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clutching her collar, grimacing at the intensifying wind. I was surprised she hadn’t whipped out her sleek satellite phone and ordered her chopper to come pick her up.
The bear family might have moved in the time she’d been ordering her staff about.
The time she’d spentanalysingme with those stunning hazel eyes, deciding whether to toy with me or not.
Muscles jumped in my stomach. As hard as I tried to ignore the sensation, what I’d seen in her
hooded, sultry eyes still sent fresh waves of apprehension through me. Not the kind that had anything to do with the work she’d hired me for. That I could do with one hand tied behind my back and one
eye closed.
No, the kind of sensation that look had elicited...that fuckingcraving.
I shook my head, partly to clear it, partly in denial.
Dammit, she’d seen it. Then she’d spotted my efforts at denial...
I gritted my teeth and unnecessarily flicked the reins attached to the dogs. The huskies were highly trained, would respond to the softest whistle or voice command, which made the reins largely
superfluous.
Or, hell, was that particular symbolism for me? Was I so hard up, I was now expressing myself
through my bloody dogs?
Dammit.
I didn’t need this. I should’ve left Graciela Mortimer’s little ice circus the moment I confirmed her project manager had lied to my agent in order to secure my services.
More than any other flaw,I hated lies. And the people who told them.
Large. Medium. Tiny white lies. Every single one of them came with wrecking balls that altered
lives, changed the dynamics of relationships, no matter how much we fooled ourselves into believing otherwise.
How many had my mother told my sister and me in order to avoid facing the glaring truth?
I’m all right. It doesn’t hurt. He’ll change.And the worst lie of them all:he loves us.
Even before my fifth birthday, I’d known that statement for a lie. And for the decade after that, that fabrication had been exposed time and again until, like poisonous acid, it’d begun to erode my
relationship with my mother.
Of course, I knew now it’d been her way of coping, the delusion her own form of security blanket.
Hadn’t I risked falling into that same pattern of delusion until I’d wised up as a grown man? Hadn’t I made allowances for Stephanie’s lies just to hang on to what I thought was a solid relationship, all the while knowing that trust, once broken with lies, never—
‘How close are we, Mr Scott?’
Of course her voice would have to melt my insides. Visions of heated honey...no, more like the
anticipation of watching melted wax in the moment before it hit my skin. The sharp burn before the
breathless, sizzling warmth.
That was what Graciela Mortimer’s voice had evoked the moment she’d spoken the wordsI’m in
charge.