On first glance, he saw a gorgeous redhead in a knockout green dress saunter into the room.

On second glance, he saw Emma.

Emma.

She’d come, just like she’d said she would. He’d figured it would be one of those empty threats, though any prospect of seeing her outside a work setting could hardly be considered a threat. Damien had been looking forward to it.

He glanced across the room, where her brother sat at one of the tables, grim-faced, already bleeding chips, and in danger of busting out. Emma homed in on him right away. Damien watched the shift on her face, the way her mouth set in a thin slash. And he watched as she surveyed the rest of the room, her gaze finally alighting on him.

He lifted his tumbler of scotch in her direction in a grim salute. Her chin immediately jutted up, the obstinate little maneuver that always made him think of branding the pale column of her throat with his mouth. Encircling it with his hand as he brought his lips lower, teasing at the plunging neckline of that dress.

Gone was her usual conservative attire. No glasses hid her wide, assessing eyes tonight. Her red hair was artfully arranged around her slim white shoulders, no pencil holding it up in place while another pencil rested behind one or both ears. Funnily enough, even with no less than two spares on her, she was always hunting for a pencil whenever he was in her office. He never called attention to the fact. He liked it when he flustered her.

The very first time they met for her job interview, he’d known almost from the moment she walked in the room that she was the one. They hadn’t spoken much beyond a standard question-and-answer session, but it had been her professionalism, her guileless wit, the way her cheeks turned rosy—and she couldn’t quite always meet his stare. He was well-versed in reading people, and he’d known her reluctance to look him in the eyes wasn’t shiftiness. It was pure, unawakened submission, and he’d been hard before she left the room. Aside from his immediate attraction to her, this was a woman who, as his employee, wouldn’t cheat him or lie to him. That was really all he required of someone handling the club’s accounts. Well, that and a strong affinity for numbers, which her résumé, degree, and transcripts had proven before he ever set eyes on her. As time had passed, he’d come to value her contribution to his workplace more than her beauty, and relegated her in his mind to hands-off status.

Right now, all he could think about was putting hands on.

Emma moved then, taking long, somewhat uncertain strides toward him, and Damien got his first real look at what that dress and those shoes did to her legs. Lengthened them, shaped them. Made him imagine those slim ankles locked around his hips. The image was no less tantalizing for its impossibility; in fact, it was more so. But while her attire screamed “siren,” her expression looked much as it had this morning: like she wanted to take his head off.

“How long has he been here?” she murmured as she approached.

“Drink?” he asked, gesturing to the array of liquor bottles behind the bar at his elbow.

“Damien, don’t bullshit me. How long?”

“Two hours.”

“How bad is it?” No sooner had she asked than a slam from the table across the room signaled her brother busting. Emma’s head jerked in that direction. Her smooth, pale shoulders rose as she inhaled, deflated as she sighed. He cataloged every move, every emotion that crossed her face. The desolation there was fascinating to watch.

“Why?” he asked, walking behind the bar to fix her a fucking drink himself. She was going to need it.

Her wary eyes followed him. “Why what?”

“Why do you let him do this to you?” A shot of Cuervo ought to fix her up. He poured it and slid it across the bar to her. Without hesitation, she picked it up and threw it back, wincing at the burn as she slammed the shot glass back on the table. “I told you,” she said, voice newly husky from the tequila. “My family.”

“Cut him off.”

“We can’t do that. He’s my brother.”

Damien put both hands on the bar and watched said brother get up from the table and pace a circle, his fingers laced behind his head. Everything about him screamed desperation, and when the prey showed fear, the predators closed in. He’d seen it countless times. The man was a swirling vortex who would suck down anyone and anything near him because he didn’t know how to hide his emotions and he didn’t know when to quit.

Damien straightened and shifted his gaze back to Emma’s distress. “Go let him see you,” he told her.

“If he doesn’t care . . .” she began, fingertips going to her lips as she stared at her sibling.

“Then you’ll know. Emma.” He said her name to get her attention, and when she turned her dampening eyes back to him, he felt ice cracking around his heart. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

“Don’t say that. You’ve never—” Shaking her head, she broke off and stalked away. This is what devotion did to people. Damien sighed and tossed a towel into the bin under the bar. Who the hell did deserve someone like her? Across the room, he saw when brother and sister connected, when Emma tried to get through to him. Tried to get him to leave. He also saw when the sandy-haired man shook his head obstinately and jerked his arm from her grasp, walking away.

