made her way on legs that weren’t quite steady down to her own room where she promptly burst into tears that were a combination of humiliation, despair and pure, white-hot anger.
Sex with Dawson was absolutely amazing, and he pushed all the right buttons and knew instinctively what she liked and how she liked it. Hell, he’d known more about what she liked even before she’d even tried any of it. But that did not give him the right to treat her like a whore whenever it suited him, especially if he was just using her in order to secure lucrative deals for his fucking company.
Zoe was still shaking like a leaf, but now it was with anger rather than arousal, and she stripped her clothes off and threw them in the back of the closet in disgust. She needed a long hot shower, and she really needed to have a long hard think about whether this job was worth losing her self-respect over.
~
Chapter Seven
~
An hour later Zoe was dressed in casual jeans and a t-shirt and making her way out of the hotel’s main door. She had to get away from the place and any chance of bumping into Dawson, because if she stayed here she knew that she would go running to him if he called her. She made her way on the local bus to a remote part of town and wandered around the shops and local tourist attractions, trying in vain to put all thoughts of Dawson from her mind.
She stopped at a small café to have some lunch and then proceeded to push the food around her plate; her appetite non-existent and her temper rising rather than cooling off. She knew that it was probably fucked up of her, but she really wished that he’d been angered by the fact that she’d had sex with another man and not just because she was on the fucking clock. At least it would have shown her that he actually gave a damn about her rather than just using her to get his rocks off when it suited him.
Zoe took a sip of her glass of water and pushed her plate away. She felt like nothing more than a piece of meat that he was more than happy and willing to use so long as it got him what he wanted. And in this instance it got him into business with Armando. She loved her job. She really did. But she didn’t love it enough to put up with being treated like this.
In the cold light of day she realized that she might have fucked Armando with the distinct hope that it might make Dawson a little jealous, but if that really had been her intention it had backfired miserably. The very fact that she wanted him to be jealous made her stop and think of things from another angle as well. Why would she want him to be jealous? Was she falling for him and hoping that their relationship could evolve from a business and sex one to a romantic one?
If that really was the case, and she had a sinking feeling that it was, she was more of a fool than she realized. Dawson was an egotistical self-centered man who had nothing but business and sex on his agenda, and it was about damn time that she realized that. If she’d been secretly harboring a desire to change him into a man who could actually have feelings for her, then she finally understood that she was sadly mistaken, because it was never going to happen in a million years.
Zoe got up from the table, paid her bill and then walked back out into the afternoon sunshine. It was no good her moaning and wailing about how she had been treated if she wasn’t prepared to actually do something about it. If she did nothing and it happened again, and she was in no doubt that it would, she would only have herself to blame. So far she’d taken pride in the fact that by letting him control her in the bedroom she was ultimately taking control and choosing to allow it. It was time for her to put a stop to it and prove to herself and to him that she was the one who called the shots and who could also call things off.
She flagged down a taxi cab and gave the driver the name of her hotel, and then while the car