by Maisey Yates
“Only if you can’t handle me yourself.”
“I’m more than capable. I’m not a little girl.”
No, she wasn’t. Not even close. His heart thundered heavily in his chest, the desire, the need to reach out and touch her almost overwhelming. But he couldn’t afford to feel anything. Not now. Not when he was so close.
He forced his thoughts back on his goal, on his reason for being there. “Good. Busy tonight?”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “I don’t know. Am I? Do I have a choice?”
Annoyance surged through him. “Do you think I’m taking total control of your life?”
“I don’t know what you expect from a little wife,” her words taunting, arousing, infuriating.
His heart thundered hard in his chest. She was making him out to be some kind of a tyrant. She was making him feel like one. He didn’t like it, he didn’t want her to see him that way, and he had no idea why he should care. When she hadn’t seen him as the enemy, she’d seen him as beneath her.
He rounded the desk and she stood, hands on her round, shapely hips, a deadly glitter in her eyes.
“I expect you to attend events on my arm,” he said. “I expect to use your connections to make advantageous business deals. And I expect this.” He hooked his arm around her waist and drew her to him.
She was breathing hard, her breasts rising and falling against his chest. He realized he was breathing hard too. To hell with fighting it. She was his now, no longer off limits to him.
See. Want. Have.
He put his hand on her face, cupped her cheek, touched her soft lower lip with his thumb. “I want this,” he said, his voice sounding rough, strained, even to his own ears.
He dipped his head and kissed her. Her lips parted beneath his. He wasn’t certain whether it was in shock or supplication, but he wasn’t going to stop and analyze it either.
She would be his now. Finally. His. All the longing, the lust that he’d carried around with him for so many years, aching and unsatisfied no matter how many women had warmed his bed since …
She tasted the same. Just as he remembered. So utterly unique, unforgettable. The only woman who had ever made him lose his head, the only woman who had ever rejected him. The only woman whose memory lingered after years of separation. Most women were a vague impression after a few days. Not Vanessa. She had stayed vivid and powerful in his mind.
And it had only been a shadow of the reality.
Actually kissing her, the velvety slide of her tongue against his, the soft sigh of satisfaction she made against his lips, her fingers curling around the fabric of his shirt as she held on to him, anchoring him to her, that was better than anything in his memory. It made his blood run like liquid fire through his veins, made his body pulse with need, made him hard and aching with the necessity of burying himself inside her.
She stole any semblance of control with the softness of her lips.
He slid his hand around the indent of her waist, the curve of her hip. She had changed physically. Her curves were softer, more womanly. More enticing. He’d been a boy twelve years ago, but he was a man now. And she was all woman.
Vanessa felt empowered by his passion, his anger. He was trying to show her that he had the power, but in one intense rush, she realized that she was the one who held it, because his hands, sifting through her hair, were unsteady, his body was hard with arousal. For her. Because of her.
He deepened the kiss and she took his bottom lip between her teeth, nipping the tender skin, showing him that she wasn’t going to be passive, in this or anything else, needing badly to stake a claim on him, as he was doing to her.
A growl rumbled in his chest and he took a step, backing her into her desk. She heard her pencil holder fall onto the floor, its contents scattering. She didn’t care.
There was nothing. Nothing but this. This battle of wills and the all-consuming passion that was taking over her mind, her body.
His fingers crept beneath the edge of her top and she was arched into him, powerless to do anything else. And that sudden loss of control, that concession to his power, made a jolt of reality slap her in the face.
She’d promised herself she wasn’t going to let him have this control. She shouldn’t feel the way she did, as if she would die if she didn’t have him. Inside of her. Now. On the floor, the desk, wherever.
She couldn’t afford to give him this part of her, to let him have dominion over her body. He would never love her, and if she gave in to this … she would be vulnerable. She couldn’t allow that.
Maybe you can’t have love, but you can have this.
Amazing, all-consuming lust.
No. It would never just be that. Not for her. Lazaro was more to her than just a hard body. And she would never be anything more to him than a simple means of feeding his sex drive.
She let go of him and pulled away, her heart thundering in her ears.
He flicked a dismissive glance in her direction, seemingly unaffected by what had just happened between them. Totally unfair, since her world had had another dramatic shift on its axis.
“I can see it won’t be a problem,” he said.
“What?” she asked, still feeling thick and muddled from the arousal that was crowding all the good, useful information out of her brain and leaving room only for the screaming want that was pounding through her.
“The attraction between us is very strong. That part of our marriage will not be a problem.”
As far as physical attraction went, no, it wouldn’t be. But it would be everything she’d never wanted and then some. A man using her because she was convenient. Because she had status. Because she had things he wanted, not because she was who he wanted.
That he was attracted to her didn’t make her feel all that special. Yes, Lazaro was a sex god with looks that could not be denied, but men tended to like sex from whoever would give it to them. And after that display he was probably feeling pretty positive that getting it would be easy.
“I have work to do,” she said, sinking back into her chair.
“I’ll leave you to it then. Are we on for tonight?”
