Christmas at the Tycoon's Command

by Jennifer Hayward

  He raked a hand through his hair. Eyed her. “It was always going to end with us, Chloe. It was just a matter of time. You know it and I know it. I am incapable of giving you what you need.”

  The way he so easily discarded what they had infuriated her. “I think you’d rather believe yourself incapable of love than expose yourself to it, Nico. Because then you’d have to allow yourself to feel something. Well, I’m not buying it for a minute. I’ve seen you with your brothers. I know your capabilities. They are miles deep. Unconditional. But they aren’t on offer to me.”

  “They aren’t on offer to anyone,” he said evenly. “We have a good thing, Chloe. But what’s going to happen when you want a man who can love you? Who can give you more? When you start to hate me because I can never give you that?”

  It was a fair point. Because the way he was tearing her apart inside right now, she wondered if she was a bit on the masochistic side.

  “I love you,” she said quietly, before she closed herself off completely. “I have always loved you, Nico, you know that. You are the strongest, most admirable man I know. But if you walk away now, it’s the last time, because you’re right, not even I’m that much of a glutton for punishment.”

  His gray eyes glimmered with an emotion she couldn’t read. “Better it happen now. Go home, Chloe. Get some sleep.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHLOE WALKED HOME on a frozen Manhattan night, feeling as numb as the sheet of ice beneath her feet.

  She shouldn’t have pushed him like that. But if she hadn’t, she never would have found out the truth. That, in his mind, Nico had never seen a future for them. That while she’d been spinning those romantic fantasies he’d warned her about, while she’d been offering him everything, he had been preserving those cast-iron walls he had perfected, never intending to let her in.

  Letting herself in her front door, she shrugged off her coat and threw it on the bench in the hall. The cozy space felt unfamiliar, foreign, because she’d spent the better part of the past couple of weeks at Nico’s place, caught up in the fantasy she’d spun for herself. It felt so empty it made her hurt inside.

  She couldn’t go curl up at Mireille’s because she was still at the office working with the team on the statement that would go out in the morning. Numb, utterly unsure of what to do with herself, she made some hot cocoa. Allowed herself a brief look at Twitter, which was a huge mistake. The Boycott Evolution hashtag had caught fire. There were thousands using it.

  Her heart crawled into her throat, a feeling of dread twisting her insides. If they didn’t contain this tomorrow, if their plan to announce the philanthropy program next week didn’t turn the tide, Evolution and everything she’d worked so hard for would be in jeopardy. Everything her parents had entrusted to her.

  She raked trembling fingers through her hair. It was all too easy to second-guess everything. Her overly ambitious launch plan, how closely she’d tied her fragrances to the personalities that represented them, how she’d ignored Nico’s advice, when if she had listened, they wouldn’t be in this situation.

  It all ran through her head as she curled up and tried to fall asleep in her four-poster bed. Alone.

  Hot tears stung her eyes, but there was also anger in that potent brew. Fury that Nico had been such a bastard to her. Fury that he would hide from himself like this, because she knew how he felt. Fury because she needed him now more than ever, his ability to right-side her world something she’d always depended on.

  Blinking back the tears, she refused to cry. Refused to let this be the thing that felled her. She’d come too far for that. She’d become too much of a fighter. Nico was a coward, that was what he was. She would not be that.

  She woke at an insanely early hour, just as dawn was creeping into the sky. A determination filled her, steely in its foundation. The massive sales, the overwhelmingly positive response to Vivre could not be wrong. She had not been wrong in her decisions. She could not abandon her vision now or it would all be for naught.

  She might have been wrong about Eddie. She had been wrong about Eddie. So now she had to fix it. Unfortunately, she had a feeling this was going to get a lot worse before it got better.

  * * *

  It did get worse. By 9:00 a.m., Evolution’s already fragile share price had dropped 20 percent and Nico was fielding calls from worried board members in between a seemingly endless number of press interviews, the media’s thirst for Hollywood’s latest scandal seemingly unquenchable.

  Chloe took it upon herself to check in with her uncle to see if he’d made any progress on pulling the television ads before Nico flipped his lid. When Giorgio’s PA announced he was on a call, she leaned against the doorway to his office and waited for him to finish. His back to her, his feet on the windowsill, she gathered it was Keith Taylor, one of the Evolution board members, on the other end of the line.

  She frowned. Why was Giorgio talking to Keith? She didn’t even think they knew each other. The gist of the conversation soon set her spine ramrod straight. He was pressing his case with Keith as the man who should be running Evolution in the middle of a crisis that could bring the company down.

  Fury singed her blood. She was livid by the time Giorgio set the phone down and swung his chair around. His gaze sliding over Chloe, he had the audacity to wave her into a seat for a coffee with a lazy, self-satisfied expression on his face.

  Chloe set her hands on her hips and raked a look over her uncle, the resemblance to her father so strong it hurt sometimes. “You are courting the board in the middle of a crisis?” she breathed. “At Nico’s expense?”

  Her uncle shrugged. “It’s the right time to get rid of him. You weren’t so happy about him becoming CEO before you started sleeping with him.”

