Wilde Heart (Wilde Women Book 2) (5 page)

Rhi wanted to say something but didn’t trust her voice so she simply turned on her heels and ran as fast as she could. Away from where Liam stood, his face plastered with the scowl she knew so well. Past the fire-breathing secretary who startled as she flew past.

Slapping her hand on the elevator button, Rhiann counted the seconds before the door slid open, and she fell inside.

Yeah. That had gone well.
Not!

C
ROSS-LEGGED ON THE SOFA, RHIANN sat unmoving in the deep silence of her tiny apartment. She needed the quiet to work some magic on her frazzled nerves following the unfortunate conclusion to her disastrous meeting with the boss man. The dude in charge. He-who-signs-the-paycheck.
Liam.

Sighing, she caught the faint tinny clicking of the metal wall clock hung in the kitchen. Soon, her left eye twitched in time—a clear signal that she was losing the battle of denial. Blocking the flashing memory of clinging to that man’s lips when she should have slapped his arrogant face and refused to play his game was a lost cause.

As she sat motionless, Rhi became more aware of the slight pulsing in her lips that hadn’t gone away since he’d claimed her mouth with such effective thoroughness. Once the floodgates opened as a result of that kiss, it was inevitable that long-denied echoes in her mind would fire up.

Feeling a bleakness in her soul for how quickly and easily Liam’s reappearance had shattered her world, Rhi couldn’t defend against the crush of memories from those days, when as a bright-eyed coed, she’d fallen for the serious, starchy grad student who eventually broke her foolish, naïve heart.

It was hot that summer between her freshman and sophomore years at university when she’d been on the brink of turning twenty. She remembered that the heat had been relentless, forcing her gaggle of college gal pals to set up camp in the Baron-Wilde backyard where a pool and a large covered pergola offered sweet relief from the monotony of the brutal heat wave. That was where she’d first laid eyes on Liam Ashforth.

“Cannonball!” hollered Shelby Sutton, Rhi’s dorm roommate, as she lunged across the deck and jumped awkwardly into the deep end, sending a huge wave of water exploding into the air. The girls shrieked their outrage as the resulting shower drenched them all.

“Jeez-us, Shelby,” Rhi barked. “Warn a bitch next time!” After scrambling away from the torrent of splashes, she laughed at her roommate’s antics and ran for cover from the noonday sun.

Across the patio, Nicole Bradley—Rhiann’s long-time neighbor—plugged her iPod into a dock and queued up a playlist of favorite tunes. As Justin Timberlake’s “
SexyBack”
floated in the humid, motionless air, and Nicole did an exaggerated bump and grind along to the music, Freya Abbott came shuffling noisily from the patio slider with a two-liter of Diet Coke tucked into the crook of her arm. Hugging the bottle close to her body, she also juggled a stack of plastic cups and a big Ziploc bag of ice.

Freya was their resident do-gooder and surrogate mom. In a lot of ways, the serious girl who Rhiann counted among her bestest of best friends was a substitute for her older sister, Brynn. Known for being a rule follower, Freya pretty much always volunteered to be the designated driver. She kept everyone on the straightedge, and like Brynn, never failed to cross the T’s and dot the I’s.

“Beverages!” she called out with a wide grin before dropping everything onto a wood picnic table. Sticking out her tongue and grunting with comic emphasis, Freya rolled her eyes. “That’s my last waitress run inside, you guys! Next time you want something—get it yourself.”

Shelby hoisted herself from the pool—landing on her butt with a hearty, wet
thwack.
“This weather!” she lamented on a groan.
Ugh.
“The pool is like bathwater it’s so damn hot.”

“Oh shit! Speaking of hot—any of you get an eyeful of the Abbott House RA?” Nicole boomed over the thumping music. “Some random chick in my Speech and Language cohort says he’s Poly Sci. I’d give a crap about politics if all the players looked like him.”

“
Hmmph,
” Rhiann grunted with an eye roll at Shelby. “How come our RA is a card-carrying member of the Nerd Squad?”

Freya set up four plastic cups on the table and was dropping chunks of ice into each one, as they all started moving toward the shade under the wide umbrella over the long picnic table.

“I’d rather stick a fork in my head than be a resident advisor,” she mumbled. “Keeping an eye on you three is one thing.”

Rhiann smiled at the mocking tone and half smirk Freya directed at them.

“But babysitting an entire dorm of unaccompanied college students? No fucking way.” The messy curls of her long black hair danced across her shoulders when she shook her head to stress the point.

Nicole wrapped a colorful length of fabric around her hips, sarong style, and Timberlaked her way over to them just as “
SexyBack”
came to an end.

“I’d totes do him.” She chuckled with a nod toward the speaker. “Justin—yum. Love a man with moves, y’know?”

“Oh Jesus, Nic,” Shelby scolded. “You’d do the exterminator if he had muscles and a driver’s license!”

Their laughter hung in the heavy, humid air. It was a lighthearted moment, one of many Rhi had shared that summer with her tight-knit group of friends. She remembered it so clearly because of what happened next. One minute they’d been dishing naughtily about hot guys, and then for Rhiann—the world wobbled a bit and was never quite the same ever again.

