by Libby Rice
“Why are you here, Scarlet?” The rumble of his voice scraped across raw nerves.
His chair-back faced an internal window spanning the length of the conference room. Even though they sat in a fishbowl, Ethan and the furniture hid most of her body from view. True to form, Ethan took advantage of their makeshift privacy. His knuckles traced the length her arms, skimming toward her fingertips until coming to rest in her lap. His hands were warm against the tops of her thighs, the gentleness of his touch at odds with the viciousness in his stare.
Apprehension prickled beneath her skin. His question should have been rhetorical. “I guess I don’t know what you mean.” She was an open book. The project would help build the legal practice she desperately needed to pay the bills, plain and simple. In theory, she’d get in, get out, and get paid. He was the one who’d been dishonest about his motivations. Sure, he wanted Optik, but he also wanted a piece of her.
“Of course not,” he growled, squeezing the pliant flesh above her knees, not causing pain, but with enough force to get her attention.
The touch didn’t work in the way he might have imagined or even the way she would have expected. Instead of putting the fear of God in her, her body went warm and lax. “Fine. You want to know why I’m in this room specifically?” she purred. “Or why I’m in Copenhagen? You know the answers to both questions.” Last night, he’d made his attraction plain, announced it to the world. Perhaps he wouldn’t like finding out the feeling wasn’t mutual. If she could muster the lie.
“Do I?” His hands began to move back and forth over her lap, caressing each leg through the soft linen pulled tight over her thighs. “I don’t think so.”
“Because you don’t think at all,” she snapped. Unlike him, her sleepless nights left time to examine her ill-conceived decision to come to Denmark. Crossing her legs, she rid herself of his roving fingertips. “You hired my firm, and me specifically, to negotiate the purchase of Optik. That’s what brought me to Denmark and that’s what has me here this morning.”
Looking at his hands, she damned her yearning to have them back on her legs. “Did you want it to be something else? You perhaps? Maybe a long-felt need to please you or beg for forgiveness?” She slid to the edge of her seat, masking the truth of her words with a hard look. “I already tried that. Didn’t work, remember?”
“How could I forget?” he sneered. “Guess the guilt’s worn off. Now you’re willing to sell my company out to the highest…”
Ethan kept going, seething, flaying her alive with cruel accusations of corporate betrayal that she could neither absorb nor understand. She heard him but receded into herself, wondering vaguely what brought this on.
Some lawyers put up with aggressive, borderline abusive shit from their clients. Too many in her opinion. Reminding herself she wasn’t one of them, she stood to leave, cutting Ethan off mid-tirade.
But when she rose, his long, muscular legs kept her bracketed between his big body and the chair. He reached around to snug the edge of the seat behind her knees, forcing her down onto the cushion.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
******
“We’ve established you didn’t come to Denmark to make amends, though if I were you, I’d reconsider.” Ethan cleared his throat, but all the gravel refused to smooth out. She’d deceived him. Used him. Again. A muscle in his jaw began to twitch with barely suppressed fury, and he held up a warning hand. “I’m not an enemy you want, Scarlet, and you’re well on your way to making me one.”
Pain crossed her face briefly, but anger quickly replaced it, and then finally, a convincing rendition of bewilderment. In a smaller voice, she said, “I don’t understand, Ethan. Get to your point.”
“This act is beneath even you.”
Ethan watched her grapple with which persona to present. Apparently strong and confident won out over seductive and surprised or innocent and confused, for the time being. With a defiant toss of that golden mane, she shifted out of her bemused mien.
“You’re wrong,” she said, drawing the words out, “about whatever offense you imagine I’ve committed.”
Really? So tell me where you go during your midnight haunts. “Where did you disappear to last night after dinner?”
She passed an unsteady hand over her forehead, abruptly looking less comfortable, more on edge. “You’re talking in riddles.” Her eyes darted away. “I went to the hotel.”
