He looked at Sarina and it was as if he recognized her more than himself.
And he didn’t know what on earth to do about that. So he did...nothing.
And Sarina squared her shoulders, looked him straight in the eye, and kept going. “He ordered her to get rid of the baby, and when she refused, he relented. She thought her determination to win him back had worked. She thought that, as she’d suspected, a little time had made him realize that of course he wanted his own child. He took her out to dinner, made love to her, and told her everything she wanted to hear.” Her voice cracked a little there, but she still pushed on. “But he was gone when she woke up in that penthouse suite at the Four Seasons. Bleeding all over the pristine, high thread count sheets.”
Sarina reached out for her coffee then. She picked up her cup and took a sip, her motions stiff and jerky. Almost like a robot, except there was still that terrible storm in her eyes that told Matteo she was anything but a machine.
You wanted to see who she was, something in him reminded him harshly. Now you know.
“Jeanette didn’t understand. She called him to let him know what had happened. That she was miscarrying the baby he’d spent the night before assuring her he wanted after all. And do you know what he did?” Matteo could guess. But he found he couldn’t bring himself to say a word. “He laughed at her.”
“Sarina,” he started again. This time, she lifted a hand, and it only occurred to him after he subsided that she wasn’t the one giving the orders here. That he was supposed to be.
But there was that ribbon of shame still bright and hot inside him, reminding him he’d forced her to tell this story—and what did that make him? Was he any different from the self-interested bastard she was telling him about now?
Matteo had the uncomfortable notion that it was nothing but a matter of degrees.
“He laughed at her, called her an idiot, and told her exactly what he put into her drink the night before. So then she called me.” Sarina’s gaze was locked to his, grief and fury and something else he couldn’t name blazing there. It made that shame inside him bloom into its own kind of fire. “I came, collected her, and brought her home. And that’s why I was there to find her the next morning, after she’d taken every pill in our medicine cabinet, and then, just to make sure, used her razor on her wrists.”
There was nothing but silence between them then, there in the too-bright glare of the temperamental Yorkshire sun through the windows, and a dull beat that it took Matteo long moments to realize was his own heart.
Kicking at him hard. Demanding to know how exactly he had become the kind of man who would force a woman to tell him a story like that. Who had come into this meeting gleeful at the notion he had ammunition.
When, exactly, had he become his father? And how had he failed to notice that appalling transformation before now? He had loved the man. He had admired his effectiveness, even. But he didn’t want to be his father. Something he’d been a lot clearer about before Eddie had died, making Matteo’s desire to be his own man feel like a betrayal.
But there was no time for that quagmire, not while Sarina was still gazing back at him. All that she’d lost stark and clear on her face.
“So, yes,” she said, all the tears she hadn’t shed there in her voice. “You could say I had a vendetta against that particular man. But a funny thing happened while I dedicated myself to his downfall. I met all these other men who seemed a whole lot like him. And as satisfying as it was to ruin a man who destroyed the best friend and only sister I ever had, I thought that I could do real good in the world if I prevented other men from doing the same thing to women just like her. Which I think you’re well aware, many of them do.”
She didn’t say, you do too—but that was what Matteo heard. Another hint he’d become Eddie Combe after all.
“That is a horrific story,” he said, hoping his voice sounded smoother than the riot inside him. “I apologize for throwing it in your face.”
“I don’t need your apologies,” Sarina threw right back at him. She stood then, rising to her feet with a certain grace that made him even more appalled at himself. At what he’d become when he’d thought he’d spent the whole of his life making certain he could never, ever turn into his father. Never. And no matter the twinges of disloyalty thinking that caused. “I brought this upon myself. If you want your pound of flesh, go right ahead and take it.” But her gaze slammed into his like a blow. “Just leave Jeanette out of it.”
* * *
“I don’t understand,” his assistant said through the phone much later that day, and though her voice was scrubbed clean of any particular inflection the way it always was, Matteo could see her dubious expression as clearly as if she was standing in front of him in the library at Combe Manor. Instead of down in his London offices, holding down the fort the way she did so beautifully. “You thought you’d go ahead and punish her by...spiriting her away to the family estate for a bit of a refreshing holiday?”
“I’m handling Sarina Fellows,” Matteo told Lauren, his own voice shorter than he’d like. “I have something else entirely I need you to do.”
“If you mean you need me to run this office in your absence, I can assure you, sir, everything is handled exactly as you’d prefer it.”
“I have no doubt,” Matteo said. He never doubted Lauren. She took efficiency to the level of art. “This is something a little bit different.”
It had been a long, strange day. He had started the morning focused and more than ready to tear strips off Sarina. But that wasn’t what had happened. He had pushed her, and she’d told him more than he ever wanted to know about her lost friend—and about her, really, in the process.
He’d been left in that breakfast room thinking he didn’t know who the hell he was anymore.
