by Stacy Gail
As she stared in open-mouthed shock, Ivar Fournier wiped a hand at his nose, which came away bloody.
Oh no, his perfect face…
Even with a bloody nose, Ivar Fournier was still the most physically beautiful being Scout had ever had the good fortune to gape at. That made sense, of course. Though he was now a fashion photographer famous for his soul-revealing portraits, mercurial temperament and making or breaking careers, he’d once been one of the highest paid male models in the world. Several inches over six feet with broad shoulders that any world-class swimmer would have envied, Ivar struck an imposing figure. But when it was combined with glacier-blue eyes, golden-hued skin and raven back hair, the term irresistible was hard to avoid.
But somehow, she’d been managing it.
Maybe she’d been able to resist him because he’d been at her like a pesky fly at a picnic, wanting permission to do a photographic collection of House Of Payne’s more famous tattoo designs. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, and she’d love the publicity for the business she had helped Payne build. But there was a problem. To photograph the tats, Ivar needed to know who wore them. Bottom-lining it, he wanted access to the House’s private client list.
The words, “Uh, yeah no,” couldn’t leave her mouth fast enough.
No matter how ridiculously hot the guy was.
When Ivar had first appeared on House Of Payne’s doorstep and refused to budge, Scout acted as she always did when it came to business—she investigated who and what he was. Though her official label at the House was office manager and assistant to Payne, her real job was to detect any trouble for House Of Payne and eliminate it. Sensing trouble was a talent she’d always had, from the time she’d grown up in some of the worst foster homes Chicago had to offer. It was an ability linked to her survival instinct, and she figured that since she’d survived one hell of a lot in her twenty-six years, she never questioned it. When those instincts focused on Ivar Fournier, with his devastating Prince Charming looks and pearly white smile that never reached dead-blank eyes, alarm bells clanged in the worst fucking way.
Yep. No doubt about it. From the top of his stylishly tousled head to the bottom of his Armani shoes, Ivar Fournier screamed trouble with a capital T.
And now he’d popped up out of nowhere to do his impersonation of Good Samaritan and got his beautiful face bloodied. How the hell was she supposed to react to that?
“Are you out of your damn mind? You could have gotten yourself killed.” Oh. So apparently nagging like a shrew was how she was supposed to react.
Good to know.
Again Ivar wiped at his nose. “You are most welcome,” he drawled in that French-accented voice that made her insides all gooey. Then, to her amazement, he held up her phone just as Leo huffed his way over in a half-jog, half-shuffle. “It is both an honor and a pleasure to risk life and limb for such a gracious woman.”
Ugh. As she took the phone from him, she wondered if she could feel any smaller. “I’m sorry, it’s just… you’re bleeding. A phone isn’t worth shedding blood over, even if I am grateful to have it back, and… Oh geez, you’re so totally bleeding.” All at once her stomach executed a wowser of a gymnastic move, and she sucked in a lungful of air to keep it from doing back flips all the way up her throat and out her mouth.
Leo stepped forward, out of breath and sweaty. “You did a good thing there, pal. Come on into the restaurant and we’ll get some ice on that, okay? Just try not to bleed all over the place, though. Not that I’ve got a problem with that, but the Board of Health would have my ass in a sling, so…”
“It’s cool, Leo, I’ve got this.” No one was more surprised than Scout when the words popped out. Both men stared at her, but Leo was the first to find his voice.
“What do you mean, you got this? Do you even know this guy?”
“As a matter of fact, I know Ivar quite well.” Okay, that was a stretch. She knew what she’d dug up on him. He’d been born in Montreal, but had worked most of his adult life in the U.S. She’d managed to find out his mother was Chantal Fournier, once a model but now retired and living in Montreal with her shipping magnate husband, Rupert Rundstrom, who apparently owned—as far as Scout could tell—approximately half the planet. There was no father recorded on Ivar’s birth certificate, but she did know he’d been raised by his maternal grandmother, a totally legit blue-blooded French baroness. Like her daughter before Ivar, the grandmother had managed Ivar’s modeling career until he dropped out to go behind the camera.
At the time, that decision seemed like a huge mistake; as a model he’d been a rising star and had been more in demand than ever. But over the years he’d gained an uncanny reputation for capturing the true soul of his subjects—for better or worse. Now, would-be models flocked to him in the hope of getting that “angelic” touch that had catapulted several careers to the supermodel level.
But there were times when his portraits wound up being downright hideous. He never pulled his punches when this happened, refusing to accept responsibility for the model’s so-called ugliness. He would simply insist that the camera never lied.
With a crappy attitude like that, Scout was baffled why anyone would dare to put themselves in front of his camera. But they did, and they did it in droves, no doubt hoping they’d be the next supermodel to pass the great Ivar’s photographic litmus test.
