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It was not the way women normally looked at him and Matteo couldn’t say he liked it much. Especially when he couldn’t help but notice the doctor was not exactly hard on the eyes. Her legs were slim and toned, and it was entirely too tempting to picture them draped over his shoulders as he drove into her—
Focus, he ordered himself.
He knew too much about her to imagine she would take kindly to his line of thought. He knew that she had built her consulting business out of nothing and was ruthless, driven—qualities he possessed himself and usually appreciated in others. Though not, perhaps, in this particular scenario, when all of that knife-edged ferocity was directed at him.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, almost idly. He knew better than to imagine anything about her was the least bit idle. “Have you?”
“There are ghosts everywhere in a house like this,” Matteo replied, unsettled despite himself. Not at the notion of ghosts. But at the strange sensation that had washed over him at the suggestion of them—the idea that he’d met this woman before when he knew he hadn’t. He shoved the odd sense of recognition aside. “The halls are cluttered with my ancestors. I’m sure some of them enjoy a good haunting, but I can’t say they’ve ever bothered me. Feel free to sleep here tonight and see if you receive a ghostly visitation.”
“That would be something indeed, as I don’t believe in ghosts.” Her head tilted to one side. “Do you?”
“If I did, I’d be unlikely to mention it. I wouldn’t wish to fail your test.”
“This isn’t a test, Mr. Combe. These are conversations, nothing more. And surely you understand why your shareholders and directors take a dim view of the sort of violent, antisocial behavior you displayed at the funeral.”
He lifted a shoulder and then dropped it, affecting a carelessness he had never actually felt. “I was protecting my sister.”
“Walk me through your thought process, if you will.” Sarina propped one elbow on the arm of the chair, then tapped one of her long, elegant fingers against her jaw. He shouldn’t have been mesmerized by the motion. “Your sister is six months pregnant. And not, by all reports, incapacitated in any way. My research into Pia indicates she’s a well-educated, well-traveled, perfectly independent woman. Yet you felt some archaic need to leap to her defense. In a markedly brutal fashion.”
“I am distressingly archaic.” Matteo wasn’t sure why that word ignited like a flame in him. Or maybe that was just her fingers on her own jaw, making him wish it was his hand instead. “It’s a natural consequence of having been raised in a historic family, I suspect.”
“All families are historic, Mr. Combe. By definition. It’s called generations. It’s just so rarely your history, complete with Venetian villas and claims of nobility.” He thought he saw something flash in her gaze then, but she repressed it in the next moment. “But back to your sister. Did you imagine you were defending her honor? How...patriarchal.”
He didn’t like the way she said that word, biting off the syllables as if they were weapons. “I apologize for loving my sister.”
Matteo loved Pia, certainly, though he couldn’t say he understood her. Or her choices when she must have known the whole of the world would be watching her—but then, perhaps she hadn’t had that pounded into her head from a young age the way he had.
“Love is a very interesting word to use in these circumstances, I think,” Sarina said. “I’m not certain how I would feel if my brother chose to express his so-called love for me by planting his fist into the face of the father of my unborn child.”
“Do you have a brother?”
He knew she didn’t. Sarina Fellows was the only child of a British linguistics professor and his Japanese biochemist wife, who had met in graduate school in London and ended up in California together, teaching at the same university.
“I don’t have a brother,” she replied, seemingly unfazed that he’d caught her out. “But I was raised by people who prize nonviolence. Unlike you, if I’m understanding your family’s rather checkered past correctly.”
He could have asked her which checkered past she meant. The San Giacomos had dueled and schemed throughout the ages. The Combes had been more direct, and significantly more likely to throw a punch. But it was checkered all around, anyway he looked at it.
“If I’m guilty of anything, it’s being an overzealous older brother,” Matteo said. And then remembered—the way he kept doing, with the same mix of shock and something a great deal like regret—that he too had an older brother. An older brother his mother had given up when she was a teenager, yet had dropped into her will like a bomb. An older brother Matteo had yet to meet and still couldn’t quite believe was real.
Maybe that was why he’d done nothing about it. Yet.
He tried to flash another smile.
Not that it was any use. The doctor didn’t change expression at all. Instead, she sat there in silence, until his smile faded away.
He understood it was a tactic. A strategy, nothing more. It was one he had employed a thousand times himself. But he certainly didn’t like it being aimed his way.
He felt the urge, as everyone always did, to fill the silence. He refrained.
