Lexi’s office, such as it was, was far away from the main part of the estate and the manor house itself. She spent her days out in what had once been a carriage house, separated from the family and the estate’s hundreds of daily visitors as much as it was possible to be while still on the same property. Her cousins lived on the estate, of course—Gerard and his family ensconced in the residential wing of Worth Manor as befit the heir to everything, and Harry in one of the cottages where he could come and go and drink as he pleased. Neither one of them had ever shown the slightest interest in leaving home or exploring the world outside of a few years at university.
Philippa had been the only member of the family who’d wanted something—anything—different. She’d been nineteen when she’d died, filled with plans and dreams and a wild, unmanageable and overwhelming certainty about how beautiful her life was going to be if she could just start living it. She’d found her father tyrannical and the expectations placed on her as the only Worth daughter enervating.
More than that, she’d been kind and silly and fiercely loyal, and Lexi missed her. Every day.
Lexi reminded herself of Philippa when she was tempted to harbor dark thoughts about her uncle and cousins—something she tried to talk herself out of almost as soon as they occurred, because she thought it made her a very small person indeed if she allowed herself to be as ungrateful as she felt sometimes. Too often, in fact. Uncle Richard had been unduly kind to her when she was nothing to him but a niece he hardly knew, who he could easily have written off the way he had her mother.
Richard had never approved of his challenging and problematic sister Yvonne’s marriage to unreliable partier Scott Haring. Much less the desperate, squalid life his sister went on to lead with a man so weak and fatally flawed. And yet there he’d been the day Lexi’s parents had finally succumbed to their addictions, ready to scoop her up and give her a life.
Of course she was grateful for that. She would always be grateful for that.
And on the days it was hard to feel grateful while she did the work her cousins and uncle blew off, again, and then repaired to her grotty little flat while they lounged about in luxury, it was helpful to remind herself that Philippa would have viewed everything about Lexi’s life as a grand adventure. Literally everything. The bedsit in a neighborhood where Lexi could come and go anonymously and as she pleased. The commute to work on buses and along streets filled with regular Londoners going about their regular lives. These were things Philippa, raised in a very specific sort of high society bubble, catered to and sheltered in turn, would have found nothing short of magical.
Even this, Lexi thought as she heard the carriage house door open and shut again with rather more force than usual, and then the secretary’s startled gasp as punctuation.
She knew exactly who’d arrived to face her at last, with no American courts or attorneys or bailiffs to keep her safe from him. Not even the marginal, grudging support of her uncle and cousins. Not this time.
It was finally happening, after the gnawing worry of the past decade and the wild panic of the past few weeks.
Her worst nightmare was coming true at last.
Atlas was here.
She heard the heavy, obviously male tread of his feet in the hall outside her door. Was it her imagination, or did he sound as if he was made of stone? As if he’d really and truly turned into the monster they’d made him—she’d made him—after all his years away?
And now that it was finally happening, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Should she stand? Remain seated? Hide in her cramped little coat closet and wait for him to go away—delaying the inevitable?
She knew what she wanted to do, and glanced at her closet as if she might dive for it. But Lexi had never had the option to hide herself away from the unpleasant things in life. That was what happened when a girl was left to raise herself while her parents chased dragons wherever they led, which was never anywhere good. And it was what happened when she was then brought to live with a new family who treated her well enough, in the sense that they provided for her, but never, ever let her imagine that she was one of them.
But that veered toward ungrateful, she told herself as steadily as she could when the world was ending. And she wasn’t ungrateful. She couldn’t be.
Because then she’d be no better than her lost mother. And she’d spent her whole life trying her best to be nothing at all like Yvonne Worth Haring, once a sparkling heiress with the world at her feet, who’d died in squalor like any other junkie.
Lexi refused to start down that path, and she knew—she remembered too vividly—that the road to her mother’s hell was liberally paved with ingratitude and all of it aimed straight at her uncle.
The heavy tread stopped outside her door and her heart pounded at her, so hard it made her feel dizzy. Lexi was suddenly glad she’d stayed in her seat, tucked up behind the narrow desk she used because a full-size desk wouldn’t have fit in the small room. She wasn’t sure her legs would have held her upright.
And she was having enough trouble keeping her heart from clawing its way out from behind her ribs without adding a collapse to the situation.
The door swung open, slow and ominous, and then he was there.
Right there.
Right here, she thought wildly, panic and dread exploding into something else, something sharper and all too familiar, as she sat there, struck dumb, unable to do anything but stare back at him.
Atlas.
Here.
He filled up the door to her tiny office with rather more brawn and heft than she remembered. He’d always been sculpted and athletic, of course. It was one of the reasons he’d been so beloved all over Europe in his heyday, and hadn’t exactly helped her with the red-faced longing she’d tried so hard to hide. Another reason Europe had adored him was his epic rise from nothing and the power he’d gathered along the way—but Lexi thought his inarguable male beauty had helped that fascination along.
It had been difficult for her to get past way back when. It still was.
She recalled every inch of him, even if memory had muted him a little. In person he was bright, hot, unmistakable. That bold nose that made his profile so intense. The belligerent jaw and curiously high cheekbones that should have canceled each other out but instead came together to make him a little too extraordinary for her poor, overtaxed heart.
He’d had all that ten years ago. He had it all still, though it was all...different, somehow. He was still beautiful, certainly, male and hard and clearly as lethal as he was mouthwateringly handsome. But it was a harder and more intense sort of beauty today. A storm rather than a work of art.
As altered as he was.
Lexi felt as if his hands were wrapped tight around her neck, holding her breath for her. This close to doing exactly what she’d accused him of doing ten years ago.
Any second now, she’d start to choke...but not yet. She was frozen solid. Panicked from her head to her feet and unable to do a single thing but stare at him, the apparition from her own personal hell.
Atlas stood in the door to her office and filled it up, all flashing black eyes and that pugilistic set to his brutal jaw. He wore a dark, obviously bespoke suit that clung to his shoulders and made her far too aware of their size and sculpted, muscled width. As if he could not only bear the weight of the world on them if he chose, he could block it out, as well. He was doing that now.
He had always had that rough, impossible magnetism. It had rolled from him wherever he went, making the hair on the back of Lexi’s neck stand up straight whenever he’d been near. Making it hard to breathe when he entered a room. Making her so aware of him that it was like a body ache.
The ache had kept her awake some nights, tucked away beneath the eaves in the manor house, where she’d lived in the servant’s quarters and had been expected to