Angela leaned back in her desk chair, regarding him coolly. “I don’t believe you didn’t know I worked here. For you to have made a move like this – to give up everything you’d built at Jessup Prior – you would have done a hell of a lot of research. You had to have known I worked here.”
“I wasn’t shocked to see you working here,” he clarified. “Just at your appearance. You’re – have you been ill? Is that why you’re skin and bones and look like you’ve got one foot in the grave?”
She rolled her eyes. “And the compliments keep on coming, don’t they? You, on the other hand, look as hale and hearty as ever, Nick. But then I wouldn’t have expected anything less. After all, you always did devote a lot of time to putting yourself first.”
Nick pointed a finger at her. “
I’m
not the one we need to be discussing right now.”
“Well, we certainly don’t need to discuss me, either. In fact, I can’t really think of anything we have to talk about, Nick. So let’s just agree to keep as much distance from each other as possible, shall we? You ought to be able to manage that just fine – in fact, I’d say you’re the expert at cutting off contact with people.”
He winced visibly at her very pointed barb. “I know I acted like a total bastard towards you. Both during and after our relationship. But you knew exactly what you were getting into, Angela. I was very, very clear about my conditions. As for cutting you off – you know exactly why I had to do that. You were – you got too close, let yourself care too much.”
She clenched her fists tightly, sorely tempted to punch him in the jaw with one, even if it meant breaking every bone in her hand. “Well, rest assured that I don’t feel a damned thing for you anymore, Nick. You made sure of that, didn’t you? So if you’re worried that I’m going to start stalking you or something, forget it. I’d have to actually care about you in order to do that, wouldn’t I?”
Nick smiled slowly, the sort of sexy, seductive smile that had never once failed to gain her capitulation. “You tempt me to put all that newfound bravado of yours to the test. But I’m not here to lure you back into my bed, as intriguing as that sounds. I’m just worried about you. Paul McReynolds told me that not only are you the biggest workaholic he’s ever known but that you shut yourself off from everyone else in the office, never socialize, never smile. And while he may not know any different, may never have seen you act any other way,
I
have, and I know damned well that this skeletal, pale and emotionless shell you’ve become isn’t the Angel I knew.”
Angela surged to her feet then, the color rising rapidly to her cheeks and her eyes blazing. “Don’t you dare call me that,” she hissed. “I don’t want to ever hear that name on your lips again.”
A satisfied look spread across his sinfully handsome face. “Ah, now you look at least half-alive. Maybe that’s the trick – I should just keep finding ways to piss you off. Maybe that will wake you up from this catatonic state you’ve fallen into.”
She glared at him. “Don’t flatter yourself, Nick. Very little gets a rise out of me these days, and I’ve made damned sure that no one will ever have the sort of power over me that I so foolishly gave to you once upon a time.”
His voice was deep and almost hypnotic. “But as I recall you liked giving me that power, Angel, liked having me control you. And you always, always obeyed me. So eagerly, so sweetly. I confess to missing that sort of blind obedience.”
“I’ll just bet you have, you bastard,” she spit out. “I doubt there are many women in this world who are stupid and gullible enough to agree to your insane conditions the way I did. Too bad I had to screw it up, hmm?”
Nick stroked a thumb over his jaw, darkly shadowed as always by his rather disreputable two-day stubble. “Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing, letting you go like that,” he mused. “If I should have just ignored what you said, acted as though it never happened. But then I realize that it was the right thing to do – for both of us. You were too young, needed to get on with your life.”
Angela was horrified to feel her eyes grow wet, and clutched her desk for support as she felt her legs start shaking again. “Except I never did,” she whispered brokenly. “Does this – do I – look like someone who’s really living? You said before I looked like the walking dead but you weren’t exactly right. A more accurate term to describe me these days would be a ghost. Because that’s just about all that’s left of me, Nick, all that’s managed to survive these past few years.”
He stared at her, a horror-stricken look on his face. “Are you saying that
I’m
responsible for – for the way you look? That all of this – the weight loss, closing yourself off from the world, that dead look in your eyes – is because of me? Because you couldn’t cope after I -”
“All I’m saying is that I don’t want to have any contact with you ever again,” she interrupted. “By some cruel twist of fate you’ve wound up working in my office but that doesn’t mean we have to see or speak to each other. You’re nothing to me any longer, Nick – friend, lover, and most definitely not my master. So why don’t you go back to your life and forget I exist – just as you’ve obviously done such a good job at for so long now.”
Nick’s dark olive complexion had paled noticeably with each of her sharply uttered words. “Who says I forgot you?” he asked quietly. “I told Paul the truth before – you’re not a woman a man could ever forget meeting. And just because I stayed out of your life – for your own damned good, I might add – doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about you.”
Some unnamed little thrill – be it hope or joy or just awareness – shimmered up her spine at his statement. But Angela forced herself not to betray any sort of reaction, refusing to let herself look for any deeper meaning to his words. “Well, that’s sweet, Nick, really it is. But you shouldn’t have bothered, because there’s really no point any longer. You ended things – very firmly, as I recall – and maybe you’re right. Maybe it was for my own good. I’ll admit it took some time but I can honestly say I’m well and truly over you now. And on the rare occasion I’ve thought of you over the years, I just felt – nothing. Just a rather peaceful sense of numbness.”
She’d always forgotten how quickly Nick could move for such a big man. It was one of the reasons so many NFL quarterbacks had landed flat on their backs after getting thoroughly sacked by one of the hardest hitting defensive ends ever to play the game.
He’d been standing there – regarding her rather warily from the other side of her desk – and then the very next second he was beside her, grasping her almost brutally by the upper arms and she was half afraid he was going to shake her.
