Chapter Three #3
His teeth were suddenly on edge, his body so tense he felt as though he might explode. But also, for the first time in a very long time, he felt alive, stimulated. Invested.
‘It’s inconvenient, and I don’t like to be inconvenienced.’
She was staring at him in confusion. ‘Surely you can’t want to work with me. And you don’t have to. You’re an important client. You can call the shots on this.’
‘I can, and I am,’ he said with deceptive casualness. ‘I want you to work for me.’
She took a step forward, her hands clenching around the folder she was holding. ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’
‘You tell me. Do you feel like a punchline?’ he said in that same taunting way she’d asked the question.
‘Very funny.’ Her smile looked as if it was stretched to breaking point. ‘I’m glad you find this situation amusing, Mr Konstantinou.’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing about this situation amuses me, Ms Hamilton. Naturally I would prefer not to have slept with you.’ That jolted her, he thought, watching her chin jerk up, but he told himself he didn’t care.
Had she been honest with him, he would never have slept with her, and if she didn’t like the truth? Tough.
‘I’ve already lost one lawyer. To lose another would be not just inconvenient but careless, and I don’t do careless.’
At the back of the offices, Milner’s overlooked one of those private parks that stippled London, and there was a silence as she stared past him at a fluttering canopy of green leaves.
Regrouping, he thought, or maybe just buying time, and he hated that there was a part of him that couldn’t help admiring her stubbornness.
Of course, he was being stubborn too. Contrarian, in fact. But he was not done with this woman. There were questions he wanted answered. And on a pettier note, it pleased him playing puppet master and jerking her strings to make her dance.
‘Why are you doing this? I mean, you couldn’t get away fast enough two weeks ago.’
‘And what exactly would I be staying for?’
The shock on her face threw everything into sharper contrast, the green of her irises startling against the pupils. And then she recovered, her fury cool, and ice-tipped as if it was studded with diamonds.
‘As if I’d want you to stay.’
‘Enough.’ He spoke more harshly than he intended, and he heard a sudden silence outside the door as if the life of the office had paused.
He took a breath, steadied himself. ‘This is getting us nowhere, and you are wasting your time and, more importantly, mine. You will work for me because I am an important client, which means I call the shots.’
Her eyes fixed on his face. ‘There are lots of very experienced, very effective lawyers at this firm, Mr Konstantinou.’
He shrugged. ‘But none are both female and the same age as my sister. But if you are unwilling to do your job, then of course, I will find another lawyer.’ He held her gaze.
‘Just not at this firm.’ He was bluffing.
He had no intention of letting Willa escape the punishment she deserved for upending his mental state.
And the complexities of the various overlapping family trusts had already turned what he’d hoped would be a cut-and-paste job into a frustratingly long process.
But he couldn’t stall Ariana indefinitely.
There was a pulsing silence.
‘You wouldn’t do that.’ He saw her hands ball into fists. She had given up trying to smile.
‘I wouldn’t want to. Larry and I are friends. I trust him implicitly. But given our history, as you so charmingly put it, I feel it would be only fair to let him know why that trust is wavering.’
‘Is that a threat?’
Staring at her with a calmness he didn’t feel, he shook his head. ‘I’m merely being transparent. You are, of course, free to make your own decision. But I will need you to make that decision before I leave this room.’
Emotions he couldn’t read flickered across her face, and he hated that, even now when he had her cornered, she remained so opaque to him.
‘I’ll take that as a no.’ He turned towards the door.
‘Fine. I’ll do it.’
Her words made him stop midstep, but he made himself wait, made Willa wait a good twenty seconds before he spun round to face her.
‘That wasn’t so hard was it?’ he said softly.
His blood thudded as her gaze sharpened on his face. Not scared. Defiant. ‘You haven’t exactly given me a choice, Mr Konstantinou, but just so we’re clear, what happened at the Clarendon will not happen again. I don’t want there to be any confusion. Any crossing of boundaries.’
‘I’m not the one who needs reminding about the limits of our relationship. Of any relationship.’
She stared up at him in silence. Outwardly she had recovered her composure. Nobody walking in on them would suspect that a battle royale of wills had just taken place between them. Or that she had been vanquished. It was quite a skill at her age to be able to present a perfect shopfront like that.
But then, no doubt it was one she’d perfected; otherwise, how else would she be able to do what she did? What she had done with him at the Clarendon.
A memory of her body coming apart uncontrollably beneath his.
Her pupils flared, and he wondered if it was just temper or if she was remembering it too. Could she feel it swelling up inside of her? If he touched her, would he feel it burning beneath her skin?
He didn’t know when he’d drifted into her orbit, just that he had. All it would take was for him to reach across the space between them—
His palms itched. The air was changing, growing taut, and despite trying so hard to pretend he couldn’t feel it, that pulsing, electric thread between them twitched like the tail of a kite in a gust of wind.
For a moment, neither of them moved, and then the light in her gaze sharpened, and he saw it again, that flicker of light on the floor. Diamonds were supposed to be forever. But not for this woman.
‘One last thing, I have business in Athens, so you’ll have to fly out to meet me there to thrash out the final details.’
Her face, her whole body stilled like some small animal spotting the shadow of a bird of prey.
‘No. I never agreed to that.’
‘I don’t require your agreement. Just your compliance.’
‘But I could do the work remotely until the prenup needs to be signed.’
‘I prefer to do it in person. But if that’s a problem—’
He waited again.
Finally, reluctantly, she said stiffly, ‘It’s not.’
He watched her pulse hammer against the pale skin of her throat, saw her fingers tighten around the folder to leave crescent-shaped imprints in the cardboard.
She was angry but curbing her emotion, and he felt another tiny flicker of admiration but also frustration, because time had rewound and they were back on the street again, and the barriers in her eyes were as high and impregnable as a forest of thorns.
And yet as he turned and walked out the door and down the corridor, he felt calmer than he had in days.