Chapter One #2
‘Obviously the answer to that question is the elephant in the room. But I understand that you want to know what, who, we’re dealing with. It’s Antaeus Tsiartas.’
‘I’ve been called many things, but never an elephant in the room.’
As one, like antelopes gathered around a watering hole who sensed the presence of a killer in their midst, every single person in the room stiffened into stillness.
For a second, Cassie was confused. Then she saw him, lounging against the wall at the back of the boardroom.
And the whole world turned to silence, and darkness surged in from the edges of the room to frame his face.
Her pulse twitched. And what a face it was.
It was a commonly accepted fact that while photos didn’t lie, they rarely told the whole story. Take celebrities. Often people were disappointed by the objects of their fascination when they saw them in the flesh. Antaeus Tsiartas was no disappointment.
His photos didn’t do him justice.
Dark blue eyes, the colour of a fathomless ocean and just as unreadable. Clean-cut features that hinted at his ancestors’ birthplace on the Aegean coast. They would have been warriors, kings maybe. Inflexible, ruthless, unyielding.
Everything about him told the same story.
Except his mouth. It was the most seductive shape of any mouth she had ever seen, and she could imagine it softening to press a kiss against her lips—
Her heart was suddenly pounding so hard she felt it could lift her off the ground.
He was absurdly, unjustly, hypnotically beautiful. But it was not his beauty but the intense, fulminant expression on this face that had her rooted to the spot.
For a moment Cassie couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t feel her hands or feet. She felt light-headed and weightless as if gravity had failed.
And stupid. So unbelievably stupid.
She had sensed his presence, but she had been so furious with the people sitting around the boardroom table who were plotting to sell her out, sell out her staff for cold, hard cash, that she hadn’t spotted him.
But it was too late to worry about that now.
Antaeus Tsiartas was here, in her boardroom, his blue gaze fixed on her face with the intensity of a searchlight as he straightened to his full height with the supple, unhurried grace of a jaguar uncurling its body.
And then he was weaving between the sitting and standing onlookers, a silent embodiment of power and predatory intent.
As he stopped in front of her, Cassie realised that she was braced like a sprinter on the balls of her feet. But she wasn’t going to run from this man. Or roll over and give him the business she had worked so hard to build. On the contrary, she was going to fight him to the death.
And it would be a fight to the death, because she knew now that this wasn’t business. It was personal. In six strides, the past was no longer just a memory. It was a motive for revenge, and this man had the means and opportunity to destroy her.
Steading her nerves, she tilted up her chin, letting her gaze collide with his as his mouth pulled into a mocking curve that made her skin prickle as if she had been out in the sun too long.
‘Antaeus Tsiartas. I don’t believe we’ve met.’ He extended his hand, slowly, deliberately, and it would be childish not to take it—
Humiliating to do so.
Manners vied with pride. Manners won, but she shivered as his palm pressed against hers, a jolt of heat like the lick of a flame snapping across her skin. She breathed in sharply, and thanks to the microphone she was wearing, the sound was amplified across the entire room.
‘Mr Tsiartas. I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, but I’m afraid I was always taught not to lie.’
Their gazes locked, and she saw something in his blue eyes that made every single nerve ending in her body sharpen almost painfully. As he let go of her hand, her fingers curled into a fist trying to contain her reaction.
It wasn’t enough. She wanted to do something like flatten her palm against the cool brickwork of the wall behind her or hold it under a cold tap, anything to stop that tingling, electric current sensation that was darting over her skin, But she could feel Antaeus Tsiartas watching her.
Checking for weakness, she thought, her breath snagging in her throat. It was how all predators worked. They looked for weakness, and fear. And then they moved in for the kill.
Well, not today.
‘By whom, I wonder?’ His voice was soft, silken even, but there was an undercurrent of steel that matched the sudden hardness in his jaw. ‘No matter,’ he said then, and she felt his intense gaze on her face. ‘Is that how you greet guests to your boardroom? What would your mother say?’
A knot was forming in her stomach, his mention of her mom sharpening her anger.