Eventually. “That so?” he prodded, allowing his voice to reveal all the disbelief and skepticism coursing through his system. Grasping the armrests protruding from her seat, he began moving Scarlet back and forth by her chair, bringing her knees into contact with his and then rolling her away as far as his arms would reach. To an outsider, the movement would appear to be a lazy sway, maybe even a gentle flirtation. But between them, it was a pure demonstration of control. He had it. She didn’t.
When she stayed quiet, he pressed, “You called a cab to travel one city block on a hot, crowded night?”
A heartbeat passed before she answered. A mere moment, but glaring. “I made a detour,” she rationalized, head rising and chin jutting forward. Her hands tightened and released her quads, right over the spot he’d squeezed. “I… needed things from the drugstore, then…”
Disappointment ripped through him like an acid wash. Ethan had wanted to be wrong more desperately than he’d realized, and facing her deceit nearly sent him to his knees. Even now, with the lie fresh on her lips, he wanted to kiss her, to drag her to the carpet and drown in pleasure. But the two of them weren’t to be.
She hadn’t detoured to the drugstore. Ethan would have intercepted her return to the hotel after a mere shampoo run. He’d waited for hours. And if she’d been gallivanting about on a romantic tryst or some otherwise legal endeavor, she’d have owned up to save her ass.
“You lie,” he snarled. Grasping for control, he released his grip on her armrests and rolled his chair away, needing some distance from the tired, wan face that made him ache to apologize for his harshness. “And that’s one thing you don’t get to do. You won’t be needing those things from the drugstore, Empress. You’re through.”
In every way I can manage.
Blinking at him, her expression went blank. She hadn’t expected this. He could see that much. The surprise made her appear even more bewildered and vulnerable.
Ignoring her subconscious appeal, he spoke in a bored voice calculated to be heard beyond their private room. “You’re fired. Susan will see to your flight. Coach. Hell, the cargo hold if she can arrange it.” He paused for a long, impatient breath. “And let’s hope this farce doesn’t permeate the JTS team.” Little chance of that. Selling him out had been personal, the exact thing he’d vowed to watch for in his decision to bring her onboard.
Ethan stood and stared at her in disgust, refusing to react to the flash of pain and disbelief Scarlet couldn’t hide and hardening himself against the continuing urge to comfort.
Save it. You’ve been fool enough.
“Expect an investigation.” After turning toward the door, he stopped. Rather than look over his shoulder and tempt himself to take it all back, he stared out the internal window to where their colleagues pretended to go about a normal day.
Then he nodded, more to himself than her, only now recognizing that fate had dealt a certain poetic justice.
“Perhaps I won’t be the only one of us to see the inside of a prison cell, Empress.”
Chapter 10
The trap had sprung.
Scarlet hunched over the edge of a park bench, entirely numb except for the diet soda that slipped down her throat to join the melee of nausea coiling in her stomach. The laughter of nearby children and tourists reminded her the day was a beautiful one. With any awareness, one could smell the tang of iodine and salt as it spread over the city from where the sea thrust itself inward through winding canals. But little of the splendor registered, not when, as Ethan had said, she was through.
Careful y
ears had preceded this, her most egregious mistake since the night she’d decided to walk alone after dark in a shitty neighborhood. This time, her error hadn’t taken the form of refusing help. It had been an act of accepting it. Never should she have trusted him.
Swallowing, her throat spasmed in indecision over whether she’d be sick. A trash can beckoned from across the cobblestone walkway. If worse came to worst…
Ethan’s offer had been too good to refuse. But, dammit, she’d known it was also too good to be true—a plum, well-paying, and well-respected client that would rocket her toward partnership and, with it, a greater measure of financial security. While she’d been rightfully leery, Scarlet had trusted him to relegate any revenge to petty annoyances she could handle.
Jokes at dinner? Doable. Single-handedly dismantling her legal career? Not so much.
Denmark had been a grave miscalculation. By bathing her in bright, comforting light before plunging her into darkness, Ethan had left her not only fearful for her future, but also completely disoriented.
