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“My type? My type? What in hell are you—”

“Bored little rich girls.”

“Rich girls? Rich girls?” Merda. She was speaking in italics. Until this second, she hadn’t even known that was possible.

“Boarding school,” Tanner said, tearing open the endless, dumb, ridiculous bags that were always tucked inside Meals Ready to Eat, as if people would actually eat the damn things if they had a choice.

“You think I went to—”

“Someplace posh. The Upper East side of Manhattan. Or maybe upstate Connecticut.”

She laughed. His gut tightened. So what if he sound

ed like a jackass? The last thing he needed was her laughing at him.

“Then Smith. Or Vassar. Wellesley, maybe, where you majored in dance or art or something else that’s equally useless.”

“You,” she said flatly, “are crazy.”

“And then, all of a sudden, you were out in the world and you needed something to do that would make you sound important, so you looked at all the stuff you own, everything with initials or names sewn on or engraved on, a bunch of crap nobody in her right mind needs or wants, and you said, Hey, I can be a designer too!”

She blinked. “What are you talking about?”

A good question. He didn’t know, so how could she? But he was on a roll now and, hell, a man didn’t stop when he was on a roll.

“So that’s what you decided you were. I bet you even have your own label. What’s it called? Lemme guess. Alessandra’s Artistic Attic, maybe. Something like that. Alliterative. And with artistic and attic spelled with q-u-e’s, of course.”

“Are you nuts?”

Yeah. He probably was. Otherwise, why was he going at her like this? She and the way she lived were not his problem. He didn’t give a damn about anything but getting her out of here…

Man, what a lie!

He gave a damn about more than that.

Forget what she was. Forget that he’d had his fill of women like her.

What was making him crazy was that he was attracted to her, goddammit, that despite everything he wanted to tear off her clothes and fuck her brains out. More than that. He wanted to make her want him the way he wanted her, and wasn’t that pathetic?

It was time to put his cards on the table. State the truth, that he didn’t like her, hear her admit she didn’t like him either, and agree to a cold-but-workable truce.

Tanner closed the couple of inches that remained between them. He lowered his head until they were damn near nose to nose.

“I don’t like you,” he said with icy precision. “You don’t like me. It’s a problem, we’re stuck with it for the next couple of days, and we need to deal with it.”

“Damned right,” Alessandra said, just as coldly.

She glared at him.

He glared at her.

Then he cursed and swept his arms around her.

Would she push him away? Would she laugh in his face?

Both were definite maybes, but she didn’t do either.

Instead, she rose on her toes, curled her fingers into his shirt, and lifted her mouth to his.