Today, the door sprang open.
“You’re here for revenge.” He set his elbows on the arms of the chair and steepled his fingers beneath his jaw. “I’m listening.”
“How did you know?” Mira asked with shock.
“Why else?” His mouth twisted in cynicism as he rose and came around the desk.
The floor seemed to shift beneath her. The closer he came, the more overwhelmed she grew, yet some twisted part of her reveled in it.
Her pain and fury had formed a ball of pent-up energy inside her, one that had no immediate outlet. She wanted to release it and lay waste to everything that Otto had ever held dear.
Rocco triggered something else in her, though. If she was the bomb, he was the detonation switch. The spark.
Goodness, she’d forgotten how tall he was. Not as tall as the first time she’d met him because she’d worn sandals then, but she was still only at eye level with his mouth in her spiked heels.
He smelled good, she noted with a heady, fuzzy sensation that was not unlike the buzz of drinking on an empty stomach. Her senses altered, becoming sharper in some ways, duller in others. Her focus narrowed to the way his shirt clung to his powerful shoulders. The corners of his mouth dug in, making her think he was amused by her.
That stung, but sweet sensations followed, trickling through her limbs.
For no reason that she had ever been able to understand, she was drawn to him. Every single time she’d seen him, she had responded this way—as though something in him awakened a part of her that didn’t otherwise exist. On those other occasions, while her inner radar had pinged, her blood had heated and waves of humiliating yearning had accosted her, she had run away.
Today, she stood still. Waiting. Feeling her body silently call to Rocco’s while she wished with her few remaining brain cells that this wasn’t happening.
“What exactly did you have in mind, Mirabella?” He hooked the tip of his finger into the ring on the tab of her zipper where it sat between her breasts.
“Oh, my God, not that!” She shoved at his hand, which only caused the zipper to be yanked low enough to show the catch of her bra.
He pulled both hands away, holding them up as though she had pointed a gun at him.
“Oh, my God,” she said again as she pulled the zipper back up. “He doesn’t care who I screw, Rocco.”
It was a galling truth that made her voice quaver. Nobody in this world cared about her. Even her mother, whom she had always believed loved her above all things on this earth, hadn’t cared enough to tell her the truth about her own father. As for the man who had conceived her? He probably didn’t even know she existed.
“Nothing you do to me will have any effect on him so don’t bother trying to use me like that again.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, fighting the press of angry tears in her eyes. She walked away a few steps. “And to think how worried I was that he would find out about London.”
“Axel? He was there.”
“Otto.” She spun. “I’m talking about Otto.”
His dark eyebrows crashed together. “You’re here for revenge againstOtto?”
“I want toannihilatehim,” she said fervently. “So I came to the most ruthless, cold-blooded, conscienceless scumbag I know. Ithoughtthe enemy of my enemy would be my friend,” she said, spelling out her reasoning with a disparaging twist of her mouth. “But, of course, all you think I’m good for is sex. Why are men such pigs?”
“Don’t hold back, cara. Tell me how you really feel.” He casually leaned his ass on the edge of his desk, arms crossed, mouth quirked in dark humor.
“How the hell do you think I feel after the way you behaved?” she cried.
“Look.” He put out a hand. “You have a right to be angry, but I didn’t mean for that to happen the way it did.”
“Save it,” she muttered. “I know that you only came on to me because of Otto. Now’s your chance to go after him directly, without using sex with me to do it.”
“Why?” His expression hardened to granite and his gaze grew watchful. “What happened?”
She drew a breath, then remembered that her new trustees had urged patience.Let us do our work.Don’t go public with what you’ve learned. He’s been hiding your paternity all this time so it seems to be a bargaining chip. Use it wisely.
“He did something that upset me,” she prevaricated, pacing again in stalking steps across the tiled floor. The office was huge. One corner was dominated by the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the busy streets of Rome’s business district. Along with his desk, there was a meeting table for six, and a sofa and love seat arranged to the side.
“I gathered that much,” he drawled. “What did he do?” He dropped his hands to the edge of his desk, which was a slab of green marble atop legs of black marble. Even that casual stance strained the seams of his white shirt across his powerful shoulders.
