Chapter Five

She was famished, too, which left little fight in her. Siobhan brought him into the building, vibrating with awareness of him and nearly wilting with hunger when the food aromas filled the elevator.

Inside her flat, he glanced around as he removed his coat and accepted the hanger she offered before she removed her own coat.

It was an older building. The rooms were small, but bright. Both the living room and bedroom had a thin balcony that looked onto an alley and an even more ornate and visually pleasing building across the way. The wall between the bedroom and living room had been partially removed and fitted with a pair of frosted glass doors that she left open to create a more spacious feel.

She was a tidy person. The bed was made and there was only a discarded scarf on it that she had decided not to wear at the last minute this morning. It still felt…intimate, heightening her jumpiness at having him in her personal space.

He doesn’t want you, she reminded herself. She didn’t know why he was here, but it wasn’t that.

She took the food into the kitchen. It was a narrow galley that ended with a door into the minuscule bathroom, but the setup was efficient and it had a good-size pantry along with newish appliances.

Conscious of the impression he was gaining, she clarified, “It came furnished.”

The sofa and chair were upholstered in a floral pattern that was too busy for her taste. She preferred contemporary styles and solid colors.

“I was lucky to find a sublet that I could get into right away. I love the location.”

She never hung pictures of family so she would warm the space with paintings she’d purchased while living in Australia. They were on the floor, propped against the wall with framed, free-expression artwork made by her nieces and nephew.

She washed her hands, then set the table with the fragrant fideuà, which was a paella made with vermicelli noodles. It was piping hot and ready to serve in enameled cast-iron dishes with lids. Warm flatbread accompanied it along with tapenade, a salad and custard-filled buñuelos for dessert.

“Corkscrew?” he asked, showing her a bottle of white wine.

She handed it over with one glass. “None for me. If I have anything stronger than a glass of water, I’ll be flat on the floor.”

He set aside the bottle without opening it. “How hard has Oladele been working you?”

“It’s not that.” She refused to let him think she was anything but delighted by her job. “I haven’t taken a proper break since before exams. Oladele said the office will close for Christmas on the nineteenth, though.” That was only a week and a half away. “I’ll catch up on my sleep then.”

Oh, heck. She still had to finish her shopping for the children. Whether she joined her sister or not, she needed gifts for everyone.

“That’s not the face of someone anticipating a break from work,” he said, making her realize she’d revealed how daunted she was. And that he was watching her as closely as he had that night in San Francisco.

Disturbed, she explained, “I just remembered the Christmas shopping I have to finish.”

“I wasn’t sure if you celebrate. You don’t have a tree.” He flickered his gaze around her undecorated lounge.

“I haven’t had time to get one.” Truthfully, she hadn’t made time. “My sister invited me to join them so there doesn’t seem a point if I won’t be here.” That was her excuse for eschewing the wreaths and garlands she had once looked forward to hanging.

Last weekend, she had stayed with her nieces and nephew while Cinnia and Henri had flown to Paris for a function, hoping her weekend visit would excuse her from the holiday altogether, but the pressure had only increased.

You haven’t had Christmas with us in five years, Cinnia had scolded. Everyone wants you here. You know that.

She did. And she wanted to see everyone. It wasn’t the people she was avoiding. It was this time of year. She used to love all the joyful decor and festive traditions around Christmas, but these days they regressed her back to that heart-stopping moment when she’d realized how badly she’d messed up.

Pushing her dark thoughts aside, she waved an invitation for Joaquin to join her at the table. They both sat and tucked in without ceremony.

“You?” she asked, trying to make this extraordinary situation feel normal when all she could think about was the way they’d flirted over drinks and fallen on each other with a different type of hunger.

This was the meal he had promised to order for them before he had dumped her.

Why did she let that continue to sting? He’d made it clear they were ships passing even before they’d slept together, then told her afterward that he wasn’t someone to plan to share things with.

She had slept with him knowing they weren’t likely to have a future and she’d been fine with it. It was only in the afterglow, when she’d been anticipating going back to him for the rest of the night, that she had indulged a few expectations, wondering if maybe there could be more between them.

