sought so hard to contain, struggling to breathe.
‘That’s not true,’ she said hoarsely. Her lungs felt as though they were being squeezed in a vice. ‘We’ve just had a difficult few months—
‘More like five years.’ He stared at her for a long moment, his gaze impassive. ‘You asked me why I’m here. Well, that’s it. That’s why. Your family is about to be ruined and I want to be here to see it.’
He stared at her steadily, his eyes straight and unblinking, and Margot stared back at him, stilled, almost mesmerised by his words. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about retribution. You and your family ruined my life, and now I get to watch your world implode.’
Margot shook her head. Stiffening her shoulders, she forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘No, you seduced me, and then you asked me to marry you just so you could get your hands on my money.’
For a moment he didn’t reply, then he shrugged, and it was that offhand gesture—the casual dismissal of the way he’d broken her heart—that told her more clearly than any words that he was being serious.
Watching the light fade from Margot’s eyes, Max told himself he didn’t care. She deserved everything that was coming. They all did.
‘And I paid for that. You and your family made sure I lost everything. I couldn’t even get a reference. No vineyard would touch me.’
Remembering the shock and helplessness he’d felt in the hours and days following Margot’s rejection, he bit down hard, using the pain of the past to block out her pale, stunned face.
‘Now it’s your turn.’
He leaned back against the leather upholstery, his eyes never leaving hers.
‘I only bought shares in your company to get a ringside seat.’
MARGOT SAT FROZEN, mute with shock, her heart lurching inside her chest like a ship at sea in a storm.
‘How dare you?’ Blood was drumming in her ears, and her body vibrated with anger and disbelief. ‘How dare you stand here in my boardroom and—?’
‘Easily.’
She watched in mute horror as Max stood up and, raising his arms above his head, stretched his shoulders and neck. His apparent serenity only exacerbated the anxiety that was hammering against her ribcage.
‘And I’ll find it easier still to stand in your office and watch the administrators repossess that beautiful custom-made Parnian desk of yours.’
He was walking towards her now, and suddenly her breath was coming thick and fast.
‘That won’t happen.’ She stood up hastily, her gaze locking on his, trying to ignore both the intense maleness of his lean, muscular body and the way her pulse was jumping like a stranded fish in response to it.
‘Oh, it will.’
He stopped in front of her, his eyes—those beautiful hypnotic eyes—pinning her to the floor even as her head spun faster.
‘Your business is in a mess, baby—a bloated, unstable, debt-ridden mess. House of Duvernay?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘More like house of straw!’
‘And you’re the wolf, are you? Come to huff and puff?’ she sneered, her gaze colliding with his.
It was the wrong thing to say—not least because there was more than a hint of the wolf about his intense, hostile focus and the restrained power of body. For a moment, she held her breath. But then he smiled—only it felt more as if he was baring his teeth.
‘I won’t need to.’ He studied her face. ‘I won’t need to do anything except sit back and watch while everything you love and care about slips through your fingers.’
The air was vibrating between them. ‘You’re a monster,’ she whispered, inching backwards. ‘A cold-blooded barbarian. What kind of man would say something like that?’
He shrugged, his expression somewhere between a challenge and a taunt. ‘The kind that believes in karma.’
Margot was struggling to speak. She wanted to deny his claims. Prove him wrong. But the trouble was that she knew that he was right.
The business was a mess.
Her brother Yves might have resented his glamorous parents, but he had been more like Colette and Emile than he’d cared to admit, and five years after his death she was still trying to clear up the consequences of his impulsive and imprudent management style. Only nothing she did seemed to work.
Her heart began to beat faster. How could it? She didn’t have her great-grandfather’s vision, or her grandfather’s ruthless determination and drive. Nor was she full of Yves’s flamboyant self-assurance. In fact, if anything, the opposite was true. She’d found the responsibility of ensuring that the family legacy stayed intact increasingly overwhelming and as her self-doubts grew the profits continued to shrink. Finally—reluctantly—she’d decided to put up the chateau as security.
Her pulse began to beat faster.
Even just thinking about it made her feel physically sick. Not only had the chateau belonged to her family for sixteen generations, in less than two months it was supposed to be the setting for her brother Louis’s wedding.
It had been a last-ditch attempt to reassure the bank. Only it hadn’t worked. Max was right. The business was failing.
She shivered.
Or rather she had failed, and soon the whole world would know the truth that she had so desperately tried to hide.
Watching her in silence, Max breathed out slowly.
He’d waited nearly ten years for this. Ten long years of working so hard that he would often fall asleep eating his evening meal. Unlike Margot, he’d had to start at the bottom. His jaw tightened. His job at Duvernay should have opened doors to him throughout the industry but, thanks to her family, that ladder had become a snake with a venomous bite.
After being more or less banished from France, it had taken him years to claw back his reputation. Years spent working punishingly long hours at vineyards in Hungary, and studying at night school until finally he had got a break and a job on an estate in California.
But every backbreaking second had been worth it for this, and although the shares had been expensive he would have paid double for this moment of reckoning.
His chest tightened. Finally he’d proved the Duvernays wrong!
He was their equal—for he was here, in their precious boardroom, not as some low-paid employee but as a shareholder.
He wanted to savour it. But although Margot looked suitably stunned—crushed, in fact, by his words—strangely, he was finding it not nearly as satisfying as he’d imagined he would.
Confused, and unprepared for this unexpected development, he stared at her in silence. And then immediately wished he hadn’t, for with the light behind her, the delicate fabric of her white dress was almost transparent, and the silhouetted outline of her figure was clearly visible. It was almost as if she was naked.
A beat of desire pulsed through his veins.
Not that he needed a reminder. Margot’s body was imprinted in his brain. He could picture her now, as he’d seen her so many times in those snatched afternoons spent in the tiny bedroom of his estate cottage. Lying in his arms, the curve of her belly and breasts gleaming in the shafts of fading sunlight, a pulse beating frantically at the base of her throat. Each time, he’d felt as though he was dreaming. He’d been completely in her thrall—overwhelmed not just by desire but by an emotion he had, until meeting her, always dismissed as at best illusory and at worst treacherous.