The Italian's Twin Consequences

CHAPTER TWO

MATTEO COMBE WAS precisely the kind of wealthy, pompous, arrogant man of too much undeserved power Sarina Fellows hated most.

He was remarkably handsome, which to her mind was a very serious strike against him, right from the start. His was the kind of attractiveness that made people silly when they encountered it. It was the walk into walls, trip over your own two feet, start giggling like a twelve-year-old sort of silliness, and it appalled her deeply that she could feel the swell of that reaction inside of her when she’d long considered herself immune to his type.

But he was different, somehow. He was...more. It was something about the glossiness of his dark hair, the assertive line of his jaw. It was his aristocratic nose and those gray eyes like a storm. It was something about the seething confidence he wore like a kind of cloak, draped about his athletic, rangy body and making it very clear that he was succumbing to her—to this evaluation his own board had demanded—because he chose to do so. That no force on earth could compel him to do a single thing he didn’t wish to do.

He reminded her of a mighty river, roaring over a great ledge. Powerful. Kinetic and dynamic.

Dangerous, something in her whispered.

Sarina dismissed that almost as soon as the word formed inside her. He was beautiful, yes. Somehow austere and lush at once, with that face of his. And he was rich. Filthily, vomitously wealthy. One branch of his family tree was stuck deep into the Yorkshire mills, hardy and tough, inside and out. The other stretched back into the golden age of the Italian Renaissance, which was right about the time this particular villa had been built.

Sarina understood exactly why he had insisted their first meeting be here, in the living fairy tale that was Venice. He wanted her to come all the way into this city of sighs and ancient palazzos and history like a bright tapestry in which his family was a shining, golden thread, the better to gasp and flutter over all his wealth and consequence.

Except Sarina wasn’t the fluttering kind.

And Matteo Combe had no idea what he was in for.

It wasn’t only that Sarina hated men like him, though she did. It was that she knew them. She knew what they were capable of, certainly, and she’d developed an acute allergy to their form of arrogance. The best friend she’d had since childhood, who she’d considered her sister, had succumbed to an addiction to a man just like Matteo. Rashly confident, propped up on all that history and the money acquired for him across centuries, and catered to by everyone he had ever met, every single day for the whole of his life.

Oh yes. Sarina knew all about men like him.

Sarina didn’t need to destroy him, necessarily. But she thought of men like Matteo as big, blown-up balloons, and as it happened, she’d set herself up to be the perfect, pointed pin. She’d been popping overweening male egos professionally now long enough to have quite the reputation for taking masters of the universe down a few pegs, to the mortal men of questionable moral character they usually were beneath all the bluster.

Some of the men she was called in to consult with were decent. In the absence of a record of misdeeds and bad behavior, she was more than happy to issue a glowing report on the man in question. She didn’t hate men, as many had accused her. She hated bad men who abused their power and those vulnerable to it.

She felt sure that Jeanette, wherever she was now, was looking down on her in support.

And the fact that the particular rich, arrogant man in front of her had already managed to worm his way beneath her skin in a way the others never had? With all that dark and brooding certainty he exuded like a rich scent?

Well. That was between her and the private conversations she had in her own head. She had no intention of letting him see it.

“You want me to have remorse,” Matteo was saying. He was sitting in an armchair Sarina didn’t have to know anything about antiques to know was exquisite and priceless, looking entirely too much like a king for her peace of mind. “If I cannot produce any on cue, does that mean I fail this examination?”

“This isn’t a pass or fail experience.” She jotted down a few words on the pad in front of her, more to make him uncomfortable than to record anything. “Do you find that unnerving?”

“That my future is in the hands of someone who cannot answer a direct question?” His gray eyes gleamed. “Not in the least.”

She hadn’t expected him to be dry. And all the pictures in the world—Sarina was fairly certain she’d viewed every last one of them, purely for research purposes—didn’t do justice to the particular wild darkness that was Matteo Combe. It was that thick, near-black hair of his, edging toward the border of unruly. It was the slate gray of his gaze that made her think not only of rain, but more worryingly, of dancing in it.

Even when she knew full well that way lay madness. And things much worse that a little madness.

He usually dressed in expensive business suits and sleek formal wear, the better to lord it over everyone else. But today he’d chosen to greet her in what she assumed passed for casual wear to a man like him. A pair of jeans that looked expensively frayed, because he’d obviously bought them that way. Men like Matteo didn’t do anything that might lead to whitened knees or artful tears in denim, designer or not. His boots were very clearly handcrafted right here in Italy. And he sported the kind of T-shirt that had about as much in common with a run-of-the-mill cotton T-shirt from the stores regular people frequented as stealth fighter jets did with paper airplanes. Worse, the T-shirt clung to his torso, telling her things she didn’t want to know about the extraordinary physical shape Matteo kept himself in.

