There was no lying to herself about who and what she’d betrayed here.
When what she’d come to do was gloat. Take the knife and drive it in deeper.
What had happened to her?
“No razor-sharp comeback?” Matteo taunted her, no trace of shame on his beautiful face. “No pointed questions like a scalpel, the better to dice me into bite-size pieces? I’m disappointed in you, Doctor.”
Sarina tried to pull herself together. Her mind reeled from one half-formed, desperate thought to the next.
“I don’t think you understand how badly it will look for you when I tell your board that you decided to put your hands on me,” she pointed out.
And she didn’t understand what she saw flash over his face then. It looked too much like victory.
Then his mouth curved, making it worse. Making everything worse. “Tell them. Explain to them, in detail, what a brute I am. I welcome it.”
Sarina had never considered herself a liar. But that empty feeling in her stomach when she imagined saying so out loud, to a man like Matteo, made her realize that it was unlikely anyone in his position would believe that of her. It was unlikely any of the men she’d identified as deserving targets thought she was honest, and least of all him.
He fully expected her to claim he was a brute, even though both he and she knew better.
For the first time since she’d started down this road, she felt her sense of purpose...shake a bit, down into its foundations.
But she pushed on. “It will be my word against yours without resorting to calling anyone a brute, Mr. Combe.”
“Matteo,” he corrected her, his voice dark and sinful. “You had your tongue in my mouth. You had best use my Christian name, don’t you think?”
That thudded through her like some kind of gong. A warning, though she was terribly afraid it was already too late.
Sarina tried to remember herself. To stand straight and get back on track, the way she always did. “It will be my word against yours no matter what I call you. And I suspect you know as well as I do that your board is far more likely to find my word convincing than yours.”
She expected him to bluster then. To scowl ferociously at her, then vent his spleen, the way men like him always did.
But Matteo Combe only smiled.
And Sarina could feel it like a flash flood, everywhere, drowning her where she stood. Closing over her head and sucking her down.
She wasn’t sure she could breathe, or if she should try, and that wasn’t even addressing the glittering look in those smoke-colored eyes.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he said, and there was something more than triumph in his voice then. Something that felt to her like a shudder beneath her own skin. “You may find that while my board is more than happy to convict me in absentia to line their own pockets, when it comes down to it, they are a group of extraordinarily conservative men. Deeply traditional and possessed, I regret to tell you, of all the regressive notions you would expect of men like them.”
She told herself there was no reason her heart should be kicking at her like that, as if she was in some kind of panic when she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t.
Sarina was the only one who knew how she’d betrayed herself here. How, in the space of one kiss, she’d broken every promise she’d ever made to the girl she still considered her sister.
One terrible, life-altering kiss she still couldn’t process. Her lips felt...raw, almost. Or maybe she did. Everywhere.
“You aren’t making any sense,” she managed to say, though her heart was still thumping in her chest. “The board of directors of any major corporation is generally conservative, yes. That’s not news.”
And it was why she’d always made certain to conduct herself in a manner above reproach. Until today.
“Indeed.” Matteo slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers again, and she couldn’t help noticing that he looked entirely too satisfied with himself. A trickle of something she refused to call fear made its way down her spine. “How do you imagine such a conservative group would react to a video of you plastering yourself against me? Between you and me, Sarina, I like my chances.”
She went hot, then cold. Then even hotter than before. An intense emotion she couldn’t name flashed through her, threatening to come out in furious tears—the very thought of which horrified her.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You only wish you had a video.” She didn’t even know where those words came from. But she sounded tough and unbothered, neither of which she felt in any way, shape, or form, so she decided to roll with it.
“I regret to inform you that I am a man of action, not wishes.”
Matteo belted out a verbal command, seemingly to the air, then lifted his chin in the direction of the far wall.
Where, to Sarina’s horror, the wood paneling pulled back and a screen appeared.
And for a dizzying moment, she thought it was entirely possible she might be sick. Or pass out. Or both.
“You must know that it is, at the very least, unethical to record—”
Matteo laughed. “Do you really think this is the time for a discussion of ethics?”
Sarina stared at the blank screen before her. Her throat was dry, yet those tears still threatened.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, trying to sound bold as she called his bluff.
“It never occurred to me that you would,” he replied. Much too smoothly.
He called out another command, and the video began to play.
And Sarina had been here. Right here in this room, a party to everything she was watching unfold before her on that damned screen. She had been here, she knew she’d participated, and yet she still couldn’t make sense of what she saw before her.
In her head she had stridden in so confidently, secure in the knowledge that she had yet another captain of industry in the palm of her hand, which was precisely where she liked them.
But the woman she saw on-screen abandoned her position of power almost immediately. She moved too close to Matteo, for one thing. And while Sarina remembered what she’d said, and how cool and professional she tried to sound, her body told a different story.
