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And through the kick of the temper he usually fought much harder to keep under wraps, he was aware that Julienne did not seem upset. She gazed back at him calmly, her face open and her eyes clear, and he was forced to think back to all the other times this woman had sat before him in her other role. As his employee.
Which was the only way he had thought about her since she’d joined the company as an intern approximately a thousand years ago. He had watched her meteoric rise from intern to vice president with a detached sort of interest, the way he would have noted any other rapid ascent, and he had sat in many meetings face-to-face with her coolness. Cristiano would not have had said he’d admired the way she handled herself, but he had appreciated it. On behalf of the Cassara Corporation, of course.
It occurred to him now that she was not afraid of him. Not intimidated in the least, which was unusual.
Remarkable, even.
“I have always been enormously grateful to you,” she said, leaving her viper of a hand where it was. Cristiano had the notion he could feel the heat of it through the fine wool of the suit his tailors had crafted precisely for the late October weather, when that was unlikely. As unlikely as the wholly unexpected response his body was having to her. “How could I not be? And I always planned to repay you, because that is the decent thing to do, is it not?”
His mouth was full of ice, it seemed. “It is unnecessary.”
“To you, yes. Which only makes it more necessary to me.”
Again he stared down at her hand, trying to recall the last time someone had dared place a hand upon him without an invitation and his express permission. Nothing came to mind.
Not even his father had dared, after a certain point. When Cristiano had finally grown too tall.
And the longer her hand rested there on his forearm, the less unpleasant he found it, no matter what he told himself. Quite the opposite, in fact. That heat instead seemed to wind through him, a peculiar treachery.
There were more betrayals. The longer she stood there, too close to him, henoticedthings. He noticedher.Her narrow, elegant fingers. The carefully polished nails, in a quietly sophisticated shade that made him think of what her skin might look like, flushed with pleasure against smooth sheets.
Unbidden, Cristiano remembered the last time she’d put her hand on him, here in this same bar a lifetime ago. He couldn’t say he’d thought about it since—and yet now he suddenly had a perfect recollection of her same hand in the same place, though she had been altogether rougher then. Her nails had been ragged and untended, or bitten down to the quick. And her eyes had been glazed with misery and fear, not...
But he did not wish to define what it was he saw in Julienne’s gaze just then.
No matter his body’s enthusiastic response.
“The Cassara Corporation has been mother and father to me,” Julienne said, with a soft intensity that he ordered himself to ignore. But couldn’t. “A family as well as a job. But you were the one who saved me. Right here. And then again and again over the years by providing me every opportunity to save myself. So I did, but all the while, I had you there as a guide. Or a goal, maybe.”
“If you mean in a business sense, I must tell you, Ms. Boucher, that this is no way to go about—”
Her hand tightened on his arm. Cristiano felt the sensation race through him like an electric shock.
“It’s not about business. Or why would I resign?” Julienne looked far more composed than he felt, and Cristiano hardly knew how to account for such a thing. “I wanted to repay our debt to you in ten years. I’ve done that now. But as those ten years passed, I found myself wishing that I could convince you to take my initial offer, after all.”
When he glared at her, she only smiled. “Not for money, of course. I’m not in the same circumstances I was then. I’m not sixteen. I’m an adult woman, no longer your employee, and fully in control of her own faculties. I am not coerced. I am not desperate. When I found out you were going to be in Monaco again so soon after my last deal went through, it seemed the perfect bookend.”
“A ‘bookend’?” Cristiano repeated, and it was bad enough that he was looking at her now. Trulyseeingher, after so long making it his business to act as if she wasn’t quite there.
It was distinctly uncomfortable.
Because Julienne might have been a scraggly, terrified teenager ten years ago, covered in too much mascara and obvious misery. But that version of her was gone. She had grown into a beautiful woman, whether he chose to admit it or not. Her hair gleamed that burnished gold and brown that made him...hungry. Her eyes were too clever by half, fixed on him with an intensity and a sincerity that made his blood heat.
And he would have to be a dead man not to notice that her body, no longer packaged in a tacky dress that had been much too old for her, was a quiet symphony of curves and grace.
Cristiano did not indulge himself with his employees, as a matter of honor and good business sense alike. Both virtues, to his mind, and both traits his own father had distinctly lacked.
But Julienne had tendered her resignation.
And enveloped as they were in the dim embrace of a quiet bar tucked away in the midst of Monte Carlo’s frenetic opulence, he could hardly remember why he should have objected to any of this in the first place.
Julienne did not know it, but she was already connected to him in ways that would have made him far more than merelyuncomfortable, had he allowed the strict compartments he kept inside him to open wide at any point in the past ten years. He never had.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to now, but her hand was on his arm and there was thatheat—
Cristiano had not been in this specific bar by chance ten years ago. He disliked Monaco intensely, associating it as he did with the worst of his father’s notorious excesses. It had been in this very bar that he had indulged in the last of those terrible scenes with Giacomo Cassara. His father had been cruel. Cristiano had returned the favor. And he had been sitting right here, staring at his father’s favorite drink—the demon Giacomo had carried about on his back, night and day, for as long as Cristiano could remember, wondering at his own descent into cruelty and what it might herald—when Julienne had appeared beside him.
He had been engaged in nothing less than a battle for his own soul that night. The endless war with his father was one of attrition, and any victories Cristiano scored grew more Pyrrhic by the day. He had begun to wonder if it was worth attempting to live up to his grandfather’s antiquated notions of honor when Giacomo was so busy dedicating himself to living down to every expectation.