Leo looked doubtfully from one to the other. “Well, if you’re sure…”
“No worries, Leo.” Dropping her phone into her bag, she dug out a packet of tissues, pulled one out and held it out to Ivar. “Hold that to your nose until I get you to my place, okay?”
He did so, tilting his head back a fraction. Not the best position in the world, but for now it would do. “Your place?”
“I live right across the street.” She curled her arm around his and, with a farewell nod to Leo, led him to the sidewalk and punched the button. “Though, considering a greasy spoon like Pig In A Poke is hardly the kind of place you’d haunt, I suspect you already know that I live around here, so you can drop the innocent act. Your being here is no coincidence.”
“Scout, you are much too cynical.” Those killer eyes slid her way, and she wanted to cuss a blue streak that not even a bloody nose could dampen his raw physical impact. “I assure you, I’m not nearly the threat you seem to think I am.”
In response, her internal alarm system clanged so loudly it was all she could do to stand still. “Uh-huh. Save it for when you’ve stopped bleeding. Oh, and I might as well give you fair warning—your excuse for being here had better be impressive.”
“I’m always impressive.”
Hell, yes, he was. Of all the men she’d come across, Ivar Fournier was just about the most impressive of the lot.
Goddamn it.
With his head tilted back and face throbbing from where the thief had landed a decent kick, Ivar took in the security men at the lobby of Scout’s building. They appeared concerned and addressed her by her nickname rather than the expected and more deferential Ms. Upton. In turn, she greeted them both by name—Darius and Zed—and gave them a solid thumbs-up that settled them down.
That was Scout’s special gift, he had come to realize. She was an impossibly organized and driven woman, and she had an answer for everything. She brimmed with a confidence no human being should have, unless they had an army at her back and a squadron of air support above. Or, like his grandmother, a purebred family tree that declared one’s inherent superiority to everyone else on earth.
Scout Upton didn’t have an army, and she wasn’t a purebred anything. Her accent was hardnosed, blue-collar Chicago. She swore like a sailor, something he liked because it was real, and whatever wealth she possessed she’d earned from her work at House Of Payne.
Or perhaps another way entirely, he thought as she passed a key fob over an elevator scanner. Then he grimaced. The story he’d been told of Scout sleeping her way to the top was getting harder and harder to believe. Mercenary tendencies just
didn’t fit the woman he had come to know. Not that he knew her well, since she was unusually cagey around him. But when he looked into her eyes—really looked—he couldn’t see anything but forthright, straight-up Scout.
Though that might not mean anything. His eyes were good at seeing things no one wanted him to see, but even he could be fooled. The predicament he was in now was proof enough of that.
“So, um… you’re staring.”
Her flatly unvarnished comment made him grin beneath the hand that held the tissue to his nose. No games. That seemed to be the epitome of Scout. “Am I?”
“You know you are.”
“I suppose I do.” He took his time to drink her in as he leaned back against the smoky-mirrored wall. “I was just thinking what amazing security your building has. If I’m not mistaken, this is your own private elevator?”
“Oh, that. Yeah.” She scrunched her tip-tilted nose that had often reminded him of a little kid’s. That scrunched-up expression practically shouted out her embarrassment. “This building has four penthouse suites that have an express elevator opening directly into their respective apartments, and I, uh… I happen to live in one of them.”
“How convenient. And, from the sound of it, expensive. House Of Payne must pay you very well, indeed.”
“Can’t complain.”
When she didn’t offer further explanation—in fact seemed to be quite comfortable to let the silence stretch on with nothing but the hum of the elevator to fill it—he studied her openly. In the short time he’d known her, Scout had had a wide purple streak in her dark hair, then later a shocking crimson. Now it was a uniform sable brown but still pulled back into a smooth French twist, a look that had been all the rage during the Second World War. Rockabilly was Scout’s style, a niche in fashion he’d never paid attention to, but now he wasn’t sure why. With her scarlet Kewpie doll lips and thundercloud-gray eyes enhanced with black winged eyeliner, her retro flair made her seem like a swan among pigeons. Even if she hadn’t already been put on his radar, he still would have noticed her.
“I was wondering if I shouldn’t call the police to report what happened,” Scout said as the elevator doors whispered open to a world of brilliant white and abundant sunshine. “At the very least I’d feel bad if this jerk struck again and really hurt someone.”
“Does a bloodied nose not constitute being hurt?” As he spoke, he looked around the massive, open-air penthouse, with white-washed walls, floor to ceiling windows that had panoramic views of both the city and Lake Michigan. The equally white contemporary furniture in the sunken living room was broken up with vivid pillows in jewel tones and covered in flowery embroidery. The dining room, complete with a long black lacquer table, had obviously been turned into an office that should have looked messy, but didn’t. Despite three monitors, two separate but neat piles of paper, a printer, a jar of green M&M’s and a wireless keyboard cluttering up the space, it was clear there was order to everything there.
