Chapter Six #4
‘It’s not that simple,’ she shot back, her words laced with a resentment and frustration she could no longer hide.
‘You make everything so black and white. With you it’s right or wrong.
Guilty or innocent. But life isn’t like that.
And people aren’t like that either. People are complicated, especially when they’re family. ’
He laughed, a harsh, humourless sound. ‘Nothing is complicated about your father. He’s a backstabber and a thief.’
She frowned. ‘Are you talking about the people who invested in the business? Because my father didn’t steal anything from Andreas or you.’
Antaeus blinked, almost as if he had lost the thread of their conversation. Or started a thread he hadn’t planned on finishing.
‘He stole my life.’ His voice was taut and unforgiving. ‘His skin-saving lies imprisoned my father.’
‘But stealing my business and keeping me a prisoner here isn’t going to change those facts. It’s just some kind of twisted reparation.’
‘Justice always appears twisted to the guilty.’
‘This isn’t justice, and whatever you do to me isn’t going to alter the past. Only someone truly blinkered and one-dimensional could imagine it would.’
His mouth curled into a sneer. ‘Says the woman who just tried to use sex to change my mind.’
Finally, they were there. Of course they were. It was unfinished business. The muscle ticking in his jaw confirmed that fact.
‘That’s not what happened.’ Her eyes narrowed on his face. ‘And this isn’t about me having sex with you. It’s about the fact that you wanted to have sex with me. That’s why you’re so angry with me, isn’t it? You hate that you wanted me.’
A flicker of rage crossed his face, and her pulse stuttered as he planted his arms on either side of her body, backing her against the glass of the door. It happened so fast she almost grabbed for him to steady herself. Which would have been both mortifying and appalling.
But not as appalling as now finding herself in a cage within a cage.
‘And you hate I didn’t fall for your charms.’ As he leaned forward, his heartbeat enveloped her. ‘Next time, maybe negotiate the price before you hand over the goods.’
His words landed like a physical blow. She knew he was being intentionally cruel, had known he was from the start.
But somehow his transparent cruelty had felt different, less insidious than the scheming of her father and her ex-boyfriend.
Henry and Gray had reputations that differed wildly from the men they were behind closed doors.
Yet in that moment, she saw Antaeus was no different to them.
And she didn’t know why that was so devastating. She just knew that she couldn’t fight the way he did. Correction: She didn’t want to fight the way he did. To be that kind of person. She wanted to tell the truth even if it broke her.
She stared at him, her chest rising and falling with sharp, angry breaths.
‘That wasn’t what happened. I wasn’t thinking about your mind, Antaeus.
I wasn’t thinking, period. I wanted you.
And it shouldn’t have happened. I hate that it did.
I hate that I was so weak. But that’s what it was. It…it was a moment of weakness.’
It shouldn’t have mattered.
It shouldn’t have changed anything.
It did matter.
And it changed him, Antaeus thought, gazing down into Cassie’s eyes. Cut his anger in two just as if she had waved a wand. Or wielded a sword. His stomach twisted with pain except it wasn’t pain but relief, a relief that felt like that bright gasp of air as he broke the surface of the water.
Because he had been wrong.
It hadn’t been a honey trap. The truth was there in her eyes, in how Cassie was looking at him.
It was how she had looked at him in the helicopter.
He let himself remember the way she pressed against his body and the sound of his name in her mouth.
That was not weakness. It was a fierce, undeniable need that had mirrored his own.
Only it was terrifying to feel his anger waver, because he needed anger to reach his goal. He tried to rally his defences, but there was something breakable about her. Instead, he reached out to touch her cheek.
‘I doubt that.’ And suddenly it was easy to be honest, open, in a way that he had never been with her or any living person. ‘You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met,’ he said slowly.
Their gazes locked. Their anger and frustration changed shape, softening and shifting into a different kind of tension that had nothing to do with her father or his.
They were inches apart, the air between them charged and ready.
‘No, I’m not. But I guess it makes it easier for you to keep hurting me if you think that.’
She held his gaze, and the look in her eyes was one of defiance, yet it held a flicker of something he couldn’t quite decipher. A mixture of fear and longing, a desperate need to protect herself from the very thing she craved.
Now she ducked under his arm and before he had a chance to react, she was running into the house, and he was alone.
He stood in silence, unmoving, his hands pressed against the glass, wondering what lay beneath the surface of her words.
His blood pulsed with a newly forged determination to find out.