He was going to leave, just like that, after raking up the old wounds, after asking about her baby—their baby—
‘It was a girl,’ she burst out, the words like staccato gunfire. Her chest burned, and so did her eyes. Her fingers clenched into a fist on her desk. Jace stilled, his hand on the door. ‘A girl,’ she repeated tonelessly. ‘Since you asked.’
He turned around slowly, lip curled in an unpleasant sneer. ‘So I did,’ he replied. ‘But actually I really don’t care.’
And then he was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
‘ELEANOR? Did Jace Zervas just leave the office?’
Eleanor jerked her head up to see her boss, Lily Stevens, standing in her office doorway. Under her glossy black helmet of hair her eyebrows were drawn together sharply, her mouth a thin red line. The elegantly disapproving look reminded Eleanor of her mother, which was unsurprising since Lily and her mother had been business partners until five years ago.
‘Eleanor?’ Lily repeated, more sharply, and Eleanor rose from her desk, trying to smile. How long had she been lost in her own miserable reverie? ‘Yes. We just concluded our meeting.’
‘That was fast.’
Eleanor moved around her desk to put Jace’s coffee cup—barely touched—back on the tray. ‘He’s a busy man.’
‘Jill said things seemed tense when she came in here.’
Of course Jill would run to her boss, Eleanor thought with resentment. What a frenemy! This business could be cut-throat, and everyone was trying to claw a way in or up. She gave a little shrug. ‘Not really.’
‘I don’t think I need to tell you,’ Lily said, her tone making it clear she thought she did, ‘that Jace Zervas is a very important client? His holdings are worth over a billion—’
‘You don’t need to tell me.’ She didn’t need Lily telling her how rich and powerful Jace was. She’d known that already. When she’d met him as a twenty-two-year-old exchange student in Boston, he’d been from money. Rich, entitled, spoiled.
Except he’d never seemed spoiled to her… until he’d left. Then he’d seemed rotten right through.
‘I want you to do everything in your power to make this party a success,’ Lily told her. ‘I’m releasing your other clients to Laura for the week.’
‘What?’ Eleanor heard the outrage in her voice, and strove to temper it. She had several clients she’d been working with for months, and she knew Laura—another frenemy—would be eager to scoop up the contacts and run with them. Eleanor gritted her teeth. This business could be brutal. She’d toughened up a lot in the last ten years, but it still made her weary. She also knew there was nothing she could do about it.
If Lily was going to make that kind of executive decision, so be it. He wasn’t worth her jeopardising her career; he wasn’t worth anything. She would work on Jace’s damn party for a week. And then she would forget—again—that she’d ever met him.
Lily’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that going to be a problem, Eleanor?’
Eleanor bit the inside of her cheek. She hated that tone, that silky, dangerous, warning tone that her mother had always taken with her as a child. Funny, how she’d ended up in a job just like her mother’s, with a boss just like her mother.
Except there was nothing remotely funny about it, or even coincidental. Every choice, every decision had been intentional, a way of distancing herself from everything she’d been or believed in. A way of reinventing herself.
And it had worked.
Now she turned to smile sweetly at her boss. ‘Of course not. I’m absolutely thrilled—and honoured, Lily—to be working with Mr Zervas. Getting his account is a coup for the agency.’
Lily nodded, seemingly satisfied. ‘So it is. Are you meeting with Zervas again?’
‘I’ll email him the particulars tomorrow.’ Eleanor shuddered inwardly to think what that meant. She’d be tied up in begging calls for the rest of the day, recalling favours and currying some more so she could make this thing happen.
The idea that she would have to slave away all for Jace burned in her gut, her heart. It was just wrong.
But she wasn’t about to lose her job over this, or even her cool. And, Eleanor told herself, there could be some sweet, sweet satisfaction in showing Jace how he hadn’t hurt her at all.
Even if he really had—and horribly at that.
She spent the rest of the day immersed in work, planning Jace’s party while refusing to think of the man himself. A call to Atrikides Holdings yielded some interesting—and unsurprising—information.
‘It all happened so fast,’ gushed the staff member Eleanor had been connected to when she asked to speak to someone about details. Eleanor leaned back in her chair and prepared to hear some gossip. ‘One minute everything was fine—it’s a family business, you know—and the next he swooped in and took over. Fired half the people.’ The woman—Peggy— lowered her voice to an awed hush. ‘They had to leave that very day. Pack their stuff in boxes. Even Talos Atrikides—the CEO’s son!’
‘Well, hopefully this party will go some way to smoothing things over,’ Eleanor replied. She could listen to the gossip, but she wouldn’t indulge in it herself. She knew better.
Still, as she hung up the phone, the conversation left her a little shaken. She’d fallen in love with Jace Zervas when he’d been just twenty-two years old, charming, easy-going, carefree and careless. She hadn’t realised just how cold—and cold-hearted—he’d been until he’d walked away.
And hearing about his actions with Atrikides Holdings today confirmed it. He really was that man.
The other one—the one she’d fallen in love with—had been nothing more than a mirage. A lie.
It was nearly midnight by the time Eleanor finally stumbled out of the office, exhausted and eyesore from scanning endless sheets of paper with their myriad details. Still, she had the basis of a party to propose to Jace—via email—tomorrow. Massaging her temples, she headed out into the street, the only cars visible a few off-duty cabs. It looked as if she would have to walk.
It was only a few blocks to her apartment in a high-rise condo on the Hudson River, a gleaming testament to glass and steel. Eleanor didn’t particularly like the modern architecture, or the building’s fussy, high-maintenance residents, but she’d bought it because her mother had said it was a good investment. And she didn’t spend much time there anyway.
Sighing, Eleanor nodded hello to the doorman on duty and then headed in the high-speed lift up to the thirtieth floor.
Her apartment was, as always, dark and quiet. Eleanor dropped her keys on the hall table and flicked on the recessed lighting that bathed the living room with its modern sofa and teakwood coffee table in soft yellow light. Outside the Hudson River twinkled with lights.
Her stomach rumbled and she realised she had
