Chapter Five #2
“Sometimes people aren’t bad until they decide to be bad.
” She gritted her teeth at the nausea rising in her throat.
“I’m not sure if he dated me in a long game or realized after we started seeing each other that being close to me could be profitable.
Either way, he fooled me into believing we were in love. ” Self-contempt clenched in her chest.
His expression seemed to harden as the silence thickened, growing potent. Maybe that was her imagination, though. Why would he care about her feelings for another man beyond seeing her as foolish for falling for him?
“I like to think I’m smart.” She forced herself to keep talking.
“I already knew people could be self-interested, but he seemed different. Keen and…” He didn’t need to hear all the ways she’d fallen for Gilbert’s charms. “It was coming up to Christmas. He wanted to meet the people who were close to me.” She brushed at a tickle on her cheek.
“I brought him into a world where I was entrusted to help keep the jackals out.”
Still, Joaquin didn’t say anything while remorse sat like a jagged rock in her throat. It stayed heavy and thorny in her chest.
“He put together an exposé on them,” she said shakily.
“Not a bad light, but it revealed a lot of personal information. He thought he could do it anonymously. He tried selling the story with photos of their children, even though he knew the family worked hard to keep their faces out of the public eye.” She started to tear up, so ashamed. So angry at Gilbert and herself.
“Did they manage to quash it?” he asked grimly.
“Yes. Thankfully, they have the money and influence to buy stories like that before they’re published.
Then some of Killian’s professionals paid him a visit to ensure he didn’t have copies.
He was a promising engineer, but as far as I know he now runs a fish-and-chip truck in a dodgy part of London.
The whole thing sits in my gut like an ulcer. ”
She gripped her elbows, still stinging with the humiliation at allowing herself to be used. At knowing he hadn’t wanted her.
“I realize that doesn’t make me seem like a reliable person to have on your payroll, but the fact is, I know what it’s like to be manipulated by sex and emotion. I would never do that to anyone. It’s horrible.”
His cheek ticked once before he swore and looked away, then scrubbed his hand over his face.
“It’s not just you.” He rose and took a few agitated steps. “It’s him.”
“Who?” Her pulse skipped at the way he was suddenly in motion. “Your father?”
“Yes. He’s the reason I left San Francisco without speaking to you.” The look he flashed her held something that relit the spark in her chest that she was trying very hard to smother.
She clenched a fist against the sensation. Don’t fall for it.
“What happened?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing heavily before he dropped his hand to reveal a weary expression, one that sent a ring of empathy through her.
“The minute you left that night, I picked up a message from Zurina. My father was trying to force her to marry him. She was very upset.”
The woman in the scarf? “She’s far too young for him.”
“He’s seventy-two. She’s twenty-eight,” he agreed grimly.
“She’s also a very wealthy woman. She brought her own fortune to the marriage and inherited Fernando’s shares in LV Global along with his very lucrative investment portfolio and other properties, including the family vineyard that Lorenzo gifted them on their wedding day. ”
“He needs the money?”
“Yes,” he said bluntly. “I didn’t know how deeply in debt he is because I don’t care to know.
When Fernando passed, he seized the chance to return to the helm and I didn’t fight him because LVG isn’t something I wanted.
But he immediately used its cash reserves to pay down debts to cronies.
He’s been taking on more debt ever since, putting the company at risk.
Market forces have played a part, but Lorenzo’s incompetence is the bigger issue.
Fernando spent a decade moving the organization into the modern age.
Lorenzo wants to take it back to what was familiar to him.
He brought in his yes-men. They’re all dinosaurs.
You met some of them today.” He waved a disparaging hand.
Does anyone else care to waste my time?
“He’s been pushing aggressively toward what was tried and true thirty years ago.
The board has been watching the place capsize in real time and were pressuring him to bring me aboard.
He was teasing me with it, but he had no intention of giving it to me so we were at an impasse.
If not for Zurina and the children, I would have let him drown in his own red ink. But I can’t do that.”
She could feel the frustration and animosity coming off him in dangerous, radioactive waves. It wasn’t directed at her, but it was still intimidating.
