Читать книгу Ruthless Revenge: Priceless Proposal - Emily McKay, Margaret Way - Страница 15
ОглавлениеTHEY WERE JUST an hour away from landing in a private airstrip in New York. Finally, Clio gathered enough nerve to switch on her tablet and opened a search engine.
More than once, her fingers slipped on the smooth surface. Tension turned her shoulders into stiff rods as she finally typed Stefan’s name.
Because he would be at the center of all this, he was the one whose coattails she would be riding through the storm they were unleashing.
Her heart hammered in her throat as the video file played again and she saw Stefan’s body enveloping her protectively even as they were lost in each other.
It spoke to the man she had known once.
Closing the video file, she scrolled down and froze at the title.
Bianco’s Redhead Is None Other than Clio Norwood, New York Financier Jackson Smith’s Fiancée of Three Years.
There was no end to the questions posed, to the number of links to other articles. No end to how the media talked about it as though it was a win on Stefan’s part that he had landed her. As though she was a prize and not a woman with feelings and emotions.
How did Stefan Bianco steal Clio Norwood from under the nose of Jackson Smith?
How long has the affair been going on? Is it serious?
Which Man Will Clio Norwood Choose in the End? one headline read, giving Clio at least the illusion of power over her own choices.
Even having been prepared for it, anger, disbelief and frustration and so many more emotions ran through Clio.
Bianco’s Redhead... God!
Clio laughed so hard that her jaw hurt, her eyes pooled. She took the tissue that Stefan patiently extended and wiped her face.
There was a relief in realizing she had seen the worst, and lived to tell it.
Stefan gazed at her with a stunned expression in his eyes. “Clio, why you are smiling?”
Clio pointed to the tablet and shrugged. “Bianco’s Blonde has so much more zing, don’t you think?” She fingered her hair and pulled it forward. “Maybe I will dye it.”
Leaning forward in a movement that jammed the breath in her throat, he caught the thick strands between his fingers, a reverent expression in his gaze. Instant tension wove around them, thick and charged.
“No, bella,” he said, his words a rough command that would brook no argument.
Wrapping the silky locks around two of his fingers, he turned them around and around, tugging her forward.
There was a feral quality to his gaze as it turned to her, a possessiveness that drenched her in heat. “Do not dare to change a strand of it, Clio. Whatever transformation you think you need, I forbid you to ruin something so glorious.”
The sight of his hair-roughened wrists handling her hair sent a tremor through her. As did the inherent command in his tone. There was nothing about him that didn’t cause Clio to lose her breath, that didn’t make her feel as though she would combust if he didn’t touch her.
But if he did, if she let him explore this heat between them, as every tingling inch of her wanted to, there would be nothing left.
And his eviscerating brand of friendship was the only precious thing left to her.
“We can’t keep doing this, Stefan,” she said, her words hoarse and uneven, completely opposite to how she wanted to sound. “I...can’t think straight when you touch me and I need everything I have to deal with Jackson.”
The magnitude of her admission hung in the air around them but she would rather face the attraction between them than pretend it wasn’t always there.
Slowly, he unwound his fingers around her hair. Disappointment and fury wreathed his features until inch by inch, he pushed them out of his face. “How do you suggest we pretend to be engaged without touching each other, Clio? If you’re weak enough to call the thing off because you can’t—”
“I don’t think it’s weak to acknowledge a weakness.” She held his gaze steadily. “To pretend in front of the world and even our friends, it’s one thing. But I don’t want anything else to muddy our relationship.”
“It worked perfectly for us this time, but it won’t happen again, sì.”
Rubbing a hand over her tummy, Clio nodded jerkily.
When he met her gaze again, it was impassive, in control. And Clio almost bought it. But now that she had tasted the heat of his kiss, saw him smile and argue with Rocco, she knew it was only a hardened facade.
Stefan still felt as passionately as he had done a decade ago. Only now, all that firestorm of emotion and passion was buried under a coldly ruthless will.
And it twisted her gut that that well of passion, all that love he had to give, would never see the light of day again.
His ready acceptance suddenly threw her even though it was what she wanted. What she needed.
