Fighting for Control (Against the Cage Book 3) Read online

  “I’m sorry,” he grumbled, diving his fingers into his hair as he paced in front of her desk like a caged animal. “That wasn’t fair. I’m not judging you.”

  But he could feel her eyes on him as he made another lap in front of her desk, and she was not returning the nonjudgmental favor. Why wasn’t she saying anything? She just sat there watching him with that expressionless look of cool professionalism on her beautiful face. He had no clue what she was thinking, and it was making him edgy as hell.

  Finally, she spoke. “It’s unethical for me to be your therapist. I’ll have your file transferred to my partner, Dr. Morrison.”

  She reached across her desk and held down the silver button on the intercom. The movement shifted the V of her blouse, giving him a glimpse of her gorgeous cleavage. His heart stuttered. No tan lines . . .

  “Penelope, when is Dr. Morrison’s next available appointment?”

  “July twenty-first. Dr. Morrison is on vacation this month, remember? Do you still want me to make the appointment?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Nikko’s scowl darkened. July twenty-first? Was she kidding? That was over a month away. “Don’t bother,” he muttered, resuming his pacing as she leaned back in her chair. “I can’t wait that long. I’ll just go somewhere else.”

  “You can’t. We’re under contract with the CFA. It’s an insurance thing. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait until Jim gets ba—”

  He stopped midpace and spun around to face her. Planting his palms on her desk, he leaned across it, pinning her with a glare. “Listen, Clover—”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “Whatever. I am this close”—he held his thumb and index finger an inch apart—“to getting kicked out of the CFA, and I am not going to tank my career because you can’t handle this.”

  Her face squished into a scowl that wrinkled her little pixie nose. “I never said I couldn’t handle this. I said it’s unethical.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, babe, but my career trumps your ethics. Until you start signing off on my therapy appointments, I can’t even set foot inside that gym. So unless you want to punch my card without seeing me—”

  “I can’t do that.”

  He plopped down in the chair across from her and folded his arms over his chest. “Then it looks like we’re stuck with each other until your shrink-dink partner gets back from vacay. Which means you’re now running about ten minutes late for my appointment, babe.”

  “Mr. Del Toro—”

  “What?”

  “I’m not your babe.”

  From this point on, I must insist you call me Dr. Summers.”

  If Vi wasn’t so freaked out, she might have laughed at the dumbfounded expression on Nikko Del Toro’s face. She was sure it wasn’t often that man was rendered speechless, so it was everything she could do to keep her own shit together. Establish boundaries. Show no fear. She recited the mantra over and over, but it wasn’t helping very much. She couldn’t believe that, for even a blip of a second, she’d actually been happy to see this guy. Then again, that was before he’d opened his mouth. What a complete and utter asshole.

  Wow, Vi. You can really pick ’em . . . Way to go!

  By the determined scowl ingrained on his too-handsome-to-be-such-a-douche-bag face, he had no intention of going anywhere. Shit . . . he was really expecting her to be his therapist, and that was not happening. There was no way in hell she was going to put her career on the line for this guy. So then what was she going to do? She couldn’t very well go to the president of the CFA and explain to him why she couldn’t be Nikko’s therapist. Maybe they could come to some sort of a compromise. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Del Toro. For the sake of time, I’ll get through your initial paperwork, just the standard questioning, and begin collecting records for Dr. Morrison. That way he’ll have a comprehensive file on you when he gets back, and you can start CBT with him right away.”

  He arched his brow. “CBT?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry—cognitive behavioral therapy.”

  “That sounds like something you’d give a fucking dog for pissing on the couch.”

  She winced at his remark, her gaze darting anxiously to the clock on the wall. “It isn’t intended to sound punitive, and I apologize if I’ve made it sound that way. In the meantime, you can check in with me as ordered by the CFA, and we’ll keep it light. We won’t delve into anything too deep or serious, okay?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not if you want to fight.”

  “Then it sounds good to me.”

  I can do this, she told herself. I’m a professional. It was only a month, well, six weeks, actually—twelve one-hour sessions. She could ignore the way her heart skipped a beat every time those silver-gray eyes locked on her, or the way he looked in those distressed, dark-washed jeans that rode low on his narrow hips . . . And she knew just how cut those lean hips were, because she could remember like it was yesterday what it felt like to have her legs wrapped around them while he thrust his—

  “You all right?”

  “What?” She startled when he snapped his fingers to get her attention. Oh, shit, how long had she been staring at him? No doubt long enough for him to guess what she’d been thinking, judging by that lopsided grin on his smug face.

  He made a show of glancing at the clock hanging on the wall. “Not sure how long you want to keep sitting here staring at me, but I have a psych eval due or my ass is going to be back in jail. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to get this over with.”

  “Of course, Mr. Del Toro.” Vi cleared her throat and turned her attention back to the file on her desk. “As I stated earlier, I went through the information that the CFA sent over. It lists your past employment as the Marine Corps MARSOC. That’s the Special Forces recon unit, correct?”

  His brows drew together in a wary scowl. He recrossed his arms over his chest, putting a lot of impressive muscle on display. “That’s right. What do you know about recon?”

