The Ultimate Revenge

by Victoria Parker - The Ultimate Revenge

  ‘I’m not interested.’ Liar.

  ‘I think you know you could’ve approached the members before now. No doubt you’ve convinced yourself you aren’t good enough. You’re ashamed of your past. I think your father made you that way instead of telling you to be proud of the woman you’ve become and to stand tall before them.’

  He was truly intimidating when he was this way—brooding and torrid. Even his body was pulsating, telling her he wasn’t in total control and that moreover he couldn’t give a stuff.

  Frowning deeply, she sifted through his words. Or she would have if he’d given her half a chance.

  ‘Don’t you see? That damn hypocrite is still controlling you from the grave. Not only do you work to the extreme, as if you’re still trying to prove your worth to him, but you’re hiding, Pia—behind a curtain of shame. When you’re probably one of the richest, most successful women in the world.’

  Stunned, she blinked over and over. He was right. She never stopped, was always working, and no matter her success it was never enough. Not for her. Why couldn’t she just be proud of herself? Forget the past and move on?

  ‘You brought the female members in, didn’t you?’ he asked, yanking her from her musings.

  ‘Yes. I was trying to drag the place into the twenty-first century. But to say it hasn’t been easy is an understatement.’

  ‘It would be if you were a visible power to contend with. You have more strength and honour than most of the men I know. How you run the companies, the club...I have no idea, Pia.’ He moved a little closer, out of the shadows and no one could miss the awe written over his face. ‘I am so proud of you.’

  Oh, God. ‘Don’t say that,’ she said brokenly. Don’t make me think you care. Not again. I can’t take it.

  Nic took another step towards her, reached up and cupped her face in his hands. Hands that weren’t quite steady as he stroked over her cheeks with the pads of his thumbs.

  ‘Nothing of what I felt about you, how I wanted you, was a lie. I’ve never wanted any woman the way I crave you, Pia, and that is the truth. I never want you to believe you were nothing to me. Ever.’

  Pia caught herself nuzzling into his hand, so skin-hungry, so desperate for his touch, so dangerously wanting to believe him. To trust in the sincerity darkening his eyes. And it was more than she could bear, because distrust lingered as if hope had been violated beyond repair.

  ‘I think you should go.’ She tried to steel her voice but heard the deep shift of higher emotion and knew he’d heard it too.

  Leave. Please. Just walk away. Her heart was breaking. Why did she have to fall for a man who’d used her every step of the way? Who was apparently marrying another woman in ten days?

  ‘Pia...’ He softly kissed her temple, her cheek, and when he pulled back and looked down at her she felt the agony and torment in his expression in her own soul.

  Suddenly words were spilling, tumbling, pouring from her mouth. ‘I’m sorry you lost your parents that way. I’m sorry your dreams were stolen in the night. I’m sorry he destroyed that life. But I’m glad—so glad—you found the strength to stand tall and make another.’

  Tears filled his eyes, pooling precariously. ‘Pia...’

  ‘Go. Marry your sweet bride. Be happy. As I will be.’

  He jerked back as if she’d struck him and thrust his hands into his hair, ravaging the sexy mess. ‘I haven’t agreed to marry her! Dios, Pia. I wouldn’t have slept with you if I had! I made Goldsmith retract the statement and say we were in talks, which is the truth.’

  She had seen that, but reading it and hearing it from his lips were two entirely different things.

  ‘Talks? A merger? Do you really want something so cold?’ It didn’t suit him at all. Didn’t make sense. Unless... ‘Do you love her?’ It came out as a whisper, because even asking him hurt so badly.

  Then. Then she knew. And emerging into the reality that she’d fallen madly in love with him was as stark and cold as being born, leaving her naked and shivering and utterly defenceless. How could she have been so stupid?

  ‘No, I don’t love her, Pia. Which is the entire point. I want Santos Diamonds for my grandfather—before I lose him too. I promised him.’

  Pia frowned, trying to piece together what he was saying, but before she even had a chance to open her mouth and ask what the hell he was talking about he flung his arms in the air with all that Brazilian flair and passion she loved so much.

