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closer attention to them.Something about her disheveled hair, the temper in her gaze, the complete lack of her usual calm expression was getting under his skin. His heart began to beat in a rhythm that boded only ill, and made him think of things he knew he shouldn’t. Those sleek legs wrapped around his waist as he held her against a wall in the old city. That mouth of hers hot and wet beneath his. That cool competence of hers he’d depended upon all these years, melting all around him …
    Unacceptable.
There was a reason he never let himself think of that night, damn it. Damn
her.
    “Calling you a force of nature rather takes away from your responsibility, doesn’t it?” she asked, as if she didn’t notice or care that he was bearing down on her, though he saw her fingers tighten around the shoe she still clutched in one hand. “You’re not a deadly hurricane or an earthquake, Mr. Vila. You’re an insulated, selfish man with too much money and too few social skills.”
    “I believe I preferred you the way you were before,” he observed then, his voice like a blade, though she didn’t flinch.
    “Subservient?”
    “Quiet.”
    Her lips crooked into something much too cold to be a smile. “If you don’t wish to hear my voice or my opinions, you need only let me go,” she reminded him. “You are so good at dismissing people, aren’t you? Didn’t I watch you do it to that poor girl not five minutes ago?”
    He took advantage of his superior height and leaned over her, putting his face entirely too close to hers. He could smell the faintest hint of something sweet—soap or perfume, he couldn’t tell. But desire curled through him, kicking up flames. He remembered burying hisface in her neck, and the need to do it again,
now,
howled through him, shocking in its intensity. And he didn’t know if he admired her or wanted to throttle her when she didn’t move so much as an inch. When she showed no regard at all for her own safety. When, instead, she all but
bristled
in further defiance.
    He had the strangest feeling—he wouldn’t call it a premonition—that this woman might very well be the death of him. He shook it off, annoyed at himself and the kind of superstitious silliness he thought he’d left behind in his unhappy childhood.
    “Why are you so concerned with the fate of ‘that poor girl’?” he asked, his voice dipping lower the more furious he became. “Do you even know her name?”
    “Do you?” she threw back at him, even angling closer in outraged emphasis, as if she was seconds away from poking at him with something more than her words. “I’m sure I drew up the usual nondisclosure agreement whenever and wherever you picked her up—”
    “Why do you care how I treat my women, Miss Bennett?” he asked icily. Dangerously. In a tone that should have silenced her for days.
    “Why don’t you?” she countered, scowling at him, notably unsilenced.
    And suddenly, he understood what was happening. It was all too obvious, and what concerned him was that he hadn’t seen this boiling in her, as it must have done for years. He hadn’t let a single meaningless night, deliberately ignored almost as soon as it had happened, haunt him or affect their working relationship. He’d thought she hadn’t, either.
    “Perhaps,” he suggested in a tone that brooked no more of her nonsense, “when I asked you if there wasa man and you denied it, you were not being entirely forthcoming, were you?”
    For a moment she only stared back at him, blankly. Then she sucked in a breath as shocked, incredulous understanding flooded her gaze—followed by a sudden flare of awareness, hot and unmistakable. She jerked back. But he had already seen it.
    “You are joking,” she breathed. She sounded horrified. Appalled. Perhaps a bit too horrified and appalled, come to that. “You actually think …
You?
”
    “Me,” he agreed, all of that simmering fury shifting inside him, rolling over into something else,