Motherfucker ought to have his ass kicked in more ways than one, leaving her standing alone in the middle of the room like that. Damien was around the bar and striding toward the jackass almost before he knew it, conscious of Emma’s alarmed expression as he reached him and grabbed his arm. “Hey.”

Obviously expecting his sister had put her hands on him again, he whirled around with fury in his eyes, but it extinguished in one heartbeat upon seeing who had hold of him.

“You and me,” Damien challenged him. “I know you’re busted. I don’t care. I’m willing to call us even, give it all back.”

Hope dawned in the asshole’s eyes, but it died a screaming death when Damien went on. “But first you have to win. What’s your name again?”

The man’s jaw worked soundlessly for a moment. “Benjamin.”

Emma approached with a clatter of high heels, looking back and forth between them in horror. Conversations died; the plink of chips and shuffling of cards came to a halt all around them.

“Benjamin. If you manage to knock me out, I want you to cash out, get the fuck out of my building, and never come back. Stop tormenting your sister.”

Emma asked the question that was all over Benjamin’s face, her eyes wide and stricken. “What if he loses? Damien, he can’t afford to go in any deeper—”

“Shut up, Emma,” Benjamin snapped, and Damien’s fist clenched, ready to knock him the fuck out for that alone.

“I think she makes a valid point,” he said instead. Control. “You can hardly afford to go further in the red, can you?” He rather enjoyed watching Ben seethe at that. “So, yes. If you lose . . .”

Emma looked as if her entire world balanced on the edge of a knife. She was staring up at him in fear and supplication, as unable as her brother to hide the churning emotion behind her hazel eyes. He could see the rapid fluttering of her pulse at her throat, the fine tremor of the lean muscles under her translucent skin. He’d never had anyone look at him that way before, as if her entire life depended on his next words. And maybe it did. After all her pious preaching about devotion to family, all her insistence that some people were willing to give up everything for others, the thought of putting her to the test was one he savored. How devoted are you, Emma?

The idea, when it hatched, slithered from its shell in his mind, dark and slimy but irresistible. His best ideas usually made him feel like a dirty sonofabitch; that’s how he knew they were good ones. Suddenly nothing seemed impossible anymore. That sweet pink mouth could be his for the taking.

And she would know what she came here to find out: just how much Benjamin cared about her, because any doting brother in his right mind would punch Damien out for the mere suggestion of what he was thinking.

“If you lose,” he began in a low voice, still looking at Emma, though he addressed her brother, “You can still have your money. I don’t need it. But you only get it at the end of thirty days. And for those thirty days . . . I get your sister.”

* * *

“You fucking asshole!” Emma shouted at Ben, certain she could be heard all over the building despite the booming bass downstairs and the clamor in the poker room. After his preposterous offer, Damien had given them the use of his office to have it out. Because Ben hadn’t fucking refused right away. What the hell was wrong with him?

“Emma, come on. You like the guy anyway. Why else did you show up here tonight dressed like that?”

“Liz dressed me,” she grumbled, tugging self-consciously at the hem of her dress. “And I don’t like him. Not like that.” It sounded feeble even to her own ears.

“He obviously likes you.” Ben actually began to laugh. “Who woulda thought?”

“Oh, shut up!” She was ready to hurl the first thing she could get her hands on at him. Stab him with one of Damien’s five-hundred-dollar pens or something. These men were horrible, horrible people, playing with others’ lives like fucking pawns. She’d kicked off her shoes and was pacing beside the couch she’d slept on last night while Ben actually perched himself in Damien’s executive chair and spun in lazy circles like a five-year-old.

“I don’t see the big deal,” he said. “He said thirty days. He won’t make it that long, Em. He’ll ship your nagging ass back home long before then. I give it three to five, tops.”

“This is terrible and depraved and—”

“And it’ll save my ass.” Ben straightened the chair and stared at her head on. “Either way it goes. Even if I lose, all he wants is you.”

“All he wants? Did you actually just say to me ‘All he wants is me’? Did you?”

“Calm down. Would it be so bad? What is he, a multimillionaire? You’d probably get a month off work and who knows where he might take you or what you might get to do.”

“I thought you hated him. And now you’re totally fine shipping your sister off with him?”

“You said you know him. Is he a bad guy? Would he mistreat you?”

No, she thought. Nothing like that. She didn’t think. But . . . “It’s the principle, Ben. How could I live with myself after this?”

Ben scoffed. “You poor thing. Give me the chance to jet off with a beautiful millionaire and see if I can live with it.”

“That’s you.”

