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“You’re married to one. It makes you the same species.”
“I’m not married to Caleb Burton. I haven’t been for eight years.”
Something...scary slithered in the depths of his cold steel eyes. But when he spoke, he sounded as offhand as before.
“So it’s in the past tense. A past full of crimes.”
“I never had a criminal record.”
“Your crimes remain the same even if you’re not caught.”
“What about your crimes? Let’s talk about those.”
“Let’s not. It would take months to talk about those, as they’re countless. But they’re also untraceable. But yours could be easily proved. You knew exactly how your husband made his mushrooming fortune and you made no effort to expose him, making you an accessory to his every crime. Not to mention that you helped yourself to millions of his blood money. Those two charges could still get you ten to fifteen years in a snug little cell in a maximum-security prison.”
“Are you threatening to turn me in to the law, too?”
“Don’t be daft. I don’t resort to such mundane measures. I don’t let the law take care of my enemies or chastise those who don’t fall in line with my wishes. I have my own methods. Not that I have to resort to those in your case. Just a little chat with your upstanding friends and they wouldn’t consider getting mixed up with someone with your past.”
“Contrary to what you believe, from your own twisted self and life, there are ethical, benevolent people in the world. The Andersons don’t hold people’s pasts against them.”
He gave her back her pitying disdain, raised her his own brand of annihilating taunting. “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have gone to such painstaking lengths to give your history, and yourself, a total makeover.”
“The makeover was only for protection, as I’m sure you, as the world’s foremost mogul of security solutions, are in the best position to appreciate.”
His lethal lips tugged. “Then, it won’t matter if your partners in progress find out the details of your previous marriage to one of the world’s most prominent figures in organized crime. Along with the open buffet of unlawful immorality that marriage entailed and that you buried. Refuse to follow me and we get to put your conviction of their convictions to the test.”
Feeling the world emptying of the last atom of oxygen, she snapped, “What the hell do you want from me?”
“To catch up.”
Her mouth dropped open.
It took effort to draw it back up, to hiss her disbelief. “So you see me walking down the street and decide on the spot to blackmail me because the urge to ‘catch up’ overwhelmed you?”
His painstakingly chiseled lips twisted, making her guts follow suit. “Don’t tell me you thought it even a possibility I happened to be taking a stroll in a limbo of suburban domesticity called Pleasantville, of all names?”
“You were following me.”
The instant certainty congealed her blood. Realizing his premeditation made it all so much worse. And the possible outcomes unthinkable.
He shrugged. “You took your time in there. I was about to knock on the Andersons’ door anyway to see what was taking you so long.”
Not putting anything beyond him, she imagined how much worse it would have been if he’d done that. “And you went to all this trouble to ‘catch up’?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Things you’ll find out when you stop wasting time and follow me. I’d tell you to leave your car, but your friend might see it and get all sorts of worrisome ideas.”
“None would be as bad as what’s really happening.”
His expression hardened. She was sure it had brought powerful men to their knees. “Are you afraid of me?”
That possibility clearly hadn’t occurred to him before. Now that it did, it seemed to...offend him.
The weirdest part was, though she’d long known he was a merciless terminator, her actual safety wasn’t even a concern.
It was in every other way that she feared him.
She wasn’t about to tell him that. But she did give him an honest answer to his query. “I’m not.”
“Good.”
His satisfaction chafed her. The urge to wipe it off his cruelly perfect face surged. “I’m not, because I know if you wanted to harm me, I wouldn’t have known what hit me. That you’re only coercing me indicates I’m not on your hit list.”
“It is heartening that you grasp the situation.” That soul-searing smile played on his lips again. “Shall we?”
She stood there, her gaze trapped in his, her thoughts tangling.
They both knew he’d cornered her from the first moment. But succumbing to this devil without resistance would have been too pathetic. She’d at least let loose some of her anger and bitterness toward him first. What she’d thought long extinguished.
It was clear they’d only been suppressed under layers of self-delusion so they wouldn’t destroy whatever remained of her stability, what everything—and everyone—in her life depended on.
Now that she’d admitted that, it was easier to admit why she’d succumb to his coercion.
The first reason was that she would have, even without his threat. If he’d turned a consummate fiend like Burton into mincemeat so effortlessly when he’d been a younger and less powerful man, she didn’t want to know what he was capable of now. She was nowhere in his league. No one was.
