly. My posture goes tight. “You don’t know what I like or what I’m into.”

Again comes her slight intake of breath, as if I’ve hurt her. It’s only because I’m not crumbling in front of her like the others. She’s got Mathis and Noble eating out of the palm of her hand. Hell, even Dax is becoming a love-sick puppy when it comes to this poisonous woman.

Not me.

I refuse to bow or break.

“That’s not nice,sir. Then again,sir, you’re old-fashioned. Boring. You wear nice suits, but all those buttons…” She trails off, waiting for me to parry.

“All those buttons, what?” I’m taking her bait. We both know it.

I give her my back again, and she moves around me, touching everything. Picking up my things and putting them down.

“I thought you wore them to hide a wild wolf, but instead they just cover up the staid shifter.”

Staid. Boring. Old-fashioned. Those are words I’d use to describe Mathis, not me.

Yet my jaw clenches and a part of me knows Ren has it right.

Maybe I should teach her a lesson. She wants to play with fire? I’ll give her an inferno.

I turn. She’s not looking at me; she’s holding one of the books left behind on the shelves. But slowly, she raises her head.

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