  “Not a lot,” she confessed, but she had worked with a several vets suffering from PTSD. In fact, she preferred them over some of her other patients. She had a soft place in her heart for the men and women who put their lives on the line for their country and came home with invisible wounds from war. “I’d like to get your military records. I’ll need you to sign a rel—”

  “What the hell for?”

  “—ease of information,” she continued, ignoring his interruption. “As I said before, so I can obtain your records.”

  “Why do you want them?”

  Violet exhaled a sigh. Talking to this man was like conversing with a brick wall. “Because, Nikko—” She realized her mistake after it was too late, the ease with which his name rolled off her tongue. Was it too much to hope he didn’t notice? Guess so, because his brow arched in question. She continued on, ignoring her slip. “Dr. Morrison will need to know what happened so he can help you. A lot of good men and women come back from the war . . . different than the way they went in. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  His face darkened, his eyes narrowing like silver bullets, aiming right at her. His jaw clenched, the scar on his cheek blanching. “You don’t know that,” he growled. “You have no idea what I have or don’t have to be ashamed of.”

  If he was trying to rattle her, he was doing a damn good job of it. She’d only been trying to put him at ease. Instead, her words had taken a bad situation and made it worse. This wasn’t going to work. She couldn’t do her job if she was constantly walking on eggshells around him, second-guessing everything she said. She’d met a lot of difficult patients in her career. Many of them were severely emotionally damaged, but she had the sinking feeling that, with Nikko Del Toro, she might have finally met her match.

  He wasn’t looking for comfort from her as so many patients were. He wouldn’t respond well to platitudes or encouraging words he didn’t feel were earned or deserved. Her only shot at getting through to this guy was going to be str
aightforward and direct honesty. She’d seen his kind before. Until he respected you, he wouldn’t trust you, and without trust, he would never open up. Of course, considering their last encounter, the respect part might be a long time coming where she was concerned. But she owed it to him to do her job, and as much as she wanted to, as easy as it would be, she couldn’t, in good conscience, write him off.

  “You’re right, I have no idea what you’ve been through. I wasn’t trying to sound blithe. You’re here for help, and I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “You’re wasting your time, Clover. You can’t help me—no one can.”

  She gritted her teeth to keep from snapping at him for calling her that. He’d done it on the plane, too. Why? Pushing aside the thought, she was forced to make the split-second decision between taking his bait and digging into the battle of what he could and could not call her—which was a much safer topic for him—or letting it go and conceding the victory so she might win the war.

  Damn him . . . she let it go.

  “You won’t know unless you try. According to the notes made by the psychologist who cleared you for the CFA last year, you declined therapy after coming home from Afghanistan. Why?”

  His scowl deepened to a full-on glower. The silver in his eyes darkened to slate as he locked gazes with her. He was warning her to back off. She was moving too fast, digging too deep—but she’d barely scratched the surface. Backing away from questions about the military, she moved to another, hopefully safer, topic.

  “Your file says you’ve been fighting with the CFA for a little over a year now. Do you enjoy it?”

  He shrugged. “As much as I can enjoy anything, I guess.”

  “Are you any good?”

  His top lip twitched with more of a smirk than a smile. “Some people think so.” The edge in his voice took on a deep huskiness, his eyes softening ever so slightly as a spark of humor tried to creep in—this was it, she thought, the way past his guard. And then she realized with pulse-quickening clarity why. He’d taken her question out of context, twisting her words and putting a sexual spin on them.

  Would it always be like this with him? Ducking and weaving, jabbing and punching? Trying to have a conversation with this man was like entering a verbal sparring match. He was deflecting her questions as fast as she could throw them at him. Well, one of them was going to get through eventually, and she could only hope that, when it did, it’d give her the knockout punch she needed to break through that hard-ass exterior.

  “What do you think?” she challenged, folding her arms over her chest.

  His gaze dropped boldly and unapologetically to her cleavage. “I think it’s going to be a long six weeks, Clover.”

  She couldn’t agree more.

  The remainder of the hour passed interminably slow while Clover shot him one question after another. Most were innocent enough, but for a guy who didn’t talk about himself—ever—they sure as hell felt personal to him. If he weren’t such a bastard, he’d consider the difficult situation she was stuck in and cut her a little slack. But he was, so he didn’t.

  A few times she touched a nerve, but she seemed to sense when to back off. Her intuitiveness impressed him because the lady didn’t know dick about him. Well, that wasn’t exactly true, since his dick was about all she did know. In fact, after finding her again, he kinda wanted a reintroduction. And how wrong was that?—getting hard for your therapist . . .

  Problem was, he didn’t see her as such, and under the context of their first meeting, he doubted that he ever would. She was his four-leaf clover, and no amount of office time was ever going to change that.

  Violet asked him another barrage of questions, most of which he managed to deflect rather seamlessly. He’d been trained in anti-interrogation tactics and had had that shit put to the test. There was no way in hell this woman was going to break him. She would know what he wanted her to know about him, and not a damn thing more.

