The Italian's Twin Consequences

by Caitlin Crews

  What were you thinking? she asked herself for the nine hundredth time that minute as the car wound around and around the desolate hill toward Combe Manor.

  But of course, that was the trouble. For the first time in her highly academic, resolutely intellectual existence, she hadn’t been thinking at all.

  And really, she’d expected him to do...something on the way to this village in Yorkshire. To taunt her, at the very least. Stick his knives in deeper. Or do whatever it was he’d done in his office that had made her act the way she had. Like a completely different woman had inhabited her body when he’d touched her.

  Sarina had steeled herself as she’d settled on the wide leather seat, certain she wanted nothing to do with whoever that different woman was and certain she could ward him off this time despite her previous behavior—

  But all Matteo had done was pull out his phone and some papers. And then he’d rolled one business call into the next for the entirety of the trip north, speaking at least six different languages, to her ear.

  Instead of relaxing Sarina, because he wasn’t paying her the slightest notice and no warding off was necessary, it had only made her more tense.

  She had never felt like a pawn before. She had felt helpless and powerless when Jeannette had fallen into the clutches of the man who had ruined her, but Sarina had gone and built the rest of her life in deliberate response to that. Since then, she had always made sure that she was in charge. It was one of the reasons she had succeeded at her job for all these years. She was never off balance. She was always, always in control.

  And she didn’t know quite what to do now the tables were turned.

  She didn’t know...how to sit. How to hold herself. How to function when she knew Matteo pulled all the strings now.

  She had never learned how to dance like the marionettes the British loved so much—and she wasn’t sure she was ready to start.

  It was late when they arrived at the manor house. Though it was lit up imposingly, the night itself was damp and shockingly, relentlessly dark. There were no stars to cast a little light and remind her that there was more to life than the comeuppance that awaited her within the grim stone walls of this place. And as Matteo ushered her in from the car, through the imposing front door, Sarina took in gulps of air that chilled her inside as well as out.

  “Welcome to Combe Manor,” Matteo told her, almost offhandedly, as he led her into the hall. “No one in its known, recorded history has ever been happy here, but who knows? Perhaps you will be the first.”

  Sarina eyed his forbidding profile, not sure how to respond to that. Not sure what to do with herself—or with this dangerous man who had showed her his teeth already. “It would be helpful if you set out the parameters of this arrangement.”

  “All in due course,” he replied, sounding very nearly merry. And that glint in his gray eyes was downright festive. “Enjoy the dread and apprehension, Sarina. Those are two of your favorite weapons, are they not?”

  And she couldn’t say she much cared for the way his mouth curved as he looked at her, with something she would never be so foolish as to label a smile.

  She wanted to fight. She wanted to do...something.

  But he only nodded, and it took her a moment to realize it was to someone who’d materialized silently behind her. Because, of course, he had staff. Likely quite a lot of staff.

  “Angela will see you to your room,” he told her in that same merry way. “And I will see you tomorrow morning, bright and early. I can only hope you spend the night awake and staring at the ceiling, reliving your each and every sin and regret.”

  She started to reply the way she usually did, sharp and cutting in return, but stopped herself.

  “Look at that,” Matteo murmured, with a kind of dark approval in his voice that made everything inside of Sarina...slide around, hot and bothersome and wrong in every possible way. “You can learn. I am so proud.”

  And then, when he waved his hand like a king to a peasant, she had no choice but to follow the silent, notably unfriendly Angela through the great, echoing house as she was bid.

  Everything he’d said to her had sounded like a threat, and echoed there inside of her, growing. Expanding. Making it harder and harder to breathe.

  She assumed that had been his goal. And she would have died before admitting it to him. Sarina hardly wanted to admit it to herself.

  She was deposited in a suite of rooms that looked out into the thick night off the back of the house. Or so she assumed, as she couldn’t see even the faintest light to suggest a village down below. Perhaps in the morning she would see fields. The famous moors, perhaps. But tonight there was only her own reflection.

  And the last person Sarina wanted to look at was herself.

  She took a shower, hoping the hot water would soothe her, but it didn’t help. She climbed into the big, canopied bed that stood against one wall in the bedroom, turned off all the lights, and lay there.

  Staring at the ceiling, just as Matteo had predicted, wondering how all of this had come to pass. Not only what had happened earlier in his office, with that video—and her own out-of-character reaction to him. But...everything. Her life.

  How had she ended up in this gloomy old house, more or less a prisoner of a man she’d hated on principle alone before he’d hoisted her up high on her own petard and let her swing?

  You know how, that voice inside of her that she was beginning to hate along with Matteo Combe, chimed in.

  And she might not like to admit it, but she did know.

  Sarina had started off with the best of intentions. She’d mourned Jeannette through her work, and she’d honestly believed that she was doing good. She had always prided herself on her research, and had stood up to many a board of directors who she’d determined were unfairly targeting their executives, usually because someone was jockeying for position. She’d been pleasantly surprised many a time. And when necessary, she’d taken a certain pleasure in ridding the corporate world of terrible, selfish, narcissistic bullies who were only vulnerable to their bottom lines and the men who controlled it.