The second was harder to face. But what she’d belatedly learned about his truth and that of what they’d shared and what he’d done to her had left a gaping hole inside her.
She wanted that hole filled. She wanted closure.
Holding his hypnotic gaze, she finally nodded.
He just turned and walked away. Before he lowered himself into the gleaming black beast that looked as sleek, powerful and ruthless as he did, he tossed her an imperious glance over his acres-wide shoulders.
“Chivvy along.”
At his command to hurry up in his native British English, she expelled the breath she’d been holding.
Chivvy along, indeed.
Might as well get this over with as quickly as possible.
In minutes she was following him as ordered as he headed to Manhattan, emotions seething inside her. Fury, frustration, fear—and something else.
That “something else” felt like...excitement.
How sick would that be? To be excited by the man who’d decimated her heart and almost her world, who’d just threatened to complete the job and had her following him like a puppy?
But...maybe not so sick. Excitement could encompass trepidation, anxiety, uncertainty. And everything with Richard had always contained maximum doses of all that. It was why he’d been the only one who’d made her feel...alive. She’d been in suspended animation before she’d met him and since he’d walked away.
For better, or in his case, for worse, it seemed he’d remain the only one who could reanimate her.
* * *
“Get it over with. Catch up.”
Isabella threw her purse on the black-and-bronze Roberto Cavalli leather couch and looked at Richard across his gigantic, forty-foot-ceilinged, marble-floored reception area.
He only continued preparing their drinks at the bar, his lupine expression deepening.
So. He’d talk when he wished. And he hadn’t wished. Yet.
Got it.
Good thing she’d called home during the forty-minute drive to say she’d be very late.
Pretending to shrug away his disregard, she looked around. And was stunned all over again.
The Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking the now shrouded in darkness Central Park and Manhattan’s glittering Upper East Side drove home to her how staggeringly wealthy he was now. The opulent, technologically futuristic duplex on the sixty-seventh and sixty-eighth floors had to have cost tens of millions.
Among the jaw-dropping features of the fully automatic smart-home was its own elevator, its remote-, voice-and retinal-recognition doors and just about everything else.
It even housed a thirty-by-fifty-foot pool.
As they’d passed the sparkling expanse, he’d told her something she hadn’t known about him. That he hated the sun and preferred indoor sports. She’d already worked out that he hated people, too. A pool in his living room at the top of the world away from the nuisance of mere mortals was a no-brainer to someone with his kind of money.
He’d been saying he’d expand the pool to get a decent exercise without having to flip over and over when she’d stopped listening. The image of him shooting through the liquid turquoise like a human torpedo, then rising from the water like an aquatic deity with rivulets weeping down his masterpiece body had tampered with her mental faculties.
Snatching her thoughts away before they slid back into that abyss, she examined the L-shaped terrace of at least five-thousand square feet. The city views must be breathtaking from there. They were from every corner in this marvel of a home.
Though home sounded so wrong. Anywhere he was could never be a home. This place felt like an ultramodern demon’s den.
Avoiding looking at him, she noted the designer furniture and architectural touches that punctuated each zone, couldn’t guess at many of the functional features. But it was spectacular how the mezzanine level took advantage of the massive ceiling heights and ingeniously provided extensive library shelves. He’d probably read every book. And archived its contents in that labyrinthine mind of his.
But what made the mezzanine truly unique was its glass floors and balustrade, with the staircase continuing the transparent theme. Looking down wouldn’t be for the fainthearted.
But Richard didn’t have to worry about that, since he was heartless. A fact this astounding but soulless place clearly underlined.
That he had other residences on the West Coast and in England, as he’d offhandedly informed her as they’d entered this place, no doubt on the same level of luxury and technology, was even more mind-boggling. Burton had been a billionaire and it had been hard to grasp the power such wealth brought. But those had been a fraction of Richard’s, who was currently counted among the top one hundred richest men on the planet. The security business was booming, and his empire reigned over that domain.
But money, in his case, was the result of the immense influence of his personality and expertise, not the other way around. And then there were his connections. Black Castle Enterprises, which he’d built from the ground up with six other partners, had a major hand in everything that made the world go round and was one of the most influential businesses in history.
“I just learned of your presence in the country today.”
