There was no way he’d choose a “suitable woman.” Not in two months or two decades. There was no suitable woman for him. Like Ferruccio, he’d been a one-woman man. Unlike him, he’d blown his one shot on an illusion. After six years of being unable to muster the least interest in any other woman he was resigned to his condition.
Though he knew resigned wasn’t the word for it. Not when every time her memory sank its inky tentacles into his mind, his muscles felt as if they’d snap.
He braced himself until this latest attack passed….
A realization went off in his head like a solar flare.
All these years … he’d been going about it all wrong!
Fighting what he felt with every breath had been the worst thing he could have done. After he’d realized none of it was going away, he should have done the opposite. He should have let it run its course, until it was purged from his system.
But it didn’t matter that he hadn’t done that before. Now was the perfect time to do it. And to let all those still-seething emotions work to his advantage for once.
A smile tugged at his lips, fueled by what he hadn’t felt in six years, what he’d thought he’d never feel again. Excitement. Anticipation. Drive. Challenge.
All he needed now were some updates on Glory to use in this acquisition. He already had enough to make it a hostile takeover, but more leverage wouldn’t hurt.
Wouldn’t hurt him.
Now, her—that was a totally different story.
Glory Monaghan stared dazedly at her laptop screen.
She couldn’t be seeing this. An email from him.
She drew a shaky hand across numb lips, shock reverberating in her every nerve.
Slow down. Think. It must be an old one….
No. This was new. She’d deleted his old emails. Though she had only two months ago. And by accident, too.
Yep, for six years, those emails had migrated from one computer to another with all of her vital data. She hadn’t clicked a mouse to scrub her life clean of his degrading echoes. She hadn’t gotten rid of one shred of him. Not his scribbled notes, voice messages or anything he’d given her or left at her place.
It hadn’t been as pathetic as it sounded. It had been therapeutic. Educational. To analyze the mementos and the events associated with each, to familiarize herself further with the workings of the mind of a unique son of a bitch.
The lessons gained from such in-depth scrutiny had been invaluable. No one had ever come close to fooling her again. No one had come close again, period. No one had surprised her, let alone shocked her, since.
Leave it to that royal bastard to be the one to do it.
She resisted the urge to blink in hope that his email would disappear. She did squeeze her eyes, but opened them to find it still staring back at her. His unread message, somehow bolder and blacker than the other unread ones. As if taunting her.
The subject line read An Offer You Can’t Refuse.
Incredulity swept inside her like a tornado.
But wait! Why was she thinking it was an actual email from Vincenzo? Some spammer with some lewd scam must have hacked into his account. Yeah. That was it. With a subject line like that, this had to be the only explanation.
Still … it was strange that Vincenzo hadn’t deleted her from his list of contacts.
Whatever. This email belonged in the trash.
But before she emptied it, her hand froze on the button, an internal voice warning, Do that and go nuts wondering what that email was really all about.
Okay. She had to concede that point. Knowing herself, she wouldn’t be able to function today if she didn’t know for sure.
But what if she opened it, only to find some nasty surprise? In the name of her quest for peace of mind, she should delete the damn thing.
God. That bastard was reaching through time and space, tugging at her like a marionette. Just an email with an inflammatory subject line had her spiraling down a vortex of agitation as if she’d never exited it.
Maybe she never had. Maybe she’d only been bottling it up, pretending to be back to normal. Maybe she did need some blow to jolt her out of her simulated animation. Maybe if this was an email from him, it would trigger some true resolution so she’d bury his memory once and for all.
She clicked open the email.
Her gaze flew to the bottom. There was a signature. His. This was from him.
All the beats her heart had been holding back spilled out in a jumbled outpour. And that was before she read the two sentences that comprised the message.
I can send your family to prison for life, but I’m willing to negotiate. Be at my penthouse at 5:00 p.m., or I’ll turn the evidence I have in to the authorities.
At ten to five, Glory was on her way up to Vincenzo’s penthouse, déjà vu settling on her like a suffocating cloak.
Her dry-as-sand eyes panned around the elevator she’d once taken almost every day for six months. The memories felt like they belonged to someone else’s life.
Which wasn’t too far-fetched. She’d been someone else then. After a lifetime of devoting her every waking hour to excelling in her studies, she’d reached the ripe age of twenty-three with zero social skills and the emotional maturity of someone a decade younger. She’d been aware of that, but hadn’t had time to work on anything but her intellectual growth. She’d been determined she wouldn’t have the life her family had, one of precarious gambles and failed opportunity hunting. She’d wanted a life of stability.
She’d worked to that end since she’d been a teenager, forgoing the time dump others called a social life. And she’d believed she’d been achieving her goal, graduating at the top of her class and obtaining a master’s degree with the highest honors. Everyone had projected she’d rise to the top of her field.
But though she’d been confident her outstanding qualifications and recommendations would afford her a high-paying and prestigious job, she’d applied for a position in D’Agostino Developments not really expecting to get it. Not after she’d heard such stories about the man at the helm of the meteorically rising enterprise. In his corporation, Vincenzo D’Agostino had grueling standards. He interviewed and vetted even the mailroom staff. Then he had vetted her.
She still remembered every second of that fateful meeting that had changed her life.
His scrutiny had been denuding, his focus scorching, his questions rapid-fire and deconstructing. His influence had rocked her to her core, making her feel like a swooning moron as she’d sluggishly answered his brusque questions. But after only ten minutes, he’d risen, shaken her hand and given her a much more strategic position than she’d dared hope for, working at the highest level, directly with him.
She’d exited his office reeling at the shock of it all. She hadn’t known it was possible for a human being to be so beautiful, so overpowering. She hadn’t known a man could have her hot and wet just looking at her across a desk. She hadn’t even been interested in a man before, so the intensity of her desire after one meeting had had her in a free fall of confusion.
But while she’d gotten a job she’d thought impossible, she’d thought the real impossibility would be him. Even if he hadn’t had an absolute rule against mixing work and pleasure, she couldn’t imagine he’d be interested in someone like her. Cerebrally, she knew she was pretty, but a man like him had stunning and sophisticated women swarming all over him, and she’d certainly been neither. Something he’d confirmed when he kicked her out of his life.
She’d