out of thin air.
It had flabbergasted her even more because she’d just been thinking of him. It had been as if she’d conjured him.
Yet when had she ever stopped thinking of him? Her memory of him had been like a pervasive background noise that could never be silenced. A clamor that rose to a crescendo periodically before it settled back to a constant, maddening drone.
But there was one explanation for his reappearance. That it was a fluke. An appalling one, but one nonetheless. What else could it have been after eight years?
Not that time elapsed was even an issue. It could have been eight days and she would have thought the same thing. She’d long realized he’d left her believing he’d never see her again.
After all, he must have known what he’d done would most probably get her killed.
Believing their meeting to be a coincidence, she’d run off, thinking the man who’d once exploited her then left her to a terrible fate would shrug and continue on his way.
But just as she’d thought she’d escaped, that he’d fade into the night like some dreadful apparition, he’d followed her. Before she could deal with the dismay of thinking this ordeal would be prolonged, he’d made his preposterous demand.
Not that it had felt like one. It had felt like an ultimatum. Her instinct had been correct.
She hadn’t forgiven him, nor would she ever forgive him, but she’d long rationalized his actions. From what she’d discovered—long after the fact—he obtained his objectives over anyone’s dead body, figuratively or literally. She, and everything he’d done to her, had been part of a mission. She only had theories what that had been or why he’d undertaken it, according to the end result.
But what he was doing now, threatening with such patent enjoyment what he must know would destroy everything she’d struggled to build over the past eight years, was for his own entertainment. That man she’d once loved, with everything in her scarred psyche and starving soul, had progressed from a cold-bloodedly pragmatic bastard into a full-fledged monster.
“Don’t look so horrified.”
His bottomless baritone swamped her again, another thing about him that had become more hard-hitting. The years had turned the thirty-four-year-old demigod of sensuality she’d known into an outright god, if one of malice. He still exuded sex and exerted a compulsion—both now magnified by increased power and maturity. But it was this new malevolence that now seemed to define him. And it made him more overwhelming than ever.
But that must have been his true nature all along. It was she who’d been blinded and under his control. She hadn’t even suspected what he’d been capable of long after he’d gotten everything he’d wanted from her, then tossed her to the wolf.
“I’m not interested in exposing you.” His voice had her every hair standing on end. “As long as you comply, your secret can remain intact.”
Summoning the opaqueness she’d developed as her greatest weapon against bullies such as him, she cocked her head.
“What makes you think I haven’t told them everything?”
“I don’t think. I know. You resorted to extreme measures to construct this St. Sandoval image. You’d go as far to preserve it. You’ll certainly give in to anything I demand so no one, starting with the Andersons, ever finds out what you really are.”
“What I am? You make it sound as if I’m some monster.”
“You’re married to one. It makes you the same species.”
“I’m not married to Caleb Burton. I haven’t been for eight years.”
Something...scary slithered in the depths of his cold steel eyes. But when he spoke, he sounded as offhand as before.
“So it’s in the past tense. A past full of crimes.”
“I never had a criminal record.”
“Your crimes remain the same even if you’re not caught.”
“What about your crimes? Let’s talk about those.”
“Let’s not. It would take months to talk about those, as they’re countless. But they’re also untraceable. But yours could be easily proved. You knew exactly how your husband made his mushrooming fortune and you made no effort to expose him, making you an accessory to his every crime. Not to mention that you helped yourself to millions of his blood money. Those two charges could still get you ten to fifteen years in a snug little cell in a maximum-security prison.”
“Are you threatening to turn me in to the law, too?”
“Don’t be daft. I don’t resort to such mundane measures. I don’t let the law take care of my enemies or chastise those who don’t fall in line with my wishes. I have my own methods. Not that I have to resort to those in your case. Just a little chat with your upstanding friends and they wouldn’t consider getting mixed up with someone with your past.”
“Contrary to what you believe, from your own twisted self and life, there are ethical, benevolent people in the world. The Andersons don’t hold people’s pasts against them.”
He gave her back her pitying disdain, raised her his own brand of annihilating taunting. “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have gone to such painstaking lengths to give your history, and yourself, a total makeover.”
“The makeover was only for protection, as I’m sure you, as the world’s foremost mogul of security solutions, are in the best position to appreciate.”
His lethal lips tugged. “Then, it won’t matter if your partners in progress find out the details of your previous marriage to one of the world’s most prominent figures in organized crime. Along with the open buffet of unlawful immorality that marriage entailed and that you buried. Refuse to follow me and we get to put your conviction of their convictions to the test.”
Feeling the world emptying of the last atom of oxygen, she snapped, “What the hell do you want from me?”
“To catch up.”
Her mouth dropped open.
It took effort to draw it back up, to hiss her disbelief. “So you see me walking down the street and decide on the spot to blackmail me because the urge to ‘catch up’ overwhelmed you?”
His painstakingly chiseled lips twisted, making her guts follow suit. “Don’t tell me you thought it even a possibility I happened to be taking a stroll in a limbo of suburban domesticity called Pleasantville, of all names?”
“You were following me.”
The instant certainty congealed her blood. Realizing his premeditation made it all so much worse. And the possible outcomes unthinkable.
He shrugged. “You took your time in there. I was about to knock on the Andersons’ door anyway to see what was taking you so long.”
Not putting anything beyond him, she imagined how much worse it would have been if he’d done that. “And you went to all this trouble to ‘catch up’?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
“What other things?”
“Things you’ll find out when you stop wasting time and follow me. I’d tell you to leave your car, but your friend might see it and get all sorts of worrisome ideas.”
“None would be as bad as what’s really happening.”
His expression hardened. She was sure it had brought powerful men to their knees. “Are you afraid of me?”
That possibility clearly hadn’t occurred to him before. Now that it did, it seemed to...offend him.
The weirdest part was, though she’d long known he was a merciless terminator, her actual safety wasn’t even a concern.
It