AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As the door closed, she turned to face him. ‘Don’t do that,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t understand what I’m talking about.’ Six years ago she might have been like a puppet on a string, blithely dancing to her doom, but that young woman didn’t exist any more. ‘You know exactly why I can’t work for you.’
She stumbled over the words. But then she shouldn’t even be having this conversation. After a normal break-up most people wanted to avoid their exes at all costs. But theirs had not been a normal break-up. Or a normal relationship, she thought, her heart twisting with misery.
Her pulse quivering in her throat, she watched as he pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, stretching out his legs just as if he owned the building and this washiswar room. Except wars required armies, and this was just the two of them, locked in combat like gladiators trading blows.
She tensed as his eyes flicked up to her accusing face.
‘I take it you’re referring to our history?’ he said softly.
History.Her breathing jerked and, lifting a hand protectively to her throat, she felt her pulse pound against her fingers. It was such a soft, vague term for something that had been so deliberately brutal.
She gave a humourless laugh. ‘You’re damn right I am.’
‘What happened—happened.’ In the sunlight, his handsome face was suddenly as harsh and unyielding as a statue. ‘It’s in the past, and I’m willing to leave it there.’
For a moment Dove couldn’t breathe.Hewas willing to leave what happened between them in the past?
It was almost impossible to stop herself from grabbing him by the perfectly tailored lapels of his suit, hauling him to his feet and shaking him hard. Did he not know how much she had loved him? Or care about the pain he had caused? Her wide grey eyes fixed on his face as his careless indifference clawed at her throat.
Of course not. And that was why it was so simple for him to forget what hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t for her.
Stomach in freefall, she silently replayed the years that had passed. Years spent trying to come to terms with the reality of their brief one-sided relationship. Working every night until her head ached and her vision blurred, and then working out at the gym, pounding the treadmill until she was too exhausted to think or remember or, most important of all, feel. Because that was the only way she could carry on.
By not feeling.
None of which would be relevant to Gabriel because he didn’t have feelings. Nor did he care about other people’s feelings either. As she knew only too well, all he cared about was money.
Outside, the sun was rising higher in the sky, and for a moment she watched its slow ascent, grateful for the reminder that not everything was subject to the will of Gabriel Silva. Then, lifting her chin, she returned his gaze full-on.
‘Well, I can’t,’ she said stiffly. ‘So I’m afraid you’ll have to ask someone else to manage your acquisition.’
There was a long, heavy silence. Around her the huge meeting room seemed to shrink and grow airless, so that it was suddenly difficult to breathe.
‘I didn’taskyou to work for me,’ he replied, and her stomach curled at the clipped ferocity in his voice. ‘I told you it was going to happen.’
She shook her head—more to clear it than out of defiance—and he lifted his chin, looking past her in that way of his that already felt too familiar, as if her opinions and wishes were irrelevant to him. Which, she realised with a thump of panic, they clearly were.
‘You know, this is all going to be so much harder if you fight me every step of the way. And there’s really no point.’
She felt the hairs stand up on the nape of her neck as his brilliant blue eyes fixed on her face.
‘Youwillend up working for me.’
She stared over to where he sat—no, lounged in his chair, like some bored potentate who was regretting his decision to grant an audience to one of his minions. He had unbuttoned his jacket and she could see the outline of contoured muscle pressing against his shirt. It was a tantalising hint of what lay beneath.
Not that she needed reminding. She knew exactly what he looked like beneath that crisp, tailored cotton.
A beat of heat danced across her skin. A heat and an awareness, a hunger, she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. As if her body was waking from a deep sleep. Only how could that be true? How could she feel anything for this man other than loathing?
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked hoarsely, batting those questions to the dark outer reaches of her mind.
His startlingly blue eyes lifted to hers, and the coolness there was such a contrast to her own fraught feelings that she had to clench her hands tightly to stop herself reaching down and hurling the fine bone china cups at his head.
‘For the same reason I do everything,’ he said, getting to his feet with the leopard-like grace that characterised every moment he made.
‘Because I can.’