Shivering in the evening sun, Scarlet sat back against the scratchy wood of the bench and closed her eyes. Fishing her mobile from her purse, she reminded herself the bastard had planned this from the beginning. She’d played right into his hands. At the airport, when he’d threatened her with ruination—a punishment she now knew he’d planned to carry out at the first opportunity—she should’ve laughed in his face and left him high and dry. Yet she’d taken the high road, which, like in any tragedy worth its ticket price, had been easily usurped by the low one.
A text from Brian buzzed in. He recommended waiting Ethan out, even offered up his own suite as home base.
Sure. Run straight from Ethan’s accusations to Brian’s room, where the two of them would get shitfaced and watch romantic comedies. Every few months, Brian made a casual suggestion that they’d do well “as more than friends” because “hot people belong together,” or some such gibberish. The coworker thing aside, Brian’s sky-is-the-limit metrosexuality put her on edge. He liked women and maintained a tight ship on his “chick calendar,” but he also liked manicures and pedicures and midi rings. Scarlet just couldn’t do that.
Contemplating a career in peril had her absently raising chilled fingertips to her ears. The earrings were her only remaining valuables worth enough to sustain her lease and other necessities for any length of time. The unemployment Ethan threatened might eventually demand their liquidation.
Feeling carefully, she detected the scars the large stones adeptly concealed. A plastic surgeon had repaired the wreckage left in the wake of having the studs ripped to freedom through protesting cartilage and skin. Now only thin raised lines hinted at the trauma.
She pictured herself ordering a pair of cheap, cubic zirconium monstrosities to cover the scars in the earrings’ absence. In this, Ethan would ultimately, even if unwittingly, hand her dad the last laugh. She’d have proven him right, showing herself to be completely incapable of making it without his backing. “I’ll see you when the money runs out,” he’d said.
The jewels would go long before she’d bow to Tripp Leore.
Shaking her head dizzily, she saw the hotel beckon in the fading light, and she trudged across the street to the safety of her suite. She hadn’t contacted Susan for a return flight. No doubt Ethan had sounded the alarm about her imaginary attempts to sink the deal, so little more than scandal awaited her in New York. She could see it now—yellow tape blocking her office while men in black poked around her desk, reviewing her every e-mail and running a forensic analysis on her computer.
Good luck with that.
She relished the idea of making Ethan pay when the facts became clear. But that dream would go unrealized. She’d been the one to teach him that innocence could be meaningless. That it doesn’t matter what you did, only what your betters think you did, or worse, want you to have done.
You’re a fast learner, Mr. Blake.
Inside her room, she slid her back down the door to land on her rear, legs folded in front of her. With arms locked tight around tucked-in shins, she laid her forehead on her knees, forcing her mind to flee her worries. Breathing slowly, she concentrated on the voice warm-ups that had lived in her brain since boarding-school choir—one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. In her mind, her voice raised a note with each number between one and five and then descended again. Over and over, she sang in her head, never allowing reality to intrude, until finally, she drifted off for the first time in days.
She dreamt of an elusive sea of money when a violent pounding shook her into awareness.
******
Scarlet hadn’t left.
Ethan raised a fist and pounded on her door, prepared to drag her bodily from the d’Angleterre if need be. He didn’t care how late it was. The little traitor wouldn’t spend another minute in their midst, plotting and scheming.
An answering knock sounded through the wood in the vicinity of his knees. Something had obviously hit the door from the inside. Kicking me in spirit, are we? The immediacy of the response said she’d been near the door when he strolled up.
Crashing an open palm against the wood, he warned her through the barrier. “You’ve overstayed your welcome, Scarlet.”
As the last word left his lips, the door cracked and then slowly opened. While Ethan remained quiet, shock flitted down his spine. She wore the same clothes she’d had on earlier in the day, but they were rumpled, like she’d slept a night in them.
Loose blonde curls had been carelessly scraped off her pale forehead, and her raised hand rubbed at the base of her skull. She winced with each stroke, hinting at the source of that answering thud.