  ‘And dammit, I don’t want to feel like this!’

  ‘This?’ God, the look in his eyes. Torment. Utter torment.

  ‘This...this agony when I look at you! This obsession to hold you in my arms. This craving to have you now. Like you are air and I can’t breathe without you. This unnatural possessiveness that grabs me by the throat and makes my heart want to explode every time I touch you, kiss you, see your smile, hear your laugh and know it will be over any minute now.’

  Her heart was beating so fast she was sure she’d pass out at any moment. Unsure what all that really meant.

  He vibrated with a torrid combination of possessiveness, violence, sorrow and an almost desperate hunger. It all worked to pull her into a near fatal frenzy as the end of their game came into sight.

  ‘Pia...’

  Like a blistering storm he closed the gap between them, thrust his hands into her hair and crashed his mouth over hers, crushing, devouring.

  She tried to pull back, she really did, but it was the first time she’d felt anything close to alive since she’d left him.

  The salt of his tears exploded on her tongue and in the back of her mind, though she knew he was using her once more in order to feel something other than pain, she let him take and take and take. Bury his sorrow, his anger, deep inside her.

  Somehow they made it to the bed, just skin against skin, frantic, desperately trying to soothe. And then he was moving inside her—one minute slow and somehow devout, the next angry and ferocious as he ran through a tumult of emotions and unleashed them all on her body one by one.

  Murmurs filled the air—some she could neither hear nor understand, others so heartbreaking she was on the verge of tears.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be this way,’ he whispered against her throat, before inhaling her scent deeply.

  This wasn’t making love or sex; this was Nic ripping her soul out of her body with his goodbye.

  ‘Please tell me I haven’t hurt you.’

  Then her own tears came, and she clutched him to her so he wouldn’t see her own heartache drawing lines down her temples, down her cheeks.

  ‘You haven’t hurt me. You could never hurt me,’ she breathed, the lies spilling from her as easily as the tears.

  ‘I would die first,’ he vowed as his climax raged through his body.

  Pia followed him into the light, that supernova burning bright, only for it to flicker and die as if it had never been.

  And when she woke he was gone, leaving the cold seeping into her heart once more. Frozen to the core.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AVÔ TAPPED HIM on the shoulder and Nic jolted back to the present. Though he’d swear he could still feel her petal-soft skin, taste her rich, evocative scent on his lips.

  He’d hoped the craving would have paled by now, ten days on. Lust could burn—Nic knew that. But he’d never felt it threaten to incinerate every rational part of him. Obliterate all the careful shields he’d built to make him a functioning member of society, leaving this savage, beastly Neanderthal filled with need and want.

  He spun round and thrust a glass of cognac to Matteo Santos, all the while drinking his own in one powerful mind-numbing shot.

  ‘There is a parcel here for you—just arrived. Open it.’

  Nic didn’t even glance towards the antique monstrosity of a table in Goldsmith’s study. ‘No. Let Eloisa open the gifts.’ Women liked that kind of thing, and she’d made no bones about the fact that wealth and security were her reasons for marrying him. Nic wasn’t intere
sted.

  He watched the marquee rise up beyond the leaded windows and for the first time wondered what kind of husband he would be.

  Fair? Definitely. Supportive? He’d try his very best. Loving? Honourable? Was it faithful to marry one woman and dream of another? The woman who’d left him suffocating in the smouldering ashes of an incomprehensible wanting. It struck him as a kind of cheating all on its own.

  ‘It is not a wedding gift.’

  ‘Have you suddenly developed psychic abilities, Avô?’ He was being as facetious as hell today, but he knew what was coming. Knew he couldn’t avoid it any longer. Not when Avô had finally cornered him in the same room.

  One grey eyebrow arched. Dark brown eyes glittered with annoyance. ‘You are not too old for me to whip your hide, boy.’

  As if. Matteo Santos had never done so much as flick his ear.

