Billionaire Unmasked(31)

“Oh, there is a reason I want you here now. I want to fuck you, Hope. For some reason I can’t get you out of my system. I might not like you very much right now, and I sure as hell don’t understand you, but I still want your body,” Jason rasped, apparently not happy about that fact.

“Get. Off.” Hope gasped now, desperate to get away. His angry voice, his large, unyielding form suffocated her.

“I plan to get off,” he told her bitterly. “Inside you.”

“No!” Hope clawed at him to get away, and she panted heavily. “I can’t. Stop, Jason. Please.” The words left her mouth as a desperate plea.

“Jesus.” Jason sat up and his hand scraped through his hair savagely. “What the hell is wrong with you? One minute your body is responding to me like you want me as much as I want you. And then, a few seconds later, you’re fighting to get away.”

Hope sat up quickly and raked her hair out of her face with a trembling hand. “I don’t want you. I just need to get out of here, annul this disastrous marriage and move on with my life. I don’t want you to tell my brothers, but I can’t stop you.”

Jason’s furious eyes bored into her. One of the muscles in his jaw twitched wildly.

Hope had never seen Jason this irate.

“You’re staying for two weeks. When you leave, I’ll never say a word to your brothers,” he demanded, his expression cold and calculating.

“I can’t. I’m busy right now,” she tried to explain. Now that he knew her fiancé was a sham, why did he still want her to stay?

“I don’t give a shit. The last thing you need is to be out chasing fucking storms, even if they aren’t tornados. You’re staying here. Take the deal or I’ll tell every single one of your brothers and you’ll have more people on your ass than the president of the United States.”

Okay. Now he’s trying to stop me from doing my job because it’s dangerous. Even though I agreed not to chase tornados anymore, he doesn’t want me to chase any storms at all.

Hope stood up, indignant and pissed off. Jason might not like how she ran her life, but he didn’t have the right to interfere. “I can’t do what I do without anonymity,” she told him heatedly. “Even if I’m not chasing tornados, I still have a job to do. There’s plenty of other extreme weather.”

Jason rose and looked down at her. His towering strength was meant to intimidate her. “Then I guess that’s a problem. You’ll suddenly be famous. H.L. Sinclair, the known photographer, will become even more famous because she’s part of the mega-wealthy Sinclair family. The media will be all over that.”

Dammit! The press would be all over her, too. It would be the end of her career. She couldn’t do what she did with a freaking entourage. Her fury with Jason exploded, and her hand flew toward his face in outrage.

He caught it before it connected with his cheek. “Don’t try it again. No woman has ever succeeded before you, and it’s not happening a second time.” A firm, strong hand held her wrist next to his face.

“Bastard,” she hissed. She hated him for what he was doing.

“You finally got that right.” Jason’s icy eyes ran over her face impassively. “Do we have a deal or not?”

Hope contemplated her alternatives, and came up with…nothing. “No sex.” She yanked her wrist from his hand and lowered it back to her side. “I’ll give you two weeks, but I’ll make your life miserable while I’m doing it.” He would be suffering the entire two weeks, and she could do it without even trying, just by being her own, broken self. Jason was about to find out that he couldn’t have what he wanted from her. Fine. She’d give him his damn two weeks, and he’d be glad to get rid of her after those days had passed.

“There will be sex and plenty of it,” Jason countered. “I’m not sure what game you’re playing, but you want this as much as I do,” he said in a sultry, low voice, but his expression was still cold. He lifted a lock of her hair and toyed with it. “Are you still a virgin, Hope?” His tone was gentler.

She snorted and batted his hand away. “Are you kidding? That was taken away from me years ago.”

“Obviously somebody did a pretty poor job of it,” he observed casually. “Stop fighting this, Hope. Stop fighting us. It’s going to happen. And it won’t be unwillingly. I’m not into taking women by force.”

“If you want me, you’ll have to,” she retorted sharply.

“We’ll see, Peaches. Two weeks is a long time. I expect you to do everything I want, short of fucking you. That will happen when you’re ready to admit you want me as much as I want you.”