“Richard.” She gave a formal nod as if greeting a virtual stranger. Then she just circumvented him and continued walking to her car.
He let her pass him, one eyebrow rising.
So. His opening strike hadn’t been as effective as he’d planned. She’d gotten over her shock at seeing him faster than he had and had decided to dismiss him.
Surely she considered anyone who knew her real identity a threat to her carefully constructed new persona. But if there were levels of danger to blasts from the past, she must think his potential damage equivalent to a ballistic missile. She couldn’t end this “chance” meeting fast enough.
Which proved she hadn’t tied him to Rose, wasn’t here because of anything concerning him. But that changed nothing.
Whatever she was here for, she wasn’t getting it.
He stared ahead, listening to the steady staccato of her receding heels, a grim smile twisting his lips.
In the past he’d been the one who’d walked away. But it had been her who’d made the decision. It now entertained him to let her think the choice remained hers. He’d let her strike his presence up to coincidence, think it would cause no repercussions for her. Then he’d disabuse her of the notion.
Last time, he hadn’t been able to override her will. This time, he’d make her do what he wanted. And right now, all he wanted was to taste her once more. He’d postpone his real purpose until he satisfied the hunger that had roared to life inside him again at the sight of her.
He’d much prefer it if she struggled, though.
The moment he heard her opening her car, he turned and sauntered toward her.
She lurched as he passed behind her and murmured, “I’ll drive ahead. Follow me.”
He felt her gaze boring into his back as he reached his car two spaces ahead. Opening his door, he turned around smoothly, just in time to witness her reaction.
“What the hell...?” She stopped, as if it hurt to talk.
He sighed. “My patience has already been expended for the night. Follow me. Now.”
Her eyes blazed at him as she found her voice again. Not the velvety caress that had echoed in his head for eight endless years but a sharp blade. “I’ll do no such thing.”
“My demand was actually a courtesy. I was trying to give you a chance to preserve your dignity.”
Her mouth dropped open. His own lips tingled.
Then his tongue stung when hers lashed him. “Gee, thanks. I can preserve it very well on my own. I’ll drive away now, and if you follow me, I’ll call the police.”
Hostility was the last thing he’d predicted her reaction would be, considering the last time he’d seen her she’d wept as he’d walked away as if her heart were being dragged out of her body. But it only made his blood hurtle with vicious exhilaration. She was giving him the struggle he’d hoped for, the opportunity to force her to succumb to him this time. And he would make her satisfy his every whim.
He gave her the patented smile that made monsters quiver. “If you drive away, I won’t follow you. I’ll knock on your friends’ door and tell them whom they’re really getting into business with. I don’t think the Andersons would relish knowing you were—and maybe still are—the wife of a drug lord, slave trader and international terrorist.”
Two
Isabella stared up at the juggernaut that blocked out the world, every synapse in her brain short-circuiting.
When he’d materialized in front of her, like a huge chunk of night taking the form of her most hated entity, her heart had almost ruptured.
But she’d survived so many horrors, had always had so much to protect, her survival mechanisms were perpetually on red alert. After the initial brutal blow, they’d kicked in as she’d made an instinctive escape. That didn’t mean she hadn’t felt about to crumple to the ground with every breath.
Richard. Here. Out of the depths of the dark, sordid past. The man who’d seduced and used...and almost destroyed her.
That he hadn’t succeeded hadn’t been because he hadn’t given it his best shot. Ever since, she’d been trying to mend the rifts he’d created in the very foundations of her being. She’d only succeeded in painting over the deepest ones. Though she now seemed whole and strong, those cracks had been worsening over time, and she was sure they’d fissured right to her soul.
But she’d just reached what would truly be a new start. Then he’d appeared out of thin air.
It had flabbergasted her even more because she’d just been thinking of him. It had been as if she’d conjured him.
Yet when had she ever stopped thinking of him? Her memory of him had been like a pervasive background noise that could never be silenced. A clamor that rose to a crescendo periodically before it settled back to a constant, maddening drone.
But there was one explanation for his reappearance. That it was a fluke. An appalling one, but one nonetheless. What else could it have been after eight years?
Not that time elapsed was even an issue. It could have been eight days and she would have thought the same thing. She’d long realized he’d left her believing he’d never see her again.
After all, he must have known what he’d done would most probably get her killed.
Believing their meeting to be a coincidence, she’d run off, thinking the man who’d once exploited her then left her to a terrible fate would shrug and continue on his way.
But just as she’d thought she’d escaped, that he’d fade into the night like some dreadful apparition, he’d followed her. Before she could deal with the dismay of thinking this ordeal would be prolonged, he’d made his preposterous demand.
Not that it had felt like one. It had felt like an ultimatum. Her instinct had been correct.
She hadn’t forgiven him, nor would she ever forgive him, but she’d long rationalized his actions. From what she’d discovered—long after the fact—he obtained his objectives over anyone’s dead body, figuratively or literally. She, and everything he’d done to her, had been part of a mission. She only had theories what that had been or why he’d undertaken it, according to the end result.
But what he was doing now, threatening with such patent enjoyment what he must know would destroy everything she’d struggled to build over the past eight years, was for his own entertainment. That man she’d once loved, with everything in her scarred psyche and starving soul, had progressed from a cold-bloodedly pragmatic bastard into a full-fledged monster.
“Don’t look so horrified.”
His bottomless baritone swamped her again, another thing about him that had become more hard-hitting. The years had turned the thirty-four-year-old demigod of sensuality she’d known into an outright god, if one of malice. He still exuded sex and exerted a compulsion—both now magnified by increased power and maturity. But it was this new malevolence that now seemed to define him. And it made him more overwhelming than ever.
But that must have been his true nature all along. It was she who’d been blinded and under his control. She hadn’t even suspected what he’d been capable of long after he’d gotten everything he’d wanted from her, then tossed her to the wolf.
“I’m not interested in exposing you.” His voice had her every hair standing on end. “As long as you comply, your secret can remain intact.”