A significantly more flirtatious one, to her horror.
Even before they reached the part where she had so foolishly reached out and put her hand on him, she was horrified.
And then he kissed her, and that was worse.
For one thing, watching herself kiss him was like doing it all over again. All that heat and the dark mastery of his mouth on hers shot through her, making her shake where she stood.
But more appalling still, the woman on screen...melted.
There was no other word to describe it. She was the one who’d moved closer. She was the one who wrapped herself around him.
She was a looking at a stranger, but the stranger was herself.
“Oh dear,” Matteo murmured, his voice bright with feigned concern. “This does not look good for our fearless doctor.”
Sarina scraped herself together, somehow, though she could hardly tell what was part of her and what wasn’t. She felt wrecked in ways she could hardly count, but she would deal with that later. She would repair to her hotel room, take a long, hard look in the mirror, and figure out where on earth that woman on-screen had come from. She would figure out how she had let this happen in the first place and what it meant that she had so misread one of her targets.
But she would do all that in private.
First she had to extricate herself from the mess she’d made here.
“Congratulations, Mr. Combe,” she managed to say, her voice so icy she was surprised a glacier didn’t fall out of her mouth. She turned to face him, and held herself as still as she could get. Her spine was so straight she was dimly amazed it didn’t snap in half. “You have outmaneuvered m
e. I’m woman enough to admit it. Congratulations. But I should warn you, the chairman of your board seems highly motivated to continue with this assessment. You can fire me, but it’s a certainty that he will have me replaced.”
“You misunderstand me entirely, Sarina,” Matteo said, a rich current of something deep and male running through his voice that she didn’t want to hear, much less name. “You’re not going anywhere. The game has changed, that’s all. But I’m going to require you to keep playing it.”
She’d wrapped herself in ice in an attempt to get her feet back under her, but she felt it turn to slush at that. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I could show that tape to my board, or I could show it to the world.” He shrugged, and she didn’t mistake the look in his dark eyes then. He relished this. And on some level, she wasn’t sure she blamed him—which told her more things about herself she didn’t want to know. “Your choice.”
“I want to be absolutely certain I understand you,” she said, clearing her throat as she desperately tried to find some leverage. “You are standing here in front of me, threatening to slut shame me on the global stage with a video recording that you must know is illegal.”
“I invite and encourage you to find a single member of the paparazzi who will give a toss about the legal ramifications of that video, Sarina. Please. Knock yourself out.”
“No one gives a toss about anything until they find themselves sued for it, I imagine.”
“But the damage will already be done, will it not?” His smile was razor sharp, and it dawned on her belatedly that she had completely underestimated him. She’d imagined he was like all the rest, when he wasn’t. He was worse. “Your reputation depends on your ability to move through the corporate world like a shark, taking down your prey swiftly and with prejudice. But how will you do that when everybody knows you might also fling yourself at your quarry in a romantic fervor?”
There was no leverage here, but Sarina kept trying to find a way out.
“Let me guess, you’re going to pretend that you’re not blackmailing me...but you’ll require demeaning and disgusting sexual favors to make certain of it.”
“So you can martyr yourself on the altar of my lust, content to think me the monster you imagined me when you walked into my villa in Venice? I think not.”
“Of course you’re not a monster. Silly me. Recording someone without their knowledge is perfectly normal, not monstrous at all.”
Matteo laughed at her acid tone. “And this is absolutely blackmail. No need to mince words, is there? But I don’t require sexual favors from you, Sarina. Not as payments, anyway. What you choose to bestow is entirely up to you.” His dark gaze...did things to her. She could feel her breasts ache again, as if she was still pressing herself against him. As if her body was attuned to him in ways that made no sense at all. “And my preference would not be for demeaning or disgusting acts, but I pride myself on being open-minded when it comes to matters of the flesh. Feel free to convince me otherwise.”
“And if I choose not to bestow any acts upon you at all?”
“As you wish.” His expression didn’t change. There was no reason at all Sarina should have felt a hollow place yawn open inside of her, as if she’d lost something. “But as it happens, I am less interested in what you can do for me in bed. It’s what you can do for me in the boardroom that interests me.”
Sarina assured herself that that rocking, shipwrecked sensation was relief. Because she didn’t think she had it in her to perform a sexual favor on command, no matter what she had to lose if she didn’t. And yet she knew that he was absolutely right about the damage that video would do to her career if he released it. And she was—or she should have been—giddy with relief that she wouldn’t have to test what kind of person she really was.
She told herself she couldn’t feel the molten heat between her legs that suggested to her that her true feelings on the subject were far more complicated.
“You want me to lie to your board.”