Or worse, he did know.
When Matteo really had spent his life trying his damnedest to learn from his father, yet never become him.
It had been impossible not to love Eddie. Or his only son had certainly found it impossible. Eddie had always been larger than life. As embarrassing as he was refreshing, often all at once. Brash, pugnacious, in-your-face Eddie Combe had been a force of nature. There was no small part of Matteo that couldn’t believe, even now, that something as prosaic as a heart attack could have taken Eddie out. When he’d thought about his father’s death, as he had done a great deal in his periodically angry adolescence, he’d been unable to imagine anything less than an act of God doing the trick. A biblical flood, pointed directly at Combe Manor. A hurricane for one.
Anything less, surely, and Eddie could have fought it off the way he did everything else.
But instead, poor diet and indifferent exercise had worked in Eddie the way it did in any other mortal man.
Matteo had always taken his father’s behavior as a guide—and, often, as a cautionary tale. He exercised all the time. It was his favorite and only habit, if he was honest. He watched what he ate. He tended to his body as if he expected to live forever, because that was his plan. He didn’t do business the way his father had, a handshake one day and a cudgel the next. He used logic. Reason. And a certain pragmatism he’d honed at Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and the many years he’d worked in Combe Industries, in every single position he could, so he knew his inheritance inside out. The people and the positions alike.
Unlike Eddie, who had swanned about like he was the king of the world, issuing orders and laying down the law on a whim because Eddie had trusted his own gut above all things.
Matteo had admired that as much as he’d despaired of it, which was as good a way as any to describe his relationship with his father.
It hadn’t been until this morning that he’d stood in this house where generations of Combe men before him had raged through the halls, bullying the servants and browbeating their families, that Matteo understood that despite his best efforts, he
was no different than any of them.
He might not have raised a fist, but he’d had no compunction whatever when it came to throwing emotional punches at Sarina. He had wanted to take her down. His urge for revenge had consumed him ever since she’d sat in his villa in Venice and had dared to act as if she had power over him.
That was what had led him to poke at her grief, just as his father would have done before him. All gut, no logic.
Matteo didn’t quite know how to live with that.
He had been the one who’d left that breakfast room, walking out without another word and leaving Sarina to stand there alone, very much as if he couldn’t face her for another moment.
That bright current of shame inside him had suggested he couldn’t.
Because he was terribly afraid that facing her meant facing that ugly part of himself that was his father after all—that had always been his father, waiting there inside him—and he’d wanted nothing to do with it.
But it wasn’t as if he could escape himself. Especially not in this house, this repository of generations of bad memories. His ancestors had been so certain that they could buy their happiness once they made their money, and one after the next, they’d learned that wasn’t the case. They could make money, and by God they did, but happiness was far more elusive.
The library Matteo used as his office when he was up north was a perfect example. It was a beautiful room, featuring a skylight far above and glorious bay windows with the view of the village below and the hills in the distance. The bookshelves were evenly spaced and filled with gleaming, leather-bound books.
Except none of the books were real. The spines had been painstakingly crafted to look like real books, but inside, the pages were blank and empty. It had been important to his great-great-grandfather to appear as educated and worldly as the men he wished were his peers, but Geoffrey Combe hadn’t been one of them.
That was the curse of families like Matteo’s. They could rise. Money was buoyant, after all.
But they could never, ever wash off the stink of their humble beginnings.
And the more Matteo had sat there, ignoring all the calls he should have been making as he stared at those fake books before him, the more he’d come to understand that they weren’t simply a funny little anecdote about long-dead men. They were him.
He had all of those San Giacomo genes, sure. He looked the part. But inside, where it counted, he was blank straight through.
And the sheer horror of that realization was why he determined that it was high time he behaved in a way he knew his father never would have. And hadn’t, in fact, when given the opportunity.
“There was a part of my father’s will that I haven’t known quite what to do with,” he told Lauren now.
“Shall I read it and tell you what I think you should do?” she asked, in her usual matter-of-fact way, because that was what she was paid to do. Know him better than he knew himself, and act in his stead when necessary.
He didn’t ask her if she knew how blank he was inside. He didn’t think he wanted to hear her answer.
“This is somewhat trickier,” he said. “It seems my mother had a child before she married my father. And she left him the bulk of her fortune in her will.”
And Lauren proved her worth all over again by not reacting to that bit of news in any audible way.
“Why hasn’t he come forward to claim his fortune?” she asked instead, quite sensibly.
“Two reasons,” Matteo said. “First, as far as I can tell, no one is sure how to find the man. The last anyone heard he was in a forest somewhere.”
“A forest,” Lauren replied, her voice dry. “That narrows it down considerably. Was that all the information your mother had?”
