by Dani Collins
That meant she didn’t have anything left to lose in standing up to Dante. She dropped her arms and lifted her chin.
“Are you accusing me of somehow causing your grandmother’s asthma so I could call for treatment?”
“No. But I think you recognized her and took advantage of an opportunity.”
“To do what? Be kind? Yes. Guilty!”
“To get on my good side.”
“You have one?”
He didn’t move, but his granite stillness was its own threat, one that made a dangerous heat coil through her middle and sent her pulse racing.
“You haven’t seen my bad one. Yet.” Then, in a surprisingly devastating move, he added, “Cami.”
She felt hammered to the floor then, all of her reverberating with the impact of his saying her name. A flash in his eyes told her he knew exactly how she was reacting, which made it all the more humiliating.
Sharma chose that moment to knock, forcing her to collect her bearings. Cami had to brush by him, which caused him to move farther into her apartment. Her whole body tingled with awareness, mind distracted by thoughts of his gaze touching her few things, casting aspersions over them. Why did she even care how little he thought of her?
“Hi,” Sharma said with a big smile.
Cami had actually forgotten between one moment and the next who she was expecting. Her own baffled, “Hi,” reflected how out of sorts she was, making Sharma give her a look of amused curiosity.
“Everything okay? Oh, you have company.” Intrigue lit her gaze, and she waved at Dante. “Hi. Are you our new neighbor?”
Cami caught back a choke. The Dante Gallos of the world didn’t live in places like this. He’d probably wipe his feet on the way out.
“He’s just visiting.” Flustered, she set a brown bag of cookies on a small box of dishes she wasn’t keeping, but that Sharma’s young family might find useful, and returned Sharma’s keys at the same time. “Thanks for the car today.”
“It was bad enough you were moving out of the building. You can’t leave town,” Sharma said, making a sad face as she accepted the box. “What happened with the job?”
“I’ll explain later.” Cami waved a hand to gloss past the question, not willing to get into it with the demigod of wrath looming behind her, skewering her so hard with his bronze laser vision she felt it like a pin in her back. She was a butterfly, squirming under his concentrated study, caught and dying for nothing because her plain brown wings wouldn’t even hold his attention for long.
Sharma’s gaze slid over to him and back as if she knew Dante had something to do with it. “Okay, well, nice to meet you.” She waved at Dante, then said to Cami, “Gotta run to get Milly, but say goodbye before you leave.”
“I will.”
As she closed the door, Cami ran through all the should-have-saids she’d conjured last night, as she had replayed her interchange with Dante in his office. Through it all, she had wished she could go back and change a decade’s worth of history, all to no avail.
No matter what threats he was making, however, she knew this was a chance to salvage something. To appeal to whatever reasonable side he might possess. Maybe. Or not. Perhaps talking to him would make matters worse.
Still, she had to make him see she was trying to make amends and hopefully ease this grudge he had. It was killing her on every level; it really was.
* * *
As Dante waited out Cami Fagan’s chat with her neighbor, his brain was still clattering with all the train cars that had derailed and piled up, one after another, starting with the news her father was dead—which had been strangely jarring.
Initially, before their association had gone so very wrong, he’d looked on Stephen Fagan as a sort of mentor. Dante’s grandfather had been a devoted surrogate after Dante’s father died, and an excellent businessman willing to bet on his grandson, but he hadn’t had the passion for electronics that Dante possessed.
He’d found that in Stephen, which was why he had trusted him so implicitly and felt so betrayed by his crime. Maybe he’d even believed, in the back of his mind, that one day he would have an explanation from the man he’d thought of as a friend. Damaging as the financial loss had been, the real cost had been his faith in his own judgment. How had he been so blind? Something in him had always longed for a chance to hear Stephen’s side of it, to understand why he would do something so cold when Dante had thought they were friends.
Hearing Stephen was dead had been... Well, it hadn’t been good, despite his claim otherwise. It had been painful, stirring up the other more devastating loss he’d suffered back then. All the losses that had come at once.
