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No matter how much the consultant his board had selected got to him.
He might have the odd daydream of walking away from it all, but he never would. That wasn’t who he was.
Matteo was the eldest son—or he’d spent his life thinking he was, anyway—and he had been raised to clean up any and all messes that arose on both sides of his family. He was the heir to the San Giacomo legacy. He was president and CEO of Combe Industries. And more than that, he was the family janitor.
What Matteo did was clean up the mess, whatever it was.
Whether he wanted to or not.
At least this particular mess was of his own making. He was the one who had taken that swing at Prince Ares—and to the other man’s credit, little as Matteo wanted to give him any when he’d already helped himself to Pia, he’d taken the hit. And had then done the right thing by Pia by instantly proposing marriage. It was the paparazzi who’d carried on as if Matteo had sucker punched him and left him for dead.
Everything else on Matteo’s plate was there courtesy of someone else’s inability to handle their lives the way he did. His sister’s love life and its consequences no matter his or anyone’s feelings on the matter, like the princely proposal she’d had no choice but to accept—as she was carrying the heir to the throne of the island kingdom of Atilia. Or his parents’ indiscretions and old scandals made new now that they’d died, in the form of at least one sibling Matteo hadn’t known he had—and wasn’t sure how to deal with now he did.
It was one hit after the next, and really, what was a slanted psychological evaluation complete with a not-so-hidden agenda next to family members he’d never met?
To say nothing about the company that he still had to run whether his board of directors thought he was fit for it or not.
By the time he landed in London, Matteo had been putting out fires for hours. Those of his own making and all the others that cropped up every day of the week. And he had little to look forward to but another long day—and week, and month—with more of the same. Fires everywhere, and once again, it was his job to extinguish them. And despite what his board pretended to think, or the papers brayed daily, the one thing Matteo had always been very, very good at was his job.
The thing about putting out fires for the whole of a man’s adult life was that, sooner or later, he developed a taste for the flames. An appreciation and something akin to admiration.
His father had set out to crush those flames any way he could. Matteo preferred to exult in them, then use the resulting heat to his advantage.
And that was what he chose to reflect upon, just as the doctor had ordered. It appeared Sarina wanted to play games instead of plod through the expected set of sessions in good faith. Matteo was perfectly happy to play along now that he’d sussed out her intentions—because the truth was, when it came to games of high stakes where winning meant surviving, he always won.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” his personal assistant, Lauren, said one morning a few days after that first session in Venice, standing at his desk in London in her usual no-nonsense manner, which was one of the reasons he paid her so well. “But she’s here, I’m afraid. And insists upon seeing you.”
Matteo was neck deep in contract negotiations with foreign distributors—all of whom had spent the past month reading the tabloids, apparently—and couldn’t think of a single person with a claim to his time. Or anyone who would dare send his assistant in here to demand it.
He scowled. “And who is she, may I ask? The bloody Queen?”
Lauren Clarke had been working for him for far too long to react to that tone of his. Or the ferocious glare he leveled at her.
“Not the Queen, sir. I doubt very much she’d appear without an appointment and the royal guard. It’s that psychiatrist.”
And this was part of what he’d agreed to, purely to placate the board. They’d all been foaming at the mouth, waving tabloid magazines and their fists in the air, and caterwauling as if they’d expected the building to fall down around their ears. He’d have agreed to anything to calm them down, and he had.
So now he had a psychiatrist standing in his office, demanding to be seen. In the middle of a complicated workday—which was to say, any old Tuesday at Combe Industries.
But he was no longer operating in good faith. She wanted to play with matches? Matteo would respond with a bonfire.
Something inside him rolled over, shook itself off, and bared its teeth.
He finished his call and gazed back at his PA, though he didn’t see her. He saw Sarina instead, and that sheen of triumph all over her face in Venice.
“Give me five minutes,” he instructed Lauren. “Then show her in.”
He set his trap, then moved to the windows that looked out over the city. Night had already set in, gloomy and wet though it was supposedly spring out there. He could see the suggestion of light and movement, blurred with moisture.