  ‘I want to know what the blazes we are doing here, because from where I’m standing you look like you have another gun to your head—and I am getting too damn old and cantankerous to pick you up again.’

  ‘I did not ask you to pick me up last time.’ Even as he said it he cringed with self-disgust at the disrespect and ingratitude of those words. But, Dios, he was dying here. Dying as conflict and turmoil roiled in the darkness of his mind. Spectres of anger and regret were circling like vultures, ready to feed off his soul.

  ‘No, I damned well made you. Told you to get up and walk again and not let the bastards win. Told you to find something to live for—’

  ‘And I did.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He gave a bitter laugh that raked over Nic’s skin like the claws of a feral cat.

  ‘Revenge. I know fine well what drives you, my boy. Always have. And I let you, probably even encouraged it, just so you’d take one step, then two. Then four, then ten.’

  Avô’s voice cracked and Nic felt it in his bones.

  ‘Just so you’d eat and sleep and wake. So I would not lose you too.’

  The old man’s eyes started filling up and Nic’s heart lurched—the first movement it had made, its first sign of life since he’d left Pia, beautiful and warm and safe in her bed.

  ‘And I am grateful, Avô,’ he said brokenly.

  ‘Are you really?’ he demanded. ‘Because from where I’m standing you’re just choosing a different kind of death. A longer torture and a slower suffering. You may as well have died on that floor with my glorious girl and her useless husband.’

  One fat tear trickled down Avô’s cheek and it broke the dam inside him.

  His voice was so thick with pent-up emotion it shook, barely audible even to his own ears. ‘I only wanted to give you back what you lost. Santos Diamonds. The lost Santos Empire.’

  ‘Excuses.’

  White-hot anger filled him. ‘No!’

  ‘Yes! You are not your father!’

  Nic braced his weight off the stained glass windows and blasted the weather pundits who had lyricised for days about this perfect sun-drenched day, clear and calm and hot enough to fry huevos on the pavements. Instead the sky was a bruised swirl of black and grey, the atmosphere sharp with chaos as storm clouds thundered across the New York skyline like the wrath of the gods, ready to beat him with their displeasure.

  ‘I don’t want to discuss my father,’ he said, loath even to think of that day.

  ‘Maybe I do.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Nic begged. Not now. Not today.

  ‘I lost my daughter, Nicandro, and you can’t get her back. And if you do this I will have lost you too. You really think money and diamonds can redeem souls, mend hearts, replace love?’

  Nic’s mind gingerly touched the words.

  Love? Was love like being in the rapture of heaven and the torture of hell? No. Love was surely sweet and kind. Not possessive and obsessive madness. Unnatural.

  The scepticism in his mind masqueraded as logic and argued vehemently with him.

  Being with Pia in Barcelona hadn’t felt unnatural. It had felt right. Heart-stoppingly perfect. It was when he was without her that it all went to hell.

  Pia...

  Her name spun inside him like a key tumbling a lock. Even his skin remembered her touch—like a kiss from a ghost.

  Was it possible that he’d just walked away from the only woman he could ever truly love? And was Santos Diamonds worth giving her up for?

  ‘No, I tell you!’ Avô hollered across the oppressive stately room. ‘It’s impossible. So I ask you again—what are we doing here?’

  ‘Goldsmith owns Santos Diamonds and his daughter is a suitable wife.’ He sounded like an automated message.

  ‘For many, I am sure. For you? Poppycock! As for Santos Diamonds—who cares? Let it go. You either continue to live in the shadows of the past or you break into a new dawn.’

  Nic squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head.

  It suddenly became glaringly obvious that he was clinging to Santos Diamonds like a life raft, still desperately trying to reach the end game he’d worked so hard for. Because otherwise it would have all been for nothing and what did he have left?

  Pia...you could have a lifetime of Pia, a little voice whispered. Taunting. Teasing. Coercing his heart to beat again. If she’d even consider having him after what he’d done to her. He still couldn’t believe he’d taken her like an animal in Paris. He wouldn’t be surprised if she never wanted to speak to him again.

