Chapter Two
ANTAEUS STARED AT Cassie’s small, still face, his heart beating out of time. He had waited so long for this moment. But there was something about her expression that made it impossible for him to simply gloat.
‘I don’t understand.’
He could hear the shock in her voice, but instead of the colour draining from her face, her cheeks were flushed. With relief, he found something that he could enjoy. That raw, unprotected reaction that seemed to burn through the perfect composure she wore like a second skin.
With anyone else, he might have felt pity, because he understood what she was feeling. But she deserved this. And at least she was an adult. He had been twelve years old.
In the nine months it had taken for his life to implode, he had been too young and confused and unhappy to do much more than survive the body blows of losing his father and his home, and then his mum.
But amidst all that chaos and upheaval, one thing remained clear and constant: Henry Appleton was to blame for all of it.
It was his testimony that helped convict his father.
It was Appleton’s fault, too, that his mother had died.
He might not have been driving the car that crashed into her, but he was the reason she was dead.
Appleton was the reason she was distracted all the time, enough not to check her sightline.
Because it wasn’t enough to take his father. Appleton had taken his mother too.
Antaeus felt his gut twist.
He had never forgotten the school principal’s face when she had told him about the accident.
All of those moments were stamped into his being. They weren’t simply events he had experienced. They had forged him, made him the man he was. Ruthlessly driven. Single-minded. Goal-oriented.
His eyes fixed on Cassie’s trembling mouth. He couldn’t remember how old she was when Henry had brought her into the office on one of the days he was there with his father. She was a baby, and he was a nine-year-old boy. In other words, he had barely given her a second glance.
Now it was hard to tear his gaze away from her face.
He knew many beautiful women, but none that had ever made him want to simply stare. And he wanted to look away, not to be captive to her beauty, only he could no more turn his head than willingly stop breathing.
But her beauty wouldn’t change the outcome. She was going to pay for the sins of her father. Because the man responsible for all that pain and suffering was out of reach forever.
‘It’s really quite simple. I intend to take over your business, and when I do, I will close it,’ he said slowly, deliberately.
Cassie hadn’t been his target at the start. That came later. But when Henry died, he had formulated the plan for acquiring Trojan Princess. And he had even more of an incentive now.
His father had served twenty-one years of his sentence. He would be coming up for parole soon, and this was to be his gift to him on his release.
It had been so much simpler than he thought it would be.
As he walked into the building this morning, the pain he had carried so long, the shame, the fury he felt for the man who had wrecked his childhood and upended his life, all of it was swallowed up by a righteous satisfaction that finally he was striking back.
And watching Cassie in the boardroom, he had felt vindicated because she was her father’s daughter.
She had his ash-blond hair and the same patrician features.
And judging by the effortless upwards trajectory of her company, she was not averse to leveraging her name and her Upper East Side social network in exactly the same way Henry had.
Only her eyes were her own, he thought. They were green. Not the glittering emerald of his mother’s engagement ring but a lighter, more delicate green like the soft hulls of the almonds that grew near his home in Greece.
But Cassie’s eyes weren’t soft now. Instead, they flashed with defiance, and he saw that his words hadn’t just angered her. They had armed her.
‘You can’t do that,’ she said then, and her cool, imperious voice was her father’s too. As if she was indeed a Trojan princess born to rule, used to giving orders and, more astonishingly, given the imbalance in power of their current relationship, expecting them to be obeyed.
She expected him to obey her.
‘But I can. I am.’ He held out his phone, showing her the screen. ‘I now own thirty-one per cent of Trojan Princess. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what that means.’
The sudden stiffening of her spine and shoulders as if she was steadying herself against a heavy blow or an unpleasant truth made it clear that he didn’t.
Like many private companies, the Trojan Princess shareholder agreement gave disproportionate power to large investors, even if they held a minority stake.
‘But I’m going to anyway. I now have the right to appoint a director to the board. Or was it two? No matter. I only need one. And of course, my stake also grants me veto rights.’