“I don’t believe you,” he bit out. “And you must know that saying things like that only tempts me to see just how quickly I could crack that protective shell of ice you’ve encased yourself in. To see,” he whispered suggestively, “how fast I could make you come. As I recall, that used to happen with very little effort and practically no time at all on my part.”
Angela bit down on the inside of her mouth so hard that this time she did feel a few drops of blood well up. She thought briefly of trying to push him away but knew it would be futile, like trying to move a steel plate. Instead, she forced herself not to react, willed her traitorous body not to betray her by swaying against him and letting him do whatever he desired. Just like old times, she thought bitterly.
“Go to hell,” she replied in a voice dripping with venom. “And don’t expect me to join you on the trip. I’ve spent quite enough time in that delightful place over the years and have no desire to ever visit again.”
Nick shook his head. “I could change your mind,” he bragged. “Very, very easily. All it would take would be –” he paused, his hands stroking over her arms beneath the severely tailored suit jacket as though belatedly realizing just how skinny her limbs were. “Fuck it all, Angela. You’re so frail I could snap one of your arms like a twig if I chose to. What the hell have you done to yourself? Please don’t tell me this is all a result of what happened between us.”
If her mouth hadn’t suddenly gone dry she would have gladly spit in his face. “Don’t flatter yourself,” she hissed. “I’m thin because I run a lot, that’s all.”
He eyed her toothpick-thin form dubiously. “You’d have to run a hundred miles at a crack to have lost this much weight.”
“Not quite, but that’s my ultimate goal,” she replied. “So far my longest race has been a fifty miler, but I’ve got a hundred kilometer planned for later this year.”
“An ultrarunner, huh?” Nick’s voice held a grudging respect. “Still, to put in those kind of miles you have to eat. I know a couple of guys from my gym who do ultras, and while they might be lean they’re far from skeletal. You -” he grimaced. “You need to pack at least twenty pounds on. For starters.”
Angela somehow found the strength to wrench her arm from his grasp. “Thanks for your very unwanted opinion. But it’s really none of your business, Nick.
I’m
none of your business.”
He reached out to caress her cheek and she flinched from his touch, causing his full, sexy mouth to tighten in disapproval. “Maybe I want to make you my business again – Angel.”
This time she did slap his hand away, fury giving her the sort of defiant courage she’d never dared displayed to him before. “Don’t call me that,” she growled. “You lost the right to do so when you cut me out of your life.”
Nick’s dark eyes, so much like her own, blazed furiously as he grabbed her left hand and squeezed it hard enough that she winced. “Tell me – does anyone else have the right to call you that – Angel?”
She glared at him, trying to pull her hand free of his iron grip. “None of your goddamned business. But I am seeing someone, yes. Someone who doesn’t impose unreasonable restrictions on when and where I can see or call him, or dictate the sorts of things I’m permitted to talk about when we’re together. In other words, Nick, an actual living, breathing human being who has blood in his veins rather than ice.”
“Speaking of ice,” he drawled in a deceptively casual voice. “Whoever this prince of yours is it doesn’t seem as though he’s been very successful at melting the deep freeze you’ve erected around yourself, does it?”
Very deliberately she gave him the sort of seductive little smile he’d always found irresistible. “Hmm, but then, as the saying goes, who really knows what goes on behind closed doors. Maybe what you see in front of you is just a façade, and I save the real me for my private life.”
Nick chuckled, seeing right through her little pretense. “I can see you still like to play with fire, Angel. But don’t forget that I’m the expert at that game. After all, who better than the devil himself to know his way around fire?”
He stepped back from her then as she only glared mutinously, refusing to further engage in their banter. He paused at the doorway of her office, and she recalled that somehow he always found a way to get the last word in.
“This is far from over, you know. The more I think about it, the more I realize just how much I’ve missed having you in my life. And how intriguing it would be to have you back. Fair warning, Angel. I always get what I want.”
With a knowing wink, Nick left as silently as he’d arrived, leaving her to stare after him in stunned, frozen silence.
The sun was already setting in the mid-April sky by the time she could summon up the presence of mind to move again. Her hand closed briefly around her coffee mug, her fingers itching to hurl it against the nearest wall and watch the cold brown liquid remaining inside to trickle down slowly like streams of blood. Instead, she released her death grip on the mug and marched outside to Cara’s neatly arranged desk. Telling herself that not only wouldn’t Cara mind but would be jumping for joy instead, Angela slid open the top left drawer where she knew her assistant kept the stash.
Five minutes later she’d wolfed down a Hershey bar, a package of peanut M & M’s, and a semi-stale, pre-packaged cinnamon bun without even being aware of her actions. And with each bite, each swallow, each increase in the massive sugar rush torpedoing through her bloodstream, she cursed Nick – for coming back into her life so unexpectedly, for being even more of a bastard than she’d remembered, and – damn it all to hell – for being every bit as sexy and irresistible as he’d been the very first time she’d seen him.
September, Five Years Earlier
She knew who he was the moment she saw him, even standing clear on the other side of the cavernous conference room. After all, there weren’t many men who had his height – six feet six inches – or shoulders that were so wide his suits just had to be custom made to accommodate their breadth.
When she’d learned on her very first day on the job that Nick Manning – the famous football player for both the Stanford Cardinal and the San Francisco 49ers – not only worked in her new office but was among the highest producing brokers, she’d wondered when she might actually get a glimpse of the man.
It had taken almost two full weeks – and this mandatory-attendance meeting with the firm’s CEO who was visiting from New York – to finally afford her the opportunity. But, she reasoned as she allowed her gaze to roam freely and thus far unobserved over the magnificent, manly specimen, the wait had sure as hell been worth it.