“What are we doing?” she asked, her eyes wandering to the pen still resting in her teacup.
“It’s a surprise.”
Vanessa watched him walk out of the room and her only thought was that she didn’t think she could take another surprise from Lazaro.
Lazaro touched the velvet box in his coat pocket and cursed the flash of adrenaline that raced through him. It was adrenaline; it certainly wasn’t nerves. He didn’t do nerves. He did decisive action. He didn’t question, he moved forward with confidence. Always.
That was how he’d worked his way up from the ground level of the massive corporation he’d eventually built up with his ideas on how to reinvent the place. It was how he’d built a career, a name for himself. How he’d netted billions in the bank.
He took advantage of every resource and did what had to be done. As he was doing now.
It was extremely fortuitous that one of the art museum’s head curators happened to be on a par with Vanessa’s father as far as social clout went. And even more fortuitous that she was a gossip.
It meant that she would tell anyone who was even half-interested that Lazaro Marino had paid to have the museum empty this evening so that he could ask the woman in his life a very important question.
In Vanessa’s circle, media exposure was seen as vulgar, common. Anyone could earn that kind of notoriety. The First Families and those like them saw class as something you were born with, not something you could acquire. And anyone who wasn’t born with it was somehow less.
The way to spread the word was through careless discretion, nothing half so common as an actual write-up in a newspaper.
He curled his fingers around the ring box and leaned against the terrace railing. Vanessa was due to arrive soon, another detail carefully coordinated with a trail that would be easy to follow.
&nbs
p; He heard high heels on marble and looked up. Vanessa was walking toward him, the expression on her face mutinous. She had dressed for the occasion, though, as he’d requested. Red silk this time, hugging her curves. Her lips were painted to match her dress and her dark hair was pulled back into a neat bun. He wished she’d left it down. He enjoyed the feel of the silken strands sliding through his fingers.
He tightened his hold on the ring box. This was what it was about. The ring. Taking his place in the world. The truth was, he didn’t give a damn about what anyone in high society thought of him. But he wouldn’t be seen as beneath anyone, as some sort of trash from the barrio they could despise and lord their power over. He wouldn’t be beneath anyone. And Vanessa was the key.
“What is this?” she asked, looking around the terrace. It was lit by a string of paper lanterns that hung low overhead, just as it had been the night they’d met at the charity event.
“You didn’t guess?”
“I wouldn’t dare try to guess at the inner workings of your mind,” she said, walking to the railing and resting her forearms on the top of it, leaning over, keeping her eyes fixed on the garden.
He moved so that he was standing next to her and pulled the ring box out of his pocket and placed it on the top of the stone railing. “I thought this was an ideal place to make our arrangement official.”
She turned her head sharply, her eyes wide. Then she looked down at the ring box.
“Are you going to look at it?” he asked.
“I … so this is your proposal?” Her eyebrows winged halfway up her forehead, her expression one of pure incredulity.
“I think I proposed already,” he said stiffly.
“Well, but … no, because now there’s a ring.” She didn’t touch the ring box, she just looked at it.
“And most women at this point would be looking at the ring.”
“Why all this?” she asked, ignoring his statement. “The museum and the lights?”
“Because I had to speak to quite a few people to arrange this romantic gesture.”
She nodded slowly. “And they’ll tell other people.”
“Yes. Your social class is just small enough that word travels to everyone in it very quickly.”
She frowned. “Right.”
“I’m sorry, did you want something more public?”
She shrugged. “No.”
Anger surged in him, anger and something else that he couldn’t quite identify. “You’re disappointed?”
“I’m not disappointed. That implies I had an expectation about this moment and, truly, for all I knew, you were going to courier me a ring at my office. But I did have expectations of this moment as far as my life goes.”
“And this doesn’t meet your standards?” he asked, his stomach tightening.
“Not really.”
“You might want to look at the rock before you declare the effort subpar, querida,” he said, conscious of the fact that his accent had thickened with his building anger.
He popped the top on the box and pushed it closer to her. She looked down and her eyes widened. Not a big surprise. Five carats would have that effect on someone like her.
“I hope that’s fitting of a woman of your status.”
Vanessa looked down at the ring, glittering beneath the lantern light. The large, square diamond set into a band of white gold with an intricate, antique-style weave was nestled in cream silk, looking as if it had been made just for her.
There was so much about the moment that seemed made just for her. An empty art museum, a gorgeous man and a marriage proposal. If it had been a real marriage proposal—real in the sense that there was love behind it and not just mercenary business dealings—he would have gotten down on one knee. They would have walked through the museum and talked about their future. They would have felt like the only two people in the world.
If they had never parted, if she had stopped him from leaving that night, maybe it would be real.
Her heart squeezed in her chest and she squelched the thought. It didn’t matter. This was reality. And in reality, he’d shoved the ring in her direction and barely looked at her. He hadn’t even asked the question, and it all just hung between them, awkward and unspoken. Painful. Because this was like some nightmare version of a fantasy she might have created for herself.