  She curled her hands into fists by her sides. He was out of control. Utterly out of line. How had she not seen it before? Had she been so deluded about everything?

  “You’re fired,” she bit out. “Effective immediately.”

  Giorgio stared at her, astonished. “You can’t do that.”

  “Father gave Nico the power to do it.” She lifted her chin. “And I’m backing him up. This is unacceptable, Giorgio.”

  She marched out of his office. Absorbed the look of shock on his PA’s face. “I will reassign you,” she muttered, before she stalked into the hallway.

  Her heart broken at her uncle’s betrayal, she marched up to Nico’s office, told her boss what Giorgio had done and that she’d fired him, then burned a path to her own office, where she focused on the nascent philanthropy program she and the team were creating, keeping in touch with Lashaunta and Desdemona to update them on things and ensure they didn’t jump ship. By the end of the week, she and the team had a platform they could brief the two stars on.

  Lashaunta and Desdemona both loved the program, which would allocate millions over the next few years to women’s causes, and both of them signed on. Helped in part by the fact that things on social media had gradually begun to calm down with Evolution’s clear assurance the company had cut ties with Carello.

  Lashaunta, with whom Chloe had developed a close relationship over the past few weeks, even agreed to fly to New York for the unveiling of the program, given she was already in America on tour.

  By the time Chloe and Nico unveiled the program to hundreds of journalists at a press conference at Evolution, Lashaunta and Desdemona at their sides, Chloe was so exhausted she could barely put one foot in front of the other, investing everything she had left into the emotional remarks she made about why the program was so important to her—how everything she and her mother had ever done had been to empower women with their own particular kind of beauty.

  When it was over, she knew she’d done everything she could. Now it was up to the world to decide Evolution’s fate. What she could not seem to repair was her broken heart. It was still raw and bruised as Nico and she stepped off the podium and removed their mics.

  “You were incredible up there,” he s
aid quietly, a warmth in his smoky gray eyes that had been missing for days.

  She wrapped a layer of Teflon around her heart. Lifted her chin. “Because I knew we could do this together. Because we are a great team, Nico. That we can weather any storm together. It’s you that didn’t believe.”

  * * *

  Nico stood looking out at a Christmas light extravaganza that was New York in December, nursing a Scotch as he surveyed the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse.

  He thought Evolution might finally have turned the corner today. Its stock price had rebounded after its disastrous drop and sales had done the same, with Be flying high again. The one price to pay from all of this might be Soar, of which sales had plummeted. But if that was the only casualty of this mess, he’d take it.

  Ads for Be had been everywhere on his way home, plastered across the city, a big flashing reminder of the woman who had shown her steel spine today in that press conference with Lashaunta and Desdemona, passionately and fearlessly handling interviews with the major daily newspapers.

  She was light-years from the woman he’d dragged home from Paris—a warrior. Something to behold. It cast his own inability to grow in far too harsh a light.

  He’d spent the past couple of months forcing her out of her shell—insisting she evolve into what he knew she could be—even when it had meant stretching her to the very limits of her capabilities. Forcing her to acknowledge her innermost fears and expose them for the fraud they were. And what had he done? Reverted to old patterns—to a knee-jerk reaction to end things between them instead of taking a good look at himself. Instead of facing his own fears.

  Chloe had been right. If he didn’t allow himself to care about another person, if he didn’t allow himself to feel, no one could destroy him like that ever again. Burying himself in his work, providing had been the only way he’d known how to survive. It was the way he’d operated since he was fifteen years old.

  Which had been fine until Chloe had battered through his defenses with her courage and fire. Until she’d made him question his limitations. Made him want more. Until she’d made him want to be more. And that had scared the hell out of him.

  He lifted the Scotch to his lips, welcoming its low, fiery burn. He missed her. He’d told himself his knee-jerk reaction to end them had been the right one, because dragging this affair out any longer was only going to hurt her more. Had buried himself in his work with twenty-hour days, expecting its usual anesthetic effects to function as it always did. But it hadn’t.

  Instead, her absence in his bed at night had only illuminated how lacking his life was in the spirit and warmth she brought to it. How being programmed as a machine to do only one thing wasn’t enough anymore.

  The problem was, he thought, staring out at a cavalcade of lights, he might have killed the one chance he’d had of having more because of a past that had owned him for far too long.

  * * *

  Christmas Eve had always been the most magical night of the year for Chloe. Right from the very beginning, when her father had read her and Mireille The Night Before Christmas in full theatrical voice while they sat on his lap at the house in Great Neck and drank big mugs of cocoa laced with her mother’s candy cane syrup.

  Later, when they’d gotten older, and Evolution had been founded, the magic had come from her father’s big heart. He couldn’t stand the idea of any of his employees spending Christmas alone, so he’d rounded them up like stray kittens and invited them to dinner, which had sometimes meant forty or fifty people at the table, her mother holding her head and muttering numbers the whole while.

  But her mother had loved those boisterous, chaotic celebrations as much as Chloe and Mireille had. It was like the whole word had come to their big, warm, happy house on the hill.

