Chapter One #2
Ashley laughed, the sound ending on a trembling note. ‘You’ll set me off,’ she warned, and the two women hugged briefly before Ruth headed back to her own office.
Alone, Ashley stared unseeingly out of the window for a few minutes at the concrete haze of midtown Manhattan.
She had no idea what Nico Galletti wanted and, more importantly, how she should approach him.
Coldly polite and professional? Come out swinging, to keep from being at a disadvantage?
What she wouldn’t do, Ashley resolved as her lips pressed together in a hard line, was beg or bend over backwards, especially not for a man.
She’d done that for far too much of her life already, and those years hadn’t just been wasted but had been incredibly, intensely damaging.
Starting Infinite Innovations had helped her to get her life, her very self, back on track, and that was something she would never let anyone take away from her…not even Nico Galletti. Not if she could help it.
Nico Galletti eyed the unprepossessing brick building on the edge of midtown from the confines of his blacked-out limo, his lip curling in disdain.
Either Ashley Woodward had fallen on very hard times or he was in the wrong place.
The last time he’d been in a Woodward building, it had been all soaring spaces, sleek marble and endless chrome, right in the beating heart of midtown.
This place looked as if it needed a serious refurb—or to be condemned.
‘Mr Galletti?’ his driver asked when Nico hadn’t moved. ‘Is this the right place?’
‘I believe so.’ Nico eyed the building once more.
‘I won’t be too long,’ he informed the driver.
‘Fifteen minutes, at most.’ He intended to deliver the news and then make a quick, satisfied exit.
He wasn’t a cruel man. He didn’t need to witness Ashley Woodward’s total downfall.
Informing her of it would be satisfaction enough.
Admittedly, it was a pity Woodward himself wouldn’t be there to enjoy hearing how his daughter’s company was about to be dismantled like an old rust-bucket of a car, but Nico would settle for telling the treacherous woman to her face.
For a second, he let himself picture Ashley Woodward as he last remembered her—eighteen years old and unbearably icy, jade-green eyes narrowed in disdain, blonde hair held back in an elegant chignon with a few platinum tendrils framing a heart-shaped faced exquisite in its beauty.
And as cold and unfeeling as if made out of marble.
Oh, yes, he remembered Woodward’s daughter.
Remembered how she’d turned away from him when her father had staged the melodrama of his arrest, as if she’d been bored by the fact that the young man she’d flirted with moments ago, the man she’d tempted, teased and kissed, was about to be arrested.
The utter injustice of it still burned, an acid corroding his stomach and crawling up his throat.
It was an injustice he’d spent the last sixteen years doing his damnedest to right, and here was the culmination.
What was left of Woodward Investments—the company that had completely destroyed his life, his family—was about to be destroyed in turn.
Thankfully, revenge was a dish best served cold, and this one was icy indeed, but just as sweet.
Nico knew he would look forward to Ashley Woodward’s dismayed surprise and dawning horror as much as he would have her feckless father’s—maybe even more.
Chase Woodward had already had his comeuppance and was now serving twenty years in federal prison for tax fraud and embezzlement.
Ashley might have escaped unscathed from that scandal, but she wouldn’t from this one.
By the end of the day, she’d have nothing but memories of dear old Daddy to keep her warm at night. Nico would make sure of it.
With that thought causing his mouth to curve in a cold smile, he exited his limousine and strode towards the building.
Infinite Innovations was on the twelfth floor, although once upon a time Woodward Investments had had its own building of thirty floors, in one of the most desirable sections of Manhattan.
Nico still recalled the cramped cubicle he’d been given when he’d been just twenty years old, desperate and determined to work his way up.
Woodward had promised him so much.
‘Work hard and you will be promoted,’ he’d told him with that glinting smile that had seemed so trustworthy.
‘I reward hard work and honesty and with you, Nico, I like what I see.’ He’d clapped him hard on the shoulder, a man-to-man gesture that, at his young age, Nico had especially appreciated.
‘You’re going to go far, my boy. Trust me. ’
Trust me. The words echoed through Nico’s mind now as he walked through the unprepossessing foyer and then stepped into the lift.
