Fuck. Where had that thought come from?
Jax rubbed a hand over his eyes. He must be really drunk if he was having fantasies about up against a wall sex with a stranger. Especially since one-night stands had never been his thing.
The woman was still standing there, looking around with a smile curving her luscious, red-painted mouth. Like she’d found Nirvana or something. Which was odd since a beautiful, sophisticated woman like her didn’t belong in a place like this, she really didn’t.
Heads turned as she moved into the bar, watching her progress. She seemed oblivious to the stares, her dark eyes taking everything in as if she’d never been in a bar in all her life. The stained ceiling, the scuffed wooden floor, the dim lighting, the sound of blues coming from the jukebox in the corner.
And as she looked at everything else, Jax looked at her. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her and he didn’t know why. In his world, beautiful women were a dime a dozen and he had his pick—power was their aphrodisiac and he had it in spades. So really, this girl with her black hair and her red dress that spoke of sex and sin, was just one more.
Yet there was something about her that caught at him like a fish hook. For all her sophistication, she moved with a hint of uncertainty, as if she wasn’t quite sure of her high red heels. And the way she looked at her surroundings … He was sure he’d caught both wonder and satisfaction crossing her delicately carved features. Like she was amazed at where she was and pleased with herself for finding it.
She stopped just short of the bar, a flash of that uncertainty lingering on her face. Then she turned her head and those interested dark eyes met his.
And he felt the impact like a blow. Like he’d been plugged into a wall socket and the switch thrown.
The whiskey haze vanished, all the alcohol burned through by the fire that suddenly ignited inside him.
He’d always been cool and calm and logical, keeping all his passions locked away. Because decisions made in the heat of moment were seldom good ones—he’d learned that years ago, the day his father had brought Sean home to live with them. And certainly, leading Morrow Incorporated had only confirmed it.
But the moment his gaze locked with hers, all his cool, calm logic vanished. The company ceased to exist. The scandal currently rocking it utterly forgotten, his family gone along with it.
The only thing he was aware of was the fact that for the first time in his life, he wanted.
And what he wanted was her.
*
The guy sitting at the bar in the corner held her frozen to the spot. She couldn’t have said what he was wearing or even if he was handsome or not; the only thing in the world was the fire that burned in his intense blue eyes. The kind of fire that lurked in the heart of a blaze, so intense it didn’t burn orange but a bright, clear blue.
The kind of fire that burned you to ash.
Pandora tore her gaze away, her heart racing even more madly than it had done when she’d escaped the limo. Men looked at her a lot and she was used to it. But what she wasn’t used to was having a response that wasn’t a shiver of repugnance.
Because it definitely wasn’t repugnance she was feeling right now. It was more a dizzying kind of excitement that made her breathless. Like the rush she got when she hacked into a really complicated firewall with her laptop, which would earn her major punishment if she was ever caught.
Kind of like what she was doing now, out by herself in the streets of Manhattan. Having escaped her bodyguards. Alone.
They would be looking for her already. She’d shut down her phone the moment she’d turned the corner and left her apartment behind because she had no doubt her father would be tracking her through it. Then she’d walked and walked, not too fast because the damn shoes were killing her, but steadily and without looking back.
It had been so good to be alone. To not have someone trailing at her elbow.
“It’s for your own protection,” her father had told her whenever she’d protested about Thing One and Thing Two’s presence in her life. “You know I have enemies. I want you to be safe.”
She didn’t bother to point out that he was the one who’d created those enemies. That if he didn’t do what he did then he wouldn’t have any. She’d accepted it because really, her choices had always been limited at best.
But not now. Now, for the first time in her life, the choices were all hers to make.
Probably she should have kept walking, not headed into a bar, but she’d wanted to get off the streets and find somewhere quiet where she could plan her next move. Whatever that was going to be. Without friends or money, she was pretty much screwed.
As Pandora stepped up to the bar, her heartbeat loud in her ears, the pressure of the man’s gaze on her was like a hand resting on her skin. She was next to him but didn’t look at him. Couldn’t look at him. Not yet. Not until she was ready.
“Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?” she finally said, keeping her gaze on the bartender as he got another customer a drink.
“You want me to stop looking?” The man’s voice was deep, with an edge of iron to it and a shiver chased down her spine. He sounded like a man used to giving orders. Used to being obeyed. Like Sergei.
Pandora gripped her purse. Shit, she wasn’t going to stand here, voiceless like a stupid teenage girl. Being silent was all she’d been doing for the past twenty-four years, like a good girl while everyone talked around her. As if she wasn’t even there.
Well, that wasn’t happening tonight.
She turned her head and met that blue gaze head-on.
Looking at him still knocked the breath from her body, but this time she was able to take in the man with the gaze and voice. A tall man, extremely tall. She could tell even though he was sitting on a bar stool. His coal black hair was short and he was wearing a dark charcoal suit, no tie, his white business shirt open at the throat, like your average businessman out for an after-work round of drinks.
Except there was nothing average about this man. For a start, that suit was custom-made and had to have been worth a couple of thousand dollars—and she should know since she was surrounded by those kinds of suits every day. Then there was the fact that he wasn’t built like any businessman she knew of, not that she knew many, but still. Even under all that charcoal wool she could tell he was built broad and muscular, more like one of her bodyguards than a man used to sitting in a cubicle all day.
No, not a cubicle. This guy was not in any way a cubicle kind of guy. With his hard jaw and high cheekbones, there was a quiet kind of arrogance to him that had corner office written all over it.
Something tugged inside of her. He was familiar in some way but she couldn’t quite place him. And that made her wary. She didn’t want to run into anyone that might be familiar to her because that would not be good, especially since the only people she had any face-to-face contact with tended to be friends of her father’s.
“Have we met?” she asked bluntly.
“No,” he responded with absolute certainty. “I would have remembered meeting you. But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“Do you want me to stop looking at you?”
No.
She took a slow, silent breath, trying to calm her racing heart. She was used to men looking at her since her father paraded her around whenever he got a moment, showing the world his lovely daughter.
But even though those men had looked at her with lust, none of them had looked at her like this man did. None of them saw
her
, they only saw Nick Garret’s daughter. This man though, didn’t know who she was. And the look in his eyes, yes, it was desire. Yet something more, something fiercer. Hotter.
“No,” she said, the breath catching in her throat. “I don’t want you to stop looking at me.”
He didn’t smile. Only kept looking. “What’s your name?”
“No. I don’t … let’s not do that.”
“You prefer anonymity?”
“Yes.” It was safer if he didn’t know who she was. Safer for both of them.
“I’m good with that.” His gaze roved over her and it made her feel hot, like there was a fire burning inside her. “But I need to call you something. Maybe Snow White.”
A startled laugh escaped her. “Snow White? That’s kind of cheesy.”
Again, he didn’t smile, but something flickered in his blue eyes, something that might have been amusement. “Why not? Black hair. White skin. Red mouth. You’re Snow White all right.”
“So what does that make you? You don’t look like Prince Charming to me.” Because Prince Charming was a good boy and this man definitely wasn’t. That fire in his blue eyes, that arrogance, that hard voice—those kinds of things only belonged to the bad boys.
His long mouth curved in a smile that made her heart stop altogether. “Oh, I’m not Prince Charming, baby. I’m the Huntsman.”
Her pupils dilated, making her eyes even darker. “The Huntsman, huh? You do know that means you have to take pity on me and let me go, right?”
She wasn’t scared. He could see that immediately and he knew how to spot fear. He’d learned to recognize it in the boardrooms he’d virtually grown up in, as he learned the business from his father.
“Let you go? I could do that.” He raised a finger to the bartender. “Or I could buy you a drink and let you decide what you want to do.”
Her dark gaze flickered, as in surprise. “Really? You sure you’re not Prince Charming?”
“Oh, I’m almost positive.” Charm was Donovan’s area of expertise, not his. He’d never needed it anyway since power and money did the job for him when it came to women. Not that he generally picked women up in bars. Or at all, in fact.
