A knock on the door kept her silent.
He opened it to uniformed staff. They turned one end of the dining table into an intimate candlelit cove, setting out covered plates and pouring wine. Soft music came on and fragrant flowers complemented scents of orange sauce and rich braised duck.
Unsteady in her heels, Clair moved forward to the chair Aleksy held for her, trying to frame her suspicion in a way that didn’t demean her any further than she already was.
When they were alone, she cleared her throat. “You said earlier—” Was it only a few hours ago they’d stood in her flat setting out terms for this arrangement? What was she doing! “You said that you’d been targeting the firm for some time. Victor was under considerable stress leading up to his heart attack. Was that from the takeover?”
The implication behind her simple question crashed and reverberated in Aleksy’s head, as swift and unexpected as the knife that had cut the line into his face. A dark maelstrom of emotion threatened, the kind he hadn’t allowed himself in years. He fought it back, master of everything he felt or didn’t feel, but it shocked him that she’d almost pulled something out of him that he no longer allowed. Chagrin. Loss. Rage.
“Are you accusing me of murdering him? Intentionally?” He was able to keep his tone impersonal, but she didn’t mistake the threat beneath. She paled.
“N-no.” Her voice was weak.
“Because I’ve been targeted for takeovers many times. It never raises my blood pressure. Van Eych knew what was coming and may have grown hypertensive, but that’s because he didn’t take care of himself. He lived as if an overweight, sedentary lifestyle would never catch up to him.” His entire body ached with tension.
“I know. I told him—”
“I don’t want to hear what you told him,” he snapped with a slip of control that made her jump. “I know more about the man than I ever wanted to. Now I want to forget him. I want his entire existence obliterated.”
He was revealing more than he intended to, but it would put an end to any more infuriating remarks regarding Victor. He glared at the elegantly simple dress that showed her delicate curves to perfection, offended that Victor had paid for it, that anything about the man had ever come in contact with her.
She sat primly, cowed by his temper into holding her hands in her lap, her spine straight, her eyes downcast. He didn’t apologize; he wanted the message driven home that this topic would never be revisited again.
“Well,” she said with quiet impertinence. “That certainly answers the question I was really asking, which was whether you had a grudge against Victor.”
“A grudge?” Aleksy choked on the inadequacy of the word, but what did you call it when you knew a man was responsible for your father’s death? For your mother’s slow, painful decline? For your own self-destruction? He swept his clogged throat clean with a swallow of wine, suppressing anguished thoughts. “Yes, Clair, I had a grudge.”
Aleksy’s posture was casual, but his stillness spoke of extreme tension. There was nothing to be read in his expression beyond the startling prominence of his scar.
Clair realized she needed to tread softly, but she had to ask, “Why?”
“He knew. That’s all that’s important.”
“Not to me,” she protested.
The corner of his lip quirked. She realized he knew what was really bothering her. “You struck the deal you wanted. Do you hear me asking why it was important to you?”
He’d already made it pretty clear he didn’t care about her motivation. This was commerce, not romance, but the worry drilling a hole in the pit of her stomach was that he didn’t really want her. Obviously he was attracted to her to some degree, but she didn’t want to be a thing. She wanted her first sexual experience to at least be sensual, not a twelve-point inspection and a stamp on the windshield. What happened when she turned out to be less than the high-performance ride he was used to?
“I just want to understand. You didn’t want anything to do with me when you thought I’d been sleeping with Victor, but when you learned I hadn’t, you coerced me into this arrangement. If you’re on a mission to collect all of Victor’s possessions, why count me among them? And why sell them off as quickly as you acquired them?”
His jaw hardened at the word coerced, but he only said bluntly, “To dismantle what he built. To expunge his mark on the world.”
“Well, I won’t let you dismantle me.” She grew hot. “I wasn’t his. You don’t get to erase me.”
“He thought you were his,” he shot back. “You let the world think you were.”