  ‘I’m scared,’ Nic said, unable to let go of the possibility he would some day turn into the man his father had become in the end. A monster.

  ‘The other side of fear is freedom, my boy. Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live. This is your chance for true happiness. Let me see you happy before I go. Knowing there is someone in the world you cannot bear to lose and that you are not spending every single moment holding her to your heart is an unthinkable tragedy.’

  * * *

  Pia stood in front of the double doors leading to the boardroom, thinking how apt it was that she’d been living— hiding—in this darkness for so long.

  Q Virtus members were gathered around the seventy-foot conference table. One chair was vacant and for that she was grateful. She was unsure if she would have had the strength to do this if Nic had been here. This morning the front-page headlines had been dominated by photographs of the happy couple at a gala dinner last weekend. They’d looked sweet together, she thought begrudgingly.

  She should hate him for dredging up all of her loneliness and rage and feelings of worthlessness. For giving her hope of an unconditional love from someone who accepted her for who she was and where she’d come from. But the fact was, how could he ever love her? She had no breeding, like his wife. Her own father had ruined his family. Nic would never look at her with adoration—only resentment for the power of his desire for her. He’d made that clear in Paris.

  And he must care for this woman he was marrying, Pia thought, to go ahead even after she’d sent him the package. It had taken her days, fighting with her conscience and her heart, to make a decision. Her head had told her to let him rot in a miserable marriage that was nothing more than a con. While her heart had loathed the fact that her father’s actions had placed him at the altar to start with. In the end her heart had won out and she’d gone to visit his grandfather.

  Pia couldn’t help but smile at the memory.

  Striking even in his seventies, the silver-tongued devil had trounced her at Gin Rummy, told her she had ‘spunk’ and kissed her goodbye. It would be very easy to love a man like that. More so because of his absolute devotion to Nic. He’d hugged her long and hard with tears in his eyes when she’d lifted her necklace—the Santos Diamonds—from the velvet cushion and given them to him.

  The only gift her father had ever given her. Going in there, she’d thought it would wrench her apart to give them up. But it had felt so right—like fate. As if somehow she’d been led—by Nic—to this man to return his legacy and make good on the sins of the past.

 
Then he’d winked at her when she’d given him a note for Nic. One she’d rewritten over and over to make sure that no emotion lay between the lines. That her love didn’t pour from the page. Telling him to ask Goldsmith exactly how much stock he owned in Santos Diamonds.

  So as far as she was concerned the past had been put to rights. Now it was time to make good on the future. If Nic had given her anything it was the strength to do this. To be proud of the woman she’d become and stand tall before them.

  Chin up, she took a deep breath, then another, trying to fight past the anxiety flurrying inside her as she walked down the hallway, concealed by the shadows. Then the double doors slowly opened before her, luring her forward, guiding her into the light.

  Stunned gasps were a susurrus around her head and Pia could hear their surprise, feel their shock. This was tantamount to a revolution. This was their new beginning. And hers too. No more hiding. She’d blasted Nic for his dishonesty, his betrayal, but hadn’t she too used subterfuge and chicanery to run this club? Yes, she had.

  And now she wanted to draw off this last veil—to bring her whole self to the stage. She didn’t want to be Olympia Merisi, the tainted girl who had been groomed into the son her father had never had. She didn’t want to sit in her ivory tower behind a curtain of shame and hide any longer. And if the club falls? whispered the little devil on her shoulder. Then she’d have done her utmost to be honest and true to them and to herself, and that was more important than upholding a vow to a man who’d thought nothing of destroying a family to fuel his greed.

  Yes, despite everything she’d loved her father. He’d saved her, given her a future, but surely after twelve years her debt had been repaid.

  This was for Pia.

  She stood in front of a high-backed leather chair—a ludicrous throne she’d toss out at the first opportunity. She wouldn’t lord it over anyone. In this room they were equals.

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, her voice strong enough to carry through the room as she looked every single man and woman in the eye, her heart steadying as her inner strength bolstered her will. ‘I am Zeus. And I believe we have business to discuss.’