Meaning that he could now block key decisions and cause internal conflict, which would effectively paralyze the business. In other words, he was holding a grenade, and if—when—he pulled the pin, any chance Cassie had of stopping this hostile takeover would go from negligible to less than zero.
‘You can’t do this. It’s not fair—’
For a few half seconds, he didn’t register what she was saying because she was talking to him in that same maddeningly imperious manner as before. Just as if she was taking over his business.
But then suddenly his brain caught up, and a rush of fury jolted through him like an electrical current.
‘Fair.’
His hands slammed against the top of the desk, and he was pushing up from the chair and moving towards her. Was she for real? How could she even say those words out loud? To him?
‘Are you really going to stand there and talk to me about fairness?’
She stood her ground, but she held up her hand like a traffic police officer stopping approaching vehicles. He saw that her nails were painted in a pink that matched her lips. Saw, too, that her hands were slim and graceful and trembling.
‘Yes, I am. Because what you’re doing is cruel and unfair.’ Despite her agitation, her posture was regal. Probably from ballet lessons, he thought sourly.
‘You don’t know the meaning of unfair, Princess.’
Her pupils bloomed starlike across her irises. Before he heard it in her voice, he saw the passion there, burning bright like a thermal pulse. Maybe there was something wrong with him. Maybe finally confronting her had rewired his brain, because he was enjoying her reaction way too much.
‘You don’t know anything about me. And don’t call me Princess.’
She still had control over her voice, just about, but her glare blazed across the air between them.
He took a step forward. ‘And you don’t know anything about me.’
She tilted up her chin, those graceful fingers of hers curling into fists. Plenty of men equal to him in size and weight had backed down in the face of his blue-eyed anger, but not Cassie. He hated that there was some part of him that admired her for standing her ground.
‘I know enough,’ she said coolly.
‘From whom?’ he jeered. ‘Did Daddy tell you a story? Or did you read it in the papers? Because you really shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.’
He was point-scoring. It was childish, but he felt childish and savage.
He felt like the twelve-year-old boy who had come home from school to find police officers upending his home.
The same twelve-year-old boy who’d had to choose between living with strangers and getting to stay in the US or moving back to Greece and the only remaining family he had left.
‘How is that any different to you? You’re not mainlining information from some oracle. Everything you know about me you learned from a third party. Because you and I weren’t participants. We weren’t even observers. I was three years old—’
‘And I was twelve,’ he said flatly. ‘Didn’t stop your sainted father from taking the stand against my dad and then taking a wrecking ball to my life.’ Even just saying it out loud made him feel blurred at the edges, drunk almost. ‘So you don’t get to talk about fairness.’
Her gaze held his and once again he found himself admiring her courage as he stared down at her delicate, determined face. She was fighting for control, fighting to stay calm. ‘If it’s just me you want to punish, then leave my business out of it. Think of some other way to satisfy yourself.’
It took her brain exactly the same amount of time as his to replay her words and hear the alternate, provocative interpretation of that sentence. He knew because he was watching her face, and he saw her cheeks flame with colour as he felt his own body respond in a more visceral, predictable way.
‘Do you have something specific in mind? Or do you want me to use my imagination?’ he said after a moment.
Her long, slim fingers flexed, and he felt their involuntary twitch in all the wrong places.
After a long silence that made his body painfully aware of hers, she said hoarsely, ‘What I want is for you to think about the people who work here. About what’s going to happen to them if you close my business. ’
‘But it won’t be your business. It’ll be mine, and all the people here will work for me.’
‘And what? You’re just going to fire everyone? That would be more than unfair. It would be monstrous.’
There was an edge to her voice now that hadn’t been there before, a rawness that surprised him. Momentarily he saw himself through her eyes, and he didn’t like what he saw.
But why was he even thinking about that?
Cassie was privileged and pampered, a spoiled only child. She was used to people changing the shape of the universe to fit her needs. She hadn’t been cast out into the wilderness or had to fight to change a reputation she had inherited, not earned.
Up until this moment, every door she’d approached had opened smoothly. She had never needed to fight her corner.
No wonder that swan-like composure was rattled.