means,” said Dax, “that you’re talking to the new owner of the Downington Plaza. The owner who can refuse to renew certain leases if he so chooses.”
It was too much, coming on the heels of the horrendous day she’d endured, and her battered brain refused to comprehend his meaning. Weakly, she sank into the rocker he’d vacated as the implications of his words sank into her head. He owned her building. And he would refuse to renew her lease. “Why?” she asked quietly, swallowing the note of pain. “Why are you doing this to me? You’ve done enough already—”
“I’ve done enough?” The words were a volcanic explosion and she shrank back at the rage spewing forth. “What about what you did? How do you think I felt, discovering my fiancée and my only brother were screwing around behind my back? How do you think I felt, coming face to face with the two of you sharing declarations of love in the same bed I’d been in a few hours before?” He leaned down and put both hands on the rocker’s arms, trapping her against the chair back. “Too damn bad for you I came home early that evening, and pretty damn lucky for me. At least I discovered what a little bitch you are before you got a wedding ring on your finger.”
The silence that crept into the void left behind his words crackled with the remains of his anger. Their faces were inches apart, and she hoped her expression was as hostile as his was. She was too busy controlling her shaking limbs to be sure.
With a sound of disgust, Dax pushed away from the rocker. Turning his back to her, he leaned an arm against the brick wall, resting his bent head against it.
And, despite the fear and fury warring inside her, a part of her longed to go to him and rub the tension from his shoulders, smooth the vertical lines that had formed between his brows, rock him until the sorrow in his heart subsided.
She needed to have her head examined.
Reaching for the most disdainful voice she could muster, she said, “So let me be sure I have this straight. I go to dinner with you tomorrow night or you throw my business and those of several other innocent people out of their stores?”
His shoulders straightened. “If that’s what it takes.” He turned to face her, but she couldn’t see his expression in the darkness. “I met with the family attorney after the funeral. He told me Charles did indeed leave you his shares.” There was bitterness in his tone. “Payment for services rendered?”
She hissed in a breath, grabbed her temper before it got away, and counted to ten. “I have no earthly idea why Charles left that stock to me. It would have gone to Alma if she’d survived him, you know.” Her voice shook unexpectedly as an image of Charles’s practical, soft and gentle little wife appeared in her head.
There was a tense silence. She could practically feel the rage emanating from him. But all he said was, “Since you’re now a company stockholder, you need to know that Piersall Industries is in trouble.”
“What do you mean, ‘in trouble’?” She was cautious, wondering what kind of trap this was.
“In trouble,” he repeated. He stepped out of the deepest shadows and his eyes were deadly serious. “That stock you hold won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on if something isn’t done to turn Piersall around.”
“Something like what?” She didn’t care about the stock, nor the profits from it; she’d succeeded in making her life comfortable without it so far. But as a businesswoman, the idea of a company closing, putting who knew how many people out of work, was anathema to her. And this was the only link she had now with Charles; she wasn’t ready to toss it aside, even to spite Dax.
Without answering her question, he said, “Tomorrow night. Seven. Dress is casual.” He stepped over to her door and twisted the key, opening the door before withdrawing the keys and tossing them into her lap. “Go to bed. You look like hell.”
She couldn’t just sit there and take more of his insults; it had been a long time since she’d allowed any man to get the better of her. “If I look like hell, it’s from having the misfortune to be in the same city with you again.”
She was still sitting in the rocker when he turned the corner and vanished into the parking lot.
Two
She can still wrap you up in more knots than a sailor could, Dax thought. He leaned his head against the back of his seat, putting off the moment of ringing Jillian’s doorbell and seeing the ice in those blue eyes.
He’d been well-prepared for their first meeting yesterday ...he’d thought. Until she’d sprung her little coup on him. He still couldn’t believe she controlled twenty-three per cent of the company’s voting stock now.
Ever since he’d received the brief, stilted facsimile telling him Charles was dead, he’d imagined that first meeting with her. Dax had been shocked to his shoes when he’d seen Jillian’s name on the letterhead; he’d almost conditioned himself to stop thinking of home, and of anyone connected to his past.
Especially her. God, how he’d hated her. It had taken years for him to stop thinking of her every minute, years, and with one damned piece of paper, she was back in his head as if she’d never left. When he’d flown up here from Atlanta, the man he’d hired to investigate her met him at the airport with everything he’d dug up. And as he scanned the doings of Jillian Kerr through the past seven years or so, he’d known he wasn’t going to walk away this time without wringing some answers out of her. Maybe once he knew why she’d agreed to marry him when she’d obviously wanted Charles, maybe then he could finally forget.
A few more phone calls had put him in exactly the position he wanted, and he’d strolled off to the funeral yesterday feeling pretty pleased with himself and primed for a fight. When he’d made his way through the crowd, he’d been ready to rip her to shreds, exactly the way she’d ripped his heart out once.
Only he hadn’t bargained for the compelling reaction his body and his emotions had experienced when he sat down beside her at the service. He hadn’t gotten a good look at her face right away, and it was just as well. He’d been so fixated on the sight of her slender thighs beneath the short black skirt, and the way she’d kept her legs pasted together, with her long, narrow feet in their elegant, unsuitable shoes cuddled side by side on the ground, that he couldn’t have spoken if he’d had to. Memories had swamped him. He could still see her long, slender body, feel the way she’d yielded beneath him, hear the sweet little whimpers she made when he was touching her.
It had taken him every minute of the rest of that eulogy to battle the need back into submission, to keep his hands from reaching out and yanking her against him. And then, when she’d stood and he’d looked directly at her for the first time, he’d been poleaxed by her glowing, youthful appearance. The woman was thirty-two years old, for God’s sake. He knew she’d been around the block more times than a kid on a new bike, and yet she still looked fresh as a flower on a dewy morning.
She’d barely seemed to notice him; he had felt her grief and the determined way she was clinging to control. It only served to enrage him all over again. Apparently, she’d stayed close to Charles all these years; Dax doubted she’d be so emotional if he were the one in that coffin.
That coffin. Regret halted his tumbling thoughts. Somehow, he’d always assumed he and Charles would speak again some day. Dax could never forgive Jillian, but Charles was another story.
He, Dax, knew firsthand just how seductive and irresistible she could be.
