looked a mess, she thought, standing there like a street urchin in her own boardroom. The hasty clean-up she had managed in the cramped washroom on the plane did nothing to make her feel adequately groomed beside his impeccable image.
‘Well, you’ve come a long way, haven’t you?’
‘Not nearly far enough yet. Not by a long chalk.’ Hostility seemed to emanate from every immaculately clothed pore.
‘What do you mean?’ Grace challenged, eyeing him warily.
He uttered a soft laugh. ‘I mean I’ve waited a long time for this moment, and I intend savouring every satisfying minute.’
Unconsciously, she moistened her lips. ‘Is that what this takeover’s all about? Revenge?’
He laughed again, a harsh, curt sound this time. ‘I prefer to call it making the most of one’s opportunities.’
‘What? Vindictively buying up enough shares so that you could steal my grandfather’s company from under my nose?’
‘Vindictive? Possibly. But not stolen, Grace, acquired—and quite legitimately. And hardly from under your nose. You’ve been enjoying yourself in New York for the past week or so, I understand, so you can hardly expect a man in my position not to salvage the spoils when you go off designer shopping—or whatever it is a woman like you does alone in the Big Apple—while your ship is sinking.’
‘I didn’t desert. And Culverwells isn’t sinking.’ If only it wasn’t! she thought despairingly. Nor was I ‘designer shopping’! she wanted to fling at him. But she decided that it wouldn’t be worth the time or the effort, any more than it would be to tell him that she had sorely needed any free time she might have had in New York, as it was the first real break she had taken in the past eighteen months. ‘OK. We’d hit a slump. But we would have pulled ourselves out of it eventually. We were surviving.’
‘A pity your shareholders didn’t share your confidence. It’s clearly that bury-your-head-in-the-sand attitude that has put Culverwells into the state it’s in today. Or have you been too busy with your rich boyfriends and your fancy little gallery that you didn’t recognise disaster when you saw it?’
There was a glass of water on the table by the note pad in front of a vacated chair, the back of which she hadn’t realised she was clutching. She had to restrain the strongest urge to pick the glass up and fling the contents right into his smug and incredibly handsome face.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he warned softly, disconcertingly aware.
‘I’ve never buried my head in the sand. None of us has!’ she retaliated fiercely, ignoring his pointed reference to the company she kept. ‘It’s been down to global forces and the dropping off of sales because the market’s been depressed. It still grates, doesn’t it? That I was born to all this when you—you were…’
‘What? Not good enough to tread the same ground you walked on?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t have to.’
No, she had made her opinion of him quite clear with those disparaging comments she hadn’t meant him to hear before simply ignoring him in the street!
She couldn’t deal with thinking about that right now. In fact, she could only deal with the shame of it by tossing back, ‘So you think my team and I are just going to lie down while you sit at that table, lording it over us and throwing your weight around?’
‘I don’t actually care what you do, Grace,’ he assured her, his body lean and hard as he moved purposefully towards her, as hard as those grey eyes that didn’t leave hers for a second. ‘And may I remind you that there was a time—however short—when my weight wasn’t something you were totally averse to?’
A rush of heat coursed through Grace’s veins, bringing hot colour up over her throat into her cheeks. Unbidden, those images surfaced again, and she saw him as he had been on that beach, those long fingers marked with grease as he’d worked on his dinghy. She smelled the salt of the sea air, felt the sun’s warmth caress her skin, and then felt the thrill of that hard, masculine body pressing her down, down into the sand.
‘That was a mistake,’ she said shakily.
‘You’re darn right it was. On both our parts. But, as the saying goes, None of our mistakes need ever be permanent.’
‘Meaning?’ He was so close now that her breath seemed to lock in her lungs.
‘Meaning you taught me a lot, Grace. I should be eternally grateful to you.’
‘For what?’
‘For showing me exactly how to handle women like you.’
A sharp emotion sliced through her, piercing and unexpected. Evenly, though, she said, ‘You don’t intimidate me, Seth, if that’s what you’re trying to do. And, as for salving that macho ego of yours, I think you managed that quite adequately eight years ago.’
Grace wasn’t sure if he needed to be reminded, but those heavy eyelids drooped and a cleft deepened between those amazing eyes.
Seth felt momentarily uncomfortable at the reminder of having said something that, even then, was beneath his usual code of ethics. He couldn’t even remember the exact words he had used, only that they had been a flaying retaliation for the way she had treated him.
‘Yes, well…’ He was regaining his cool, reclaiming the upper hand—which was what he needed to do, he reminded himself, with this calculating little madam. ‘No man appreciates being snubbed by someone who only forty-eight hours before was sobbing with the pleasure of having him inside her.’
A deep throb made itself felt way down in her lower body. Surely she couldn’t still be attracted to a man who with one swoop had just seized all that her grandfather had worked for—and whose only motive, where she was concerned, was to seek revenge?
‘So this is how it’s going to be.’ His abrupt return to business put her off-balance to say the least, before he went on to give her a brief résumé of his plans for Culverwell’s. ‘I shan’t make any unnecessary redundancies, unless I see areas of overstaffing or anything that will be detrimental long-term to the company and its other employees if I desist. I’ll keep you on as my assistant—I can’t deny that your expertise in the field of textiles will be invaluable. If you co-operate and accept my leadership, you won’t have anything to worry about where your job is concerned. If you don’t…’
‘You’ll have me fired, right?’
He didn’t affirm or deny that statement. His narrowing eyes, though, resembled hard chips of steel, and harsh lines suddenly bracketed his mouth.
‘Like your grandfather was instrumental in doing to me?’
Grace frowned. ‘What are you talking about? You didn’t work for my grandfather.’
‘Directly, no, but he had interests in that boatyard, and enough clout with its owner to see that I was swiftly dispatched for even daring to breathe on his precious granddaughter, let alone lay my rough, rude hands on her supposedly chaste little body.’
His
