He Wants Her Back: The Billionaire's Leading Lady novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Front Door

I read the word three times.

Then I sat down on the edge of the bed, because my legs stopped holding me.

Bea sat next to me and took my hand.

"She handed it to you," she said. "In front of forty people. She smiled while she did it."

"I know."

"I'm going to kill her."

"Get in line."

Neither of us slept.

At seven, Bea went to the window to open the blinds and stopped.

"Juno. Come look at this."

Two black SUVs were parked at her curb, one at each end of the block.

A man in a dark suit leaned against the nearest one, drinking coffee, watching her front door.

I knew him. He'd stood outside the hospital room.

"Is that for you or for me?" Bea said.

"It's for him."

I pulled on jeans, a gray sweater and sneakers.

I walked out to the curb and knocked on the SUV's window.

The man lowered it.

"Miss Hartigan."

"Take me to him."

He didn't ask where.

Damon's house sat on the cliffs in Malibu, all glass and pale stone above the water.

For three years I had come in through the garage at the bottom of the drive.

The driver turned toward it out of habit.

"No," I said. "The front."

He looked at me in the mirror.

Then he drove up past the garage and stopped at the top of the steps.

I walked up them and rang the bell.

Damon opened the door himself.

He was barefoot, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and charcoal trousers.

He looked at me on his front step.

His expression tightened, unsettled.

"You rang the bell," he said.

"I've never been allowed to."

I walked past him into the house.

The living room was one long wall of glass with the Pacific on the other side.

I turned around in the middle of it.

"Call them off."

"No."

"There are two trucks outside my best friend's house."

"There will be three tonight."

"You don't get to guard what you hid, Damon."

"Someone put a drug in your glass in front of me," he said. "I'm not asking you anymore."

"You never asked me. That's the whole problem."

"Then I'm done pretending I was going to."

He came toward me.

I didn't back up this time.

"Did you know?" I said. "In the hospital. Did you know she wore my face?"

He stopped a foot away.

"I saw it," he said.

"And you held her hand."

"Yes."

"And you told me to go home."

"Yes."

"Why?"

His eyes went over my face.

"Not today," he said. "I'll tell you. Not today."

I shoved him.

Both hands flat on his chest, hard.

He took a step back and let me.

"You don't get not today," I said. "You don't get Thursdays. You don't get to own my building and my sidewalk and my face."

I shoved him again.

This time he caught my wrists.

He didn't pull. He just held them against his chest, so I could feel his heart slamming under my palms.

It was going as hard as mine.

"Then what do I get, Juno?"

I looked up at him.

At the cut on his lower lip where I'd bitten him five nights ago, still healing.

I hated him.

I wanted him so badly my teeth ached.

"This," I said. "And nothing else."

I pulled my wrists free, took his shirt in both fists and dragged his mouth down to mine.

His mouth hit mine and the anger went straight through us.

It was not a kiss.

It was a fight where the only thing either of us wanted to win was more.

I bit his lower lip again, the same place, and tasted blood and heard him groan.

My hands tore his shirt open so the buttons hit the floor.

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