  She had been ethical, always, or so she’d thought.

  But somehow, somewhere along the way—and it pained her to admit this to herself—she’d turned into the enemy herself.

  And it had taken Matteo Combe, of all people, to make her realize it.

  By the time the dawn crept in, light gleaming at the edges of the curtains she’d drawn tight, Sarina had tossed and turned the whole night through. The way he’d told her he hoped she would, which made the hollow feeling inside her ache. Her eyes were gritty, she felt scraped raw, and she had spent the night obsessively going over each and every case she had ever had.

  She knew she hadn’t been wrong about the men she’d helped topple from their exalted positions. They had been noted bullies. But that didn’t make Sarina herself the bright, shining light of righteousness she’d imagined herself all this time.

  Her motivations weren’t quite as noble as she’d thought they were, were they?

  Because she couldn’t help thinking that if she was a truly good person—if she’d honestly tried to help Matteo, say, instead of going out of her way to push him over a cliff of her own making—she wouldn’t be here.

  About to face her own reckoning whether she wanted to or not.

  She rose from her bed, feeling like a very old woman. Every one of her joints seemed to ache as if she’d developed a terrible arthritis in the night, so she went and sat in the tub for a while, hoping that hot water and a liberal application of the fancy bath salts she found next to it would do her some good.

  But when she got out, she smelled rather strongly of lavender and was otherwise unchanged.

  A different maid was waiting for her when she emerged from her bedroom.

  “Mr. Combe would like to see you now,” the girl said, and
when Sarina tried to smile her thanks, it was as if she was wearing a mask of her own face. Her mouth didn’t seem to work any longer.

  She’d tossed on the clothes she usually saved to wear when she was blissfully alone in her hotel room—a pair of comfortable, stretchy trousers and a soft pullover. She thought about changing into something more professional, but discarded the idea. There was no point putting on any kind of armor. Not now. Not when she had sunk so far.

  And more, not when Matteo would know exactly what she was doing and use it against her, as she had to believe he would.

  She didn’t even bother putting her hair up into its usual smooth twist, which was her version of a white flag of surrender. She followed the maid down the hall as she was, then down the great stairs. The house was quiet all around her, and filled with as many shadows as fussy statues and ponderous art.

  Sarina was halfway toward thinking the whole manor house was a kind of stuffy museum to dead people, like most of Great Britain to her mind, until they turned a corner and arrived at a surprisingly sunny little breakfast room. It sported a view out the bay windows of rolling moors in the distance, brooding and beautiful, and an exquisitely manicured garden closer in, and worst of all, there at the table with his dark gray eyes already glittering with more victories she knew would cost her, was Matteo.

  Her doom.

  And if she was brutally honest with herself, her just desserts.

  “You look sufficiently martyred,” Matteo said, that dark voice of his cutting through all those voices and regrets in Sarina’s head. “I half expected you to walk into this room dragging a crucifix behind you.”

  There were several propped up amongst the hideous artwork cluttering up the second floor, she nearly said, but caught herself. That was old Sarina. New Sarina was more circumspect.

  She stood where the maid had left her, there before the table where Matteo sat, as if awaiting his judgment. She forced her neck to bend, clasped her hands before her, and tried to appear demure.

  Whatever that looked like.

  “Are you unwell?” Matteo’s voice was a dark lash. And if she wasn’t mistaken, that was amusement in his gray eyes. “You’re looking rather peaked.”

  “I am perfectly well,” Sarina said. And then, because perhaps there was only one Sarina and she had no idea what she was doing, she smiled. “Well rested, in fact. I’m not sure I’ve ever slept so deeply in my life.”

  His eyes were like smoke and they laughed at her, though he made no noise and his stern mouth did not curve in the slightest. “I’m delighted to hear it. The manor house is not known for its hospitality, much less its comfort, but it thrills me that you again defy expectations.”

  He had not invited her to sit, and if this was any other day, Sarina would have pushed it. She would have gone to the table and helped herself to his seat. Then to the coffee she could see steaming away in the French press at his elbow.

  But she didn’t dare do any of those things, because she couldn’t help thinking this was all a test. One that was set up for her to fail already.

  So she stayed where she was and endeavored to look totally at her ease.

  “I thought stately homes such as this were meant to be the first word in comfort and hospitality.” She worked on her smile, aiming it at him and trying to imagine it without edges, somehow. “Surely that is its purpose.”

  “How delightfully American.” He sat back in his chair, folding the paper he’d been reading in front of him, its pink pages gleaming faintly in the sun. “You misunderstand entirely the purpose of a pile of stones like Combe Manor. Comfort and hospitality are the very last thing one should expect from a place like this. It is a monument to cold, hard ambition. Each and every stone represents a chunk of human soul given or traded away by one of my ancestors. There is only one way to rise from peasant roots to wealth like this, and it isn’t a pretty road. The house is meant to cause nightmares, not dreams. Some might call it a cautionary tale.”

