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He shrugged almost lazily. ‘Then I’ve no doubt you will do the very best job you can for me. Because if you don’t I will ruin this business. I will drive it into the ground.’
Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them away. She wanted to scream and keep on screaming. At him, and at a world that allowed a man like him to become powerful. Only his words had sucked all the air from her lungs.
‘This is how you do business, is it?’ she said finally. ‘By issuing threats, bullying people, blackmailing them?’
‘I do whatever needs to be done to get what I want,’ he said, and it was the softness in his voice that made her understand just how ruthless he was.
She glared at him. ‘You know, I wish I could say this was a revelation—a hitherto unforeseen glimpse into your character—but frankly it doesn’t surprise me at all—’
She broke off, hating herself for becoming so emotional, for letting him get under her skin. Hating him for coming back and tearing down another set of illusions—that she was getting on with her life. In reality she had simply been ignoring a huge, jagged wound...pretending it was healed.
He took a step closer, and every single nerve-ending in her body jerked into life as she breathed in the masculine scent that had been tormenting her ever since she’d walked into the war room.
‘This isn’t business, Dove.’
His voice rolled through her, fierce and dark and compelling. Or perhaps it was the sound of her name in his mouth as his gaze held her captive.
‘This is personal.’
She stared up at him, panic stampeding through her veins, her muscles clenching, tightening hard around the hollow at the bottom of her stomach. Earlier, she had been wrong. He had changed. Now he didn’t have to hide who he was any more. He didn’t need to pretend or play games. Now he was a man who openly pursued what he wanted. A man not used to failing.
But he was going to fail this time. Because there was no way she was going to work for him. Not without a fight.
‘Like I said earlier, we have history.’
Her train of thought snapped in two as images of that ‘history’ popped into her head. It had been frenzied.Shehad been frenzied. Frantic. Out of control. And strong and hungry and demanding in a way she wasn’t in life. Gabriel had released a side to her she hadn’t known existed. His kiss had stirred her, his touch unravelled her, and her body had ached at his absence—
It still did.
Her pulse quivered. Because he had left her. In exchange for money. And that was what she needed to focus on and remember. Not this strange, shimmering weave of tension between them that made her heart pound high up in her throat and her body shake inside.
‘We had a relationship. We were going to elope. Then my father offered you money to walk away, and you took the money and walked. So, in fact, we don’t just have ahistory, Gabriel. What we have is a conflict of interests.’
He was shaking his head, certainty etched into the contoured arcs and planes of his gorgeous face. ‘There’s no conflict. You want Cavendish and Cox to be around for another two hundred years, and I want that too. All you have to do to make that happen is manage one small acquisition for me.’
And look into his beautiful lying eyes every day and relive the pain and misery of his deceit.
She didn’t have a choice. But she tried again.
‘Any acquisition is a complex process.’ She kept her voice calm and professional. ‘As you know, there are multiple steps. At Cavendish and Cox, we believe that communication at each stage of the process is the most important factor in achieving the optimum outcome for our clients.’
His fine dark brows arched. ‘So it says on the website. What’s your point?’
‘How do you expect us to do that?’ The slow burn of his gaze made her feel light-headed. Knots were forming in her belly. ‘You and I...we don’t communicate. On any level. We never did.’
There was a long pause, and the knots inside her tightened as he stood studying her. His blue eyes were so intent it was like being held in a tractor beam. He was so close she could see the ring of darker blue around his irises and the minute constriction of the pupils. Feel the heat and energy and intent humming beneath his immaculate suit.
‘I’d have to disagree,’ he said finally, breaking the taut silence.
His bright and intensely blue eyes rested on her face, reaching into her, seeing more than she wanted him to see, seeing far too much.
‘You see, as I remember it, you and I...we communicated extremely productively,’ he said smoothly, but with that same edgy undercurrent that made her head feel light and her nerve-endings judder like telephone wires in a high wind. ‘On one level,’ he added.
She felt heat spill over her skin, and suddenly her breath was hot and tangled in her throat and she tensed, remembering. Glancing up at his face, she knew from the tension in his jaw that he was remembering it too.
‘That was a long time ago.’ Her voice sounded scratchy.
Even though it might look like a retreat, she knew that someone as smart as she was supposed to be would have moved out of reach of that tractor beam gaze by now. But it was impossible to stop her own eyes from lingering on his beautiful face and his lush, curving mouth. Impossible not to imagine how that mouth would feel against hers.
