TRAGIC: Rook and Ronin, #1 (6 page)

"Relax, Rook. This place is famous for their burgers so I ordered you a burger. Well-done, because that's how most people eat their burgers. I like mine medium-rare, but I don't like the idea of you eating undercooked hamburger, so I got it well-done, OK? Do you want me to change the order? I will if you prefer medium or rare or whatever."

I look away, embarrassed. Did I just overreact? Or did he just play me?

There's no time to answer because a girl dressed up like a biker straight out of Sturgis saunters up to Ronin and plants herself next to him in the booth. She ignores me completely.

"Ronin, my love. Does this outfit scream STURGIS, or what?"

It's like she read my mind. A laugh bursts out before I can stop it and the wannabe biker chick shoots me a dirty look.

"Sorry," I mumble.

"We're not casting for STURGIS until TRAGIC is over, Lisa. You'll have to come back in a few weeks."

"Well, I can do TRAGIC, too! I'm tragic, right?"

"Ah, you are, sweetie. But Rook here is our new TRAGIC girl, sorry. That job is taken."

My eyebrows shoot up. "I am?"

Lisa jumps on my indecision. "She's not signed yet?"

"It doesn't matter, Lisa, Antoine and I chose her this afternoon during her test shoot. She's the girl we want." And then he looks over to me and smiles. But this time it's not cocky and bold. It's warm and seductive—a little crooked with a promise of something devious and a hint of dirty in it. Everything inside me goes warm in an instant. "So we'll do whatever it takes to keep her."

Lisa pouts and whines a little more but Ronin is looking straight at me the whole time. His gaze gets uncomfortable and I have to look away.

I take a deep breath and when I look up again, Lisa is gone and the food is here. Ronin helps Cindy with the plates and scoots my burger over towards me, says some flirty words to the waitress who looks exhausted and ready to go home, and then winks at me as he takes a bite of his food.

Chapter Nine - RONIN

This Rook is going to be a handful, I can tell. She's got a dark look to her, a look that says she's had some trouble recently. But she's not down, that's for sure. And her defenses are on high alert. Much too high for my comfort level. I'll have to work on that. If she doesn't trust me to order her food, then she's definitely not going to trust me to take care of her during a shoot.

And even though I told Lisa Rook is definitely the girl I want for TRAGIC, we won't get far if we can't touch her.
I
can't touch her, I correct myself. I'm the one who'll be touching her.

She has a good appetite once she settles in and starts eating, and that's a plus. I can only eat half of my burger, too many beers tonight, but Rook scarfs hers down and makes a decent dent in her French fries as well. I smile as she leans back in the booth. "Satisfied?" She blushes a bright pink and I have to stop myself from growling with desire. This girl does something to me and I'm not quite sure what to do about it.

"I was hungry," she explains. "I didn't eat all day."

"That's not good," I say, frowning at her. This might be an issue after all. "You want some pie? Cookie makes the best pies in town."

She laughs, as if this is absurd. "No, thanks. I've had enough."

I stand and hold out my hand to her. She looks at me funny but accepts it and I pull her to her feet and put my hand behind her back to direct her to the door.

"Don't we have to pay?"

"We have a tab, Rook. When you eat here you walk to the back booth, you order whatever you want and they bill us. No questions asked."

"Oh, then you take it out of our pay or something?"

I hold the door open for her and she murmurs a thank you as she passes through. I love her manners. She's a contradiction though, dark and defensive one minute, sweet and innocent the next. I'm not sure which side I prefer to be honest, I like them both at the moment. "No, this is just what we do for the models. We like you girls to look a certain way. Make sense?"

She looks over to me as we cross the street and make our way back to the studio. "I guess."

She has no idea what I'm talking about, and I'm really too tired to explain, so I just walk next to her in silence until we get to the door. "You can use my code for now, all right? It's 37351 I'll write it down for you when we get upstairs. It works for the terrace door too, so you're not a princess anymore."

She laughs at that and I have a sudden urge to put my hands all over her body, that's how much those little noises coming from her mouth turn me on. I can't even remember the last time a girl made me feel like that. Maybe never.

"Sorry for escaping, the hunger about drove me mad."

Oh shit. I feel bad. I'm such an asshole.

"But thanks for the burger. I really did like it."

We trudge up the four flights of stairs with just the noise of our footfalls to break the silence. Her little Converse sneakers are cute—bright red with little holes near the toes, like she's been wearing them since she was twelve and can't bear to give them up. I open the studio door and make sure it clicks closed behind us. "We've got the doors on a lock timer, so if you come in during business hours, it's always open, but after hours you need the code."

I open the terrace door for her and wait for her to walk through, then follow her out onto the terrace.

"This place is so beautiful, even in the moonlight."

I look around at it. I'm so used to living here I don't even notice the cherry trees anymore. "Yeah, Antoine spends a small fortune on gardeners every month. We shoot a lot of stuff out here though, so it's worth it I guess."

She looks longingly at the grass and flowering fruit trees. "I spent most of my life in the city and there were some pretty places, I mean every city has pretty places, right? But they never quite made up for the ugliness."

Something tells me she's not talking about Denver.

"There's a swing over there near the first tree." I take her arm and pull her along with me over to the trees. "Get on. I'll push you."

I half expect a little fight out of her, but she's a lot calmer than she was when I found her in the diner. I watched her come out of the alley, get nervous about a group of guys following her, and then overreact when another guy asked her a question. She was wound up tight when I showed up.

