“Did you fail to notice where we were when we arrived?” He gestured toward the windows. “Or take a peek at the view? Textile mills and row houses as far as the eye can see, on both sides of the river. Smokestacks like steeples all over the Pennines.”
“You said this house was the problem, not the mills in town.”
“I admire that you imagine there could be some separation between the fate of the mills and of the people in this house. Outward appearances to the contrary, they have always been inextricably linked.” His head tilted to one side. “I had no idea you were so interested in the history of the area. Why is this under discussion in the first place?”
“I was under the impression time was of the essence,” she replied, and the more jagged and undone he felt, the smoother she sounded. It pricked at him. “The sooner I can report on a third session to your board, the sooner we part ways.”
He had been thinking something similar earlier, when he was virtuously sending his personal assistant off to corral his long-lost brother, the better to distinguish himself from his father. But he found he didn’t like it much when she said it.
“Because now, of course, we’re in some kind of a hurry. There was no sense of urgency whatsoever when you were in control of these proceedings.”
“I thought that was what you wanted.”
But she didn’t say it in any kind of obsequious fashion. There was something in that gaze of hers that struck him as wholly uncowed by anything that had happened. Whatever she said to make it sound as if his wishes were of concern to her, all she really wanted was to get away from this. From him.
Matteo shouldn’t have cared what she wanted. He was the one blackmailing her, after all.
But he hated it.
God help him, but he hated it with such force he was surprised his skin didn’t peel away from his bones. It felt as if it might.
“I am beside myself with astonishment,” he found himself growling at her, as if he was suddenly unable to play this game he’d set into motion himself. What was happening to him? “My wants and needs are suddenly of paramount importance to you, the woman who wished to ruin me. Oh happy day.”
“I must have misunderstood you,” Sarina replied, almost sweetly. Almost. “Do you want to wrap up the current situation with your board of directors and return to your regular life unscathed? Or do you want to toy with me, playing cat and mouse games in this empty old house of yours?”
He considered her. “Must I choose?”
She shifted where she stood, her chin lifting in a wordless display of her defiance, even now. Even here. “Don’t feel you need to rush to a decision on my account. But I’ll remind you that every day that passes with this cloud over your head, your ability to lead your company effectively becomes more questionable. Still, I suppose you must do you.”
That scraping restlessness inside him crystallized, turning into something else, brittle and bright in turn.
“This is not a happy place,” he said, his voice gruff. And all this maddening woman did was gaze back at him, as if she wasn’t the problem. “It is filled with ghosts of desperate, determined men who got some of what they wanted, but never all. And worse still, the women and children they took their disappointment out on.”
“I thought the Combes were rich industrialists, stretching back generations.”
“Some of them were. And they enjoyed being rich, do not mistake me. But naturally, when a man gets most of what he wants, he spends his time concentrating on what he cannot get. In my family’s case, that would be acceptance into society. Believe you me, there is nobody more desperate than a rich man who wants to be an aristocrat, but can never wash away the taint of his peasant blood.”
“Surely your father broke this tradition for you. He might have had peasant blood—” and she said those words in that uniquely American way, infused with the brash certainty that theirs was the only classless society in the history of mankind “—but he married into an aristocratic Italian family. You should therefore be happily untainted, shouldn’t you?”
“My parents’ relationship was a famous love story.” Matteo couldn’t stand still. He found himself roaming across the floor, not meaning to end up in front of her. Not conscious that was what he was doing, anyway. But then there he was “Do you know what that means?”
Sarina shrugged, which seemed particularly provocative when he was this close to her. “Thinly veiled made-for-cable movies based on their lives? Or more likely, on intrusive articles about their lives?”
Matteo smiled and thought she saw the warning in it when her expression turned wary.
“Mostly what it meant was that they were focused entirely on each other, to the exclusion of all else. Who was faithful. Who had lied and about what. Who had flirted at this or that party the night before. They betrayed each other a thousand times a day, fought, fell apart, and argued their way back together. Over and over and over again, always conscious of the fact that any misstep they made would be seized by a greedy public and dissected by strangers. They were deeply concerned about those strangers and only occasionally forced to notice that there were other people in this house. Children, for example, who might need or want the occasional hint of parental affection. But children are not the storytelling public, forever obsessed with other people’s fairy tales, so we were usually ignored.”
Sarina’s gaze searched his. “That doesn’t sound like a love story at all.”
“What is love if not the stubborn insistence that hope must vanquish experience, time and time again, despite all evidence to the contrary?”
His own cynicism seemed to have a scent, acrid and thick.
But it was true, so there was no reason he should have wanted to gather those words up, take them back, keep her from hearing them. Much less the echo of them, filling up the room all around them.
“You should think about opening up your own line of sentimental greeting cards,” Sarina suggested after a moment. Her voice was dry, her chin was lifted, but once again, that too-rapid pulse in her throat gave her away. “Just think of all the money you could make with all that...unnecessary emotional honesty.”
