Книга - Imprisoned By The Greek’s Ring

Imprisoned By The Greek's Ring
CAITLIN CREWS


His vengeance won’t be complete……until he has her as his bride!After ten years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, ruthless Greek Atlas Chariton is back to take revenge on Lexi Haring—the woman who put him there. He’ll meet her at the altar and bind her to him—for life! But once they're married the bliss of her sensual surrender threatens to unravel his hard-won vengeance…







His vengeance won’t be complete...

Until he has her as his bride!

After ten years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, ruthless Greek Atlas Chariton is back to take revenge on Lexi Haring—the woman who put him there. He’ll meet her at the altar and bind her to him—for life! But once married, the bliss of her sensual surrender threatens to unravel his hard-won vengeance...


USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She even teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://www.caitlincrews.com).


Also by Caitlin Crews

Castelli’s Virgin WidowExpecting a Royal ScandalThe Return of the Di Sione WifeThe Guardian’s Virgin WardBride by Royal DecreeUndone by the Billionaire DukeA Baby to Bind His Bride

Scandalous Royal Brides miniseries

The Prince’s Nine-Month ScandalThe Billionaire’s Secret Princess

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).


Imprisoned by the Greek’s Ring

Caitlin Crews






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


ISBN: 978-1-474-07193-2

IMPRISONED BY THE GREEK’S RING

© 2018 Caitlin Crews

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Cover (#u775e8ad3-28aa-51fe-9708-c2e5e730db96)

Back Cover Text (#u03cad64e-cdbf-5da5-9976-0e701a01b6a2)

About the Author (#u51c98450-d09f-505d-86b1-0941ebbe8b90)

Booklist (#u66fa267a-db88-55f5-a787-a4016665c97e)

Title Page (#ue69dbf85-02e0-5e7e-9930-e1bb48e8cd89)

Copyright (#u82ef195f-a422-5cde-a702-b71c8742a28c)

CHAPTER ONE (#ude96a0d8-b8c8-505f-bfad-4cd5faaa0696)

CHAPTER TWO (#u1b63d9e1-8cdd-59a6-81b1-932509fde528)

CHAPTER THREE (#uc362ee74-4ff5-5b67-a715-51535aa72d13)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


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

THE WORST FINALLY happened on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon in the middle of a gray and sullen British spring.

It wasn’t as if Lexi Haring hadn’t been expecting it. They’d all been on tenterhooks since the news had come in. After all these years—and all the appeals that the Worth family solicitors had assured everyone were nothing but noise right up until the very end—Atlas Chariton was a free man.

Not just free. Innocent.

Lexi had watched the press conference he’d given, right there in front of the American prison where he’d been serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole for the murder that DNA evidence at his last appeal trial had conclusively proved he didn’t commit. He’d been released the same day.

She hadn’t been able to turn away from a single moment of the breathless coverage, if she was honest, and not only because every channel was showing the press conference live.

“I’ve maintained my innocence from the start,” Atlas had said in that dark, powerful voice of his that had seemed to come straight through the screen, the English he spoke with both a British accent and that hint of his native Greek as richly mysterious to her ears as ever. He’d had the same effect on her he always had. He filled the small bedsit Lexi counted herself lucky to have in her shabby West London neighborhood. It was a long bus ride plus ten minutes’ brisk walk to the Worth estate where she worked, thanks to her uncle’s continuing kindness to her. And even if she sometimes felt her uncle wasn’t all that kind, she kept it to herself and tried to remind herself of that luck. “I am delighted to be proved so beyond any possible remaining doubt.”

Atlas looked older, which was only to be expected, though no gray had dared yet invade that thick black hair of his that threatened to curl at any moment. The stark ferocity that had always been there on his face and stamped into the long, lean lines of his body was more evident now, eleven years after he’d first been arrested. It made his black eyes gleam. It made his cruel mouth seem even harsher and more brutal.

He made Lexi shiver the way he always had done, though he was all the way on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Her heart kicked at her the way it always had when he was near. And it was as if he was aiming that pitiless midnight stare directly at her, straight through the television cameras.

She thought he was. Of course he was.

She had no doubt that he knew perfectly well that she was watching.

It reminded her of the way he’d glared at her a decade ago, when she’d been eighteen and overwhelmed and had stuttered every time her gaze had clashed with his across that overheated, airless courtroom on Martha’s Vineyard. And yet she’d still somehow managed to choke out the testimony that had damned him.

She could still remember every word she’d said. She could taste each one on her tongue, bitter and thick.

She remembered too much of that time. The intense pressure her uncle and cousins had put on her to testify when she hadn’t wanted to—when she’d been desperate to believe there was another explanation. That there had to be another explanation.

And the way Atlas had watched her in that stony, furious silence when she’d broken down on the stand and admitted she couldn’t think of one.

“What will you do now?” a reporter had asked him outside the prison.

Atlas’s mouth had curved, lethal and cold, more dangerous than the sharpest knife. Lexi had felt it deep in her belly as if he’d thrust it into her, steel edge to hard hilt. No one could possibly mistake it for a smile, surely. No one could miss the fact it was a weapon.

It was her curse that even now, even after everything that had happened, he was the only man alive who made her heart skip a beat, then pound, long and low.

“I will live my life,” Atlas had said, dark and sure, a terrible promise. “At last.”

Lexi had known what that meant. What was coming as surely as night followed day. Her uncle Richard had hemmed and hawed and blustered rather than face the subject head-on, but she thought he’d known, too. Her cousins Gerard and Harry, meanwhile, had acted as if it wasn’t happening. The same way they’d acted eleven years ago when Philippa had been found dead in the pool at Oyster House, the family’s summer estate in Martha’s Vineyard. The way they’d behaved through the trial and the appeals process all this time, as if they weren’t involved. As if it would all go away and revert to normal if they pretended nothing had happened in the first place.