“Anything else, Clio?”
“I won’t be made a fool of again, Stefan. Not even in a pretend relationship.”
“I do not understand.”
Heat crept up her neck and she pointed to the tablet, images of him with other women accompanied with captions like predatory playboy in capital letters.
Stefan changed girlfriends like she did her clothes. And their kiss, it had made her feel more alive than she had in years.
Two different facts and both she needed to accept without giving it more weight.
“You are never without a woman.”
Something devilish gleamed in his gaze. “You still have me lost, bella. Say it in words I can understand, Clio. You forget that English is not my language.”
She was not a prude. But thinking of Stefan and sex in the same sentence sent a burst of heat through her belly that she didn’t even begin to know how to handle.
He knew how uncomfortable she was talking about this and yet he was goading her.
“What are you going to do for sex, Bianco?” she said, gritting her jaw, daring him to laugh at her now.
He did it anyway, but it was an indulgent smile that cut grooves through his cheeks. Her fingers itched to trace them, to feel the stubble on his cheek.
“Was that so hard?”
“No.” She returned his smile, feeling as if they were on equal footing again. “You haven’t answered me, though.”
“I will not take up a woman on the side while all this is going on, sì? You have my word, bella. And I’m sure a few months of deprivation won’t kill me. If I do get desperate, I have two very capable hands,” he said, holding them up, his expression deadpan.
Blushing at how quickly her mind supplied an image of him, naked, Clio threw her purse at him. “Too much information, Bianco.”
He waggled his brows at her and, shaking her head at that lewd expression, she laughed.
“You have such a beautiful laugh, Clio. You should do it more.”
Struck speechless by his abrupt observation, Clio nodded.
“We’ll be landing in an hour,” he said, tilting his head toward the New York skyline emerging through the clouds and visible through the windows. “Have you started looking at Jackson’s documents? Do you require help?”
“No, I can do it myself,” Clio replied, just hearing Jackson’s name making her feel dirty from the inside. “I have downloaded and printed every document pertaining to his finances and his hedge fund company. There isn’t a single number or transaction that I don’t have a hard copy of. But I haven’t seen anything yet, Stefan. Are you sure—”
“He’s dirty? Yes. I’ll bet my entire fortune on that.”
Leaning back against the seat, he propped one ankle over the other knee. Clasped his hands behind his head, causing his white dress shirt to stretch tight against that wide chest. “Keep looking, bella.”
“It’s fascinating. For example, did you know that when—”
“So you still have a thing for numbers,” he drawled softly.
“And you’re still the only man in the world that can make that sound dirty.”
“Now that you have me locked in with no relief in sight, I have to find my pleasure where I can,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
Clio looked away from him, feeling the heat of his gaze like a caress, praying that she didn’t fall apart before she had a chance to be whole again.
Because this time there would not even be pieces of her heart and self-respect left.
Leaning forward, he tugged her left hand into his. She barely managed a gasp as the diamond ring slid in smooth and cold against her skin.
Her heart slammed against her rib cage. Instant refusal rose to her lips. But she held it off as she caught Stefan’s expression.
Distaste, and something else, something she didn’t even want to know, glimmered in his eyes.
Was he remembering Serena just as she was thinking of Jackson?
That day in the flat, she had removed the heavy, over-the-top diamond that Jackson had bought for her. Had finally felt free after so long.
Eyeing the ring, she willed herself to calm down. This was only a pretense, something she was walking into with her head screwed on right.
At least it was something that was close to her own taste—the most beautifully cut diamond, in a princess setting.
Her gaze flew to Stefan, who watched her with an intensity that arrested her thought process.
“Stefan, thank you...for everything. I—”
“Not required, bella. Do not, even for a moment, believe I’m doing you a favor or that there’s anything personal to all this. You have your side of the bargain and I have mine to keep up.”
While she grappled with his ruthless warning, he leaned forward and unbuckled her belt. “We will see Jackson tonight at a party, Clio. I made sure he can’t get to you before the evening. But obviously he will be foaming at the mouth to see you and to challenge me. He will make a scene, bella, and if I’m right about Jackson, it’s going to get dirty.