  But she was a tenacious little thing, he’d give her that. Dr. Violet Summers seemed determined to help him whether he wanted it or not, and he wasn’t sure that he did—at least not from her. Maybe he was being a sexist prick, but really, how could a midge who looked like she hadn’t seen a hard day of work in her life understand a thing about what it was like to hump countless klicks through the Afghani mountains in a heat index of 120 while six of the best men he’d ever known were counting on him to get them from point A to point B without getting blown to shit. Fuck, his pack weighed as much as she did.

  What the hell did she know about hunting down targets who had imbedded themselves so deep in schools and mosques that it became impossible to do your job without collateral damage? Collateral damage the government knew damn well they were racking up, yet remained far enough removed from to claim deniability if the media ever got wind of what they were doing over there.

  She didn’t have to close her eyes at night and see the faces of those women and children. She didn’t have to live with the guilt of failure every fucking day of her life, knowing good men had died under her command.

  No, Dr. Violet Summers just got to sit there in her high-back leather chair, safe behind a desk, and pick other people’s scabs. Then she’d wave her fancy degree and form judgments by placing labels on him like PTSD, emotionally unstable, unfit for duty. She might as well add murderer to the list while she was at it.

  Yeah, thanks but no thanks. He’d been there, done that, and had zero interest in going there again. After he’d gotten back to the States and healed from the shrapnel that had blown his chest open and nearly taken his face off, Nikko had jumped through every hoop he possibly could to get back over there, but the USMC refused to put him into active duty.

  Instead, they’d given him a handshake and pat on the back and pretended like that mission had never happened. Yeah, well, it’d happened for him, and it sure as hell had happened for Remmy.

  “—with you before your next appointment?”

  Shit, what did she say? “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled. At this point, he would have agreed to just about anything to get out of here.

  “Good.” She stood, giving him his first opportunity to fully look at her. That woman was gorgeous. Her pale-blonde hair, that he knew for a fact was 100 percent natural, was pulled up in one of those I Dream of Jeannie ponytails. The flipped ends flirted with her shoulders as she walked around the desk and headed toward him. Her skirt ended just above her knees, giving him a glimpse of her beautiful sun-kissed calves. Those black strappy sandals were deceptive—she wasn’t nearly as tall as they suggested. She stopped in front of him and he forced his gaze up to meet hers, taking his time to enjoy the view on the way there.

  She had a rockin’ body, slender but curvy—her waist was so tiny he could nearly span it with his hands, but her hips had a definite feminine flare. And those tits . . . Mercy, she had the kind of cleavage a man dreamed of burying his face in. Her breasts weren’t so large that she looked disproportionate, but they were full, and round, and so soft . . . Shit, was he really getting hard just looking at her?

  By the time his eyes met hers, a becoming blush was staining her cheeks. And that right there was the reason she was his clover—she looked so sweet and innocent, and . . . wow, did she look pissed off. He should probably have had the decency to be ashamed for eye-fucking her like that, but he didn’t care enough to fake it. Apparently, it wasn’t as good for her as it had been for him, because when she handed him his papers, she slapped them into his chest and snapped, “We’ll meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays until Jim gets back. I realize tomorrow is probably too soon to complete all this paperwork, but I’ll need you to sign this release of information before we can get started.”

  She indicated the form still on her desk. He cocked his brow. “I’ll sign it, but I’m telling you right now, you’re wasting your time.”

  “How about you let me be the judge of that? I’ll need these forms back no later than Wednesday so I’ll have them for our meeting on Thursday.
My assistant will start tracking down your medical and military records.”

  She went to move, but instead of catching the forms, Nikko grabbed her wrist, holding her palm flush against his chest. He could feel her pulse flickering beneath his fingertips like a little bird caught in a cage. She startled at his touch, her eyes growing big and round.

  Sweeping his thumb over the underside of her wrist, she tensed, but he wasn’t fooled. That was desire flaring in her eyes. He’d seen that look before, right before she’d shattered around his cock. The air around them began to crackle with energy, lust prickling his flesh.

  “I tell you what,” his voice fell to a low, husky growl. “How about I give these back to you over dinner?”

  She stared at him like he’d lost his mind, and he probably had. Wasn’t that why he was here anyway? “Are you . . . ? Are you asking me out?”

  She didn’t have to sound so scandalized by it. He shrugged. “I guess I am.”

  “I . . . it wouldn’t be appropriate, Mr. Del Toro.”

  But holy hell if she didn’t look disappointed to be turning him down. No doubt about it, they had chemistry, and that shit was getting ready to boil over.

  “Call it a business meeting if it makes you feel better.”

  “That’s even worse! I can’t see you outside of the office. It’s unethical. Everything about this is wrong.”

  Maybe that’s why it felt so right. He had zero interest in getting therapy from her, unless that ministration was to his dick. Was she really going to hide behind her ethics and pretend she didn’t want him as much as he wanted her? Well, she could try, but he wasn’t going to let her get away with it. Something about this woman turned his crank, and if he was going to be forced to sit in an office with her twice a week for the next six weeks, this was going to get uncomfortable fast.

  “Okay, I tell you what. On Wednesday I’m going to be having dinner at Carboni’s at let’s say . . . seven o’clock. And if you just happen to be there, too, well, then there’s nothing unethical about eating dinner, right?”