“I’m fine.” She struggled for a lighter tone. “I hope you’re having a good trip. It’s just been a stressful day. You don’t need to call me every day, you know.” Though I count the minutes between the times I hear your voice.

“You’re still coming this weekend.”

“I said I was. But there are some things that have come in, a new tea shipment, and—”

“Marguerite, don’t make me have this conversation with you again.”

“About dungeons and drawbridges, white knights who think they can make the world a better place?” Her attempt at control exploded. Goaded by his tone, the darkness surged up in her. “I’m not a damsel in distress and I don’t appreciate being treated like one. In case you, my staff and the whole fucking world hadn’t noticed—” As she raised her voice, Tyler could almost see Chloe and Gen shrinking into the recesses of the kitchen. “I don’t need to be babied. I’ve taken care of myself for a long time.”

“You need all the babying you can get, angel. And something’s bothering you. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Go to hell.” She slammed down the phone.

He snapped his cell phone closed, held it in his hand for several moments, thinking.

He turned as Michael, carrying an open longneck, approached him on the outside balcony. “Megan’s completely sold on the project now.” He grinned, tapping Tyler’s beer sitting on the railing. As he took a swig, he studied Tyler’s expression. “Okay, your reaction was supposed to be jubilation, not murderous fury. Have I missed something?”

“I go home tonight,” Tyler said grimly. “I’ve had something come up.”

Nobody was going to run her life but her. It was that simple. If she lost the reins, she’d never get them back. The horses of Hades would simply break free and drag her over the edge of the chariot, scrape every protective layer off her until she was nothing but an incoherent chaos of vulnerable internal organs and exposed nerve endings. She’d even thought about going to The Zone last night, as she’d always done before when the fear and anxiety, the darkness swept in. Find someone to help her balance. Pick a submissive, as usual one that she’d never touched, that would never touch her, even as she found the secret to his soul and used it to retrieve her own from perilous waters.

But then she remembered the last two times she’d been there and didn’t know if she would be allowed. She couldn’t face the humiliation of being turned away at the door.

Not to mention, her traitorous body wanted Tyler. Not just her body, but her mind, her heart, her soul. She could only calm the scream of her body and even that was a temporary, empty fix that did not assuage the yearning within her.

Chloe and Gen kept a low profile, their tones quiet in the kitchen area as they performed the morning routine. She picked up the napkins and moved out to the main floor. She was going to shape them into lotus flowers today, practice some of the origami tricks she’d recently seen in her tea industry magazine, a nice touch her clients would appreciate.

The moment she stepped onto the floor, before she saw him, she knew he was there.

He sat at his preferred table, the one he’d chosen when he responded to her call for a meeting a handful of weeks ago. A meeting she never should have initiated.

But, oh, he looked so good sitting there. He was dressed more casually than she’d ever seen him in Tea Leaves. Well-fitted jeans, dark T-shirt, a day’s worth of stubble. In order to be in her tearoom when she’d talked to him on the phone less than ten hours before, he must have taken a red eye home. He looked dangerous, all the more because he didn’t move when he saw her, just pinned her with that tiger’s gaze.

She tightened her chin and her resolve. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

“I was told to go to hell. My connecting flight was delayed so I thought I’d drop in.” She raised a brow. Stopping at station four, she laid out the stack of napkins. She took up one by the two corners and did the first fold, though it took all her concentration to keep her hands from shaking. He had to get out of here. Didn’t he know she couldn’t do this, couldn’t want anyone this much? She knew just how his hands would feel on her, his mouth.

“You’ve never paid any attention to anything I’ve told you to do before. Why would you start now?”

He stayed quiet. He was probably trying to figure out how to manipulate this situation, get her to be as absurd as he always seemed to make her. Insane was a better word than absurd. But not this time. This was her territory, her fortress, where she could best keep the nightmares at bay, and she was not leaving it again. Resentfully, she wished fairy tales were true, specifically the one about unwary knights being turned into toads when they ventured uninvited into a sorceress’s palace.

She was messing up the design. Picking it back up, she shook it out and started over again. Her fingers kept twitching involuntarily, more and more as the silence grew.

Or a herd of swine. She’d keep him as a pet and let him wallow in a mud puddle in her private garden. Feed him scraps.

