that he could still make her feel this way, that he still had this power over her, threatened her as much as his words.
She took a step back. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said quickly. ‘You and I were a mistake I’m not planning on repeating. We’re certainly not marriage material.’
‘Why not? I’m a man...you’re a woman. There are no obstacles preventing us from tying the knot.’
Jamming her hands into the pockets of her dress, she looked up at him, disbelief giving way to exasperation, then fury. ‘Aside from mutual loathing, you mean?’
Glancing around the boardroom, he shook his head slowly. ‘You see? This is why your business is struggling, baby. You’re just too resistant to change, to new ideas.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise blackmail was so on-trend!’
He laughed, and before she could stop herself—before she even knew she was doing it—she was laughing too. How could she not when his mouth curled up so temptingly at the corners, wiping the mockery from his face so that he looked heartbreakingly like his younger self?
And, fool that she was, she felt her pulse lose speed, felt a sudden overwhelming urge to reach out and touch the curve of his lips, to feel again the hard, masculine pressure of his body against hers.
Heat burned in her cheeks and she breathed in sharply. Her reaction had been instinctive, involuntary, but she was already regretting it. How could she laugh with him after everything he’d done to her? And how could she let herself feel anything other than hatred and contempt for this man who was backing her into a corner, demanding something that was impossible for her to give?
She felt his gaze on the side of her face.
‘What was that you were saying about mutual loathing?’ he asked.
The mocking note was back, and she looked up defiantly, her whole body stiffening into fight mode. ‘Just because you can make me laugh once, it doesn’t mean anything.’
Dragging her gaze away from the indecently lush mouth, she stared past him.
Except that it did.
She winced inwardly. It was all there in her voice—everything that she didn’t want him to hear or to know about how she was feeling—and that was why this conversation had to stop now.
‘You might have a head for business, Max, but you have zero understanding of human nature. If—if—we were to get married, we wouldn’t just be talking in the boardroom.’ She felt a sudden prickle of ice run down her spine. ‘We’d have to live together. Share a home.’
Share a bed, she thought silently, her face suddenly hot as his eyes narrowed on hers and something moved across the irises that made her breathing quicken.
Cheeks burning, she began speaking again. ‘Share our lives. And how are we going to do that? We can’t even be in the same room together without—’
But she never finished her sentence. Instead she made the mistake of looking up at him, and instantly the words stalled in her throat.
She felt her body tense, almost painfully, and then her legs started to shake just as they had the first time she had ever seen him. Dressed in faded jeans, a T-shirt that hugged the muscles of his arms, and wearing dark glasses, he had looked like a cocktail of one part glamour to two parts cool. And then he’d taken his glasses off, and it had been like a thunderclap bursting inside her head.
Over time she had, of course, grown used to how he looked. But at least once a day it had caught her off guard, and now apparently nothing had changed. The seemingly random arrangement of mouth, nose, cheekbones still had the same power to rob her of even basic impulses, such as breathing and speaking.
‘Without what?’
Her stomach tightened with awareness. The air felt suddenly charged with a different kind of tension, and his voice had grown softer. Too soft.
She could feel it slipping over her skin like a caress, so warm and tempting and—
Deceptive! Had she really learned nothing from what happened between them?
Ignoring his eyes, she crossed her arms in front of her body, shielding herself from the pull of the past. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, but it does. You see, I need an answer,’ he said, and the smoothness of his voice in no way diluted his uncompromising statement.
‘Well, tough!’ Her eyes widened. ‘You can’t seriously expect me to give you one here and now?’
For a moment he didn’t reply, just continued to stare at her thoughtfully, as though he was working out something inside his head.
‘Actually, I can—and I am.’
Her pulse shifted up a gear as he glanced at the surprisingly understated watch on his wrist.
‘Deals have deadlines, and this one runs out when I walk back out through that door.’
She took a breath, fear drumming through her chest. ‘But that’s not fair. I need time—’
‘And I need an answer.’
The commanding note in his voice whipped at her senses so that suddenly her head was buzzing and the glare of the sunlight hurt her eyes.
‘And, to be fair, you have had ten years.’
Margot blinked. ‘You can’t compare what happened then with this.’ She felt suddenly sick. Surely he didn’t think that this ‘proposal’ somehow picked up where they’d left off?
‘This is nothing like before,’ she said shakily.
‘I agree. This is far better.’
She gaped at him speechlessly, uncertain of how to interpret his words, and then suddenly she shook her head, her eyes snapping upwards. ‘Better! What are you talking about?’
Her voice was too loud. So loud that someone in the corridor would be able to hear her. But for the first time in her life she didn’t care what other people might think.
‘How is this better? How could this ever be better?’
‘It’s simpler. More transparent.’ His gaze dropped to her throat, then lowered to the V of her dress. ‘What you see is what you get. And, despite all your talk of mutual loathing, I think we can agree that we both like what we see.’
Margot felt something dislodge inside her. His closeness was making her unravel. She wanted to disagree. To throw his remark back in his face. Only she didn’t trust herself to speak—not just to form the words inside her head but to say them out loud.
Her pulse hiccupped with panic, and his gaze cut to hers. Surely though he couldn’t sense the way he made her feel?
But of course he could—he always had. And, as though reading her mind, he reached out and gently stroked her long blonde hair, his touch pulling her not just closer, but back to a past that she had never quite relinquished.
‘I can’t give you time, Margot, but I can give you a reason to marry me.’
His gaze rested on her face, his eyes drawing her in, and she felt her nerves quiver helplessly in response to the message in the darkening irises.
‘You have given me a reason, Max,’ she said shakily. ‘It’s called blackmail.’
There was a moment of silence, and then his gaze shifted from her eyes, dropping and pressing onto her mouth. Suddenly her skin felt too hot and too tight, and she had a slip-sliding sense of déjà-vu as he took another step closer, the intensity of his eyes tangling her breathing.
‘Actually, I have a better reason.’
For perhaps a fraction of a second her brain was screaming at her to turn, to move, to run. And then his lips closed on hers