Just as Matteo had told her in his offhanded, imperious way, it took her a solid hour to march down that winding road into the village, where she hired a taxi at a stand near the coach stop, asked to be driven to the city of York, and once there, waited in the old train station until she could board the next train headed south toward London.
Because she didn’t know who she’d become in Matteo Combe’s arms. She only knew that she could not possibly allow herself to be that woman again. Wanton. Soft and yielding.
Desperate for his touch. Desperate for him.
The kind of woman she’d never been—the kind of woman she’d looked down on, if she was honest—who gave herself body and soul to a man like him.
As if she imagined she could do something so reckless without suffering for it.
When Sarina knew better. She knew she would suffer for all that pleasure, sooner or later. She already knew how things like this ended. Where touching a man like Matteo would lead.
Straight on into tears and loss and despair.
Whether Sarina wanted it or not.
CHAPTER NINE
MATTEO KNEW HE was alone in the stately bed in Combe Manor, another part of his inheritance whether he liked it or not, before he came fully awake that next morning.
He rolled over, then ran a palm over the sheets where Sarina had slept. Or, to be more precise, had rested briefly in between addictive bouts of the wildest passion Matteo had ever known.
Beside him, the sheets were cool. Matteo flopped over onto his back again and rubbed his hands over his face, all the things he didn’t want to think about flooding into him like the ghosts he never wanted to admit could feel a little too real. Particularly in a place like this.
He had never been a playboy. Unlike many of the men he’d known at university, or socially, who had grown up the way he had—with plump bank accounts and investment income and too many strains of aristocratic blood in their veins—he had never attempted to distinguish himself by the notches on his bedpost. He had never drowned himself in women only to become jaded and careless. As he’d told Sarina once, he had always been archaic.
That wasn’t to say he hadn’t indulged himself.
But it had never been like this.
He had never felt so unlike himself. So out of control and very nearly maddened with the need to keep tasting her, keep sampling her, keep making her cry out his name...
He felt that need wash over him anew, making him hard and ready as if he hadn’t spent the whole of the night drowning himself in her.
There was something about Sarina that kept him off balance, even when he was the one with the experience and she the innocent.
Innocent.
That word went through him like a shudder, deep and dark, roaring in him like something primitive.
And it took him long moments to accept that what he felt was possessive.
Deeply, extraordinarily, unutterably possessive.
Because he had been her first. He had taught her how to please him, and herself, in every way he knew. He had taken her again and again, and when he’d been certain she’d had more than enough, she had crawled over him in the dark and started the dance herself.
He had never felt anything like this in his life. Addicted. Obsessed. Fully and completely needy, to his horror.
As if he was nothing but a man, after all.
Matteo jackknifed up in his bed, rolled out of it, and stalked off into his shower. Surely the heat would clear his head. Surely the water would wash these bizarre sensations away before he stopped recognizing himself altogether.
But when he emerged from all that steam, water, and heat, he felt as edgy as he had before. As if she’d done more than take him into her body—she’d wrenched him open and into a different shape than before. When he’d been perfectly content with the shape he’d been in before, thank you.
This was supposed to be a cold-blooded interlude. She had made a business out of her thirst for revenge. He had happily blackmailed her in return. Why was it the only thing he could seem to concentrate on today was the soft noises she’d made when he’d been deep inside her, so lost in her he wasn’t sure he’d known his own name?
Matteo dressed quickly, then headed downstairs to the library again. He avoided the breakfast room entirely. He sat there, surrounded by the gold-embossed leather spines of books that weren’t books at all, and told himself he didn’t care what was or wasn’t inside them. There was no shame in remaining opaque. Just because the world had gone mad and pretended to value transparency in all things—as curated so carefully from behind so many screens—that didn’t mean he had to partake in the obsession.
All he needed to do was glance out the windows to remind himself that in some places, history still squatted down hard, its solid haunches keeping everything more or less just as it had been for centuries. Why did he imagine he was the Combe who could change that?
He cracked open his laptop, set his mobile on the table before him, and applied himself to his work with all the focus and fury of a man who had no intention of cracking open the various compartments inside himself and seeing what lurked around in there.
If his life had taught him anything it was that a person’s internal life should stay where it was. Lest it turn into hurled statuary, tabloid speculation, and his lonely childhood.
The morning passed with intense negotiations, contract disputes, and discussions with vice presidents stationed all over the world. And every time Matteo was forced to defend himself—without seeming at all defensive—against the sly little whisper campaign Roderick Sainsworth had started, using Sarina and her usual findings as his evidence—he was grateful.
It reminded him who he was. Who he had always been. And why he had made that video in the first place.
As the day wore on and he didn’t see so much as the faintest trace of Sarina, Matteo was sure he understood. It was that edgy, restless feeling he’d woken up with and hadn’t managed to conquer yet. He didn’t like it. He felt certain that Sarina, with her deeply held distaste for men like him, found it all even more offensive.