Even as she dwelled with satisfaction on the image, her radar picked up on a different quality to the quiet. A dangerous shift. She glanced up. His gaze had settled on her throat, the decorative scarf she wore around it, tucked into the neckline of the sleeveless button-down blouse she wore loose over the pleated broomstick skirt. She quickly turned away, but spun around as she heard his chair scrape back. In a flash, she moved to put a table between them. “Stop,” she warned, gesturing with the napkin.

Thinking better of it, she put it down to keep both hands free.

She resisted the urge to put her hand over the scarf, over whatever part of her neck might be exposed. Last night, she’d done it in angry defiance and fear, but now, looking at his face, she thought she’d lost her mind. Proving that even when he wasn’t around, he was making her do insane things. A century or two of advances in women’s rights meant very little to a man like Tyler, who felt it was his job to protect a woman and give her hell when she didn’t follow his orders to do so.

“I told you what would happen if you did that again.”

“Chloe and Gen are here.” It was a desperate statement and she cursed herself for making it, for showing him that he’d unnerved her.

“You think that will protect you? You take one step back from me, I’ll throw that table through the wall and haul you up the stairs over my shoulder. Or you can lead me up there now and we’ll have this discussion in your room. Your choice.”

“I don’t owe you a conver—”

His hand caught the edge of the table and she quickly sat on it. “Gen,” she called out, pulling back her lip in a snarl at him. “I’m going upstairs a moment. Will you watch over things?”

“Sure,” came the reply from the kitchen. “Take as long as you need.” A chuckle wafted out from Chloe, indicating they’d seen who their first customer of the day was, but Marguerite wasn’t seeing the humor of the situation. Not faced with a man of Tyler’s imposing stature who was obviously, genuinely furious with her. He made a gesture, a clear command for her to precede him up the stairs. She didn’t have to do so.

She could scream her lungs out, even stand in cold defiance and call his bluff…except she knew it wasn’t a bluff. She was trembling at the look in his eyes. And what was more terrifying to her was that all of her reaction was not fear. Any more than all of his was anger.

Chloe peered out, her smile vanishing as she looked between the two of them.

“Everything all right?”

“Fine.” Marguerite forced the words past her lips. Tyler moved. One step, two, to come around the table and take her arm. He brought her to her feet with a firm lift, drawing her hips off the table. Marguerite nodded to Chloe with a reassurance she did not feel as he guided her up the narrow staircase, down the hallway toward her room, away from the safety of an audience.

“Are you finished being overbearing and obnoxious?” She said it between gritted teeth because if she loosened her jaw she was sure they would chatter with nerves, the way her arm was vibrating under his touch.

“Is there anything you do that isn’t designed to take you a step closer to the other side?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No? The rituals, the ceremonies you surround yourself with. The way you cut yourself off from everything and everyone, only allowing us so close. You’re a ghost.

You act like you died at fourteen and you’ve been conducting the damn funeral for your whole life, figuring out the most likely way to get yourself in the coffin in just the right way. So what is this?” In the privacy of her room, he let her go, gestured at her throat with an accusing finger. “A hope that one day something will go wrong so you can be a corpse stinking up your bedroom with your post-mortem bowel release?” She drew herself up. “I won’t have this discussion. You’ve no right to make demands on this part of my life.”

She’d always thought great levels of anger were like conflagrations. With Tyler, it was an arctic wasteland that frosted his gaze, living up to his surname and making her realize instantly she’d just said the worst thing possible.

“I’m in all parts of your life. If you’re determined to be in that coffin, you’re going to have to make it a bigger size as part of your ‘preparations’.”

He closed the bedroom door with a snap. “I made a promise never to strike you with anything other than my hand. I’m going to break that promise, because you broke one to me.”

“I never told you I wouldn’t do it again. I didn’t promise.” She backed away. “You don’t own me, Tyler. I’m not a child.”

“No, you’re not. But you know one of the reasons a child tests her parents, asks for punishment by being bad? Because it tells her that someone loves her enough to keep her safe. I’m not your father or your brother, but I’m your lover. You didn’t protect your neck under the belt so the strap would mark you. So you’d have to wear this.” He lashed out with a long arm and flicked the edge of the pale blue print scarf she’d worn, making her jump and despise her cowardice more. “You did it to test me in exactly this way.”