He only gazed back at her, one dark brow raised higher than the other, and she felt herself...quiver.
“Yes,” he said in that voice of his, with that accent she couldn’t quite place. “Sex. But not just any kind of sex, obviously. I like tools. And props. And all kinds of games. It’s a very particular kind of sex that I don’t care if you understand or not. But I prefer, all the same, to do the deciding about who I share that with.”
“I get it,” Rory said, nodding maybe a little too vigorously. As if that would make all the dark, wicked images his words had stirred up dissipate. It didn’t work, but she kept going. “I grew up on Fifty Shades, so...”
The man did not sigh. He did not roll his eyes. Yet somehow he gave the impression of doing both.
Without moving an inch or lifting that navy blue, winter sea gaze of his from her.
“There are normally consequences for lying to me in this room,” he told her. Very calmly. “Consequences I have no doubt you would not wish to pay, for all your posturing.”
“I’m notposturing—”
“What you are is fired.” This time his voice was all steel, and though he didn’t change his volume, it wasn’t quiet. “But before you leave here, never to return, I would like you to give me your mobile.”
Rory blinked. She would do nothing of the kind.
But before she knew she meant to move—or even breathe—she found herself crossing back to the door, her hand outstretched toward him, so caught up in that stare of his she thought she might have leaped off a cliff—
She only caught herself at the last moment, rocking to a halt and frowning at him in a flush of confusion.
“Wait.”
But he reached over and tugged her phone from her grip, managing to do it without touching her at all.
Something that shouldn’t have made her feel so...raw.
“You really can’t go around taking people’s phones,” she protested. “Right out of their hands.”
He tapped a few buttons, deleting the photos she’d taken, and then raised that cool gaze to hers again. “It is such an invasion of privacy, isn’t it? I understand.”
And she felt that rawness inside her turn into something else, too quickly, as if he’d flayed her open with such a mild reproach.
The shame inside her seemed to swallow her whole. It was hot and awful, and she couldn’t seem to feel anything but the press of it.
And the way he looked at her, as if he knew.
“I’m sorry,” she heard herself say, as if from a very great distance.
In a voice that didn’t sound like hers at all.
The man handed her phone back to her in a peremptory way that nearly had herthankinghim. And then he studied her, something about that slow, intense perusal making her fight to keep from shivering.
She wanted to back away from him, but she didn’t.
“I think that’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me so far,” he said. And she had the strangest notion that he approved.
A kind of glow lit her up, washing through all the places she’d felt shame, like a changing of the tide.
She didn’t know what the hellthatwas.
“Look, Mr.—” but she stopped. Because she realized she had no idea what his name was.
His eyebrows rose even higher, and for a dizzying sort of moment she was sure he looked as amused as he did astonished. “Vanderburg. Conrad Vanderburg.”
And it wouldn’t occur to her until much later that he paused after he said that, clearly anticipating that she would recognize his name. She didn’t.
She plowed on. “Okay, Conrad. I think this is a terrible misunderstanding. I should never have come in here and I’ve apologized for that. I probably shouldn’t have taken pictures, either, but really, I was just...doing what I do. I didn’t think about it.”