Summoning the opaqueness she’d developed as her greatest weapon against bullies such as him, she cocked her head.
“What makes you think I haven’t told them everything?”
“I don’t think. I know. You resorted to extreme measures to construct this St. Sandoval image. You’d go as far to preserve it. You’ll certainly give in to anything I demand so no one, starting with the Andersons, ever finds out what you really are.”
“What I am? You make it sound as if I’m some monster.”
“You’re married to one. It makes you the same species.”
“I’m not married to Caleb Burton. I haven’t been for eight years.”
Something...scary slithered in the depths of his cold steel eyes. But when he spoke, he sounded as offhand as before.
“So it’s in the past tense. A past full of crimes.”
“I never had a criminal record.”
“Your crimes remain the same even if you’re not caught.”
“What about your crimes? Let’s talk about those.”
“Let’s not. It would take months to talk about those, as they’re countless. But they’re also untraceable. But yours could be easily proved. You knew exactly how your husband made his mushrooming fortune and you made no effort to expose him, making you an accessory to his every crime. Not to mention that you helped yourself to millions of his blood money. Those two charges could still get you ten to fifteen years in a snug little cell in a maximum-security prison.”
“Are you threatening to turn me in to the law, too?”
“Don’t be daft. I don’t resort to such mundane measures. I don’t let the law take care of my enemies or chastise those who don’t fall in line with my wishes. I have my own methods. Not that I have to resort to those in your case. Just a little chat with your upstanding friends and they wouldn’t consider getting mixed up with someone with your past.”
“Contrary to what you believe, from your own twisted self and life, there are ethical, benevolent people in the world. The Andersons don’t hold people’s pasts against them.”
He gave her back her pitying disdain, raised her his own brand of annihilating taunting. “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have gone to such painstaking lengths to give your history, and yourself, a total makeover.”
“The makeover was only for protection, as I’m sure you, as the world’s foremost mogul of security solutions, are in the best position to appreciate.”
His lethal lips tugged. “Then, it won’t matter if your partners in progress find out the details of your previous marriage to one of the world’s most prominent figures in organized crime. Along with the open buffet of unlawful immorality that marriage entailed and that you buried. Refuse to follow me and we get to put your conviction of their convictions to the test.”
Feeling the world emptying of the last atom of oxygen, she snapped, “What the hell do you want from me?”
“To catch up.”
Her mouth dropped open.
It took effort to draw it back up, to hiss her disbelief. “So you see me walking down the street and decide on the spot to blackmail me because the urge to ‘catch up’ overwhelmed you?”
His painstakingly chiseled lips twisted, making her guts follow suit. “Don’t tell me you thought it even a possibility I happened to be taking a stroll in a limbo of suburban domesticity called Pleasantville, of all names?”
“You were following me.”
The instant certainty congealed her blood. Realizing his premeditation made it all so much worse. And the possible outcomes unthinkable.
He shrugged. “You took your time in there. I was about to knock on the Andersons’ door anyway to see what was taking you so long.”
Not putting anything beyond him, she imagined how much worse it would have been if he’d done that. “And you went to all this trouble to ‘catch up’?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Things you’ll find out when you stop wasting time and follow me. I’d tell you to leave your car, but your friend might see it and get all sorts of worrisome ideas.”
“None would be as bad as what’s really happening.”
His expression hardened. She was sure it had brought powerful men to their knees. “Are you afraid of me?”
That possibility clearly hadn’t occurred to him before. Now that it did, it seemed to...offend him.
The weirdest part was, though she’d long known he was a merciless terminator, her actual safety wasn’t even a concern.
It was in every other way that she feared him.
She wasn’t about to tell him that. But she did give him an honest answer to his query. “I’m not.”
“Good.”
His satisfaction chafed her. The urge to wipe it off his cruelly perfect face surged. “I’m not, because I know if you wanted to harm me, I wouldn’t have known what hit me. That you’re only coercing me indicates I’m not on your hit list.”
“It is heartening that you grasp the situation.” That soul-searing smile played on his lips again. “Shall we?”
She stood there, her gaze trapped in his, her thoughts tangling.
They both knew he’d cornered her from the first moment. But succumbing to this devil without resistance would have been too pathetic. She’d at least let loose some of her anger and bitterness toward him first. What she’d thought long extinguished.
It was clear they’d only been suppressed under layers of self-delusion so they wouldn’t destroy whatever remained of her stability, what everything—and everyone—in her life depended on.
Now that she’d admitted that, it was easier to admit why she’d succumb to his coercion.
The first reason was that she would have, even without his threat. If he’d turned a consummate fiend like Burton into mincemeat so effortlessly when he’d been a younger and less powerful man, she didn’t want to know what he was capable of now. She was nowhere in his league. No one was.
The second was harder to face. But what she’d belatedly learned about his truth and that of what they’d shared and what he’d done to her had left a gaping hole inside her.
She wanted that hole filled. She wanted closure.
Holding his hypnotic gaze, she finally nodded.
He just turned and walked away. Before he lowered himself into the gleaming black beast that looked as sleek, powerful and ruthless as he did, he tossed her an imperious glance over his acres-wide shoulders.
“Chivvy along.”
At his command to hurry up in his native British English, she expelled the breath she’d been holding.
Chivvy along, indeed.
Might as well get this over with as quickly as possible.
In minutes she was following him as ordered as he headed to Manhattan, emotions seething inside her. Fury, frustration, fear—and something else.
That “something else” felt like...excitement.
How sick would that be? To be excited by the man who’d decimated her heart and almost her world, who’d just threatened to complete the job and had her following him like a puppy?
But...maybe not so sick. Excitement could encompass trepidation, anxiety, uncertainty. And everything with Richard had always contained maximum doses of all that. It was why he’d been the only one who’d made her feel...alive. She’d been in suspended animation before she’d met him and since he’d walked away.