by Maisey Yates
“That wasn’t it at all. I was … You were my first kiss and I wasn’t ready to go from first kiss to bed in five minutes time.”
“I said things then that I should not have said,” he said. “I thought you were playing a game with me.”
“The same game you thought I was playing in the club?” She didn’t need a hint of affirmation and she didn’t get one. “It wasn’t a game. I was worried about … what people would think if they saw me behaving that way.”
“With me?”
“With anyone. But … you do make me lose control, Lazaro, and it scares me sometimes.”
Silence settled between them and she knew it was up to her to ask again. Even though it had been derailed and she’d been given an out. There was no simple out. They had to wade through the mess of the past if they were ever going to go forward. It was that simple.
She took a shuddering breath. “What did my father do to you?”
“Not your father personally. He would never have gotten his hands dirty that way. He has people on hand to take care of life’s more unsavory problems.”
“You were an unsavory problem?”
“Of the worst sort. I had my sights set on his daughter’s virtue.” Vanessa felt every line in Lazaro’s body tense, could sense the scarcely harnessed aggression that was flowing through him. She wanted to soothe him, and she honestly didn’t know how.
“What did they do?”
“After I left the guesthouse that night I was upset. I went into town. I was followed. I don’t know that you need details, but I woke up facedown in the alley and, at the time, a broken nose was the least of my problems.”
“They beat you?” She scrambled out of the bed, her breath coming hard, fast. “My father had you beaten?”
“You didn’t know, then,” he said, his voice flat.
“No.” She put her hand on her stomach, trying to quell the nausea that was rising in her. “You thought I knew? You thought that I …”
“Your father puts on a convincing front of civility, Vanessa. At the time I thought it was possible you did the same.”
“I would never …”
“I know. I had let go of the idea of you being involved a long time ago.”
She was relieved to hear him say that, even if that was selfish.
“I told you we were fired from the estate, but there was more,” Lazaro continued. “Your father made sure no one else would hire us either. We were evicted from our apartment. Usually, we had a shelter to sleep in, but sometimes we ended up sleeping outside. My mother’s health did not do well in those conditions.”
For the third time since Lazaro had come back into her life, she felt the ground shift beneath her feet.
“I knew …” Her voice cracked. “I knew my father was a hard man, I knew he was controlling, but I didn’t know … I didn’t know he’d gone that far. I had a … There was a man I was interested in at Pickett when I was first hired on and my father was adamant about me not seeing him because he was just an employee. I did what he asked. I didn’t want to be with anyone he didn’t approve of. I just didn’t imagine he would ever do something like … Something so horrible.”
She felt like her world was falling away, shattering into tiny little pieces, fragile and in danger of being scattered by the wind.
She had protected her father’s legacy at the expense of everything. Her dreams. She could hardly remember her dreams anymore because she’d shoved them to the side with ruthless efficiency when she was thirteen years old in order to fulfill the demands of the most important man in her life.
And that man was a coward. A criminal.
She believed Lazaro’s words. She felt the truth of them all the way down to her soul. She was sick with the truth of it spreading through her like poison, undeniable and deadly.
“I survived, Vanessa,” he said, his voice hard. “More than. And I don’t want your wide-eyed pity.”
“I don’t pity you,” she said.
She didn’t. It was impossible to pity a man like Lazaro. He was too strong, the pride that radiated from him forbidding anything as debasing as pity.
But she felt betrayed. Betrayed by the man who shared her blood, the man whose legacy she had fought so hard to preserve. The man who had brought so much destruction into the lives of other people for the sake of his vision for the future.
It made her feel tainted. Made everything in her, her ambition, her blood, feel dirty. That blood that was supposed to be so important, that was supposed to define her … she hated it now.
“It is done, Vanessa. The only thing I regret is that my mother lived out her last days in discomfort, rather than in the lifestyle she deserved. But it was the defining moment in my life.” The gleam in his eyes was deadly, cold and devoid of anything tender. “It was the moment when I realized that I would stop at nothing to make it to the top where I could crush men like your father beneath my heel.”
It was the venom in his voice, not aggressive or blatant, woven into every syllable, touching every word, that shocked her the most. The hatred that was there.
She had been a fool. She had imagined that Lazaro’s quest was about vanity, but it was about something so much deeper. She had thought herself a trophy to him, but that was so far removed from the truth it was laughable.
She was his avenue to vengeance. He was using her, a fact she’d known from the beginning, but what she hadn’t realized was exactly what she was being used for.
He would use her not only to bring him to the top, but to mock her father’s efforts. To show him that he now owned everything that her father had tried to keep from him. That he, Lazaro, had won.
Even as the realization crashed through her, she could understand it, but she didn’t want to be Lazaro’s pawn. Or his queen, as the case may be.
And yet, she wasn’t certain she had a choice because everything felt tangled now, complicated beyond fixing.
