Read Because You Are Mine Part VI: Because You Torment Me for Free Online

say something rude or sharp to the oily LaGrange, ruining his chances to acquire the other man’s company. With Francesca there, he’d be less focused on LaGrange’s smug belief that he’d bettered Ian with the deal.
    It’d be easier for him to control his temper while Francesca was there. Her freshness softened him.
    But he hadn’t expected to take a sex siren to a dinner where Xander LaGrange was present.
    He returned to the bedroom, a lightweight cropped black sweater with a jeweled clasp in his hand. “If you must wear it, please put this on. It’ll cover all that—” he paused, his gaze on her exposed chest in the wide V-neck. Her breasts were decently under wraps, even if a large expanse of skin at her chest and shoulders was bare. The way the dress molded and shaped her breasts, however, equated to visual sex candy. The black fabric made her skin look exceptionally white and smooth by contrast . . . very naked.
    “Skin,” he finished under his breath, willfully ignoring the eager lurch of his cock. “I’ll speak to Margarite. I asked her for sexy-discreet, not jaw-dropping and eye-popping.”
    “I don’t see your jaw dropping,” she said lightly, turning so he could slip the cover-up over her shoulders. When he didn’t immediately put the sleeves next to her hand, she glanced back, catching him staring at her luscious ass encased in the clinging fabric.
    “It’s dropping on the inside,” he mumbled before he slipped the sleeves over her hands and she shrugged on the cover-up. He grasped her shoulders and turned her toward him, examining her. “You didn’t wear this particular dress to make some sort of point, did you?”
    “What point would that be?” she asked, her chin going up.
    “A point of defiance.”
    “You asked me to wear one of the dresses, and I am.”
    “Take care, Francesca,” he said in a quiet, ominous tone, brushing his fingertip across the soft skin of her jaw and feeling her shiver. Heat rushed through his cock. She really was going to kill him before this was through.
    “Take care of what?” she asked.
    “You know what I think of impulsiveness. You know the consequences for it,” he added quietly, before he took her hand and led her out of the suite.
    * * *
    Sixteen was housed in the Trump International Hotel & Tower, the dining room dominated by the modern, clean lines of cherrywood-paneled walls and an enormous, stunning Swarovski-crystal chandelier. They dined next to thirty-foot tall floor-to-ceiling windows, looking down at magnificent views of the city, some of the buildings so close she felt like she could reach out and touch them.
    Francesca initially thought that the best way to describe their dinner companion, Xander LaGrange, was
polished,
but she quickly altered the descriptor to
slick
. She learned that Ian and he knew each other through the University of Chicago and were old rivals—or at least from Xander’s viewpoint.
    “So you were in college together?” she clarified when Xander made a vague reference to how long he and Ian had known each other.
    “I was a graduate student when Ian was a freshman at the University of Chicago,” Xander explained. “Once he came along, myself and the rest of the computer-science department were constantly trying to find our ways out of his brilliant shadow. Ian and I shared an academic mentor. Professor Sharakoff asked me to grade his papers and Ian to write a book with him.”
    “Don’t exaggerate, Xander,” Ian said quietly
    “I thought I was downplaying things,” LaGrange said with a swift smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
    LaGrange was in his mid-thirties, with short sandy-blond hair graying at the temples. He was handsome and charming enough, Francesca supposed, for a dinner companion. She immediately sensed the underlying conflict between Ian and him, however. By the time the waiter came to take their drink orders, she’d gauged that while Ian was the epitome of polite charm toward the