And as if there had ever been any possibility that a man like Atlas would simply fade away into the ether, in jail or out.

Lexi had always known better. When she’d wanted desperately to believe in his innocence and when she’d reluctantly believed in his guilt. Because to her, no matter what, Atlas Chariton had always been the only man in all the world.

“The last thing he’s going to want to do is take up where he left off,” irascible Harry told anyone who would listen in the Worth family home and offices peppered throughout the grand old stately house and estate that had been in the family for hundreds of years, spread across the acreage that had been gloriously maintained in West London since the seventeenth century. Harry was always that confident, about everything. “I’m sure he’s got as little interest in us as we do in him.”

But Lexi knew better. She’d been the one up in that witness box. She’d been the one who’d watched Atlas’s face as she’d testified against him. So harsh and terrible. All judgment and the promise of retribution.

At the time she’d convinced herself it was a measure of the man himself. The signs he was a killer, right there in his grim gaze and that set to his proud jaw—and that despite the more tender, secret things she’d felt about him then.

A schoolgirl’s crush, she’d told herself then, to excuse herself. That was all.

Today it felt like an indictment. That she’d had a desperate, endless crush on a man like Atlas and had testified against him the way she had—had she really been telling the truth to the best of her ability? Had she bowed to her uncle’s whim the way she always did? Or had she simply wanted to get Atlas’s attention however she could, linking herself to him forevermore?

She didn’t know how to answer that.

Or to be more truthful, she didn’t want to know the answer to that.

Whatever her emotions, the science told the truth. There was no getting around it, much as she might have wanted to, in some desperate attempt to feel better about what she’d done. She’d thought she’d been standing up for Philippa, doing the right thing even if it had torn her up inside, and she’d hated herself for the part of her that had ached for the Atlas she’d thought she’d known, but now...

Now she would pay. Of that she had no doubt.

She’d had the weeks between his release and his arrival in London to reconsider every thought she’d ever had about Atlas, and to cast herself in the light he most assuredly saw her, which was in no way flattering to either the teenager she’d been or the woman she was these days.

And now he was here.

Lexi forced a smile and nodded at the wide-eyed secretary who’d brought her the news.

“Thank you for coming all the way out here to tell me,” she said, and was proud of how calm she sounded. How serene and capable, as if this disaster was happening to someone else.

“Mr. Worth wanted me to tell you especially,” the secretary told her, her northern vowels sounding extra pronounced, as if the heightened tension around the estate over these past weeks was getting to her and bringing out her Yorkshire.

Lexi could sympathize. She kept her smile steady as she looked past the other woman, out toward the great, green sweep of the lower lawn and the straight march of the famous drive that led to the grand sprawl of Worth Manor in all its ancient splendor. It had once been the pride of a very rich merchant and the impoverished noblewoman he’d married and tried to win with the things his money could do, and sometimes Lexi liked to imagine that the estate itself was ripe with all that old longing time had not assuaged. Today was another gray, wet day in a long run of the same, with only the desperately cheerful flowers along the borders of the winding drive to suggest that spring was limping along.

There were two vehicles parked outside. One was the little sedan that the secretary had driven down from the manor house, small and nondescript. The other was a gleaming black, classic Jaguar convertible that looked like it deserved its own Bond film. If not a franchise.

Her stomach lurched, then knotted, and she felt pale all the way through. But it wouldn’t do to show any of that.

Nor would it help.

“If you hurry back,” Lexi said in the same deliberately, preternaturally calm voice, because she had nothing else to work with today except the appearance of serenity, “you might beat the rain.”

The secretary nodded her thanks, pulling her serviceable mackintosh tighter around her sturdy torso and letting herself out of Lexi’s small office. Lexi stayed where she was. Frozen solid, in fact. Lexi could hear the secretary’s heels click loudly against the uneven floorboards as she moved down the hall toward the front door.

Lexi’s office, such as it was, was far away from the main part of the estate and the manor house itself. She spent her days out in what had once been a carriage house, separated from the family and the estate’s hundreds of daily visitors as much as it was possible to be while still on the same property. Her cousins lived on the estate, of course—Gerard and his family ensconced in the residential wing of Worth Manor as befit the heir to everything, and Harry in one of the cottages where he could come and go and drink as he pleased. Neither one of them had ever shown the slightest interest in leaving home or exploring the world outside of a few years at university.

Philippa had been the only member of the family who’d wanted something—anything—different. She’d been nineteen when she’d died, filled with plans and dreams and a wild, unmanageable and overwhelming certainty about how beautiful her life was going to be if she could just start living it. She’d found her father tyrannical and the expectations placed on her as the only Worth daughter enervating.

More than that, she’d been kind and silly and fiercely loyal, and Lexi missed her. Every day.

Lexi reminded herself of Philippa when she was tempted to harbor dark thoughts about her uncle and cousins—something she tried to talk herself out of almost as soon as they occurred, because she thought it made her a very small person indeed if she allowed herself to be as ungrateful as she felt sometimes. Too often, in fact. Uncle Richard had been unduly kind to her when she was nothing to him but a niece he hardly knew, who he could easily have written off the way he had her mother.

Richard had never approved of his challenging and problematic sister Yvonne’s marriage to unreliable partier Scott Haring. Much less the desperate, squalid life his sister went on to lead with a man so weak and fatally flawed. And yet there he’d been the day Lexi’s parents had finally succumbed to their addictions, ready to scoop her up and give her a life.

Of course she was grateful for that. She would always be grateful for that.

