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She heard the heavy, obviously male tread of his feet in the hall outside her door. Was it her imagination, or did he sound as if he was made of stone? As if he’d really and truly turned into the monster they’d made him—she’d made him—after all his years away?
And now that it was finally happening, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Should she stand? Remain seated? Hide in her cramped little coat closet and wait for him to go away—delaying the inevitable?
She knew what she wanted to do, and glanced at her closet as if she might dive for it. But Lexi had never had the option to hide herself away from the unpleasant things in life. That was what happened when a girl was left to raise herself while her parents chased dragons wherever they led, which was never anywhere good. And it was what happened when she was then brought to live with a new family who treated her well enough, in the sense that they provided for her, but never, ever let her imagine that she was one of them.
But that veered toward ungrateful, she told herself as steadily as she could when the world was ending. And she wasn’t ungrateful. She couldn’t be.
Because then she’d be no better than her lost mother. And she’d spent her whole life trying her best to be nothing at all like Yvonne Worth Haring, once a sparkling heiress with the world at her feet, who’d died in squalor like any other junkie.
Lexi refused to start down that path, and she knew—she remembered too vividly—that the road to her mother’s hell was liberally paved with ingratitude and all of it aimed straight at her uncle.
The heavy tread stopped outside her door and her heart pounded at her, so hard it made her feel dizzy. Lexi was suddenly glad she’d stayed in her seat, tucked up behind the narrow desk she used because a full-size desk wouldn’t have fit in the small room. She wasn’t sure her legs would have held her upright.
And she was having enough trouble keeping her heart from clawing its way out from behind her ribs without adding a collapse to the situation.
The door swung open, slow and ominous, and then he was there.
Right there.
Right here, she thought wildly, panic and dread exploding into something else, something sharper and all too familiar, as she sat there, struck dumb, unable to do anything but stare back at him.
Atlas.
Here.
He filled up the door to her tiny office with rather more brawn and heft than she remembered. He’d always been sculpted and athletic, of course. It was one of the reasons he’d been so beloved all over Europe in his heyday, and hadn’t exactly helped her with the red-faced longing she’d tried so hard to hide. Another reason Europe had adored him was his epic rise from nothing and the power he’d gathered along the way—but Lexi thought his inarguable male beauty had helped that fascination along.
It had been difficult for her to get past way back when. It still was.
She recalled every inch of him, even if memory had muted him a little. In person he was bright, hot, unmistakable. That bold nose that made his profile so intense. The belligerent jaw and curiously high cheekbones that should have canceled each other out but instead came together to make him a little too extraordinary for her poor, overtaxed heart.
He’d had all that ten years ago. He had it all still, though it was all...different, somehow. He was still beautiful, certainly, male and hard and clearly as lethal as he was mouthwateringly handsome. But it was a harder and more intense sort of beauty today. A storm rather than a work of art.
As altered as he was.
Lexi felt as if his hands were wrapped tight around her neck, holding her breath for her. This close to doing exactly what she’d accused him of doing ten years ago.
Any second now, she’d start to choke...but not yet. She was frozen solid. Panicked from her head to her feet and unable to do a single thing but stare at him, the apparition from her own personal hell.
Atlas stood in the door to her office and filled it up, all flashing black eyes and that pugilistic set to his brutal jaw. He wore a dark, obviously bespoke suit that clung to his shoulders and made her far too aware of their size and sculpted, muscled width. As if he could not only bear the weight of the world on them if he chose, he could block it out, as well. He was doing that now.
He had always had that rough, impossible magnetism. It had rolled from him wherever he went, making the hair on the back of Lexi’s neck stand up straight whenever he’d been near. Making it hard to breathe when he entered a room. Making her so aware of him that it was like a body ache.
The ache had kept her awake some nights, tucked away beneath the eaves in the manor house, where she’d lived in the servant’s quarters and had been expected to find her circumstances evidence of her uncle’s generosity. It hadn’t exactly faded in the years since—it had just shifted into the nightmares that woke her in her tiny little bedsit and some nights, kept her from falling back to sleep.
