Chapter One #3
‘It’s none of your business, but if you must know it’s a professional one.’
Something inside me eases down from attack mode. ‘Just this once, I’ll compromise. We’ll leave at eight, instead.’
‘You speak of compromise like you’re doing me a favour. Have you forgotten this is a joint effort?’
‘I haven’t forgotten that Ashon enticed you in with the promise of equal footing in this project.
I regret to say that’s just a sweetener to get you on board.
My cousin knows I don’t work that way. I’m in charge, Miss Rockson.
Your role is important, but what I say goes at the end of the day.
Accept that now…’ I say, then nudge my chin at the door, ‘…or you can leave.’
She sucks in a breath, then actually glances at the door. And for the tiny seconds her gaze is unattached to mine, everything seems to suspend inside me. Hold its breath like a guillotine commands an audience.
‘Ashon wouldn’t dare—’ she starts.
‘He would. Trust me. Perhaps he was counting on luring you in for a while before the reality becomes clear to you, but I don’t like my time wasted. So are you going to run after him or will you accept things on my terms?’
She leans forward and it occurs to me that she hasn’t yet taken a seat.
Her beautiful, ripe body is on full show and I can’t help but drink her in.
‘No, I will not. I work on my own terms. And if it happens to coincide with yours, then lucky you. If not…’ She shrugs, and the motion lifts her breasts, making my mouth water, my groin stir and my heart thankful I’m sitting down so she won’t see her effect on me.
‘I guess we’ll find out tomorrow, then. Eight a.m. VIP terminal. If you’re not there, I’ll fly without you,’ I warn. ‘Dress for the heat. And the politics.’
‘Politics?’ she echoes stiffly.
‘I’m attempting to minimise his interference, but my grandfather might be there.’
Her face tightens, telling me she knows all about Nana Biney and his antics. ‘The hell he will. He made my cousin Cilla’s life hell in the name of his vaunted legacy before she married Ashon.’
I shrug. ‘Then you’ve been forewarned.’
Her mouth goes flat in the kind of line that, if drawn on paper, would make a building look falsely stable. ‘If he’s there, I’m not going without clear boundaries.’
I curb a smile and choose not to point out her unspoken capitulation. ‘Which are?’
‘No insults. No slurs about my middle-class family and the land he all but stole from us and was shamed into handing back. And no insinuations about how culture is a nice side dish to concrete.’
All mirth disappears at the pointed reminder that Ashon and I aren’t the only ones who have experienced the sharp end of Nana Biney’s tongue. ‘He won’t. I’ll handle it.’
She eyes me warily. ‘You will?’
I keep my voice even as my pulse remembers every conversation I’ve had in that study with the smell of cigars and empire. ‘I’m the one he’s really testing. Let him test me.’
The flash across her face is there and gone—surprise, then the quick shutter that means you lost any right to touch the words ‘protect’ and ‘me’ in the same sentence. ‘I don’t need you to handle anything for me.’
‘I know…’ the words slide out softer than I intend ‘…but I can handle him for me.’
Her eyes search my face for signs of mockery. When she finds none, our gaze remains locked, in defiance perhaps, but also in the kind of awareness of two people who’ve known pleasure together.
It’s shattered when the door swings back open and Ashon steps into the doorway. ‘Are we done here?’
I raise my eyebrows at her.
Tension vibrates through her for several long seconds. ‘Subject to a few more things being ironed out, yes.’
A smile creases my cousin’s face. ‘Great. Go make genius together.’
He’s barely gone before Tessa turns to me like a warrior queen, ready to slay. ‘I meant what I said earlier. I want rules.’
‘Rules,’ I repeat lazily, choosing not to admit how smashing them is a temptation I can never resist.
My mother treated rules like playthings, flouting every single one ever written by man, woman or child.
Not in ways that made her free or honourable, even, but in ways that left us disgraced and whispered about in rooms I was too young to enter.
My father tried to fix it the only way he knew how—by turning control into a weapon.
He laid down laws like iron bars and when my mother slipped through them anyway, he tightened the cage until there was nothing left but misery and anguish inside.
So I learned early that rules don’t protect.
They humiliate, they suffocate and they rot everything they claim to preserve.
I’ve despised them ever since. To me, rules are like scaffolding built too rigid and too narrow, leaving structures destined to collapse because there is no room for the weight of real life.
I decided decades ago that I won’t be chained by them, not in business, not in life and sure as hell not by a woman.
Especially not by Tamara—a Sultan’s daughter who’d thought her pedigree made her irresistible.
The woman who’d thought to trap me with fatherhood when it was the last thing I yearned for, scarred as I was by dysfunctional parents.
And not even by this spectacular woman, who gave me the most blistering night of my life, only to walk away with my name burning like poison on her lips.
‘For the war room,’ she says, unaware of the storm brewing beneath my surface. ‘For us.’
I lean back, balancing my chair on two legs the way Nana used to smack me for. ‘Word to the wise, I only enjoy rules when they’re mine to dispose of as I please.’
Her eyes flash. ‘We’re going to pretend that didn’t sound like what it sounded like.’ She inhales, crisp. ‘Rule one, no personal remarks. This is work.’
‘Define personal.’
‘Anything about the past.’
The word cracks like a thin porcelain plate tapped too hard with a fork. I nod once. ‘Fine. Past is prologue. I prefer to look forward to our future, anyway.’
Her nostrils flare in a vivid show of control-gathering. ‘Rule two, no meetings alone in hotel rooms.’ She says it without flinching, without the courtesy of pretending the memory doesn’t exist.
‘I hate to break it to you, but hotel rooms aren’t the only places bad decisions happen. Take this conference room for instance,’ I say, rapping the polished wood with a knuckle. ‘All it’ll need is a yes, whispered or screamed, for spectacularly good things to happen.’
She stills and I’m certain she’s silently counting to ten. ‘Rule three,’ she continues grimly. ‘Far be it from me to make conditions about your private life, of course, but I’d thank you to keep it discreet. And out of my sight.’
‘And if I don’t?’ I tilt my head, silk in my voice. ‘You’ll file a complaint with HR?’
‘Not at all.’ Her gaze slices into mine like a scalpel. ‘But you’ll be confirming that you’re exactly the caricature of a man that everyone says you are.’