by Tara Pammi
His disappointment earlier still stung like a slap.
If she went to him the way she was feeling right now, he would lacerate her with his ruthless words, would peel away any remnants of self-respect she still had left.
The thought of telling him what she had heard, the thought of his reaction got her to move as nothing else could.
She took a few steps toward the revolving glass doors when she heard her name called again.
“Ms. Clio, Mr. Bianco authorized a permanent key card for you with us. At all our international branches. He left very specific instructions that we were to provide anything you asked for, anything you needed, should you come.”
The receptionist placed the key card on the gleaming counter and pulled his hand back.
As if he knew how close to breaking point she was. As if she were a wild animal he needed to treat with the utmost care. Something in his kind gaze, something in the cajoling tone of his voice shook Clio out of the fog she was functioning in.
Was this what she had become? A woman so lost in life that she had reduced a perfect stranger to pitying her?
She didn’t know what she wanted to do, she didn’t know how to take the next step in her life. She felt utterly lost, alone.
The fact that all she wanted to do was crawl into the nearest hole and never emerge scraped her raw. And yet, something in her, some small part of her that refused to whimper like a victim, had brought her here.
Her career, her life, her self-respect and her heart— everything lay in ragged tatters around her feet.
She knew that she needed help. To figure out how to do the one thing that burned inside her while everything else lay in ashes.
She grabbed the key card and palmed the smooth surface. Forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, to take a deep, purging breath. The quiet swish of the lift as it bore her to the fifty-second floor pinged against her tautly stretched nerves.
When the doors finally opened, she stepped out onto an enormous foyer boasting four balconies with glass railings that provided breathtaking views of the one of the world’s finest cities.
It was like a castle built amidst the clouds.
Walking past a gold-embossed statue in the middle of the foyer, she reached the lounge. A champagne-and-brown color scheme reigned, with glittering burnished-gold and deep red accessories here and there that matched the white-hot temperament of the man she had once known.
Although the Stefan she had met this evening had been coldly ruthless.
What the hell was she even doing here?
Just as she turned in the direction of the elevator, his silky smooth question rang out.
“You’re leaving already?”
Clutching her eyes closed, Clio willed herself to calm down. In a helpless way that made her totally nauseous, she was glad that he had spotted her before she had made a hasty exit.
Because now, she knew Stefan wouldn’t let her leave. Now, if she could just find the strength to say what she had come to say without betraying herself...
Every doubt she was harboring ground to a halt as he moved into the lounge with a lithe grace that she followed as if she was mesmerized.
A plush white towel wrapped around his narrow hips contrasted sharply against a tanned chest. Droplets of water clung to chest hair that covered ropes of well-defined muscles. His freshly shaved jawline glinted with that trademark arrogance of his while his olive green gaze pinned her to the spot.
Awareness sliced through Clio like a physical shove to her senses and she swayed where she stood. It was like a deluge of flood over drought-ridden land.
“Clio, is everything all right?” he said, tossing a white towel over his nape that fell onto his chest.
Clio came back to the earth with a thump. Suddenly, asking Stefan for help felt like the most absurd idea she had ever thought of.
Before she could blink, he covered the distance between them. The scent of him, raw and masculine, was like a whiplash that slammed her breath in her throat.
Shaking her head, she pushed her hair back. “I’m fine. Can I have something to drink?”
For a few seconds, he stood there staring at her.
Tall, impossibly wide, six feet three inches of prime Sicilian male, and all his focus was on her. His eyes perused her with a leisurely intensity that made her feel exposed, raw.
Not that she trusted her body’s response.
Finally, he moved to the glittering bar that covered one side of the lounge. “What would you like to drink?”
“Just some water, please.” There was a false comfort in talking about something so mundane. Maybe because it reminded her that the world did not fall away even through the earthquake in her life. “Alcohol gives me—”
“A migraine, I know. Are they still as bad as they used to be?”
He had remembered. Clio squashed the spurt of warmth that bloomed in her chest with ruthless will. So one of the youngest millionaires in the world had a good memory. Not a big surprise. “I never found anything to help me. So I don’t touch it,” she said, shrugging.
The sound of the refrigerator opening, the soft clink of the ice cubes against the glass punctured the silence that swathed them with awkwardness.
She hadn’t even told him why she was here. And he hadn’t asked.
Yet, it felt as if there was something in the air, an imbalance of power, a swirl of currents eddying around them, caging them together in the cavernous lounge. And she recoiled at adding to it by telling him what had happened tonight.
Would he laugh at her stupidity that she hadn’t even seen through Jackson’s facade for so long?
She grabbed the glass from him, and took a greedy gulp. All the while, he stood there like a dark specter, watching her, assessing her. And somehow she had a feeling, he found her wanting.
She had fallen in her own eyes. Did it matter if she did in his? a rebellious part of her mocked.
