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there for me and thank you for letting me stay at your house. I don’t know what I can do to repay—”
    He not-so-gently bit her hip, startling a squeak out of her. “I don’t want to hear about you repaying me. I love you. This is what people who love each other do.”
    She sighed, then scratched her nails lightly over his head. “Ryan—”
    “Can you cook?”
    “What?”
    “Can you cook?”
    “Well, yeah.”
    “Good, then if you want to repay me, cook dinner four nights a week. My housekeeper handles the other three and when I get busy with work sometimes I forget to eat, so I just grab whatever crap is on hand or skip dinner entirely. I can’t do anything more complicated than boiling spaghetti and throwing a can of sauce on it, so if you could cook for me that would be a big help.”
    Ryan’s housekeeper actually cooked all of his meals and made sure his freezer was stocked with dinners he could just defrost and eat, but Emma didn’t need to know that.
    “Ryan, I can’t just laze around the house all day.”
    “You don’t have to. Use that time to look into school, or send out your resumé. I want to help you achieve everything you’ve dreamed about, Emma. I want you to be happy. Please.”
    Once again she sighed, but when Ryan looked up at her the light, the warmth in Emma’s gaze sent a hard bolt of affection through him, making his breath catch.
    “It’s too much.”
    Knowing that Emma was going to argue with him, Ryan decided to let it slide for now. He had plenty of time to convince her that life with him would be so much better than without him, if she would just give him a chance. The scent of the light floral fabric softener she used filled his nose as he pressed his face closer to her softness, the feeling of coming home intensifying until he was clinging to her. Underneath her ball-busting strength she was still human, still vulnerable. He swore that he would do everything he could to make sure that her stalker was found and dealt with so his Mistress didn’t have to waste one more moment fearing for her safety.
     

Chapter Three
    Two and a half weeks later
     
    Emma stood three steps away from Ryan’s deep kitchen sink with an empty wineglass in her trembling hands. Fear had her rooted to the spot and she struggled to draw in a full breath as the sunlight streaming in warmed skin below the hem of her knee-length, flowing white skirt. Panic tried to claw at her, to make her flee the room, but she tried to damndest to think past the rapid beat of her heart and focus, really focus on the window over the sink. A normal, everyday window that looked out over Ryan’s beautifully landscaped back yard down to the glimmering edges of the water.
    Nothing nefarious out there.
    It was a calm, lovely, peaceful late-afternoon scene, a view that wouldn’t look out of place in one of those high-end home-and-garden magazines, but to Emma, it represented nothing but danger.
    Someone could be out there, right now, waiting for her, watching her, hoping that she’d come close enough to the window so he could see her.
    On some distant level, she knew this pulse-thundering fear was all a product of her messed-up mind trying to cope with the trauma of finding out someone had been stalking her, but that didn’t make the need to flee and hide any less real. It took all of her iron will to take another step forward, the pink nail polish that Ryan had painted on her toes last night sparkling in the light. Her palms began to sweat, and she really hoped she didn’t drop the wineglass from her now-numb fingertips.
    Anger flared within Emma, anger over her own weakness, over her inability to just get over it. People had been through a lot worse than she had and gone on to live normal, paranoia-free lives. Unfortunately, no matter how strong she tried to be, her anxiety over someone watching her whenever she left the house had now intensified to the point where she was no longer comfortable even in the home when