Page 9 of Naughty Irish Liar

Tossing my cell phone onto my desk, I slowly strode over. Watching as she watched me, biting that goddamn lip again right at the corner. Just like moments ago I used my bigger body to crowd her into the wall, cupped the side of her face and made it appear as if I wanted to kiss her.

I absolutely didn’t.Lie. Not yet anyway.

She looked like a maiden about to be mauled and innocence never titillated me before.Before her. I preferred a woman who knew how to own her body and to work mine.

But then as we were learning, Catherine Clemonte defied all my rules.

I pressed my mouth to her ear. Inhaled her scent. It was fresh and sweet at the same time. Something you’d smell in the morning. She smelled like a fucking latte, I realized. I ran my nose along the curve of her ear, caught her shaky gasp.

She wasn’t hating it because she stood right there, batting her lashes and breathing softly with her pixie chin tipped up.

“You’re no longer sixteen,acushla,” Goddamn me, again? It slipped out of my mouth natural as breathing. My voice hardened. “If I want to take you down to the floor and peel you out of those jeans and taste what secrets you have hidden between your legs, I will. So either tell me that’s what you’ve come for or get the fuck out of my pub.”

“I want a job. And you’re going to give it to me. You owe me, Ronan.”

I blinked. Sure I was hearing shit.

“Say what now?”

She was saved from a dirty bastard mauling by a knock, my bar manager calling my name from the other side of the door letting me know the distributor had turned up after all, that late motherfucker.

“Go back to your princess bed, Catherine. I don’t have time for your games.”

I walked out leaving her there.

In the space of ten minutes my whole fucking existence came down to the four lies I’d just told.

I hadn’t missed her.

I didn’t want her.

I’d never thought about her.

And I wasn’t going to keep her.

CHAPTER 3

Catie

I’d guessed correctly that he’d age into a colossal jerk-face.

I mean, he’d been on the way to being one back when but now he was a fully card-carrying asshole without the training wheels.

I smiled while sipping my first cup of earl grey breakfast tea.

He’d reacted as I’d wanted him to. Asexpected. Better than I’d hoped for. Because anyone unaffected by someone from their past wouldn’t have reacted as Ronan had. His whole-body language was pure fire blistering out of him from the second he spotted me to the point of dismissal.

Ronan MacNamaranoticedme alright.

If not for the knock on the door I wondered if we would have kissed.

I wanted that kiss.

I wanted everything he’d taunted me with.

Far from his harshness deterring me, it was what I’d anticipated from a man who I’d followed closely from afar for all these years and watched him not only rise in his professional life but guard his private life from public knowledge.

He didn’t date, from what I’d been told from people who knew him.

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