The Italian's Twin Consequences

It was shouting up a storm as he flew back to London two days later.

By then he’d had every member of his board on the phone to him, demanding he explain the report they’d received from the consultant Matteo had known was in their pocket—but perhaps not so deep. He’d learned a valuable lesson.

His instincts about Sarina Fellows had been correct: she wanted to take him down.

He was pleased to have that clarified, he thought darkly as his plane soared over continental Europe. He should have thought of that while he was letting her provoke him into shooting off his mouth. He should have been prepared for the woman to be a weapon, and he hadn’t been—because he’d been far more intrigued by the gut punch of his attraction to her.

And as entertaining as it was to imagine the fun he might have had with a woman like Sarina if he’d met her under different circumstances, Matteo couldn’t actually let her take him down. He had felt compelled to allow his board to subject him to this consultation, and thought submitting to it as his own father wouldn’t have made him look far more reasonable and biddable than Eddie had been, but he couldn’t let her plant her seeds of doubt and dissension. It would never be a good time for such things, but this was particularly bad timing all around. He needed to prove to a set of disapproving old men that he could take the helm of the company he’d already been running for years. He needed to cater to his family’s legacy and make sure Combe Industries didn’t die on his watch. And while he was at it, he needed to handle all the unpleasant revelations of his parents’ wills.

No matter how much the consultant his board had selected got to him.

He might have the odd daydream of walking away from it all, but he never would. That wasn’t who he was.

Matteo was the eldest son—or he’d spent his life thinking he was, anyway—and he had been raised to clean up any and all messes that arose on both sides of his family. He was the heir to the San Giacomo legacy. He was president and CEO of Combe Industries. And more than that, he was the family janitor.

What Matteo did was clean up the mess, whatever it was.

Whether he wanted to or not.

At least this particular mess was of his own making. He was the one who had taken that swing at Prince Ares—and to the other man’s credit, little as Matteo wanted to give him any when he’d already helped himself to Pia, he’d taken the hit. And had then done the right thing by Pia by instantly proposing marriage. It was the paparazzi who’d carried on as if Matteo had sucker punched him and left him for dead.

Everything else on Matteo’s plate was there courtesy of someone else’s inability to handle their lives the way he did. His sister’s love life and its consequences no matter his or anyone’s feelings on the matter, like the princely proposal she’d had no choice but to accept—as she was carrying the heir to the throne of the island kingdom of Atilia. Or his parents’ indiscretions and old scandals made new now that they’d died, in the form of at least one sibling Matteo hadn’t known he had—and wasn’t sure how to deal with now he did.

It was one hit after the next, and really, what was a slanted psychological evaluation complete with a not-so-hidden agenda next to family members he’d never met?

To say nothing about the company that he still had to run whether his board of directors thought he was fit for it or not.

By the time he landed in London, Matteo had been putting out fires for hours. Those of his own making and all the others that cropped up every day of the week. And he had little to look forward to but another long day—and week, and month—with more of the same. Fires everywhere, and once again, it was his job to extinguish them. And despite what his board pretended to think, or the papers brayed daily, the one thing Matteo had always been very, very good at was his job.

The thing about putting out fires for the whole of a man’s adult life was that, sooner or later, he developed a taste for the flames. An appreciation and something akin to admiration.

His father had set out to crush those flames any way he could. Matteo preferred to exult in them, then use the resulting heat to his advantage.

And that was what he chose to reflect upon, just as the doctor had ordered. It appeared Sarina wanted to play games instead of plod through the expected set of sessions in good faith. Matteo was perfectly happy to play along now that he’d sussed out her intentions—because the truth was, when it came to games of high stakes where winning meant surviving, he always won.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” his personal assistant, Lauren, said one morning a few days after that first session in Venice, standing at his desk in London in her usual no-nonsense manner, which was one of the reasons he paid her so well. “But she’s here, I’m afraid. And insists upon seeing you.”

Matteo was neck deep in contract negotiations with foreign distributors—all of whom had spent the past month reading the tabloids, apparently—and couldn’t think of a single person with a claim to his time. Or anyone who would dare send his assistant in here to demand it.