He was far more compelling now. Brutally, lethally compelling. There was something untamed and dangerous about him that his luxurious suit did nothing to hide. If anything, the expertly tailored coat and trousers called attention to how wild he was, how much more he was than other men. He was so much bigger. Rougher. Infinitely more dangerous though he wore the disguise of civility with such ease.
And he glared at her as if he, too, was imagining what it would be like to take her apart with his own two hands.
She couldn’t blame him.
Lexi’s throat was so dry it hurt.
Her palms felt damp and her face was too hot. She had the vague notion she might be sick, but there was something in the pitiless way he regarded her that kept her from succumbing to the creeping nausea.
“Lexi,” he murmured, her name an assault. An indictment. And he knew it. She could see he knew it, that it was a deliberate blow. That he reveled in it—but then, he’d earned that, too. “At last.”
“Atlas.”
She was proud of the way she said his name. No catch in her voice. No shakiness. No stutter. As if she was perfectly composed.
All a lie, of course, but she’d take anything at this point. Anything that got her through this. If there was any getting through something like this.
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t step farther into her office. He only stood where he was and regarded her in that same nearly violent way, all terrible promise and impending threat.
It was excruciating.
“When did you arrive in London?” she asked, still managing to keep her voice calm. If thin.
One dark brow rose, and she felt it like a slap.
“Small talk?” His voice was harshly incredulous and made her feel small. Or smaller. “I arrived this morning, as I’m certain you know full well.”
Of course she knew. He’d been all over the news the moment his plane had set down in Heathrow.
Lexi wasn’t the only one who couldn’t seem to get enough of the scandalous rise and fall of Atlas Chariton. A man who’d built himself from nothing, then swept into the world of high-society high stakes as if he’d been made for it. He’d been hired as the CEO of the Worth Trust at a shockingly young age and had overseen the major renovations and reorganization that had taken the grand old estate from its old, moldering status to a major recreation center for public use and in so doing, had made himself and everyone else very, very wealthy. He’d opened the famous, Michelin-starred restaurant on the grounds. He’d created the five-star hotel that had opened and run beautifully while he’d been incarcerated, thanks entirely to his vision and planning, a point the papers had made repeatedly. He’d started the new programs that had continued in his absence, going above and beyond the usual stately house home and garden tours, making Worth Manor and its grounds a premier London tourist and local destination.
And then he’d been convicted of murdering Philippa and put away.
They’d all been living off his vision ever since.
But by the look of him, Atlas had been living off something else entirely.
A black, dark fury, if Lexi had to guess.
“And how do you find the estate?” she asked, as if she hadn’t taken his warning to heart.
Atlas stared at her until a new heat made her cheeks feel singed, and she felt very nearly lacerated by her own shame.
“I find that the fact you are all still standing, unchanged and wholly unruined, offends me,” he growled. “Deeply.”
“Atlas, I want to tell you that I—”
“Oh, no. I think not.” His teeth bared in something she was not foolish enough to call a smile. She remembered what his smiles had looked like before. How they’d felt when he’d aimed them her way. They had never been like this. Ruthless and terrible in turn. “No apologies, Lexi. It’s much too late for that.”
She found herself rising then, as if she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she simply couldn’t sit there another moment, like some kind of small animal of prey. She smoothed down the front of her pencil skirt and hoped she looked the way she’d imagined she had this morning in her mirror. Capable. Competent. Unworthy of this kind of malevolent focus.
“I know you must be very angry,” she began.
And he laughed. It was a hard, male sound that rolled down the length of her spine and seemed to lodge itself there in her lower back, where it spread. Until there was that same old aching thing again, low in her belly and made of a kind of fire Lexi didn’t pretend to understand.
But there was no getting around the fact that she’d never heard a laugh like that before. So utterly devoid of humor. So impossibly lethal she wanted to look down and check herself for bullet holes.
“You have no idea how angry I am, little girl,” Atlas told her, that grim fury and something else making his black eyes gleam as they tore straight through her. “But you will. Believe me, you will.”
CHAPTER TWO (#u88826969-3f64-50d0-81b1-a37fc253d9c6)
ATLAS WAS USED to fury.
He was used to rage. That black, choking spiral that had threatened to drag him under again and again over the past decade and some years, very nearly had for good.