As he’d been processing that he would never get answers from Stephen, someone had knocked insistently, informing him his grandmother was unwell. Rushing outside, what had he found?
Cami.
In the confusion, she’d slipped away, but she’d stayed on his mind all the while his grandmother was treated. The moment she had recovered, his grandmother became adamant that she thank the young woman who had helped her.
Back when she’d been grieving the loss of her husband, Dante hadn’t dared make things worse by revealing how he’d put the family’s security in jeopardy. It was one of the reasons he hadn’t pressed charges against Stephen—to keep his grandmother and the rest of the family from knowing the extent of their financial woes. He hadn’t wanted anyone worrying more than they already were.
Instead, with the help of his cousin, he’d worked like a slave to bring them back from the brink.
That silence meant Noni didn’t understand why he was so skeptical of Cami’s altruism. He didn’t want to tell her he would rather wring Cami’s neck than buy her a meal, but he wasn’t about to let his grandmother go hunting all over town for her good Samaritan, possibly collapsing again. He also sure as hell wasn’t going to give Cami a chance to be alone with his grandmother again. Who knew what damage would be done this time?
So, after a restless night and a day of putting it off, he’d looked up her address from her CV and had come here. He’d walked up the stairs in this very dated building, wondering what sort of debts her father had paid off since he clearly hadn’t left much for his daughter, and knocked.
Then Smash! She had opened the door, plunging him into a blur of pale pink top that scooped low enough to reveal the upper swells of her breasts and thin enough her nipples pressed enticingly against it. Her red shorts were outright criminal, emphasizing her firm thighs and painting over her mound in a way that made his palm itch to cup there. The bright color stopped mere inches below that, covering the top end of a thin white scar that scored down past her knee.
He’d barely processed the old injury when she whirled away in response to a buzzer. The fabric of her shorts held a tight grip on her ass as she turned and bent to retrieve something from the oven, making his mouth water and his libido rush to readiness.
He had spent the night mentally flagellating himself for being attracted to her at all, let alone so intensely. Cami was beyond off-limits. She was a hard No. Whatever he thought he might have seen in the first seconds of their meeting had been calculated on her part. Had to have been.
She had known who he was.
And now he knew who she was, so how could he be physically attracted to someone who should repel him? It was untenable.
Yet the stir in his groin refused to abate.
She turned from closing the front door, and her wholesome prettiness was an affront. A lie. He curled his fist and tried not to react when she crossed her arms again, plumping that ample bosom of hers in a most alluring way. Deliberately?
“I don’t know how to convince you that I had no ulterior motive yesterday, but I didn’t.” Her lips remained slightly parted, as though she wanted to say more but was waiting to see how he reacted first.
“You can’t. She wants you to come to the hotel anyway. To thank you. Not the Tabor. The one where we’re staying.”
Surprise fli
ckered across her face, then wariness. “And you’re here to intimidate me all over again? Tell me not to go anywhere near her?”
“I’m here to drive you.” Was she intimidated? She wasn’t acting like it. “But it’s true I don’t want you near her. That’s why I’ll supervise.”
“Ha. Fun as that sounds—” She cut herself off with a choked laugh. Her ironic smile invited him to join in the joke, then faded when he didn’t.
Something like hurt might have moved behind her eyes, but she disguised it with a sweep of her lashes, leaving him frustrated that he couldn’t read her as easily as he wanted to.
She moved into the kitchen to transfer the last batch of cookies onto the cooling rack. “Too bad you didn’t put it off until Monday. I would have been gone. Tell her I’ve left town.”
He moved to stand on the other side of the breakfast bar, watching her.
Such a domestic act, baking cookies. This didn’t fit at all with the image he’d built in his mind of her family living high off his hard work and innovation. Nothing about her fit into the boxes he’d drawn for Fagans and women, potential hires or people who dined with his family. Nothing except...
