“You’ll let me, when the time is right. But we need to get a few things straightened up first.”
“Sure, starting with you turning this car around. I want to go back to the coffee shop,” I whisper, desperate to reset.
To crawl back into the safe mediocrity I know.
“Fuck no.” His growl rattles the air. “I’ll buy you the goddamn place if you want. But I’ll break every bone in that fucker manager’s face before I let you step foot in there again. The way he looks at you? Like you’re something he’s owed? Over my fucking dead body.”
I gape at him. “Do you know how caveman you sound?”
He shrugs, unapologetic. “Best we have all our cards on the table off the bat.”
“Excuse me?”
His gaze pins me, feral and hungry. “You heard me. It’s your turn, baby.”
“My turn for what?”
“To tell me how much you’ve missed me. How you haven’t been able to stop thinking about me. How you’re glad to see me.”
All of the above. All true.
But I’d cut my pinky off and feed it to a New York rat before I admit that to him. And I don’t need to just yet because Zane Draven isn’t done talking.
“You’ll also tell me all youryesesand yournos—but I reserve the right to debate some of those nos.”
I must have fallen and broken my brain somewhere between last night and now. Because there’s a wild second when I want to recite every single need I possess. Give him that chance to make them all come true.
Like some Victorian waif too stupid to rub her two brain remaining cells together.
God.
I fold my arms, glare out the tinted window, and say nothing. I can’t. He’s scrambled me from head to toe and I needseveralminutes.
Several minutes pass. He continues staring at me with a fixation that poets would envy. As the car slows. Turns. Climbs.
When I finally blink and attempt to work out where we are, my stomach lurches. We’re in front of towering iron gates.
But it doesn’t lead to an exclusive hotel or resort. And it isn’t some dive rock star crash pad.
It’s a mansion.
Posh, sprawling, perched on the Hollywood Hills with a view that could drown a city.
And it’s where Zane Draven just brought me.
As I stareand stare and stare at the mansion, I half pray we’re here for his work.
Because this place? It’s the kind you only ever see in music videos, with white stone, glass walls, drive lined with palms swaying like synchronized dancers. The kind of place where you half expect paparazzi drones to hover permanently overhead.
It’s not the kind of place ordinary humans actually live, eat, bathe,sleepin.
Right?
The car rolls to a stop.
Before I can dig my heels in, Zane is out of the car and circling around. He yanks my door open like he owns not just this house but gravity itself.
He reaches inside for me and I bat his hand away. “Stop doing that! I can walk,” I snap.