He scowled. “And who is she, may I ask? The bloody Queen?”

Lauren Clarke had been working for him for far too long to react to that tone of his. Or the ferocious glare he leveled at her.

“Not the Queen, sir. I doubt very much she’d appear without an appointment and the royal guard. It’s that psychiatrist.”

And this was part of what he’d agreed to, purely to placate the board. They’d all been foaming at the mouth, waving tabloid magazines and their fists in the air, and caterwauling as if they’d expected the building to fall down around their ears. He’d have agreed to anything to calm them down, and he had.

So now he had a psychiatrist standing in his office, demanding to be seen. In the middle of a complicated workday—which was to say, any old Tuesday at Combe Industries.

But he was no longer operating in good faith. She wanted to play with matches? Matteo would respond with a bonfire.

Something inside him rolled over, shook itself off, and bared its teeth.

He finished his call and gazed back at his PA, though he didn’t see her. He saw Sarina instead, and that sheen of triumph all over her face in Venice.

“Give me five minutes,” he instructed Lauren. “Then show her in.”

He set his trap, then moved to the windows that looked out over the city. Night had already set in, gloomy and wet though it was supposedly spring out there. He could see the suggestion of light and movement, blurred with moisture.

But however cold and miserable it was outside, it was no match for the blast of heat he felt when he heard his office door open, then shut.

Temper. Fury. Anticipation.

“You have been busy, Doctor,” he said, his voice so mild he almost fooled himself into imagining it was real. “In less than a week you have managed to sow dissent throughout the whole of Combe Industries. Uncertainty and speculation.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Combe,” came the reply in her smooth voice, and maybe he was imagining the undercurrent of satisfaction in it. Though he doubted it. “I told you that you weren’t my client. You should have assumed that anything you said to me was in no way confidential.”

Matteo didn’t turn around to face her. He kept his gaze on the window before him, but he stopped looking at blurry, giddy London, and focused instead on the figure he could see in the reflection.

She was dressed in black again, sleek and sharp. Like a blade, he thought.

And he was certain he could feel every hair on his body stand on end. He told himself it was his temper channeling into the ferocious intent he was known for, nothing more. This woman had no idea what he was capable of—but he had every intention of showing her.

“I did not expect confidentiality,” Matteo replied. “But I did imagine you would pretend, at the very least, to get at the truth. Instead, you have made it clear that your mission is to destroy me.”

He waited for her to deny that, but she didn’t.

She didn’t laugh, either, but he was sure he could hear the hint of it in her voice when she answered him. “I don’t need to destroy you. You appear to being doing that job all by yourself.”

“I was under the impression that you were here to perform an impartial assessment, not an assassination.”

She moved farther into his vast, sprawling office. He watched her reflection move across the room, a liquid, rolling walk, all hips and glory, and he stopped pretending that the way she affected him had only to do with his temper. She was wearing another pair of those impossible heels, and Matteo was forced to face the somewhat confronting notion that this woman was not only doing her best to make a fool out of him in front of his business associates—she was single-handedly turning him into a foot fetishist.

He would make her pay for that, too.

“I’m not following you,” came her cool reply. He watched her walk to the front of his desk, then shift to lean against it. She folded her arms over her chest, she cocked out one hip, and he knew she understood every square inch of the power games she was playing. At another time he might have applauded it. “I assume you feel that your character is being assassinated, is that it?”

“With a hatchet, Dr. Fellows.”

He didn’t have to see that smirk of hers to feel it, like one more knife shoved deep into his back. “Your character is your business, Mr. Combe. You explained to me that you felt justified in all of your choices. How, then, could I take a hatchet to your good name? Surely that would only be possible if you felt some sense of shame.”

“Because you are determined, one way or another, that you will make me feel this shame. No matter what it takes.”

“That you’re even discussing the possibility of feeling shame feels a great deal like a breakthrough. I didn’t think such a thing was possible.”

He turned then, holding on to his control by the barest of threads. He could feel temper, yes, but something far darker—and much thicker—pounding in his veins. Making his skin feel too tight. Making his self-possession feel threadbare at best.

But then, this was where he had always operated at his fullest capacity. When he was the most challenged, he shone the brightest.