Beauty and the Beast (Not Quite the Fairy Tale #3) Read Free Page B

things.
    Human interactions were about give and take. Some gave beauty; he couldn’t, so he offered money or favors instead. Most women were happy to take it.
    Apparently, not that one. As she hadn’t even attempted to negotiate a price, he knew better than to push it. Why had he even tried? She was a perfect beauty and he, an actual beast.
But he couldn’t help himself, he needed to know.
“So, you won’t work on your back, or you won’t work on your back with me?”
    “Actually,” she replied without breaking the eye contact, “I don’t believe your little contract specified anything about sexual favors. I’m smarter than I look: I know what you’re after.”
    She had no idea what he was after, or she would have run the other way, screaming.
    “You want to save your face to make sure other hackers don’t try their luck with you. Well, that’s fine: I’m here as requested, until you release me and declare my brother’s foolishness accounted for.”
So that was her angle. He should have been disappointed but found that, in fact, he wasn’t. He hadn’t liked the idea of her selling that body of hers.
That didn’t make a blink of sense. Hell, if she’d wanted to make a commodity out of those legs and that mouth, he would have advertised them and drawn thousands of fuckers to his door.
    Or locked her up in his room and showered her body under millions of golden marks to keep her there.
“Fair enough. Well, how much do you make at your job?”
    She bit her lip, visibly annoyed at that question.
    Not very much, then.
    Aiden wondered why she bothered. With her face, her body, her smell, her presence, she could have become a rich man’s wife without much effort. Sure, he’d heard of women who believed about earning their own keeps, but those were mentioned in books – generally historical or fictitious ones. In real life, nowadays, no female said no to security. None of those he knew, in any case.
    “Well, any fee for the inconvenience caused put aside, now you’re here, your brother still owes me one hundred thousand marks. Does he have it?”
    Of course he didn’t; Aiden could feel his lips curl up when she shook her head. He wasn’t sure why, but he loved the leverage.
    “If you don’t want to repay his debts the easy way, you’ll have to work for it otherwise. Your presence is likely to aid my reputation, which is why you will be by my side every evening, from ten to midnight. Then we will retire. Together. You’ll need to make very convincing sounds at some point, to keep the illusion alive.”
    Her expression said that she got what he meant: he might not take advantage of her, but people would assume he did.
    With a bit of luck, it would be enough to repair whatever damage Ben Thornton had carved in his reputation.
     
    •
     
    “You’re a pig,” she told him, blushing despite her best efforts.
    He only laughed, and she felt the vibration of his chest, close as he was.
    “I’ve been called worse.”
    That, she could believe.
    She’d heard a lot about him, too; however, she now saw that it had all been a big, huge pile of bullshit.
    From the talk, she’d expected something akin to a wild animal, completely devoid of the slightest human emotion. That sort of threat, she would have acted differently towards, but what she found instead was the opposite: a regular guy. Not even an ugly one. The pile of defined muscles, that V leading down his fleece PJs, and the chiseled, deeply marked features were exactly the kind of stuff romance novels were on about, and she understood why. Preventing herself from gawking took some effort.
    If he’d been traditionally beautiful – another six-foot-one artificially tanned guy with a pot of gel on his hair and a seedy whitened smile, she would have had the opposite reaction. Her dealings with those kinds of men had taught her to give them a wide berth. They were beasts; the real kind.
    The name Beast did fit him, too, because damn if he wasn’t