The answer had to be no because she didn’t have a single feeling to spare for him. There was nothing but cold will to keep her going.
“I’m sorry about intruding on you unannounced,” she said, once the cold water brought feeling back into her throat. “I didn’t even realize I had started walking toward...”
Catching the gleam of mockery in his green gaze, she faltered.
He took the glass from her shaking fingers. “Clio Norwood—epitome of good manners and decorum, even as she’s falling apart.”
“I’m not falling apart.”
His blunt-tipped fingers landed on her jaw and tilted her face up.
Panic chasing her stringent awareness of him, she caught his wrist to push it away. The pressure of his fingers increased.
“Then why are you so jumpy?”
There was no sympathy in his voice and for that she was a thousand times grateful. One kind word from him would break the small thread that was holding her together.
Falling apart, in front of him, was not a choice.
“I’m not. I just...” A ball of tears tightened her throat.
“Tell me what’s going on, Clio.”
The inherent command in his tone somehow grounded her.
Instead of jerking away from his touch, she slowly pushed it back. But the rasp of his hair-roughened wrist, the strong tendons of it, was too much sensation. She dropped his hand, her pulse thudding too loud.
“Have you eaten dinner?”
“No.”
“How did you get here?”
She raised her gaze. “What?”
“To the Chatsfield?”
“I walked.”
“From where?”
“From the dinner party.”
“At the Empire State Building?”
“Yes.”
&nb
sp; He cursed so vehemently that Clio hugged herself instinctively. “That’s almost fifteen blocks from here and it’s nine-thirty at night. What the hell is wrong with you that you would walk at night in New York of all places?”
She remained mute, no response rising in the face of his valid point.
He sighed. “Finish that water and then order something from room service. I’ll get dressed and be back. And then you can tell me why you look like you—”
Anxiety hit her in waves. If he disappeared, she knew she would lose whatever it was that had brought her this far.
Saving face in front of him would become more important than moving on in her life.
“No, wait. Don’t leave. I...”
“Then get rid of that look in your eyes, bella,” he said. “I can’t stand it.” A hint of emotion colored that bland statement.
“What look?”
Pushing his tensile body into her space, he folded his hands. The muscles in his biceps curled enticingly and Clio choked back hysteria. Her life was falling apart, and yet it seemed the sight of Stefan half-naked could distract her as nothing else could.
“Like you’re terrified of me,” he said through gritted teeth. “We might have become strangers to each other but I would never hurt you, bella. Whatever Jackson did, you need to shake yourself out of it.” His voice fell as if she were a wounded animal he was persuading into his care.
“I’m not a danger to you, Clio.”
Oh, but he was, Clio admitted, her pulse skyrocketing.
If Jackson had reduced her to a shadow of herself over the years, Stefan could destroy the small part of her that was still intact. That he knew what she had been once and what she was now, it was a weapon he could wield with ease and without emotion, if he didn’t like what she was about to say.
The young man she had known at Columbia had not only been idealistic but also kind, with a rosy view of the world.
This man he was now, he rattled Clio on so many levels.
But she had no intention of ever letting a man define her sense of self. Ever again.
The thought gave her the courage to say what she wanted to. “I decided to take you up on your offer. I need your...I need help, Stefan.”
Something infinitesimal flashed in his brooding gaze, gone before she could read it. His defined jaw hardened. He moved to a small side table with delicately carved legs, and pulled out a checkbook.
He flipped it open with a pen poised in his left hand. That familiar sight of him balancing the book on his right forearm brought forth such a strong memory that she almost didn’t hear him when he said, “How much do you need?”
Her jaw falling open, Clio stared at him. Acid crawled up her throat and she forced herself to hold his gaze, realizing what his look had meant.
He thought she had come to him for money.
Even as he had reminded her of what she had been, it was clear that Stefan had already written her off as a lost cause.
It rankled just as much as Jackson’s treacherous perfidy did; it tore her in half that she had brought this on herself. But it was high time she started fighting for herself, too. High time she started growing a backbone.
“How much, Clio?”
“Will you give me as much as I want, Stefan? How about a million dollars?” Something in her challenged him, pushed to see how far he would go.
He didn’t even blink. “A million it will be, bella. I will tell my finance guy that this year our charity contribution is going to the Clio Norwood Foundation.”
I don’t want your charity.
Swallowing back the bile his offhand comment provoked, she reminded herself to not flinch, to not betray the hurt that lanced through her.
She had no idea why she was inflicting this on herself, but she couldn’t stop.
“And if I come back for more?”
“I’ll give you more.” He threw the checkbook on the coffee table between them, the gesture so full of powerful arrogance and a masculine elegance that Clio forgot what had prompted it. Even half-naked as he was, power and ruthlessness emanated from every cell in him.
