Page 61 of Tamed

I walked silently through the hallway to the living area doorway and stopped.

The living area had the same lighting, a few spots, a floor lamp or two and one on a side table beside the white leather sectional couch.

Isabel was sitting on the couch, cross-legged and her headphones on, gazing intently at the screen of her laptop. She’d changed out of her pretty office get up and wore instead a pair of loose comfortable looking yoga pants and that pale gray sweatshirt again, the one that kept slipping off her shoulder.

It had slipped off her shoulder now, and this time there was no bra strap marring her creamy skin. There was nothing at all, just smooth skin, and freckles.

The laptop screen lit her face, screwed up tight in concentration, and there were freckles there too, on her forehead and her nose and her cheeks. Fucking gold dust.

When she’d been a kid, that face had been rounder and there’d been a sweetness to it. That sweetness was still there, yet it was very much a woman’s face now, the roundness gone. She had Juliana’s high cheekbones and proud nose. Juliana’s rosebud mouth.

There was nothing of Ten in her, apart from maybe that forehead and the sharpness that could edge her green eyes.

Desire clenched hard inside me whether I wanted it to or not, the memory of her beneath me on the floor of Arcadia replaying itself in my brain. The tight, wet clasp of her pussy around my cock, her face flushed and gleaming with sweat, her jaw tight as she fought against the orgasm I was hellbent on giving her.

She was a fighter, that girl, she always had been, and I liked that about her.

But nothing was going to happen between us again, I’d already decided, no matter how beautiful she was sitting there with that sweatshirt half falling off her.

Jesus, if it was a quick fuck I wanted, I could head to Arcadia and find myself a sexy little brat to play with. It didn’t have to be Isabel Fox.

I hadn’t moved, but something must have given me away, because suddenly she lifted her head and stared at me. For a second her eyes widened in alarm, her mouth opening. Then recognition hit and the alarm faded, to be replaced by a sharp, glittering anger.

“Jesus, Caleb,” she said, not bothering to take off her headphones. “You should have let me know you were coming instead of hanging creepily in the doorway and waiting for me to notice you.”

So, still pissed then.

“Yeah, I should,” I said. “But I didn’t.”

“Sorry.” She tapped one side of her headphones. “Can’t hear you.”

Still pissed and being passive aggressive about it.

I hitched a shoulder against the doorway and folded my arms. I wasn’t going to let her draw me into an argument, no matter how much she wanted one.

She glanced down at her laptop for a couple of minutes, trying to get on with the serious business of making me wait, but her own impatience must have gotten in her way, because she looked up again, scowling. Then she pulled her headphones off. “Okay, fine. What the hell do you want?”

“We need a little talk, Isabel.”

17

Isabel

Caleb leaned in the doorway with his arms folded, looking so unbelievably sexy it made me furious.

Everything about him made me furious.

Fury was apparently my default mode with him.

He wasn’t in a suit for a change, but jeans and a black T-shirt with a black hoodie over the top. It was wet so he’d been out in the rain, which should have made him look bedraggled and sad, except he was anything but.

He looked hard and mean and dangerous. A guy you didn’t want to cross. Except me being me, I wanted to cross him.

Why is fighting him automatically your first thought? It never makes things better. It only makes them worse. Especially after what you said to him today…

My stomach twisted, the memory of him walking out of the office earlier that evening, his expression set and hard, hitting me unpleasantly all over again.

He hadn’t taken my badly considered throw-away statement about my childhood well, and okay, I didn’t blame him. I’d let my temper get the better of me and I’d said something I hadn’t meant, and that had pissed him off in a major way. I’d apologized, but he hadn’t wanted a bar of it and had walked out.

---