Just as the tension between us was making me sweat, an assistant spoke hesitantly beside us and shattered the spell.
“What?” Jae snapped with tightly controlled menace. He didn’t move his eyes from me.
“The changing room is ready for your guest. If she could start picking out some things she likes.”
Jae turned toward her, and I sagged in the aftermath of his attention. The man was intense.
“Go ahead, Kat,” he said, presumably after verbally decapitating the poor assistant who’d interrupted us.
I shuffled away in my sliders along the first line of clothes. Reaching out and trailing my hand down some of the garments, I marveled at the textures and fine quality of the materials. There was everything from glittering ballgowns to cashmere sweater dresses and leather pants. I pulled a few things out and turned to look for Jae but didn’t spot him.
A woman appeared beside me, wheeling a clothing rail.“Put the stuff you want to try on here,” she said, looking at me curiously. I got it. I looked weird as hell. “Your name is Kat?” she asked bluntly, and a sudden discomfort blossomed in my belly.
I turned to stare at her.
“Kat Ivanov,” she continued.
Icy-cold nerves blossomed, spreading tendrils of anxiety through me.I tried to channel my inner Jae and looked imperiously bored. “Who’s asking?”
The assistant grinned. “Someone’s looking for you.”
“Too bad I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said as a large hand settled in the small of my back.
“Is she bothering you?” Jae asked, giving the assistant the kind of look smarter women would have cried over.
“No, why would she be? She got me confused with someone else,” I murmured, moving down the line of clothes and feeling like a million eyes were on me. The ones that burned the hottest were Jae’s. He had questions, and I didn’t know how to avoid them.
I pulled a leather catsuit out of the clothes rack and held it up to him. “How about this? Would Dami approve of this?”
Jae’s eyes turned to the garment, over the belts and Madonna-style studded cones at the bust, and back to me. Then he laughed. Everyone in the store froze, from his lethal-looking security at the door to the assistants.
CHAPTER6
Jae Han
Isat in the plush seating area of the boutique, waiting for Kat to leave the changing room again. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Waiting around to watch a stranger shop wasn’t my thing. I didn’t take dates shopping. Not even women I’d been seeing regularly for years. Maybe I was having an early mid-life crisis.
I tapped out a message on my phone, keeping up to date with a family lawyer currently trying to get a few of my men out of jail and another official trying to push through the paperwork for port entry.
Every single thing I did lately was boring. Since my eldest sister had married Vincenzo Luciano, business was booming. The strategic alliance between the Songs and Lucianos was a genius move, not to mention the family of brothers had become the closest thing I had to friends lately. Despite profit being at an all-time high, I felt nothing. Life had become a blood-splattered trudge through grayness. Until her.
Kat wasn’t boring. She didn’t seem capable of something so ordinary. In my world of muted monotones and darkness, she was a vivid slash of color. She wasn’t sunshine. The circumstances we’d met in would have broken her if she had been, but she was alive like no one else I’d ever met. She took up all the air in every room she was in, and I craved to be by her side as soon as I saw her. I wanted her teasing words. I wanted to shield her petite body. I wanted to be the focus of her darkly amused eyes.
I wanted her.
It was surprising to realize after experiencing apathy and boredom toward the opposite sex for so long. I’d been hit on by supermodels and beauty queens, yet I wanted a woman who had barely resembled a human only a day ago.
She pulled back the curtain with a dramatic flourish and strutted out. There was no false modesty or shyness from this woman.
“What do you think?” she asked, twirling in front of me.
Fuck. She was wearing a skin-tight, blood-red bandage dress that revealed every curve and hollow of her body.
“No,” I muttered and looked back at my phone. My body was already hard as hell at the idea of her changing only a few steps away, but now, my hard-on threatened to punch through my pants.
Kat crossed her arms and tapped her foot.“No? Why not?”
“Too short,” I said in a bored tone that was entirely affected. Too right, it was too fucking short. I didn’t want anyone but me to see the soft skin of her upper thighs.