“I take it back,” he murmured in my ear. “Take it as far as you like. Then, maybe, you’ll see just how much my masculinity is threatened by you.”
“Your masculinity can kiss my ass.” I turned my face into his as we took a simultaneous step forward in the line. “Oh, wait. It pretty much is.”
His cock was slowly hardening against my ass, pushing firmly against his zipper.
“It’ll do more than kiss your ass, sweetheart.”
“Not if I break it off.”
“Are you gonna bite me? Seeing you choke on my cock might be worth the risk,” he rumbled in a low tone, his lips now brushing my earlobe.
The people in front of us in line stepped up to order, and I shrugged myself out of his grip. No doubt, he could have kept me there against him if he really wanted to, but he let me go anyway.
What was with this newfound inability to have a conversation in person without it turning sexual?
He wasn’t deprived, that much was sure. Handsome, rich, and charismatic, there was no doubt in my mind that he had sex virtually on tap. Thirty minutes in a bar would guarantee him company for the night. Yet, here he was, all up in my business with his dirty words all the damn time.
He couldn’t be that hard-up.
Well.
Considering I’d felt his erection plenty of times, he was certainly able to get up and hard, but still.
I placed my order for a BLT with extra cheese and then, on no more than a complete whim, I pulled a Damien.
I ordered for him.
I handed over my credit card before he could protest. I’d ordered him exactly the same as mine, because who didn’t like that? But, still, I could almost feel the annoyance as it radiated off of him. It was almost radioactive as he gripped the edge of the counter, leaning a little too close to me.
He stayed there, perfectly still, seethingly silent until our sandwiches were wrapped and handed to me. I took one in each hand and swept around him, turning toward the door. If he thought he was going to run the rest of this lunch, he had a thought or ten coming his way.
I tucked both sandwiches against me in one arm and opened the door. This time, I didn’t even wait for him to walk through or grab it. I stalked outside without him and turned away from the car.
“Where are you going?”
I ignored his question and kept walking. More than anything, I was giving the man a taste of his own medicine. He’d done nothing but dictate to me since I’d met him, and he hadn’t stopped for a second to actually realize something very important.
I wasn’t the kind of woman you dictated to.
I followed rules well. I could take orders.
Demands were a whole other ball game.
I wove through the few blocks until I reached the small area of grass that was the park I’d spent a lot of my childhood in. And by childhood, I mean teenage years and evenings drinking vodka disguised inside Coca-Cola bottles.
“Oh, cute. A picnic,” Damien muttered when I sat down not far from a flowerbed.
I glared and held out his sandwich. “You’re not the only one who can assume and be a dick about it.”
He sat down next to me and took the wrapped BLT from me. The paper crinkled as he gripped it, and he spared me a glance before he unwrapped it. “Is this how you feel when I picked Barny’s without asking you?”
I said nothing. I simply unwrapped my sandwich and took a small bite out of the end without looking at him. Instead, I gazed out at the children’s playground I’d been in so many times before, where so many of my youngest years had been spent with my parents pushing me on swings and catching me at the bottom of the slide.
He sighed.
I kept up my firm ignorance as the crinkling of his wrapper reached my ears. I didn’t know if he looked at me—I didn’t care to know. I wanted to make my point. Make the point that he couldn’t keep steamrolling over me. It didn’t matter how hard or how far he pushed me, I’d push right back, even if my back was against the wall and my arms were tied behind me.
I was Dahlia Freakin’ Lloyd.
I submitted to nobody.
Sexually or otherwise.
I was, at the very least, an equal to everyone I crossed, because I was a goddamn human being. Very few things could push me off that pedestal of being equal to another person. Damien Fox’s ego was not one of those things.
And damn it, I would take him down a peg or two. Even if it was only so nobody else had to put up with this shit.
I popped the last bite of my lunch into my mouth and crumpled up the wrapper. He was mere inches from me, and neither of us had spoken for at least ten minutes. Strangely, though, neither of us really needed to. My point was made. I didn’t need to say anything else for that, but I did want him to realize something important.