And on the days it was hard to feel grateful while she did the work her cousins and uncle blew off, again, and then repaired to her grotty little flat while they lounged about in luxury, it was helpful to remind herself that Philippa would have viewed everything about Lexi’s life as a grand adventure. Literally everything. The bedsit in a neighborhood where Lexi could come and go anonymously and as she pleased. The commute to work on buses and along streets filled with regular Londoners going about their regular lives. These were things Philippa, raised in a very specific sort of high society bubble, catered to and sheltered in turn, would have found nothing short of magical.

Even this, Lexi thought as she heard the carriage house door open and shut again with rather more force than usual, and then the secretary’s startled gasp as punctuation.

She knew exactly who’d arrived to face her at last, with no American courts or attorneys or bailiffs to keep her safe from him. Not even the marginal, grudging support of her uncle and cousins. Not this time.

It was finally happening, after the gnawing worry of the past decade and the wild panic of the past few weeks.

Her worst nightmare was coming true at last.

Atlas was here.

She heard the heavy, obviously male tread of his feet in the hall outside her door. Was it her imagination, or did he sound as if he was made of stone? As if he’d really and truly turned into the monster they’d made him—she’d made him—after all his years away?

And now that it was finally happening, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Should she stand? Remain seated? Hide in her cramped little coat closet and wait for him to go away—delaying the inevitable?

She knew what she wanted to do, and glanced at her closet as if she might dive for it. But Lexi had never had the option to hide herself away from the unpleasant things in life. That was what happened when a girl was left to raise herself while her parents chased dragons wherever they led, which was never anywhere good. And it was what happened when she was then brought to live with a new family who treated her well enough, in the sense that they provided for her, but never, ever let her imagine that she was one of them.

But that veered toward ungrateful, she told herself as steadily as she could when the world was ending. And she wasn’t ungrateful. She couldn’t be.

Because then she’d be no better than her lost mother. And she’d spent her whole life trying her best to be nothing at all like Yvonne Worth Haring, once a sparkling heiress with the world at her feet, who’d died in squalor like any other junkie.

Lexi refused to start down that path, and she knew—she remembered too vividly—that the road to her mother’s hell was liberally paved with ingratitude and all of it aimed straight at her uncle.

The heavy tread stopped outside her door and her heart pounded at her, so hard it made her feel dizzy. Lexi was suddenly glad she’d stayed in her seat, tucked up behind the narrow desk she used because a full-size desk wouldn’t have fit in the small room. She wasn’t sure her legs would have held her upright.

And she was having enough trouble keeping her heart from clawing its way out from behind her ribs without adding a collapse to the situation.

The door swung open, slow and ominous, and then he was there.

Right there.

Right here, she thought wildly, panic and dread exploding into something else, something sharper and all too familiar, as she sat there, struck dumb, unable to do anything but stare back at him.

Atlas.

Here.

He filled up the door to her tiny office with rather more brawn and heft than she remembered. He’d always been sculpted and athletic, of course. It was one of the reasons he’d been so beloved all over Europe in his heyday, and hadn’t exactly helped her with the red-faced longing she’d tried so hard to hide. Another reason Europe had adored him was his epic rise from nothing and the power he’d gathered along the way—but Lexi thought his inarguable male beauty had helped that fascination along.

It had been difficult for her to get past way back when. It still was.

She recalled every inch of him, even if memory had muted him a little. In person he was bright, hot, unmistakable. That bold nose that made his profile so intense. The belligerent jaw and curiously high cheekbones that should have canceled each other out but instead came together to make him a little too extraordinary for her poor, overtaxed heart.

He’d had all that ten years ago. He had it all still, though it was all...different, somehow. He was still beautiful, certainly, male and hard and clearly as lethal as he was mouthwateringly handsome. But it was a harder and more intense sort of beauty today. A storm rather than a work of art.

As altered as he was.

Lexi felt as if his hands were wrapped tight around her neck, holding her breath for her. This close to doing exactly what she’d accused him of doing ten years ago.

Any second now, she’d start to choke...but not yet. She was frozen solid. Panicked from her head to her feet and unable to do a single thing but stare at him, the apparition from her own personal hell.

Atlas stood in the door to her office and filled it up, all flashing black eyes and that pugilistic set to his brutal jaw. He wore a dark, obviously bespoke suit that clung to his shoulders and made her far too aware of their size and sculpted, muscled width. As if he could not only bear the weight of the world on them if he chose, he could block it out, as well. He was doing that now.

He had always had that rough, impossible magnetism. It had rolled from him wherever he went, making the hair on the back of Lexi’s neck stand up straight whenever he’d been near. Making it hard to breathe when he entered a room. Making her so aware of him that it was like a body ache.

The ache had kept her awake some nights, tucked away beneath the eaves in the manor house, where she’d lived in the servant’s quarters and had been expected to find her circumstances evidence of her uncle’s generosity. It hadn’t exactly faded in the years since—it had just shifted into the nightmares that woke her in her tiny little bedsit and some nights, kept her from falling back to sleep.

He was far more compelling now. Brutally, lethally compelling. There was something untamed and dangerous about him that his luxurious suit did nothing to hide. If anything, the expertly tailored coat and trousers called attention to how wild he was, how much more he was than other men. He was so much bigger. Rougher. Infinitely more dangerous though he wore the disguise of civility with such ease.

And he glared at her as if he, too, was imagining what it would be like to take her apart with his own two hands.

She couldn’t blame him.

Lexi’s throat was so dry it hurt.

Her palms felt damp and her face was too hot. She had the vague notion she might be sick, but there was something in the pitiless way he regarded her that kept her from succumbing to the creeping nausea.

