Chrissie made no attempt to disguise her anger when Nicky’s words came to a stuttering halt. “What an utter—”
“Bastard. Yes,” Nicky agreed shakily.
“The man is totally fucked up!”
“Yes,” Nicky sighed.
“But you still like him?” Chrissie looked at her searchingly.
“I’m not sure that ‘like’ is the right word to use in connection with the way I feel towards Lucien...” Nicky grimaced.
“The sex was that good?”
“The sex was incredible,” Nicky admitted ruefully. “I’ve never experienced anything so intense in my life before.”
“Then I’m guessing neither has he, and he’ll be back for more.”
Nicky snorted softly. “I somehow doubt that.”
“Is that why you have that hopeful note in your voice?” Chrissie said knowingly.
“I don’t—well...maybe I do,” she conceded heavily. “There’s just something about Lucien, something so—so—he looks so sophisticated, so controlled and together, and yet that day in his apartment he was—” She gave a shake of her head. “There was just something so raw, primal even, about the way he made love to me. It was as if he was totally out of control one moment and the next he was this cold stranger telling me to get dressed and leave.”
“Because you got to him,” her friend said knowingly.
“No—”
“Yes.” Chrissie nodded with certainty. “Think about it, Nicky, the man is sophisticated, and far too controlled and controlling, and then you came along, and he lost it. It doesn’t matter that he managed to claw back that control, to get it together again. You got to him, and so you had to leave.”
Nicky wasn’t sure she quite believed Chrissie’s interpretation of what had happened that day. Although it did help to alleviate some of the heaviness that had settled on her chest and refused to go away. “This came in the mail this morning.” She turned and took an envelope out of the depths of her shoulder bag and placed it down on the table.
Chrissie gave her a searching glance before picking up the envelope and taking out the letter from inside. Something fell as she unfolded the letter. Chrissie glanced down. “What the—!” Her eyes widened as she read the amount written on the check now lying on the table.
“Read the letter that came with it,” Nicky urged.
Chrissie’s brows rose. “It says here that you’ve been reinstated in your job and the enclosed check is to cover all your back wages for the past six weeks.” Her eyes narrowed. “So, as well as sorting out the letch Lionel Jenkins, Lucien Wynter has also arranged for you to be given your old job back?”
Nicky nodded. “What I don’t understand is why? Why would he even bother?”
“Guilt, maybe?” Chrissie shrugged. “Because he was such a bastard to you that day in his apartment, and this is his way of saying sorry?”
Nicky had thought that too at first. She had also considered taking the letter, and the check, to Lucien’s office and telling him exactly where he could shove it.
Except her pride wasn’t going to pay her bills or keep a roof over her head, but this check would.
Once Nicky had calmed down a little she had also recognized that Lucien wasn’t a man who allowed himself to feel guilt. Or feel the need to apologize. For anything.
So why had he done this? What possible reason could he have for arranging for her to have her job back, and also ensuring that she was paid the wages she had lost because of Lionel Jenkins?
“Or,” her friend spoke slowly, “this could just be his way of letting you know he’s still out there?”
“I don’t think so.” Nicky gave a definitive shake of her head. “Not when he made it perfectly clear when we parted that he wasn’t going to see me again.” The two of them had walked to the elevator in silence that day, Nicky stepping inside it in that same silence, Lucien looking on grimly as he stood and watched the elevator doors close. All without either of them having said another word to each other since they left the kitchen.
The kitchen where Lucien had made love to her on the marble tabletop...
Chrissie shrugged. “Then maybe he’s trying to antagonize you into going to see him again?”
And that’s exactly what Nicky would have done if she had followed through on her first reaction to receiving this letter.
It was never going to happen. Nicky would never deliberately put herself through that particular humiliation again.
“I can’t believe you haven’t told me any of this before now.” Chrissie eyed her incredulously.
Nicky was surprised she had confided in her friend now, when for so many years she hadn’t dared to confide in anyone about anything. When for that same amount of years she’d had to think about every word she said before she said it. To be careful never to slip up and reveal any of Felicity Bennett’s past rather than the one she had invented for Nicky McKenzie.
Even with Chrissie, her closest friend for the past three years, she had always been careful. Not for her own sake, but for Chrissie’s; knowledge of Nicky’s past could put her friend in danger, and Nicky never wanted to do that.
But this situation with Lucien was just too big, so far out of her experience that she needed to talk to someone about it. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before now, Chrissie. I just—it all seemed slightly unreal that day at uni, and then the evening was such a disaster.” She grimaced. “The sort of humiliating disaster I just wanted to forget.”
“I’ve had a few of those myself.” Chrissie gave Nicky’s hand a reassuring squeeze.
Nicky gave her friend a grateful smile, knowing she had been forgiven. “These last few times I’ve seen him again...well, I wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that I went to ask him for a job in the first place, let alone the humiliation that followed.” The humiliation that still haunted her, damn it. “And now this.” She picked up the letter. “What do I do next, Chrissie?” She looked across at her friend appealingly.