He shrugged. “I promise you, that’s any man. But it could be you. Living the high life. No one has to know but us. I don’t think anyone heard him. And hey, what the hell is this? We’re talking like I have no chance. I can win this thing, you know.”

She didn’t have much hope of that. If they agreed to these stakes, the deal was as good as done. Benjamin would never beat Damien. Not in this life. But she didn’t need to let on she felt that way. “Ohhhh, you’d better win, Ben. No phoning it in because you think you’re off the hook. It’s my ass on the line right now and you’d better play hard for it.”

He leaned forward earnestly. “I will, Em. I guarantee victory. I can do this.”

“Right.”

“Are you agreeing?”

It felt like teetering on the edge of the world. Fall to one side . . . nothing changed. They would continue in their reality. Not a good one, but reality all the same. Fall to the other . . .

Who the hell knew what lurked in those depths. But her brother would be off the hook.

Emma perched on the edge of her boss’s couch. The man who wanted her. For whatever reason. For thirty days. His decor surrounded her, his art, his life. She did like him. She respected him. But what did she really know about him? What would she know at the end of a month?

“I can’t do this, Ben,” she said softly, even though she was closer now than she’d been since Damien made his indecent proposal. Sometimes she wished she could be like her brother. She wished she could not care.

“Maybe he’ll give us more time to think about it,” Ben said, a note of desperation creeping into his voice. Before, when he’d asked if she was agreeing, he’d sounded positively excited.

“It sounds like we don’t need to think about anything. Only I do.” Emma shot daggers across the room at him with her eyes. “You came in here tonight guaranteeing victory, you realize. You busted. I can’t trust anything you say. I can’t trust you not to get your money back, Benjamin, and go to another room and play it all. You’ll end up right back in this shape. No. I get the money. And you’ll tell me where to take it to get you out of debt. And believe me when I say that I will never, ever, ever bail you out of anything ever again. Ever.”

“That’s enough ever’s.”

“No, it isn’t. I want you up to your ass in ever’s. You leave me alone, you leave Mom and Dad alone. You’re on your own after this, Ben, or I will tell them what I’ve done for you, what you were willing for me to do for you.”

He didn’t hear a word. “So you’re agreeing?”

Emma got to her feet. “I want to talk to Damien. Alone.”

Benjamin practically hurled himself out of the chair in his haste to go get him. Emma resumed her feverish pacing, her body thrumming with a strange energy. Almost . . . almost elation, but that made no sense, did it? She pressed the tip of her thumb between her lips, gnawing the already bitten nail, and started when the door opened and Damien walked in, closing it behind him.

All the headway Ben had made nearly vanished in an instant at the man’s imposing appearance. She didn’t know what it was about him, could never quite put her finger on it. He wasn’t a big guy. Tall, but lean. He was extraordinarily handsome. But that beauty held a cold ruthlessness at its core, an impenetrable, frostbitten darkness. She wondered if anyone would ever chisel through it to any sort of warmth underneath. Did it even exist?

He strolled over to his desk as if it were any other day, crossed his arms, and leaned back against it, watching her expectantly.

Emma drew herself up and faced that cold darkness with all the courage she could muster. “One week,” she said.

“Thirty days.”

“Two weeks.”

“Thirty days.” He said it almost before she got the words out of her mouth. Exasperated, she figured she had nothing to lose.

“Three weeks! Three whole weeks, Damien. Twenty-one days. That’s plenty of time.”

He stared impassively at her for a moment. Just when she thought he might concede . . . “Thirty days.”

Emma threw up her hands. “Why so long?”

“I like nice round numbers.” Casually crossing his ankles, he gave a shrug. “Two weeks isn’t long enough but I leave for Vegas around the fifteenth for a tournament. Assuming we begin on the first of next month”—only a week away! her mind supplied as he glanced back at a calendar—“I figured we’d make a vacation of it.”

A tournament. Another bracelet, another few million dollars. God. “What about my job?”

“You always have a job here. You should know that.”

“What if . . . what if I can’t do it?”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “Why couldn’t you?”

“If we . . . if you and I . . .”

“If we fuck?” The crassness of it knocked the breath out of her for a second, the hairs bristling on her nape. It wasn’t the word itself—hell, they said it all the time around here—but never with we directly in front of it. The idea burned through her with startling intensity. “You wouldn’t be the first,” he said.

Oh. Well. Goddamn if that wasn’t reassuring. Not for the first time, she wondered how many times he’d nailed Stacia, probably on the very couch where she’d slept. Ew.

“I’m assuming, however, I would be the first to spend an entire month with you exclusively?”

