Imprisoned By The Greek's Ring

“Has it never occurred to you to wonder why it is your uncle goes to such great lengths to hide you away?” he asked, forcing himself to remain cool and calm even though this was the part he’d been looking forward to the most. “He treats you like the hired help, and you never think to question why that is, do you?”

“It’s because that’s essentially what I am,” Lexi said briskly. If there was some emotion in her gaze, she blinked and it was gone. She even stood taller—likely because this was familiar ground for her. “And I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for any shred of grace the Worths deign to throw my way. Because it’s more than I ever would have gotten if my uncle had left me where I grew up.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised how deeply invested she was in that story. After all, he’d believed the old man, too, and he’d known better. How could a little girl have managed to hold out against a liar like Richard when Atlas had never seen any of this coming?

Not that he forgave her. Not even close.

“Yes, about that. Did you never think to question how it was your uncle found you so quickly?”

“I don’t know what any of this has to do with what’s happening here,” Lexi burst out, with more emotion than he’d heard from her yet. She was more comfortable taking the blame than in spreading it around, Atlas thought. He needed to explore that—but only once he got his unruly fascination with the woman she’d become under control. “My mother walked away from this life. I feel lucky every single day that my uncle decided that just because he disowned her, that didn’t mean he needed to write me off, too.”

But again, despite the words she used, Atlas was certain he saw a hint of something else on her face. As if she wasn’t as meekly grateful and humbly subservient as she acted.

“Because your uncle is nothing if not emotional,” he said derisively, hoping that might tease Lexi’s real thoughts out. “Family first, that’s what he’s known for.”

She flushed at his harshly ironic tone. “He’s a little reserved, yes, but—”

“Your uncle never had the power to disown your mother, Lexi,” Atlas said, and even though he’d been leading up to this from the start, since before he’d stepped outside his cell, he made himself sound impatient. Gruff and dark, because he knew it got to her.

And so it did. She squirmed.

“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” he asked when she made no reply. “You are as much a Worth family heiress as Philippa was. All your mother’s money was held from her and is now yours. With interest.”

“That’s not possible,” she said, almost dully. Almost as if she couldn’t entirely process what he was saying.

“Of course, because your mother was such a disaster, there’s a little clause in your trust. If your uncle does not approve of the man you marry, you will never see a penny of your fortune. And if you never marry, he will continue to handle that fortune as he sees fit, lest you be drawn into a marriage like your parents’ at some point in the future.”

“My...” She shook her head, her gaze blank. He thought perhaps she was shocked. “I don’t have a fortune.”

“But you see, you do. You always have.” Atlas reached over and took her chin in his fingers before he knew he meant to move at all, much less touch her. He told himself the bolt of sensation that seared through him at so innocuous a touch was about his years in prison, not her. He needed a woman. Any woman. He told himself it had nothing to do with this woman, particularly. But he also didn’t let go. “And I want it.”

“You want...?”

“You, Lexi.” Atlas smiled. Not at all nicely. “I want you. When your uncle asks what else he can give me, that is what I will tell him. That I intend to marry you. And that he will give his enthusiastic blessing to the match or live to regret it.”

“None of this... I’m not...” Her chin trembled in his grip. “He won’t do that. For any number of reasons.”

“He will,” Atlas said, stone and certainty, and furious all the way through. “Because if he does not, I will burn this place, and this family, straight down to the ground, Lexi. And better yet—I’ll enjoy it.”

CHAPTER THREE (#u88826969-3f64-50d0-81b1-a37fc253d9c6)

LEXI WAS THE only one who had not dressed for dinner, which had the immediate effect of making her feel like a scullery maid. She tried to suck that in and bury it beneath her usual unflappably serene expression—the one she’d practiced in the mirror for years when she was younger—but as she stood in the family drawing room before dinner in her wilted office clothes while all around her swanned her cousins in the typical Worth family finery, she found it grated.

Or maybe it was that everything grated, suddenly, and her clothes were just a symptom.

She had no idea where the rest of her afternoon had gone.

Atlas had left the carriage house and she’d stood where he left her for a long, long time, as if she’d forgotten how to move. At some point she remembered, because she’d moved to the window near the polished stones she’d collected during the one beach holiday her parents had ever taken her on, and that was where she found herself as twilight began to fall over the estate. It was like a fugue state, and it left her no time to return to her flat, change into one of her few more formal dresses and then get back in time for dinner.

Maybe there was a part of her that had wanted it that way, she’d thought as she’d walked the twenty minutes across the park toward the manor house. Maybe something in her wanted to walk into one of Worth Manor’s famous formal dinners dressed like an office drone, every inch of her the obviously poor relation she’d been to these people since Uncle Richard had come to collect her at eight years old.

Except...if what Atlas had said to her was true, she’d never been the poor relation at all.

Did they all know it? Were they all a part of this, or did they all believe the same story Lexi always had?

