All That She Wants(6)

She looked over at Stanley, probably for some sort of indication as to the kind of guy I was. I didn’t see his reaction, but she relaxed the tiniest bit and then reached out to take hold of my hand.

Her skin was so soft… and cool to the touch…

I wondered how it would be to touch the rest of her.

“M-Mr. Brooks?” she stuttered.

She was nervous.

Rather than wanting to take advantage, I just wanted to soothe her.

It’s okay, I wanted to say. I won’t hurt you.

But that would have been a little weird.

“Good to put a face to the voice,” I said instead, and hung onto her hand a bit longer than I needed to. Part of it was to put a little sexual charge on our interaction, which I figured could only help me talk her into what I needed.

But the other part was I didn’t want to stop touching her.

“Yes,” she said, staring at me with those huge brown eyes.

Okay, Templeton, get it together.

I dropped her hand and put on my ‘friendly but commanding’ voice again. “Okay. Call your boss for me.”

She was obviously not comfortable with that prospect. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and crinkled up her forehead.

It was adorable.

“Ohhhh… I don’t really know if – ”

“Relax, Lily, you’ll talk to him first, and it’ll be on your phone, so I won’t even see the number,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Besides, he’s probably not even out of the parking deck yet, is he?”

She sighed. I’d hit all of her objections, and there wasn’t much she could say otherwise. She pulled a cell phone out of a small black purse, tapped at the screen, and then put it to her ear.

Before she could even say hello, I heard Zimmerman’s pissed-off voice. “What.”





8





I have to interject something here.

This Lily woman was seriously cute. Definitely desirable. Her eyes, her hair, her face, her body –

There was just one problem:

She might be stupid.

I wasn’t inferring that from anything she’d said or done directly. In fact, from every outward indication I had, she was actually quite intelligent.

But she worked for Klaus Zimmerman.

And Klaus Zimmerman was loathsome to me. He was arrogant with nothing to back it up. He was overbearing and insufferable. I was betting he was incompetent in his area of expertise, yet he acted like he was the Preeminent Authority on Earth. He was rude, he was an asshole, and I was pretty sure that when the chips were down, he was spineless, too. A conniving little shit who kissed asses to get ahead even as he stomped across the backs of his underlings.

That was my general impression of him, anyway. I was pretty good at pegging people within seconds of meeting them – and I’d had 45 interminable minutes of listening to his snide remarks and empty boasts on that conference call.

So what kind of person would choose to work for Klaus Zimmerman?

Rather, what kind of idiot would choose to work for Klaus Zimmerman?

Maybe she was a sweet kid without an ounce of self-esteem.

But even if that were the case, she was still an idiot.

Still, I felt bad for her. She had chosen to live in hell, and she probably didn’t even know it.

As soon as Klaus’s voice came over the phone, it was like fingernails grating across a chalkboard.

Maybe a better analogy would be a flint sparking across stone.

If he’d been nice to her – hell, if he’d even been curt but civil – I probably would have left him alone.

But he wasn’t.

He was a Grade A Asshole.

Which meant he was just throwing gasoline on the spark.

Something primal kicked in deep down inside me: the urge to protect this woman…

… and the bloodlust to take Klaus down.





9





Lily glanced at me nervously. “Um… I have Mr. Brooks here, and he’s pretty insistent about – ”

Even though Klaus wasn’t on speakerphone, he might as well have been, he was so loud.

“WHAT THE HELL?! What part of your brain shut down when I left, Lily?!”

From there it was a blistering series of ‘fucking idiot’ this and ‘fucking moron’ that.

I watched her carefully as it went on – and immediately thought, I might have been wrong about her.

She didn’t shrink down or wilt.

No: she got angry.

I could see she was fighting to keep it in.

But if she said anything, she was going to pay for it ten-fold. With a boss like Zimmerman, that much was assured.

I decided to do her a favor, and treat myself in the process.

I put out my hand for the phone.

She glanced up at me in shock with those gorgeous-as-hell eyes.

“May I?” I said, and gave her the type of smile that usually gets me my way with women.