“Do you have what it takes to face him, Clio?”
“And if I don’t want to?”
“Then I will drag you with me anyway. Jackson needs to be stopped and I won’t get an opportunity like this again.”
The utter ruthlessness with which he said it stunned Clio. Every time she thought she knew him, he surprised her again. Once again, she wondered why Stefan despised Jackson so much.
But with a self-preservation instinct she should have had long before this, she didn’t prod him. For some reason, understanding what drove Stefan was a territory she didn’t want to go into. So she reassured him of her own intentions. “I’ll never want him back in my life, Stefan. This week has helped me see more than just Jackson’s betrayal.
“I’ll need you to stand by me tonight, but yes, I’m ready to take Jackson on.”
For once, there were no doubts in his gaze as it swept over her face searchingly. And Clio measured her progress in that green gaze, felt a small flicker of hope for herself.
“You have me, bella. For as long as you want.”
The moment Stefan helped her out of the limo onto the private estate in the Hamptons where the night’s party was, Clio heard the exponential rise in the intensity of the charged atmosphere.
Flashes of cameras and microphones were thrust in their faces from behind ropes. Their names seemed like a chant on a hundred lips.
Jackson had always been a media favorite, too.
Handsome, hardworking, successful—the perfect poster boy for America’s success stories. Or at least that was the image he had liked to project.
But the crowd that the security team was trying to corral tonight was like nothing Jackson had ever warranted.
Clutching the ring on her finger like a lifeline, Clio fisted and unfisted her hands as security guards ushered them inside the mansion through the throng.
“Mr. Bianco, are you seeing Ms. Norwood now?”
“Ms. Norwood, is it true you and Mr. Bianco were college sweethearts at Columbia?”
“Have you left Jackson Smith for Mr. Bianco? Or is it his bigger and better status and wealth that lured you in?”
She almost slipped until Stefan caught her hand in his and shielded her with his body. There was no end to the relentless questions, no lower depth that they could attribute to her motives.
Gritting her jaw, Clio followed Stefan’s lead until one bold reporter shot out a hand and blocked Stefan’s path.
“Give us one sentence, Mr. Bianco. Is Ms. Norwood just one of your usual arm candies or is there anything special about her?”
Stefan stilled and took in the crowd around them with a sly smile. Tugging her to his side, he wrapped an arm around her waist until she was plastered to him.
Something glittered in his gaze as he looked at her and a hundred flashes went on again to capture that mesmerizing look.
His gaze was molten fire, his mouth a study in sensuality.
Every inch of Clio gathered into a trembling ball at that heated look. He raised her hand to his face and kissed her knuckles, making sure the diamond on her finger caught the glare of every flash.
He played them so well.
Clio shivered uncontrollably. Gathering her against him, Stefan absorbed the tremors as if his solid, hard body was made for the very purpose of cushioning her and her emotions.
“After all these years, it didn’t take us long to realize how perfect we are for each other. Ms. Norwood has done me the honor of agreeing to marry me, yes. And whoever else has been in her life until now, it’s me she’s walking to the altar with,” he announced, possessiveness and pride dripping with each word, a flash of his Sicilian temperament wreathing his face.
It was all an act, Clio reminded herself, a perfectly orchestrated one by a man who wanted to hit his opponent where it would hurt.
The crowd went ballistic at the direct cut aimed toward Jackson. Her breath balling in her throat, she clung to Stefan’s hard frame to stop from being mobbed with more questions.
She knew she should speak up, she knew that she was remaining calm just as she had done with Jackson. But for the life of her, she couldn’t utter a word through the tightness in her chest.
She couldn’t help but wish, with a powerless fury, that time would turn back.
Before Stefan had changed and before she had let herself be lost. Before life had woken them up to the gritty reality of it all.
“Mr. Bianco, will you settle down in New York now that your betrothed is here?”
“Will you make New York the base of operations for Bianco Luxury Real Estate?”
For the first time that evening, Clio saw a momentary doubt shadow Stefan’s gaze.