Chase Woodward had destroyed his life deliberately, strategically, luring Nico in with all those false promises: pretending to take a paternal interest; always so friendly and encouraging; nodding along to his ideas so that, for the first time in his life, Nico had felt as if he could finally make a difference.
Every aspect of that evil charade tormented him now, mocking him with his own shameful and humiliating naivety for trusting a man who had only wanted to use him as a stooge. To flirt with his daughter, and not just flirt, but beg.
Well, he’d vowed never to be so na?ve again. Never to be so trusting, and certainly not with a Woodward—any Woodward.
The lift doors opened and Nico stepped out into a modest and even shabby foyer, with none of the glamour or bling he remembered from Woodward Investments, where every element had been a deliberate and ostentatious display of wealth.
Here, everything was of decent, if not precisely good, quality: a couple of ergonomic chairs in black leather; a single picture on the wall; a photograph of space with a scattering of stars across an endless night, and a framed vision statement beneath that Nico didn’t bother to read.
He didn’t care how worthy Infinite Innovations purported to be.
It was about to be reduced to nothing more than a closed file on someone’s computer.
In any case, Nico didn’t trust Infinite Innovations’ supposedly worthy aims. Chase Woodward had sold his financial firm as ‘cutting-edge investments for the innovative opportunist’, but in the end he’d been the only opportunist, and a complete scammer at that.
Many of the investments he’d touted as ‘cutting edge’ had only existed on paper.
The fact that Ashley Woodward’s company also purported to champion such infinite innovations had made Nico even more cynical.
Like father, like daughter…in so many ways.
As he stepped into the foyer, the receptionist at the front desk, who only looked about twenty, clambered to standing, seeming terrified by his presence.
‘You—you must be Mr. Galletti…?’
‘That’s right.’ He kept his voice clipped. He was going to fire every single person on this floor, and there was no need to get their hopes up with even a modicum of friendliness. ‘If you could let Miss Woodward know I’m here…or, better yet, just show me the way to her office.’
There was enough steel in his voice to have the receptionist stammering that Ashley Woodward’s office was the last one on the right.
He gave a terse nod before striding down the hall.
He looked forward to surprising Miss Woodward with his unannounced arrival; he already had her on the back foot, but what he really wanted was her sprawled on the floor.
Tripped up completely with no recourse, begging for his mercy on her knees, which he would coldly refuse…
just as she had once so coldly refused him.
Yes, that was a pleasant thought indeed.
He rapped once on the door before immediately opening it and standing on the threshold of the office.
He’d had an image in his head of this moment, he realised—Ashley Woodward looking like the haughty princess he remembered, elegant and aloof as she stood behind her desk in a huge corner office, her icy hauteur melting into shocked fear when she realised just what was happening to her company, to her life.
Nothing about what greeted Nico lived up to that vision.
Who was this dishevelled-looking woman with her hair in tumbled disarray, her blouse unbuttoned and a stick of deodorant in her hand?
For a second, he couldn’t make sense of it: the woman in her simple blouse and skirt, both of which looked decent but cheap; the scrap of lacy bra he glimpsed from beneath her unbuttoned blouse moulding to high, firm breasts with creamily ivory skin; the cramped and unremarkable office she stood in.
It didn’t even have a window. Had he gone into the wrong room?
He looked around, as if for clues, while the woman let out an indignant squeak of protest.
‘Don’t you normally wait for someone to say it’s okay to come in?’ she demanded as she hurled the deodorant onto the desk and pulled the sides of her blouse together. ‘Let me guess. You’re Nico Galletti.’
That voice. It was so different, without the elongated syllables and cool, cut-glass accent of the Ashley Woodward he’d once known, but it still possessed that upper-class lilt that had once made him struggle to soften his own Brooklyn accent.
This was Ashley Woodward—looking very different, but still essentially the same.
‘Considering this is only going to be your office for about three more minutes, I decided to dispense with the niceties,’ he replied in a cold drawl before nodding at her blouse. ‘But I suggest you button that up.’
‘And I suggest you turn your back,’ Ashley snapped. ‘If you’re a gentleman.’
Nico let out a laugh of genuine amusement. ‘Oh, but I’m not a gentleman.’