She couldn’t feel nothing for this man who made love to her with such explosive, sweet passion. She couldn’t shut off what she felt for her first lover, the man she had fallen for at sixteen. As clichéd as it was, she felt connected to him now. As though he were a part of her.
If she were really honest with herself, the connection wasn’t new. Having their bodies joined was just a physical manifestation of what had been from the beginning. He’d been in her from the start.
It was why she had always kept an eye on his career when he’d started getting media attention. Why she’d silently cheered for his success even while she hurt inside over not sharing it with him.
It was why part of her wanted to cheer for his success now in this, his quest for vengeance and justice.
And part of her wanted to scream at him and ask him why he’d dragged her into everything. Or more to the point, why he’d made her care. Why he looked at her as though he wanted to devour her. Why he kissed her as though he were sampling some rare, exquisite wine. How he could make her feel this way when she knew he had to hate her.
Why couldn’t he just be a jerk? Why couldn’t she simply see him as he was: a man set on using her for his own ends?
But it wasn’t so simple that it could be reduced to anything that easy to understand. There was nothing simple about it.
There was nothing simple about the massive knot of emotion that was filling her chest, making it hard to breathe. There was nothing easy about the thick tension that hung in the air. Sexual. Emotional.
“Come back to bed,” Lazaro said, pulling back the covers.
“I should maybe go—”
“You’re coming to bed. With me. You need to sleep, we’re going to be flying out tomorrow.”
And because she was exhausted, and because she ached to be in his arms, she climbed back into the bed.
He drew her close to his body, his hands moving over her curves, soothing her, making her brain fuzzy and her body sleepy.
Her last thought before drifting off was, how did a man with so much anger in hi
m, a man who was only using her, make her feel more wanted, more desired, than anyone else in her life ever had?
Reality set in quickly back in Boston. Lazaro was busy, and Vanessa had a mountain of paperwork on her desk, thanks to the remaining fossils Pickett Industries had accounts with who had never heard of sending documents via email.
Her office was her home away from home again, and her personal life was back to being nonexistent. She doubted it had ever really existed. Lazaro was some unholy mash-up of her personal and professional life, not to mention her newfound sex life, which she was missing after a few nights alone in her big, cold bed.
She would see him tonight though. After work he was taking her to a big gala that was historically reserved for a very select group. The Pickett name was always on the list and, since word of their engagement had spread and Lazaro was now becoming a part of that legacy, he had secured an invitation too.
She was serving her purpose at least—bringing Lazaro into the hallowed institutions of the American aristocracy. Into a cornerstone of which she was about to put a big crack.
Her phone buzzed and she hit the intercom button. “Yes?”
“Ms. Pickett, your father is here to see you.”
Vanessa swallowed hard. “Send him in.”
Her father strode into the room, his expression dark. Dangerous. His gray eyebrows were locked together in a show of disapproval. “You’ve been on vacation?”
“I took some time off with my new fiancé,” she said, striving to keep her tone light.
“Can you afford time off?”
“I have to do my part to ensure my marriage is successful.”
“That isn’t what you called me here to say though, is it, Va ness a?”
“No,” she said slowly, standing from her chair, planting both palms firmly on her desk. She hoped the gesture conveyed confidence, because what she was really doing was trying to keep her knees from buckling. “I know what you did to Lazaro.”
Her father didn’t flinch. “I thought you might.”
“You’re a cold-blooded bastard,” she said, through clenched teeth.
“I did it for you, Vanessa, so we could avoid a situation like this—you marrying so patently beneath your station.”
“My station? Because Lazaro wasn’t born into money he’s somehow beneath me? Beneath you? Lazaro is a better man than you will ever be, and you have to keep men like him shut out because he has something you don’t. He’s brilliant, he solves problems. He even knows how to fix this disaster you and I are standing in.”
Michael Pickett looked at her, his eyes—eyes she’d always imagined looking like her own—stared back at her, cold and dead. “Did you call me in here for the sole purpose of hearing your impassioned little speech or did you have a point?”
“I had a point,” she said. “You will make sure Lazaro is welcomed into high society with your blessing. Because if you don’t, I will let this place crumble. Hell, I’ll tear it apart myself. Brick by brick.”
“Insolent, ungrateful …”
“I don’t think you understand the reality here. Lazaro and myself combined own the majority of this company. You don’t have the power here. Not even close. Lazaro and some of our board members have close professional relationships and his influence carries a lot of weight.”
“You would dismantle your family legacy? The one meant for your brother? The one he would have seen flourish?”
“For the man I love? In a heartbeat.”
They were the truest words she’d ever spoken. She didn’t realize it until she spoke them. She loved Lazaro. She would move heaven and earth for him. She would stand up to Michael Pickett for him. She had stood up to Michael Pickett. She would do it again, ten times over.
“Lazaro isn’t a boy that you can have beaten and left for dead in an alley, not anymore.” She took a breath. “And I’m not a little girl. I won’t simply do as I’m told without looking into what’s really going on. Lazaro isn’t just going away,” she said, watching her father’s face for a hint of what he was thinking, whether he was going to explode.