Instead, he settled there in the ancient armchair where he remembered his own grandfather sitting decades ago, shrouded in bitterness because he was noble, yet not royal. Matteo lounged there the way he remembered the old man had, endeavoring to look as unbothered as he ought to have been. Because this was a minor inconvenience, surely. An impertinence, nothing more.
He was submitting to this because he chose to. Because it was an olive branch he could wave at his board to prove that he was both conscientious and different from his father. Not because he had to.
It didn’t matter if the doctor didn’t realize that.
Besides, the longer she stared at him, letting the silence stretch and thicken between them, the more he found it impossible to think about anything but how distractingly attractive she was. He’d expected someone far more like a battle-ax. Fussy and of advanced years, for example.
He suspected her beauty was another tactic.
Because Sarina Fellows didn’t look at all like the kind of woman who could hold such supposed power over his life. She looked a great deal more like the sort of woman he liked to take to his bed. Sleek and elegant. Poised. Matteo preferred them intelligent and pedigreed, because he liked clever conversation as well as greedier, more sensual pastimes.
If she hadn’t been sent here to judge him, he might have amused himself by finding ways to get his hands up beneath the hem of the elegant pencil skirt she wore and—
“Toxic masculinity,” she pronounced, with something like satisfaction in her tone.
Matteo blinked. “Is that a diagnosis?”
“The good news, Mr. Combe, is that you are hardly unique.” It was definitely satisfaction. Her dark eyes gleamed. “You seem unrepentant, and think about what we’re discussing here. A funeral is generally held to be a gathering where the bereaved can say their final goodbyes to a lost loved one. You chose to make it a boxing ring. And you also took it upon yourself to draw blood, terrify those around you, and humiliate the sister you claim to love, all to assuage your sense of fractured honor.”
He didn’t sigh at that, though it took an act of will. “You obviously never met my father. There were no bereaved at his funeral and furthermore, he would have been the first to cheer on a spot of boxing.”
“I find that difficult to believe. And, frankly, more evidence of the kind of cowboy inappropriateness that seems to be part and parcel of the Matteo Combe package.”
“I am Italian on one side and British on the other, Dr. Fellows. There is no part of me that is a cowboy. In any respect.”
“I’m using the term to illustrate a strain of toxic male vigilantism that, as far as I’m aware, you haven’t bothered to apologize for. Then or now.”
“If I felt the need to apologize for defending my sister’s honor, which I do not, that would be a discussion I had with Pia,” Matteo said quietly. “Not with you. Certainly not with my board. Nor, for that matter, with the clamoring public.”
Her pen was poised over her paper. “So you do feel remorse for your brutality? Or you don’t?”
What Matteo felt like doing would, he suspected, inspire her to call him names far worse than cowboy. He spread his hands out in front of him, as if in some kind of surrender. When he didn’t have the slightest idea how to surrender. To anything or anyone.
“Remorse is a lot like guilt. Or shame. Both useless emotions that have more to do with others than with the self.” He dropped his hands. “I cannot change the past. Even if I wanted to.”
“How convenient. And since you can’t change it, why bother discussing it. Is that your policy?”
“I cannot say that I have a policy. As I have never subjected myself to these, quote-unquote, ‘conversations’ before.”
“Somehow I am unshocked.”
“But I am here now, am I not? I have promised to answer any question you might have. We can talk at length on any topic you desire. I am nothing if not compliant.” He made himself smile again, though it felt like a blade. “And toxic, apparently.”
“Compliant is an interesting word choice,” Sarina said, and he was sure there was laughter in her voice, though he could see no sign of it anywhere on her face. “Do you think it’s an adequate word to describe you or your behavior?”
“I have opened my home. I have invited you into it and lo, you came. I have agreed to have as many of these conversations as you deem necessary. And for this, I am called toxic instead of accommodating.”
“That word bothers you.”
“I would not say that it bothers me.” What bothered him was the pointlessness of this. The waste of his time and energy. And yes, the fact that she was distractingly beautiful—which, he had to remind himself, was nothing but another weapon. “But it is not as if one wishes to be called toxic, is it? It is certainly not a compliment.”
“And you are a man who is accustomed to compliments, is that it?”
He knew better, but still, he felt his mouth curve. “It will perhaps shock you to learn that most women who make my acquaintance do not find me the least bit toxic.”
“Are you attempting to make this session sexual, Mr. Combe?” He saw her eyes flash at that and he could have sworn what he saw in them then was triumph. It told him he was in deeper trouble than he’d thought even before she smirked. “Oh dear. This is much worse than I thought.”