“My mother called my father a bully. My father called my mother deceitful. They both would have called their relationship tempestuous. But I will tell you, as the child who was forever buffeted around in the storms they kicked up between them, I just wanted them to be the people I thought they were. A man too mighty and a woman too beautiful for the world.”
“But it was the house you blamed. Not them.”
“Some say there is a curse.” Matteo was closer than he should have been. Standing over her in that doorway, every part of him focused on Sarina, as if her upturned face was causing that bright, brittle shattering inside of him. And he couldn’t say it wasn’t her. Nor did he step back. “No one who’s lived here has ever been happy, so the locals mutter no one ever will. Even the ghosts are too depressed to get in a good haunting.”
But he felt haunted anyway. He’d felt it since she’d walked into his villa and turned his life on end. She was his only ghost, and the closer he stood to her the more he felt that same tug of reluctant recognition that had dogged him since he’d laid eyes on her.
It didn’t escape him that she did not appear to be similarly afflicted.
“Do you think that being raised by people who were forever at odds in this way affected how you behaved at your father’s funeral?” she asked, in case he’d had any doubt on that score.
“Why are you psychoanalyzing me, Doctor?” Matteo’s voice was so low it was barely a lick of sound, though it felt much louder inside of him. “We are past that now, are we not?”
“I have to follow a certain protocol,” Sarina replied, and then swallowed, hard, that pulse in her neck telling him that even if she wasn’t haunted the way he was, she was still affected. That was something. He told himself that had to mean somethi
ng. “The third meeting requires a presentation on my part to the client.”
“The client who is not paying you to find me a sympathetic figure and will likely take against you when you do.”
“Whatever outcome Mr. Sainsworth may want, he is actually paying me to be impartial. You heard me tell him so myself.”
“Is it believable, do you think?”
And something in him broke then. He couldn’t seem to keep himself from reaching out when he knew he shouldn’t. When he knew it not only told her things he should want to keep from her, it put him in the same position she’d found herself in yesterday.
Yet he still let his finger do what it liked, tracing the line of her jaw, then dipping down to move back and forth over that pulse of hers. Until he could feel the beat of it deep in his own sex.
“You are feared for your takedowns, not your support. How will Sainsworth react when the feared enemy of the C-suite actually...suggests a CEO not be fired?”
She reached up and grabbed his finger. To stop him, presumably.
Though he was perverse enough to feel it like a caress.
“You threw Jeanette in my face for a reason.” Sarina’s voice was quiet. It seemed to shudder its way through him—something he liked about as much as he did that steady, knowing gaze of hers. “And I didn’t like it, but I understand why you did it. It’s far more upsetting to face the fact that you have a point. While I’ve always prided myself on my impartiality, it’s possible that I’ve allowed myself to assume guilt rather than allowing the facts to lead me to the appropriate conclusion, whatever that might be.”
Matteo didn’t make the mistake of imagining she was complimenting him. Much less surrendering. Or, heaven forbid, apologizing.
The way you rushed to do, a snide voice inside him supplied. Unhelpfully.
That smile of hers was still razor sharp. “But we will never be able to tell whether my mandated glowing report on you is something you actually deserve. Or whether it’s simply the spoils of war because you managed to outmaneuver me.”
“Something I can live with, I think. As it hardly matters.”
“It matters to me.” She pushed his hand away, and he let her do it. But only so he could watch, fascinated anew, as she drew herself up taller. “I don’t necessarily need your life story, Mr. Combe. But the more detail I can give that shows we really did have a third session, the better. You understand that it’s not just your professional reputation on the line.”
For the first time in his entire life, Matteo didn’t care in the least about his professional reputation or how it made him like or unlike his father. He should have moved back. He should have continued his restless pacing around the library, since he couldn’t seem to stay still. But he didn’t do either one of those things.
“I understand that I asked you to call me by my name,” he said instead, watching her pulse tell him the truths she wouldn’t. “That you won’t begin to feels like deliberate provocation.”
“I think that might be some leftovers from your parents’ relationship, maybe floating around here like your ghosts,” she shot back at him. “It shouldn’t matter what I call you.”
And he thought about the books, the damned books, volume after volume with nothing inside them. All those leather covers, crafted to showcase a wealth of knowledge no one in this house possessed.
And somehow that tangled around inside of him, kicking over into this woman, her taste, and the fact he hadn’t felt like himself since she’d walked into his villa in Venice.
He was terribly afraid he never would again.
“It seems to me you should be far more concerned about keeping me happy than you are,” he pointed out, as if he hadn’t spent the day questioning himself. “I would have thought that was the point of blackmailing someone, if I’m honest. Built-in genuflecting, bowing and scraping on command, I would have said.”