  And then there’d been the year the Di Fiore boys had shown up, looking shell-shocked in the middle of the crowd. Chloe thought she might have taken one look at Nico as he’d sat through her father’s traditional end-of-year philosophical rant, so serious as he’d soaked it all up as if it was the most profound thing he’d ever heard, and fallen in love with him that instant.

  But, she reminded herself as an ache surfaced deep inside her, she wasn’t thinking about him right now. She and Mireille were going ice skating at Rockefeller Center, before they had wine and fondue at home. A new tradition. And she wasn’t going to cry about that either, because Be was under half of Manhattan’s Christmas trees, she knew her mother would be so proud of her and she was going to hold her memories close to her heart, exactly as Nico had said.

  Damn him. He was everywhere.

  Hat planted on her head, mittens at the ready, she tapped her foot impatiently on the hardwood floor. She had just glanced at her watch for the third time when a knock sounded on the door.

  “You’re late,” she said impatiently, swinging the door wide. “Why is it I’m—” She stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of Nico standing on the doorstep, the memory of that kiss, that show-stopping kiss, flashing through her head.

  Oh, no. She was not doing this tonight.

  “Go away,” she said firmly, refusing to acknowledge how beautiful he looked in jeans and a dark turtleneck sweater. “Mireille and I are going ice skating.”

  “Mireille isn’t coming until later.”

  Her eyes widened. “Why not?”

  “Because we need to talk.” He gestured toward the door. “Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  He sank his hands into her waist, picked her up and moved her aside. She gasped and gave him a furious look as he closed the door. “I don’t want to talk to you. Nor do I want to kiss you until I lose my head. I want to go ice skating.”

  “Chloe,” he said quietly, eyes on hers, “I need to talk to you. Hear me out and I promise I’ll go away if that’s what you want.”

  He looked serious, so serious she relented, toeing off her boots and leading the way into the living room. Perching herself on the sofa, she eyed him warily as he sat down beside her.

  He raked a hand through his hair in an uncharacteristically fidgety move. “You were right,” he began, “about why I pushed you away. This time and every time. Because I have always felt too much for you. Because you make me feel too much.”

  Her heart lodged in her mouth. “My father was a workaholic,” he continued. “He was addicted to the buzz, but he was also addicted to keeping my mother happy. She messed with his head, she played him for all he was worth. If he’d had his head fully in the game, I’m not sure he would have made the mistakes he did, taken the risks he did, and maybe the outcome would have been very different.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t say that. It may simply be that he had an addictive personality, a disease. To blame it on your mother is unfair.”

  His mouth compressed. “I’m not so sure. I went to see my mother, Chloe. That’s how much you’ve turned my head upside down. I thought maybe you were right—that it would help me to understand better. Reframe things in my head.”

  Shock rendered her speechless. “What did she say?” she finally managed.

  “That she was to blame for most of it. That she resented losing her career. She felt unequipped to be a mother, and she took it out on my father.” He lifted a shoulder. “She also said she felt a great deal of sorrow about the decisions she’s made.”

  “And did you believe her?”

  “She seemed genuine about it.” He rubbed a palm over the thick stubble on his jaw. “She said my father had the affairs to hurt her. To strike back. It became a vicious circle between them.”

  “Relationships are rarely simple,” she murmured. “Even my parents, as in love as they were, had fights that would take down the rafters. They were passionate people. But the point is, they worked through it. They loved each other enough to make it work.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “They did.” He dropped his head in his hands. Was silent for a moment. When he looked up, she saw the glitter of an emotion she co
uldn’t read in his eyes. “I told myself I would never go on that kind of an emotional roller-coaster ride with a woman. I made sure I never did. But with you, I didn’t have a choice. It just was. And when things fell apart with Eddie, it raised all my red flags and I mentally disengaged. A force of habit.”

  She shook her head. “We’re better together, Nico. We are more powerful together. That’s what held it all together. You and me.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged, “I know that now. But all of my baggage came into play. I started to question what I could be. Something Martino said to me.” He rubbed a hand against his temple. “He saw us on the Fourth of July, Chloe.”

  Her jaw dropped, disbelief filtering through her. “He never said.”

  “He talked to me about it afterward. He told me to date you seriously or walk away.”

  She sank her teeth into her lip. “I can’t believe he did that. It was my life.”

  “You were eighteen, Chloe. A baby. I was a hardened twenty-two. And he was right,” he conceded. “I couldn’t offer you what you needed. You needed to grow up and learn what life was all about. I already knew too much about life.”

  If she thought she’d been furious with her father before, she was livid with him now. Because what would she and Nico have become if he hadn’t interfered? What could they have become?

  “So why are you here now?” she tossed at him, her insides hollow and empty, as if they’d been scraped out with something sharp. “If you’re so sure you can never be what I’m looking for?”

  His gaze locked with hers. “Because you’ve always been the best thing in my life. Because I was a fool to walk away from you again, and if you give me one more chance, I promise I won’t mess it up.”

  “How do I know?” she whispered, hurt throbbing from the inside out. “I can’t go through that again, Nico. Not one more time.”

  “Because I love you,” he said, without missing a beat. As if they weren’t the most earth-shattering words he’d ever uttered to her. “Because I’ve been in love with you a long time and I’m tired of fighting it.”