Just as it was clear that Scout didn’t do traditional entertaining where a dining table would ever be used for actual dining.
“You serious? You call a dinky little nosebleed damage?” Guiding him to the breakfast bar and pushing him onto a stool shaped like a calla lily, she pulled at the hand that held the tissue to study his face. “Look at that. Not even broken. If your nose had been broken you might have gotten some sympathy. But since I’ve had nosebleeds from getting smacked in the snotbox a time or two in my life, all you get is an icepack and ibuprofen. Stay.”
Snotbox? And what was this stay command, as if he were a flea-bitten cur? Then the rest of her statement sank in and his building irritation vanished. “What do you mean, you have been smacked? As in struck? Hard enough to bleed?” When she didn’t answer, instead offering him an eye-rolling shrug, as if he were an idiot for stating the obvious, his brows came together. “Who did this to you?”
“I dunno.” She pulled a bag of frozen peas from a stainless steel freezer and broke up the contents on the counter. “Can’t remember the names, really. Some foster homes are worse than others, know what I mean?”
“You were in foster care?” He hadn’t known that.
“I didn’t start out in a fancy-shmancy palace in the sky, pal. Life just took some freaky turns and before I knew it, I landed here. Take this.” She’d wrapped a kitchen towel around the bag of peas and pushed it into his hand, then gave him a clean tissue. “Lean forward on the counter and put the cold compress on the bridge of your nose, and press it on either side so it’s all pinched together. Keep it in place for about fifteen minutes, or until I’m done reporting this to the police. If you’re still bleeding half an hour from now, I’m taking you to the ER.”
There it was again, that unruffled confidence that got under his skin and bugged him until he couldn’t sit still. “We shall see.”
“You’ll do it, and you’ll do it without bitching, because you’re a super-smart guy. And what I’m saying is the super-smart thing to do.”
As she began to turn away, his hand snaked out and snagged her wrist. They both stared in surprise at the fingers shackling her. Ivar had no memory of wanting to keep her there, but now that he’d done it he might as well get a few things straight. “You should know something about me.”
She looked at him dubiously. “What do I need to know about you that I don’t already know?”
Now there was an intriguing statement. “I don’t like bossy women.”
“What about bossy men? You okay with them? Because if so, pretend I have a penis and do what I tell you.”
Merde, the things that came out of this woman’s mouth… “Of all the things you have told me to do in the past few minutes, picturing you with a penis is the most impossible. Picturing you as you are, however…” Against his will, his gaze slid down her body, from her peasant-like blouse that showed off a colorful garden of flower tattoos on her chest, assuredly the most bountiful cleavage in all of Chicago, a belt that cinched in her petite waist and emphasized the earthy flare of her hips, and long denim-clad legs that ended with impossibly high red leather heels. Like the rest of her, her curves were pin-up girl popping with a side of hey-sailor sass. No doubt she could tempt even a saint to reach out as if he’d gone blind and her body was covered in Braille. “This I can do. Most easily.”
Her eyes widened even as he watched her pupils dilate, and she took a sudden, too-close-to-the-edge step in retreat. “Fine, be stubborn and do whatever the hell you want. Just take it from someone who knows—if you keep your head tilted back, the blood drips down your throat into your stomach, and eventually you barf it back up in Technicolor. I’d prefer that doesn’t happen while you’re here.”
“But you would be fine with it if I did it elsewhere?” He knew he was needling her; of course he knew it. But he couldn’t help it. He took too much pleasure in the way her storm-colored eyes—those windows to the soul—flared with inner fire whenever she was peeved.
Whenever she dealt with him, Scout was almost always peeved.
“If that’s how you want to take it.” She gave her wrist a jiggle. “Now, if you’d be a sport and let me go, I’ll get some pain meds for you before tackling the police. Sound like a plan?”
For a fleeting moment he considered ignoring her and keeping her as his gently held prisoner. Then, when the insanity of that particular urge hit him, he let her go. “As you wish.”
But it wasn’t what he wished.
Not by a long shot.
Author’s Note
Hi there! Did you know that one of the coolest things about being an author is hearing from readers? Yep, it totally is. Please feel free to drop me a line at [email protected], or follow me on Twitter or Facebook. If you mention that you’ve read House Of Payne, I promise to follow back and say hi! :)
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There’s more lust, lies and love to be
had in the House that Payne built. Look for these titles in the coming weeks and months:
House Of Payne: Scout
House Of Payne: Twist
About the Author
A competitive figure skater from the age of eight, Stacy Gail began writing stories in between events to pass the time. By the age of fourteen, she told her parents she was either going to be a figure skating coach who was also a published romance writer, or a romance writer who was also a skating pro. Now with a day job of playing on the ice with her students, and writing everything from steampunk to cyberpunk, contemporary to paranormal at night, both dreams have come true.
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