CHAPTER TWO (#uf7fbc461-503c-549f-b0c0-994fc6b4e1d5)
MATTEO COMBE WAS precisely the kind of wealthy, pompous, arrogant man of too much undeserved power Sarina Fellows hated most.
He was remarkably handsome, which to her mind was a very serious strike against him, right from the start. His was the kind of attractiveness that made people silly when they encountered it. It was the walk into walls, trip over your own two feet, start giggling like a twelve-year-old sort of silliness, and it appalled her deeply that she could feel the swell of that reaction inside of her when she’d long considered herself immune to his type.
But he was different, somehow. He was...more. It was something about the glossiness of his dark hair, the assertive line of his jaw. It was his aristocratic nose and those gray eyes like a storm. It was something about the seething confidence he wore like a kind of cloak, draped about his athletic, rangy body and making it very clear that he was succumbing to her—to this evaluation his own board had demanded—because he chose to do so. That no force on earth could compel him to do a single thing he didn’t wish to do.
He reminded her of a mighty river, roaring over a great ledge. Powerful. Kinetic and dynamic.
Dangerous,something in her whispered.
Sarina dismissed that almost as soon as the word formed inside her. He was beautiful, yes. Somehow austere and lush at once, with that face of his. And he was rich. Filthily, vomitously wealthy. One branch of his family tree was stuck deep into the Yorkshire mills, hardy and tough, inside and out. The other stretched back into the golden age of the Italian Renaissance, which was right about the time this particular villa had been built.
Sarina understood exactly why he had insisted their first meeting be here, in the living fairy tale that was Venice. He wanted her to come all the way into this city of sighs and ancient palazzos and history like a bright tapestry in which his family was a shining, golden thread, the better to gasp and flutter over all his wealth and consequence.
Except Sarina wasn’t the fluttering kind.
And Matteo Combe had no idea what he was in for.
It wasn’t only that Sarina hated men like him, though she did. It was that she knew them. She knew what they were capable of, certainly, and she’d developed an acute allergy to their form of arrogance. The best friend she’d had since childhood, who she’d considered her sister, had succumbed to an addiction to a man just like Matteo. Rashly confident, propped up on all that history and the money acquired for him across centuries, and catered to by everyone he had ever met, every single day for the whole of his life.
Oh yes. Sarina knew all about men like him.
Sarina didn’t need to destroy him, necessarily. But she thought of men like Matteo as big, blown-up balloons, and as it happened, she’d set herself up to be the perfect, pointed pin. She’d been popping overweening male egos professionally now long enough to have quite the reputation for taking masters of the universe down a few pegs, to the mortal men of questionable moral character they usually were beneath all the bluster.
Some of the men she was called in to consult with were decent. In the absence of a record of misdeeds and bad behavior, she was more than happy to issue a glowing report on the man in question. She didn’t hate men, as many had accused her. She hated bad men who abused their power and those vulnerable to it.
She felt sure that Jeanette, wherever she was now, was looking down on her in support.
And the fact that the particular rich, arrogant man in front of her had already managed to worm his way beneath her skin in a way the others never had? With all that dark and brooding certainty he exuded like a rich scent?
Well. That was between her and the private conversations she had in her own head. She had no intention of letting him see it.
“You want me to have remorse,” Matteo was saying. He was sitting in an armchair Sarina didn’t have to know anything about antiques to know was exquisite and priceless, looking entirely too much like a king for her peace of mind. “If I cannot produce any on cue, does that mean I fail this examination?”
“This isn’t a pass or fail experience.” She jotted down a few words on the pad in front of her, more to make him uncomfortable than to record anything. “Do you find that unnerving?”
“That my future is in the hands of someone who cannot answer a direct question?” His gray eyes gleamed. “Not in the least.”
She hadn’t expected him to be dry. And all the pictures in the world—Sarina was fairly certain she’d viewed every last one of them, purely for research purposes—didn’t do justice to the particular wild darkness that was Matteo Combe. It was that thick, near-black hair of his, edging toward the border of unruly. It was the slate gray of his gaze that made her think not only of rain, but more worryingly, of dancing in it.
Even when she knew full well that way lay madness. And things much worse that a little madness.
He usually dressed in expensive business suits and sleek formal wear, the better to lord it over everyone else. But today he’d chosen to greet her in what she assumed passed for casual wear to a man like him. A pair of jeans that looked expensively frayed, because he’d obviously bought them that way. Men like Matteo didn’t do anything that might lead to whitened knees or artful tears in denim, designer or not. His boots were very clearly handcrafted right here in Italy. And he sported the kind of T-shirt that had about as much in common with a run-of-the-mill cotton T-shirt from the stores regular people frequented as stealth fighter jets did with paper airplanes. Worse, the T-shirt clung to his torso, telling her things she didn’t want to know about the extraordinary physical shape Matteo kept himself in.