“Oh that’s easy.” The other woman gave a grin. “You cash the bastard’s check and you take your job back. You should never have lost it in the first place.”
“But then Lucien would be my boss!”
“Only indirectly.” Chrissie shrugged. “It’s not as if he’s going to have anything to do with the day-to-day running of Jenkins, Simmons and Simmons.”
Nicky frowned. “So I just go back to work as if nothing has happened?”
“That’s the idea, yes.”
“And Lucien, what do I do about him?”
“What do you want to do about him?”
“I don’t know!”
Her friend grinned gleefully. “Then I think a little silence on your part is really going to piss him off.”
“Silence...?” Nicky repeated doubtfully, still half inclined to rip the letter and the check into tiny little pieces before throwing them both in the bin. Or Lucien’s arrogant face.
“Silence,” Chrissie repeated with satisfaction. “Let’s see how he likes a little of his own medicine. And if he is still interested in you—”
“He’s not,” Nicky put in quickly.
“But if he is,” her friend repeated firmly, “then no reaction from you is going to drive a control freak like Lucien Wynter ever so slightly insane.”
Silence.
The woman who seemed to have an opinion on everything—most especially Lucien—had chosen now to be silent?
Oh Nicky had cashed the check she had received for her back pay, and had also been back at her desk at Jenkins, Simmons and Simmons for a week now, but otherwise...
Bloody silence.
Lucien had expected...something. If only, after receiving the letter and check, that Nicky would march back in here, red hair flying wildly and fire blazing in her eyes, as she told him precisely in which part of his anatomy he could ‘stick’ his check and his job.
It would have been a ridiculous act of pride on her part, when she needed both the check and the job,
but Lucien knew he would have enjoyed the performance anyway.
Hell, maybe he had even been counting on it.
Instead, here he stood at the windows of his office on the tenth floor of the Wynter Enterprises building, ‘king of all he surveyed’ from up in his ‘ivory tower’—damn, the woman had a mouth on her, and she wasn’t afraid to use it—staring sightlessly out at the London skyline.
Why the hell couldn’t he just forget about Nicky and move on, like he always did?
Because he hadn’t forgotten about her, not for a moment since he had shown her the door...
Because he’d had to, damn it. Because he lived his life without any emotional entanglements. Because he couldn’t allow himself to need anything or anyone. Or to lose control.
He had even made a point of going out with two other women these past couple weeks. One a beautiful and sought-after model, the other an Oscar-winning actress. Both had accepted dinner invitations from the billionaire Lucien Wynter without even meeting him first.
His mouth tightened now as he thought of those two disastrous evenings.
He had only just made it through dinner with the model, her breathy laugh irritating him, her groping him beneath the table in the empty restaurant—something he would once have taken full advantage of—only succeeding in irritating him more. So much so that he had put her in a passing cab the moment they were outside the restaurant.
The actress—he couldn’t even remember her name now—had been a redhead. Long, straight and glossy red hair to her shoulders, her eyes a sultry blue.
As far as Lucien was concerned, she had been too tall, and didn’t have curls or rebellious chocolate-brown eyes.
She was all wrong. Just wrong.
Lucien’s jaw clenched as he now slammed his fist into the window frame, uncaring of the pain he inflicted as he stared across the London rooftops to the building where he knew Nicky was once again sitting and working behind her desk.
His building.
Behind a desk he also owned.
Nicky was just carrying on with her life as if he didn’t exist. As if the two of them had never met. As if the two of them hadn’t had sex on top of the table where Lucien ate a bagel and drank his coffee every morning.
He placed his hands wide on the window frame as he breathed deeply, jaw still clenched, eyes glittering.
He stood like that for five minutes, ten, arms tensed, jaw aching, glaring at the building where he knew Nicky was hard at work.
Until he couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Audrey,” he bellowed harshly for his PA. “Audrey, get your—” He broke off as his obviously startled PA appeared in the doorway. He nodded grimly. “You arranged for a letter and check to be sent to a Nicky McKenzie last week; do you have any personal information on her other than her address? A phone number? Email?”
“I… Both, I think.” Audrey nodded warily.
“I want them. Now,” Lucien added with grim determination.
No!
This could not be happening to her. Not again.
She just couldn’t keep fighting a man as formidable as Lucien.
But she had tried. She had tried so hard to do exactly that. And now this.
Nicky’s fingers tightly gripped the sides of her computer screen as she stared at the email she had just opened without recognizing—realizing—it was from him.
Those same two words and time that he had written on his business card the day they met, ‘Petruccio’s, 8:00 tonight’.
Also just like the last time, there was no please, no would you, can you, could you, just a place and time. The same place and time.
Her cheeks heated with color and she found herself squirming in her chair as the memories of that evening once again came flooding back to her.
“Everything okay here, Nicky?” Mark Graham, her immediate boss, paused beside her workstation.
“Fine.” She managed to give Mark a reassuring smile as she eased the tension from her shoulders and forced herself to get back to work.
Her very first task was to eliminate the email from Lucien without looking at it again.
