“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.”
“It doesn’t mean you can treat me like—”
“Property?” Bracing his elbows, he leaned forward so she had to jerk back. “Why do you care? You got what you wanted. I’ll get what I want. There’s no conflict.”
There was, but apparently only to her.
Drawing a deep breath, she picked up her fork and said stiffly, “Just so I’m clear…You don’t care whether the things you’ve acquired are to your taste. You only want to hold them long enough to devalue and unload them?” Looking him in the eye was an act of supreme courage, especially since it made him bare his teeth in an uncivilized grin.
“You get to keep the money, Clair. You’ll walk away satisfied that your bottom line has benefited, I promise. Now let’s change the subject.”
“I think you just did,” she muttered, staring at food she had no appetite for as she tried to sift through the mixed emotions of being physically infatuated with a man who promised to give her pleasure while only taking a cold helping of revenge for himself.
His attitude hurt her and she didn’t want him to have that power. She wanted to be unaffected and remote, the way he was.
“Did I?” he responded with throwaway sarcasm.