“Excuse me ladies,” a deep, male voice cut in. “I knocked at the front but there was no answer. Sorry to interrupt your, uh. . . . recreation time,” the stranger told them with the slightest hint of a disparaging jeer in his voice. “Is Professor Wilde available?” Producing a manila envelope that looked stuffed to the gills, he added, “He wanted this information as soon as it was available.”

Had the time slowed down when the unexpected stranger spoke? Rhi wasn’t sure, but that was how she remembered the encounter.

An interminable silence followed while she mentally scrambled to pull it together—a task made difficult by the vision of male perfection standing just a few feet from her.
My Lord.
A mad rush of butterflies descending into the pit of her stomach put a hitch in Rhiann’s breathing.

Tall, lean, and gorgeously broad-shouldered, he looked out of place in the sweltering heat of that summer day. Dressed in a brilliantly white, button-down shirt tucked into a pair of grey slacks, he struck an odd chord next to the four friends in their bathing suits and sunglasses.

He had the bearing of an authority figure—reminding Rhi of a soldier or police officer. It was the way he held himself—how he stood—with his back ramrod straight, feet apart. Something slithered along her spine. A sense of physical awareness that came as a shock and made her uneasy.

Although he was buttoned up all tight and proper, he sported a sexy don’t-give-a-fuck stubble that only added to his appeal. It suggested an inner rebel bad boy lurking just below the surface.

Reaching for the plain, gauzy cover-up she’d thrown in a crumple on a lounge chair, Rhi slid it on quickly. She was fiddling with her long, plait of brown hair sweeping it over her shoulder to hang down over a breast.
God,
he made her so nervous, and she didn’t even know his name.

Liam paced back and forth along the bank of windows in his office. The executive wing of the BPG headquarters, what was, in essence, the throne room of his very own personal kingdom, was about as swank as a top-notch New York City designer could manage. Every square inch had the intention to impress and fill visitors with a sense of awe. Power and money practically oozed from the air vents.

But for him, the space was nothing but an accessory. Like his ridiculously expensive suits. Or the twenty thousand dollar watch he favored. He played the game, and he played it well.
But honestly.
He might as well have been in a concrete bunker with a street-level view wearing a department store timepiece and an off-the-rack business suit for all it meant to him.

Money was something he no longer concerned himself with. Human collateral aside, Liam could have anything he wanted. And right now, he wanted Rhiann Wilde.

The second he was back on U.S. soil after slogging through a long, protracted deal BPG was negotiating in Europe, every waking moment became consumed with her. Even when he slept, his dreamscapes resembled erotic tableaus of lusty scenes with the sexy brunette that easily turned into a nightmare.

Since his return, he’d done nothing but pace, frown, and somewhere in that reverie, acknowledge that the impressive office, expensive suits, all of it—the trappings of wealth and the advantages of power that made up his world—were covered with her unseen fingerprints. On the outside, the things driving his ambitions provided the fuel he needed to succeed as quickly as he had. But on the inside? In the shadowy corners of his mind? It was all about the girl.

Now that his mother was gone, and the crappy little empire built by his morally corrupt father decimated, Liam could no longer hide his admission. At the core of all his hopes and desires was a smart-ass brunette with a killer body and a
blow me
attitude who at the present moment didn’t seem to give a good goddamn about his accomplishments or social standing.

Gruffly snorting at the absurdity of thinking he had anything that would in
any
way impress the one female not swayed by his shit, he saw the error of his arrogance too late. After all, Rhiann Wilde knew the college boy inside the man. She’d gotten naked with him on his crappy double bed with the lumpy mattress in his postage stamp sized studio apartment. Hell, she’d even been under him in the backseat of his beater Toyota with her jeans and panties in a ball on the floor.

Dropping like a stone onto his desk chair, Liam swiveled away from the city view and scowled at the report he should be reading. But he couldn’t concentrate on it spread out before him.

It was useless to deny that he’d fucked up royally by letting his impatience take control earlier. Driven and unwilling to wait, he’d foolishly played his boss man card at the magazine. Regretting the scene in the executive office at
Passion
and growling at his own stupidity, he knew he should have waited for a better time when he could lure Rhiann to his inner sanctum here at BPG. Maybe seeing him in his normal surrounding would have been more impressive.

Impressed by his cock and balls swagger and the plethora of expensive toys he was surrounded with?
Yeah. Fuck that.
Nothing he had, did, or said more than bounced off her like a quarter on a hospital bed corner. She couldn’t care less. Only thing was, he still remembered a time when she could barely breathe whenever he was around. A time she hadn’t been such a bitch or as disdainful of his presence on the planet as she was now.

Giving in to the endless pull of the memory, he let the recollection of the day they first met fill his senses. It was the summer before he got his master’s degree. He’d landed a coveted gig as a professor’s assistant, which led to that fateful day when he’d first laid eyes on a teenage Rhiann Wilde.