‘Ye-es…’ Ruth’s hesitant reply had Ashley wincing in immediate understanding.
‘Let me guess—but not the CEO?’
‘The CEO usually is a necessary casualty in these takeovers,’ Ruth admitted. ‘I’m sorry, Ashley.’
‘It’s okay.’ Ashley straightened, squaring her shoulders. ‘I can take it,’ she stated, even though she wasn’t sure she could. Infinite Innovations had been her entire life, her life’s blood for the last four years. Could she really walk away from it all?
It seemed as if she’d have to.
‘As long as everyone else gets to stay,’ she finished, and Ruth smiled sorrowfully.
‘Like I said, maybe it won’t be as bad as we think.’
‘And maybe Nico Galletti will ride in on a unicorn,’ Ashley quipped. She’d learned the hard way not to hope for happy endings. The only thing she could do was take the hard knocks on the chin and then do her best to stay standing. And if she could convince Nico Galletti to keep on everyone else but her… Well, she’d count that as a victory.
Ruth glanced at her watch. ‘Ten minutes until D-Day. Shall I leave you to your ablutions?’ She gestured wryly to the stick of deodorant in Ashley’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ Ashley replied. ‘And Ruth, whatever happens…thank you for everything.’
Ruth shook her head as her eyes turned glassy. ‘Don’t set me off,’ she warned.
Ashley laughed, the sound ending on a trembling note. ‘You’ll setmeoff,’ she warned, and the two women hugged briefly before Ruth headed back to her own office.
Alone, Ashley stared unseeingly out of the window for a few minutes at the concrete haze of midtown Manhattan. She had no idea what Nico Galletti wanted and, more importantly, how she should approach him. Coldly polite and professional? Come out swinging, to keep from being at a disadvantage? What shewouldn’tdo, Ashley resolved as her lips pressed together in a hard line, was beg or bend over backwards, especially not for a man. She’d done that for far too much of her life already, and those years hadn’t just been wasted but had been incredibly, intensely damaging.
Starting Infinite Innovations had helped her to get her life, her veryself, back on track, and that was something she would never let anyone take away from her…not even Nico Galletti. Not if she could help it.
Nico Galletti eyed the unprepossessing brick building on the edge of midtown from the confines of his blacked-out limo, his lip curling in disdain. Either Ashley Woodward had fallen onveryhard times or he was in the wrong place. The last time he’d been in a Woodward building, it had been all soaring spaces, sleek marble and endless chrome, right in the beating heart of midtown. This place looked as if it needed a serious refurb—or to be condemned.
‘Mr Galletti?’ his driver asked when Nico hadn’t moved. ‘Is this the right place?’
‘I believe so.’ Nico eyed the building once more. ‘I won’t be too long,’ he informed the driver. ‘Fifteen minutes, at most.’ He intended to deliver the news and then make a quick, satisfied exit. He wasn’t a cruel man. He didn’t need to witness Ashley Woodward’stotaldownfall. Informing her of it would be satisfaction enough. Admittedly, it was a pity Woodward himself wouldn’t be there to enjoy hearing how his daughter’s company was about to be dismantled like an old rust-bucket of a car, but Nico would settle for telling the treacherous woman to her face.
For a second, he let himself picture Ashley Woodward as he last remembered her—eighteen years old and unbearably icy, jade-green eyes narrowed in disdain, blonde hair held back in an elegant chignon with a few platinum tendrils framing a heart-shaped faced exquisite in its beauty. And as cold and unfeeling as if made out of marble.
Oh, yes, he remembered Woodward’s daughter. Remembered how she’d turned away from him when her father had staged the melodrama of his arrest, as if she’d beenboredby the fact that the young man she’d flirted with moments ago, the man she’d tempted, teased andkissed, was about to be arrested. The utter injustice of it still burned, an acid corroding his stomach and crawling up his throat.
It was an injustice he’d spent the last sixteen years doing his damnedest to right, and here was the culmination. What was left of Woodward Investments—the company that had completely destroyed his life, his family—was about to be destroyed in turn. Thankfully, revenge was a dish best served cold, and this one was icy indeed, but just as sweet. Nico knew he would look forward to Ashley Woodward’s dismayed surprise and dawning horror as much as he would have her feckless father’s—maybe even more.
Chase Woodward had already had his comeuppance and was now serving twenty years in federal prison for tax fraud and embezzlement. Ashley might have escaped unscathed fromthatscandal, but she wouldn’t from this one. By the end of the day, she’d have nothing but memories of dear old Daddy to keep her warm at night. Nico would make sure of it.
With that thought causing his mouth to curve in a cold smile, he exited his limousine and strode towards the building. Infinite Innovations was on the twelfth floor, although once upon a time Woodward Investments had had its own building ofthirtyfloors, in one of the most desirable sections of Manhattan. Nico still recalled the cramped cubicle he’d been given when he’d been just twenty years old, desperate and determined to work his way up.
Woodward had promised him so much.
‘Work hard and youwillbe promoted,’ he’d told him with that glinting smile that had seemed so trustworthy. ‘I reward hard work and honesty and with you, Nico, I like what I see.’ He’d clapped him hard on the shoulder, a man-to-man gesture that, at his young age, Nico had especially appreciated. ‘You’re going to go far, my boy. Trust me.’
Trust me. The words echoed through Nico’s mind now as he walked through the unprepossessing foyer and then stepped into the lift. Chase Woodward had destroyed his life deliberately, strategically, luring Nico in with all those false promises: pretending to take a paternal interest; always so friendly and encouraging; nodding along to his ideas so that, for the first time in his life, Nico had felt as if he could finally make a difference.
Every aspect of that evil charade tormented him now, mocking him with his own shameful and humiliating naivety for trusting a man who had only wanted to use him as a stooge. To flirt with his daughter, and not just flirt, butbeg.
Well, he’d vowed never to be so naïve again. Never to be so trusting, and certainly not with a Woodward—anyWoodward.
The lift doors opened and Nico stepped out into a modest and even shabby foyer, with none of the glamour or bling he remembered from Woodward Investments, where every element had been a deliberate and ostentatious display of wealth. Here, everything was of decent, if not precisely good, quality: a couple of ergonomic chairs in black leather; a single picture on the wall; a photograph of space with a scattering of stars across an endless night, and a framed vision statement beneath that Nico didn’t bother to read. He didn’t care how worthy Infinite Innovations purported to be. It was about to be reduced to nothing more than a closed file on someone’s computer.
In any case, Nico didn’t trust Infinite Innovations’ supposedly worthy aims. Chase Woodward had sold his financial firm as ‘cutting-edge investments for the innovative opportunist’, but in the end he’d been the only opportunist, and a complete scammer at that. Many of the investments he’d touted as ‘cutting edge’ had only existed on paper. The fact that Ashley Woodward’s company also purported to champion suchinfinite innovationshad made Nico even more cynical.
Like father, like daughter…in so many ways.
