Chapter One #4
Her cheeks felt like someone was holding a blowtorch to her face, and she couldn’t understand it.
Couldn’t understand why he was having this effect on her.
For weeks now, she’d felt as if she was being played with, and she’d told herself that if her unseen tormenter arrived in person, she would face him on her terms. Now he was in her office, and she understood that this was not a man who played at anything.
‘Why are you here?’ she said bluntly.
‘Well…’ He sat down on the edge of her desk. ‘It’s called a hostile takeover.’
‘You’re not funny.’ She cut him off, stepped closer.
But his presence was acting like a narcotic on her brain, and she had stepped too close, she realised a moment later.
Close enough that she could feel the heat of his body, see the faint outline of his muscles beneath his shirt.
For a moment, her brain froze on what he might look like beneath the crisp poplin.
She had to curl her fingers into fists to stop them reaching out and tugging the line of buttons bisecting his chest.
‘I know why you’re here now. What I want to know is why you want to take over my business.’
Her hands moved to her hips automatically, although they had never done so before.
And she couldn’t be sure if it was to steady herself or steal back some of the space he had invaded.
Maybe something of that showed in her face, because Antaeus’s eyes widened infinitesimally.
That absurdly beautiful mouth of his pulled into another new shape that could only be described as incredulous.
‘Are you trying to pretend you’re not aware of our shared history?’
The room felt Arctic cold all of a sudden as if the air conditioning had been turned up.
‘We don’t share anything. Our fathers had a history.’
‘Then you know why I’m here,’ he said softly, so softly that at first she didn’t hear the warning.
And then she felt his gaze darken. It was almost impossible not to scream or run as he pushed off the desk.
Despite her panic, her eyes still tracked the ripple of muscle in his thighs as he got to his feet.
But she couldn’t run. She couldn’t leave her staff to deal with this man.
She bit into her lip. ‘So, this is some kind of payback?’
His eyes found hers, and any hopes she had that she might have been mistaken were brutally quashed.
It didn’t matter that his father had been found guilty by a judge and jurors.
As far as Antaeus was concerned, his father’s partner, her father, had betrayed Andreas, and now the son wanted vengeance.
Which was why there was no point fooling herself into thinking that suit was evidence of some higher, civilized state of mind.
Antaeus was an apex predator, the king of a concrete-and-glass jungle.
He was ruthless and single-minded, and he had waited a long time to pick off his prey, she thought numbly.
‘Actually, I don’t care what this is,’ she said then, answering her own question. ‘This is my business, and you are not going to take it over and turn it into some kind of mouthpiece to promote your empire-building.’
‘If that’s what’s worrying you, then let me put your mind at rest. I have no intention of using Trojan Princess to promote my empire or anyone else’s, for that matter.’
She frowned. Beneath her feet, she could hear the ice creaking.
‘I thought you wanted to take the business to the next level.’
‘I do. But in this instance, the next level will also be its final one.’
It took her a second to catch up. Whatever she had been planning on saying dissolved on her tongue. She stared at him in the shocked, taut silence that followed his remark.
‘You said—’ she began, but what had he said? Was it not more a case of what she had heard?
There was a buzzing in her ears. Her brain felt slow and sluggish, punch-drunk.
She had assumed that Antaeus wanted to take her business to punish her. That in some twisted way, he thought that taking Trojan Princess would redress the balance of what his father had lost.
Obviously some hostile takeovers were simply horizontal mergers designed to acquire and eliminate a competitor in the same industry.
It had never occurred to her that would be the case here, because they were not competitors.
Too late she realized that they were rivals in a zero-sum game where only one could survive.
‘What did I say?’ he said, and there was a hoarseness to his voice that made her legs feel weak and boneless.
‘I thought you wanted to buy the company to punish me. To take something away from my family.’
‘I do but taking it away was always going to be the starting point.’
She thought for a moment that storm clouds were gathering outside the window, but then she realised that his eyes had darkened almost to black. His gaze was fiercer and more destructive than any storm.
‘But what I intend to do when I take over your business, which I will, is shut it down. To be clear, Ms Appleton, starting now, I’m going to take away anything and everything you own. Your father wrecked my life, now I’m going to wreck yours.’
Heart pumping with panic and shock and fear, she watched him walk over to the desk and drop down into her chair. Just as if he was already the owner.