Permanent Marker (7 page)

She ended up reading his thoughts on that one. Rose sifted her fingers through his beard, then his hair, coaxing him lower, lower, until their lips met again. Fire and arousal roared through him anew, until the second he recognized the desperation behind the sweeps of her tongue and the pressure of her mouth. When they pulled apart, the depths of her gaze confirmed his suspicion. The kiss wasn’t hello. It was good-bye.

“I have to deny it,” she whispered. “I have to. Not every rose is meant to blossom, Senator. Some are just there to remind the world about the thorns.”

She pushed to be free again. And this time, Mark let her go. Just like he let her turn and leave the building without looking back at him. He found the strength to get through it by remembering a little axiom that had served him well through the years.

“You took the battle, Rose,” he murmured. “But the war is far from over.”

Chapter Six

The next morning, Rose stopped in the hallway outside the meeting room to take a deep breath. Another. Her head already throbbed, due to one inescapable fact. Facing Ryan, Pete, Kai, and the others was less terrifying than having to face Mark Moore again.

She’d hijacked his beautiful words last night and driven them right into the ground. To make matters worse, she’d turned and left him standing in the mental wreckage. Not that she didn’t feel a hundred kinds of shit for it. Not that she hadn’t stopped ten steps out the fitness center’s door, longing to run back in and sob that she didn’t mean it, that she’d never felt like this before, not even with Owen. And oh yeah, while she was at it, he was right; she was indeed a stubborn brat, and needed to be put in her place. She needed to be tied back down again, and given over for his punishment…and pleasure. God, how she wanted to bring the man pleasure.

Instead, she’d gone back to her room, caught
Titanic
on HBO, then fallen into a chaotic sleep just before midnight. The irony of the whole thing hadn’t escaped her. The Rose in the movie had been given a soul mate, then gone against everything she knew to have him. The ship hit the damn iceberg, anyway.

But the woman had known a love that lasted her a lifetime.

She clenched her jaw, banished the thought, and forced her feet forward.

Her stare found him instantly. The experience was worse than what she anticipated. In a rich charcoal suit and deep burgundy tie, with his hair and beard groomed to perfection, he looked beautiful enough to jump, even here. His clothes, fitting him to the millimeter, made him more perfect than a hunk from a magazine ad—but his stance turned him into something more appropriate for a wild-game hunter. Every inch of him conveyed pure aggression, from his braced legs and stiff shoulders to the scowl that looked tense enough to bite someone’s hand off.

His expression intensified when he looked up and saw her.

She squared her chin, forcing herself to take his scrutiny. He’d asked her to return, not the other way around. She was not going to let him pull the intimidation-by-wounded-male bit. Bolstered by that, she marched her way down the tiers to the front of the room again and took her front-row seat. She didn’t look back up again until she’d stowed her purse, then pulled out her course binder and pen—

And got assaulted by a stare more intense, permeating, and outright cocky than a grown man had a right to yield.

Which, when coupled with the tie and suit, only made her long to glue herself to him worse than before.

Only then did she notice the smirk. It was the smallest of expressions, a tiny sideways slant, barely noticeable…unless a person happened to be sitting less than six feet from the man.

She blinked. Maybe she’d imagined it. But then Mark slid the look to the other side of his mouth. The gig was up. His original glare really was a ploy, a stunt that’d drawn her up here better than a magnet on metal shavings.

Why?

She didn’t know why she squirmed when considering the answer to that. Looking at him didn’t help. His all-business mask was now slammed back on his features. He lifted that expression to the entire class.

“I hope all of you enjoyed the break yesterday and used it to accomplish the goals I set?”

Rose glanced around as reactions to that ranged from awkward coughs to a few “Yes, Senators.” It didn’t escape her that Kai and Peter were members of the latter group. Ryan chose stoic silence, only giving a respectful nod to Mark, acknowledging he’d heard. Shockingly, Ryan included her in the action too.

The
Twilight Zone
theme started in her head. Ryan Johnson, prick of the year, was now giving her deference? What the hell had happened in here yesterday? A questioning stare back at Mark gave her nothing. His eyes were hard as agates now, his mouth set with grim satisfaction. His words from the grotto echoed in her head.
“You really thought I’d treat those morons with a shred of civility after what they did to you?”

