“If you needed a lift. All you had to do was ask.” At least her voice worked and she hadn't warbled on a single word. “There was no reason for the he-man kidnapping or for you to appropriate my keys and my car.”
His smile was devastating. “Wasn't there?”
She crossed her arms over her still heaving chest. “No.”
“You weren't going to come back to my place without an order from the Senate.”
“That's ridiculous.”
“No, what's ridiculous is your stubborn insistence on waiting out the ferry at the terminal! What would you have done if ferry service didn't resume? Slept in your car?”
Since that was exactly what she had planned, she didn't feel the need to answer him.
“This may be a small island, but that doesn't mean it's safe for a beautiful woman to sleep alone in her car all night.”
Beautiful woman? Right. She made a rather rude noise in response to his blatant attempt to win her acquiescence with a falsehood.
“And I'd like to know what you were going to eat. All I saw was bottled water. Jacob said you didn't have breakfast. Did you plan to starve yourself?”
She went cold at the question. She didn't starve herself. Not anymore.
She wasn't anorexic
. It was just that rejection had a negative impact on her ability to eat. “I wasn't hungry.”
It was his turn to make a rude noise of disbelief.
“What I eat, or don't eat, has nothing to do with you, Mr. Brant.”
“Why not? I thought we were friends.”
“We're business associates.”
“We can't be friends too?”
Not when she wanted him more than she wanted to breathe, more than she wanted to guard herself against rejection. She'd allowed that want to dictate her actions last night and look what had resulted. She'd been humiliated, even if he didn't know it.
“I doubt I'll even see you again after today.”
“You will if you continue to pursue the merger.”
They'd reached his gate, which Jacob had left open for Simon. No cat and mouse games from the old codger for the boss.
Simon stopped the car in front of the house and got out. She opened her door and was climbing out when she realized he had popped open the trunk and was pulling out her suitcase.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting your things.”
“There's no need.” She tried to grab her suitcase and put it back in the trunk, but he placed it on the other side of his body. An impossible barrier in her current state. “I'll be on the ferry in a couple of hours.”
He shook his head while reaching in to pull out her laptop. “I don't think so. More likely the first ferry out will be tomorrow morning, but even if it is, you won't be on it.”
“What do you mean I won't be on it?” she asked with a fair amount of panic.
“We aren't done discussing this merger business, which I would have told you if you'd bothered to stick around long enough this morning to say goodbye.” He sounded really miffed by the fact she hadn't.
But why would he care if she said goodbye, or not?
She ignored the part of her brain that insisted he was right that they weren't done discussing the merger and said, “I've told you all the facts.”
“What if I have a question?” He pulled her briefcase from the trunk and turned to look at her with nothing less than accusation. “Or want to
discuss
some aspect of the proposal?”
“You don't want the darned thing!” This was stupid. Simon wanted that merger about as much as she wanted a cozy friendship with her ex-husband. “Why would you ask me any questions?” she demanded. “You didn't bother to last night.”
He picked up her laptop and swung the case strap over his shoulder, then picked up her suitcase. “I was busy listening.”
More like ignoring her. “
Right
.”
His eyes narrowed. “I can prove it.” Then he started spouting facts at her like bullets out of an automatic pistol. Every one of them accurate, every one of them something she had told him the night before. When he was done, he looked smug. “Maybe I don't want the merger, but I thought you were going to try to change my mind.”
This was too much. He could quote her words back to her verbatim, but that didn't mean he believed a single one of them. “You can't turn a stone into water.”
“Are you saying I'm dense like a rock?” Amusement twitched at the corners of his mouth and her temper exploded.
“No, stubborn as a mountain of rock!”
He threw back his head and laughed.
Heat surged into her face as her temper continued to escalate. She wasn't embarrassed; she was angry. “It's not funny. This is my career we're talking about. You won't even consider the merger regardless of whether or not it's the best thing for both of the companies.”
Suddenly the laughter stopped and his gray eyes fixed on her with serious intent. “And your job is all that matters to you, isn't it?”
“A career doesn't let you down like people do.”
“And if this merger doesn't go through are you saying you'll get what you want out of your career anyway?”
Remembering the silken threat in Daniel's voice, she grit her teeth against an honest answer. “What difference does it make to you?”
“Maybe I care.” He slammed the trunk shut with an excess of force and grimly finished picking up her things. “Maybe I don't want to see you hurt by this, but I don't have any choice about it because what you want
isn't
best for Brant Computers. You just think it is.”
She didn't know what to say. He made it sound like what happened to her really mattered to him and she knew that wasn't possible. She was nothing to him but an irritant. A blip on the radar of his life and just as temporary.
Without another word, he turned and headed for the house, leaving her to follow or not. She followed.
He went directly to her former bedroom and deposited her things on the end of her bed, then turned to face her. “I can't promise to change my mind, but I can promise that if you leave I won't have a chance to.”
There was no compromise in his expression. If she stayed, there was a slight chance of success. If she left, the merger was dead. It was blackmail. Plain and simple. Effective too. He'd chosen to hold the lure of the one thing she valued in her life besides her friendship with Jillian. Her career.
