Or maybe it only echoed in my throbbing head.
Dimitri dropped the bags and glanced around the foyer before shrugging and taking off into the house without even being invited.
Well, the hundred thousand dollars I’d just transferred to him so that he’d be willing to fuck me probably qualified as an invitation, to be fair.
“This is McMansion hell.” His voice drifted back to me from somewhere deeper in the house. “Is there some reason why everything’s all kind of tan-colored?”
The short and truthful answer: my mother thought beige was “classy,” and I didn’t have a spine.
The answer I gave, once I’d swallowed down my rising irritation: “It’s neutral and you don’t need to worry about it not matching anything.” I followed him out of the foyer and down a few steps into the large sunken living room, with its enormous sectional camel-colored sofa, an area rug in various shades of oatmeal, a variety of coordinating lamps and end tables, and a few painfully bland abstract paintings on the walls. “It’s not so bad.” It was so, so bad. “Besides, I’m hardly ever here, as in this room or most of the downstairs, period. If I’m not at work, I’m in my home office or my bedroom.”
Dimitri turned around from where he’d been twitching aside the (beige) blinds to peer out the front window and frowned at me. “It’s like you go out of your way to make your life as fucking depressing as possible.”
There went the last of my Zen.
“It’s just a house,” I snapped. “Not some commentary on my mental state.”
He grimaced, raised his eyebrows, and then mimed zipping his lips shut.
I stared at him for a moment, contemplating the life choices that had led me to need to pay this man to fuck me up the ass and bite me on the neck.
Depressing barely even began to cover it.
“So are we going to do this mating thing or not? I’m a hundred grand richer, so I’m ready to go. And it’s not like we’re going to enjoy it more for putting it off, right?”
That stung a lot more than I wanted to admit. Alphas were notorious for sticking their dicks in anyone who’d hold still long enough. Hadn’t he called mepretty? Maybe that had been an insult after all.
“Didn’t you zip your mouth literally two seconds ago?”
Another shrug. “I’m not saying anything else about your furniture, am I? So where’s your bedroom? Unless you’d rather get knotted over the back of that couch, in which case we should maybe talk a little more about your relationship with the décor in here.”
I had to consciously relax my jaw to answer. “Ha fucking ha,” was the best response I could muster.
Get knotted.
That was going to happen to me.
Right now.
Christ, my ass muscles were clenching as hard as my teeth.
“I’m going to go take a shower. Make yourself at home,” I added, realizing with a pang that whether or not I meant it, he would be doing exactly that. Since he’d be moving in with me. At this moment, basically. Shit. “Actually, come on, let me give you a quick tour and then we can meet up in my bedroom. There’s a guest room across the hall you can have. It has its own bathroom, so you’ll have some privacy.”
I turned for the stairs, and Dimitri followed me, his footsteps sounding heavily on the wood floor. “I’ll take that as a hint to get in the shower myself while you’re getting ready. Towels and stuff in there already?”
“Yeah.” Oh my God, this was so agonizingly awkward. “That’s my room, and that’s your room now, I guess. And that’s my office at the end of the hall. Um, everything’s in there already. Like I already said. You can tell me if there’s anything you need.” Every word out of my mouth felt heavy, stilted, unnatural. I turned and found him a couple of inches behind me, looming and muscular and intimidating and about tofuck me in the ass, and I jumped and practically fell into the opposite wall. “Yeah. I’ll be done soon.”
And with that, I fled into my own bedroom and shut the door behind me a little too forcefully.
Shit, shit, shit.
“That wasn’t me slamming it!” I called through the door. “Accident!”
My fingers had started to tingle again, and I squeezed my eyes shut as if that could make me disappear.
“Okay,” Dimitri called back after a moment, sounding more confused than anything. “Roger that.”
Christ, I was such a spaz.