She lifted her gaze and found him watching her with a pull of dismay in his brows.

He was even more aloof and unreadable than he’d been in San Francisco.

Her stomach curdled anew with the fear she’d done something wrong. Offended or disappointed or repelled him in some way.

“I was only asking what you do at this time of year. If that’s a state secret you don’t care to share…” She was trying to be ironic, but the joke fell flat. She looked hopelessly at her food, appetite evaporating.

He let the silence hang for an extra second before stabbing his dish as though it needed killing before eating.

“My brother used to invite me to join him and Zurina. I always refused because our father was also invited. Last year, I gave in for the children’s sake. It was their first Christmas without Fernando and it turned into hell because my father was there. We despise each other, as you may have gathered.” He closed his lip over a mouthful, pensive as he chewed and swallowed.

She had gotten that memo. It had slapped her in the face this morning in the form of Lorenzo’s rage.

“This year, Zurina and her parents are spending a few weeks in the Canary Islands,” he continued. “I put them on my plane this afternoon. She asked me to join them, but I’ll work. Prepping for today pushed my own projects to the back burner. I need to catch up.”

“I’m still trying to understand what happened today,” she admitted wryly.

“Same,” he said with pithy sarcasm, flickering his gaze over her face and shoulders in a way that made her feel off balance.

She dropped her eyes, hating herself for liking the feel of his gaze. For quietly willing something more visceral out of him.

“I called Killian about your security clearance. He said he knows you through clients. He declined to tell me who they are, but said you were at liberty to reveal that information if you chose to.”

“I don’t.” Her heart clenched in a pulse of discomfort.

Out in the street, there was a faint jangle of sleigh bells. It was the only noise for a few seconds, amplifying his silence.

“My partnership with Killian is reciprocal,” Joaquin said. “I supply some of his hardware. He ensures my proprietary designs are well protected. He wouldn’t set me up for industrial espionage when it could compromise his own interests, but I still find your presence in my father’s company too convenient.”

“For who?” she snorted.

“See? It’s problematic for both of us.”

“You can’t fire me just because I accidentally had sex with you! I didn’t know you were buying the company I was coming to work at.” Dismissing her would be worse than mean-spirited. It was a betrayal of how vulnerable and uninhibited she’d been that night. He had already tossed her away like trash once for it.

“I can’t afford mistakes right now.”

“I didn’t know I was one.” She quit the table abruptly. Angrily. “I told you I hadn’t slept with anyone in ages and this is why.” She pointed at the floor between them. “I didn’t want a man derailing me from my aspirations again.” She had sensed that he had the power to pull her off course, but had found him enthralling enough to risk it. “I never dreamed you were the sort to deliberately sabotage my career. Out of misguided spite.”

“I’ll help you find something else—”

“Oh, don’t do me any favors,” she snapped. “I know people if I want to get hired through nepotism. I don’t.”

She paced across her small lounge, but when she reached the door to the balcony, she was compelled to yank the drapes to block out the colored lights on the neighbor’s balcony. They were another throbbing reminder of that other time she had been profoundly stupid where a man was concerned.

Maybe if Joaquin understood that she really was okay with keeping a firm distance between them, he would let her stay? A pang of humiliation wrenched behind her navel. She refused to beg leniency from a man who had already made it clear he didn’t want her.

She would fight for her job, though. He didn’t get to take her dignity and her nascent career.

“I won’t tell you who Killian’s clients are, but I’ll tell you why I went to Australia to start over,” she decided, turning to face him. “I was living with some of them in London. The man I was seeing used me to get information on them.” She still felt sick when she thought of it. Her eyes grew hot with remorse. With a ferocious desire to reverse time. To go back and not be so caught up in romantic ideals. She’d been so naive. So oblivious.

“Killian didn’t do a background check?” He turned in his chair to face her more fully.