A strange warmth suffused her chest. Was this what those medieval maids felt, when knights went out and broke lances on each other for them? And if so, did that damsel question the feeling as being completely ridiculous?

“Very good,” Mark pronounced. She half expected him to pound his chest too, but the man’s authority was subtler than that. He moved forward and once again to the desk right next to her. She braced herself for the sexy-as-hell, lazing-lion thigh pose from yesterday, but he opted for a more commanding stance, hiking a foot up to the chair. After angling an elbow to that knee, he looked out over her classmates again. “I believe we left off at discussing one’s attitude in unknown lands…leaving the office mentality behind, getting into the headspace of your guest status in another country. Can anyone share if they took away any keywords from our dialogue?”

Rose wasn’t surprised when Ryan jumped on the chance to speak. His tone conveyed the pure purpose of getting in a fresh piss on his territory. “Leadership.”

“Okay,” Mark answered. “Good. You thought about your answer, Mr. Johnson. That’s an outstanding way to phrase it. Who else?”

Christine, one of Aria’s buddies from the Austin office, raised her hand. “Compassion?”

“Excellent, Ms. Daye.” He nodded at the back of the room. “And Ms. Vernon?”

“Humility.” Veronica, who had come from the New Orleans office, said it with conviction. Mark reacted with a hum of praise, which brought another heat front to Rose’s chest. This time the sensation wasn’t so pleasant—and irked deep when she recognized it as a certain green monster of sentiment. And outright rankled when she let it drive her arm up.

She almost regretted the action as Mark cocked his head toward her. His gaze was sharpened by deep topaz flecks. “Ms. Fabian? You’d like to share?”

She floundered. Everything about his posture was casual and relaxed; everything about his stare was incisive and intense.

But damn it, he wasn’t going to crumble her so easily. She lifted her chin, deliberately defiant about the motion. “Brains, Senator. Plain and simple. People don’t use them enough.”

His brows lifted. “It’s all about the head today, is it? What happened to yesterday’s words of the heart?”

She took him up on the brow jump but added a shrug. “Heart still has its place, but not as your mission statement. When you’re in new lands, where you don’t know where you are or what lies ahead in the next hour, you can’t just let everything go to the moment. You do that, and you’re…”

He leaned at her by just an inch. But even that tiny schism of space, filled with his presence, made her stammer back into silence.

“And you’re what, Ms. Fabian?”

Hell.

Confronting his stare now was like standing naked in the summer sun—with all the resulting heat to the layers of her sex. “You’re…overwhelmed.”

A smirk inched back across his lips. “Overwhelmed isn’t bad, Ms. Fabian. Sometimes you can’t, and you won’t, control everything.”

“So what then? You surrender and get yourself killed?”

“Sometimes you surrender in order to survive. Sometimes surrender
is
your freedom.”

Air was becoming a rare commodity to her lungs. He was so close. Too close. Too strong, hard, golden, and beautiful…and infuriatingly sure of himself.

Especially as she realized, with every instinct in her body, he wasn’t talking about the mission anymore.

Damn him.

She fought his little trick with an irritated snap. “I respectfully disagree.”

He reacted to that with leonine grace, returning to his feet in a couple of smooth steps. But his gaze, hard as stone again, never left her. “Overwhelmed is inevitable.” His voice drilled into her with the same unflinching intent. His words weren’t conjecture. He gave them to her as pure, hard fact. “It. Will. Happen. And the only thing you can do is be prepared, Ms. Fabian—to accept it.”

She parted her lips a little, letting him see her locked teeth. “Accepting dangerous plans isn’t what I do anymore, Senator.”

“Then for the first time, I
am
worried about your fate on this project, Ms. Fabian.”

Okay, forget the emotional sunburn. He’d just pulled out her spirit, and fried it to a crisp. As Rose blinked from the blow, Kai obliged the class by filling the air with a low whistle. “Oooh! Senator Moore throws down!”

“Shut up, Mr. Thomas.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mark gave her one last look, nearly dismissive in how icy it was, before looking out across the room once more. “All right, I want everyone at page fifty in your study manuals. We’ll start in on daily rituals and project work habits until first break in a couple of hours.”