‘Guests are invited. You’re a gate crasher and a viper who has spent the last three weeks slithering into my business, using your money to destabilize my board, my team.’
There was a sudden airless silence that scraped over her skin like a nail down a chalkboard. The faces around the table froze into rictus masks of panic that would have been almost comical if they hadn’t been so terrifying.
But why was she terrified of him? He’d already done his worst. And for a moment, she considered sharing that fact with him. But this man was a chimera, part snake, part goat, part lion. It would be unwise to let down her guard.
He held her gaze, then shrugged, an infinitesimal lift of his shoulders that triggered a disproportionately violent desire to slap his flawless face.
‘I was invited, not by you but by others here. As for slithering, I reached out,’ he said blandly. ‘Your board didn’t have to respond as they did. That they chose not to reject my offer reflects their uncertainty about your leadership.’
‘I set up the business four years ago,’ Cassie said through the fierce pounding of her heart. ‘In that time, we’ve won five International Public Relations Society awards, including best campaign, best use of content, best use of a celebrity—’
‘—and yet according to the papers, you lost out on the Aura campaign,’ he said smoothly, turning towards the people sitting around the table.
Some of them smiled nervously. She hated them in that moment for their weakness.
Hated him, too, for turning the solid floor into something akin to the skim ice on the surface of a lake.
Meeting his dark blue gaze, she glared at him.
‘We didn’t lose anything. We walked away because there was a question over the inclusivity of the brand sizing.
If that’s the basis for this takeover, might I suggest you do a little more research next time.
You can’t believe everything you read in the papers. ’
He held her gaze and let the silence stretch between them. He was good at waiting, at using silence and stillness as a weapon. Already she could see that in his hands, almost anything could be weaponised.
‘I took time out of my busy schedule to come here today because I take my business commitments very seriously. And as a businessman with many years of experience dominating a global market, I’m going to share the first rule of business with you.’
‘I know what the first rule of business is, Mr Tsiartas. The customer is always right.’
‘Correct. And your shareholders are your most important customers. Their investment buys performance. Their money isn’t charity, and they are not donating to your cause. They want a return.’
His eyes held hers captive for so long that Cassie thought she might never be able to breathe normally again.
She had been on edge ever since she realised that something was happening. But now she understood her nerves were not just reacting to the seeming inevitability of a takeover.
It was this man. There was an intensity in his eyes that made her skin sting, and he made her feel naked. Vulnerable. Uptight and yet also as if she was unravelling.
Pushing back against the menace creeping in from the edges of the room, she said stiffly, ‘We are making money.’
In another of those edgy, precarious silences he specialised in, Antaeus’s eyes flicked down to her throat turning him from man to predator in a quarter of a second.
‘Not enough. In my opinion, your business is underperforming. And there could be any number of reasons for that. But the responsibility for steering any ship safely past rocks and icebergs belongs to the bridge. The buck stops with the captain. In this case, you. You are the problem, whereas I can and will take the business to the next level.’
She felt nauseous with terror, but she held her ground.
‘Your opinion is noted, Mr Tsiartas.’ She turned back to the sea of faces. ‘People, I think we have enough to think about for now. More pressingly, we have an agency to run. Thank you, everyone.’
As if a spell had been broken, people started to detach themselves from the wall and push back their chairs.
And it should have comforted her. After all, she’d had the last word, but she couldn’t help but notice that many of them glanced at the man standing beside her.
And as the directors and shareholders filed out the door, Cassie knew immediately which ones would approve Antaeus’s acquisition of her company, because they couldn’t meet her eyes.
Her limbs felt weak.
She couldn’t afford to counter his offer.
Paying off her dad’s debts had taken every cent of her trust fund.
Throat tightening, she considered the numbers again, considered selling the family townhouse again.
It would raise some much-needed capital, but she wasn’t going to make her mom homeless.
Her mother’s lupus was so much better right now.
The stress of losing her home would exacerbate it massively.
As for selling her own apartment, the money she raised would be nothing more than a token offering against Antaeus’s fortune.
But there had to be something she could do—