“It’s lovely.” She reached out and touched it, hesitant to pick it up, to put it on, because the ring made it all seem real. And final.
And because part of her wanted so badly to wear Lazaro’s ring, so very badly. And that was embarrassing, humiliating. She didn’t really want the Lazaro that had come back into her life with all the finesse of a jackhammer. She wanted the man she used to imagine he was. The man he never had been.
“Don’t you like it, querida?” he asked.
“I love it. It’s beautiful. Perfect.”
“You seem giddy,” he said, his expression flat.
“I love it,” she said, teeth gritted.
“Put it on.”
Anger surged through her, pummeling her tender heart. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
She held her hand out, determined not to be the one to fasten her own diamond handcuffs. He took her hand in his, the heat of his skin on hers sending prickles of electricity through her body, making it nearly impossible for her to cling to the anger that was anchoring her to the balcony, reminding her that this was nothing more than a farce.
He took the ring out of the box and it caught the light. Such a beautiful sign of eternal bondage. She closed her eyes while he pushed it onto her fourth finger. It fit perfectly, and it was more disturbing than anything that it fit. That it somehow seemed right.
She pulled her hand back and brushed her palm down over her skirt, trying to ease the fiery, tingling sensation that was spreading from her fingertips to her wrist.
“How big is it?” Her own voice, the mercenary tone, cooled her off quickly. Reminded her that this was a transaction. Nothing more. Because she had to do something to stop her heart from pounding faster. To keep herself from thinking of all the what-ifs.
“Does it matter?” he asked, his voice as cold as the sick weight in her stomach.
“I’ve heard size matters.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped. “Big enough to satisfy you.”
She swallowed hard, the need to get the upper hand fueling her, choosing her words for her. “I’m not sure about that.”
“The purebred could do better?”
She looked at the ring again. It was beautiful. Perfect. “Possibly.” The lie stuck in her throat.
He jerked back, as though she’d struck him. He looked, just for a moment, like the boy he’d been the night she’d rejected him. Then any vulnerability was gone, replaced with an expression that was as hard as granite.
“I think,” he said, “it’s time we went and had a talk with your father.”
CHAPTER SIX
“I’VE already heard your news, Vanessa. I’ve been down at the club this morning.”
Vanessa fought the urge to hang her head and stare at the toes of her ruby-red shoes. Something happened to her when her father used that tone, that flat, disappointed tone that let her know she’d somehow made a mess of things. She felt like a child again. Small and desperately inadequate, trying to live up to an ideal that had been placed just out of her reach, an ideal she was falling so short of it was nearly laughable.
Michael Pickett wasn’t a large man; he wasn’t young anymore. His voice was thin now, wispy. He couldn’t yell. He didn’t need to. What he could do with a small hint of disapproval in his voice couldn’t be underestimated.
Vanessa swallowed. “Well, it was … unexpected.” She looked down at the rug, a floral-print rug, the same one that had been in place in her father’s office since she could remember. Everything was the same at the Pickett estate. Nothing ever changed. The house was like a relic, surrounded by the modern world but not really a part of it. Like the owner of the estate h
imself.
“And what of your obligations to Craig Freeman? Do they mean nothing?”
“I want to marry Lazaro,” she said. “I don’t want to marry Craig.” That, in the very strictest sense, was the truth. In spite of the fact that things had been stilted between the two of them since the previous night’s engagement, he was still the better option.
“Since when is life about what you want?” he said, his voice soft, and deadlier for it.
“I …”
“Don’t be stupid, Vanessa. This man is beneath you.”
She could sense the moment Lazaro’s control slipped its leash. The moment he was no longer playing his part.
“You had better damn well watch what you say to my fiancée,” Lazaro said, his voice hard, dangerous, each word rougher, less civilized, as though a veneer was slowly being stripped away, revealing the true man. Dangerous. Feral. As far from the polished, old-money setting as it was possible to be.
Lazaro had been silent for most of the meeting, letting Vanessa do the talking. But the silence was broken now. “Vanessa was handed a crippled corporation, and with the remains that you gave to her she’s fashioning something that can survive the new market, the modern sensibility, something no one else on your staff, including you, had the creativity to do.”
She waited for him to say exactly why they were getting married. That he was the one saving the company from a slow corporate death. But he didn’t.
Her father curled his hands into fists. “I’m not taking orders from a man whose mother used to scrub my floors.”
She felt Lazaro stiffen next to her. “But maybe you will take orders from the man who is now the principal shareholder of Pickett Industries. Interesting thing about going public, Mr. Pickett … the public can buy pieces of your company. And I’ve bought quite a few pieces for myself.”
“Having money does not make you an equal with my family,” her father said. “Money doesn’t buy class.”
“But money does buy stock.”
“Vanessa.” Her father leveled his cold gray eyes on her. “Did you know about this?”
“Yes.” Vanessa cleared her throat and tilted her chin up, fighting the urge to look back down at the carpet. She wasn’t going to look down anymore. “He’s my fiancé. So it will still be all in the family, won’t it?”
