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‘You had me investigated?’ she cried in realisation. ‘That is a violation of my privacy!’ Her outrage would have been laughable, had it not been for the increasingly concerned glances being cast their way from the other people in the warehouse.
‘You can’t have expectations of privacy while committing a crime.’
‘Oh, for the love of—’
‘Give me back what you stole and I’ll be out of your life for good,’ he said pleasantly, even though he felt anything but pleasant.
Her hand flexed around the strap of her bag as if she thought he might try and take it from her with force.Joder, what kind of man did she think he was? And then he remembered that she had been grabbed and kissed by a stranger in a dark bedroom and told that she had been mistaken for a gift.
‘And to...erm...’ Mateo rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Henri wishes for it to be known that he doesn’t buy women.’
‘What?’ Evelyn’s hazel eyes peered up at him in confusion.
Mateo cleared his throat. ‘I promised that I would explain to you that Henri did not buy a woman for me as a gift.’
‘Oh.’ She bit her bottom lip and snared his attention away from the conversation. ‘Okay,’ she said on a little laugh. This wasnotgoing how he’d intended. People didn’t laugh at him; they usually did what he said. But Evelyn Edwards seemed to oppose him at every turn.
‘Now, the notebook?’ he asked, holding his hand out in expectation.
‘I can’t give it back to you,’ she said.
‘I believe you can. It’s really quite simple. You reach into your bag and you place it in my hand.’
‘I don’t have it with me,’ she replied, the pretty blush becoming slightly angry on her cheeks now.
He raised an eyebrow, disbelieving her entirely.
‘And even if I did,’ she started, ‘why do you want it?’ she asked, for once genuinely. ‘What is it to you? You didn’t speak to him for the last three years of his life, Mateo.’
And there it was again. The knife that cut too close to the heart of an old hurt it left him almost breathless with anger.
‘You think you have more right to it than I do?’ he demanded.
‘Maybe, yes,’ she replied, and the sheer honesty of her response was more cutting than a thousand knives.
‘Well, you’re wrong,’ Mateo stated sharply. ‘I deserve every page of that notebook because while he was scribbling notes about his research on his trip to the research dig in Indonesia, he’d promised to be there for the results of mybachillerato.And when he was delivering his lecture on Iondorra’s Economic Impact on Europe in the Eighteenth Century, it was my twenty-first birthday. And you know what? I don’t even know where he was to celebrate my company’s IPO launch because all Ineedto know is that he simply couldn’t be bothered to show up.’
Evelyn looked at him with a sympathy that grated rather than soothed.
‘Have you read it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t need to read it. And neither do you. You were there with him on every dig and every research paper,’ he bit out, unable to prevent the mean words from spilling between them.
‘I don’t—I’m sorry, Mateo.’
‘But you won’t give the notebook back to me?’
Evelyn bit her lip as if to stop herself from saying more.
‘Fine. You don’t want to give me the notebook? Then I’ll have to take something you want even more.’
Concern filled her gaze, blotting out the thousands of questions he saw there. Honestly, her eyes were like a constellation, mapping the course of her thoughts. The woman should never play poker. Because he’d already beaten her at her own game.
‘A word of warning. If you’re planning to go to the auction dressed like that, think again.’
With that parting shot, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the auction house, leaving her standing alone in the middle of a near empty room.
Evie flexed her hand, before running the black liner across her eyelid, working carefully so as not to stab herself. Much like the heels, she’d practised make-up but it had never made her feel the way that the shoes did, so she tended not to wear it. She always thought that when teaching, it made her look as if she were trying too hard. To fit in, to look older, to try to make them take her seriously. She pulled her hand back as she got a little upset.