His comment dragged her out of her musings, his deepened voice making the cultured precision of his British accent even more shiver worthy. She’d always thought that killer brogue of his the most evocative music. She used to ask him to speak just so she could revel in listening to him enunciate. It had always aroused the hell out of her, too.
But everything about him always had. During the four months of their affair she’d been in a perpetual fugue of arousal.
She watched him approach like a leisurely tiger stalking his kill, every muscle and sinew flexing and pulling at his fitted black shirt and pants, his stormy sky-hued eyes striking her with a million volts of charisma. The familiar ache she hadn’t felt since she’d last seen him, that had been trembling under the suppression of shock, hostility and anxiety since he’d appeared before her, stirred in her deepest recesses.
Time had been criminally indulgent with him, enhancing his every asset—widening his shoulders, hardening his waist and hips, bulking up his torso and thighs. Age had taken a sharper chisel to his face, hewing it to dizzying planes and angles, turning his skin a darker copper, intensifying the luminescence of his eyes. His luxurious raven hair had been brushed with silver at the temples, adding the last touch of allure. He was now the full potential of premium manhood realized.
As he reached for the cocktail glass, his fingertips grazed hers, zapping her with a bolt of exquisite electricity.
Great. His deceit and her ignorance of his true nature and intentions had had nothing to do with his effect on her as she’d long told herself. He’d almost cost her her life, and she knew what he truly was and how she’d been a chess piece he’d played and disposed of...yet it made no difference to her body. It didn’t deal in logic, cared nothing about dignity and hadn’t learned a thing from the harsh lessons of experience. It only saw and sensed the man who’d once possessed and pleasured it almost beyond endurance.
She sat before he realized he still liquefied her knees...and everything else. When she’d thought she’d irreversibly turned to stone.
But she’d thought that before she’d first met him. It had taken him one glance to get the heart she’d believed long petrified quivering. He remained the one man who could reverse any protective metamorphosis.
Safe on a horizontal surface, she looked way, way up at him as he loomed over her like a mystic knight, or rather a malevolent wizard, from an Arthurian fairy tale.
“So the moment you realized I was on American soil, you decided to track me down and ambush me.”
“Precisely.”
In a heartbeat he was beside her. She marveled again at the strength and control needed for someone of his height and bulk to move so effortlessly. Even though he didn’t come too near, her every nerve fired.
Sipping the amber liquid in his crystal glass, he turned to face her fully. “I’ve been remembering how we met.”
She sipped her drink only to suppress the impulse to hurl it in his face. The moment it slid down her throat she realized how parched she was. And how it hit the spot. Perfect coolness and flavor, light on alcohol, heavy on sweetness.
He remembered. How she took her drinks.
Something suffocating, something similar to regret, swept her.
Suddenly the bitterness that had lain dormant in her depths seethed to the surface again. “We didn’t meet, Richard. You tracked me down then, too. And set me up.”
Nonchalance tugged a corner of his lips. “True.”
She took another sip, channeling her anger into sarcasm. “Thanks for sparing me the aggravation of denial.”
His gaze lengthened, becoming more unreadable and disturbing. Then he shrugged. “I don’t waste time on pointless pursuits. I already realized you know everything. From the first moment, your hostile attitude made it clear I’m not talking to the woman who cried rivers at my departure.”
“Why conclude that was because I know everything? That could have been classic feminine bitterness for said departure. Surely you didn’t expect even the stupid goose I used to be to throw herself in your arms after eight years?”
“Time is irrelevant.” Just what she’d been thinking. “It’s what you realized that caused you to change. You clearly worked everything out.” His gaze intensified, making her feel he was probing her to her cellular level. “So how did you?”
“You know how.”
“I probably do. But I’d still like to know the actual details of how you came to realize the truth.”
A mirthless laugh escaped her. “If you’re asking so you never repeat whatever clued me in, don’t bother. Working it all out wasn’t due to any discernment on my side, and I only did over three years after the fact.” One formidable eyebrow rose at that particular detail. “Yeah, pathetic, right?”
“Not the adjective I’d use.” She waited for him to substitute his own evaluation, but he left her hanging. “I don’t want details as a prophylactic measure for future operations. I know I am untraceable. Your deductions couldn’t have been backed up by any evidence. Even if they were, I made sure your best interest remained in burying any.”
