THE WORST FINALLY happened on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon in the middle of a gray and sullen British spring.
It wasn’t as if Lexi Haring hadn’t been expecting it. They’d all been on tenterhooks since the news had come in. After all these years—and all the appeals that the Worth family solicitors had assured everyone were nothing but noise right up until the very end—Atlas Chariton was a free man.
Not just free. Innocent.
Lexi had watched the press conference he’d given, right there in front of the American prison where he’d been serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole for the murder that DNA evidence at his last appeal trial had conclusively proved he didn’t commit. He’d been released the same day.
She hadn’t been able to turn away from a single moment of the breathless coverage, if she was honest, and not only because every channel was showing the press conference live.
“I’ve maintained my innocence from the start,” Atlas had said in that dark, powerful voice of his that had seemed to come straight through the screen, the English he spoke with both a British accent and that hint of his native Greek as richly mysterious to her ears as ever. He’d had the same effect on her he always had. He filled the small bedsit Lexi counted herself lucky to have in her shabby West London neighborhood. It was a long bus ride plus ten minutes’ brisk walk to the Worth estate where she worked, thanks to her uncle’s continuing kindness to her. And even if she sometimes felt her uncle wasn’t all that kind, she kept it to herself and tried to remind herself of that luck. “I am delighted to be proved so beyond any possible remaining doubt.”
Atlas looked older, which was only to be expected, though no gray had dared yet invade that thick black hair of his that threatened to curl at any moment. The stark ferocity that had always been there on his face and stamped into the long, lean lines of his body was more evident now, eleven years after he’d first been arrested. It made his black eyes gleam. It made his cruel mouth seem even harsher and more brutal.
He made Lexi shiver the way he always had done, though he was all the way on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Her heart kicked at her the way it always had when he was near. And it was as if he was aiming that pitiless midnight stare directly at her, straight through the television cameras.
She thought he was. Of course he was.
She had no doubt that he knew perfectly well that she was watching.
It reminded her of the way he’d glared at her a decade ago, when she’d been eighteen and overwhelmed and had stuttered every time her gaze had clashed with his across that overheated, airless courtroom on Martha’s Vineyard. And yet she’d still somehow managed to choke out the testimony that had damned him.
She could still remember every word she’d said. She could taste each one on her tongue, bitter and thick.
She remembered too much of that time. The intense pressure her uncle and cousins had put on her to testify when she hadn’t wanted to—when she’d been desperate to believe there was another explanation. That there had to be another explanation.
And the way Atlas had watched her in that stony, furious silence when she’d broken down on the stand and admitted she couldn’t think of one.
“What will you do now?” a reporter had asked him outside the prison.
Atlas’s mouth had curved, lethal and cold, more dangerous than the sharpest knife. Lexi had felt it deep in her belly as if he’d thrust it into her, steel edge to hard hilt. No one could possibly mistake it for a smile, surely. No one could miss the fact it was a weapon.
It was her curse that even now, even after everything that had happened, he was the only man alive who made her heart skip a beat, then pound, long and low.
“I will live my life,” Atlas had said, dark and sure, a terrible promise. “At last.”
Lexi had known what that meant. What was coming as surely as night followed day. Her uncle Richard had hemmed and hawed and blustered rather than face the subject head-on, but she thought he’d known, too. Her cousins Gerard and Harry, meanwhile, had acted as if it wasn’t happening. The same way they’d acted eleven years ago when Philippa had been found dead in the pool at Oyster House, the family’s summer estate in Martha’s Vineyard. The way they’d behaved through the trial and the appeals process all this time, as if they weren’t involved. As if it would all go away and revert to normal if they pretended nothing had happened in the first place.
And as if there had ever been any possibility that a man like Atlas would simply fade away into the ether, in jail or out.
Lexi had always known better. When she’d wanted desperately to believe in his innocence and when she’d reluctantly believed in his guilt. Because to her, no matter what, Atlas Chariton had always been the only man in all the world.
“The last thing he’s going to want to do is take up where he left off,” irascible Harry told anyone who would listen in the Worth family home and offices peppered throughout the grand old stately house and estate that had been in the family for hundreds of years, spread across the acreage that had been gloriously maintained in West London since the seventeenth century. Harry was always that confident, about everything. “I’m sure he’s got as little interest in us as we do in him.”
But Lexi knew better. She’d been the one up in that witness box. She’d been the one who’d watched Atlas’s face as she’d testified against him. So harsh and terrible. All judgment and the promise of retribution.
At the time she’d convinced herself it was a measure of the man himself. The signs he was a killer, right there in his grim gaze and that set to his proud jaw—and that despite the more tender, secret things she’d felt about him then.
A schoolgirl’s crush, she’d told herself then, to excuse herself. That was all.
Today it felt like an indictment. That she’d had a desperate, endless crush on a man like Atlas and had testified against him the way she had—had she really been telling the truth to the best of her ability? Had she bowed to her uncle’s whim the way she always did? Or had she simply wanted to get Atlas’s attention however she could, linking herself to him forevermore?
She didn’t know how to answer that.
Or to be more truthful, she didn’t want to know the answer to that.
Whatever her emotions, the science told the truth. There was no getting around it, much as she might have wanted to, in some desperate attempt to feel better about what she’d done. She’d thought she’d been standing up for Philippa, doing the right thing even if it had torn her up inside, and she’d hated herself for the part of her that had ached for the Atlas she’d thought she’d known, but now...
Now she would pay. Of that she had no doubt.
She’d had the weeks between his release and his arrival in London to reconsider every thought she’d ever had about Atlas, and to cast herself in the light he most assuredly saw her, which was in no way flattering to either the teenager she’d been or the woman she was these days.
And now he was here.
Lexi forced a smile and nodded at the wide-eyed secretary who’d brought her the news.
“Thank you for coming all the way out here to tell me,” she said, and was proud of how calm she sounded. How serene and capable, as if this disaster was happening to someone else.
“Mr. Worth wanted me to tell you especially,” the secretary told her, her northern vowels sounding extra pronounced, as if the heightened tension around the estate over these past weeks was getting to her and bringing out her Yorkshire.
Lexi could sympathize. She kept her smile steady as she looked past the other woman, out toward the great, green sweep of the lower lawn and the straight march of the famous drive that led to the grand sprawl of Worth Manor in all its ancient splendor. It had once been the pride of a very rich merchant and the impoverished noblewoman he’d