Resisting the Tycoon's Seduction Page 0,1

the pink lace, just trying to get it away from her chest area. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hide her curiosity and held the pink lace up so she could understand his last statement. When she realized that there was a dangly crystal that would sparkle right between her breasts, she couldn’t help the pink that suffused her cheeks and neck once again. “Leave me alone!” she growled.

With an urgency she hadn’t ever felt before, she stepped around the man. Stomping up to the cashier, she dumped all of her items onto the counter, surprising the sophisticated cashier.

Marissa wanted to turn around and glare at the man, but she didn’t want him to see her flushed face or the way her body seemed to be tingling because she knew with absolute certainty that he was still watching her. Was he laughing at her?

She almost jumped a foot in the air when a strong, dark hand dropped a pink, lace thong onto the pile. “She’ll need that as well,” his deep voice said. “Put it all on my account.”

Marissa stared at the lace, horrified that she’d kept the pink bra he’d been examining her in. With her mouth hanging open in horror, she tried very hard to come up with a scathing retort, something to bring the man down a peg. Or ten!

Unfortunately, by the time she’d turned around, he wasn’t anywhere in the store. She walked to the front, determined to tell him off, but he wasn’t even in the hallway. Where had a man of his size disappeared to so quickly?

“Here you go, Ms. Berutelli,” the cashier stated softly.

Marissa’s head snapped around and saw the huge bag, the top covered in silver tissue paper. With a groan, she stepped back. “I can’t take that,” she declared emphatically.

The cashier smiled with a twinkle in her eye. “Mr. Vaughn just called a moment ago and told me you’d say that. He instructed me to tell you that if you didn’t take the items today, I was to ship them to your house.”

Once again, Marissa couldn’t help it when her mouth fell open in surprise. And that annoying tingling started up once again, irritating her beyond anything she’d ever experienced. “He actually said that?” she snarled.

The cashier smiled and nodded her head, still holding the large bag.

“What arrogance!” she snapped, but she took the bag and stormed out of the shop. She had planned on spending the whole day here at the stores, spending her father’s money on things she didn’t need. But the possibility of running into that man again was too appalling so she quickly walked to the exit, tossing the bag onto the passenger seat of her little, black roadster.

Zooming out of the parking lot, she spent the rest of the drive home coming up with several different ways to embarrass that man just like he’d done to her. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to accomplish most of those ideas because she didn’t know who the man was, where he lived or what he did for a living.

With a maliciousness she hadn’t known she was capable of, Marissa briefly considered telling her father what the man had done. He wouldn’t ever allow any man to disrespect her in that manner. But as soon as she thought of the idea, she immediately dismissed it. She would never tell her father about that kind of incident. Mr. Vaughn, or whoever he was, would be dead. Literally. Joe Berutelli wasn’t a man to mess with she’d learned over the years.

“What’s wrong?” her sister, Sierra, asked as soon as Marissa had dumped her bag in the closet where her father wouldn’t be able to see what she’d purchased.

Marissa flung herself on the bed, staring up at the ceiling in exasperation. “I just had an encounter with a man who really….” She wanted to say something horrible, but her sister was only eighteen years old. “He was just a jerk,” she finished.

Sierra tossed her book off to the side, moving so her own face blocked her sister’s view of the ceiling. “Tell me what happened,” she said with mock earnestness.

Marissa wasn’t in the mood to play. She was in the mood to hurt someone. Namely, a big, huge brute of a man who had no sense of how to treat a lady. “I just hate men sometimes.”

Sierra pulled back and pushed the pillows into a more comfortable position behind her back. “I can’t imagine that. Men usually grovel at your feet,” she teased, looking at