The Italian's Twin Consequences (One Night With Consequences)

by Caitlin Crews

  If he kept it up, she would likely be hired to go after him next.

  If all you’re doing is playing whack-a-mole with sociopaths, that voice inside chimed in, then why do it at all? You’re not doing any good. You’re just choosing one bad man over another. What’s the point?

  But this was not the time for unpleasant self-examination.

  “I dropped in on Mr. Combe unexpectedly last night,” Sarina said in her usual clinical tone, which it only now occurred to her was awfully close to bored. That felt like another body blow, and she struggled to keep going. “As I explained to you at the start, drop-ins are an important part of this process. While it is always interesting to see what can be found out in the planned sessions, drop-ins force a loss of control. I prefer to conduct them in places where the subjects usually feel the most safe and inaccessible. That way the loss of control feels more like a personal violation. Which can often reveal a subject’s true character.”

  Across the table from her, Matteo’s gray eyes gleamed, promising a kind of retribution that would leave her breathless.

  Assuming she could ever breathe again to note the difference.

  “Yes, yes,” Roderick huffed. “I remember the sales pitch.”

  “Mr. Combe responded as expected,” Sarina said, and found herself unable to look away from Matteo. It was as if he held her tight in one of his fists, his grip unbreakable and fierce. Her eyes felt suspiciously bright, but she ignored them. “He was on the defensive initially, but then, to my great surprise, he rolled with the sucker punch.”

  There was a short silence on the other end of the phone. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I found him rather agile, in fact, as he switched course,” Sarina said, as if she was musing through the problem as she sat there. As if the man in question wasn’t glowering at her from across a notably small table in a deserted room, high on a hill in a house out of a horror movie. “Some men rise to prominent positions through bullying, as I’m sure you’re aware. Others ascend to those positions thanks to exactly this sort of agility. Their ability to pivot no matter what is thrown at them in the course of a day. It strikes me as a possibility that your Mr. Combe is the latter.”

  “If you’re talking about his ability to pivot into a fistfight that makes the papers, perhaps,” Roderick snarled. “I’m not paying you to let the boy turn your head.”

  Sarina stared across the table at the man before her, who only a very great fool would consider a boy in any sense of the term. She could see that darkness in his gaze, but otherwise he didn’t so much as twitch. She looked for any kind of telltale sign that he was furious, because she could feel that he was, but there was nothing there. He might as well have been one of the stone gargoyles that graced his own roof here, theatrically snarling, but as still as the stone from which they’d been carved.

  “I was under the impression that you were paying me for an assessment of your CEO and president following the events at his father’s funeral,” Sarina replied coolly, because she was regrettably not made of stone. “If your requirements have changed, Mr. Sainsworth, you will need to update me. But I should warn you right now, the assessment is the assessment. My head will not be turned by Mr. Combe, or you.”

  Roderick blustered on, claiming she’d misunderstood him, and Sarina continued on when he finished, presenting the man with a fairly nuanced picture of Matteo. But a positive one, at the end of the day.

  And when she hung up, Matteo’s mouth curved in her direction.

  “Nicely done,” he said, and yet somehow, a compliment delivered in that voice of his felt nothing like a compliment at all. “Presumably, as time goes on, you will get gradually more and more...enthusiastic.” That word felt like a slap. She was instantly tossed back into his office, melting into that kiss—and she could feel her cheeks heat. Especially when his lips quirked. “The more you are captivated by my suitability for my job, of course.”

  “It will only take one more session,” she told him, ignoring the heat on her face as best she could. “I always present my preliminary finding after three sessions. If that finding is that the subject would be better off removed from his position of power, we conduct a further set of sessions, to be sure. Usually three or four, depending on the situation.”

  Matteo studied her until Sarina was fairly sure her face would simply remain that hot. Forever.

  “Out of curiosity, how many times have you gotten to the third week and pronounced one of your subjects perfectly able to continue his command of his company? Or do you find only guilty men wherever you look?”

  “Guilty men are guilty,” Sarina said as calmly as possible, though she felt as if that grip of his was tightening around her. “I don’t make them that way.”

  “How remarkably convenient for a woman who makes her living pronouncing that guilt.”

  Sarina took her time draining the rest of her cup of coffee. Then she refilled it, cupping it in her hands as she leaned against the rigid back of her chair. She forced herself to meet that knowing gaze of his head-on.

  “What, exactly, do you want from me, Mr. Combe?”

  “Matteo. Mr. Combe was my father, and you are already aware of how I behaved at his funeral. Keep calling me by his name, and who knows what I might do?”

  “Matteo,” she said, and couldn’t help but feel as if that was a surrender. His name on her lips felt distressingly intimate. But she tried to ignore that the way she was trying to ignore everything else. “You have what you want. You are in total control, and in a few days, I will call in with the results of your third and final session. I will sing your praises and we can be on our way. Yet I get the sneaking suspicion that’s not enough for you.”