But this was different. She was different.
Because little Lexi Haring, who had once followed him around these very grounds like a shy puppy, all big eyes and a shy smile that was all for him, was the architect of his destruction.
Oh, he knew in some distant, rational part of his brain that she was no less a pawn than he had been in this. He knew exactly how little her relatives thought of her and more, what they’d taken from her. Her presence in this hidden away little carriage house made her status amongst the Worths perfectly clear, far away from the members of the family who mattered. More than that, he’d had his own investigators digging into these people for years now, gathering all the things he’d need when he was finally free, and he knew things about her he doubted she knew herself.
Things he’d always known he’d use against her without a second thought once the opportunity arose.
From the moment of his arrest Atlas had refused to accept that he’d never be free again. Some long, lonely years, that was all that had kept him sane in that loud, bright hell of concrete and steel.
And now, standing here in this drafty old place, he realized he remembered all the ins and outs of the Worth family dramas better than he’d like. All those memories of the way they’d excluded Lexi while pretending to extend her a little charity. Keeping her close enough to be grateful and uncertain, but never close enough to forget herself and the subservient place they wanted—needed—her to occupy.
But Atlas would be damned if he felt any sympathy for her. Lexi was the one who had sat up in that witness box and ruined him. One halting, obviously terrified word after the next.
He remembered her testimony too well. That and the way she’d looked at him, her wide brown eyes slicked with tears, as if it hurt her to accuse him of such things. And worse than that. With fear.
Of him.
The worst wasn’t what she’d done to him. It was that unlike her bastard of an uncle, she’d believed that he’d done what he was accused of doing. She’d believed with all her heart and soul that he was a vicious killer. That he’d had an argument with impetuous, grandiose Philippa who had made no secret of the fact she’d have liked to get naked with him, had choked her because—the prosecution had thundered—he was a man with no impulse control and had feared that a relationship with the Worth heiress would get him fired, and had then thrown her into the pool on that cool summer night in the Oyster House compound.
Leaving her there to be found by Lexi when she’d gone looking for Philippa early the next morning.
“If Mr. Chariton feared that he would lose his position at the company because of Miss Worth, why would he leave her in the pool to be found the moment someone woke up?” his lawyer had asked Lexi.
Atlas could still remember the way her eyes had filled with tears. The way her lips had trembled. The way she’d looked at him, there at the defense table, as if he stormed through her nightmares nightly. As if he hadn’t just killed Philippa, to her mind, but had broken her own heart, too.
“I don’t know,” she’d whispered. “I just don’t know.”
And in so doing, had made him the monster the jury had convicted after a mere two-hour deliberation.
It was Lexi’s belief in the fact he must have done such a terrible thing—and how upset she’d been at the prospect—that had locked him away for a decade.
She might as well have turned the key in the lock herself.
“You’ve grown up,” he said when it didn’t look as if she planned to speak. Possibly ever again.
“I was eighteen when you left,” she replied after a moment, her cheeks a crisp, hot red. “Of course I’ve grown up since then.”
“When I left,” he echoed her, his own words tinged with malice. “Is that what you call it? How delightfully euphemistic.”
“I don’t know what to call it, Atlas. If I could take back—”
“But you can’t.”
That sat there then, taking up all the space in the close little room, as claustrophobic and faintly shabby as it was possible to get on this vast, luxurious estate. And he understood exactly why her devious, manipulative uncle had stashed her away here. Heaven forfend she spend even one moment imagining herself on the same level as his feckless, irresponsible sons.
Atlas roamed farther inside the small office, cluttered with overstuffed bookshelves and unframed prints when there were old masters piled high and unused in the attics of the great house. He was aware that it would take no more than an extra step to put himself right there on the opposite side of her flimsy little desk, within arm’s reach. What bothered him was how very much he wanted to get close to her. Not just to make her uncomfortable, though he wanted that. Badly.
But he also wanted his hands on her. All over her, and not only because the past ten years had been so particularly kind to her—so kind, in fact, that he’d had to take a moment in the doorway to handle his reaction. And to remind himself that while he’d expected a drab little girl and had been wholly committed to doing what needed to be done with her, the fact she’d grown into something rather far removed from drab could only be to his benefit.
