Irritation zipped through her. ‘Neither. It’s for when we took off again, after refuelling.’
‘I see. At which point you’d believe I would be unwilling to turn back the plane or take steps to eject you entirely?’ he enquired silkily.
Vayle squirmed beneath the incisiveness of his gaze. She knew her nerves and lack of a decent poker face gave her away but, she told herself, since that was exactly what she’d hoped, why hide from it? ‘Yes.’
‘Hmm.’ It was very perturbing that this man was so livid with her, yet he continued to tend to her as if he had all the time in the world. As if she were a person in need he cared about.
Which was a vicious lie. Kindness and consideration were the last things he was capable of. For the better part of a year she’d watched him decimate the hotel she co-managed with Agnes, stealing contracts and clients right from under their noses and not even bothering to disguise what he was doing. He was systematically driving them out of business so he could scoop up what remained.
So this had to be a trick. An apex predator toying with his prey. His hands wreaked magic on her body while those eyes continued to flash hot and cold, keeping her guessing as to his true emotions.
With more power than she’d thought herself capable of, considering her insides veritably quivered with the nerves eating her alive, she yanked her foot from his hold.
This time she succeeded. Or he let her go. She scrambled back until her spine hit the side of the enormous bed. And he watched her with sizzling focus as she tried to compose herself, flex her foot and with relief note that the throb had substantially decreased. She curbed the urge to check the hair she could feel unravelling from its neat knot, or the grey pencil-skirt and jacket that she’d cobbled together to pass muster as one of his flight attendants. Glad when she managed both, she darted a glance at him and saw his folded-arms stance, the eyebrow raised in rigid expectation.
She licked her lips. ‘You know why I’m here.’
His gaze slowly raked over her, the tiniest escalation in his breathing telling her he wasn’t as supremely cool as he projected. ‘Do I? Or should the more pertinent question be, why the hell should I care?’ Before she could launch into the spiel she’d practised repeatedly since their meeting, he continued. ‘You’re adequately intelligent enough to know you’ve broken several laws. Shouldn’t you concern yourself with navigating that dilemma before anything else?’
She opened her mouth to speak, then a cold shiver washed over her. ‘So you knew I was onboard, and you deliberately let me hide in here just so you could get me into trouble? Is that your idea of fun?’
His head tilted. ‘Let me get this straight. Are you attempting to make me somehow responsible for your crimes?’ he mused, then every hint of amusement evaporated. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised, considering who reared you, and yet…’ The hard edge embedded in his voice abruptly cut off, leaving her short of breath.
Because in those last words she’d witnessed a complex mine of emotions, every single one of them containing ferocious charges set to detonate at the smallest friction.
Who reared you…
Whether he was referring to George Lancaster, or Agnes and her late husband Tolis, she wasn’t sure. Both Tolis and her father had died within weeks of each other, eighteen months ago, the former from a stroke and the latter after a short and violent illness that had screeched in like an evil wind and taken him with it. It was a shockingly apt metaphor for how he’d lived his life and the anguish he’d left behind. And, while Tolis hadn’t been as affable as his wife, Vayle was in the dark as to why his son was so bitter.
But acrimonious family history wasn’t why she was here. She was here to save her inheritance, regardless of the despair shrouding it. Or maybe it wasbecauseof the despair that she fought so hard. Because all these years of suffering surely would have been for nothing if she couldn’t turn Vayle Hotel into a happy and welcoming place.
‘We’re getting off on the wrong foot,’ she started, only to halt when he barked out arid laughter.
‘No, Miss Lancaster. You and I will not be getting off anywhere—ever.’ The words hovered, dark, ominous and…curiously electrifying, before he added, ‘We will be touching down on Ascension in the next hour. You will be handed over to the authorities with a full account of how you lied your way through the airport by pretending to be a member of my crew to gain access to my jet, then hid away with the intent of…doing me harm? Attempted poisoning, suffocation or strangulation? Which is more salacious, do you think?’
Her mouth gaped as her mind spun. ‘I was right, wasn’t I? You…knew and you let it happen.’
‘I knew,’ he confirmed with zero inflection, as if he were confirming a menu selection. ‘Every step of the way.’ He shrugged. ‘I may have even eased your way just to see if you’d go through with it. Your commitment in the face of possible arrest was quite…something.’ Again his eyes seemed to sizzle over her, his brows pinching faintly before he shook his head, as if freeing himself from a thrall.
She swallowed, ignoring her own elevated temperature.Nowshe knew why it’d seemed so easy to saunter past all the checkpoints that should’ve been more rigorous. He’d been watching, the ultimate puppet master as she’d strung herself up. She experienced a futile nanosecond of unadulterated fury with him before she wised up.
This was no one’s fault but hers. Even if she actively detested hiswhere’s the fun in that?she’d willingly stepped into this trap. And, as she knew from years of torment at her father’s hand, it was entirely up to her how she dealt with it. Curling herself into a ball and wailing was not an option.
Slowly she straightened her no longer spasming leg, flexing it again to test that it was indeed cramp-free before she manoeuvred onto her knees. Just before she rose to her feet, something hot and lethal flashed in his eyes, but it was gone far too quickly to decipher its origin or purpose. ‘You said we have an hour before we land?’
He didn’t answer, but his eyes narrowed that extra fraction, warning her that whatever she was about to demand wouldn’t be well received.
She ploughed ahead because…she really had no choice. She hadn’t done all this to back down now. ‘That thing you said about the way I was reared…’ Her heart lurched and she almost lost the power of speech when his eyes turned several degrees more arctic. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong. Because, while not my blood relatives, your mother, Agnes—and Tolis when he wasalive—were more loving and generous to me than my own parent ever was. So, no, I wasn’trearedlike some wild and unruly farm animal, as you so insultingly implied, and…’
Vayle stuttered to a stop as the man before her turned into a statue. But, while his body froze, the complex mine of emotions cracked and fizzled through his eyes like the most devastating fireworks. The blood rushed from her head, making her stagger back one step, then another, until the back of her legs met the bed and she couldn’t retreat further.
Still caught in the vortex of his eyes, she watched him pivot to face the wardrobe that’d been her hiding place. And, with zero warning, Nelios Petralis dropped his towel.
She told herself her knees weakened because of the deadly currents flying through the air. And while that was very true—dear heaven, why had her words triggered such an intense reaction from him?—she didn’t even equivocate about her body’s searing response to being presented with the most visually magnificent man she’d ever seen. A man whose body belonged in the annals for mortal men and women to study those mile-wide shoulders and the muscles that moved beneath them; the olive-hued perfection of his skin; the tight glutes that formed his gloriously impressive ass; the tree-trunk legs that could down a lion with stupefying vigour.
This was a man who had zero compunction about being naked in front of her. Did he want to scandalise her, perhaps? No, Vayle concluded as her fists bunched in the high-thread-count sheets; she was almost certain that wasn’t the case.
The simple truth was that her words had triggered something in Nelios Petralis. Something so primal, raw and lethal, he’d momentarily acted purely on autopilot.
