Chapter 1
Claire
“You’re a witch, Claire. A spiteful, vengeful, hag. I wish I
had never met you.”
Claire rolled her eyes in the face of the insults. It was hard
to believe that this defeated, angry man with the salt-and-
pepper hair and the purple smudges under his eyes, the
dishevelled clothes and the few days’ worth of patchy beard
growth had once been someone she held close to her heart in
few ways she ever let anyone in.
Robert Watt was a classic example of why it paid to never
let anyone get close.
Her righthand woman—Claire still privately found it
amusing to call Jenny that in her head—snarled from the
corner of Claire’s office. Half personal secretary, half
bodyguard, Jenny defined the phrase good things come in
small packages. Also, mean things. Highly trained in the arts
of defense and fighting, as well as brilliant, Jenny was one of
the very few people Claire did still believe in trusting. The
woman was probably ex-military, but if she was, she’d
managed to keep her past hidden like a blank slate, and after
seeing her capabilities at the job interview, Claire hadn’t dug
any further.
“You’re hardly in a spot to be hurling stones,” Claire shot
back. Her voice was perfectly neutral, and she let none of the
disgust she felt for Robert show. “And I’m sure that’s not true.
If you’d never met me, you wouldn’t be where you are now.
Or were. Because you were on top of the world, but now
you’re here. You just asked me to save you from the mess of
your own making. You’re here. Grovelling. And then you
insult me in the next breath?” She shook her head. “Manners,
Robert. Where are your manners?”
Robert threw a hand up to the back of his neck and
squeezed hard, like he could will himself back into control.
That was part of Robert’s problem. He had a terrible temper
and it showed itself, snapping and snarling like a two-headed
beast, so often that every single person in New York, Los
Angeles, Miami, London, Paris, and Milan knew about it. And