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She couldn’t breathe for a moment. Was that what had happened six years ago? Had he taken her father’s money simply because it had been offered? Or had he been angling for that all along? It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him. But she didn’t want to talk about the past with this cold-eyed stranger.
She licked her lips. ‘That’s not an answer.’
His eyes homed in on her mouth like a heat-seeking missile tracking its target and she felt the tension throb between them. But then, just as swiftly, he turned away without replying.
Watching him walk across a room six years ago, she had fallen in love with him. Now, though, she stared in appalled fascination as he sauntered slowly round the table. Her eyes fixed to the dark jacket that stretched endlessly across his back and she felt a tic of heat pulse across her skin. Once upon a time she had loved to slide her fingers over the smooth muscles of his shoulders, guiding his movements, her breath staccato in her throat as he drove into her—
Heat bloomed inside her as a blurry montage of their entwined bodies wove through her head...
‘So this is him? The guy you’re related to?’
Blinking, she glanced over to where Gabriel was standing in front of the gilt-framed portrait of Arthur Cavendish.
She nodded. ‘He’s my great-great-great-grandfather.’
‘Handy. To have a ready-made corporate law firm in the family.’ He turned and stared at her, long and hard, a muscle working in his stubble-covered jaw. ‘Although I seem to remember you telling me on more than one occasion that you would never work at Cavendish and Cox.’ His mouth slanted into a smile that was more of a baring of teeth. ‘But perhaps you didn’t mean what you said.’
Resentment surged through her, and anger—a hot, sweeping anger such as she had never felt in her life before, so that she wasn’t even sure itwasanger. ‘We both said things we didn’t mean, Gabriel.’ Her eyes met his, grey clashing with the blue. ‘And you weren’t the only one who made a mistake.’
He didn’t like that. She saw the flare of male pride and arrogance in his eyes. But she didn’t care. Even if it was too little, too late, she wanted him to hurt—wanted to hurt him as he had hurt her...was still hurting her.
‘So now we both know where we stand, why don’t you stop with the games—?’
‘You think this is agame?’
His dark brows snapped together and she took an immediate, defensive step back, her hand rising instinctively in front of her body as he made his way back around the table.
‘You think this is a game?’ he repeated as he stopped in front of her.
She forced herself to hold her ground.
‘I don’t know what this is, but I do know that if it was up to me I’d tell you exactly what you could do with your acquisition.’
‘Then it’s fortunate for all your colleagues that it’s Alistair who’s in charge of Cavendish and Cox and not you.’ His blue gaze held steady and the tension in her stomach wound tighter. ‘In case it’s passed you by, he’s running a business—not a charity. So I doubt he’ll be turning away wealthy clients any time soon.’
‘But that’s where you’re wrong.’
She took a step closer, pushing her hand against the solid wall of his chest to emphasise her point. It was harder than she remembered, and warm through his shirt.
‘Alistair’s not just a lawyer. He’s a man of principle. He cares about the way things get done, the way people behave, because he knows that there’s more to business than making money. Not that I’d expect a man like you to understand that.’
‘And what kind of man is that, Ms Cavendish?’
He leaned into her hand and the touch of him, at once familiar and forbidden, scorched her fingers. She jerked them away.
‘A ruthless, amoral, cold-blooded one.’
She flung the words at him, wishing they were sticks or stones, or better still rocks, but instead of hitting their target they seemed to lose their force, like waves hitting a breakwater. And, gazing up, she saw something in his eyes that made her spine tense.
‘You forgot successful. But you’re working here, so I can understand whythatword might have been dropped from your vocabulary.’
How dare he say that? Angry words bubbled up in her throat. Maybe the firm was no longer the legal powerhouse it had once been, but it was still a solid, reputable business.
‘Cavendish and Cox have been in existence for nearly two hundred years,’ she snapped. ‘I’d call that pretty successful.’
Watching his mouth twist, she felt her stomach clench. So many smiles, each one different and infinitely more disturbing than the last. This one was doing something strange to the air, making it quiver as if a storm was approaching.
Or maybe the storm was already here, she thought as he stared down at her, his blue gaze glittering in the sunlight, bright and sharp like tempered steel.