Matteo didn’t want to talk about his mother. He hadn’t wanted to talk about her when she’d died so suddenly. And the six weeks that passed before Eddie had died too hadn’t changed anything. Alexandrina had mixed her wine and painkillers one night in a manner everyone assured everyone else was purely accidental, and Matteo had accepted that.
Alexandrina wasn’t a box Matteo wanted to open. Because he had no idea what else he would discover about himself if he rummaged around in his mother’s life—or her death. That he was crippled from the pain of losing the mother he’d never known well?
Or that he wasn’t?
“Second, and more importantly, the request was left in my father’s hands,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard Lauren’s question. “But it did not appear that he intended to honor it.”
“I see,” Lauren murmured.
Matteo did not tell his assistant his fears that he had already gone too far down the road to becoming his father. He didn’t explain why that was something he didn’t want, just as he didn’t try to pretend what he already knew. That it was entirely within character for Eddie Combe to ignore information he didn’t want. Like the fact that Alexandrina, the San Giacomo wife he had worked so hard to win, had been possessed of a life, a history, and indeed, a son, before she’d met him.
“I need you to find him,” Matteo said instead. “By whatever means necessary. He is a member of this family, and whether he chooses to stay in his forest or not, it should be a choice he makes.”
Not a choice yet another angry member of the Combe family made for him. Whoever he was.
And the fact he had a brother only a few years older than him was something Matteo intended to hold deep inside himself. Not quite a scar, not quite a pleasure, but both at the same time. Or neither.
But at least it was better than the blankness.
He put down the phone, aware of that same edgy restlessness that had plagued him all day. As if his skin was two sizes too small. As if his bones no longer fit the way they should.
As if he really was one of these collections of empty pages masquerading as a book, and now he knew it, he could feel nothing but the falseness of it. Those ornate covers pressing down hard on the emptiness within.
Making him a stranger to himself, blank straight through.
And it somehow made perfect sense that when he looked up, Sarina was standing in the doorway.
His very own avenging angel, with a sharp tongue in place of a terrible sword.
His trouble was, he still wanted to taste her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SARINA WAS STILL in the same clothes she’d had on this morning, and now that he wasn’t trying to tear into her, Matteo allowed himself to notice that what she wore looked soft and far more lived-in than the crisp black pieces she’d worn at both of their official sessions. And avenging angel or not, he couldn’t help thinking that this was the real Sarina before him.
She looked...approachable, instead of sleek and intimidating. Touchable instead of bristling with all her deliberately sharp edges.
Not that thinking such things helped Matteo handle that wild, nearly out-of-control greed for her inside him any better.
She’d put her hair up, clipping it back from her face in the way he knew she liked. But all it did was draw more attention to her fascinatingly high cheekbones and her beautifully wide mouth.
And all he could think about was the fact he knew how she tasted.
“What brings you back into my lair?” he managed to ask when the silence had dragged out too long and still she stood there, not quite inside the library. As if she planned to turn and run at the faintest sign from him.
Matteo opted to flash that sign. He lifted himself from his chair as if they were facing off. As if this house was a boxing ring and as if, at any moment, he expected a fight might break out. He squared his shoulders like he was preparing to go a few rounds with her, and he didn’t allow himself to remember each and every time he’d watched his father do the same.
Just as he didn’t allow himself to think any further about how much of Eddie there was in him, especially around this woman.
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“I expected you to make a break for it,” he said instead. “It’s an hour’s walk into the village. Another hour or so to York to catch a train. You could have made it down to London by now.”
Sarina’s mouth curved, though if it was a smile, it made his chest hurt. And made that greedy thing inside him kick into higher gear.
He had to believe that whatever that said about him, it wasn’t good.
But he couldn’t seem to make it stop. Any of it.
“The story of what happened to Jeanette isn’t new to me,” Sarina said quietly, her dark gaze on his. “I’m no more or less sad about her than I was when I woke up this morning.”
“Good,” Matteo heard himself say, and was struck at once by how scratchy his own voice was.
And how inadequate his response seemed, particularly as it hung there between them like smoke.
And he noticed too many things in the silence that stretched out across the library then. The light had changed over the course of the day as the typical clouds had crept in. Now that it was evening and the last of the sun was clinging to the horizon, all he could see in this library—in this house—were the shadows. Like creeping, deepening monuments to all the sadness that had gone on here and had pooled in him despite his best efforts, over the years, to make himself different.
Matteo didn’t understand why looking at Sarina made it worse.
Or more, anyway. She made him feel more than he wanted to, or should, and he found himself rubbing at that space between his pectoral muscles where she had placed her hand, as if he could rub all those sensations away.
“What happened to you in this house?” she asked, as if she was there on the inside of his head when she was still standing in the doorway.
He disliked the sensation. Immensely.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
She folded her arms and regarded him steadily. “You do. You’ve made more than one reference to the fact that this is an unhappy place. Why?”
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