She knew it already. She knew he liked to run miles upon miles. She knew he enjoyed epic swims and then, with his leftover energy and time, a great deal of flinging weights around. She’d read all of that, but it was one thing to read in a far-off hotel room. It was something else again to sit in the presence of a man who clearly preferred to use every iota of power he could, including the physical.

But she was here to assess his mental state, not gaze adoringly at the place where his bicep strained the hem of his T-shirt, so she frowned a little as she focused on him again.

“This will only be an adversarial relationship if you make it that way.”

“It’s an inherently adversarial relationship,” he corrected her, mildly enough, though there was nothing mild in the way he gazed at her. “I suspect you know that.”

“But you enjoy adversity in your relationships, don’t you?”

He let out a laugh, as if she’d surprised him.

“I would not say that I like adversarial relationships. But in my family, there is almost no other kind.”

“Yet you sat right there and told me how much you love your sister. Or do you consider love another form of adversity?”

“Your family is obviously different from mine or you would know the answer to that question.”

Sarina knew entirely too much about his family, as did everyone else in the known world, because both branches of it had spent so much time dominating tabloid headlines. Even if she’d never looked one of them up deliberately, there would have been no avoiding them. Matteo’s father had regularly appeared in the headlines, for this or that supposed marital or corporate indiscretion. His mother, meanwhile, had been widely held to be the most beautiful woman on the planet while she’d lived. Which had come with its own share of scandals and speculation, and all the attendant tabloid attention.

He and his sister were close, or so it was believed—or as close as they could be with a ten-year age gap between them, leaving Matteo as something more like a secondary parent than a brother.

In contrast, Sarina had been raised by chilly academics. They were far more concerned with their own research, their endless pursuit of publication, and the petty intellectual squabbles of their peers than the daughter she thought they’d had as an experiment in humanity more than any desire to parent. And they had less than no interest in any scandals she might have kicked up along the way.

Sarina couldn’t imagine growing up in a place like this villa, no matter how lovely Venice was. She and Jeannette had grown up in side-by-side old houses in the Berkeley Hills, racing in and out of rooms notable for their towering piles of books and comfortable, threadbare rugs, muddy porches and overgrown yards. This villa was a dramatic clutter of perfectly preserved tapestries and heavy stone statues, slung about this chamber and that, lest anyone be tempted to forget that this was the very heart of old-world wealth.

She knew why he’d brought her here, but it was backfiring in ways she doubted he’d imagined. Because now she knew how seriously he took himself and his pedigree. And that could only work to her advantage.

“Why did you think that it was better to meet here?” she asked, keeping her voice cool. “In a place that is very clearly a home, and not part of your business empire? Is this another attempt on your part to steer our interactions toward something sexual?”

“You are the one who keeps mentioning sex, Dr. Fellows,” Matteo said silkily. “Not me.”

Somehow she kept any reaction to that off her face. “Yet you insisted we start here, not in one of your many offices. Can you explain that choice?”

“This is where I happen to be at the moment,” he replied, and there was a certain smokiness in that voice of his with its unique accent, not quite British and not yet Italian. Something dark, and more compelling than she wanted to admit. To her horror, she felt a certain...thrill work its way through her, settling between her legs and worse, pulsing. She was so horrified she froze. “Both you and the chairman of my board impressed upon me that these meetings had to begin as soon as possible. Obedient in all things, I immediately made myself available.”

There wasn’t a single obedient thing about this man. Sarina ordered herself to concentrate on her reasons for being here and not that pulsing thing. Or the wildness she could sense in him, simmering there beneath his aristocratic surface.

“What I think, Mr. Combe, is that you wanted me to see this villa You wanted to impress me.”

“I cannot imagine anything less on my mind than a desire to impress you.”

“I’m assessing you for corporate reasons, yet you appear in a T-shirt. Here in this very personal space. At the very least, you aren’t taking this seriously. Do you think that’s wise?”

Something changed in his gaze then. Some flash of awareness, or temper. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and she was suddenly aware of the fact that though he’d called it a library, this was really nothing more than a small living room. It just happened to contain a number of books. A fireplace. What had seemed like a reasonable amount of space without it feeling like a closet.

But when he shifted like that, he seemed to take up the whole of it.

