The Man to Be Reckoned With Read Online Free PDF

again, Riya felt the impact of his presence like a magnet pulled toward a slab of iron.
    The beard was still unshaved, but he had changed. Now his clothes reflected the casual power he exuded so easily. The rumpled shirt had been exchanged for a white dress shirt and a formal jacket this time. The snowy-white collar a contrast against his sunburned skin. His hair gleamed with wetness, looked more black than brown.
    He looked knee-meltingly gorgeous. Case in point, her knees practically buckled beneath her.
    â€œYou didn’t come back to the office, haven’t been answering my calls,” he said, waving his cell phone.
    â€œI didn’t realize I was supposed to be at your beck and call,” she retorted, not trusting the invasive intimacy of his smile. In fact, she had liked him better when he was angry and threatening. “Not everything I do is about you.”
    That small smile turned into a grin, and his teeth gleamed against his tanned skin. It lit up his whole face, softening the harsh angles of his features. And the mouth...she had been right. It was made for smiling and something else that she didn’t want to think about.
    â€œFrom now on, it’s going to be all about me,” he said, stretching his arms by his sides. The casual gesture drew her gaze to the breadth of his shoulders. That jacket was cut perfectly, following the wide swath of his shoulders and the narrowing of his waist.
    Alarm spiked through her. “No.”
    â€œI have a proposition for you.” Something glimmered in his gaze. “You’re not chickening out already, are you?”
    Jackie gasped, and Riya wondered if her mother could explode from the tension radiating from her. She infused steel into her voice. “We don’t have a deal.”
    â€œWe do now. You’ve...
persuaded
me to take a chance on you, Riya.”
    There was no way to arrest the heat blooming up her face. He was doing it on purpose. Saying her name like that, insinuating with that smile that there was more between them than his hatred and her risky gamble. She wanted to run away and hide in her bedroom, hope it was all a bad dream.
    Next to her, Jackie began again. “Riya, how dare you not tell me—”
    Nathan shot Jackie a look. Pure arctic frost, it was the only way Riya could describe it. Granted, he probably was the one man who could shut Jackie up without meaning to, but Riya had a feeling he would have the same effect on all of them, even if he had just been Nathaniel Ramirez. And not the adored heir of the estate.
    He had that kind of a presence. Contained and controlled with a violent energy brimming underneath the calm facade.
    How was it possible that she could notice so much, understand so much about him just in a few hours?
    â€œCome,” he said in a cajoling tone as if she were a recalcitrant child. When she still didn’t move, he caught her wrist and tugged.
    Her bare skin tingling at the contact of his rough fingers, Riya followed, past the nonplussed staff, who had gathered in the huge dining hall, and her pale mother, through the door and out into the lush acreage behind the house.
    A cold breeze blew her hair in her face, and with a soft huff, Riya pulled it all to the side. The night was inky black, only the moon and carefully placed lights on the ground illuminating the path for them.
    But instead of dulling his presence, the dark intensified her awareness of him. The graceful line of his shoulders, the taper of his lean chest to his waist and the corded energy of his thighs when she stumbled and he steadied her.
    Her own senses revolted against her mind, determined to observe and absorb every little thing about him. They’d reached the well-lit-up gazebo in the south corner of the estate when Riya realized his long fingers were still wrapped around her wrist.
    Dragging her feet on the grass, she tugged her hand away.
    The splish-splash of water from another fountain, the relentless