Chapter Seven

If she checked her watch one more time, Mark was certain she’d bust the thing from overuse.

Under other circumstances, he would’ve chuckled at the way he’d clearly pushed some of her buttons. Correction: had nearly short-circuited that control panel she’d worn in here this morning. And yes, he
would
have laughed at his handiwork—if that had been his intention. After secretly shadowing her back to her room last night to make sure she got there in one piece, he’d taken a walk on the beach in hopes of clearing his head about the way things had gone in the fitness room. Maybe, he’d thought, he could dissect why it went down that way. If he could drill it down to that, discern why he’d gone right to the discipline and the domination with her, he could purge the whole thing and write it off as the aberration
she
insisted it was.

Instead he’d replayed every second of the episode again. Then again. The rightness of it. The perfection of her submission. The beautiful notes of her climax, and every gorgeous tear of her breakdown in his arms afterward. And yes, the glory of what she’d become, and the triumph of what he’d discovered in himself again.

All of it…all the way up to the moment she’d bolted.

Damn it, he needed to talk to her again. He had to get into her head just one more time. Every instinct in
his
head screamed for it. He couldn’t let her go on thinking there was something wrong with who she instinctively was created to be…all the joy she was meant to have…

Suddenly, the suit, the tie, and the room itself weren’t the only things that felt too tight and hot. Even in her ire, maybe
especially
in it, she was a delicious mix of movement and attitude that aroused him with visceral force. He observed the feisty little stabs of her hands as she grabbed water and a tea bag from the catering table in their break patio, then bypassed the platter full of doughnuts and cookies to press against a wall, brooding at the world like she wanted her orange pekoe to turn into a murder dagger. Her nostrils flared, shadows clashed in her eyes, and her mouth was a twist of stewing-in-my-own-juices conflict.

She needed some time. His instinct also told him that. A little time, a lot of patience.

He let out a low growl at that. There was his damn rub. He had plenty of the latter, but none of the first.

“None” wasn’t a word that sat well in his vocabulary.

And damn it, if he could speed shit along on Capitol Hill, this should be a cakewalk.

With renewed purpose, he strode across the patio as if needing to go check on something at the hotel’s front desk, making sure his path took him past Rose. As he expected, she let out a little snort. As he hoped, she tossed her tea and followed him.

“Senator!”

Her shout stopped him in front of the hotel’s bar. The place was dark right now, scrubbed up from last night’s revelries, though the air still carried the inevitable aftermath of spilled booze, sweaty bodies, and salty snacks. He paused, leaning on the empty hostess podium with a pretense of mild surprise.

“Miss Fabian. Hello. What’s on your mind?”

No pretense in her, on the other hand. What thin veneer she had on her ire came off as she closed the distance to him, then dug her nails into his arm with the force of a pissed-off sand crab. She dragged him deeper into the murky room, glancing to make sure they were alone.

“I think you already know what’s on my mind.”

He tilted his head. “I’m many things, Ms. Fabian, but mind reader isn’t one of them. And even if you’re right and I do know, what makes you think I’d presume how you’ve processed your thoughts, or would let you get away with not talking to me about it?” He savored the startled flare of her lashes and took advantage of tumbling her more off-center. With a deliberate step, he got close enough to make her head fall back. “Speak up. Let’s hear it, pet.”

“S-stop calling me that.”

He dipped his head a little. “Have dinner with me tonight, and I’ll consider it.”

“That’s extortion!”

“That’s negotiation.” He couldn’t help it. Her neck called to his fingers, so creamy and elegant. It felt like silk as he caressed from her ear to her collarbone. “And I’m very good at it.”

Her breath audibly hitched. She jerked back. Well, tried to. He was ready for the move and counteracted it by catching her nape and locking her in place. She countered with a harsh huff. “Okay, fine. You want me to talk? Here’s me talking. What the hell were you trying to pull in there? Is that some kind of specialty test for the students you want to drive the craziest? Is that the reason for the special suit today?” He willed everything south of his eyes into complete composure. That forced her to meet his gaze directly again.