his smiles had looked like before. How they’d felt when he’d aimed them her way. They had never been like this. Ruthless and terrible in turn. “No apologies, Lexi. It’s much too late for that.”
She found herself rising then, as if she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she simply couldn’t sit there another moment, like some kind of small animal of prey. She smoothed down the front of her pencil skirt and hoped she looked the way she’d imagined she had this morning in her mirror. Capable. Competent. Unworthy of this kind of malevolent focus.
“I know you must be very angry,” she began.
And he laughed. It was a hard, male sound that rolled down the length of her spine and seemed to lodge itself there in her lower back, where it spread. Until there was that same old aching thing again, low in her belly and made of a kind of fire Lexi didn’t pretend to understand.
But there was no getting around the fact that she’d never heard a laugh like that before. So utterly devoid of humor. So impossibly lethal she wanted to look down and check herself for bullet holes.
“You have no idea how angry I am, little girl,” Atlas told her, that grim fury and something else making his black eyes gleam as they tore straight through her. “But you will. Believe me, you will.”
ATLAS WAS USED to fury.
He was used to rage. That black, choking spiral that had threatened to drag him under again and again over the past decade and some years, very nearly had for good.
But this was different. She was different.
Because little Lexi Haring, who had once followed him around these very grounds like a shy puppy, all big eyes and a shy smile that was all for him, was the architect of his destruction.
Oh, he knew in some distant, rational part of his brain that she was no less a pawn than he had been in this. He knew exactly how little her relatives thought of her and more, what they’d taken from her. Her presence in this hidden away little carriage house made her status amongst the Worths perfectly clear, far away from the members of the family who mattered. More than that, he’d had his own investigators digging into these people for years now, gathering all the things he’d need when he was finally free, and he knew things about her he doubted she knew herself.
Things he’d always known he’d use against her without a second thought once the opportunity arose.
From the moment of his arrest Atlas had refused to accept that he’d never be free again. Some long, lonely years, that was all that had kept him sane in that loud, bright hell of concrete and steel.
And now, standing here in this drafty old place, he realized he remembered all the ins and outs of the Worth family dramas better than he’d like. All those memories of the way they’d excluded Lexi while pretending to extend her a little charity. Keeping her close enough to be grateful and uncertain, but never close enough to forget herself and the subservient place they wanted—needed—her to occupy.
But Atlas would be damned if he felt any sympathy for her. Lexi was the one who had sat up in that witness box and ruined him. One halting, obviously terrified word after the next.
He remembered her testimony too well. That and the way she’d looked at him, her wide brown eyes slicked with tears, as if it hurt her to accuse him of such things. And worse than that. With fear.
Of him.
The worst wasn’t what she’d done to him. It was that unlike her bastard of an uncle, she’d believed that he’d done what he was accused of doing. She’d believed with all her heart and soul that he was a vicious killer. That he’d had an argument with impetuous, grandiose Philippa who had made no secret of the fact she’d have liked to get naked with him, had choked her because—the prosecution had thundered—he was a man with no impulse control and had feared that a relationship with the Worth heiress would get him fired, and had then thrown her into the pool on that cool summer night in the Oyster House compound.
Leaving her there to be found by Lexi when she’d gone looking for Philippa early the next morning.
“If Mr. Chariton feared that he would lose his position at the company because of Miss Worth, why would he leave her in the pool to be found the moment someone woke up?” his lawyer had asked Lexi.
Atlas could still remember the way her eyes had filled with tears. The way her lips had trembled. The way she’d looked at him, there at the defense table, as if he stormed through her nightmares nightly. As if he hadn’t just killed Philippa, to her mind, but had broken her own heart, too.
“I don’t know,” she’d whispered. “I just don’t know.”
And in so doing, had made him the monster the jury had convicted after a mere two-hour deliberation.
It was Lexi’s belief in the fact he must have done such a terrible thing—and how upset she’d been at the prospect—that had locked him away for a decade.
She might as well have turned the key in the lock herself.
“You’ve grown up,” he said when it didn’t look as if she planned to speak. Possibly ever again.
“I was eighteen when you left,” she replied after a moment, her cheeks a crisp, hot red. “Of course I’ve grown up since then.”
“When I left,” he echoed her, his own words tinged with malice. “Is that what you call it? How delightfully euphemistic.”
“I don’t know what to call it, Atlas. If I could take back—”
“But you can’t.”
That sat there then, taking up all the space in the close little room, as claustrophobic and faintly shabby as it was possible to get on this vast, luxurious estate. And he understood exactly why her devious, manipulative uncle had stashed her away here. Heaven forfend she spend even one moment imagining herself on the same level as his feckless, irresponsible sons.
Atlas roamed farther inside the small office, cluttered with overstuffed bookshelves and unframed prints when there were old masters piled high and unused in the attics of the great house. He was aware that it would take no more than an extra step to put himself right there on the opposite side of her flimsy little desk, within arm’s reach. What bothered him was how very much he wanted to get close to her. Not just to make her uncomfortable, though he wanted that. Badly.
But he also wanted his hands on her. All over her, and not only because the past ten years had been so particularly kind to her—so kind, in fact, that he’d had to take a moment in the doorway to handle his reaction. And to remind himself that while he’d expected a drab little girl and had been wholly committed to doing what needed to be done with her, the fact she’d grown into something rather far removed from drab could only be to his benefit.
Because he had a very specific plan, she was integral to it, and it would involve more than just his hands. It would involve his entire body, and hers, and better still—her complete and total surrender to his will in all things.
He thought that might—just might—take the edge off.
Or anyway, it would be a good start.