“Unlike you, I don’t lie, especially to people I care about.”
“Boy, you love to get your little digs in, don’t you? When did I lie to you?”
When she’d mentioned he was being paid back, for starters, but, “Forget it. I’m not here to rehash the past. I’ve moved on.” Begrudgingly and with a dark rage still livid within him.
“Really,” she scoffed in a voice that held a husk. Was it naturally there? An emotional reaction to his accusation? Or put there to entice him? “Is that why you fired me without even giving me a chance? Is that why you said it was ‘good’ that my father is dead? My mother died in the same crash. Do you want to tell me how happy you are to hear that news?” The same emotive crack as yesterday charged her tone now, and her eyes gleamed with old agony.
He wanted to write her off as melodramatic, make some kind of sharp comeback so she wouldn’t think she could get away with dressing him down, but his chest tightened. Whatever else had happened, losing one’s parents was a blow. He couldn’t dismiss that so pitilessly.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” he allowed, finding his gaze dropping to the scar etched onto her collarbone. She had that longer one on her leg, too. Had she been in the accident? He tried to recall what he had known about Stephen Fagan’s family, but came up with a vague recollection of a wife and a forgotten number of children.
Why did he find the idea of her being injured so disturbing? Everything about this woman put him on uneven ground. He hated it. There was already a large dose of humiliation attached to her father’s betrayal. He’d been soaked in grief over losing his grandfather, but guilt, as well. The old man had loved him. Indulged him. And Dante had failed so very badly, even contributing to his grandfather’s death with his mistake.
An acrid lump of self-blame still burned black and hot within him. He had had to take that smoldering coal in hand, shape and harden it with an implacable grip, and pull himself into the future upon it.
Since then, nothing happened without his will or permission. He was ruled by sound judgment, not his libido or his temper. Certainly not his personal desires. Yet anger had got the better of him yesterday. She had. And emotion was threatening to take him over again today, especially when she muttered, “No. You shouldn’t have.”
The utter gall of her was mind-blowing.
She clattered the cookie sheet and spatula into the sink. Her ponytail was coming loose, allowing strands of rich mink and subtle caramel with tiny streaks of ash to fall around her face. It gave her a delicate air that he had to consciously remind himself was a mirage. That vestige of grief in her expression might be real, but the flicker of helplessness was not. Fagans landed on their feet.
“Look,” he said, more on edge than he liked. “Helping my grandmother was a nice gesture, but I’m not giving you back that job, if that’s what you were after.”
She lifted her head. “It was a coincidence!” She dropped some cookies into a brown paper bag and offered it to him. “Here. Tell her I’m glad she’s feeling better.” Her hand tremored.
He ignored the offering. “She wants you to come for dinner.”
“I have plans.” A blatant lie. She set the bag on the counter between them.
“I’m not letting you hold this over me. Or skirt around me. Put on a dress and let’s get it over with.”
“I’ve packed all my dresses.”
“Is that your way of asking me to buy you a new one?” He had played that game a lot and couldn’t decide if it grated that she was trying it. Under the right circumstances, he enjoyed spoiling a woman. Cami’s heart-shaped ass in a narrow skirt with a slit that showed off her legs—
“No,” she said flatly, yanking him back from a fantasy that shouldn’t even be happening. A pang of something seemed to torture her brow. Insulted? Please.
“What do you want, then? Because clearly you’re holding out for something.” He had to remember that.
“And you’re clearly paranoid. Actually, you know what I want?” Her hand slapped the edge of the sink. “I want you to admit you’ve been receiving my payments.”
“What payments?”
“Are you that rich you don’t even notice?” She shoved out of the kitchen and whisked by him to the rickety looking desk, then pulled up short as she started to open a drawer. She slammed it shut again. “I forgot. It’s not here. His name is, like, Bernardo something. It’s Italian.”
“What is?”
“The letter! The one that proves I’ve been paying you back.” She frowned with distraction, biting at her bottom lip in a way that drew his thoughts to doing the same. “My brother has the file, though. He took it last fall.”