  “We must while away the intervening days in some fashion or other,” Matteo said after another long moment of silence that tore at her. “I find I am desperate to understand you. While you slept so well and so deeply last night—” the look he sent her then suggested he knew exactly how she’d spent her night “—I searched for more information on Sarina Fellows, the avenging angel of a doctor who does not help people, but rather chooses her targets and takes them down. One by one.”

  She couldn’t feel the expression on her own face, her cheeks were still so hot. “I don’t have targets, I have subjects. And I only take them down if they deserve it. Some would say that taking those men down is a form of helping others all its own.”

  “I have no doubt that is what you tell yourself. But I want to know why.”

  Sarina directed her attention to her coffee again. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  This was unbearable. And yet, thanks to that video, she had no choice but to bear it. She had no choice but to sit here and subject herself to whatever conversation Matteo chose to have, with her or at her. She was stranded here in this house of his, so far away from everything. But it wouldn’t have mattered if they were smack down in the middle of a London street. A thousand people could be thronged around her, and he would still have had total control.

  Because she’d given it to him when she’d lost her mind and touched him.

  If he wanted her to talk about herself, something that Sarina had gone out of her way to avoid for years, she would have no choice but to oblige him.

  Even if the words stuck in her throat.

  Because how could she make anyone understand what Jeannette had been to her?

  Sarina’s friendship with Jeannette had blossomed into being when they were still in strollers, both in the care of nannies while their parents worked. Sarina’s parents rarely left their universities. Jeannette’s rarely came home from their medical practices.

  Sarina and Jeannette had been left to fend for themselves, and they’d done it together. They became each other’s family. In time, it was as if they were the real family and their parents were just afterthoughts. Footnotes.

  Her own time in therapy
while studying for her degree had forced her to face head-on how damaging this must have been. Even if she’d never felt damaged, not while Jeannette had been alive to make everything their very own adventure. How could she consider herself damaged when parental neglect, however benign, was the reason she and Jeannette had considered themselves blood—with the scars on their palms to prove it?

  Girls with attentive parents didn’t make blood oaths of enduring sisterhood at ten. And Sarina didn’t want to imagine who she might have been if she hadn’t been there that afternoon, with a sharp knife and all that giddy laughter up in the attic in Jeannette’s house, ripping up old T-shirts to use as bandages.

  But how did she explain that to Matteo, who had a real blood family and, if the photographs she’d studied were to be believed, had actually spent time with them?

  Especially when he was already studying her like she was an animal in a zoo. “And you are certain that yours is the path of the righteous, are you not?”

  She didn’t believe that silky, almost-playful note in his voice. She didn’t believe that he was anything but the danger she knew him to be. She knew it. And even so, his voice seemed to curl around inside of her, too hot and too intense.

  Too dangerous by far. But there was nothing she could do about it.

  “I am,” she made herself say, and something broke inside her as she said it.

  He wanted her to feel like the villain here, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t—or she hadn’t been. Not every man in a position like Matteo’s deserved to be pushed out. But each and every one of them could do with some serious, unflinching attention paid to the kind of men they were, or they became monsters. That was what she’d always believed.

  All Sarina had ever wanted was to pay them that attention, the better to weed out those monsters before they did too much damage.

  And she might not understand why she responded to this man the way she did, but that didn’t mean she had the wrong idea about him. He was blackmailing her, after all. She might need to reexamine her motivations, but she had nothing to feel guilty about.

  “I am certain,” she said, and she heard that familiar spark in her own voice. The fire that had motivated her all these years.

  I have nothing to feel guilty about, she asserted, deep inside.

  “I understand,” he said, and he sounded almost kind.

  And Sarina could sense it then, the trap he’d laid for her. She might not understand where or how he would spring it—but she knew it was there. It was that hint of kindness when she knew there was none of that here. She knew it was part of the snare.

  Especially when Matteo smiled. “Tell me then. Who is Jeanette?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  HE WATCHED THAT name strike her as if he’d hauled off and thrown a fist.

  And it was a fist he’d meant to throw, so Matteo didn’t understand why the sight of Sarina taking that blow made him... Uncomfortable. There was a part of him that still felt, no matter what, that he recognized her somehow and it seemed connected to the tightness in his chest.

  But he ignored it.

  Before him, Sarina had gone still. Pale.

  “Jeanette Maroney lived next door to you as a child. You and she were fast friends, by all accounts.”

  “Sister.”

  Sarina sounded like someone else. Her voice was ragged, like a scrape through the surprising spring brightness of the breakfast room, the only tolerable room in this dark and stuffy house when the sun was out. Which in Matteo’s memories of his childhood was never.

  He didn’t know why he tortured himself by coming back here when he’d always hated the place. Or why he was thinking about his childhood at all when he had this woman off balance before him. At last.

  “I am not following you, Sarina.”

  She cleared her throat. She dropped her head and breathed out so he could hear it. And when she lifted her eyes to his again, there was something like defiance in her dark gold gaze.

  Which should have annoyed him, not hummed in him like fire. Like need.