“You can have as much as you want, Clio. All you would have to do is walk away from that crook. No matter how deep you are in, you can walk away.”
“Why? Why would you help me?”
“Once, you were my friend. Once, I used to think the world of you. Seeing you like this...”
Some unnamed emotion flickered in his eyes and Clio stared anew. His face transformed so much when a hint of emotion touched it that it was like seeing a shadow of the old Stefan.
“If I can help you get away from—” he scowled as if he hated even saying Jackson’s name again “—I’ll save you, even if it has to be from yourself. It’s like taking a friend or a family member to a rehabilitation clinic for treatment for addiction.”
“Even though you think I’m not worth the ground I’m standing on?”
His dark smile didn’t falter for a second. “Your words, bella, not mine.” A blast of cold solidified in her core and Clio shivered.
It was one thing to think that of herself, another to hear someone confirm it. But with Stefan, there was nothing but honesty. Cutting, lacerating honesty, but honesty all the same.
His gaze swept over her, lingering and intense. “But, yes, even then. I would do the same for Rocco, Christian and Zayed, too.”
The Columbia Four’s friendship, the inviolate bond they had forged with each other, she had always been envious of it. To be included now as something he had to salvage from the wreck she’d made of herself... “Wow, at least in one regard, I’m in illustrious company, aren’t I?”
He moved around the coffee table, and it was like watching a wild animal move. With grace and purpose.
The moment he was within touching distance, everything within Clio retreated inward into a tight ball. But still, the heat of his body incited a trembling in her very bones.
The breadth of his frame swathed her as he bent down. “Do not ask a question of me if you don’t have the constitution for truth, Clio.”
Her brain taken over with issuing flight responses, Clio nodded dumbly.
Stefan Bianco was a Sicilian alpha male in his prime.
Physically magnificent, powerful beyond her wildest imagination, ruthlessly rich. A potent combination of masculinity and heat that could probably compel a stone to react if he so intended.
A woman like her, with her very sense of self battered and beaten down, was nothing. She wrapped her hands around herself, as if it could corral his presence and her reaction.
If she wasn’t careful, he would overpower her so much that she would get swept away in unraveling that enigmatic disinterest he projected so easily. As so many women did—deluding themselves that they could melt the icy heart beneath the fiery exterior of his Sicilian temperament.
Stefan had buried his heart so deep and so long ago that he didn’t even have one anymore, she sensed. Stepping away from him, she shook herself free of his magnetic pull. Met his gaze head-on. “I never want to hear anything but the truth from you, Stefan.”
“Deal,” he said with an indulgent smile that was more like a threat than a reassuring promise. “Now it’s time to put your cards on the table, bella. Without fear.”
She knew exactly where she stood with him; she would always know.
His brand of friendship—eviscerating and without an ounce of pretension—was what she needed to remake herself, to redefine herself. Stefan was the perfect path for her to walk on toward becoming her own woman again.
“As gratifying as it is to learn I could have millions if I just made myself your charity case, I didn’t come here for money. I want nothing from you for free.”
“What do you want, then?”
Her chest felt so
tight that she had to break his gaze. Had to force herself to speak past the sound of Jackson’s and Ashley’s combined laughter resonating through her.
Jackson’s cheating on her, using her for her connections, reducing her entire identity to the value she provided him in his blasted business, scraped her raw. But that he could be so casually cruel about her feelings, that he would betray every aspect of their lives together, that he would laugh at her fears and insecurities behind her back...it festered inside her like a putrefied wound.
It tainted every aspect of her so much that she was beginning to despise herself.
And she wouldn’t be able to move forward, wouldn’t be able to look herself in the eye unless she showed him that he couldn’t do this to her without realizing the consequences. Unless she proved to him and herself that she was more than what he had called her.
“I want to teach Jackson a lesson he will never forget.”
Cold—blanching and eviscerating—dawned in Stefan’s gaze and he stepped away as if she was the very plague. His jaw clenched so tight that it was a wonder he spoke through it. “I will not play petty games so that you can make him jealous and win him back. If that’s why you came, get out. Now. Before I physically restrain you from going back to that leech.”
“I don’t want to make him jealous. I want to remove Jackson from every part of my life. I don’t want even his shadow to touch me anymore.”
“That is as simple as walking away, Clio.”
“Not without making him realize what he’s done to me.”
Disbelief shone in his eyes. “Earlier, you wouldn’t believe a word I said. How do I know you won’t go running back to him the minute he starts whispering words of love again?”
“Earlier, I was a fool who’d have done anything for the man I loved. Now...I feel nothing but disgust and pity for that woman. My skin crawls when I think that I stayed all these years... Does that satisfy you? Or do you want me to prostrate myself before you’re ready to believe me?”
His gaze encompassed her from top to toe as though he was enjoying the idea of her prostrating herself. By sheer will, she stood still under that assessing gaze.
