Fellows had been born and raised in San Francisco and had distinguished herself in one of the city’s foremost private academies. She’d gone on to Berkeley, then Stanford, and instead of going into private practice as a psychiatrist, had opened up her own consulting firm instead. Now she traveled the globe, working most closely with corporations on various projects where psychological profiles on executives were needed.
Matteo was simply her latest victim.
Because he hadn’t simply punched out the jackass prince who’d left Pia pregnant and alone, which he still wasn’t the least bit sorry about. His little sister was the only family member Matteo had ever had that he could say he adored unreservedly, if often from afar, as the heiress to two grand fortunes was something of a target. For unscrupulous fortune hunters as well as princes, apparently. He’d happily do it again, and worse. But he’d done it in full view of the paparazzi, who’d had a field day.
Chip off the old block, they’d called him in a frenzy of malicious glee. They’d dragged his late father’s many scandals and altercations back into the light of day, in case anyone had been tempted to forget who Eddie Combe had been, mere days after his death. It had taken a single snide news cycle for the vicious tabloids to start speculating about whether or not Matteo was the right person to run his own damned company.
He’d had no choice but to submit to the demands of his prissy, pearl-clutching board of directors, all of whom had fluttered about claiming they’d never seen such behavior in all their days. A bald-faced lie, since they’d all gotten their positions in the first place from Eddie, who’d been a brawler by nature and inclination.
But Eddie was dead, which Matteo still found difficult to believe. All that force and power and fury, gone. And Matteo had to get high marks from the good doctor after the way he’d channeled his father at the funeral, or risk a vote of no confidence.
Matteo could have quashed the motion outright. But he knew that the company was in a time of transition. If he wanted to lead—instead of what his father had done all this time, which was bully, threaten, lie and occasionally cheat—he had to start off on the right foot.
Especially when he knew exactly what other revelations awaited in his parents’ wills.
“My sister is naive and trusting,” Matteo said shortly. “She was raised to know very little of the world, much less the nature of men. I’m afraid I don’t take kindly to those who would take advantage of her better nature.”
Sarina shifted slightly in the seat opposite, staring at him as if he was some kind of science experiment.
It was not the way women normally looked at him and Matteo couldn’t say he liked it much. Especially when he couldn’t help but notice the doctor was not exactly hard on the eyes. Her legs were slim and toned, and it was entirely too tempting to picture them draped over his shoulders as he drove into her—
Focus, he ordered himself.
He knew too much about her to imagine she would take kindly to his line of thought. He knew that she had built her consulting business out of nothing and was ruthless, driven—qualities he possessed himself and usually appreciated in others. Though not, perhaps, in this particular scenario, when all of that knife-edged ferocity was directed at him.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, almost idly. He knew better than to imagine anything about her was the least bit idle. “Have you?”
“There are ghosts everywhere in a house like this,” Matteo replied, unsettled despite himself. Not at the notion of ghosts. But at the strange sensation that had washed over him at the suggestion of them—the idea that he’d met this woman before when he knew he hadn’t. He shoved the odd sense of recognition aside. “The halls are cluttered with my ancestors. I’m sure some of them enjoy a good haunting, but I can’t say they’ve ever bothered me. Feel free to sleep here tonight and see if you receive a ghostly visitation.”
“That would be something indeed, as I don’t believe in ghosts.” Her head tilted to one side. “Do you?”
“If I did, I’d be unlikely to mention it. I wouldn’t wish to fail your test.”
“This isn’t a test, Mr. Combe. These are conversations, nothing more. And surely you understand why your shareholders and directors take a dim view of the sort of violent, antisocial behavior you displayed at the funeral.”
He lifted a shoulder and then dropped it, affecting a carelessness he had never actually felt. “I was protecting my sister.”
“Walk me through your thought process, if you will.” Sarina propped one elbow on the arm of the chair, then tapped one of her long, elegant fingers against her jaw. He shouldn’t have been mesmerized by the motion. “Your sister is six months pregnant. And not, by all reports, incapacitated in any way. My research into Pia indicates she’s a well-educated, well-traveled, perfectly independent woman. Yet you felt some archaic need to leap to her defense. In a markedly brutal fashion.”
“I am distressingly archaic.” Matteo wasn’t sure why that word ignited like a flame in him. Or maybe that was just her fingers on her own jaw, making him wish it was his hand instead. “It’s a natural consequence of having been raised in a historic family, I suspect.”
“All families are historic, Mr. Combe. By definition. It’s called generations. It’s just so rarely your history, complete with Venetian villas and claims of nobility.” He thought he saw something flash in her gaze then, but she repressed it in the next moment. “But back to your sister. Did you imagine you were defending her honor? How...patriarchal.”
He didn’t like the way she said that word, biting off the syllables as if they were weapons. “I apologize for loving my sister.”
Matteo loved Pia, certainly, though he couldn’t say he understood her. Or her choices when she must have known the whole of the world would be watching her—but then, perhaps she hadn’t had that pounded into her head from a young age the way he had.
“Love is a very interesting word to use in these circumstances, I think,” Sarina said. “I’m not certain how I would feel if my brother chose to express his so-called love for me by planting his fist into the face of the father of my unborn child.”
“Do you have a brother?”
He knew she didn’t. Sarina Fellows was the only child of a British linguistics professor and his Japanese biochemist wife, who had met in graduate school in London and ended up in California together, teaching at the same university.
“I don’t have a brother,” she replied, seemingly unfazed that he’d caught her out. “But I was raised by people who prize nonviolence. Unlike you, if I’m understanding your family’s rather checkered past correctly.”
He could have asked her which checkered past she meant. The San Giacomos had dueled and schemed throughout the ages. The Combes had been more direct, and significantly more likely to throw a punch. But it was checkered all around, anyway he looked at it.
“If I’m guilty of anything, it’s being an overzealous older brother,” Matteo said. And then remembered—the way he kept doing, with the same mix of shock and something a great deal like regret—that he too had an older brother. An older brother his mother had given up when she was a teenager, yet had dropped into her will like a bomb. An older brother Matteo had yet to meet and still couldn’t quite believe was real.
Maybe that was why he’d done nothing about it. Yet.
He tried to flash another smile.
Not that it was any use. The doctor didn’t change expression at all. Instead, she sat there in silence, until his smile faded away.
He understood it was a tactic. A strategy, nothing more. It was one he had employed a thousand times himself. But he certainly didn’t like it being aimed his way.
He felt the urge, as everyone always did, to fill the silence. He refrained.
Instead,