“It had crossed my mind,” he admitted.
Her embarrassment turned to anger. “Seriously?”
He sighed. “Amber-”
“You are the most egotistical, opportunistic-”
“Hey, you were the one who was dressed to kill and insisted on ‘taking a ride in my jet plane.’”
“That
“Really?” He looked genuinely surprised. “It usually is.”
Amber compressed her lips. How had she been so naive? How could she have been so incredibly foolish? Royce wasn’t some knight in shining armor. He was a charming, wealthy, well-groomed pickup artist.
Her distaste was replaced again by embarrassment. She’d proposed paying her way here by doing office work. He’d had a completely different line of work in mind.
She pushed the wheeled chair aside and moved to go around him. “I think I’d better leave.”
She’d have to call her parents to rescue her, head back to Chicago with her tail between her legs, maybe even reconsider her relationship with Hargrove, since, as the three of them so often told her, she was naive in the ways of the real world.
At least with Hargrove, she knew where she stood.
“Why?” Royce asked, putting a hand on her arm to stop her.
She glanced at his hand, and he immediately let go.
“There’s obviously been a misunderstanding.” She’d hang out in the upstairs bedroom until a car could come for her. Then she’d head back to the airport, home to her parents’ mansion and back to her real life.
This had been a crazy idea from beginning to end.
“Clearly,” said Royce, his jaw tight.
She moved toward the door.
Royce’s voice followed her. “Running back to Mommy and Daddy?”
Her spine straightened. “None of your business.”
“What’s changed?” he challenged.
She reached for the doorknob.
“What’s changed, Amber?” he repeated.
She paused. Then she turned to confront him. No point in beating around the bush. “I thought I was a houseguest. You thought I was a call girl.”
A grin quirked one corner of his mouth, and her anger flared anew.
“Are you always this melodramatic?” he asked.
“Shut up.”
He shook his head and took a couple of steps toward her. “I meant what’s changed on your home front?”
“Nothing,” she admitted, except it had occurred to her that her parents might be right. She had been protected from the real world for most of her life. Maybe she wasn’t in a position to judge human nature. They’d always insisted Hargrove was the perfect man for her, and they could very well be right.
“So, why go back?” Royce pressed.
“Where else would I go?” She could sneak off to some other part of the country, but her father would track her down as soon as she accessed her bank account. Besides, the longer she stayed away, the more awkward the reunion.
Royce took another step forward. “You don’t have to leave.”
She scoffed out a dry laugh.
“I never thought you were a call girl.”
“You thought I was a barroom pickup.”
“True enough,” he agreed. “But only because it’s happened so many times before.”
“You’re
“Just stating the facts.”
She scoffed at his colossal ego.
“You’re welcome to stay as a houseguest.” He sounded sincere.
“Are you kidding?” She couldn’t imagine anything more uncomfortable. He’d been planning to sleep with her. And for a few seconds there, well, sleeping with Royce hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea. And he must have known it. She was sure he’d known it.
Their gazes held.
“I can control myself if you can,” he told her.
“There’s nothing for me to control,” she insisted.
He let her lie slide. “Good. Then it’s settled.”
“Nothing is-”
He nodded toward the desk. “You organize my office and pay my bills, and I’ll keep my hands to myself.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you change your mind about my hands.”
“I’m not going to-”
He held up a hand to silence her. “Let’s not make any promises we’re going to regret.”
She let her glare do the talking, but a little voice inside her acknowledged he was right. She didn’t plan to change her mind. But for a few minutes there, it had been easy enough to imagine his hands all over her body.
Four
Royce felt the burn in his shoulder muscles as he hefted another stack of two-by-fours from the flatbed to a waiting pickup truck. The two ranch hands assigned to the task had greeted him with obvious curiosity when he joined the work crew. Hauling lumber in the dark, with the smell of rain in the air, was hardly a choice assignment.
But Royce needed to work the frustration out of his system somehow. How had he so completely misjudged Amber’s signals? He could have sworn she was as into him as he was her.
He slid the heavy stack across the dropped tailgate and shifted it to the front of the box, admitting that he’d deluded himself the past few months in the hotel fitness rooms. High-tech exercise equipment was no match for the sweat of real work.
“Something wrong?” came Stephanie’s voice as she appeared beside him in the pool of the yard light. She tugged a pair of leather work gloves from the back pocket of her jeans. “You looked ticked off.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Royce denied, turning on the dirt track to retrace his steps to the flatbed, passing the two hands who were on the opposite cycle. “Where’d you come from?”
Stephanie slipped her hands into the gloves, lifting two boards to Royce’s five, balancing them on her right shoulder. “I drove down to join you for dinner. I wanted to see how Amber was doing.”
“She’s fine.
“She inside?”
He shrugged. “I assume so.”
“You have a fight?”
“No. We didn’t have a fight.” An argument, maybe. In fact, it was more of a misunderstanding. And it was none of his sister’s damn business.
“Something wrong with Bar-”
“No!” Royce practically shouted. Wait a minute. His sister might have changed topics. He forced himself to calm down. “What?”
“With Barry Brewster,” she enunciated. “Our VP of finance? I talked to him earlier, and he sounded weird.”
Royce slid his load into the pickup then lifted the boards from Stephanie’s shoulder and placed them in the box. “Weird how?”
It was Stephanie’s turn to shrug. “He yelled at me.”
Royce’s brow went up. “He
They stepped out of the way of the two hands each carrying a load of lumber.