He might even have found it ever so slightly entertaining that she’d apparently locked herself away rather than face what had happened between them. But by the time evening rolled around, Matteo found he was far less amused. It had begun to eat at him that Sarina was so distraught by the events of the previous evening that she’d shut herself away rather than face it.
Or, more to the point, him.
He prowled through the manor house, his already-dim mood blackening further with every step. He moved past the forbidding portraits of his Combe ancestors, studying them as he went. They were hard men, each and every one of them. Dressed up in the fashions of the day and clearly attempting to look more like the nobility than what they were. Tough and determined. Capable of climbing out of the textile mills into this manor house, if not as able to alter the broad, northern accents that marked them as less than, forever.
Or so Matteo’s father had always told him every time he’d smacked Matteo for letting slip the posh accent Eddie had paid for in all those fancy schools.
And Matteo doubted very much that any of his ancestors—like his burly great-great-grandfather who had clawed the family out of poverty with his own two hands and ingenuity to spare—would have much use for a descendent whose head was so filled with a woman that he couldn’t quite see straight enough to walk down his own damned hall.
Matteo didn’t like to think of himself in those terms. But what other terms applied?
Especially when he could feel his body betraying him as he stalked toward the guest suite where Sarina was staying. Readying itself. Hardening into pure need.
He gave a peremptory knock at Sarina’s door, then pushed it open.
But she was nowhere to be found.
And it took him only a moment or two to understa
nd that she wasn’t simply out of her rooms, wandering about the house somewhere. There was no luggage. No sign, in fact, that she had ever been here at all.
He retraced his steps, his jaw clenched so hard he feared he might shatter a tooth.
“Where is Dr. Fellows?” he asked the first member of his staff he found.
“I thought you knew, sir,” the woman replied, looking immediately uneasy, which forced Matteo to wrestle his expression under control. Or try. “She left. Early this morning. By foot.”
And he would never know what he said in reply.
He waited until the following morning. Only then did he ring her, standing in the library where he had first tasted her innocence, staring out at the clouds and gray while the weight of Combe Manor and the mill valley below him seemed to crush him into pulp.
“Dr. Fellows,” she said by way of greeting, as if she didn’t know exactly who was calling her. As if she truly believed that she could usher them back onto professional footing that way.
Though now that Matteo had tasted her, he was forced to wonder if anything that had passed between them had ever been professional. At all.
“It appears you do not understand how blackmail works, Sarina,” Matteo said when she was sure he could sound very nearly disinterested. Cool and calm.
At complete odds with how he felt. And God help him, he was sick to death of all this feeling.
“I thought we agreed on our terms,” came her reply, icier by far than his. And he would have moved the mills and factories below him with his own hands if he could have seen her face then. If he could have touched her. “I saw no reason to linger. Or did you imagine that you could keep me locked up in that house forever?”
“I did not keep you locked up at all, quite obviously, or you would still be here.”
That came out somewhat less cool and calm, but she ignored it.
“I plan to make my presentation to your board in a week’s time,” she said, much as he imagined she would discuss her travel arrangements. Or a shopping list. “I will add you to the video chat room. If, for some reason, you do not like my performance or feel more effort is required on my part, we can talk further.”
Even the way she paused then was dismissive. And Matteo didn’t understand that howling thing inside of him that wanted nothing more than to remind her how it had been. How she’d come apart in his hands, over and over and over again. How she had surrendered, and in so doing, had humbled him.
Changed him, even, though he still didn’t choose to accept that.
“Do you feel we have more to discuss, Mr. Combe?” Sarina asked, her voice as cold as it was challenging.
“I think not,” he replied, ice for ice.
He put down the phone, stared out at all that wet and cold, and told himself he felt nothing.
Nothing at all.
A week later, to the day, he sat in his London office and watched as Sarina spoke with quiet confidence into a camera.
He knew she was talking about him—or the character of him she and his board and perhaps the ever-present paparazzi had created between them—but he couldn’t seem to focus on that. A few weeks back he would have said there was nothing more important on earth than his role in this company, he would have laughed at the notion that he might shift his focus from it for the merest instant, and yet today all he could focus on was Sarina.
She looked flawless, which irritated him, as he remembered her with color in her cheeks and tears in her eyes. Slumped over him, her skin glowing, sweet and hot. Today her thick black hair was pulled back into a sleek knot. Her cheekbones were as high as he remembered them, her mouth as temptingly generous. She wore that relentless black she preferred, smiled only very coldly, and kept her hands folded in front of her on her desk.
Behind her were a set of bookshelves, and Matteo had no doubt that she had read each and every one of the volumes lined up there.
Because Sarina is real, something in him whispered. It’s you that is fake.
Or a ghost, perhaps. Of all the lives that had come before him and failed, time and again, to do anything but end in disappointment.
