Hot Picks: Secrets And Lies: His Mistress with Two Secrets (The Sauveterre Siblings) / More than a Convenient Marriage? / A Debt Paid in Passion. Dani Collins
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her calls.”
“That’s nice. Tell your driver I’m on the other side of London. He’s going the wrong way.”
“Cinnia,” Henri growled. “Have some compassion. There are reasons.”
The kidnapping? The isolation? She glanced at him, desperately wanting to throw his words back in his face, but he didn’t look manipulative or even like he was trying to cajole. He looked frustrated and, beneath it, troubled.
She recalled him saying he never spoke about his family and sighed. Perhaps she would have to take him at his word, but it was still insulting as hell.
“Fine,” she muttered.
“Do you mean that? Or is it a passive-aggressive fine?”
“Does it matter? I could ask you to tell me what those circumstances are, but you’re not going to, are you?”
“No.” His expression darkened.
She shrugged, hiding that his reticence struck her as lack of trust, which hurt far more deeply than it had a right to.
“So what do you care if I’m fine or not? Even if we’d ended things on a warmer note that night, you were never going to call me after. We both know that, so who cares how we end things now?”
“I care, obviously.”
“No, you don’t!” she cried on a scoffing laugh. “You walked into that party and saw the easiest girl in the room.” If she could take back her capitulation… Would she? Oh, it was lowering to admit it, but probably not. Regardless, she’d be a fool to repeat it.
“You’re looking for a do-over,” she accused. Her voice cracked and she forced out a tight no, thanks.
“Au contraire,” he said, his voice so sharp and hard it stabbed through the thick plate she was trying to hold over her chest. “At least three women in that room were far easier. Trust me. I’ve met them in the past. Not slept with them,” he quickly clarified. “But I’ve been invited to on very short acquaintance. I came tonight because you were on the guest list.”
Her emotions were taking a bumpy ride despite the smoothness of the car’s suspension. He’d come to see her? She didn’t want to believe that. It would make her soften toward him and she was already struggling to keep him at arm’s length.
“I wish you hadn’t. My supervisor already suggested it would be a good career move if I sent you a letter of introduction for the firm.” She turned her face to the window again. “Now he’ll be even more of a pain about it. Thanks.”
“You want me to come into his office and let him give me his spiel? Fine.”
“No, Henri, I don’t!” She swung her head around, barely able to keep a civil tone. “What message does that send? Next he’ll tell me who to sleep with in order to land a client. Men! Are you really that obtuse? Your notoriety is not ‘gold’ for me. It’s a scarlet letter. Don’t do me any favors.”
He sat back, a ring of white appearing around his tight mouth.
“I can’t help who I am, Cinnia. I can’t help that people want to use me, or use anyone who comes close to me to get to me. If I could change it, I would, but I can’t!” His voice rang through the small space like a thunderclap, rife with incensed frustration.
His outburst was so shocking, she sat in silence a moment, absorbing what he’d revealed—reluctantly, judging by the way he shut down immediately after.
Empathy rolled into the spaces he’d blown open in her. She couldn’t help feeling bad for him then, especially as a motor scooter buzzed up alongside the car and the passenger on the back aimed a camera at the darkened window. It flashed, perhaps catching her frown of dismay.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, making a visible effort to maintain his strained control.
“Trella—Trella Bella as we call her, or Bella—has a particular struggle. Partly it’s due to the attention we draw. I make myself available to her when she needs it. We all do. If she had called Ramon, your friend Vera would be the one feeling slighted. Trella’s situation is a fact of my life. That’s all I’m saying on the topic and you can believe it or not or post it to your damned news feed if that will make you feel better.”
“Of course I wouldn’t,” she said crossly. “Why would I deliberately hurt someone I don’t even know?”
Now she would dwell forever on the struggles of that poor girl who had surely been through enough just from being kidnapped. No public statements had ever been made about what had really happened to her during the five days she was missing. Terrible things had been theorized, though. Cinnia dearly hoped none of them were true, but judging by Henri’s grim expression, his sister had a lot to deal with.
She had such an urge to reach out to him in that moment, she had to clench her fingers together in her lap.
“Has the attention been bad?” he asked. “Are you being harassed by cameras outside your home? It’s so rare I meet anyone who feels like I do, I didn’t imagine it would be a burden for you.”
She shrugged. “Mostly just friends and family are asking about it. I didn’t say much and that’s not out of character because I keep a low profile as a rule.”
He glanced inquiringly, so she explained further.
“My kind of work is like banking or the law. Clients expect confidentiality and no one wants to give their portfolio to a woman who’s posting party photos or running with a sketchy crowd, so I live quietly and don’t put much online. But as you say, people put a lot of stock in the Sauveterre name. I realize it’s not really a detriment to be associated with it. It would shatter my ego completely, however, to have people say I only succeeded because of who I know. And to have my boss pressure me like that? I was really annoyed.”
“Did you report him to your HR?”
“There’s no point.”
“There is. Speaking as the president of a huge company, I can’t fix what I don’t know is broken. I need reports of that sort of thing so I can take action or it will keep happening.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way, only that she was leaving soon. “Fine. I will.”
“Good.”
Great. Annoying-boss issue resolved. “Can you take me home now, please?”
“I would like to have dinner with you.”
“You don’t want dinner, Henri.” That damned crack was back in her voice, betraying that she was still feeling slighted because even if he hadn’t been cheating when he’d made love to her, it had been nothing more than a casual hookup. “You want to go to bed with me.”
“I do,” he said baldly, face tightening at her tone. “Tell me you’re not interested and I’ll take you home. Be honest.”
She wanted to look away, but his intense gaze held hers, peeling back her layers of defensiveness as the streetlights flashed by. She knew she was flushing with guilty anticipation. She had managed to hate him for weeks because he had taken his girlfriend’s call after their lovemaking, but that’s not what he’d done. Her best reason for resisting him was nullified.
She jerked her head around, staring blindly at the passage of headlights and darkened shop windows.
“Ça va?”
“You could have called,” she muttered. “You’re not going to call tomorrow if I sleep with you tonight.”
“Since you’ll be with me at breakfast, there will be no need.”
She snorted at his arrogance.
“You were not planning to sleep with me that night.” Something in his quiet tone made her listen. It was as if he was reflecting fondly and it gave her a small shiver of pleasure because