“Lexi,” he murmured, her name an assault. An indictment. And he knew it. She could see he knew it, that it was a deliberate blow. That he reveled in it—but then, he’d earned that, too. “At last.”

“Atlas.”

She was proud of the way she said his name. No catch in her voice. No shakiness. No stutter. As if she was perfectly composed.

All a lie, of course, but she’d take anything at this point. Anything that got her through this. If there was any getting through something like this.

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t step farther into her office. He only stood where he was and regarded her in that same nearly violent way, all terrible promise and impending threat.

It was excruciating.

“When did you arrive in London?” she asked, still managing to keep her voice calm. If thin.

One dark brow rose, and she felt it like a slap.

“Small talk?” His voice was harshly incredulous and made her feel small. Or smaller. “I arrived this morning, as I’m certain you know full well.”

Of course she knew. He’d been all over the news the moment his plane had set down in Heathrow.

Lexi wasn’t the only one who couldn’t seem to get enough of the scandalous rise and fall of Atlas Chariton. A man who’d built himself from nothing, then swept into the world of high-society high stakes as if he’d been made for it. He’d been hired as the CEO of the Worth Trust at a shockingly young age and had overseen the major renovations and reorganization that had taken the grand old estate from its old, moldering status to a major recreation center for public use and in so doing, had made himself and everyone else very, very wealthy. He’d opened the famous, Michelin-starred restaurant on the grounds. He’d created the five-star hotel that had opened and run beautifully while he’d been incarcerated, thanks entirely to his vision and planning, a point the papers had made repeatedly. He’d started the new programs that had continued in his absence, going above and beyond the usual stately house home and garden tours, making Worth Manor and its grounds a premier London tourist and local destination.

And then he’d been convicted of murdering Philippa and put away.

They’d all been living off his vision ever since.

But by the look of him, Atlas had been living off something else entirely.

A black, dark fury, if Lexi had to guess.

“And how do you find the estate?” she asked, as if she hadn’t taken his warning to heart.

Atlas stared at her until a new heat made her cheeks feel singed, and she felt very nearly lacerated by her own shame.

“I find that the fact you are all still standing, unchanged and wholly unruined, offends me,” he growled. “Deeply.”

“Atlas, I want to tell you that I—”

“Oh, no. I think not.” His teeth bared in something she was not foolish enough to call a smile. She remembered what his smiles had looked like before. How they’d felt when he’d aimed them her way. They had never been like this. Ruthless and terrible in turn. “No apologies, Lexi. It’s much too late for that.”

She found herself rising then, as if she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she simply couldn’t sit there another moment, like some kind of small animal of prey. She smoothed down the front of her pencil skirt and hoped she looked the way she’d imagined she had this morning in her mirror. Capable. Competent. Unworthy of this kind of malevolent focus.

“I know you must be very angry,” she began.

And he laughed. It was a hard, male sound that rolled down the length of her spine and seemed to lodge itself there in her lower back, where it spread. Until there was that same old aching thing again, low in her belly and made of a kind of fire Lexi didn’t pretend to understand.

But there was no getting around the fact that she’d never heard a laugh like that before. So utterly devoid of humor. So impossibly lethal she wanted to look down and check herself for bullet holes.

“You have no idea how angry I am, little girl,” Atlas told her, that grim fury and something else making his black eyes gleam as they tore straight through her. “But you will. Believe me, you will.”


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

ATLAS WAS USED to fury.

He was used to rage. That black, choking spiral that had threatened to drag him under again and again over the past decade and some years, very nearly had for good.

But this was different. She was different.

Because little Lexi Haring, who had once followed him around these very grounds like a shy puppy, all big eyes and a shy smile that was all for him, was the architect of his destruction.

Oh, he knew in some distant, rational part of his brain that she was no less a pawn than he had been in this. He knew exactly how little her relatives thought of her and more, what they’d taken from her. Her presence in this hidden away little carriage house made her status amongst the Worths perfectly clear, far away from the members of the family who mattered. More than that, he’d had his own investigators digging into these people for years now, gathering all the things he’d need when he was finally free, and he knew things about her he doubted she knew herself.

Things he’d always known he’d use against her without a second thought once the opportunity arose.

From the moment of his arrest Atlas had refused to accept that he’d never be free again. Some long, lonely years, that was all that had kept him sane in that loud, bright hell of concrete and steel.

And now, standing here in this drafty old place, he realized he remembered all the ins and outs of the Worth family dramas better than he’d like. All those memories of the way they’d excluded Lexi while pretending to extend her a little charity. Keeping her close enough to be grateful and uncertain, but never close enough to forget herself and the subservient place they wanted—needed—her to occupy.

But Atlas would be damned if he felt any sympathy for her. Lexi was the one who had sat up in that witness box and ruined him. One halting, obviously terrified word after the next.

He remembered her testimony too well. That and the way she’d looked at him, her wide brown eyes slicked with tears, as if it hurt her to accuse him of such things. And worse than that. With fear.

Of him.

The worst wasn’t what she’d done to him. It was that unlike her bastard of an uncle, she’d believed that he’d done what he was accused of doing. She’d believed with all her heart and soul that he was a vicious killer. That he’d had an argument with impetuous, grandiose Philippa who had made no secret of the fact she’d have liked to get naked with him, had choked her because—the prosecution had thundered—he was a man with no impulse control and had feared that a relationship with the Worth heiress would get him fired, and had then thrown her into the pool on that cool summer night in the Oyster House compound.

Leaving her there to be found by Lexi when she’d gone looking for Philippa early the next morning.

“If Mr. Chariton feared that he would lose his position at the company because of Miss Worth, why would he leave her in the pool to be found the moment someone woke up?” his lawyer had asked Lexi.