She didn't have a clue why Simon wanted her to stay. She couldn't believe it was because he really wanted to consider her arguments in favor of Extant's proposal. But what if she was wrong? Even if she wasn't, the longer she held Daniel off from going after the other cousins' support, the better. She refused to be responsible for igniting a family war.
The arguments chased themselves in her head until she was dizzy. She felt torn between the familiar hell of staying with Simon and wanting him when he didn't want her, and the unfamiliar hell of knowing she had let herself and her company down professionally.
What real choice did she have? She'd survived marriage to Lance. She could withstand a few more days in Simon's home.
“I'll stay.”
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Simon watched Amanda meander along the shoreline from the lab room window. She'd changed from her starchy suit to a cotton shorty top and matching Capri pants. She'd even pulled her magnificent hair back into a ponytail, letting it loose from that neat bun she constantly wore. She looked incredible, not at all like the buttoned-up woman he'd come to know so well in such a short time.
A timer went off, reminding him he was supposed to be working, but then so was she. She'd told him she had a couple of hours of online work to do before lunch after once again refusing any sort of breakfast. That bothered him, but he'd won a major concession and had sensed he wouldn't win another one.
He'd come up to his lab to try to gain some perspective. He had several puzzles that needed solving in his two major projects and that should have been enough to take his mind into a realm populated by circuit wires and computer code instead of people. It hadn't been.
For the first time in his memory, he could not dredge up enough interest in his projects to focus on them. He was too busy thinking about Amanda. Forcing her to stay had to be one of the least logical things he'd ever done. There were several very good reasons for letting her leave and never seeing her again. Reasons he had been convinced were paramount until that morning when he walked into the kitchen and she hadn't been there.
None of those sound arguments stacked up against the reality of her being gone. He'd expected to see her eating at the table and when he hadn't, the light had gone out of his morning. When Jacob told him that Amanda had left without saying goodbye, cold winds had blown across Simon's soulâwinds that had been silent since her arrival at his home.
He hated that cold and the shadows that accompanied it. She filled the empty places and pushed the shadows away.
That's why he had kidnapped her from the island's one small grocery store, why he had blackmailed her into staying. It didn't have anything to do with the merger, no matter what he had told her to get her to stay. He wasn't being fair to her. He knew it. He had no intention of changing his mind about the merger. It was the wrong move for a family run company and given enough time, Eric was bound to see that as well, but Simon had still used the carrot of his possible change of heart to lure Amanda into staying.
Because as of this morning when he'd faced a day without Amanda in it, and the prospect of endless more to follow, he had become as determined to keep her as he was to reject the merger.
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“I thought you needed to take care of some e-mail.”
Simon watched with fascination as Amanda jumped and whirled at the sound of his voice. She acted like a jackrabbit startled by a fox.
She stepped backward, away from him. “I didn't hear you come up.”
“You must have been thinking pretty hard.”
The twist of her lips could be called a smile, but there was something not quite right about it. She said, “Or you walk as quiet as a panther.”
He shrugged at that. “I walk the way I walk.”
She chewed on her bottom lip, which looked like it had already had a fair amount of that treatment. It was red and slightly swollen, all of the lipstick eaten off of it. Finally, she sighed. “You're so sure of who you are.”
“Are you trying to tell me you're not?” She was easily as focused on her career as he was on his projects.
She looked away toward the water, her expression pensive. “I suppose I am when it comes to my job.”
“But not when it comes to being a woman,” he guessed, remembering his initial impression of her.
Her laugh was almost brittle. “No, not when it comes to being a woman, but then I'm much better at being a junior executive than I am at being female.” The last words came out in such a low voice he had to strain to hear them.
“You don't think you're any good at being female?” he asked for confirmation because he found the idea so laughable. If she were any better at it, he'd need a straitjacket to keep his hands off her.
She whirled to face him, her dark brown eyes shooting sparks like a metal cup in the microwave. “Stop it. I know what I am. And while we're at it, you can quit making those stupid comments about my supposed beauty. I know what I look like, all right? I don't need you patronizing me with false flattery or your sarcastic little jokes about wanting to have sex with me.” She sucked in air, drawing his attention to the charms she was so certain she did not have.
“We've got a business relationship. That's all. I don't need you to pretend like you notice me as a woman when you don't. Heaven knows I'm used to it.”
“Used to what?” The conversation was not falling into any sort of logical pattern he could recognize.
“Used to being seen as my job rather than myself.” She closed her eyes and seemed to battle for control before opening them again. “It's not important. I don't need you to see me as a woman. I'm here to do a job, nothing else.”
He had never said otherwise. He might have thought it, but he hadn't said it. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?”
Unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears, their brown depths awash with pain as well as wetness and he felt like a total bastard for having hurt her. He hadn't meant to. All he wanted was to understand what was going on inside her mind right now. He wanted to know why she had left without a word to him, why she had been so adamant about not coming back.