Lexi couldn’t let herself think about it too closely. It was too much to pile on top of the lingering effects of Philippa’s murder and the greater worry of Atlas’s return. The fact that Atlas had gotten out of prison in the first place felt like entirely too much to handle, if she was honest. Much less that he’d come straight for her. The things he’d thrown out so cavalierly, as if they were simple little facts like the color of the walls instead of literally life-altering—well. How could she possibly process any of that? It was too much. He was too much.

Not to mention the things he’d said to her. Much less threatened.

“What are you doing here?” her cousin Harry asked her when she settled herself on the farthest settee in the drawing room, where she’d assumed she was least likely to attract notice or offend anyone with her presence. He was a tad too provoking for her tastes, but that was Harry. Red of face and shockingly ginger of hair, but nothing so attractive as the redheaded prince who shared his name. This Harry was always drunk and bitter. “Do you have something for Father to sign?”

And Lexi felt it then. That twisted, tangled, knotted thing inside her that she’d worked so hard all these years to ignore. To keep tucked away so nobody could possibly suspect it was lurking in there, the dark and forever angry little part of her that had always found the compulsory gratitude that was expected of her a little too hard to produce on cue.

Especially when she was treated like the lowliest member of the staff instead of family.

“I was invited,” she said, perhaps more coldly than necessary.

She didn’t say by whom. If Harry was surprised by that, or her chilly tone, he buried it in his back-to-back pre-dinner cocktails the way he always did. And by the time the whole of the family was gathered in the drawing room, Harry was well on his way to being entirely drunk. And the reckless way he ran his mouth when intoxicated was far more interesting to concentrate on than the reason everyone was standing there, speaking to each other in quietly appalled, obviously anxious tones.

As if that would make any difference. As if the quietness would save them, somehow, when Lexi felt certain that Atlas wouldn’t care if they screamed and shouted. In fact, he might prefer it that way.

He, of course, was late.

“You’d think the one thing a person might learn in prison was how to be on time,” her cousin Gerard muttered. His wife, the self-satisfied Lady Susan—who never missed an opportunity to flaunt the fact that she was both titled and had provided Gerard with an heir and two spares to cement her position in the family forever—tittered.

Lexi stayed where she was, on the settee tucked beneath the far window. She felt different, somehow, than she normally did when she found herself in the middle of the Worth family. As if the fact that Atlas was innocent had changed something in her, too.

Or as if the things he’d said to her today had made it impossible for her to view anything in the way she had before. As if he’d torn the veil from her eyes without her consent and it didn’t matter, anyway, because there was no going back now that she could see. Maybe that was why she found herself studying these people, her family, whom she’d spent most of her life wanting desperately to include her.

For twenty years now, all she’d wanted was to feel as if she was a part of this. Of them. And the truth was that she never had.

In those twenty years, only Philippa had ever treated Lexi as if she was something more than a charity case. Only Philippa had ever acted as if she cared—and that had been such a long time ago it was almost as if Lexi had made it up. Dreamed it, perhaps, a decade back when she’d still been so young and hopeful.

Only Philippa—and occasionally, back in those gleaming days before anything bad had happened, Atlas.

Lexi didn’t want to think about what Atlas had said to her earlier. And worse, if what he’d said was true, what that meant about everything she’d believed about her life all these years. She didn’t want to consider all the implications—but she couldn’t quite seem to help herself.

She concentrated on her uncle. Richard looked like exactly who he was and always had been. A very wealthy man indeed, whose consequence stretched back several centuries to a time when the first Worth merchants had emerged from the unwashed masses and dared to claim a place in British society. He was inordinately proud of the fact he still had a full head of leonine white hair and stood a bit above six feet. He ran a religious few miles every morning and swore by an evening constitutional around the grounds to digest his dinner. He was a careful man, Lexi would have said, despite his vanity—or perhaps because of it. He considered his every move deeply and dispassionately.

If he was disconcerted by Atlas’s return, he was the only one who didn’t show it. Richard stood in one of his quietly masterful suits at the mantel over the crackling fire. He hardly touched the drink he held. That he was irritated with Harry’s drunkenness was evident only in the faintest curl of his austere lips. That he had never had any particular use for Lady Susan was equally evident in the way he failed to look at her directly, no matter how she tittered and made a show of herself.

Lexi thought Gerard was Richard’s favorite, but tonight she wondered if that was true—or if Gerard was simply the only one who didn’t inspire his father to visibly fight the urge to roll his eyes. She tried to remember how he’d treated Philippa, but that had been so long ago. And Lexi had been so young and easily embarrassed herself that it was hard to remember what had really happened and what was simply her own potential overreaction to things.

Before tonight, Lexi had never considered the fact that her uncle’s complete lack of expression when he looked at her was a kind of blessing. It was neutral, anyway. She wondered if that put her higher in his estimation than Harry—or at least, drunken Harry. Or Lady Susan and her tittering.

Then again, perhaps his neutral expression when he looked at her was simply because Richard Worth didn’t stir himself to have visible reactions to anyone who wasn’t a member of his nuclear family.

Damn Atlas for making all of that seem nefarious.