“I was under the impression your specific blackmail threat was about sex and shame,” she hurled right back at him. “Bowing and scraping weren’t mentioned.”
“Surely that part was implied.”
He didn’t expect it when she jerked forward, her gaze bright with something it took him too long to realize was a kind of fury. On the surface, anyway.
But when he did, his body responded instantly.
Hard. Hot. Ready.
“The fact of the matter is that you’re just as bad as any other man I’ve taken down,” Sarina informed him, very distinctly—as if to make certain he was paying close attention. “The funny part is that they all knew exactly who they were. You’re the one who seems to be confused. Let me clear that up for you. Good men don’t blackmail. The end.”
“Good women don’t build their lives around revenge fantasies,” he hurled right back at her. “So I will thank you not to imagine you are somehow cantering about the moors on any kind of moral high horse.”
“I have a purpose. My life has meaning. It doesn’t have to make sense to you, or anyone else. It doesn’t have to be right.” She threw each word at him as if she thought she might cut him in half. He had no intention of letting her see how easily she could. “And I certainly don’t care if my choices make overstuffed, overconfident men like you uncomfortable.”
“The only thing you have going for you, Sarina, is my goodwill.” Matteo laughed. Loud, because the only kind of goodwill he had about her concerned getting inside her. Before he exploded. “And here you are. Squandering it by the moment.”
She rolled her eyes. At him.
“Your problem is that you’re used to people being afraid of you. I’m not. I don’t want that tape going out in the world, true. But I’m not afraid of you, Matteo.”
He swept his gaze over her, noting the flush in her cheeks, the way her chest moved with the force of her breath, and even the fists she curled her hands into at her sides. Curled and then uncurled, as if in time with that pulse in her neck.
The one that matched the answering pulse in his sex.
And somehow, he didn’t think this was a simple as her temper. But he could think of one thing that was resolutely simple. The most simple thing in the world.
“If you want me, Doctor, all you need do is ask.”
The effect on her was instant. And electric. She stiffened, then her cheeks flamed.
“You pompous, conceited, insufferable—”
“Sarina, Sarina,” he murmured, her name a confection in his mouth, sweet and right. “That is not how you say please.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“OR,” MATTEO CONTINUED, his voice silk and sex and too many other things Sarina didn’t know how to name, though she could feel them all like velvet temptation inside of her, changing her, “perhaps you do not know how to ask for what you want. Is that it, little one?”
Sarina had already been angry. She had spent the day locked away in her rooms, going over what had happened in that breakfast room again and again. Better still, picking through every moment of every interaction she’d had with this man, still trying to understand how she’d ended up here.
How he could be so loathsome—to throw Jeanette in her face, to challenge her the way he did—and yet she still felt that molten betrayal pulsing between her legs.
It was worse now.
Much, much worse.
And the things he’d said to her made her want to scream. Sarina gulped that down, but she couldn’t seem to do a thing about the thick heat that burst all over her and kept right on going, making her...burn. As if she’d thrown open the door and stepped into a sauna and wasn’t sure she could breathe through the steam.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. Because it was the only thing she could think to say. “I’m not your little one.”
And her stomach dropped, because the look he gave her then was... Different. Considering. Pure male speculation mixed with something else, somethin
g that looked a good deal like...patience.
Patience etched on stone.
It made her feel as if he’d reached down inside of her, rummaged around, and turned her inside out.
“You were a very driven child,” he said, his voice musing, which seemed to connect directly to all the heat that suffused her. “You were the valedictorian of your high school class. You excelled in college, maintaining a distractingly high grade point average all four years.”
Of all the things she’d imagined he might say, it certainly wasn’t that.
She tried to pivot. To follow him wherever he was going, the way she would have done if this was any kind of normal session. She was supposed to be good at this. Following the threads, knitting them together—
But he was talking about her life. And he was doing it with that odd light in his dark gray eyes, that patience she couldn’t help but think boded ill for her, and worse still, she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.
“I’m actually already conversant on my academic record, thank you,” she managed to say, and she didn’t understand why she felt shaky. When nothing was happening.
Except... She didn’t feel right. She thought maybe she was coming down with something, brought on, no doubt, by the stress of all this. She felt weightless and raw, swollen and shaky, all at once. She was wet between her legs, her breasts actually hurt they ached so much, and she couldn’t think what could cause all of those things at once. It had to be that she was coming down with something.
“You applied yourself with the same rigor to your graduate studies. And then you lost your friend.”
“No one talks about her anymore,” Sarina said quietly, despite how bizarrely ill she felt. She was sure it was an illness, though she didn’t feel sick. Just...off. “Too many years have passed. Half the people I know now don’t remember her, and those who do think too much time has passed to bring her up at all. It’s like she never existed. Normally, I would be delighted that her name came up twice in one day. But you’ve managed to ruin that, too.”
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