Page 35 of Untouchable
Caleb should be leaving for work in a little while. She needed to find somewhere he was likely to see her but didn’t look like she was trying to be seen.
She got a cup of coffee as an excuse for being downstairs, thanking Breah and making sure the housekeeper saw where she was heading from there.
She settled in a small, pleasant sunroom and immediately pulled out her phone.
She started to write an email to herself, repeating the same sentence over and over.
Several minutes passed without any sign of Caleb, and she was starting to resign herself to another failed idea when a voice from the doorway made her jump. “You’re up early.”
Remembering what she was supposed to do, she ducked the phone quickly out of sight into the pocket of her robe. “Yeah,” she said with a smile. “Couldn’t sleep.”
Caleb was dressed in another suit, looking so sexy and sophisticated that she was momentarily breathless. And more breathless when he walked over with a possessive heat in his eyes.
She let him pull her to her feet.
“You look irresistibly rumpled this morning,” he murmured, tilting his head down toward her. “Like someone finally gave you the fuck you needed.”
Her mind was a hot blur of conflicted responses, and before she could sort them out, Caleb slipped a hand into the pocket where she’d put her phone and smoothly pulled it out.
He was actually bringing up the screen display when she snatched it back out of his hand.
“What the hell?” She didn’t have to fake her indignation. The bastard thought he had the right to invade her privacy, to look at her phone. “That’s not yours.”
She stuffed the phone back into the pocket, glaring at him, feeling a tremor of fear at the idea of his seeing the email she’d just been writing, which was made up ofWhat the fuck am I doing?repeated about a hundred times.
Her phone was locked, but it didn’t make the fear of his seeing it any less real.
The corner of his lips tilted up. “I wanted to see what you were doing. You looked so intense and secretive.”
“Well, next time, ask like a normal person instead of behaving like a presumptuous ass.”
His expression changed again, and he slid a hand down the line of her spine until it was resting on the small of her back. Tilting his head closer to her, he murmured warmly, huskily, “Wouldn’t you like to tell me?”
Torn between more anger and involuntary amusement, she pulled away from him. His instinctive entitlement was absolutely outrageous. “That’s not how a normal person asks either.”
“I bet it would work though.”
It probably would. He could likely charm or seduce the secrets out of anyone he set his mind to, and she’d have to be very careful to not let it work on her too.
He wasn’t even making a serious attempt right now. He was having fun with her. She could see the glint of humor in his eyes, and something inside her wanted to respond to it.
She smothered that weak little part of herself, though, and remembered why she was there in the first place. “If you want to know something, ask.”
“What were you doing just now when I came in?”
She sighed as if resigning herself to answer him—even though she’d come down here on purpose to tell him this very thing. “I was emailing someone I know. Trying to get some more information on?—”
She trailed off strategically.
He obviously knew who she was referring to. Her fictional ex-lover who’d sent the thugs after her. “Any news?”
She shook her head, letting her shoulders and head slump.
“You know, I could help, if you’d let me.” His voice was different now, nothing playful or teasing about it. It was quiet, thoughtful.
“I already told you that it’s my problem and I’m going to deal with it.”
“But that’s irrational, and I’m not in the habit of accepting irrationality from people who know better.”