Silence hung between them, the only sound Vanessa’s thundering heart in her ears.
Her father’s face remained set in stone. “Of course he will be welcomed,” he said, his tone cold. “He’s my future son-in-law.”
“Yes,” she said, over the blood roaring in her ears. “He is.”
She watched her father leave and felt a pleasant numbness spread from the pain in her fingertips to the pain in her chest, blocking it out. She’d done what she had to do. She wouldn’t allow her father to have any kind of victory, not in Lazaro’s life, not in hers. Not now that she knew who he really was. Who she had been protecting, helping for so many years.
Her secretary buzzed her again. “Yes?” Her voice was shaking now, the adrenaline seeping from her system and leaving her weak, drained.
“Mr. Marino has sent a limo.”
“And is Mr. Marino in said limo?”
“Not that I saw.”
A spike of disappointment pierced the blessed numbness. A limo, but not the man himself. Well, that was life with rich, important men, she was well aware. As long as she served her purpose, things went smoothly. But she wouldn’t be getting any excess attention.
“I’ll be right down.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LAZARO’S heart squeezed tight when Vanessa walked into the main living area of his Beacon Hill penthouse.
She was dressed in her business clothes, wide-legged slacks and spiky heels combined with a dark fitted jacket and a brightly colored top underneath. Her dark hair was swept back into a low ponytail and the gloss on her lips was a sedate rose, perfect for board meetings. And, apparently, for making his blood pump hot and fast.
But then, there was never a time when his desire for Vanessa seemed to cool, no matter what she was wearing—or not wearing.
He had missed her over the past few days. He had hoped the separation might help him regain some of his control. But now that she was here, he was on fire with lust. A response that was as instant as it was beyond his control.
“I didn’t bring my dress with me,” she said, shifting her weight, her eyes scanning the room, careful not to land on him for too long. “I didn’t realize you wanted me to meet you here.”
“I bought you a dress.”
Then she did look at him. “You bought me a dress? For tonight? I have one. I had what I was going to wear planned out.”
“You won’t need it,” he said.
He’d seen the dress at a shop in Buenos Aires when they’d been there, and he’d instantly envisioned Vanessa wearing it. He’d contacted the designer and ordered the dress in a color and size he thought would suit Vanessa and had had it shipped back to Boston just for the gala.
It was the kind of thing she should have. Something made just for her. Something nice and expensive. She deserved everything he could give.
“But you didn’t ask me.”
“It was a surprise.”
That earned him stony silence and a censorious look from her dark brown eyes. “Show me,” she said, after a pause.
He led her through the main living area of the house and up the open staircase to the loft floor that overlooked the open kitchen, living- and dining-room portions of the penthouse. He opened the door to his bedroom and ushered her inside.
He noticed, for the first time, how Spartan everything was. How masculine. Vanessa looked so pale and delicate in these surroundings, out of place. The black-and-gray design scheme, the stark angled lines, didn’t suit her at all.
That his room was a wholly masculine domain had never mattered before. He didn’t bring women into his home. It was much too personal. Vanessa was the first woman he’d brought into his bedroom. And the first person he’d brought into the house for a very long time. Entertaining at home wasn’t high on his agenda.
Vanessa walked over to the bed where the dress was draped across the black comforter, the
red silk shocking against the dark background. There were gold shoes beside it, high heels with delicate ankle straps that he knew would draw attention to her slender legs.
She frowned as she examined the offering and his gut tightened.
“I don’t know that it’s a red sort of event,” she said crisply.
He locked his teeth together, then loosened them, the stupid thing she’d said about TMJ ringing in his ears. “That’s why you should wear it.”
“So I’ll stand out?”
“So everyone will look at us.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
Frustration boiled inside him. “Yes. I want everyone to see us there. To know I’m with you.”
She frowned again. “I see.”
“There’s a wrap to wear over it. It will be cold tonight.” As if that fixed his intent somehow.
“Okay.”
Vanessa watched Lazaro stalk from the room, his annoyance with her a palpable presence that lingered long after he left.
She examined the dress spread out on his bed and the black cashmere wrap that was folded next to it. It was such an intimate thing, and yet he had presented it in a way that was anything but. The gesture spoke clearly of what she was to him, the part he expected her to play tonight. She was his accessory for the evening and he hadn’t trusted her to dress accordingly. He had to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that she was exactly as she should be. So that people would look at them.
So that he could use her as a status symbol.
Her stomach lurched.
Was he any different than her father?
Yes.
Yes, he was different. He would never have anyone harmed, would never do anything so reprehensible. But as far as his feelings for her? She was a thing. A possession.
You are mine.
His. His status symbol in red.
She picked the dress up by the spaghetti straps and held it in front of her, the delicate fabric swishing as she lifted it. This was what she’d signed on for. Trophy wife, agreeable accessory who did as she was told in public, who put on a good front so that Lazaro could move freely in the upper levels of society.