His approach to women was the same as his approach to business—cool and logical, emotions kept right out of it. If he did happen to want sex then he preferred to meet appropriate women at appropriate gatherings. Wine them and dine them. And if compatible, indulge in a satisfying sexual affair usually lasting no more than a month.
It was easier that way, less chance of anything messy and emotional happening. Having had a front-row seat to the fallout of his father’s affairs in the form of a half-brother his own mother had hated on sight, he’d witnessed firsthand how destructive love and passion could be. It wasn’t anything he wanted for himself.
So what are you doing lusting after this woman?
He didn’t quite know since he’d never lusted particularly strongly after any woman before. But perhaps the whiskey had shaken loose something inside him because the thought of letting this woman leave was unthinkable.
Leaning forward, he snagged a bar stool and dragged it over. “Sit down, Snow. I’m not going to cut out your heart yet.”
“You have no idea how reassuring that sounds.” There was a sarcastic edge to her tone but she sat down nevertheless, clutching a little red sequined purse in long white fingers.
“You’re not scared,” he said.
“No,” she admitted frankly. “But then being nervous isn’t the same as being afraid.”
“This is true.” The bartender approached and Jax raised an eyebrow at the woman sitting beside him. “What would you like to drink? A green apple martini too cheesy for you?”
“Oh, just a bit.” Her gaze rested on the whiskey tumbler near his elbow. “I’ll have one of those if you don’t mind.”
“Why would I mind? I like a woman who appreciates a good scotch. Another please, Tony.”
“Actually, I don’t much care what it is as long as it’s extremely alcoholic.”
“Nerves again?”
“You could say that.”
He studied her, taking in the way the light fell on the red silk of her dress. How the material pulled tight over her breasts and hugged the slim width of her hips, highlighting her subtle curves. The dress had an asymmetric hem with a split that left bare one thigh almost to her hip. A sophisticated, seriously sexy dress. Much like her in fact.
Desire gripped him, making him aware of how long it had been since he’d taken a woman to bed. Since that damn journalist’s exposé had hit the headlines and Morrow’s past paraded in front of a gossip hungry world, he hadn’t had the time for any pleasant distractions. All his energy had gone into making sure his hold on the company was absolute and limiting the damage. He certainly wouldn’t ever have considered a bar pickup.
But tonight was different. Tonight she was here.
Maybe the intensity of the chemistry between them should have disturbed him but it had been a long time since he’d done anything purely for himself. And hell, after the hours he’d clocked up putting out fires and calming investors, he deserved a little R&R surely?
Make up all the excuses you like. You just want her. End of story.
Yeah. He did.
Of course, she could be a reporter, which would be bad, not to mention incredibly disappointing. Then again, he didn’t think she was. That look of wonder on her face as she’d entered the bar hadn’t been feigned, he was sure of it, and it was certainly an expression he’d never seen on any journalist he’d met.
Jax took another sip of his whiskey, watching as Tony pushed another tumbler toward her. She didn’t hesitate, just lifted the glass and knocked the whole lot back.
“Jesus,” he murmured. “You
are
nervous.”
She thumped the empty tumbler back on the bar top, a flush to her pale cheeks now. “I need another.”
“One more and that’s it.”
“I can buy my own drinks.”
“I don’t doubt it. But I’d like you to be able to make an informed choice when I ask you home tonight.”
The flush in her cheeks deepened but she didn’t look away. “In that case you’re right. Only one more.”
Jax raised another finger and Tony poured her a refill. She didn’t knock back this one. Instead she picked it up and took a sip, studying him from underneath long, silky black lashes. “So, do you often ask strange women you meet in bars home?”
He supposed he could have lied, played down the attraction that pulsed in the space between them. Made it into something less than it was, something meaningless. Something cheap. But he couldn’t do that. A woman like this deserved more than cheap and shit; so did he. And besides, he hated liars. “No,” he said softly. “I never have.”