“Not at all,” Matteo replied, sounding very nearly entertained. She hated him. “I want you to give them the glowing account of my fitness for my duties that I deserve. No more and no less.”
And Sarina wanted to gather her cloak of righteousness around her. She wanted to draw herself up to a great height and cut this man down with the force of her integrity. Because she had started this for the best of reasons, hadn’t she? She had watched what that man had done to Jeanette, how he’d destroyed her, and she had vowed that she would see to it that he couldn’t do it to anyone else. He had been the first corporate giant she had helped remove from his position, and she still held that victory close to her heart. Nothing could bring Jeanette back, but Sarina had been so sure that what she’d done to the man who’d abused her had restored a little balance.
But Sarina hadn’t stopped there. She’d spent the years in between going out of her way to make herself available to anyone and everyone who needed her services—and she’d told herself that there was nothing wrong with that. That it wasn’t her fault there were so many men like this in the world, wholly deserving of the kinds of consequences that she alone could deliver. There were good, decent men, too, of course. But the scales seemed to tip toward the unpleasant ones.
And somewhere in there she had lost track of herself, and maybe those scales, too...or she wouldn’t be here today.
Somewhere in there, she had become the vigilante she’d told Matteo he was. The cowboy who swaggered into town and shot the place up because she could, because she was good with a gun, and because she enjoyed a firefight—not because she was needed.
Because she had seen the pictures from Eddie Combe’s funeral splashed across the tabloids. Yes, Matteo had punched broodingly handsome Prince Ares in the face. But Matteo’s sister hadn’t looked the least bit horrified by the display. And if Sarina was being completely honest with herself, neither had the prince.
Why do you imagine that what you think about a situation matters more than what those involved in it feel? a voice inside her asked.
Because she had long since stopped caring whether the outrage she operated in was manufactured or not. She’d long ago stopped caring either way. If there was outrage, she acted.
Is this really who you are? that voice asked.
A voice she recognized. A voice that sounded like the best friend and sister she’d lost so long ago.
At a certain point—or maybe at this particular point, whether she wanted to or not—Sarina wondered whether she wasn’t punishing abuses of power anymore. If instead, she was committing them herself when called in by questionable people like the chairman of the Combe Industries board, who had told her straight off he wanted Matteo gone.
She didn’t want to answer those questions inside her. Though she was afraid the fact she’d asked them already gave her the answers.
Sarina felt shaken straight through when she returned her attention to the man standing there in front of her, watching and waiting as if he could see every thought that moved through her. As if he already knew how this would end.
“I don’t want that video released anywhere,” she said when she was sure she could speak without stammering or shaking. When she could sound like a version of her former self. “Why don’t you tell me what it is you want me to do.”
She told herself that this would be a spot of penance, that was all, which never hurt anyone. And it could be worse, of course. If Matteo still required that she deliver her findings to his board, that suggested that he wouldn’t press his advantage as far as others might have. Surely that gave her some kind of armor. She could pay her penance and even learn a little something from this experience. Like how not to repeat it. And while she was at it, maybe she could go on and change her life back to something—and herself to someone—she recognized.
Assuming she survived this.
Somethin
g that seemed significantly in doubt when all Matteo Combe did was smile back at her, like a wolf.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE COMBE FAMILY seat sprawled across the better part of the highest hill outside one of Yorkshire’s old industrial mill towns. Many of the original mill structures had been reclaimed these days, turned into gastropubs, highly optimistic boutiques, and modernized flats, in a concerted effort to draw a younger, flasher demographic back to these once-abandoned northern towns.
But Combe Manor had been built a long time ago for a very different purpose: to proclaim the Combe family’s precipitous rise from their humble beginnings to all and sundry. Its purpose was to be seen from all corners of the village.
Which meant it stood apart from that village, up a winding road with no neighbors within shouting distance. Isolated and out of reach in every possible way, Sarina couldn’t help but notice.
But she assumed that was the point.
And her pounding heart, newly in residence in the back of her throat, would simply have to find a way to cope.
Matteo had insisted that they leave from London that very same afternoon. And Sarina had been in no position to argue. About anything.
Obedience did not come naturally to her, but she’d bitten her tongue, ducked her head—metaphorically, anyway—and done what was asked of her while that horrible video played again and again in her head. Matteo had ordered her things brought from her hotel. Then he’d ushered her into one of his cars, settled in the spacious back seat beside her, and informed her that they would be driving up to his family’s stately home in Yorkshire.
Sarina was sure that he’d been waiting for her to react badly to this pronouncement, so, naturally, she hadn’t. She’d nodded and smiled in her best rendition of the kind of obedient creature she wasn’t, and wondered how the hell she was going to make it through this ordeal.
Especially when being close to this man made her behave like someone else. Someone who touched men for absolutely no reason and when it was the very last thing she should have been doing under the circumstances.
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