form of adversity?”
“Your family is obviously different from mine or you would know the answer to that question.”
Sarina knew entirely too much about his family, as did everyone else in the known world, because both branches of it had spent so much time dominating tabloid headlines. Even if she’d never looked one of them up deliberately, there would have been no avoiding them. Matteo’s father had regularly appeared in the headlines, for this or that supposed marital or corporate indiscretion. His mother, meanwhile, had been widely held to be the most beautiful woman on the planet while she’d lived. Which had come with its own share of scandals and speculation, and all the attendant tabloid attention.
He and his sister were close, or so it was believed—or as close as they could be with a ten-year age gap between them, leaving Matteo as something more like a secondary parent than a brother.
In contrast, Sarina had been raised by chilly academics. They were far more concerned with their own research, their endless pursuit of publication, and the petty intellectual squabbles of their peers than the daughter she thought they’d had as an experiment in humanity more than any desire to parent. And they had less than no interest in any scandals she might have kicked up along the way.
Sarina couldn’t imagine growing up in a place like this villa, no matter how lovely Venice was. She and Jeannette had grown up in side-by-side old houses in the Berkeley Hills, racing in and out of rooms notable for their towering piles of books and comfortable, threadbare rugs, muddy porches and overgrown yards. This villa was a dramatic clutter of perfectly preserved tapestries and heavy stone statues, slung about this chamber and that, lest anyone be tempted to forget that this was the very heart of old-world wealth.
She knew why he’d brought her here, but it was backfiring in ways she doubted he’d imagined. Because now she knew how seriously he took himself and his pedigree. And that could only work to her advantage.
“Why did you think that it was better to meet here?” she asked, keeping her voice cool. “In a place that is very clearly a home, and not part of your business empire? Is this another attempt on your part to steer our interactions toward something sexual?”
“You are the one who keeps mentioning sex, Dr. Fellows,” Matteo said silkily. “Not me.”
Somehow she kept any reaction to that off her face. “Yet you insisted we start here, not in one of your many offices. Can you explain that choice?”
“This is where I happen to be at the moment,” he replied, and there was a certain smokiness in that voice of his with its unique accent, not quite British and not yet Italian. Something dark, and more compelling than she wanted to admit. To her horror, she felt a certain...thrill work its way through her, settling between her legs and worse, pulsing. She was so horrified she froze. “Both you and the chairman of my board impressed upon me that these meetings had to begin as soon as possible. Obedient in all things, I immediately made myself available.”
There wasn’t a single obedient thing about this man. Sarina ordered herself to concentrate on her reasons for being here and not that pulsing thing. Or the wildness she could sense in him, simmering there beneath his aristocratic surface.
“What I think, Mr. Combe, is that you wanted me to see this villa You wanted to impress me.”
“I cannot imagine anything less on my mind than a desire to impress you.”
“I’m assessing you for corporate reasons, yet you appear in a T-shirt. Here in this very personal space. At the very least, you aren’t taking this seriously. Do you think that’s wise?”
Something changed in his gaze then. Some flash of awareness, or temper. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and she was suddenly aware of the fact that though he’d called it a library, this was really nothing more than a small living room. It just happened to contain a number of books. A fireplace. What had seemed like a reasonable amount of space without it feeling like a closet.
But when he shifted like that, he seemed to take up the whole of it.
“I would ordinarily spare a visitor a dreary history lesson, but there is very little personal about this villa. It appears as it always has. It is my job to be its steward, not a resident in any real sense. I must hand the villa on to the next generation intact. As it has been handed down, eldest son to eldest son, since the day it was built. For me, Doctor, there is no distinction between what is corporate and what is personal. My mother was a San Giacomo. Surely you must know what that means.”
“Is this your way of reminding me that you’re famous, Mr. Combe?”
“My family is not famous,” he said gently. “Fame is the stuff of a moment, here and gone. My family—both of my families—are prominent and of significant means. And have been for some centuries.”
“Do you think—”
“Let us cut to the chase, please.” He interrupted her smoothly, but she was sure that was impatience she could see in his face. And his please wasn’t any sort of supplication. “What is it you are looking for from me? Is it a certain set of words, arranged in a specific way, so as to assuage whatever offended dignity my board is currently pretending they feel? Tell me what it is you need, I shall provide it, and then we can all move on with our lives.”
That felt like a slap, and the fact that it did made her wonder why she hadn’t noticed that he was getting to her the way he was. Not just that thing she could still feel like a new pulse, low in her belly. He was nice to look at, yes—magnetic, even—but it was more than that. She was leaning forward in the uncomfortable chair she’d chosen and now felt she had to pretend she found pleasant.
But Sarina wasn’t assessing Matteo Combe the way she should have been. Instead, she was hanging on his every word. She was enjoying sparring with him a little bit too much.
She was...enjoying this. Him.
A wave of self-hatred crashed over her, and on some level she was shocked it didn’t sweep her away. That he couldn’t see it.
I’m sorry, Jeanette. And as she thought of her lost friend, her sister in her soul, another wave hit her—this time, of the grief that never quite left her. And never would, she thought, until she did her part to give a little back to the kind of men who preyed on pretty girls like Jeanette had been. And did nothing when they fell apart, because they’d already moved on to another victim.
Sarina had vowed that she would honor her best friend’s memory right there where she’d found Jeanette’s body, there in the bathroom of the apartment they’d shared while Sarina finished up her graduate work. She would do what she could to bring supposedly untouchable men to justice, if they deserved it. She would identify predators, look hard at arrogance, and where appropriate, help dismantle systems that kept abusive men in power.
That vow hadn’t simply been words. She’d made it the cornerstone of her life.
One beautiful, brooding much-too-rich man with eyes like smoke wasn’t going to change that.
“I’m afraid that’s not how it works.” Her voice was much chillier than it had been before. Overcompensation, maybe. But there was something about Matteo that encouraged her to...lean in too much. Be a little bit too much engaged. Try to match wits with him when she should have been quietly and competently undermining his confidence. “I understand that you’re a man who’s used to being in charge of things,