“I would ordinarily spare a visitor a dreary history lesson, but there is very little personal about this villa. It appears as it always has. It is my job to be its steward, not a resident in any real sense. I must hand the villa on to the next generation intact. As it has been handed down, eldest son to eldest son, since the day it was built. For me, Doctor, there is no distinction between what is corporate and what is personal. My mother was a San Giacomo. Surely you must know what that means.”

“Is this your way of reminding me that you’re famous, Mr. Combe?”

“My family is not famous,” he said gently. “Fame is the stuff of a moment, here and gone. My family—both of my families—are prominent and of significant means. And have been for some centuries.”

“Do you think—”

“Let us cut to the chase, please.” He interrupted her smoothly, but she was sure that was impatience she could see in his face. And his please wasn’t any sort of supplication. “What is it you are looking for from me? Is it a certain set of words, arranged in a specific way, so as to assuage whatever offended dignity my board is currently pretending they feel? Tell me what it is you need, I shall provide it, and then we can all move on with our lives.”

That felt like a slap, and the fact that it did made her wonder why she hadn’t noticed that he was getting to her the way he was. Not just that thing she could still feel like a new pulse, low in her belly. He was nice to look at, yes—magnetic, even—but it was more than that. She was leaning forward in the uncomfortable chair she’d chosen and now felt she had to pretend she found pleasant.

But Sarina wasn’t assessing Matteo Combe the way she should have been. Instead, she was hanging on his every word. She was enjoying sparring with him a little bit too much.

She was...enjoying this. Him.

A wave of self-hatred crashed over her, and on some level she was shocked it didn’t sweep her away. That he couldn’t see it.

I’m sorry, Jeanette. And as she thought of her lost friend, her sister in her soul, another wave hit her—this time, of the grief that never quite left her. And never would, she thought, until she did her part to give a little back to the kind of men who preyed on pretty girls like Jeanette had been. And did nothing when they fell apart, because they’d already moved on to another victim.

Sarina had vowed that she would honor her best friend’s memory right there where she’d found Jeanette’s body, there in the bathroom of the apartment they’d shared while Sarina finished up her graduate work. She would do what she could to bring supposedly untouchable men to justice, if they deserved it. She would identify predators, look hard at arrogance, and where appropriate, help dismantle systems that kept abusive men in power.

That vow hadn’t simply been words. She’d made it the cornerstone of her life.

One beautiful, brooding much-too-rich man with eyes like smoke wasn’t going to change that.

“I’m afraid that’s not how it works.” Her voice was much chillier than it had been before. Overcompensation, maybe. But there was something about Matteo that encouraged her to...lean in too much. Be a little bit too much engaged. Try to match wits with him when she should have been quietly and competently undermining his confidence. “I understand that you’re a man who’s used to being in charge of things, but you’re not in charge of this. I am. I will tell you when and where the next meeting is. You already agreed to show up. In the same fashion, I will let you know when we’re finished.”

“Surely you cannot have convinced my board to allow this to drag on forever. They prefer instant gratification, I must tell you.”

“What I did or did not offer your board isn’t something I can discuss with you. They are my client. The nature of our relationship must remain private.”

“How convenient.”

“Here’s what I want you to think about,” she said, and smiled at him, encouragingly. With too much teeth, perhaps. “Control is obviously very important to you. You control your company, now more than ever. You apparently think that you ought to be able to control the reproductive choices of your own sister. You’re a very powerful man, and powerful men, as a rule, tend to be under the impression that they should be able to control anything and everything. But you don’t control this. You don’t control me.”

“As it happens, I have thought of little else.”

Again, he was far more dry than she’d been prepared for. It unnerved her—but Sarina hid that. Or hoped she did.

“Good. And as you continue to think about it, as I’m sure you will, I’d like you to find your way to viewing this as an opportunity.”

His mouth curved into something sardonic. “An opportunity for what, exactly?”

He was still leaning forward, and despite herself, so was she. And the room suddenly felt breathless. Fraught and tight around them, like a fist.

But Sarina didn’t sit back. She didn’t break that connection—because she refused to show him that she noticed it in the first place.

“Why, for you, Mr. Combe.” She made her voice light. Very nearly airy. “It’s your opportunity to be a better person. Once you learn how to give up control, you might find that you don’t have to struggle with concepts like toxic masculinity.”

His expression suggested that he was not overconcerned with said concepts, or indeed any kind of struggle. But he only gazed back at her, his gray eyes steady in a way that made her breath feel shallow.