His grip over her wrist tightened into a vise and she gasped.
Instantly, it loosened but he didn’t break his stride to answer their questions this time.
* * *
Clio made it through most of the evening with herself intact. Of course, she had to remind herself more than a few times that what she and Stefan were putting on was an act.
Because it was intoxicating to be in the company of a man who didn’t belittle anyone to prove his own worth, a man who could acknowledge the value of a competitor, a man whose confidence and self-belief was so bone deep that it was enthralling to watch for someone like her who had lost all sense of herself.
And because of their genuinely shared history, it was doubly easy to slip into the role of a loving fiancée, to finish each other’s sentences, to laugh at a shared joke without having to communicate.
They fit together too well, as he had noted. More than one conservative businessman, some Stefan claimed had never liked him previously, dropped by to congratulate and backslap him.
To tell him in obvious terms that he had made a fantastic choice by finally giving up his playboy ways and turning into a family man.
His brows rose, he laughed as his cell phone continued to chime with calls from his board members from all over the globe.
The worst part of the evening was standing by him without betraying the shiver that went through her when he casually touched her every other minute.
A hand on her waist, a kiss on her cheek, the intimate way he pushed a strand of hair that had slipped from its knot behind her ear, the way his long fingers lingered over her nape, sometimes dipping lower, sometime pressing into the very spot on her shoulders where she was getting stiff.
The chemistry that they had discovered in Athens seemed only to grow exponentially even under the most innocent of touches.
It thrilled her and scared her equally.
Excusing herself, she made her way to the buffet table. Determined to look her best tonight, and at Stefan’s urging, which was the nicest way to put his high-handed arranging of her day, Clio had spent most of the day lazing in the ultraluxurious spa at the Chatsfield, nibbling cucumber slices and drinking kale juice that had her looking supersuave in her designer dress—again arranged for her by her arrogant “fiancé”—but that had also left her on edge with hunger.
A migraine was looming, she was sure, and she wanted to stop it before it got worse.
She was about to grab a plate when her nape prickled, and a familiar scent sent her gut twisting into the most painful knot. She cast a look around and realized Jackson had her cornered.
“I didn’t think you had it in you to lure someone of Bianco’s stature. Fool me, huh, Clio?”
Nastiness dripped from every word Jackson uttered. But Clio held off the impulse to instantly scan the crowd for Stefan.
This had begun with Stefan at her side, true, but it was high time she looked after herself. Squaring her shoulders, she turned around.
His mouth curling, Jackson swept his blue gaze over her with such disdain that sweat pooled over her skin.
“Don’t make a scene, Jackson.”
“Oh, come on, Clio. After that entrance, after that clip of you crawling all over him out there for the world to see...after you jumped into his bed without even telling me we’re through, you disgust me.”
That he could think all that of her, that he could say it to her face stunned Clio.
“You’re the one who’s been fooling me for months,” she said, unable to curb the words from falling out of her mouth. All the warnings she had given herself about not betraying what she had seen flew out. Her throat felt like there was glass stuck in it and she had to remind herself that it was not her shame.
“God, you had sex with Ashley and you laughed at me with her.”
Something like shame filled his gaze, and was gone in a nanosecond, a calculating look emerging in his features. “So that’s what this is about? Payback? You think you’ll dangle yourself on his arm and make me sorry for what I did? You think I’ll come running back to you and beg for forgiveness?”
His gaze took in her designer dress, her upswept hair, the diamond on her finger as if he was cataloging everything about her.
Venomous satisfaction filled his gaze. “Of course it is. Why else would a red-blooded Sicilian like Bianco, who’s known to never date a woman for more than a week, want to marry you of all the women on the planet?”
For the first time since she had heard the sound of him shamelessly shagging his assistant, Clio was filled with molten fury unlike she had ever known.
It was cleansing, it was invigorating and it burned any remaining doubt that somehow, it had been her fault.
She had done nothing wrong except for trusting a deceptive man with not an ounce of honor.
“You have pushed me beyond my limits already but be careful what you say about him. Stefan already doesn’t have much of an opinion about you.”