But now—I listen to her stifle down a laugh as she settles down on the old wooden swing—she's calm and soft.

I think I prefer her like this. I can do without the dark Rook, but this girl, the one who says thank you when I open the door for her and who giggles when I push her in the cherry tree swing—this girl is sexy. Rook has Lisa and her Sturgis outfit beat by a mile and all she's wearing is some ripped-up low-cut jeans and an oversized white t-shirt that shows zero cleavage.

Her long dark hair floats out behind her as she swings forward, and then whips against her back as she returns to me. I catch a glimpse of her bare neck every once in a while and I get the urge to kiss her there.
Shit, Ronin, what's wrong with you?
Models are not girlfriend material, I remind myself. They are the farthest thing from girlfriend material there is. I try not to date the models, I try not to even look at them.

But Rook isn't a model. She might be one next week when we start this campaign, but right now, she's just a girl.

And the only thing I know right now is that I want her.

"So Rook, tell me. Do you think you'll like modeling?"

"Yeah," she says, "I'll love it, as long as it pays me money. I just want a job, you know?"

She tilts her head back as she swings forward, making her whole body dip, and I imagine how she might look underneath me in bed—arching her back as I tickle her stomach with kisses. I snap out of the fantasy. "Do you have family here in Denver?"

"No."

That's all I get.
No
.

"Friends?"

"Nope."

Again, she offers nothing.

"So how did you get here?" I push.

"Fate." She laughs and jumps off the swing the next time it goes forward. She lands on her knees in the grass and then rolls down on her back. "That was fun, thank you." She gets to her feet and waits.

Despite her smile and her laugh, I recognize the move. She just ended the night.

"You're welcome. Want me to write the code down for you? So you can go get breakfast in the morning?"

"Yeah, sure," she says, already walking towards the garden studio. She punches in her code, which is all ones, so not a big deal, but she punches it in like she's lived here all year and not half a day. "Is there some paper and a pen in here? I haven't looked through everything yet."

"Yeah," I say. "In the top drawer next to the stove."

She shoots me a weird look, wondering how I know that probably, but I don't offer up an explanation and she simply hands the stuff over and I write down my code. "The doors are off hours all weekend, so you have to use the code at all times. OK?"

She nods. "Thanks."

Aaaaand… that's it. She's shut me down.

I take the hint and move towards the door. "OK, I guess I'll see you around tomorrow?"

She holds the door as I stand there waiting for an answer. "Sure."

I sigh and step out, feeling a little hurt as the door quickly closes behind me.

Chapter Ten - ROOK

I lean my body back against the door after I force myself to close it on Ronin's face. It was so difficult to end this night but I'm not ready to get close to anyone, especially a guy like Ronin. He's dangerous, I can tell. He's some kind of supermodel, he runs the girls, whatever that means, and he's hot as fucking hell.

I giggle at my private swooning.

But it's true. My heart is still racing and it's not all because he scares me either. He does scare me though. I'm afraid of just about everything he represents. I mean let's be honest, all the best-looking guys cheat. That's a given. They know they look good, they probably spend all their time at the gym trying to maintain those bodies, and they only want one thing. But they want that one thing from as many girls as they can get, not just one thing from one girl. Because if I could find me a hot guy who only wanted that one thing from just me, I might think about it.

But seriously—Ronin is not that guy. He's practically got himself a harem of models that he claims like a caveman. Hell, even Elise told me to tell the diner I belonged to Ronin.

It's degrading.

And that whole ordering for me thing? I'm still confused about that. Because we both know it started out as a challenge, to see how far I'd let him walk all over me. But then he turned it on me with his logic and made me feel stupid for putting up a fight.

I huff out a breath and walk back to the bedroom and shuffle through my backpack to find my toothbrush. Everything I own is contained in this bag. And it's not much. Two pairs of jeans, besides the ones I'm wearing. And four more t-shirts. I don't even have underwear, because if you can believe this, someone at the shelter pilfered through my stuff and stole it all. They didn't just steal the underwear, that would be sick. They took all my clothes. So I had to get these all from the thrift store down the street from the shelter last week.

I grab what few toiletries I have and pull out a drawer to stash them away.

But the drawer is filled with stuff. Girl stuff. Make-up, lotion, nail polish. All sorts of things I'd love to buy on a regular basis but have had to go without for the past few months.

I sigh with satisfaction and then start to brush my teeth.

Rook, your luck has changed
. This is a huge break. Last night I was holding a knife to my chest, ready to cut the pervert in the cot next to me if he tried to touch me again, and tonight I'm living—
living
—in a rooftop garden apartment on the trendy side of town. Is life weird or what?

It is weird, but I try not to think about it too much because if life can change for the better this fast, then it can change for the worse as well. I remember the money Elise gave me this afternoon and dash back to the bedroom to pull it out from under the mattress. I guess it's overkill to stash money in my own apartment that I live in by myself—this makes me privately squeal—but I can't help it.

Plus, I remind myself that I am making a list of why Ronin is not the guy for me, no matter how fast my heart thumps when he's near. That whole
I'll order for you
thing is cute the first time they do it, maybe. It's not for me, but if I was another girl, it might be cute. But in my mind, that shit is a red flag. Flying high out above his head. It says
I want to control you
.

And I'm not into that at all. Hell, I barely escaped the last boyfriend with my life, there's no way I'm getting involved with another guy who thinks he can tell me what to do.

And Ronin is flirting with the very edge of my boundary in that area.