“So you bought up the debt to oust him.”
“Yes. Zurina’s support was vital to my takeover today. Also, now that I have control of her interest in LVG, she has less value to my father. He should leave her alone, but we’ll see.” He pushed his hand through his hair.
“Doesn’t that put you in his line of fire instead?” she asked with concern.
He shrugged that off, expression remaining hard. “I long ago accepted that he will plague me until one of us dies. I expect him to use any means to sabotage me, my company and LVG, now that I’ve stolen it from him.” His gaze swung to her, landing with a crash. “That includes you.”
“Me?” A clunking sensation swept through her limbs. “How could he use me? Why would he?”
“Because he exploits anything he perceives as a weakness.” His graveled tone made her heart roll to a halt in her chest. “If he learns we’re personally involved, he’ll use it.”
“But…we aren’t,” she said faintly, realizing they couldn’t be.
She had thought he was treating her with such coldness because he didn’t like her. Because he had regrets about San Francisco. She’d been feeling very brushed off and hurt.
Now her brain was catching up to the fact he’d left her for a family emergency.
One with higher stakes than she could have imagined.
He hadn’t owed any explanations to a woman he’d spent an hour with, no matter how intimately they’d spent that time.
He had believed he would never see her again.
That was why he hadn’t come to her door to tell her all of this then.
As her shell of umbrage cracked and fell away, so did most of her defenses against him. A need to help rose like a force inside her.
“Keep me on,” she urged. “I will be a valuable asset and no one will ever know we…” She swallowed whatever words might have described the way they’d knotted themselves together, wringing so much pleasure from a brief hour. “I promise.”
She wasn’t pleading for her job as much as a chance to keep seeing him, if only from afar.
His mouth tightened. The way he delved into her eyes with his narrowed gaze made her feel obvious. Naked. As though he read her motives as clearly as a neon sign.
His cheek ticked. Did he feel it, too? The temptation? The want?
A hot pressure of desperation arrived behind her breastbone. She looked away, blinking, trying to douse it with a measured breath.
“Fire me, then. I don’t care,” she lied while anguish slithered in her belly.
“You can stay,” he said abruptly. “For now.” He moved to the closet. “We won’t talk of this again. San Francisco didn’t happen.”
She nodded jerkily while a flip-flopping sensation of relief and disappointment nearly pushed a whimper from her throat. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? She would keep her job. He wouldn’t interfere in her life.
A weight sat on her chest as she came to the door and watched him shrug on his overcoat, though. A sense of lost potential. Deep in her fanciful brain, she had thought maybe destiny had brought them together again.
The reality was they hadn’t had any sort of connection beyond sexual. She’d been a release valve for him at a time he was under a lot of pressure. Now that was firmly in the past.
“There’s something I wished I’d done before you left my room that night,” he said with a hard set to his jaw.
“What’s that?” she asked, lifting her gaze with surprise.
“I should have said goodbye properly.” His hand arrived at her waist and the other cradled the side of her neck, dragging her close.
Time turned to gelatin, making each movement slow and deliberate and profound.
Her hands slid upward of their own accord, arriving at his shoulders to twine around his neck.
She rose on tiptoe, offering her mouth without speaking another word, and dove her hand into the hair at the back of his head, urging him down.
Because she had longed for this, too. She had needed to know if it had been as good as she imagined.
It was.
As his lips sealed over hers, a sob left her, one of pain because the electric sensation of kissing him was too intense. It rang like a bell through her arms and across her chest, urging her grip to tighten around his neck. To cling. Because they couldn’t do this.
For a long minute they did, though. They held fast to each other while they said hello and I remember and goodbye in the same long, poignant kiss. The thickness of his erection nudged against her aching mound and he could have easily taken her to her bed. She was ready to drag him there herself.
But he drew back abruptly, as though being wrenched from her by an invisible force.
It stung like a tear. Her heart pounded loud enough to deafen her ears. She kept her eyes closed, not wanting to face the inevitable. Not wanting him to see how utterly he owned her when he was, once again, the one pulling away.
She heard him take one shaken breath and the door closed behind him.
“See you tomorrow,” she whispered.