Page 104 of Going Deep
“I have to apologize for something else, too,” he said.
“Trying to buy me a job?” she finished drily.
“No.” He scowled. “Why does everyone think I’m that big a jerk?”
“It’s not that big a leap, Michael,” she said, then blinked. “Wait. You weren’t buying me a job?”
“No. For fuck’s sake.” He scraped a hand through his hair. “I asked Miriam to look at your resume, and bring you in for an interview, but I never told her to hire you no matter what.” His glare could’ve melted glass. “What the hell do you take me for?”
She glared right back. “Well, I don’t fucking know, Michael. You weren’t telling me anything, remember?”
“All right, that’s fair,” he allowed grudgingly.
“If you’re not apologizing for that, then what?”
The unease flickered back across his face. “For stopping that last scene.”
She blinked. “Why are you apologizing for that?”
“Because of why I stopped it.”
Michael pulled in a deep breath and bit the bullet. “I stopped it because while I was binding your legs, and you were lying there getting goofy on the rope, I had this thought.”
She nodded, waiting. “Okay.”
“I thought,” he went on, “how easy it would be to take you under.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “Take me under?”
“Into subspace,” he explained. “You were close, anyway, with the rope, and I’d been planning both a spanking and a flogging.”
There was a flicker of interest, of heat, in her pretty blue eyes before she smothered it. “Okay.”
“And I knew if I had you under, in subspace, I could ask you about the job, and you’d tell me the truth. You wouldn’t be able to lie,” he continued, his belly tightening when her eyes narrowed, “not in that state. And I was tempted. I was really tempted.”
He blew out a breath. “And that scared the hell out of me.”
Understanding was creeping into her eyes. “So you, what, panicked?”
He nodded. “You could say that, yeah.”
“And you stopped the scene.”
“Yes.”
“And then instead of asking me about the job, like a normal fucking person with kindergarten-level communication skills, you dumped me like a dickhead.”
He winced. “Yes.”
She stared at him for so long, her blue eyes glittering and that soft, generous mouth set in a mutinous line, that he was on the verge of blurting out another apology—for what he had no idea. Then she sighed. “Damn her.”
He blinked. Whatever he’d been expecting to hear, it hadn’t been that. “Damn who?”
“Lola.”
He was confused. “Okay. Why?”
“Because,” Ginger said, clearly annoyed. “She said I owed you an apology, and she was right. Damn her.”