Her groggy eyes were dry, but they hadn’t been. He’d never seen tracked mascara look so tragically beautiful, and he realized the last thing he should do was confront this woman—a vision he could barely resist—in her room. Next to her bed.
“What do you want, Ethan?” she croaked, letting the hand that massaged her scalp fall limp at her side.
Pushing the door wide, he prowled into the suite, searching for packed bags and finding a lived-in space. A skirt and camisole draped carelessly over a chair. A service tray, probably from breakfast, perched on her nightstand, boasting a half-eaten bagel and a mini tub of cream cheese. Shoes littered the floor in front of the television, and he was momentarily struck dumb by her array of high heels in every color and style. At the sight of one of his most sensual obsessions, he froze, imagining her walking toward him, wearing nothing but sky-high heels.
When she reached him, he would press her legs apart and lower himself to the floor in front of her. He would lick into her lush heat until she came, over and over, no longer able to balance on the stilettos. Then he would…
With a low hiss, he pushed the fantasy away and jerked the armoire open. After grabbing her suitcase and garment bag, he laid them on the mattress, a mattress with a perfectly even coverlet smoothed over its surface. The bed clearly hadn’t seen a body since the maid. Had she been sleeping in front of the door? It would explain the noise, the tender skull, even the midnight perfection of her bedding.
Ignoring the pang of remorse that accompanied the realization, he spoke in a dull voice. “You’re still here,” he said, as though stating the obvious would fill the stillness of the dim space. Then he threw the suitcase open with every intent of seeing her packed and gone.
“So I am,” she said mechanically.
Had she yelled it, he could have ignored her. But her voice was calm, soft, and when she spoke again, she reached out to still his rushing hands. “I don’t have a plane ticket or a reservation at another hotel. I can’t leave, Ethan.”
He shook her off. “Not my problem.” Back at her closet, he ripped clothes from their hangers and returned to the bed to stuff them inside her baggage.
“Ethan,” she said, her increasing alarm radiating outward, “it’s too late to go tonight.” Her pause pulsed in the air, and he wondered what she wasn’
t saying. “I’ll go to the airport first thing tomorrow morning. I promise. Tonight, I’m staying in this room. I’ll pay for it.”
The last brought him up short. “You think I give a damn whether you pay for the room? This hotel is Atavos’s negotiation headquarters, Scarlet. You shouldn’t even know where we are. Whipping out your credit card? Not quite the point.” Stealing himself, he gathered her shoes from the floor, tossing pair after pair carelessly on top of the clothes he’d retrieved from the closet.
She moved to stand in front of the door, a sentinel prepared to barricade him from leaving with her things.
With her floor and closet clean, he stepped into her bathroom to grab her night cream and body lotion and all the other shit women hauled everywhere. When he flipped on the light—
His mind shorted, totally blank. “What the fuck is this?”
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Her bathroom dripped in expensive lingerie. The towel bars, the tub, the shower curtain rod, practically every available surface sported something scorching—bras, thongs, lace panties, translucent negligees. While nothing screamed Letters to Penthouse, neither could her choices pass for demure. And he’d purchased enough women’s intimates to know high-end when he saw it. Everything looked to have been set out to dry.
Nearly doubling over with the sudden force of his erection, he heard her whisper behind him, from her post by the door. “Out,” she said. “Now.”
He whipped around, examining her pallid face. “Well, well. An interesting find, to say the least.”
“Laundry services aren’t good with fine lingerie,” she said breezily, her expression anything but. “Get out of my bathroom.”
He sauntered toward her, full of caustic scenarios. “Quite the haul for a few days. Do you change and hand-wash your underwear three times an afternoon? Some kind of phobia? A kinky fetish?” When he reached her position by the door, he added with a leer, “I know. I’ve had you really hot and bothered, so drenched you’ve gone through a bucket of Woolite.” He placed his arms against the door on either side of her head and whispered against her temple. “You get more captivating by the second.”