But however cold and miserable it was outside, it was no match for the blast of heat he felt when he heard his office door open, then shut.
Temper. Fury. Anticipation.
“You have been busy, Doctor,” he said, his voice so mild he almost fooled himself into imagining it was real. “In less than a week you have managed to sow dissent throughout the whole of Combe Industries. Uncertainty and speculation.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Combe,” came the reply in her smooth voice, and maybe he was imagining the undercurrent of satisfaction in it. Though he doubted it. “I told you that you weren’t my client. You should have assumed that anything you said to me was in no way confidential.”
Matteo didn’t turn around to face her. He kept his gaze on the window before him, but he stopped looking at blurry, giddy London, and focused instead on the figure he could see in the reflection.
She was dressed in black again, sleek and sharp. Like a blade, he thought.
And he was certain he could feel every hair on his body stand on end. He told himself it was his temper channeling into the ferocious intent he was known for, nothing more. This woman had no idea what he was capable of—but he had every intention of showing her.
“I did not expect confidentiality,” Matteo replied. “But I did imagine you would pretend, at the very least, to get at the truth. Instead, you have made it clear that your mission is to destroy me.”
He waited for her to deny that, but she didn’t.
She didn’t laugh, either, but he was sure he could hear the hint of it in her voice when she answered him. “I don’t need to destroy you. You appear to being doing that job all by yourself.”
“I was under the impression that you were here to perform an impartial assessment, not an assassination.”
She moved farther into his vast, sprawling office. He watched her reflection move across the room, a liquid, rolling walk, all hips and glory, and he stopped pretending that the way she affected him had only to do with his temper. She was wearing another pair of those impossible heels, and Matteo was forced to face the somewhat confronting notion that this woman was not only doing her best to make a fool out of him in front of his business associates—she was single-handedly turning him into a foot fetishist.
He would make her pay for that, too.
“I’m not following you,” came her cool reply. He watched her walk to the front of his desk, then shift to lean against it. She folded her arms over her chest, she cocked out one hip, and he knew she understood every square inch of the power games she was playing. At another time he might have applauded it. “I assume you feel that your character is being assassinated, is that it?”
“With a hatchet, Dr. Fellows.”
He didn’t have to see that smirk of hers to feel it, like one more knife shoved deep into his back. “Your character is your business, Mr. Combe. You explained to me that you felt justified in all of your choices. How, then, could I take a hatchet to your good name? Surely that would only be possible if you felt some sense of shame.”
“Because you are determined, one way or another, that you will make me feel this shame. No matter what it takes.”
“That you’re even discussing the possibility of feeling shame feels a great deal like a breakthrough. I didn’t think such a thing was possible.”
He turned then, holding on to his control by the barest of threads. He could feel temper, yes, but something far darker—and much thicker—pounding in his veins. Making his skin feel too tight. Making his self-possession feel threadbare at best.
But then, this was where he had always operated at his fullest capacity. When he was the most challenged, he shone the brightest.
He hoped he blinded her.
“You will have to tell me what you think it will take,” he growled at her. “Do you require me on my knees? Shall I rend my garments at your whim? You will obviously only be satisfied by a very specific performance. Why don’t you tell me my lines?”
Her smile was placid, but her dark eyes gleamed. “If it is not genuine, Mr. Combe, how can it be counted as real?”
“Tell me, Doctor. How would you know the first thing about genuine sentiment for one’s family?”
He took satisfaction in the way she stiffened, as if she hadn’t expected the hit. Her gaze flashed into something darker and he liked that, too.
“I would strongly caution you against making this personal,” she said, and this time her voice was stern. As if she thought he might back down simply because she sounded like she was in charge.
But Matteo wasn’t her client. As she had amply illustrated.
“Why ever not, Dr. Fellows?” he asked, his voice quiet. But he could tell by the way her chin lifted that she wasn’t fooled by his tone. “My board of directors feels that they can excavate my personal life at will. Why shouldn’t I do the same with the blunt instrument they have sent to do their bidding?”
“Am I...a tool in this scenario?”
“What you are is a woman who has no experience whatsoever in the sorts of relationships that led me to the choices I made at my father’s funeral.”