No wonder she’d run off. As if pursued by wolves, unable to leave behind so much as a note.
Even the man she spoke of now, the Matteo Combe who she claimed to have profiled so thoroughly, was fake. A creation of his will and her surrender.
“The longer Mr. Combe and I spoke, the more convinced I became that his behavior at his father’s funeral had far more to do with his understandable grief over being orphaned so suddenly than any defect of character,” she was saying. “It seems in questionable taste to exploit a man’s weakness. Another sucker punch, you could say.”
If Matteo didn’t know better, he might have thought that she believed that. That she believed in him—and when had he wanted that from her, or anyone?
As far as Matteo could tell, Sarina was his one weakness in all the world.
The fact he’d exploited her for his own ends made him no better than his own father, which was another way of saying that Matteo’s worst fears had come true. Fears which had always been at war with his affection for Eddie. And he had to sit idly by, here in his expansive office, and watch it as it happened.
And he thought he knew, now, why he felt that spark of recognition every time he saw her, as if he’d lost her long ago and had only just found her again. Or it was more accurate to say that he was afraid he knew.
But he had never been much good at being human, and she wanted nothing to do with the man who’d blackmailed her, so what he knew or didn’t know would stay in him. Like one more ghost rattling its chain, all noise and no impact at all.
Eddie Combe had been many things. But he had never been ineffectual. Matteo would have to live with that.
When Sarina finished her tidy, matter-of-fact presentation, the rest of the board muttered amongst themselves.
“I am satisfied in every respect and delighted we can put this chapter behind us,” Lord Christopher Radcliffe said at once, there in the boardroom three floors down in a meeting that Matteo had not been invited to join. He raised a brow in Roderick’s direction, across the gleaming table. “Roderick? I’m certain you must be as relieved as I am that your fears were unfounded?”
“It is as if a great weight has been lifted,” Roderick Sainsworth gritted out.
He had made a power play and lost. Matteo should have felt like a god.
Instead, he wanted the one woman in the world who hated him the most to look at him like he was a man, not a science experiment.
But she’d logged off after delivering her assessment, her part already played.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” Matteo said when it was his turn to speak into his monitor. “I appreciate the concern for my well-being, and that of Combe Industries, that led to this little adventure in psychotherapy. And I am delighted that the good doctor has pronounced me wholly fit to continue running my family’s company as intended.”
And when the video link went dead, when everyone had disconnected, Matteo was left staring at a blank screen.
He told himself that he should be happy, goddamn it, because he had everything he wanted.
Every single thing, he told himself.
Again and again.
Because sooner or later, he was sure he’d start believing it.
* * *
One week led into two. Three.
Matteo focused on the company because it was all he had. And all he knew how to do.
It was up to him to make certain that no matter his board’s flirtation with the idea of voting him out of office, he was fully prepared to take Combe Industries to the next level. To build on the family tradition, and better it however he could.
Which meant, as far as he could see, not being his father or any one of his Combe forebears.
Something he ha
d already failed to do in his personal life.
The better to remedy that, he set out to personally visit every single office. All over the globe. No matter how remote, how small, or how ancillary.
Two months in, Matteo saw his half brother for the first time over a video link from London while he was visiting the Combe offices in Perth.
“I would have known you anywhere,” he said as he stared at the man before him on his screen.
Dominik was tall and dark, with the same gray eyes they’d both inherited from their mother. He was far brawnier than Matteo, his dark hair almost too long and a kind of wariness on his face that suggested a certain level of physical prowess, but there was no doubt that they were related.
“Brother,” Dominik had replied, his voice gruff and a gleam in his dark gaze that told Matteo that for all he might have been a hermit, he was in no way a pushover. “What a pleasure to almost meet you.”
Matteo counted that as a perfectly acceptable family reunion.
“What do you mean you’re not coming straight home?” Lauren asked, once Dominik had left her office. She actually scowled at him through the screen, rather than gazing at him placidly, the scowl merely implied. It was a shift in his normally unflappable assistant. “What exactly do you want me to do with your long-lost brother while you’re out there traveling the world, indulging this sudden attack of wanderlust?”
Matteo shrugged, happy that he was in Perth and couldn’t have rushed back even if he’d wanted to. “Civilize him, Lauren. He is a San Giacomo. Teach him what that means before the papers shred him into pieces.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Lauren replied, in a tone that suggested she thought very little respect was due, after all, “isn’t that a job only you could do?”
But Matteo was doing his job. He was living his job.
Because he understood it now, after these weeks on the road. There could be women to distract a man. Children to clamor for attention. Family and all their demands and complications.
But the company remained throughout all those petty human concerns. The company had come before him, and it would carry on after him, much like the San Giacomo villa in Venice. He was nothing but a steward, protecting what his ancestors had built to hand it over, intact and hopefully improved, to whoever came after him.
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