Page 65 of The Wicked

“But would you stay in the event-planning industry?”

“I’d like to, but I also want to leave The Lookout and make a clean break, so I’ll take whatever pays me enough money to do that. I have plenty of transferrable skills. Organising is my superpower. Although I haven’t made a single to-do list today, which is unusual.”

“Getting withdrawal symptoms?” he joked. “You want me to find you a pen and paper?”

“Maybe? I also have an app on my phone.”

“You want me to find you a job too?”

I stiffened. “Is that…is that a joke?”

“Not at all. If you need to earn enough to claim your inheritance, I can make it happen. As you so sweetly pointed out”—he paused to kiss the tip of my nose—“that much is a rounding error for my family.”

“I…” What was I meant to say to that? He was offering a solution to a problem I never thought I’d be able to solve, but at the same time, it felt…wrong. I’d sold out once for money and lived to regret it, and the idea of being beholden to a man I was sleeping with, dependent on him for everything, left me uneasy. “Can I consider it? We’ve known each other for such a short period of time, and if you were my boss, then the whole dynamic between us would change, and…and I want to keepthis.”

“Take as much time as you need, but the offer’s there.” Another kiss. “Enough of the serious stuff… Wait here for a moment.”

He rose from the couch and opened a hidden cupboard on the other side of the room. Everything in this apartment was tucked away, leaving the surfaces clean and clutter-free. This was the expensive kind of minimalism, the type that came not from being unable to afford things but from having enough money to hide all the junk.

A minute later, Charming returned with an artfully wrapped box. “For you.”

A gift? He’d brought me a gift? “Thank you, but I haven’t gotten you anything, and—”

“Shh. We’re not running a scorecard, and besides, this present benefits both of us. Open it.”

Shoes. He’d bought me shoes. Dance shoes, to be precise, black Latin dance shoes with laces that criss-crossed over my feet and tied at the ankles. They were beautiful, undoubtedly expensive, higher than I was used to but unbelievably sexy.

“I’ll cue up the playlist while you put them on. Iwillget my dirty tango, Saralisa.”

At that moment, I’d have given my prince anything he asked for.

23

SARA

“What do you want for dinner this evening? I can pick something up on the way back.”

I hadn’t left Johannes’s apartment in two days. Nor had I spoken to our absent host, but Garrett informed me that several of the paintings on the wall in the great room were self-portraits, so I already felt I knew the man far better than I needed to. He was an artist, Garrett said, an artist and a trust fund baby who had an uncanny ability to convince women to remove their clothes. One of the paintings slid to the side to reveal a hidden studio flooded with natural light from skylights above, and I suspected that the paint-covered bed in one corner was used for more than just staging. Garrett claimed there wasn’t a surface in this apartment that wasn’t intimately acquainted with bare flesh, so I felt that was a fair assumption to make.

I also sanitised all the kitchen counters and the dining table while he chuckled from behind his laptop screen.

Garrett was surprisingly easy to spend time with. The darkness, the intensity that both unnerved me and turned me on, he seemed to be able to switch it on and off at will. It rarely made an appearance during daylight hours, and I secretly wondered whether he might be part vampire, but so far, he’d been drinking coffee and wine rather than blood. He had a sweet side too. All those chaste kisses, the grazes of his fingers that made me shiver, the little gifts he brought me. Okay, so this morning’s surprise had been a pair of leather handcuffs, but it was the thought that counted, right? I took a bite of croissant and studied the man opposite me as he sipped his morning latte and checked his emails.

A week ago, the idea of being tied up in bed would have horrified me, but now I could divide my life into two parts: before Charming and after. If he wanted me to wear the cuffs, I’d wear them, and I trusted him to make sure I enjoyed the experience. Sheesh, I was gettingthatache just from thinking about it.

“I’ll eat pretty much anything except seafood. I’m not a big fan of slime.”

He smiled, and my heart skipped. “Noted.”

“Are you sure you can’t stay here and try out those cuffs?”

“If I could, I would, but this is one commitment I can’t cancel.”

He hadn’t told me where he was going, and I hesitated to ask. We were sharing parts of ourselves, but we were still at the stage of picking and choosing which snippets to divulge. I had to respect his privacy. There were still pieces of my past I couldn’t bring myself to speak about, so the reticence went both ways. Meanwhile, I was planning a Netflix marathon in front of Johannes’s giant TV with popcorn, ice cream, and the box of chocolates Garrett had bought for me yesterday.

I hopped down from my stool and went for payback with a kiss to his cheek.

“I understand, but I’ll be waiting.”

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