Atlas could still remember the way her eyes had filled with tears. The way her lips had trembled. The way she’d looked at him, there at the defense table, as if he stormed through her nightmares nightly. As if he hadn’t just killed Philippa, to her mind, but had broken her own heart, too.

“I don’t know,” she’d whispered. “I just don’t know.”

And in so doing, had made him the monster the jury had convicted after a mere two-hour deliberation.

It was Lexi’s belief in the fact he must have done such a terrible thing—and how upset she’d been at the prospect—that had locked him away for a decade.

She might as well have turned the key in the lock herself.

“You’ve grown up,” he said when it didn’t look as if she planned to speak. Possibly ever again.

“I was eighteen when you left,” she replied after a moment, her cheeks a crisp, hot red. “Of course I’ve grown up since then.”

“When I left,” he echoed her, his own words tinged with malice. “Is that what you call it? How delightfully euphemistic.”

“I don’t know what to call it, Atlas. If I could take back—”

“But you can’t.”

That sat there then, taking up all the space in the close little room, as claustrophobic and faintly shabby as it was possible to get on this vast, luxurious estate. And he understood exactly why her devious, manipulative uncle had stashed her away here. Heaven forfend she spend even one moment imagining herself on the same level as his feckless, irresponsible sons.

Atlas roamed farther inside the small office, cluttered with overstuffed bookshelves and unframed prints when there were old masters piled high and unused in the attics of the great house. He was aware that it would take no more than an extra step to put himself right there on the opposite side of her flimsy little desk, within arm’s reach. What bothered him was how very much he wanted to get close to her. Not just to make her uncomfortable, though he wanted that. Badly.

But he also wanted his hands on her. All over her, and not only because the past ten years had been so particularly kind to her—so kind, in fact, that he’d had to take a moment in the doorway to handle his reaction. And to remind himself that while he’d expected a drab little girl and had been wholly committed to doing what needed to be done with her, the fact she’d grown into something rather far removed from drab could only be to his benefit.

Because he had a very specific plan, she was integral to it, and it would involve more than just his hands. It would involve his entire body, and hers, and better still—her complete and total surrender to his will in all things.

He thought that might—just might—take the edge off.

Or anyway, it would be a good start.

And the fact she’d grown up curvy and mouthwatering just made it that much better.

“I don’t know what to say.” Lexi’s voice was quieter then, and he watched, fascinated, as she laced her fingers together and held them in front of her as if they provided her with some kind of armor.

“Is this what wringing your hands actually looks like? I’ve never seen it in person before.” He tilted his head slightly to one side as he let his gaze move over her bookshelves. All dull books about the damned house and the Worth family, stretching back centuries. It wasn’t until he looked at her again that he saw the brighter and more cracked spines of the books behind her desk—within her reach—that suggested she allowed herself a little more fun than she perhaps wished to advertise. That boded well. “Is that meant to render me sympathetic?”

“Of course not. I only—”

“Here’s the thing, Lexi.” He stopped near the window and noted that the rain had begun again, because of course it had. This was England. He picked up one of the small, polished stones that lay on the sill, tested the weight of it in his hand, then set it down again. “You did not simply betray me, though let us be clear. You did. You also betrayed yourself. And worst of all, I think, Philippa.”

She jerked at that, as if he’d hauled off and hit her. He wasn’t that far gone. Not yet. He’d stopped imagining surrendering to the clawing need for brutality inside him some years into his prison term. Or he’d stopped imagining it quite so vividly as he had at first, anyway.

“Don’t you think I know that?” she demanded, though it came out more like a whisper, choked and fierce at once. “I’ve done nothing since your release but go over it all in my head again and again, trying to understand how I could possibly have got it all so wrong, but—”

“Lucky for you, Philippa is just as dead now as she was eleven years ago,” Atlas told her without the faintest shred of pity for her when she blanched at that. “She is the only one among us who does not have to bear witness to any of this. The miscarriage of justice. The incarceration of an innocent man. All the many ways this family sold itself out, betraying itself and me in the process. And in so doing, left Philippa’s murder unsolved for a decade. Though there is one question I’ve been meaning to ask you for years now.” He waited until she looked at him, her brown gaze flooded bright with emotion. Good, he thought. He hoped it hurt. He waited another beat, purely for the theater of it. “Are you proud of yourself?”

Her throat worked for a moment, and he thought she might give in and let the tears he could see in her eyes fall—but she didn’t. And he couldn’t have said why he felt something like pride in that. As if it should matter to him that she had more control of herself these days than she had ten years back.

“I don’t think anyone is proud of anything,” she said, her voice husky with all those things he could see on her face.

“We are not speaking of anyone,” Atlas said sternly. “Your uncle and your cousins will face a different reckoning, I assure you, and none of them deserve you rushing to defend them. I’m talking about you, Lexi. I’m talking about what you did.”

He expected her to crumple, because the old version of Lexi had always seemed so insubstantial to him. In his memory she had been a shadow dancing on the edge of things. Always in the background. Always somewhere behind Philippa. She’d been eighteen and on the cusp of the beauty she hadn’t grown into yet.

Though there had been no doubt she would. He’d known that even then, when he had made certain not to pay too close attention to the two silly girls who ran around the Worth properties together, always giggling and staring and making nuisances of themselves.

Her mouth had never seemed to fit her face, back then. Too lush, too wide. She’d been several inches shorter, if he wasn’t mistaken, and she’d bristled with a kind of nervous, coltish energy that he knew had been her own great despair back then. Because she’d been so awkward next to her cousin, the languid and effortlessly blond Philippa.

They’d just been girls. He’d known that then, but it had gotten confused across all these lost, stolen years. And still, Philippa had seemed so much older. Even though it was the always nervous Lexi who had actually done some real living in her early years, when she’d still been in the clutches of her addict parents.