  “If you dislike it so much, why come here at all?”

  “Because it is my home, Sarina. Whether I like it or not.”

  He studied her for a moment that dragged on too long, then nodded to the chair opposite him.

  She didn’t wait for him to clarify his feelings about his home. She sat down, and tried not to sigh audibly when he filled her coffee cup for her. And she knew that he was likely doing it to sneak beneath her defenses, put her off her guard—but she didn’t care. Not when there was coffee.

  “Last night you wanted parameters,” he said as she took her first deep sip, the rich, strong brew shooting through her, right where she needed it. “There is only one thing I want. You need to convince my board that my behavior is above reproach. You must give them whatever reports they need to prove that I am not merely the best CEO and president Combe Industries has ever had, I am, indeed, the best of men.”

  Sarina took another pull from her coffee while she tried to collect her thoughts. “Do you think that will work?”

  “If it does not, you and I will both be out of a job, and I suspect that video will make the nightly news.”

  Just in case she was tempted to forget where she was. And why. No matter how great the coffee was after a restless night.

  “Yes, thank you. I haven’t forgotten that you’re blackmailing me.”

  “I prefer to think of it as an inducement to do the right thing.”

  “The right thing, in this scenario, being perverting my methodology to produce the result you want. On command.”

  “Are we pretending that you walked into your first meeting with me without an agenda in place?” Matteo’s voice was silky then, but that only made the blade of it slide in deeper. “How can I pervert a methodology that is already twisted and biased?”

  Sarina cleared her throat, and did not answer that. “Normally how this works is that I take a full month to six weeks. I have as many meetings with the subject as I deem necessary. After each meeting, I routinely check in with my client and tell them how I think these meetings are going.”

  “Have you checked in with them after your meeting with me yesterday?”

  She didn’t want to think about yesterday at all, and certainly not when she was in his presence. But that was one more thing that wasn’t up to her anymore.

  “No.”

  Matteo nodded at her and she thought she could see every San Giacomo ancestor of his in the way he inclined his head, as if he was too noble to live.

  She assured herself she found that repulsive. But the slick heat between her legs told her otherwise, and she didn’t know what to do with a disobedient body. It had never happened to her before.

  “Go on then,” he said, a silken order. “I want to listen to your report.”

  She hadn’t expected this, and she should have. Sarina couldn’t understand how this man kept catching her off her guard at every turn. What was the matter with her that she couldn’t seem to get her bearings around him?

  Even as she thought it, she felt her hand twitch, and she knew that if she’d been any closer to him, that hand would have reached out of its own accord to touch him.

  Again.

  She wanted to cry. She wanted to crumple into that broken heap she had been only once, after Jeanette, and had vowed she would never be again.

  And that was the least forgivable thing in all of this, she thought. She could shrug off the blackmail as one more corporate manipulation, and call it even, really. But this man kept making her feel things she had been certain she had locked away forever.

  Pain, hurt, helplessness. She thought she’d excised it all, but here it was again. As if it had been lying in wait all this time.

  “Very well,” she said calmly, though her tongue felt thick in her mouth. And she hadn’t had near enough coffee. “If you insist.”

  There was the faintest suggestion of a smile on
his lips then. “I do.”

  Sarina felt like she was having an out-of-body experience, except both versions of her were trapped here in this brooding house. With Matteo. And there was nothing for her to do but reach into the pocket of her trousers and pull out her cell phone, as he’d commanded.

  She tried to school her features to the sort of impassivity that was called for here, but she couldn’t quite get there. His gaze was too intent. Too dark and knowing.

  She scrolled through her contacts, found the name of the chairman of his board, and pressed the button to call the number.

  And as it rang, she stared across the table in all the surprising Yorkshire morning light, wishing that something—anything—could dull the man in front of her. This was the first time she’d seen him in natural light. No rain outside to mute the impact he had. No clouds or gray skies to make him less vivid.

  Matteo was beautiful.

  He wore dark trousers and a button-down shirt, open at the neck, as if he thought a business meeting might break out at any moment. He looked pressed and perfect, and the quiet exquisiteness of his clothing only underscored all of that brooding masculinity that seemed to wrap around her where she sat.

  He seemed bigger now. Taller somehow, though the only thing that had grown since yesterday was her appreciation of his ability to play all the games she did, but better.

  She set her teeth, cleared her throat as she heard the other line pick up, and then it was time for her performance.

  “Speaker,” Matteo mouthed at her, tapping the tabletop to underscore his command that she let him hear both sides of this call.

  She obliged, of course. What else could she do? She pressed the requisite button, then set her phone down on the tabletop between them.

  “I trust you’re calling with more good news,” came Roderick Sainsworth’s booming voice. He had been Eddie Combe’s best friend, and something of an uncle to Matteo and Pia if the reports were to be believed. But with Eddie gone, Matteo’s scandalous behavior at the funeral presented Roderick with an opportunity. Sarina understood men like Roderick completely.