This guy’s penchant for idle chats at weird moments was something else again. “Get… off… mother… fucker.”
“It tells me that you’re an inherently nice person. And, as an inherently nice person, you’re always going to be bad at this kind of shit, no matter how many moves you’ve got.” He pressed his weight down on her all the more, to show her that moving was something she’d be allowed to do only when he was in the mood for it. “Leave shit like this to the professional ass-kickers of the world, like me, because nice is one thing I’m not.”
An infuriated growl seethed out of her as she struggled uselessly to get out from under him. “Get off, you sonofabitch, or I’ll bite your damn nose off!”
When he burst out laughing, she honestly couldn’t blame him. Then, just as she gave serious consideration to headbutting him to get him to move, his mouth suddenly landed on hers.
What.
The.
hell.
By degrees, the rasp of his close-cropped beard on her skin and the press of his hard lips against hers seeped into her stunned senses. His touch was warm and vibrant and so overwhelmingly masculine it knocked every thought out of her head. Then it was over, and he was back to grinning down at her.
Like that, the rage inside her vanished without a trace. It was almost as if he’d thrown cold water on her. Or slapped her. Or…
Or kissed her.
Alice blinked, baffled and upset and holy crap, strangely unable to stop from focusing on how she could still feel the imprint of his lips on hers.
She who loses control, loses.
Yeah. That was her, all right.
A total loser.
“There we go.” He sounded inordinately pleased as he looked down at her, his hammered-gold hair hanging down in a way that seemed to almost curtain off the rest of the world. “That stopped the bite, or headbutt, or whatever the hell it was you were about to pull. Still wanna kill me?”
“Yes.” She shouted it so loudly she hurt her throat, before huffing in a growing sense of soul-crushing humiliation. Dear God, she’d let her temper—that murderous Halliday temper—get the better of her, when she’d never allowed that to happen before. Never. How could she ever forgive herself for this horrible lapse? “Except I can’t. You’re way more than I can handle.”
“Yes, I am. Though, honestly, I doubt there’s a man alive who can handle you. ‘Cept me, of course.”
With the embarrassment of losing her vaunted cool swallowing her whole, she barely heard him. “I wanted so much to teach you a lesson… Damn it.”
“What lesson would that be?”
“The lesson that you can’t just screw with people’s lives and get away with it. But…” Again she struggled, hating how hot his thighs were against hers. Honestly, the man could rent himself out during the winter months as an organic space heater. “But I was the one who got taught a lesson instead.”
“Hell, yeah, you did.”
Great. Now he was laughing at her wild-eyed lunacy. She swallowed against the hard knot in her throat and looked away, all too aware that this was what she deserved for losing control of the dreaded Halliday temper. “Maybe I should be grateful I can still walk away… And I will walk away, I swear, just as soon as you let me up.” In point of fact, she’d run, not walk, as far from this place as she could to make sure they never crossed paths again. If she had to call the police to get that payroll back, then fine. But never again would she darken this man’s doorstep.
“Hm.” She felt his gaze slide over her for what seemed like forever. “Yeah, nah. I don’t believe you.”
Her eyes widened before she began struggling in earnest, knowing instinctively that her humiliation over her loss of control was about to find new depths. “Get off of me, you—”
“Here’s the way I see it,” he went on, ignoring her while at the same time refusing to let her go. “Either you’re going to crawl away like a whipped dog, or you’re going to get even more crazy and come at me like some vengeful maniac. I can’t have that, Alice, especially here at my place of work.”
Crazy.
Vengeful.
Maniac.
It was like he was trying to punch every button she’d had burned into her soul from the time she was twelve.
“You think I want a repeat performance of this?” she gritted out, torn between humiliation and fury. “I lost control, I admit it. That’s something that’s never happened before, and I never want it to happen again.”
A faint frown crossed his face. “What are you talking about? You seemed pretty much in control to me.”
“I came here to talk to you, not…this.” She wriggled her trapped arms against his for emphasis. “You’re obviously too much for me to handle. I might hate your guts for screwing up my life because you’re a selfish, violent asshole thief, but I’m not about to take you on again. I’m not frigging suicidal.”
Watching her with that curious frown in place, he slowly shook his head. “Try to understand my position, Stems. First off, you’re continuing to believe that I’m a thief who’s taken something from you. I haven’t taken a damn thing, but since you think I owe you something, you’re not going to stop until you feel you’ve exacted some kind of payment from me.”
“No, I—”
“Secondly, you’re the one who challenged me. Because of that, you promising to not be a pain in my ass somewhere down the road isn’t going to put my mind at ease, yeah? I need something more than that.”
What the hell could he possibly need from her? “Let me make this perfectly clear. I do not care what you need, because I’m not a part of your life, and you’re not a part of mine. Let me up, and I swear to everything I hold holy that you’ll never see me again.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” God knew she never wanted to see him again. He was a living reminder that she was nothing more than a chip off her father’s block.
“Hm,” he said again, his head tilting as if in thought. Then he shrugged. “Too bad for you that’s not what I want.”
She scowled up at him, baffled. “What?”
“Never seeing you again is not what I want. What I want is an even playing field.”
“What does that even m—” Before she could finish the question, he was up on his feet and pulling her to a standing position as well. The moment she was vertical, she turned and began to walk away, only to be grabbed from behind. A massive, muscled arm slashed diagonally across her torso like a seatbelt, his forearm between her breasts and his hand clamped hard on her shoulder. Automatically she stomped down on his foot with her heel, then groaned when it felt like she’d stomped down on a rock.
Damn those steel-toed biker boots.
“Even playing field, Stems,” he said again, his mouth close to her ear. “You know way more about me than I know about you, but that’s about to change.” To her outrage, his hand groped her ass. In an instant she bucked, first trying to elbow him in the ribs, then crouching and trying to flip him over her own back. He seemed to know every trick she had and evaded every time. Then, just when she started to panic, she felt a tug at her back pocket before she was abruptly released. In an instant, she whirled around with a roundhouse kick—which he deftly avoided. He barely even looked at her, his attention instead on the wallet he held.