Chapter Two #4
It helped that here at least, in her apartment, she knew Antaeus Tsiartas wasn’t going to stroll into her living room and stretch out on her sofa.
After he had swaggered out of her office, her body had started to shake inside in some kind of delayed reaction.
Thankfully, after years of playing the part of Cassie Appleton, she had perfected the art of appearing serene whatever turmoil was churning inside her.
It didn’t matter that her father had depleted yet another trust fund. Or that her mom was once again so crippled with lupus that she couldn’t leave the house. Cassie was an expert at maintaining the illusion of a perfect life.
So she had spent the rest of the day smiling and soothing her agitated staff. Had she lied to them? By omission, yes. She hadn’t told them that she had ten days to change Antaeus’s mind about shutting the business and leaving them jobless.
But what choice did she have? Telling them would only cause panic. And change nothing. The only person who had the power to change anything was her. As usual. And the responsibility of that was already suffocating.
Unwrapping the towel, she rubbed her hair vigorously to head off the panic seeping down her limbs.
Ten days to change his mind.
It sounded like the title for a book that promised passion, secrets and a powerful clash of wills. The kind with a sultry heroine on the cover and a hero with a brooding ten-thousand-yard stare.
Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she screwed up her face. She didn’t look sultry. She looked tired and tense.
She felt tired and tense too. Truthfully, she felt exhausted.
How was she, of all people, supposed to change Antaeus’s mind?
Then again, he probably had no intention of changing it whatever she did.
But she had to try. And in less than five hours, the clock would start ticking.
Tomorrow would be day one of the ten-day deadline he had given her.
She didn’t know which was more terrifying—that or the fact that she was going to have to see Antaeus again.
And again. And again.
She sat down heavily on her bed and fell back against the pillows.
It was agonizing just thinking about it. Which was no doubt why Antaeus had refused to accept her resignation. He wanted to punish her; he’d already admitted that. But this way, he got to make her jump through hoops for a period of time that he had plucked out of the air.
Probably they would be the flaming kind. The sort they used in old-fashioned circuses, allegedly to entertain people.
Tell that to the tigers who had to jump through them, she thought grimly.
The tears she had been holding back all day filled her eyes. Why was this happening to her? This was her father’s mess. But as usual, Henry wasn’t around to clear it up. And this time, he had the perfect reason not to be.
She pushed her knuckles into her eyes, pushing back the tears.
Henry Appleton was a long way from being the perfect father and nothing like his golden boy image. He was lazy and greedy and selfish, but ever since he was a child, everyone had overlooked his faults because he was handsome and charming, and he told people what they wanted to hear. Even her.
She had hated him for that, and yet she still loved him.
Rolling onto her side, she hugged her knees into her chest. Now he had a rival for her contradictory feelings. Not for her love, though, she amended quickly.
It didn’t matter that Antaeus Tsiartas looked like a Greek god or that he cut a steady, unwavering arc through the world like a thrown spear.
The vengeful son of her father’s former business partner embodied precisely the kind of destructive male power she had learned to distrust. And she didn’t need the gift of foresight to know that her attraction to him was a weakness he could exploit, just as her father had exploited her mother’s money and trust.
What she felt for Antaeus was more basic and less baffling than love, a chemical attraction. No, she decided, it was more the magnetic attraction of opposites—her feminine to his masculine.
And the equally powerful repulsion of their mutual loathing.
Because she didn’t need any more lessons about the dangers of men like him. Growing up with Henry and then surviving her disastrous relationship with Gray had rammed that message home.
Before Trojan Princess, she had started another business, and Gray had been there almost from the beginning. First as a friend, then a lover. She had trusted him, opened her heart to him, and he had taken her heart and tossed it aside and left her behind. He had taken half her clients with him.
It was another hard, painful life lesson, and it had felt more personal and galling. You couldn’t choose your father, but she had chosen Gray.
It wouldn’t happen again. She wouldn’t let another man blindside or exploit her. Nor was she going to wave the white flag. This might be a doomed campaign for her, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be an enjoyable one for him.
Nor would it be easy. For either of them. As Antaeus Tsiartas would soon find out.