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‘You came here to lose to me,’ Alessandro told her without preamble. ‘If you had any sense, you would recognise that and wave the white flag before I start lowering the price I’ve offered to pay for that place.’ He drew her attention to the clock on the wall. ‘With every passing minute, I drop my price by a grand, so make sure your argument’s a winning one, because if it’s not you’re going to find that you’re not working on behalf of your client.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘I can do whatever I like, Lyla...Chase...or shall I call you Mrs Evans? Or perhaps Ms...?’
‘This isn’t about us, Alessandro.’ She tried to claw the conversation back to the matter at hand, back to the shelter. ‘So please don’t think that you can use empty threats to—’
‘Look around you,’ Alessandro cut in lazily. ‘And tell me what you see.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘Just do as I ask.’
Chase looked around nervously. She could feel the jaws of a trap yawning around her, but when she tried to figure out what sort of trap she came up empty. ‘Big, bland conference room,’ she told him in a voice that hinted that she was already bored with the subject. When she looked around her, her eyes kept wanting to return to him, to look at his face and absorb all the small changes there. Seeing him now, she was beginning to realise that she had never entirely forgotten him. She had buried him but it had obviously been in a shallow grave.
‘I like it bland. It doesn’t pay to provide distractions when you want the people seated at this table to be focused.’
‘You like it bland...’
‘Correct. You see, I am AM Holdings. I own it all. Every single deal is passed by me. What I say goes and no one contradicts me. So, when I tell you that I intend to drop my price by a grand for every minute you argue with me, I mean it and it’s within my power to do it. Of course, you’re all business and you think you can win, in which case my threat will be immaterial. But if you don’t, well, after a couple of hours of futile arguing... Do the maths.’
Chase looked at him, lost for words. In view of what had happened between them, the deceit and the half-lies that had finally been her undoing, she was staring at a man who had been gifted his revenge. She should have done her homework on the company more thoroughly, but she had been handed the case after her boss had done the preliminaries himself, only to find that he couldn’t follow through for personal reasons. She had focused all her energies on trying to locate loopholes that would prevent the sale of the shelter to anyone rather than specifically to AM Holdings. Even so, would she have recognised Alessandro had his name cropped up? They hadn’t afforded much time for surnames.
‘Sounds ungentlemanly.’ Alessandro gave an elegant shrug and a smile that was as cold as the frozen wastelands. ‘But, when it comes to business, I’ve always found that being a gentleman doesn’t usually pay dividends.’
‘Why are you doing this? How could you think of punishing those helpless women who use the shelter because we...we...?’
‘Had an ill-fated relationship? Because you lied to me? Deceived me? Does your firm of lawyers know the kind of person you really are?’
Chase didn’t say anything but she could feel her nervous system go into overdrive. She had inadvertently stepped into the lion’s den; how far did revenge go? What paths would it travel down before it was finally satisfied? Alessandro Moretti owned this place. Not only was it within his power to do exactly as he said, to reduce the amount he was willing to pay for the shelter with each passing minute, but what if he decided actively to go after her?
‘Things weren’t what they seemed back then, Alessandro.’
‘The clock’s ticking.’ He relaxed and folded his hands behind his head. Against all odds, and knowing her for what she really was, he was irritated to discover that he could still appreciate her on a purely physical level. He had never laid a finger on her but, hell, he had fantasised about it until his head had spun, had wondered what she would look like underneath the student clothes, what she would feel like. By the time he had met her, he had already bedded his fair share of women, yet she had appealed to him on a level he had barely comprehended.
He hadn’t gone to the university intending to get involved with anyone. He had gone there as a favour to his old don, to give a series of business lectures, to get students inspired enough to know that they could attempt to achieve in record time what he had succeeded in achieving. Six lectures charting business trends, showing how you could buck them and still come out a winner, and he would be gone. He hadn’t anticipated meeting Lyla—or, as she now called herself, Chase—and staying on to give a further six lectures.