“That’s true, but of little consequence. We’re both adults. I won’t push you into this; it’s entirely up to you. But the offer is what it is. Thirty days, or he walks out of here still flat on his ass.”

Cold. Cold. Cold.

God. He might be a psychopath. “What, um, would you require of me?”

“Require?”

“That we fuck?”

The way she flipped the word back at him seemed to please him. He grinned his wolfish grin. “Nothing that you don’t agree to.”

“What if I don’t agree to any of it? Sex, I mean.”

“Then you don’t agree, but we have no deal.”

“So you’re doing this to get laid.”

“If you think this is what I have to do to get pussy, you’re sadly mistaken.” There he went again, throwing out words that shocked her system. But she refused to be shaken. She tipped her chin up.

“It’s what you have to do to get mine.”

That cold darkness flooded his expression again, replacing the smile of moments ago. But he cocked a mocking eyebrow at her, and she knew he saw right through her. Yeah, so he could probably have her six ways to Sunday on his desk right now, if he made the move. But he didn’t have to know that. She met his gaze as defiantly as she knew how.

People weren’t her thing. People were weird and unpredictable. Numbers were her thing; they always made sense, and if they didn’t, she’d made a mistake somewhere. Negotiating with Damien Larson made her feel dizzy and confused.

“Just don’t hurt me,” she blurted, and for maybe the first time since she’d met him, she thought she saw a fine crack in his veneer. He uncrossed his arms and braced his hands against the edge of his desk, knuckles whitening with his grip.

“One thing I can promise you with absolute certainty, Emma, is that I would never hurt you.” But then his heated dark gaze traveled the length of her body, from her bare feet to the tousle of her red hair. All her lady bits were covered but, somehow, he still made her want to cover herself. “Unless you give me permission to.”

Why would I ever do that? she wondered, ignoring the uncomfortable emptiness between her legs that had begun to bloom with that look. The look that made her want to leave this dress an emerald puddle at her feet and climb him right here.

But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She might give him thirty days’ free rein of her body, but her body was the only part of herself she was willing to give. Not her heart. Not her mind. If she could help it, not even her pleasure. “No one can ever know,” she warned him.

“Done, on my part. Who you tell is up to you.”

Of course he wouldn’t give a shit who she told. He had no shame. These fucking men. “Would I still come to work?” Or are you going to keep me chained up in your bedroom? And why did that make her a little hotter than she was already?

“If you wish.”

“So . . . I don’t have to?”

“For all I care, you can go out with your friends and shop all day. But the nights are mine.”

She chose to ignore the additional shivers that skittered down her spine. She couldn’t take much more of this. “How will we explain if I’m gone for a month?”

“We don’t have to explain anything. You’re on leave, but you’ll be back. End of story.”

“Okay,” she said slowly, her mind running a thousand miles per hour. What had she left out? There were probably so many things, because she sucked at this. At the core of it all, though, was one burning question. “Why, Damien? Why me?”

A muscle flexed in his well-defined jaw. “Maybe you have something to teach me about devotion.”

“You mean this is some sort of experiment you’re putting me through? A test to see how far I’ll go? Don’t you have better things to do with a month?”

He smirked, pushing off his desk and striding toward the door with that gliding gait of his. “No, not really.” Reaching it, he opened it and looked at her. “Do you agree?”

Moment of truth. She would’ve felt better if he’d had more assurances, if he’d told her everything would be okay, if he’d touched her . . . something. But except for that one tiny crack in his freakishly controlled façade earlier, he had showed her nothing.

He was going to make her say it. Now or never.

She thought of her mom and dad, working their fingers to the bone well into their retirement years. Their security was worth everything in the world. This wasn’t for Ben at all; it was for them. In fact, if she could take Ben’s money at the end of this and simply hand it over to them . . .

“I already told Ben this, but either way it goes, the money comes to me. Only me. I don’t trust him to do what he needs to do.”

Damien gave her a single, solemn nod. “Good. I would prefer it that way.”

His earlier question still hung heavily in the air as he looked at her, awaiting her reply. Emma shut her eyes to draw up the courage to force it past her lips. It felt rather like signing over her soul. “Yes. I agree.”

“Then let’s go do this.”

Yes, let’s. Let’s go seal my fate. When she maintained her frozen spot by the couch instead of following him, though, he turned to look at her again. “Aw, Emma. No confidence in your brother’s abilities?”

She drew herself up. “I hope he whips your ass.”

That only made him laugh, which was even scarier than his smile.