For the first time in his very privileged life, he had found himself in a situation with a woman over which he’d had little control and he had been prepared to kick back and enjoy it. For someone to whom things had always come easy, he had even enjoyed the hard-to-get game she had played. Of course, he had not expected that the hard-to-get game would, in fact, lead nowhere in the end, but then how was he to know the woman he had been dealing with? She had left him with the ugly taste of disillusionment in his mouth and now here she was...
Wasn’t fate a thing of beauty?
‘You’re not interested in reliving our...exciting past. So, sell me your arguments... And, by the way, that’s one minute gone...’
Feeling that she had stepped into a nightmare, Chase opened the top file with trembling fingers. Of course she could understand that he was bitter and angry with her. And yet in her mind, when she had projected into a future that involved her accidentally running into him somewhere, his bitterness and anger had never been so deep, nor had he been vengeful. He could really hurt her, really undo all the work she had done to get where she had.
She began going over some of the old ground covered in the past three meetings she’d had with his underlings, and he inclined his head to one side with every semblance of listening, before interrupting her with a single slash of his hand.
‘You know, of course, that none of those obstructions hold water. You’re prevaricating and it won’t work.’
Chase involuntarily glanced at the clock on the wall and was incensed that the meeting—all the important things that had to be discussed, things that involved the lives of other people—had been sidelined by this unfortunate, unexpected and worrying collision with her past.
And yet she lowered her eyes and took in the taut pull of expensive trousers over his long legs, the fine, dark hair that liberally sprinkled his forearms... Not even the unspoken atmosphere of threat in his cool, dark eyes could detract from the chiselled perfection of his face. He had the burnished colour of someone of exotic blood.
When she had first laid eyes on him, she had been knocked sideways. He hadn’t beaten about the bush. He had noticed her, he said, had seen her sitting in the university canteen. She had instinctively known that he had been waiting for a predictable response. The response of a woman in the presence of a man who could have whoever he wanted, and he wanted her. She had also known that there was no way she could go there. That she should smile politely and walk away, because doing anything else would have been playing with fire. But still she had hesitated, long enough for him to recognise a mutual interest. Of course, it had always been destined to end badly, but she hadn’t been able to help herself.
She tightened her lips as she realised just how badly things could go now, all these years later.
‘Okay, so you may have all the legalities in place, but what do you think the press would make of a big, bad company rolling in and bulldozing a women’s shelter? The public has had enough of powerful people and powerful companies thinking that they can do exactly as they like.’ This had been her trump card but there was no hint of triumph in her voice as she pulled it out of the bag.
‘I have names here,’ she continued in the gathering silence, not daring to risk a glance at him. ‘Contacts with journalists and reporters who would be sympathetic to my cause...’ She shoved the paper across to him and Alessandro ignored it.
‘Are you threatening me?’ he asked in a tone of mild curiosity.
‘I wouldn’t call it threatening...’
‘No? Then what exactly would you call it?’
‘I’m exercising leverage.’ It had seemed an excellent idea at the time, but then she hadn’t banked on finding herself floundering in a situation she couldn’t have envisaged in a million years. His dark eyes focused on her face made her want to squirm and she knew that her veneer of self-confidence and complete composure was badly undermined by the slow tide of pink colour rising to her face. ‘If you buy the shelter in a cloud of bad publicity, whatever you put up there will be destined to fail. It’s quite a small community in that particular part of London. People will take sides and none of them will be on yours.’
‘I bet you thought that you’d bring that out from up your sleeve and my lawyers would scatter, because there is such a thing as bad publicity being worse than no publicity. It’s a low trick, but then I’m not surprised that you would resort to low tricks.’ He leaned forward, rested both arms on the shiny conference table and stared directly at her. ‘However, let’s just turn that threat on its head for a minute...’