Atlas hated that there was a part of him that still remembered the affection he’d once felt for the poor Worth relation. The little church mouse who the family had treated like their very own Cinderella, as if she ought to have been happy to dine off their scraps and condescension the rest of her life.

Looking at her now, it was clear that she was doing exactly that. That she’d taken it all to heart, locked away in the farthest reaches of the estate, where she could do all the work and remain out of sight and out of mind.

The way her uncle had always wanted it; and Atlas should have had more sympathy for her because of it.

He didn’t.

She’d grown into her beauty now, however, though she appeared to be dressed like a mouse today. Or if he was more precise, a run-of-the-mill secretary in a sensible skirt and an unobjectionable blouse. Brown hair tugged into a severe bun that looked as if it ought to have given her a headache.

She looked as if she was dressed to disappear. To fade into the wallpaper behind her. To never, ever appear to have a single thought above her station.

But still, mouse or secretary or Cinderella herself, she didn’t crumple, which made her far more brave than most of the men he’d met in prison.

“You will never know how sorry I am that my testimony put you behind bars,” she said, her eyes slick with misery as if she was as haunted by all of this as he was. Yet she kept her gaze steady on his just the same. “But Atlas. I didn’t tell a single lie. I didn’t make anything up. All I said was what I saw.”

“What you saw.” He let out a bitter laugh. “You mean what you twisted around in your fevered little teenage brain to make into some kind of—”

“It was what I saw, nothing more and nothing less.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. Once, harshly. Then again. “What did you expect me to do? Lie?”

“Certainly not.” He moved until he was directly opposite her, only the narrow little desktop between them. This close, he could smell her. Soap, he thought, crisp and clean. And something faintly like rosemary that washed through him like heat. Better still, he could see the way her pulse went mad in the crook of her neck. “After all, what do you have if not your word? Your virtue?” He put enough emphasis on that last word that she cringed. “I understand that is a requirement for the charity you enjoy here. Your uncle has always been very clear on that score, has he not?”

She flushed again, harder this time. And Atlas shouldn’t have been fascinated at the sight. He told himself it was nothing more than the vestiges of his prison time, making him find a female, any female, attractive. It wasn’t personal.

Because it couldn’t be personal. There was too much work to do.

“My uncle has never been anything but kind to me,” she said in a low, intense voice, though there was a flicker in her gaze that made him wonder if she believed her own words.

“I know he requires you to believe it.”

Another deep, red flash. “I understand that you’re the last person in the world who could think kindly of the family. Any of them. And I don’t blame you for that.”

“I imagine I should view that as a kind of progress, that I am permitted my own bitterness. That it is no longer considered a part and parcel of my guilt, as if remorse for a crime I didn’t commit might make me a better man.”

Atlas regarded her stonily as she jerked a bit at that, though something in him...eased, almost. He’d spent all those years fuming, seething, plotting. He’d discarded more byzantine, labyrinthine plots than he cared to recall. That was what life in prison did to a man. It was fertile ground for grudges, the deeper, the better. But he’d never been entirely sure he’d get the opportunity to put all of this into motion.

“I won’t lie to you, Lexi. I expected this to be harder.”

“Your return?”

He watched, fascinated despite himself, as she pressed her lips together. As if they were dry. Or she was nervous. And Atlas was a man who had gone without female companionship for longer than he ever would have believed possible, before. No matter what else happened, he was still a man.

He could think of several ways to wet those lips.

But that was getting ahead of himself.

“I don’t expect you to believe this,” Lexi was saying with an intense earnestness that made him feel almost...restless. “But everyone feels terrible. My uncle. My cousins. All of us. Me especially. If I could change what happened, you have to believe I would.”

“You’re right,” Atlas murmured. He waited for that faint bit of hope to kindle in her gaze, because he was nothing if not the monster they’d made him. “I don’t believe it.”

And really, she was too easy. He could read her too well. He saw the way she drooped, then collected herself. He watched her straighten again, then twist her hands together again. Harder this time.

“I know why you came here,” she said after a moment. Quietly. “I expect your hatred, Atlas. I know I earned it.”

“Aren’t you the perfect little martyr?” When she shook a bit at that, he felt his mouth curve. “But it’s not going to be that easy, Lexi. Nothing about this is going to be easy at all. If you come to a place of peace with that now, perhaps you will find this all less distressing.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps not.”

She looked panicked, but to her credit, she didn’t move. She didn’t swoon or scream or do any of the things Philippa would have done. No tantrums, no drama.

But then, Lexi had never been about theatrics.

That was precisely why she’d been such an effective witness for the prosecution, all starchy and matter-of-fact until she’d turned the knife in him, one glassy-eyed half sob at a time.

And what was wrong with him that he was tempted to forget that? For even a moment? He felt no connection to this woman. He couldn’t. She was a pawn, nothing more.

It irritated him that he seemed to need reminding of that fact.

“What exactly is to come?” she asked, her voice hardly more than a breath and her eyes much too big in her face.

“I’m so glad you asked.” He stood where he was, watching her. Studying her. Then he crooked a finger, and liked it a little too much when she jolted, as if he’d shot her through with lightning when he wasn’t even touching her. Yet. “Come here.”

She swayed on her feet and he was bastard enough to enjoy it. Hell, he more than enjoyed it. He figured it was as close as Lexi ever got to a full-on faint, and it was only a drop in the bucket next to the pain he owed her.

She swallowed, hard. He watched her throat move and braced himself for a spate of complaints. Or excuses. Anything to avoid what was coming.

