vengeance. They were too wild, too rebellious to fit the cultured mold I forced myself into. My skin tightened at the awareness of how short my high-waisted shorts were. I didn’t think I’d be sleeping in a man’s office when I packed my bag yesterday. He rocked back in his leather chair, tossing a stress ball between his hands. Toss. Squeeze. A small smile. “You’re a heavy sleeper.” Nobody had to tell him it was inappropriate to watch someone sleep. He knew. That much was evident by the roguish flicker in his eyes. Maybe not so much a gentleman at heart? The deep sleep I fell into after the grumpy redhead woke me a little after four a.m. had dulled my short memory of him. His presence was larger than life; a shadow where a shadow shouldn’t be. He was still black from head to toe, no tie, but today his hair was slightly messy, as if he’d run those inked fingers through it, and judging by the twirl of smoke rising from an ashtray on his desk, he was smoking a cigar in what had to be the early morning. I never had a problem with talking, with pushing words past my lips, but with this man’s full attention on me, I found anything I wanted to say caught in my throat. So, with a blush I deeply resented, I turned my head and said nothing at all. He chuckled softly, reached for a phone on his desk with a cord, and dialed a number. I groaned in my mind. He thought I was amusing. Meanwhile, the mere touch of his gaze on my skin warmed me like the heat of the sun. And his voice, lightly accented and holding an experienced edge .. . I could listen to it all day and never tire of it. I got to my bare feet and folded his wrinkled jacket and the blanket neatly, which evoked a quirk of his lips mid-Russian sentence to whoever was on the other end of the line. His stare slipped over my skin as I padded across the room to view the photos hanging on the wall. One showed a few smirking and smoking men, but the focus was a teenage Ronan with a rifle in his hand and a dead deer at his feet. I’d never seen a gun in my life.