Because he had a very specific plan, she was integral to it, and it would involve more than just his hands. It would involve his entire body, and hers, and better still—her complete and total surrender to his will in all things.
He thought that might—just might—take the edge off.
Or anyway, it would be a good start.
And the fact she’d grown up curvy and mouthwatering just made it that much better.
“I don’t know what to say.” Lexi’s voice was quieter then, and he watched, fascinated, as she laced her fingers together and held them in front of her as if they provided her with some kind of armor.
“Is this what wringing your hands actually looks like? I’ve never seen it in person before.” He tilted his head slightly to one side as he let his gaze move over her bookshelves. All dull books about the damned house and the Worth family, stretching back centuries. It wasn’t until he looked at her again that he saw the brighter and more cracked spines of the books behind her desk—within her reach—that suggested she allowed herself a little more fun than she perhaps wished to advertise. That boded well. “Is that meant to render me sympathetic?”
“Of course not. I only—”
“Here’s the thing, Lexi.” He stopped near the window and noted that the rain had begun again, because of course it had. This was England. He picked up one of the small, polished stones that lay on the sill, tested the weight of it in his hand, then set it down again. “You did not simply betray me, though let us be clear. You did. You also betrayed yourself. And worst of all, I think, Philippa.”
She jerked at that, as if he’d hauled off and hit her. He wasn’t that far gone. Not yet. He’d stopped imagining surrendering to the clawing need for brutality inside him some years into his prison term. Or he’d stopped imagining it quite so vividly as he had at first, anyway.
“Don’t you think I know that?” she demanded, though it came out more like a whisper, choked and fierce at once. “I’ve done nothing since your release but go over it all in my head again and again, trying to understand how I could possibly have got it all so wrong, but—”
“Lucky for you, Philippa is just as dead now as she was eleven years ago,” Atlas told her without the faintest shred of pity for her when she blanched at that. “She is the only one among us who does not have to bear witness to any of this. The miscarriage of justice. The incarceration of an innocent man. All the many ways this family sold itself out, betraying itself and me in the process. And in so doing, left Philippa’s murder unsolved for a decade. Though there is one question I’ve been meaning to ask you for years now.” He waited until she looked at him, her brown gaze flooded bright with emotion. Good, he thought. He hoped it hurt. He waited another beat, purely for the theater of it. “Are you proud of yourself?”
Her throat worked for a moment, and he thought she might give in and let the tears he could see in her eyes fall—but she didn’t. And he couldn’t have said why he felt something like pride in that. As if it should matter to him that she had more control of herself these days than she had ten years back.
“I don’t think anyone is proud of anything,” she said, her voice husky with all those things he could see on her face.
“We are not speaking of anyone,” Atlas said sternly. “Your uncle and your cousins will face a different reckoning, I assure you, and none of them deserve you rushing to defend them. I’m talking about you, Lexi. I’m talking about what you did.”
He expected her to crumple, because the old version of Lexi had always seemed so insubstantial to him. In his memory she had been a shadow dancing on the edge of things. Always in the background. Always somewhere behind Philippa. She’d been eighteen and on the cusp of the beauty she hadn’t grown into yet.
Though there had been no doubt she would. He’d known that even then, when he had made certain not to pay too close attention to the two silly girls who ran around the Worth properties together, always giggling and staring and making nuisances of themselves.
Her mouth had never seemed to fit her face, back then. Too lush, too wide. She’d been several inches shorter, if he wasn’t mistaken, and she’d bristled with a kind of nervous, coltish energy that he knew had been her own great despair back then. Because she’d been so awkward next to her cousin, the languid and effortlessly blond Philippa.
They’d just been girls. He’d known that then, but it had gotten confused across all these lost, stolen years. And still, Philippa had seemed so much older. Even though it was the always nervous Lexi who had actually done some real living in her early years, when she’d still been in the clutches of her addict parents.
Atlas hated that there was a part of him that still remembered the affection he’d once felt for the poor Worth relation. The little church mouse who the family had treated like their very own Cinderella, as if she ought to have been happy to dine off their scraps and condescension the rest of her life.