“You stupid whore,” he spat out, fear and something else shaking his well-muscled frame. “Can’t you see he’s just using you to get to me?”
They were drawing looks, she was aware of it as if there was another version of her scanning the room. Years of breeding and her own nature cringed at being amidst a spectacle, recoiled at being the center of attention. But she was damned if she let Jackson intimidate her, too, on top of everything else he had done.
“Don’t you dare take another step forward, Jackson.”
Something in her tone must have registered because he stopped, his mouth still wearing that nasty curl. “The minute he realizes you’re of no use to him, just as you weren’t to me, he’s going to dump your ass.
“He’s no more going to marry you than I did in three years. And when he does dump you, when he moves on to brighter and better pastures, I’ll still be here to laugh at you, Clio.
“You’re nothing but a crutch to be used.”
The knowing smile on his lips, the sneering tone of his words, the decided gleam in his eyes that there was nothing valuable about her to any man, the echo of her darkest fear that no man would ever love her for herself and not her name—it unleashed a firestorm in Clio.
She wanted to roar at Jackson, she wanted to raise her hand and slap the sneer off his mouth.
But he didn’t even deserve her anger.
Lifting her head high, she gave him an imperious look that cut him to size. “Be prepared to lose, Jackson. Everything,” she said loudly, glad that she sounded steady, confident.
She could not let him ruin what was left of her life in the city that she loved so much. She would not let him run her out of New York on a wave of scandal and shame. She could not let him still have so much power over her life, her happiness.
Even if it meant taking the biggest gamble she had ever risked in her life, even if it meant tying her fate to the one man who could help her become whole again, even if he did it by shredding her to pieces.
“You’ll be glad that you’re the first one to hear this. Stefan and I are going to be married in a week. Here in New York, at the Chatsfield. And you know what, Jackson? You’re invited.”
* * *
Dio, no!
Clio hadn’t just said that.
Standing at the back of the crowd that was hungrily lapping up the exchange between Clio and that scum, Jackson, Stefan stood rooted to the spot, a hundred different emotions crashing and derailing him from inside.
It felt eerily like that moment when Serena had callously and without even an ounce of emotion told him that she was done with him, that she had no use for him without his parents’ fortune.
In just a minute, he had lost everything—his parents’ respect and trust and love, the woman he had given up everything for, and the worst, his belief in his judgment, his emotions, in his self-worth.
His entire world had collapsed.
Her shoulders ramrod straight, her eyes breathing green fire, her small breasts falling and rising, her skin glowing with anger—it was the Clio he had admired and lusted after a decade ago.
She was spectacular to behold, truly an equal to goddess Athena at that moment as she battled the obvious fear that shadowed her gaze.
But even above the fierce pride and admiration he felt on her behalf for finally putting Jackson in his place was the most insidiously ugly and eviscerating thought he had ever faced.
Her boldness in so publicly and irrevocably announcing their wedding in a week...
Had this been her plan all along? Had the distrust and fragility in her eyes, the way she had trembled under his lips, the shadow of the woman that made him want to protect her from everything, had it all been an act?
The minute the thought erupted, Stefan felt acidic distaste flood his mouth. Cursing, he drove his fist into the pillar next to him, attempting to ground himself, struggling to contain his volatile emotions and his mind’s poisonous thoughts.
Dio, he didn’t want to think along either lines about Clio. And yet the distrust in him was bone deep.
Even as he hated that she was changing his life, even as he couldn’t get a handle on his suspicions, he knew how much making a life here meant to her, knew how much she loved this city.
Reminded himself of the desperate courage that had shone in her eyes when she had shown up at his suite.
Running a hand along his brow, he looked back at her.
Jackson was nowhere to be seen and she was surrounded by well-wishers.
A little of the color was back in her cheeks as her gaze swept through the hall, looking for him.
She had more than surprised him, true. But she couldn’t be allowed to indulge in it again, couldn’t be allowed to warrant this much emotion from him—whether surprise or fury or this want for her that was becoming a force he couldn’t fight.
If she wanted him to marry her, there was only one way that he could do it.