“You don’t think I’m capable of assessing human relationships. Is that what you just said?”
Matteo felt everything in him focus on his target, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his suit trousers before he reached out with them and ruined this little trail of breadcrumbs he was leaving for her.
“Your parents are lofty intellectuals,” he told her, as if she might have missed that. “Academics who have spent their lives locked away in elite institutions, catering to children of the rich and famous.”
“I’m going to stand back and wait for the irony to hit. If I were you, I would duck.”
“They had you when they were quite old, relatively speaking. You have no siblings. As your parents were each only children themselves, you have no extended family of any kind. Which made it doubly challenging, I imagine, that they ignored you so thoroughly as you grew up, if their lack of attendance at what might reasonably be considered your milestones is any guide. What I’m suggesting to you is that when it comes to the kinds of familial bonds and debts that govern the lives of most people, your view is necessarily limited by your experience.”
“I live in the world,” she shot back at him, with heat, and he wondered if she knew that she’d betrayed herself. That he could see he’d landed a hit. “Last I checked, the world was filled with human beings and human relationships. In fact, I made those things the focus of my life’s work. Rest assured that even if I never experienced the delight of a house filled with siblings—or even numerous houses shared with one much younger sibling and a whole lot of staff, like you—I have made a deep and comprehensive study of every possible permutation of human emotion.”
“Furthermore,” he said, the way he would if he was in a business meeting and didn’t wish to acknowledge that someone else had spoken, “you appear to lack any actual personal relationships yourself.”
She flushed at that, which told him a great many things he doubted very much she wanted him to know. Then she stood straighter, and he was sure he could see her vibrating with her own temper.
But unless he missed his guess, with decidedly less focus.
“You have absolutely no right to go digging around in my life,” she hurled at him.
“It seems only fair. Since you’ve taken a backhoe to mine.”
“You do realize, of course, that this is more evidence of the kind of antisocial behavior that got you into this position in the first place?”
“I am a man who does my research. I leave nothing to chance. No one who knows me—particularly my board—could possibly imagine that I would allow someone access to me, my thoughts, my entire life, and not perform my due diligence.”
“You must be very proud of yourself,” Sarina said, after a moment, that flush still betraying her emotions. He wanted to touch the heat of it. Taste it, even. “Does it make you feel more in control of this downward spiral of yours to think you’ve unearthed the truth about me?”
“You have no relationships,” he repeated, as if he was delivering judgment from above. “You’re a driven, ambitious, professional woman. You live and breathe your work, and you usually do both from hotels. Your parents are fully preoccupied with their research. As far as I can tell, you are entirely solitary.”
They were standing, facing off, as if a brawl was about to break out. And Matteo knew that he was his father’s son, because his blood sang at the thought. But he was also heir to the San Giacomos and all the scheming and plotting that had made them one of Italy’s most prominent families—for centuries.
Sarina should have done her homework.
“You must be under the impression that if you taunt me with my own life, this will somehow... Break me? Put me off my game? Unfortunately for you, Mr. Combe, all it does is give me further insight into your character. I wouldn’t be concerned about anyone else performing an assassination when you seem so willing and able to do it yourself.”
She’d wrestled that flush on her cheeks into submission. Now she gazed back at him pityingly, which he assumed was meant to make him feel small. Off balance.
But Matteo could see the way her pulse racketed around in her neck, and he knew better.
That response—the response he’d thought he’d seen in Venice, but hadn’t pushed—was what he’d been banking on. Somehow, he contained his own roar of victory.
“It turns out I have a fascination for psychology,” he said instead. “For example, I cannot help but wonder why a woman who lives such a lonely, empty life imagines that she should set herself up as a world-renowned expert on the very emotions and relationships she lacks? I should as soon declare myself an authority on literature. I’ve read a book, after all.”
“Keep digging that hole, Mr. Combe.”
Matteo moved then, prowling closer to her and keeping his eyes on that telltale pulse. It was possible it was her own temper, of course. But when he moved closer, he saw the way her eyes widened. The slight flare of her nostrils. And, sure enough, that pulse in her neck sped up.
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