She wasn’t going to allow Lucien to do this to her again. To think that he could just snap his elegant fingers and expect she would come running.
If he really wanted to see her again, after throwing her out of his apartment the last time they were together, then he was going to have to ask this time.
Even if just the thought of seeing Lucien again, being with him again, was enough to cause Nicky to tremble and shake.
With desire.
Arousal.
With anticipation of the pleasure he could give her so easily...
“What on earth is wrong with you tonight?” Chrissie studied Nicky closely later that evening as they sat eating dinner in the kitchen of the apartment she shared with Fleur. “You’re cheeks are flushed, eyes feverish, and that’s the second time you’ve dropped your fork. And you’ve hardly touched Fleur’s world-class lasagna.” She smiled affectionately at the other woman before turning back to Nicky. “Are you coming down with a—” She broke off as her expression became suddenly speculative. “You’ve heard from him again, haven’t you?”
There was no reason for Nicky to ask Chrissie who she meant by ‘him’.
There was only one him.
The same him who was the reason Nicky felt slightly nauseous, and ‘flushed and feverish’, as eight o’clock arrived, and then slowly ticked by.
She gave another glance up at the clock on the wall of Chrissie and Fleur’s kitchen. 8:10. Lucien would have been seated at the otherwise empty restaurant for ten minutes by now. Would have slowly—angrily?—realized that she wasn’t going to turn up.
And she was slowly going out of her mind worrying over what he would do next.
Not that she regretted her decision not to go to the restaurant. Not for a moment. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t also apprehensive as to what Lucien’s response might be to her defiance—
She almost jumped up out of her chair as her cell phone vibrated to let her know she had a new message.
Her hand shook as she picked the cell phone up from the table and read the message. Well, it was more of a symbol, really. Just ‘?’.
Lucien not only knew her home and email address, but also her cell phone number?
Of course he did, damn him. She was one of his employees; it would have been a simple matter of checking with personnel—or in Lucien’s case, having his PA check with personnel—as to the personal details they had on file for Nicky McKenzie. Or maybe Dair Grayson, Lucien’s cousin and head of his security, had done it for him. However Lucien had attained that information on her, Nicky had no doubts he would not have gone to the trouble of doing it himself.
And he was going to be furious, in that cold and scary way of his, because she had left him sitting alone in the exclusive restaurant.
Her cell phone vibrated with another new message.
‘5 more minutes’
Five more minutes until what? Lucien fired her again, if she didn’t respond?
Nicky had pondered that possibility all day as she carried on with her work on autopilot, finally deciding that really wasn’t Lucien’s style. That he would never do anything so petty, especially after going to the trouble of reinstating her.
No, Lucien was much more subtle than that, could probably think of a dozen ways he might make her life difficult—more difficult, Nicky acknowledged ruefully. Hiding out from the boss of London’s underworld for almost six years hadn’t exactly made her life easy.
“Nicky?”
She looked up into Fleur’s gentle Asian face, even as she inwardly acknowledged it had been a mistake for her to come here this evening, that she was obviously worrying her two closest friends with her behavior.
She gave a slightly shaky smile. “Chrissie’s right, I actually don’t feel too well this evening. So if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just—” She broke off as yet another message vibrated o
n her cell phone.
A message Nicky was too afraid to look at this time, knowing the five minutes Lucien had given her must have elapsed.
She really had no idea what Lucien was going to do now, couldn’t even guess, but she wanted to be far away from Chrissie and Fleur when he did it.
Nicky stood up noisily. “Thank you both for dinner, but I really do have to go.” She thrust her now eerily silent cell phone into her shoulder bag before turning to hug her two friends goodnight. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Chrissie,” she promised, slightly breathless.
Chrissie gave her a searching look before nodding slowly. “Make sure that you do, otherwise I’m going to worry.”
Nicky felt as if the devil himself were at her heels as she left the apartment and traveled home on the tube.
Taking out her cell phone once she was on the train, and reading Lucien’s last enigmatic message, did nothing to reassure her either.
‘Last chance’
Last chance for what?
Lucien must have known, when she hadn’t responded to his other messages, that she wasn’t just running late, otherwise she would have messaged back and told him so.
Last chance or what?
There was any number of things Lucien could do to her. Most of which she knew would give her no pleasure at all.
Her cell phone continued to be eerily silent as she hurried home through the rain-wet streets to her apartment. The sort of silence that made her nervy as a cat and startle at every unfamiliar—and some familiar—noises, as the urban foxes, and yes, some cats too, rooted through the garbage in the darkened alleys looking for food as she passed by, their eyes glowing in the darkness as they paused to watch her hurry past.
Once she reached her apartment she was going to lock and bolt the door, close all the curtains, turn off her cell phone—
“Miss McKenzie.”
Nicky’s eyes widened, the color draining from her cheeks as a man stepped out of the shadows directly in front of her.
Chapter 7
A man well over six feet in height, dressed all in black, and with that distinctive scar at his temple. Dair Grayson.
Dark Alpha (ALPHA 2) Page 8