“Convenient.”
“God, you’re arrogant.”
He shrugged, having heard that before. Recovering his belief in himself had been the hardest part of all. His ego had taken a direct hit after misjudging her father. He’d questioned himself, his instincts and his intelligence, which almost crippled him as he faced the Herculean task of recovery. In the end, he had no choice but to trust his gut above anyone else and get on with the work. He would have been dead in the water otherwise.
He refused to go back to self-doubts. He faced everything head-on and dealt with it as expediently as possible. “Let’s get past the games. I know you have a hidden agenda. Speak frankly.”
“I don’t! I’m exactly what I look like. I applied for a job for which I am fully qualified. You came along with your sword of retaliation and cut me off at the knees. Then I was nice to a little old lady who happens to be your grandmother. Now I have to move and get back on my feet. Again.”
Her hand flung out with exasperation as she spoke. She smelled like the cinnamon and vanilla she’d been baking with, sweet and homespun. All smoke and mirrors.
“How was I supposed to know you would buy the Tabor when I interviewed six months ago? I’m not trying to pull a fast one on you. You’re the one out to get me.” She managed to sound quite persecuted.
He shook his head, amazed. “You look like you’re telling the truth, but so did your father. It’s quite a family talent, I have to say.” Then, because he was so damned tempted to reach out and touch her, he neutralized that secret weapon of hers. He gave her luscious figure a scathing once-over and said, “Of course, he didn’t work the additional diversions you employ.”
Her jaw dropped open with affront, but her gaze took a skitter around the room. She blushed, seeming disconcerted. Caught out, even. “I’m not—You showed up here unannounced! As if I’d throw myself at you.”
“No?” He was needling her, determined to maintain the upper hand, but that tiny word seemed to flick a switch.
She flung back her hair to glare at him. “You’re the last man on earth I’d want anything to do with!”
She faltered as she said it
and tried to give him a scathing once-over, but her lashes quivered. He could tell by the way they moved that her gaze traversed his torso and down to the muscles in his abdomen. His stomach tightened with the rest of him. In those charged seconds, he grew so hot, his clothes should have incinerated off his body.
When she brought her gaze back in a flash of defiance, there was a glow of speculation in their depths. The light shifted, or, more accurately, the fog of animosity in her eyes dissolved into a mist of desire.
The air shimmered, hot and oppressive between them. All an act, he reminded himself, but, What the hell. He ought to get something.
* * *
“If you want to talk about compensation, I’m listening.” He suddenly seemed really close. His voice was like whiskey-soaked velvet.
“What?” She took a step back, reeling from the way her body was betraying her. She was trying to rebuff him, but everything about him overwhelmed her senses.
She came up against the wall and he flattened his hands on either side of her head, not touching her, but caging her. She set her hands on his chest, alarmed then intrigued by the layers of heat and strength that pressed into her fingertips. He was pure vitality, enticing her hands to splay and move in a small stroke of curiosity that quickly edged toward greed.
How did he disarm her so quickly? How had they even wound up like this? She could feel his sharp nipples stabbing into the heels of her palms and it pleased her. Excited her. She wanted to run her hands over his chest and onto his lower back, exploring everywhere.
She had to quell a whimper of helplessness. This desire was terrifying and exhilarating at once. Deadly, yet impossible to ignore.
His pupils swallowed all the color in his eyes, drawing her into the darkest unknown.
“What are you offering?” His arousal was so tangible in his voice, it felt like a caress from her shoulder down her chest. A sweep of bumps rose on her skin and her breasts grew heavy and swollen.
“Cold?” The corners of his mouth deepened and she couldn’t read his eyes.
This was bizarre and damning, yet compelling. She felt as though a drug had been released in her system that made her languid and euphoric. She didn’t move away. Couldn’t. Her breaths moved unevenly, and she could swear she felt the brush of his erection against her.