you.”
“What I did or did not offer your board isn’t something I can discuss with you. They are my client. The nature of our relationship must remain private.”
“How convenient.”
“Here’s what I want you to think about,” she said, and smiled at him, encouragingly. With too much teeth, perhaps. “Control is obviously very important to you. You control your company, now more than ever. You apparently think that you ought to be able to control the reproductive choices of your own sister. You’re a very powerful man, and powerful men, as a rule, tend to be under the impression that they should be able to control anything and everything. But you don’t control this. You don’t control me.”
“As it happens, I have thought of little else.”
Again, he was far more dry than she’d been prepared for. It unnerved her—but Sarina hid that. Or hoped she did.
“Good. And as you continue to think about it, as I’m sure you will, I’d like you to find your way to viewing this as an opportunity.”
His mouth curved into something sardonic. “An opportunity for what, exactly?”
He was still leaning forward, and despite herself, so was she. And the room suddenly felt breathless. Fraught and tight around them, like a fist.
But Sarina didn’t sit back. She didn’t break that connection—because she refused to show him that she noticed it in the first place.
“Why, for you, Mr. Combe.” She made her voice light. Very nearly airy. “It’s your opportunity to be a better person. Once you learn how to give up control, you might find that you don’t have to struggle with concepts like toxic masculinity.”
His expression suggested that he was not overconcerned with said concepts, or indeed any kind of struggle. But he only gazed back at her, his gray eyes steady in a way that made her breath feel shallow.
“And I will be free of this struggle because my corporation will crumble into dust, as it requires my control and attention at all times? Or perhaps it will be my family that suffers, once I release my grip—as I am the only thing currently holding us together? I think you misunderstand the fundamental nature of my character, Dr. Fellows. I am not trying to control the universe. Between you and me, I do not much care about the universe. But I do like to control what I am, in fact, in control of.”
“Says the man who descended into an all-out brawl at his own father’s funeral.”
She saw it then. That blaze of pure, stark temper in his gaze that made his whole face change. Into something taut and dark. Powerful in an entirely different way.
Thrilling, something in her supplied, as she pulsed anew. But she ignored all of that.
Or she tried.
But Matteo’s eyes were smoke and ruin, and she had the oddest sense he knew it.
“Oh, Doctor.” He sounded almost pitying. Almost. “Do you think that I was goaded into punching that man? On the contrary, I very much meant to do that. And am glad I did.”
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