  “She was my friend, yes. Always. But as far as I was ever concerned, we were sisters. She was my family.”

  “Would you like me to tell you what I found out about her?” Matteo asked, and had to remind himself that he need show no mercy here. That if she’d had her way, Sarina would have shown him less than no mercy in return. She’d never had any intention of walking away from this job of hers without his head on a platter.

  There was no reason that he should find this difficult. That the sight of her in some kind of distress should make him feel...anything at all. Much less that stiffness in his own chest.

  “I already know everything there is to know about Jeanette,” Sarina said after a moment, and he could hear how tight her voice was, in contrast to that matter-of-fact tone she usually used. He could see how stiffly she sat there on the other side of the table. “I doubt very much that a recitation of events I lived through, picked up from a few internet searches and twisted to suit your narrative here, is going to tell me something I don’t already know.”

  Matteo studied her face, and chose not to acknowledge the fact he’d already committed her every feature to memory. Just as he chose not to think too hard about how excited he’d been when he’d stumbled over those old pictures online the night before. The pictures that had led him down a dark rabbit hole to the sad, brief life of one Jeanette Maroney.

  And her best friend, who had found her, and had spent the rest of her own life avenging Jeanette’s loss.

  “We appear to have found your motivation,” Matteo said, almost idly. “The reason you spend your days in interchangeable hotel rooms, plotting out how best you will ruin the life du jour.”

  Sarina gazed back at him for a beat. Then another.

  And then she laughed.

  It was the first sign of life he’d seen in her since she’d shuffled into the room looking off balance and subdued, and the effect on Matteo was electric. He felt that laughter everywhere. And the fact that she sounded slightly unhinged did nothing to ease the hit of that electricity or the way it seared into him.

  Had he thought he wanted to crush her? Because the truth was, he liked her this way. Alive and uncontrolled. Careless and bright with it.

  Reckless, something in him whispered, as if passing down a dire sentence.

  Because reckless was for other people. Never Matteo. Never the heir to two august families and their attendant fortunes.

  But it turned out, he liked the sound of it in that laugh of hers.

  “You should see your face,” she said, and her eyes were far too bright as she shook her head at him, that recklessness all over her the way he wished he was. “You are so certain that you have me all figured out, aren’t you? You know Jeanette died, and boom. There is my motivation. There’s your psychological profile all worked out for you.”

  “A simple yes or no would do,” Matteo replied coolly.

  She laughed again, and he didn’t understand what it was about that laugh that got inside him, and made everything... Messy. And not the kind of mess he knew how to clean up. Not the kind he’d spent his adult life learning how to handle.

  This was the kind of mess that sank in deep. And stayed put.

  “Jeanette was more than two dates and a dash on a gravestone,” Sarina hurled at him, her eyes still too bright. And a different kind of intensity all over her face. “She told the worst jokes I’ve ever heard in my life. Deliberately. She didn’t need music to dance, not that she had any rhythm, but she didn’t need that, either. She was so smart and so gullible, all at the same time. And she was always late. Even if you told her to meet you at an earlier time than necessary, still. She’d find a way.” She paused, a faraway look on her face then, as if she was remembering being kept waiting somewhere. She swallowed, hard. “Jeanette never met a stranger. She was relentlessly kind to
everyone she met. Which isn’t to say she was a saint. She loved drama. She would marinate in it. And she didn’t get to grow old enough to learn how much better it is to live life with a whole lot less of it.”

  Matteo didn’t recognize the feeling that swept over him. It took him too long to understand that it was a kind of shame, and he couldn’t say he cared for it in the slightest.

  “Sarina...”

  But she didn’t hear him. Or she didn’t care if she did. “At first she didn’t tell me about the new man in her life. Jeanette liked her secrets. She loved fairy tales more than anything, and when she finally did tell me that he existed, you would have thought she’d met Prince Charming. That was how she thought of him, of course. He swept her off her feet, wining and dining her all over the world, giving her expensive gifts, making her feel like a princess.” Sarina was smiling then, as if she was telling a happy story, but there was that sharp brightness in her eyes. And besides, Matteo already knew how it ended. “Then she got pregnant. And there was no more wining or dining or fancy trips to far-off cities. He told her to handle it, cut her a check as some kind of final gift, and stopped taking her calls or making himself available.”

  “I assume he was married,” Matteo said. “Isn’t that usually how this story goes?”

  “He had three ex-wives at that point, but he was never considering Jeanette for that role. And don’t defend him to me,” she said, her voice getting fierce, as if he’d argued that the man’s marital status excused his behavior. “Not every man is cut out to be a father and emotions run high when there’s an unplanned pregnancy. I understand that. But that doesn’t give a man the right to be cruel. To be despicable.”

  Sarina took a deep breath, as if to steady herself, and Matteo wanted to tell her to stop. He didn’t need to know the details, surely. What had he thought there was to gain in this? But he didn’t say a word. And he didn’t know if that was because he thought she wouldn’t stop telling this story if he told her to, or if he was far more concerned that she would.