“Sometimes people aren’t bad until they decide to be bad.” She gritted her teeth at the nausea rising in her throat. “I’m not sure if he dated me in a long game or realized after we started seeing each other that being close to me could be profitable. Either way, he fooled me into believing we were in love.” Self-contempt clenched in her chest.

His expression seemed to harden as the silence thickened, growing potent. Maybe that was her imagination, though. Why would he care about her feelings for another man beyond seeing her as foolish for falling for him?

“I like to think I’m smart.” She forced herself to keep talking. “I already knew people could be self-interested, but he seemed different. Keen and…” He didn’t need to hear all the ways she’d fallen for Gilbert’s charms. “It was coming up to Christmas. He wanted to meet the people who were close to me.” She brushed at a tickle on her cheek. “I brought him into a world where I was entrusted to help keep the jackals out.”

Still, Joaquin didn’t say anything while remorse sat like a jagged rock in her throat. It stayed heavy and thorny in her chest.

“He put together an exposé on them,” she said shakily. “Not a bad light, but it revealed a lot of personal information. He thought he could do it anonymously. He tried selling the story with photos of their children, even though he knew the family worked hard to keep their faces out of the public eye.” She started to tear up, so ashamed. So angry at Gilbert and herself.

“Did they manage to quash it?” he asked grimly.

“Yes. Thankfully, they have the money and influence to buy stories like that before they’re published. Then some of Killian’s professionals paid him a visit to ensure he didn’t have copies. He was a promising engineer, but as far as I know he now runs a fish-and-chip truck in a dodgy part of London. The whole thing sits in my gut like an ulcer.”

She gripped her elbows, still stinging with the humiliation at allowing herself to be used. At knowing he hadn’t wanted her.

“I realize that doesn’t make me seem like a reliable person to have on your payroll, but the fact is, I know what it’s like to be manipulated by sex and emotion. I would never do that to anyone. It’s horrible.”

His cheek ticked once before he swore and looked away, then scrubbed his hand over his face.

“It’s not just you.” He rose and took a few agitated steps. “It’s him.”

“Who?” Her pulse skipped at the way he was suddenly in motion. “Your father?”

“Yes. He’s the reason I left San Francisco without speaking to you.” The look he flashed her held something that relit the spark in her chest that she was trying very hard to smother.

She clenched a fist against the sensation. Don’t fall for it.

“What happened?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing heavily before he dropped his hand to reveal a weary expression, one that sent a ring of empathy through her.

“The minute you left that night, I picked up a message from Zurina. My father was trying to force her to marry him. She was very upset.”

The woman in the scarf? “She’s far too young for him.”

“He’s seventy-two. She’s twenty-eight,” he agreed grimly. “She’s also a very wealthy woman. She brought her own fortune to the marriage and inherited Fernando’s shares in LV Global along with his very lucrative investment portfolio and other properties, including the family vineyard that Lorenzo gifted them on their wedding day.”

“He needs the money?”

“Yes,” he said bluntly. “I didn’t know how deeply in debt he is because I don’t care to know. When Fernando passed, he seized the chance to return to the helm and I didn’t fight him because LVG isn’t something I wanted. But he immediately used its cash reserves to pay down debts to cronies. He’s been taking on more debt ever since, putting the company at risk. Market forces have played a part, but Lorenzo’s incompetence is the bigger issue. Fernando spent a decade moving the organization into the modern age. Lorenzo wants to take it back to what was familiar to him. He brought in his yes-men. They’re all dinosaurs. You met some of them today.” He waved a disparaging hand.

Does anyone else care to waste my time?

“He’s been pushing aggressively toward what was tried and true thirty years ago. The board has been watching the place capsize in real time and were pressuring him to bring me aboard. He was teasing me with it, but he had no intention of giving it to me so we were at an impasse. If not for Zurina and the children, I would have let him drown in his own red ink. But I can’t do that.”

She could feel the frustration and animosity coming off him in dangerous, radioactive waves. It wasn’t directed at her, but it was still intimidating.

“So you bought up the debt to oust him.”

