LITMIR.BIZ

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more sensual pastimes.

      If she hadn’t been sent here to judge him, he might have amused himself by finding ways to get his hands up beneath the hem of the elegant pencil skirt she wore and—

      “Toxic masculinity,” she pronounced, with something like satisfaction in her tone.

      Matteo blinked. “Is that a diagnosis?”

      “The good news, Mr. Combe, is that you are hardly unique.” It was definitely satisfaction. Her dark eyes gleamed. “You seem unrepentant, and think about what we’re discussing here. A funeral is generally held to be a gathering where the bereaved can say their final goodbyes to a lost loved one. You chose to make it a boxing ring. And you also took it upon yourself to draw blood, terrify those around you, and humiliate the sister you claim to love, all to assuage your sense of fractured honor.”

      He didn’t sigh at that, though it took an act of will. “You obviously never met my father. There were no bereaved at his funeral and furthermore, he would have been the first to cheer on a spot of boxing.”

      “I find that difficult to believe. And, frankly, more evidence of the kind of cowboy inappropriateness that seems to be part and parcel of the Matteo Combe package.”

      “I am Italian on one side and British on the other, Dr. Fellows. There is no part of me that is a cowboy. In any respect.”

      “I’m using the term to illustrate a strain of toxic male vigilantism that, as far as I’m aware, you haven’t bothered to apologize for. Then or now.”

      “If I felt the need to apologize for defending my sister’s honor, which I do not, that would be a discussion I had with Pia,” Matteo said quietly. “Not with you. Certainly not with my board. Nor, for that matter, with the clamoring public.”

      Her pen was poised over her paper. “So you do feel remorse for your brutality? Or you don’t?”

      What Matteo felt like doing would, he suspected, inspire her to call him names far worse than cowboy. He spread his hands out in front of him, as if in some kind of surrender. When he didn’t have the slightest idea how to surrender. To anything or anyone.

      “Remorse is a lot like guilt. Or shame. Both useless emotions that have more to do with others than with the self.” He dropped his hands. “I cannot change the past. Even if I wanted to.”

      “How convenient. And since you can’t change it, why bother discussing it. Is that your policy?”

      “I cannot say that I have a policy. As I have never subjected myself to these, quote-unquote, ‘conversations’ before.”

      “Somehow I am unshocked.”

      “But I am here now, am I not? I have promised to answer any question you might have. We can talk at length on any topic you desire. I am nothing if not compliant.” He made himself smile again, though it felt like a blade. “And toxic, apparently.”

      “Compliant is an interesting word choice,” Sarina said, and he was sure there was laughter in her voice, though he could see no sign of it anywhere on her face. “Do you think it’s an adequate word to describe you or your behavior?”

      “I have opened my home. I have invited you into it and lo, you came. I have agreed to have as many of these conversations as you deem necessary. And for this, I am called toxic instead of accommodating.”

      “That word bothers you.”

      “I would not say that it bothers me.” What bothered him was the pointlessness of this. The waste of his time and energy. And yes, the fact that she was distractingly beautiful—which, he had to remind himself, was nothing but another weapon. “But it is not as if one wishes to be called toxic, is it? It is certainly not a compliment.”

      “And you are a man who is accustomed to compliments, is that it?”

      He knew better, but still, he felt his mouth curve. “It will perhaps shock you to learn that most women who make my acquaintance do not find me the least bit toxic.”

      “Are you attempting to make this session sexual, Mr. Combe?” He saw her eyes flash at that and he could have sworn what he saw in them then was triumph. It told him he was in deeper trouble than he’d thought even before she smirked. “Oh dear. This is much worse than I thought.”

       CHAPTER TWO

      MATTEO COMBE WAS precisely the kind of wealthy, pompous, arrogant man of too much undeserved power Sarina Fellows hated most.

      He was remarkably handsome, which to her mind was a very serious strike against him, right from the start. His was the kind of attractiveness that made people silly when they encountered it. It was the walk into walls, trip over your own two feet, start giggling like a twelve-year-old sort of silliness, and it appalled her deeply that she could feel the swell of that reaction inside of her when she’d long considered herself immune to his type.

      But he was different, somehow. He was...more. It was something about the glossiness of his dark hair, the assertive line of his jaw. It was his aristocratic nose and those gray eyes like a storm. It was something about the seething confidence he wore like a kind of cloak, draped about his athletic, rangy body and making it very clear that he was succumbing to her—to this evaluation his own board had demanded—because he chose to do so. That no force on earth could compel him to do a single thing he didn’t wish to do.

      He reminded her of a mighty river, roaring over a great ledge. Powerful. Kinetic and dynamic.

      Dangerous, something in her whispered.

      Sarina dismissed that almost as soon as the word formed inside her. He was beautiful, yes. Somehow austere and lush at once, with that face of his. And he was rich. Filthily, vomitously wealthy. One branch of his family tree was stuck deep into the Yorkshire mills, hardy and tough, inside and out. The other stretched back into the golden age of the Italian Renaissance, which was right about the time this particular villa had been built.

      Sarina understood exactly why he had insisted their first meeting be here, in the living fairy tale that was Venice. He wanted her to come all the way into this city of sighs and ancient palazzos and history like a bright tapestry in which his family was a shining, golden thread, the better to gasp and flutter over all his wealth and consequence.

      Except Sarina wasn’t the fluttering kind.

      And Matteo Combe had no idea what he was in for.

      It wasn’t only that Sarina hated men like him, though she did. It was that she knew them. She knew what they were capable of, certainly, and she’d developed an acute allergy to their form of arrogance. The best friend she’d had since childhood, who she’d considered her sister, had succumbed to an addiction to a man just like Matteo. Rashly confident, propped up on all that history and the money acquired for him across centuries, and catered to by everyone he had ever met, every single day for the whole of his life.

      Oh yes. Sarina knew all about men like him.

      Sarina didn’t need to destroy him, necessarily. But she thought of men like Matteo as big, blown-up balloons, and as it happened, she’d set herself up to be the perfect, pointed pin. She’d been popping overweening male egos professionally now long enough to have quite the reputation for taking masters of the universe down a few pegs, to the mortal men of questionable moral character they usually were beneath all the bluster.

      Some of the men she was called in to consult with were decent. In the absence of a record of misdeeds and bad behavior, she was more than happy to issue a glowing report on the man in question. She didn’t hate men, as many had accused her. She hated bad men who abused their power and those vulnerable to it.

      She felt sure that Jeanette, wherever she was now, was looking down on her in support.

      And the fact that the particular

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