Page 48 of The Alpha's Gamble
“I—I don’t bitch,” I stammered, too startled myself to come up with a better reply.
He scoffed. Actually scoffed. I wondered if he’d learned that from his grandmother, too. “Yes, you do. You bitch, and you whine, and you complain, and explain to me why nothing around you is good enough. But you stopped. About three weeks ago. Care to tell me why? Finally get a little humility, Blake?”
My turn to scoff. “If I did, it wouldn’t come out like that. I know what I’m worth.” The only thing was, I’d started to come to the uncomfortable realization that other people were worth something, too.
His eyes narrowed. “Then how would it come out?”
I fidgeted and strolled over toward the window, focusing on a golf course off in the distance to give me a reason not to look at him. “It wouldn’t.”
His chair creaked, and I could feel him coming up behind me by the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
“I think it has,” he said softly. “I’ve been watching you.”
My fists clenched at my sides.Don’t turn around, don’t turn…but he could probably see my expression reflected in the window, anyway, with his sharp werewolf vision. I could see his. His eyes, anyway, so bright.
“Watching me. To make sure I didn’t try to rob you? Or attack anyone?”
A brief pause. “Of course.” That sounded like a lie to me. “But I’ve seen enough to know you’ve been making yourself popular with the staff. Tipping well. Being friendly and patient when service is slow. I’ve heard about you, too. Good things.”
His tone suggested that took effort for him to admit.
“I told you I’d follow your rules. And I wouldn’t cause trouble.”
“I know.” He stepped closer. “But I didn’t believe you. Are you actually bored? I thought all you wanted out of life was a drink and a fuck and entertainment. I fuck you every night, at least once. You could keep yourself drunk twenty-four seven without stepping over my limits on your spending. And you have a whole casino to mess around in.”
True, true, and true, but…I could’ve made some retort about how I usually had more money to spend, or how no one was catering specifically to my every whim, or how I didn’t want tobefucked, I wanteda fuck, and those were two different things. A couple of weeks ago, that would’ve been mostly true, and a couple of months before that, it would’ve been entirely true.
But not today. The real truth was, I’d never stayed in one place being entertained for long enough to get sick of it. I’d jetted off to Greece, or Hawaii, or Aspen, or the Morrigan, or wherever I could find pleasure for a week or two, and then repeated the process endlessly. I’d never had time to be bored, even though objectively, now that I’d sat with it…it was boring.
Maybe the people who worked in those little offices down the hall, sending their emails and then going home to microwave some dinner, would’ve given their right arms to be bored like that. Voicing any of my thought process aloud would’ve made me sound like such a douchebag.
But I kept coming back to thinking about Brook. He had the same privileged life I did, but he spent his time productively.
You could be rich but not useless.
I’d been both.
Now I was poor and useless. And that was incredibly dull.
So I didn’t have a retort to make, unfortunately, and the silence lengthened around us.
Declan sighed deeply, as if the contemplation of my boredom and uselessness left him feeling equally bored.
“Okay, fine. You’re not boring, so I’ll skip that step.” He didn’t think I was boring? Be still my beating heart. “You want me to give you something to do? I will. But you won’t like it.”
I turned around at last and met his eyes. No alpha could resist a challenge, and I was alpha enough in that respect.
“Try me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Fine. Sit on the couch there, in front of the coffee table. I’d let you work at my assistant’s desk, but she’s particular about her stuff and she’ll be back from vacation tomorrow anyway.”
Work…at a desk? Or a coffee table, anyway? He wanted me towork? Well, what had I been expecting?
I sat down as bidden and watched as he opened a cupboard across the room and pulled out another laptop, twin to the one on his desk, and then dropped into the chair opposite me. He booted it up and typed something in, maybe a password, before he clicked a few times and spun it to face me.
The screen held a spreadsheet, some of the little boxes containing words and numbers and some of them empty. I mean, I’d never looked at one up-close before, but I’d seen them in the background on other people’s computers. That had to be a spreadsheet, right?
I looked up at Declan, and my total bafflement must have shown on my face, because he shook his head and chuckled. “I told you you wouldn’t like it.”