But she didn’t say anything. She didn’t argue or dawdle. She straightened that blouse of hers that was already precise to a near military level, and then she stepped out from behind her desk.

“Closer,” Atlas ordered her when she only rounded the desk and stopped, leaving several feet between them.

Another hard, audible swallow. He could see her terror beat in her neck. He could see the flushed state of her skin. He could see fear and apprehension in her gaze, and the truth was, it was better than he’d imagined.

And God knew, he’d imagined this moment again and again and again. He’d imagined it so many times it was as if it had already happened. As if it was set in stone and made memory and prophecy at once.

She took one step. Then another.

“Here,” Atlas said, gruff and cruel. And nodded his head to a spot on the floor about one inch in front of him.

And she surprised him yet again. There was no denying the uneasiness in her gaze, her expression. But she didn’t carry on about it. She simply stepped forward, putting herself exactly where he’d indicated she should go.

Then he got to watch her tip her head back, way back, so she could hold his gaze with hers. And they could both spend a little moment or two recalling how much bigger and taller and more dangerous he was than she could ever dream of becoming.

He, at least, enjoyed the hell out of it.

“I think we can both agree that you owe me, can we not?” he asked.

It wasn’t really a question. He didn’t think she would confuse it for one, and he wasn’t disappointed.

Her nod was jerky. “I wish I could change the past, but I can’t.”

“Indeed, you cannot. You cannot change one moment of the past eleven years.”

“Atlas...”

He ignored her. “Your uncle has invited me to dinner tonight up at the manor house,” he told her. “Perhaps you already know this.”

“I know that was his intention, yes.”

“Your uncle believes that breaking bread with me rather than squabbling in a boardroom or court of law will make this all go away.” He could tell exactly how cruel his smile was by the way her brown eyes widened at the sight of it. “It won’t.”

“I don’t think anyone expects any of this to go away.”

“Wonderful. Then no one will be surprised by anything that happens now, I’m sure.”

“Atlas. Please. No one meant to hurt you. You have to believe that.”

It was an impassioned plea. He thought she even believed it. But he only shook his head at her.

“Let me tell you what I believe, Lexi. I believe that you were a teenager. That you saw something you didn’t understand and put a spin on it that made sense to you. On some level, I don’t even blame you for it. You were little more than a child, and of all the vultures and liars in this family, Philippa was at least the most genuine. In that I suspect she actually liked you.”

She sucked in a breath, ragged and sharp at once. “They’re my family. They all like me.”

But he doubted even she thought that sounded convincing.

His mouth twisted into something as hard as it was sardonic. “Tell yourself those lies if you must. I cannot stop you. But do not tell them to me.”

“You have a harsh view of the Worth family. I understand it and you have every right to it, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with you. I don’t hate them the way you do.”

He laughed at that. “The thing is, Lexi, your uncle was not a teenager. He was not confused. He knew exactly what he was doing, and you should ask yourself why he was so eager to do it.”

“My uncle has never been anything but kind—”

“At the very least, Lexi, you must ask yourself why, when your uncle knew full well that I could not have killed his daughter, he pretended to think otherwise.” Her breath sounded strangled, and he pushed on. “Your cousins, I think we can both agree, are varying degrees of useless. They believe whatever is most convenient and likely to fill their coffers. But you should know better. Is it that you don’t—or that you won’t?”

She seemed to struggle where she stood, and he let her.

“If you hate them all so much—if you hate us so much—I don’t know what you’re doing here.” Her hands were no longer clenched in front of her. Instead, she’d curled them into fists at her sides. “You can go anywhere in the world, Atlas. Why return to a place that caused you so much pain?”

“Because I intend to cause pain in turn,” Atlas told her, his voice hard. And he held her gaze in the same way, as if the look he was directing her way was a blow.

Good. It was.

“Surely there’s been enough pain...” she whispered.

“You will be at that dinner tonight.”

“I wasn’t invited.”

“I’m aware. Doesn’t it fascinate you that while they were happy to trot you out as a witness for the prosecution, they are less interested in having you attend my glorious return?”

“It’s not that they’re not interested, it’s that I’m not the same as the rest of them. I don’t have an interest in the estate’s trust, for one thing.”

“Though of all the Worth family blood relations, you are the only one who actually works for the trust. Does that not strike you as odd?”

She blinked and he thought he’d hit upon a sore spot. “Whether I do or don’t doesn’t matter. This is how things work here and everyone is perfectly happy with that. Except you, apparently. And I still wasn’t asked to join your reunion dinner.”

“I’m inviting you,” he said, and watched her as she didn’t react to that. As she very deliberately didn’t react to that. “I told your uncle that I expected the entire family to be at that table and he’s not inclined to cross me. Not this soon. Not while paparazzi still follow me around, desperate to record my every utterance.”

“I don’t know why you’d want me there. Surely you need to have a conversation with Uncle Richard, and my cousins, to discuss what is to become—”

“The first thing you need to learn, Lexi, is that I run this show.” Atlas smiled at her, all fangs. “I will tell you when to speak and what to say, and if I do not, your job is to remain silent. After all, we both know you’re very good at that, don’t we?”

She went pale. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do. You’ve spent your entire life learning how to blend in with the scenery here.” He raised his brows. “Do that.”

She didn’t like that. He could see it in the way her jaw moved, but she didn’t rail at him the way he’d expected she might. Atlas was certain there was fire in her—temper and turmoil—but she never let it loose. Not even here, now, when it could be chalked up to the drama of this reunion.

“Whether I blend or don’t blend,” she said very carefully, as if she was weighing each word, “what does that have to do with you?”

He was far more comfortable with this part than with the unexpected perfection of the turn of her cheek. That he even noticed such a thing was a distraction and he couldn’t afford distractions. Not now.

