“What happened?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing heavily before he dropped his hand to reveal a weary expression, one that sent a ring of empathy through her.
“The minute you left that night, I picked up a message from Zurina. My father was trying to force her to marry him. She was very upset.”
The woman in the scarf? “She’s far too young for him.”
“He’s seventy-two. She’s twenty-eight,” he agreed grimly. “She’s also a very wealthy woman. She brought her own fortune to the marriage and inherited Fernando’s shares in LV Global along with his very lucrative investment portfolio and other properties, including the family vineyard that Lorenzo gifted them on their wedding day.”
“He needs the money?”
“Yes,” he said bluntly. “I didn’t know how deeply in debt he is because I don’t care to know. When Fernando passed, he seized the chance to return to the helm and I didn’t fight him because LVG isn’t something I wanted. But he immediately used its cash reserves to pay down debts to cronies. He’s been taking on more debt ever since, putting the company at risk. Market forces have played a part, but Lorenzo’s incompetence is the bigger issue. Fernando spent a decade moving the organization into the modern age. Lorenzo wants to take it back to what was familiar to him. He brought in his yes-men. They’re all dinosaurs. You met some of them today.” He waved a disparaging hand.
Does anyone else care to waste my time?
“He’s been pushing aggressively toward what was tried and true thirty years ago. The board has been watching the placecapsize in real time and were pressuring him to bring me aboard. He was teasing me with it, but he had no intention of giving it to me so we were at an impasse. If not for Zurina and the children, I would have let him drown in his own red ink. But I can’t do that.”
She could feel the frustration and animosity coming off him in dangerous, radioactive waves. It wasn’t directed at her, but it was still intimidating.
“So you bought up the debt to oust him.”
“Yes. Zurina’s support was vital to my takeover today. Also, now that I have control of her interest in LVG, she has less value to my father. He should leave her alone, but we’ll see.” He pushed his hand through his hair.
“Doesn’t that put you in his line of fire instead?” she asked with concern.
He shrugged that off, expression remaining hard. “I long ago accepted that he will plague me until one of us dies. I expect him to use any means to sabotage me, my company and LVG, now that I’ve stolen it from him.” His gaze swung to her, landing with a crash. “That includes you.”
“Me?” A clunking sensation swept through her limbs. “How could he use me?Whywould he?”
“Because he exploits anything he perceives as a weakness.” His graveled tone made her heart roll to a halt in her chest. “If he learns we’re personally involved, he’ll use it.”
“But…we aren’t,” she said faintly, realizing theycouldn’tbe.
She had thought he was treating her with such coldness because he didn’t like her. Because he had regrets about San Francisco. She’d been feeling very brushed off and hurt.
Now her brain was catching up to the fact he’d left her for a family emergency. One with higher stakes than she could have imagined. He hadn’t owed any explanations to a woman he’d spent an hour with, no matter how intimately they’d spent thattime. He had believed he would never see her again. That was why he hadn’t come to her door to tell her all of this then.
As her shell of umbrage cracked and fell away, so did most of her defenses against him. A need to help rose like a force inside her.
“Keep me on,” she urged. “I will be a valuable asset and no one will ever know we…” She swallowed whatever words might have described the way they’d knotted themselves together, wringing so much pleasure from a brief hour. “I promise.”
She wasn’t pleading for her job as much as a chance to keep seeing him, if only from afar.
His mouth tightened. The way he delved into her eyes with his narrowed gaze made her feel obvious. Naked. As though he read her motives as clearly as a neon sign.
His cheek ticked. Did he feel it, too? The temptation? Thewant?
A hot pressure of desperation arrived behind her breastbone. She looked away, blinking, trying to douse it with a measured breath.
“Fire me, then. I don’t care,” she lied while anguish slithered in her belly.
“You can stay,” he said abruptly. “For now.” He moved to the closet. “We won’t talk of this again. San Francisco didn’t happen.”
She nodded jerkily while a flip-flopping sensation of relief and disappointment nearly pushed a whimper from her throat. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? She would keep her job. He wouldn’t interfere in her life.
A weight sat on her chest as she came to the door and watched him shrug on his overcoat, though. A sense of lost potential. Deep in her fanciful brain, she had thought maybe destiny had brought them together again.
The reality was they hadn’t had any sort of connection beyond sexual. She’d been a release valve for him at a time he was under a lot of pressure. Now that was firmly in the past.
