Pechorin absorbed that for a moment, and then nodded.
“Fine,” he said shortly. “But I’m not taking responsibility for it if something happens to you because you’re in denial.”
“I amnotin denial!”
Which of course made me sound defensive. And in denial.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m not!”
Pechorin shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s get down to business. As long as you’re not hiding anything else I need to know.”
I resisted putting a hand behind my back and crossing my fingers. If he hadn’t read deeply enough to learn that alphas shouldn’t be able to carry Hensley’s, or to connect the dots on which of my parents I must’ve inherited it from, I simply couldn’t bring myself to be the one to enlighten him.
“I’m not.”
He narrowed his eyes at me suspiciously, but then he shrugged again and turned away toward the table, pulling out one of the chairs and dropping into it.
For just a moment, I let myself lean my head back against the wall and take a breath, relieved of his looming, unsettling nearness.
And then I pushed off the wall, put on my game face, and joined him at the table.
If I wanted to run Castelli Industries, I had to be able to handle this.
Chapter 3
Big, Dumb, and Polite
Pechorin’s price for mating me turned out to be a hundred thousand dollars. I choked a little. That would wipe out the money I’d been able to put aside from my monthly payments from my trust and from my salary. The lifestyle my family required me to lead—the expensive clothes and car and dinners and accoutrements—took most of my income. And I was also pretty sure I’d have paid that muchnotto take his knot, but here we were. That said…I still didn’t have any better ideas.
“Jesus Christ, how much do you owe?” I had to ask, when he named the sum.
“Sixty grand,” he said easily, without any hesitation. He’d leaned back in his chair, sprawled with one elbow propped on the armrest like a man without a care in the world. Only the faint golden glow in his eyes betrayed him. “But I borrowed the money for reasons that still stand. I need the other forty. And I won’t do it for less. Plus a stipend if this mating lasts a while. We can discuss that.”
“Reasons? Because I’m not going into this blind, either.”
“Family issue. Not your business. Nothing that’s going to bite you in the ass.” He bared his teeth at me. “That’s my job, apparently.”
And oookay, not touching that one. My cheeks went hot and I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. Mating bites went on the neck, but my ass would be involved in other ways. Just the thought of his knot forcing me open had me squirming.
All right. Moving on. No point in dwelling on that.
Since I was still keeping some family secrets of my own even after making him believe otherwise, I didn’t feel like pushing it on his “family issue,” either. Which still left his other problems.
“And the packs after you? What happened there?”
Pechorin eyed my pen, which I’d started tapping against the notepad open on the table in front of me. “You’re not going to be writing this down, are you? And what is all that?”
Fuck. I slapped the notepad shut. “None of your beeswax. I’m not writing anything else down.”
He gave me a slow, lazy grin that had all my hackles up in an instant.
Well, my remaining hackles. Most of them had been up since I walked into that bar.
“None of your beeswax,” he repeated, grinning even wider. “You sound like my grandmother. Good thing you don’t look like her, or we’d have a real problem regarding the mating part of this deal.” As I sputtered, helpless to form an answer to that, he continued with, “And I can read upside down, especially when your handwriting’s that obsessively neat. I was just being polite by asking. You were really hoping you could talk me into being the one to take your cock, huh? With bullet points and everything.”
“I know you’re not going to—I wasn’t—” I fumbled frantically with the notepad and then yanked my hands back, forcing them into my lap. I’d already closed it. He might be able to read upside down, but he didn’t have X-ray vision, for fuck’s sake. Deep breaths. Close my eyes for a second. Christ. When I opened them again, Pechorin hadn’t moved, staring at me with those intense eyes and the hint of a smile still playing over his lips. “I won’t take any notes if you’d prefer I didn’t, but it helps me organize my thoughts. And this mating’s supposed to make me look good to the company’s board, not worse. I need to know who’s after you and why so we can deal with it.”
