Jordan St Claire: Dark and Dangerous Read Free

here.’
    She smiled slightly. ‘Unfortunately for you, you aren’t the one paying the bills.’
    ‘I don’t need a damned housekeeper! ‘ he repeated, frustrated.
    ‘As I said, that’s questionable,’ Stephanie teased lightly as she moved to dry her hands on a towel that also looked as if it needed to come face to face with some hot soapy water—or, more preferably, disinfectant! ‘Stephanie McKinley.’ She thrust out the dry hand. ‘And I’m not a housekeeper.’
    A hand Jordan deliberately chose to ignore, breathing deeply as he looked down at her from between narrowed lids. Probably aged in her mid to late twenties, the woman had incredibly long, dark lashes fringing eyes of deep green, and the freckles that usually accompanied hair as red as hers were a light dusting across her small uptilted nose. Her lips were full, the bottom one slightly more so than the top, above a pointed and determined chin. She also had one very sexy body beneath the casual white T-shirt and denims, and—as he was now all too well aware—a tongue like a viper!
    No one—not even his two brothers—had dared to talk to Jordan these last few months in the way Stephanie McKinley just had.
    ‘How do you know Lucan?’ Jordan probed suddenly.
    ‘I don’t.’ With a shrug, the woman allowed her hand to fall back to her side. ‘At least, not in the way I thinkyou’re implying I might.’ She gave him another mocking glance.
    Jordan had been standing for longer than he usually did, and as a result his hip was starting to ache. Badly. A definite strain on his already short temper! ‘Is paying a woman to go to bed with me Lucan’s idea of a joke?’
    Stephanie smiled in the face of the deliberate insult—at the same time as she wryly wondered whether the coldly remote man she had met the previous week even had a sense of humour! ‘Do I
look
like a woman men pay to go to bed with them?’
    ‘How the hell should I know?’ Jordan scorned.
    ‘Implying you don’t usually need to pay a woman to go to bed with you?’ That was something she was already well aware of—Jordan Simpson had trouble keeping women out of his bed rather than the opposite!
    ‘Not usually, no,’ he ground out.
    Stephanie realised that he was deliberately trying to unnerve and embarrass her with the intimacy of this conversation. He was succeeding, too—which wasn’t a good thing in the circumstances.
    She raised an eyebrow. ‘I assure you I would have absolutely no interest in going to bed with a man who is so full of self-pity that he’s not only shut himself off from his family but the rest of the world, too.’
    Jordan’s face darkened ominously. ‘What the hell would
you
know about it?’ he snarled viciously. ‘I don’t see
you
suffering pitying looks every time you so much as go outside, as you stumble about with the aid of a cane just so that you don’t completely embarrass yourself by falling flat on your backside!’
    Stephanie hesitated slightly before answering. ‘Not any more, no.’
    Those golden eyes narrowed to dark slits. ‘What exactly does
that
mean?’
    Stephanie calmly met that furiously glittering gaze. ‘It means that when I was ten years old I was involved in a car crash that left me confined to a wheelchair for two years. I couldn’t walk at all for all of that time, not even to “stumble about with the aid of a cane”. You, on the other hand, still have mobility in both your legs, which is why you won’t be receiving any of those pitying looks from me that you seem to find so offensive from the rest of humanity!’
    Ordinarily Stephanie didn’t tell her patients of her own years spent in a wheelchair. She saw no reason why she needed to, and wouldn’t have done so now, either, if the challenge in Jordan’s tone hadn’t touched on a raw nerve.
    ‘You were lucky enough to get up and walk so now you think anyone else who finds themselves in the same position should do the same?’ he said.
    ‘So you’ve had the bad