“Cyrus?”
My mother’s voice filters down from the second floor. He stands at the sound of his name in the tired voice, shaking my wrist off as he does it. I stand, too, but not to go to her—to grab for the folio and a pen from the holder on his desk. The electricity flickers as I step into my father’s path. Irritation darkens his face. “Excuse me.”
“Sign it.”
I feel as desperate and small as I did in Mason’s office, but I won’t let it show. That’s not how you get things done. Without breaking eye contact, I flip open the contract to the correct page, marked with a red tab.
My dad snatches the pen out of my hand. His cheeks are as red as the tab on the page, and I don’t move. I hardly breathe. I just stand still, blank-faced, as expressionless as possible while he takes off the cap. He’s been in business a long time, and he doesn’t sign things without reading them. But right now, today, he’s drunk. My mom’s waiting. His eyes move over the page. Cursory. Unseeing.
The tip of the pen hovers over the line.
It trembles.
My dad seems to notice it at the same time I do. He curses under his breath, scrawling his name in big loops on the line. Then he tosses the pen down onto the paper. It leaves several droplets of ink. They remind me of blood. He brushes past me on his way out of the room. “I’ll expect a copy on my desk by the end of the week,” he says as he disappears into the hall.
Outside, lightning flashes over the trees at the edge of the yard. They bend and twist in the wind, looking for all the world like they’re screaming.
2
Mason
I wonder if she’s going to show.
Wondering anything about a woman is an unfamiliar habit. There have been a few over the years who served as useful distractions, but no one has ever made such an impression that it kept me awake at night or snatched away my attention during business meetings. Keeping the family intact has taken the bulk of my focus for the past fourteen years, followed closely by building Phoenix Industries. Those two projects dovetailed. I needed money to keep us together, and to keep my siblings in school and then in college. I needed the business to prove to anyone who might come knocking that we were fine.
So that’s what I did. That’s what I’ve done.
Until Charlotte Van Kempt.
I thought of Cyrus’s wife and daughter in the abstract before. As pressure points to be manipulated.
Charlotte could not be more real.
And now all I can think about is her body in that skirt suit. Her red-faced rage at me for ruining her plans. Her curiosity. She’s twenty and sheltered, new to the world of men like me, and it is fucking intoxicating.
But I’m not here to be intoxicated. I’m here to observe the property I’m about to own. Charlotte will show. Naive as she is, she understood that she had reached a dead end. No other choices but to bend to my will. If she hates the idea, all the better.
The Cornerstone development has one positive attribute: the location. From this rise at the edge of the property I can look down into the open rib cage of what Cyrus Van Kempt tried and failed to build. Steel beams rise from a concrete slab at the bottom of the basement.
Of course, everyone with half a brain knows that location is crucial in real estate. I’m of the opinion that it’s a key part of any project, but not the only essential consideration. With enough investment any area’s desirability can be increased. Business districts and neighborhoods can be manipulated to a person’s will as long as he has enough money and drive.
Cyrus had neither. He ran out of money before the initial construction stages could be completed, and the man has only ever had enough drive to fuck people over.
I have personal experience with that.
I’m not the only one.
His daughter didn’t look so pink-cheeked and white-faced at our meetings because she has time to fix any of this. The situation at Van Kempt Industries is far less rosy than she painted it in her proposal. When she said a versatile team is already in place, she meant that the staff originally hired to work the project are down to a skeleton crew. Most of them are doing the jobs of three people or struggling to make work for themselves in the absence of any actual development to do. It’s not just the man’s family he’s let down. It’s families across the city, some of whom were no doubt counting on him to keep them employed.
They’ve made a poor assessment.
A black town car turns the corner at the edge of the site. It’s clearly struggling, the frame juddering in a way that suggests a problem with the engine, or the transmission. Things I don’t generally bother to care about, except for the fact that this town car is carrying Charlotte Van Kempt. She grips the wheel with small hands. Hanging on for dear life. The innocent heat of her mouth comes back to me in a hard push at the base of my spine.
I don’t want her hands on the wheel of that car. I want them elsewhere. Clasped and begging, for instance. Or wrapped around my cock.
It’s a slight problem, that wanting. Wanting is not strictly part of the deal. At least not want for Charlotte specifically, though it is her body that’s been on my mind. Her eyes. Her taste. The feel of her delicate bone structure underneath my palm.
It’s her body that will bear the brunt of my revenge.
I see the moment she sees me, standing next to my Escalade. Charlotte can’t or won’t meet my eyes and her teeth dig into her bottom lip. She concentrates very, very hard on parking behind my car, leaving a good twenty feet of space behind the back bumper. The curve of her neck when she leans over to take something from the front seat makes my already-hard cock harder.
Fuck.
One slim ankle out of the car, then the other, then the rest of her. Charlotte wears a black sheath dress made from the same fabric as that little skirt suit, a narrow belt around her waist and those same cardboard shoes. No sunglasses, so I have a clear view of the adorable determination in her huge blue eyes. She grips the leather folio like it’s holding her upright. The muscles around my right knee tighten, layering a more acute pain over the ever-present ache.
I’m going to wreck her.
She approaches with her head held high, though her pert chin drops as she gets closer. Charlotte Van Kempt can’t help herself. I know what I look like, towering over her next to a monument to her father’s abject failure as a business owner and a man. I know how she’d fight me if I forced her to her knees. I know how she’d secretly be relieved.
Charlotte slows a few feet off. Out of my reach. Her eyes dart over me, head to toe, in a flutter of her eyelashes. Suspicion needles at the back of my neck. That she’s seeing more than I want her to see.
Not possible.
She clears her throat. “Mr. Hill, I’ve brought—”
I take one step toward her to put her within my reach, shove my hand between her dress and that little belt, and yank her closer. Charlotte gasps. She almost goes over, tumbling off her heels and into me. It’s a disappointment when she doesn’t, and a sheer pleasure to watch her straighten up with her face blazing red.
“Now you don’t have to shout.”
Her hand comes up to her throat, to the naked hollow there, her fingertips hiding her nervous swallow from view. Charlotte brushes a single lock of hair away from her face. “I’ve brought—”