The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(14)

“Fuck off, Miller.”

“Elevator’s behind you if you’d rather not bask in my presence.”

“I don’t want to bask in your presence, but until my grandmother is convinced this is a terrible idea and lets us all go back to our real lives, I don’t appear to have many options.”

He sips his coffee.

It doesn’t escape my attention that I haven’t been invited inside, beyond the ridiculously adorable red door to wherever his magical coffeepot is. Nor has he offered me a cup. And I swear I detect a hint of vanilla lingering in the air too.

I lift the Gigi brow.

He snorts into his cup, coughs like he’s choking on his coffee, and sets the mug aside to wipe his beard. “Does that look actually work for you?”

“Let’s get to the point, Mr. Miller. You want us to leave. I want us to leave. I’ve considered your point that we’re free to leave without requiring that you allow us to return the school building in exchange for a refund, and I agree to your terms. However, my grandmother does not. She needs extra convincing.”

He sips his coffee again.

He also continues to neglect to offer me a mug of it.

I order myself to keep my coffee lust in check, but it smells so damn good, and I haven’t had a decent cup in two days, and I don’t think I’m succeeding.

I want his coffee.

I covet his coffee.

I would drink it straight out of the pot right now. Hell, I’d drink it out of a hollow log at this point.

“Ask you a question?” he says in that soft drawl, snapping my attention back from my desperation for a decent cup of joe.

“We are negotiating, Mr. Miller. I expect questions.”

“Why don’t you just pack up your fancy matching luggage and haul your curvy ass back to New York without your grandmother?”

Forget the Chanel skirt. I should’ve worn actual plated armor. “My grandmother sits on the board of directors for Remington Lightly, where I’m the executive assistant director for the vice president of production for the paper-goods division, and where I intend to one day run the whole damn company, same as my great-grandfather did before me. She’s convinced the board and the CEO that I need a year of administrative leave in order to continue my career advancement properly. In other words, I don’t currently have a job to go back to.”

“So quit and find a different job.”

“I don’t want a different job.”

“Because you couldn’t be a low-level manager with a big fancy title just because of your name at another job?”

I square my shoulders.

He smirks behind his coffee mug—or so I assume, given the way his beard is twitching—and I realize he’s baiting me.

The man doesn’t want to help me convince my grandmother this is a terrible idea.

He wants to pick us off one by one. “Do you enjoy being disagreeable, Mr. Miller, or do you honestly think so much of yourself that you believe you, by yourself, can take on Estelle Lightly and convince her to leave after you’ve gotten rid of the rest of us?”

He tilts his head. “Yes.”

Wonderful. No cell signal. Bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Six of his goats will probably take up residence in the school that Gigi is insisting we’ll be cleaning ourselves, and the only person in this godforsaken town who might be able to help me is an uncooperative royal ass.

“Then maybe I’ll decide I want to stay.”

He chuckles, and a shiver dashes across my skin, making my breasts tighten and something catch in my throat.

How can a man so irritating also be so manly?

I don’t like beefcakes. I prefer my men slender, blond, and academic. We look right together.

Yet here I am, my subconscious wondering what it would be like to have Teague Miller at my mercy in the bedroom if that’s where our negotiations need to go next.

Less than twenty-four hours after I first set foot in this town, it’s breaking me.

I don’t like breaking. “Mr. Miller, you are aware that with two phone calls, I could have half the paparazzi in New York crawling through your little town and digging up dirt on each and every one of your friends here, aren’t you?”

His beard and sunglasses leave me at a distinct disadvantage for reading his reaction to my threat, but his biceps and pecs tighten.

And that makes my thighs clench.

Dammit.

I remind myself I get turned on by a good fight and not by muscles, but I don’t think I believe myself.

He takes another sip. “If you really think they’d want to cover Willie Wayne’s broken garden fence and the way my goats will be spending all day eating his lettuce shoots, or Ridhi’s fight with Deer Drop Floyd over him stealing her family’s coconut-pudding recipe, then be my guest. Call away. If you can find cell service to make that call, that is. Got a notion they’d be far more interested in you falling into more lakes, though. And probably digging into how your sister’s handling motel living and what your brother’s doing without easy access to weed and groupies. Love your family that much, do you? Or is it the trust fund you like?”

So he’s doing his homework. This could be good or bad. “I make my own money, Mr. Miller.”

“In a job at the family company. Yep. Self-made woman, all right.”

“Some of us have a heritage we’re proud of and working hard to live up to, and for the record, we don’t control enough of the company for things to just be handed to me. Do you want us gone or not?”