“At this dinner, I expect your uncle to offer me compensation for my years in prison. Money. A job. Whatever. It won’t be enough.”

“Can anything be enough?”

“I’m glad you asked. No.”

“Then what do you hope—”

“I spent years trying to decide what would best serve my needs and also be the least palatable to your uncle,” Atlas told her softly, in the tone that had kept more than one cell mate at bay. “And I could only think of one thing. I will reclaim my position, of course. I will take all the money that is owed me and then some. I will once again have all the things I worked so hard to achieve before they were stripped from me. But that will not return a decade of my life, will it?”

“Nothing will.”

“Nothing,” he agreed. “So you see, I have no choice but to make certain that this can never happen to me again. I will not be your uncle’s patsy. I will not be a target. I will be something much, much worse.” He smiled wider at that, dark and grim. “Family.”

She didn’t understand. He could see the confusion on her face, and like everything else about this meeting, it pleased him. Because he had never been a good man, he’d only ever been an ambitious one. He’d fought his way out of the slums with absolutely no help from anyone because he’d refused to accept that he should stay there. While Lexi had been coltish and silly at eighteen, Atlas had been focused. Determined.

There had never been another option.

He’d taken over his first company when he’d been barely twenty and turned it into a global contender. He’d gone from that to a boutique hotel chain in Europe that had been on the verge of collapse and had turned all seven locations into paragons of luxury, destinations in and of themselves, and in so doing had made himself the most sought after businessman in the world. The transformation of Worth Manor and its grounds from tottery old heap of family stones into a recreational destination in London, a city packed with such things, had been supposed to send him straight into the stratosphere.

Instead, he’d gone to prison. And he’d spent the past eleven years learning that really, all he truly was beneath all of that was furious.

As if furious was in his bones. As if furious was who he was and ever would be.

Atlas was fine with that.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lexi said, and he had the sense she was fighting to remain calm. He hoped it was a struggle.

“Your uncle will offer me a great many things tonight,” Atlas told her, because he knew the old man. He knew exactly how this would go. He was depending on Richard Xavier Worth being exactly who he’d always been. That was the trouble with doing what Richard had done to a man like Atlas, who had worked for him. Atlas had studied his boss. Richard should have taken better care to do the same to the man he’d sent to prison. “And I will take them all. Then I will take one more thing. You.”

He supposed it was a measure of her confusion that she only blinked at him. “Me?”

“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.

Lexi was the first to hear the footsteps in the hall. She sat a little straighter, her gaze on the door, but no one else seemed to hear anything. The footsteps drew closer. Then closer still, that same dark-sounding tread that announced Atlas like the drums of war. It wasn’t until he was right outside the door that all the Worths tensed, and Lexi couldn’t tell if they’d been pretending not to hear him earlier or if they’d truly been oblivious. Either way, the drawing room fell silent.

And this time, when Atlas pushed through the door, he was smiling.

“How delightful,” Atlas murmured, stopping in the doorway again, as if he knew exactly what kind of entrance he made and wanted to make sure they gazed at him there—not in handcuffs, not in a courtroom, not on a television screen from across the sea—for as long as possible. “All together again, just as I asked.”

“Welcome home, Atlas,” Uncle Richard said, after only the faintest pause. He even lifted his glass.

Atlas’s smile seemed to get darker. Sharper. He moved farther into the tidy little drawing room decked out in its Victorian finery, his black glare sweeping from one wall to the next, then back. Lexi found herself holding her breath while her pulse went wild—and hated herself for her own reaction.

It was the same reaction she’d always had to him. Only tonight it was worse.

“And what a home it is,” Atlas was saying in that same too-dark approximation of joviality. “Imagine my delirious joy to find that every single improvement I suggested during my tenure as CEO has been implemented. Every. Single. One. I took a long tour of the house and grounds today, and it warms my convict heart. It truly does. What a visionary I was. Feel free to applaud at will.”

“Listen, you—” Harry started, all red and snarly, but he subsided with a single harsh look from his father.

“There’s no need for all this menacing scenery-chewing, surely,” Uncle Richard said into the tense silence, his voice bland. Much blander than the cold gleam in his eyes. “We’re all quite aware of the role you played in...well, everything.”

“To clarify, do you mean the fantasy evil villain role you cast me in that landed me in jail?” Atlas asked with soft menace. “Or are you referring to the actual reality of what I did here that lacked any murderous intent but did manage to transform the place from a crumbling old mausoleum into...all this?”

Lexi saw the muscles leap in her uncle’s cheek and knew he was clenching his jaw. Just as she was clenching hers. She made herself relax. A little.

“No one can change the past,” Uncle Richard said in a gravelly sort of way, somber and serious. “We can only move forward, I’m afraid.”

Atlas accepted a drink from the wide-eyed footman, but Lexi noticed he didn’t take a sip of it. He only played with it in his hand, swirling the amber liquid this way, then that, as if he was enjoying a relaxing evening surrounded by loved ones.

“To the future,” he said in that same mild tone with its darker edge, then lifted his tumbler toward the light.

It was the most awkward toast in history. The room was silent, but filled with tension. So much tension Lexi was half-afraid it would choke them all where they stood.

But no. Dutifully, helplessly, everyone lifted their glasses. Even Harry, though he still wore that same dark scowl on his face.

Even Lexi, though she knew better.

Atlas didn’t say another word. He simply stood there a scant inch or two in front of the door—almost as if he was blocking it. It felt as if he was. He was dark and commanding and entirely too enigmatic, especially when all he did was swirl his drink around and let his black, fulminating gaze land on whomever he chose.

As if he was taking mental notes, none of them flattering, and committing them to memory where he stood.





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