“Yes. Zurina’s support was vital to my takeover today. Also, now that I have control of her interest in LVG, she has less value to my father. He should leave her alone, but we’ll see.” He pushed his hand through his hair.

“Doesn’t that put you in his line of fire instead?” she asked with concern.

He shrugged that off, expression remaining hard. “I long ago accepted that he will plague me until one of us dies. I expect him to use any means to sabotage me, my company and LVG, now that I’ve stolen it from him.” His gaze swung to her, landing with a crash. “That includes you.”

“Me?” A clunking sensation swept through her limbs. “How could he use me? Why would he?”

“Because he exploits anything he perceives as a weakness.” His graveled tone made her heart roll to a halt in her chest. “If he learns we’re personally involved, he’ll use it.”

“But…we aren’t,” she said faintly, realizing they couldn’t be.

She had thought he was treating her with such coldness because he didn’t like her. Because he had regrets about San Francisco. She’d been feeling very brushed off and hurt.

Now her brain was catching up to the fact he’d left her for a family emergency. One with higher stakes than she could have imagined. He hadn’t owed any explanations to a woman he’d spent an hour with, no matter how intimately they’d spent that time. He had believed he would never see her again. That was why he hadn’t come to her door to tell her all of this then.

As her shell of umbrage cracked and fell away, so did most of her defenses against him. A need to help rose like a force inside her.

“Keep me on,” she urged. “I will be a valuable asset and no one will ever know we…” She swallowed whatever words might have described the way they’d knotted themselves together, wringing so much pleasure from a brief hour. “I promise.”

She wasn’t pleading for her job as much as a chance to keep seeing him, if only from afar.

His mouth tightened. The way he delved into her eyes with his narrowed gaze made her feel obvious. Naked. As though he read her motives as clearly as a neon sign.

His cheek ticked. Did he feel it, too? The temptation? The want?

A hot pressure of desperation arrived behind her breastbone. She looked away, blinking, trying to douse it with a measured breath.

“Fire me, then. I don’t care,” she lied while anguish slithered in her belly.

“You can stay,” he said abruptly. “For now.” He moved to the closet. “We won’t talk of this again. San Francisco didn’t happen.”

She nodded jerkily while a flip-flopping sensation of relief and disappointment nearly pushed a whimper from her throat. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? She would keep her job. He wouldn’t interfere in her life.

A weight sat on her chest as she came to the door and watched him shrug on his overcoat, though. A sense of lost potential. Deep in her fanciful brain, she had thought maybe destiny had brought them together again.

The reality was they hadn’t had any sort of connection beyond sexual. She’d been a release valve for him at a time he was under a lot of pressure. Now that was firmly in the past.

“There’s something I wished I’d done before you left my room that night,” he said with a hard set to his jaw.

“What’s that?” she asked, lifting her gaze with surprise.

“I should have said goodbye properly.” His hand arrived at her waist and the other cradled the side of her neck, dragging her close.

Time turned to gelatin, making each movement slow and deliberate and profound. Her hands slid upward of their own accord, arriving at his shoulders to twine around his neck. She rose on tiptoe, offering her mouth without speaking another word, and dove her hand into the hair at the back of his head, urging him down.

Because she had longed for this, too. She had needed to know if it had been as good as she imagined.

It was.

As his lips sealed over hers, a sob left her, one of pain because the electric sensation of kissing him was too intense. It rang like a bell through her arms and across her chest, urging her grip to tighten around his neck. To cling. Because they couldn’t do this.

For a long minute they did, though. They held fast to each other while they said hello and I remember and goodbye in the same long, poignant kiss. The thickness of his erection nudged against her aching mound and he could have easily taken her to her bed. She was ready to drag him there herself.

But he drew back abruptly, as though being wrenched from her by an invisible force.

It stung like a tear. Her heart pounded loud enough to deafen her ears. She kept her eyes closed, not wanting to face the inevitable. Not wanting him to see how utterly he owned her when he was, once again, the one pulling away.

She heard him take one shaken breath and the door closed behind him.

“See you tomorrow,” she whispered.