Chapter One #3
Which is why I didn’t encourage Antony’s friendship with Hennessy, only Charlie had somehow wrangled her a place at Antony’s school.
I should have removed him there and then, but it was a good school, and so much of his life had been spent moving between foster families. I just wanted him to have stability.
Of course, Hennessy got them both expelled four years later anyway, I remind myself as her glare envelops me.
‘You think my life is a party. You don’t know anything about my life.’
Oh, but I do. I know that she was named after her father’s favourite drink and that her hair is naturally blonde.
I know her taste in men is depressingly predictable and that, like every other poor little rich girl I know, she likes ‘bad boys’ from the other side of the tracks. Or, as I like to call them, losers.
My shoulder blades pinch together, and I feel a surge of adrenaline as I remember that other toxic, pouting man-child who was with her that night in Vegas. ‘I know that Garrison Cutler’s father has cut him off. Is that why he’s sniffing around you?’
‘He’s not sniffing around me. We’re not even close,’ she says in that voice of hers—the maddening, citizen-of-nowhere drawl that manages to suggest both intimacy and contempt.
Not close? So why had she gone to his party? Were they just friends with benefits? That question, or rather the answer to it, rolls around inside my head like a discarded bottle on a bar-room floor, and I swear silently but savagely.
She is staring up at me, or rather glowering at me, and my eyes follow the movement of muscle beneath the skin as her shoulders stiffen. She has a ballerina’s poise which is at odds with the pugilistic gleam in her eyes, and I feel the contradiction thrum through me like a physical thing.
‘You know, it’s not just your small talk that needs some attention—you need to learn how to listen. I said I was going to a party, not that I went. As I mentioned earlier, I came here and worked most of the night, and then I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was too late to go home and change.’
Her chin is jutting up, lips parted, and a surge of heat swells inside me.
It’s been three years since we last met but it’s as if my body is picking up from where we left off.
It takes every ounce of my not inconsiderable willpower to keep from pulling her closer and kissing that curl from her mouth.
It’s seeing her again, and up close. She has been off my radar since Vegas, enough that I started to think, to hope, that she and Antony might have fallen out for good. But first Antony and then David called me yesterday, and suddenly here she is: the proverbial bad penny.
Only, she’s not just trouble, she is torment and tribulation wrapped up in a body so tempting it makes the Big Apple itself seem small and flavourless. Even more than her father, she is the reason I hesitated over getting more deeply involved with Wade and Walters.
She angles her head so that her sugared-violet gaze is almost level with mine. ‘In other words, you got the wrong end of the stick.’
‘You should have a change of clothes at the office,’ I snap, because inconceivably she is right, and for some reason I find myself both astonished and fascinated by that fact.
‘This isn’t your father’s business anymore, Hennessy.
It isn’t your business either—it’s our business—and while you and I are conjoined commercially I expect you to be at work on time and appropriately dressed.
And to have your phone switched on. You are the face of the business now. It matters how you behave.’
My words echo round the office, and I feel their hypocrisy. It still rankles that I came so close to losing control of myself that night. And that I’ve had to break my own rule of keeping Hennessy Wade at arm’s length.
When Antony found out that David had asked me to step into his shoes, he was thrilled.
And then stunned when I said that I was thinking of refusing.
More than stunned. When I said that I had reservations about working with her, there was a look of pain in my brother’s eyes that was hard for me to ignore.
There was anger and confusion too, because he knows how hard I fought to get custody of him when I was old enough, and how important his happiness is to me, so he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t do this for him.
But I can’t tell him the truth. I can’t tell him that, last time I got close enough to help Hennessy Wade, I lost my way.
I lost myself and became a ravenous stranger interested solely in feeding her hunger and mine.
It wasn’t planned; I wasn’t even supposed to be in Vegas, but thanks to a storm my plane got grounded.
There was a private party at the bar in the hotel that I was avoiding.
But then I saw Hennessy. Up until that night, she was just Antony’s friend: a kid; a teenager; a brat.
An irritant, not an incitement to lose my head.
But she was all woman that night, and I wanted her as a man, and I felt so many things and not one was irritation.
I wanted nothing but to burn in the flame of my need and I wanted her to be mine…
Then I came to my senses, and I’ve been avoiding her ever since.
Until now.
And I hate that, not only do I have to fix Charlie Wade’s mess, but my motives for doing so are only partially driven by altruism and finances. My one consolation is that she clearly hates it too.
I watch her irises flare, like petals opening in sunlight.
Hennessy is angry with her father and me.
And with the board members who have elected me as her co-CEO via a virtual EGM.
But then, anger is her default setting, even when she is in the wrong.
Even when she is cornered, she comes out fighting.
Except that one time.
‘Are you done?’
‘Not even close.’ I pause. ‘Take a seat.’
Her eyes widen. She reminds me of a cornered cat. If she had a tail, it would be twitching, and her back would have arched, but I don’t care. What matters is that she understands that she can call herself the Queen of Sheba if she wants, just as long as she understands that I am in charge.