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It's barely coherent. It's like I was the one who'd been attacked.
"The thing about me being your fiancée?" she says.
I nod. "Yes, that."
Her hand waves in the air dismissively. "I'm ignoring that. I don't care what kind of fucked up prank you're trying to play on me, but I am not biting. Look, I've been good. I've left all of you alone, so why can't you just forget that I exist?Please."
I'm winded. The hurt in her voice is palpable. Hating me because I've always been a dick to her is one thing. Thinking that I would play a cruel prank like this hurts. She must really hate me. She always has. But this seems different.
"Clarissa."
She shakes her head and covers her face. "Please, just go. Just leave me alone."
I ignore her. "What's going on? Why are you here?"
She moves her hand away, looking confused. "What are you talking about?"
"I mean, what are you doing at this club? Is this some side project that you're doing for your family's business?"
She spits. She literally purses her lips and spits, right there on the floor by her feet. Like she'd been chewing cud except that it's resentment. Anger courses through the irises of her almost violet eyes.
Unnerving.
Beautiful.
Other worldly.
Right now, even as she bites her glistening lip, she looks like an ethereal demon from hell.
Hungry.
"My family?" she snickers. "You've got to be fucking kidding."
I'm confused. "What's going on with your family?"
"You don't know?" she looks genuinely surprised.
I throw my hands up. "Apparently I don't know anything!"
Her face settles into a contemptuous mask. "You don't know that after the debacle with Damien, my father disowned me? And practically sent me off like a convict in the 1600's to rot away in New York out of his sight?"
No.
I can't believe what she's just told me. Yes, we'd all heard that she moved to the USA, but Terry had made it sound as though that was her choice. That she didn't want to live in Sydney anymore, not where Damien had publicly gotten back together with his now fiancée. And Clarissa had always famously hated England anyway."Too cold,"she complained her entire childhood. I had always joked that she should probably get used to the cold. She wouldn't run the risk of her icy heart melting in an English summer.
But this, the idea that Terry Masters had cut her off and sent her here, is news I wish I hadn't heard. That heartless fuck. He was getting worse with age. He's always been a ruthless bastard, but under my grandfather's eagle eye, he had kept that ruthlessness under wraps. But now he's apparently let it run free. Maybe Terry Masters has let being the chairman of the board for Baxter Enterprises go to his head.
Or to whatever he has for a heart.
"Oh, Clarissa. No..."
Her eyes harden under my words.
And her throat constricts as though she's trying to force down a swallow. "No, what? No, he didn't give me twenty-four hours to pack up my things before he put me on the company plane? No, he didn't freeze all my accounts and give me nothing but an envelope of money, a key for an apartment he was going to kick me out of after three months, and the explicit instructions to never try to contact the family ever again? No, I think it's very much what happens. Or do you need evidence?"
She reaches into her desk and pulls something out of a drawer and drops it onto the desk. It's a yellow envelope, crumpled, wrinkled, as if it's been folded and unfolded a hundred times, having its contents constantly checked as it got lighter and lighter.
Pushing it across the desk, she looks at me, as if watching for my expression as she flips it over.
