LITMIR.BIZ

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second now, she’d start to choke...but not yet. She was frozen solid. Panicked from her head to her feet and unable to do a single thing but stare at him, the apparition from her own personal hell.

      Atlas stood in the door to her office and filled it up, all flashing black eyes and that pugilistic set to his brutal jaw. He wore a dark, obviously bespoke suit that clung to his shoulders and made her far too aware of their size and sculpted, muscled width. As if he could not only bear the weight of the world on them if he chose, he could block it out, as well. He was doing that now.

      He had always had that rough, impossible magnetism. It had rolled from him wherever he went, making the hair on the back of Lexi’s neck stand up straight whenever he’d been near. Making it hard to breathe when he entered a room. Making her so aware of him that it was like a body ache.

      The ache had kept her awake some nights, tucked away beneath the eaves in the manor house, where she’d lived in the servant’s quarters and had been expected to find her circumstances evidence of her uncle’s generosity. It hadn’t exactly faded in the years since—it had just shifted into the nightmares that woke her in her tiny little bedsit and some nights, kept her from falling back to sleep.

      He was far more compelling now. Brutally, lethally compelling. There was something untamed and dangerous about him that his luxurious suit did nothing to hide. If anything, the expertly tailored coat and trousers called attention to how wild he was, how much more he was than other men. He was so much bigger. Rougher. Infinitely more dangerous though he wore the disguise of civility with such ease.

      And he glared at her as if he, too, was imagining what it would be like to take her apart with his own two hands.

      She couldn’t blame him.

      Lexi’s throat was so dry it hurt.

      Her palms felt damp and her face was too hot. She had the vague notion she might be sick, but there was something in the pitiless way he regarded her that kept her from succumbing to the creeping nausea.

      “Lexi,” he murmured, her name an assault. An indictment. And he knew it. She could see he knew it, that it was a deliberate blow. That he reveled in it—but then, he’d earned that, too. “At last.”

      “Atlas.”

      She was proud of the way she said his name. No catch in her voice. No shakiness. No stutter. As if she was perfectly composed.

      All a lie, of course, but she’d take anything at this point. Anything that got her through this. If there was any getting through something like this.

      He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t step farther into her office. He only stood where he was and regarded her in that same nearly violent way, all terrible promise and impending threat.

      It was excruciating.

      “When did you arrive in London?” she asked, still managing to keep her voice calm. If thin.

      One dark brow rose, and she felt it like a slap.

      “Small talk?” His voice was harshly incredulous and made her feel small. Or smaller. “I arrived this morning, as I’m certain you know full well.”

      Of course she knew. He’d been all over the news the moment his plane had set down in Heathrow.

      Lexi wasn’t the only one who couldn’t seem to get enough of the scandalous rise and fall of Atlas Chariton. A man who’d built himself from nothing, then swept into the world of high-society high stakes as if he’d been made for it. He’d been hired as the CEO of the Worth Trust at a shockingly young age and had overseen the major renovations and reorganization that had taken the grand old estate from its old, moldering status to a major recreation center for public use and in so doing, had made himself and everyone else very, very wealthy. He’d opened the famous, Michelin-starred restaurant on the grounds. He’d created the five-star hotel that had opened and run beautifully while he’d been incarcerated, thanks entirely to his vision and planning, a point the papers had made repeatedly. He’d started the new programs that had continued in his absence, going above and beyond the usual stately house home and garden tours, making Worth Manor and its grounds a premier London tourist and local destination.

      And then he’d been convicted of murdering Philippa and put away.

      They’d all been living off his vision ever since.

      But by the look of him, Atlas had been living off something else entirely.

      A black, dark fury, if Lexi had to guess.

      “And how do you find the estate?” she asked, as if she hadn’t taken his warning to heart.

      Atlas stared at her until a new heat made her cheeks feel singed, and she felt very nearly lacerated by her own shame.

      “I find that the fact you are all still standing, unchanged and wholly unruined, offends me,” he growled. “Deeply.”

      “Atlas, I want to tell you that I—”

      “Oh, no. I think not.” His teeth bared in something she was not foolish enough to call a smile. She remembered what his smiles had looked like before. How they’d felt when he’d aimed them her way. They had never been like this. Ruthless and terrible in turn. “No apologies, Lexi. It’s much too late for that.”

      She found herself rising then, as if she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she simply couldn’t sit there another moment, like some kind of small animal of prey. She smoothed down the front of her pencil skirt and hoped she looked the way she’d imagined she had this morning in her mirror. Capable. Competent. Unworthy of this kind of malevolent focus.

      “I know you must be very angry,” she began.

      And he laughed. It was a hard, male sound that rolled down the length of her spine and seemed to lodge itself there in her lower back, where it spread. Until there was that same old aching thing again, low in her belly and made of a kind of fire Lexi didn’t pretend to understand.

      But there was no getting around the fact that she’d never heard a laugh like that before. So utterly devoid of humor. So impossibly lethal she wanted to look down and check herself for bullet holes.

      “You have no idea how angry I am, little girl,” Atlas told her, that grim fury and something else making his black eyes gleam as they tore straight through her. “But you will. Believe me, you will.”

       CHAPTER TWO

      ATLAS WAS USED to fury.

      He was used to rage. That black, choking spiral that had threatened to drag him under again and again over the past decade and some years, very nearly had for good.

      But this was different. She was different.

      Because little Lexi Haring, who had once followed him around these very grounds like a shy puppy, all big eyes and a shy smile that was all for him, was the architect of his destruction.

      Oh, he knew in some distant, rational part of his brain that she was no less a pawn than he had been in this. He knew exactly how little her relatives thought of her and more, what they’d taken from her. Her presence in this hidden away little carriage house made her status amongst the Worths perfectly clear, far away from the members of the family who mattered. More than that, he’d had his own investigators digging into these people for years now, gathering all the things he’d need when he was finally free, and he knew things about her he doubted she knew herself.

      Things he’d always known he’d use against her without a second thought once the opportunity arose.

      From the moment of his arrest Atlas had refused to accept that he’d never be free again. Some long, lonely years, that was all that had kept him sane in that loud, bright hell of concrete and steel.

      And now, standing here in this drafty old place, he realized he remembered all the ins and outs of the Worth family dramas better than he’d

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