She knew it already. She knew he liked to run miles upon miles. She knew he enjoyed epic swims and then, with his leftover energy and time, a great deal of flinging weights around. She’d read all of that, but it was one thing to read in a far-off hotel room. It was something else again to sit in the presence of a man who clearly preferred to use every iota of power he could, including the physical.
But she was here to assess his mental state, not gaze adoringly at the place where his bicep strained the hem of his T-shirt, so she frowned a little as she focused on him again.
“This will only be an adversarial relationship if you make it that way.”
“It’s an inherently adversarial relationship,” he corrected her, mildly enough, though there was nothing mild in the way he gazed at her. “I suspect you know that.”
“But you enjoy adversity in your relationships, don’t you?”
He let out a laugh, as if she’d surprised him.
“I would not say that I like adversarial relationships. But in my family, there is almost no other kind.”
“Yet you sat right there and told me how much you love your sister. Or do you consider love another form of adversity?”
“Your family is obviously different from mine or you would know the answer to that question.”
Sarina knew entirely too much about his family, as did everyone else in the known world, because both branches of it had spent so much time dominating tabloid headlines. Even if she’d never looked one of them up deliberately, there would have been no avoiding them. Matteo’s father had regularly appeared in the headlines, for this or that supposed marital or corporate indiscretion. His mother, meanwhile, had been widely held to be the most beautiful woman on the planet while she’d lived. Which had come with its own share of scandals and speculation, and all the attendant tabloid attention.
He and his sister were close, or so it was believed—or as close as they could be with a ten-year age gap between them, leaving Matteo as something more like a secondary parent than a brother.
In contrast, Sarina had been raised by chilly academics. They were far more concerned with their own research, their endless pursuit of publication, and the petty intellectual squabbles of their peers than the daughter she thought they’d had as an experiment in humanity more than any desire to parent. And they had less than no interest in any scandals she might have kicked up along the way.
Sarina couldn’t imagine growing up in a place like this villa, no matter how lovely Venice was. She and Jeannette had grown up in side-by-side old houses in the Berkeley Hills, racing in and out of rooms notable for their towering piles of books and comfortable, threadbare rugs, muddy porches and overgrown yards. This villa was a dramatic clutter of perfectly preserved tapestries and heavy stone statues, slung about this chamber and that, lest anyone be tempted to forget that this was the very heart of old-world wealth.
She knew why he’d brought her here, but it was backfiring in ways she doubted he’d imagined. Because now she knew how seriously he took himself and his pedigree. And that could only work to her advantage.
“Why did you think that it was better to meet here?” she asked, keeping her voice cool. “In a place that is very clearly a home, and not part of your business empire? Is this another attempt on your part to steer our interactions toward something sexual?”
“You are the one who keeps mentioning sex, Dr. Fellows,” Matteo said silkily. “Not me.”
Somehow she kept any reaction to that off her face. “Yet you insisted we start here, not in one of your many offices. Can you explain that choice?”
“This is where I happen to be at the moment,” he replied, and there was a certain smokiness in that voice of his with its unique accent, not quite British and not yet Italian. Something dark, and more compelling than she wanted to admit. To her horror, she felt a certain...thrill work its way through her, settling between her legs and worse, pulsing. She was so horrified she froze. “Both you and the chairman of my board impressed upon me that these meetings had to begin as soon as possible. Obedient in all things, I immediately made myself available.”
There wasn’t a single obedient thing about this man. Sarina ordered herself to concentrate on her reasons for being here and not that pulsing thing. Or the wildness she could sense in him, simmering there beneath his aristocratic surface.
“What I think, Mr. Combe, is that you wanted me to see this villa You wanted to impress me.”
“I cannot imagine anything less on my mind than a desire to impress you.”
“I’m assessing you for corporate reasons, yet you appear in a T-shirt. Here in this very personal space. At the very least, you aren’t taking this seriously. Do you think that’s wise?”
Something changed in his gaze then. Some flash of awareness, or temper. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and she was suddenly aware of the fact that though he’d called it a library, this was really nothing more than a small living room. It just happened to contain a number of books. A fireplace. What had seemed like a reasonable amount of space without it feeling like a closet.
