The Billionaire Gets His Way(27)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

He was six-feet-two and two hundred pounds of unpleasantness.

Please, Gavin thought. He was six-three and a hundred and ninety pounds. And every inch was pure muscle.

He was the sort of man who could kick a kitten to the curb, into a pile of wet slush.

Now that was just hyperbolic.

And I knew if he could do that to a kitten, he wouldn’t think twice about tossing me into the company paper shredder.

He continued reading through to the last printed page, noting that Violet’s editorial changes hadn’t softened Mason Gavin, but had instead made him even more severe. He’d heard stories about authors who modeled characters in their novels after their enemies and then made them suffer heinous deaths, but Violet didn’t seem to want death for her Mason Gavin. She merely wanted to antagonize and berate him. A lot. And she wanted her heroine to bring him down a peg or two. Or ten. When he finished the last page, he collected the rest of the scene from the cushion beside himself and began to straighten the pages. As he added them to the tidied articles, he glanced up.

Violet stood framed by the bedroom entrance, leaning against the doorjamb with her arms crossed and one foot crossed over the other.

She had gotten dressed, too—kind of—and was wearing a pair of baggy, low-riding pajama bottoms spattered with a snowflake print, topped by a snug cropped T-shirt that rode high enough to expose a delectable stretch of flesh between the two garments.

“I was kind of mad at you the day I wrote that passage,” she said. “I wasn’t going to keep that name for him. Wouldn’t want to get sued for libel and defamation, after all.”

There was something in her voice that belied her casual posture, though whether that was because she was afraid of how he was going to react to what she’d written or because she was having second thoughts about what had happened between them, he couldn’t have said. Yes, she’d enjoyed their lovemaking as much as he had. But in the harsh light of waking—both literal and figurative—people often had regrets.

“What I think,” he began carefully, “is that…” He sighed heavily. He held up the manuscript pages and said, “Have I really been this bad?”

She pushed herself away from the doorjamb and braved a few steps forward. “Yes,” she told him, making something inside him twist painfully. Then she amended, “In the beginning, you were,” and he relaxed. Some. When she took a few more steps forward, he relaxed even more. “But I guess,” she continued, “in the beginning, maybe you had a reason to be.”

He shook his head. “No, I didn’t. I realize that now.”

She smiled a little tentatively, completed the last step necessary to bring her next to the sofa, but didn’t sit beside him. Instead, she gestured with her chin toward the stack of magazine pages on the end table. “I guess I could have shown you that in the beginning, so you could see how I did my research. It might have saved us both some trouble. Maybe if you could have seen then how universal a man Ethan is, and how there was nothing in my research to link him to you—”

“Except for my penthouse, you mean.”

She frowned. “What are you talking about? I got Ethan’s penthouse from a spread in Chicago Homes. I’m using it in the new book, too, because I liked it so much.”

This time Gavin was the one to grin. “A spread that was done about my home.”

“What?”

He sorted through the articles until he found that one. But instead of getting up from the sofa to bring it to her, he patted the cushion on the side of him in silent invitation. After only a moment’s hesitation, Violet joined him. But she crowded herself deep into the corner so that a good six inches of space remained between them. He wasn’t sure what that meant, after what the two of them had shared. He wasn’t sure he should try to figure it out, either. One thing at a time.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a line in the first paragraph. “It identifies the residence as the Chicago penthouse of CEO Gavin Mason.”

Violet read the sentence he indicated, but shook her head. “I swear, I don’t remember that at all. I’m not even sure I read the article. I just thumbtacked it above my desk so I could look at the pictures while I was writing.”

“Well, even if you did read it, you read it a long time ago and couldn’t have remembered my name. Or made the association when you learned it.”

She smiled at that. It wasn’t a big smile, but it wasn’t bad. “So you really do believe me,” she said. “You’re finally convinced you’re not Ethan?”

He made a noncommittal sound at that. No need to get into that again.

“I mean, how could the book be anything but fiction, you know?” she asked further. “A woman not being taken advantage of or brutalized in the sex trade? A woman actually controlling her own sexual destiny in a male-dominated world? A woman finding sexual gratification every single time she has sex, with every single man, and never having to fake an orgasm? As if.”

Gavin had started to smile, too, as she spoke, but the smile fled as she voiced that last part. “Are you saying you’ve faked an orgasm before?”

She bit her lower lip, a gesture that made him want to nibble it, too. “Um, yeah, Gavin. Every woman has at some point.”

“Did you…tonight?” he asked, surprising himself. He’d never wondered whether or not a woman had faked it with him. And, honestly, he wasn’t sure he would have cared if one had, as long as he’d found satisfaction himself. Suddenly, though, with this woman, he did care. He cared a lot.

She laughed. “You’re kidding, right? How can you even ask me that?”

The relief that washed over him was almost palpable. Until he realized she hadn’t actually answered the question. “So that’s a no?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

That was better.

She blushed becomingly again—he wasn’t sure he would ever stop being fascinated by that—and her gaze skittered nervously away from his, falling on the papers he’d been sifting through. “So…I guess seeing all this means you’re really not going to be suing me, right?”

There was still clear doubt in her voice, and he was surprised she could still ask the question. Although, after the way he’d threatened her, maybe she needed him to spell it out for her, too.

“No. I know the book is fiction. I know that I’m not Ethan. And I know that you never worked as a call girl.”