“And I will be free of this struggle because my corporation will crumble into dust, as it requires my control and attention at all times? Or perhaps it will be my family that suffers, once I release my grip—as I am the only thing currently holding us together? I think you misunderstand the fundamental nature of my character, Dr. Fellows. I am not trying to control the universe. Between you and me, I do not much care about the universe. But I do like to control what I am, in fact, in control of.”

“Says the man who descended into an all-out brawl at his own father’s funeral.”

She saw it then. That blaze of pure, stark temper in his gaze that made his whole face change. Into something taut and dark. Powerful in an entirely different way.

Thrilling, something in her supplied, as she pulsed anew. But she ignored all of that.

Or she tried.

But Matteo’s eyes were smoke and ruin, and she had the oddest sense he knew it.

“Oh, Doctor.” He sounded almost pitying. Almost. “Do you think that I was goaded into punching that man? On the contrary, I very much meant to do that. And am glad I did.”

CHAPTER THREE

MATTEO SHOULD NOT have said that.

It was the truth, but the truth was needlessly provocative and he’d known it even as he’d formed the words.

Sarina had stood, a curious expression on her face. Triumphant, he’d thought in the moment, though he couldn’t think why. She’d smoothed her hands over her skirt as if to free it from wrinkles, though it showed none, and when she’d gazed at him her expression had been nothing short of pitying.

“I think we’ll stop here,” she had said in that way of hers, as if her word was law in Matteo’s house. In his presence. When everyone else who’d ever dared speak to him like that had been related to him by blood—and was now dead. “Before we stray too far from our objectives. And I’d advise you to take a bit of time to reflect on the opportunity you have before you for growth, Mr. Combe. But that growth will be stagnant, I fear, if you remain completely unrepentant for the unprovoked physical attack you made on another man.”

At least that time he’d had the sense to bite his tongue.

And he’d reflected, all right, but not in the way the doctor had ordered. She had refused his offer of accommodation, which was likely wise when he couldn’t seem to keep himself from looking at her in ways he knew he shouldn’t. She’d let herself out of the library and marched off, down from his preferred wing of the villa into the great hall, where she’d stood, prim and disapproving, in the midst of all his San Giacomo ancestors in their fussy portraits.

He’d reflected on the height of her heels, sharp stilettos that made her legs look longer than they were and gave rise to all manner of inappropriate images in his head. One more delicious than the next. He’d reflected on the cool intelligence in her gaze and how much he liked that, even when she clearly wished to use it against him. Maybe especially then, because he couldn’t seem to help but like a challenge. He’d reflected that, really, it was unfortunate that he found his board-appointed therapist—consultant—so mouthwatering. Intellectually as well as physically.

He spared no thought at all to Prince Ares, whose eye he’d happily blackened. And would again, with a song in his heart.

Matteo had waited quietly with Sarina until the boat was brought around to ferry her back to her hotel, and he’d murmured all the appropriate, polite things as she’d gone back out into the rain.

But he knew his first meeting with this woman had not gone as well as it might have.

And if he hadn’t, a board member who was still his ally rang up the following morning to quote Matteo’s words back to him.

“You meant to punch that prince. You said so straight out.” Lord Christopher Radcliffe sounded despairing. “Do you want them to vote you out of power, Matteo? Is that what this is about? Suicide by board meeting?”

“Of course not,” Matteo had replied,

But that wasn’t entirely true. There was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to light it all on fire and walk away.

Sometimes that part of him made a lot of noise.

It was shouting up a storm as he flew back to London two days later.

By then he’d had every member of his board on the phone to him, demanding he explain the report they’d received from the consultant Matteo had known was in their pocket—but perhaps not so deep. He’d learned a valuable lesson.

His instincts about Sarina Fellows had been correct: she wanted to take him down.

He was pleased to have that clarified, he thought darkly as his plane soared over continental Europe. He should have thought of that while he was letting her provoke him into shooting off his mouth. He should have been prepared for the woman to be a weapon, and he hadn’t been—because he’d been far more intrigued by the gut punch of his attraction to her.

And as entertaining as it was to imagine the fun he might have had with a woman like Sarina if he’d met her under different circumstances, Matteo couldn’t actually let her take him down. He had felt compelled to allow his board to subject him to this consultation, and thought submitting to it as his own father wouldn’t have made him look far more reasonable and biddable than Eddie had been, but he couldn’t let her plant her seeds of doubt and dissension. It would never be a good time for such things, but this was particularly bad timing all around. He needed to prove to a set of disapproving old men that he could take the helm of the company he’d already been running for years. He needed to cater to his family’s legacy and make sure Combe Industries didn’t die on his watch. And while he was at it, he needed to handle all the unpleasant revelations of his parents’ wills.