Revenge At The Altar

Her breath caught in her chest and, petrified that the expression on her face might reveal her thoughts, she pushed aside the unsettling image of a naked Max and forced herself to meet his gaze.

He smiled, and the line of his mouth arrowed through her skin.

‘Margot...it’s been a long time.’

As he spoke she felt a tingling shock. His voice hadn’t changed, and that wasn’t fair, for—like his eyes—it was utterly distinctive, and made even the dullest of words sound like spring water. It was just so soft, sexy...

And utterly untrustworthy, she reminded herself irritably. Having been on the receiving end of it, she knew from first-hand experience that the softness was like spun sugar—a clever trick designed to seduce, and to gift-wrap the parcel of lies that came out of his mouth.

‘Not long enough,’ she said coolly.

Ignoring the heat snaking over her skin, she stalked to the opposite end of the room and dropped her bag on the table. ‘Why don’t you give it another decade—or two, even?’

He seemed unmoved by her rudeness—or maybe, judging by the slight up-curve to his mouth, a little amused. ‘I’m sorry you feel like that. Given the change in our relationship—’

‘We don’t have a relationship,’ she snapped.

They never had. It was one of the facts that she’d forced herself to accept over the years—that, no matter how physically close they’d been, Max was a cipher to her. In love, and blindsided by how beautiful, how alive he’d made her feel in bed, she hadn’t noticed that there had been none of the prerequisites for a happy, healthy relationship—honesty, openness, trust...

The truth was that she’d never really known him at all. He, though, had clearly found her embarrassingly easy to read. Unsurprisingly! She’d been that most clichéd of adolescents: a clueless teenager infatuated with her brother’s best friend. And, of course, her family was not just famous but infamous.

Even now, the thought of her being so transparently smitten made her cringe.

‘We don’t have a relationship,’ she repeated. ‘And a signature on a piece of paper isn’t about to change that.’

His gaze held hers, and a mocking smile tugged at his mouth as he rotated the chair back and forth.

‘Really?’ He spoke mildly, as though they were discussing the possibility of rain. ‘Why don’t we call my lawyer? Or yours? See if they agree with that statement.’

Her head snapped up. It was a bonus that Max hadn’t spoken to Pierre yet, but the very fact that he was hinting at the possibility of doing so made her throat tighten.

‘That won’t be necessary. This matter is between you and me.’

‘But I thought you said we didn’t have any relationship?’

She glared at him, hearing and hating the goading note in his voice.

‘We don’t. And we won’t. I meant that this matter is private, and I intend to keep it that way.’

Max stared coldly across the table. Did she really think that he was going to let that happen? That she was in control of this situation.

Nearly a decade ago he had been, if not happy, then willing to keep their relationship under wraps. She had told him she needed time. That she needed to find the right moment to tell her family the truth. And he had let her beauty and her desirability blind him to the real truth—that he was a secret she would never be willing to share.

But he wasn’t about to let history repeat itself.

‘Are you sure about that? I mean, you know what they say about good intentions, Margot,’ he said softly. ‘Do you really want to head down that particular road?’

There was a taut, quivering silence, and Margot felt her face drain of colour, felt her body, her heart, shrinking away from his threat.

There’s no need! she wanted to shout into his handsome face. You’ve already cast me out of heaven and into a hell of your making.

But she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how raw her wounds still were and how much he had mattered to her.

She returned his gaze coldly. ‘Are you threatening me?’

Watching the flush of colour spread over her collarbone, Max tilted his head backwards, savouring her fury. He had never seen her angry before—in fact he’d never seen her express any strong emotion.

At least not outside the bedroom.

His pulse twitched and a memory stole into his head of that first time in his room—how the directness of her gaze had held him captive as she had pressed her body against his, her fingers cutting into his back, her breath warm against his mouth.

Margot might have been serious and serene on the surface, but the first time he had kissed her properly had been a revelation. She’d been so passionate and unfettered. In fact, it had been not so much a revelation as a revolution—all heat and hunger and urgency.

Suddenly he was vibrating with a hunger of his own, and he felt heat break out on his skin. Slowly, he slid his hands over the armrests of the chair to stop himself from reaching out and pulling her against him. The muscles in his jaw tensed and he gritted his teeth.

‘Only the weak and the incompetent resort to threats. I’m merely making conversation.’ He looked straight into her flushed face. ‘You remember conversation, don’t you, Margot? It’s the thing you used to interrupt by dragging me to bed.’

Margot stared at him, her body pulsing with equal parts longing and loathing. If only she could throw his words back in his face. But it was true. Her desire for him had been frantic and inexorable.

She lifted her chin. So what if it had? Enjoying sex wasn’t a crime. And it certainly wasn’t sneaky or dishonest—like, say, deliberately setting out to seduce someone for their money.

Eyes narrowing, she yanked out one of the chairs with uncharacteristic roughness and sat down on it. Pulling her bag closer, she reached inside.

Max watched in silence as she pulled out a fountain pen and a leather-bound case. Ignoring him, she flipped it open and began writing with swift, sure strokes. Then, laying the pen down, she tore the paper she’d been writing on free and pushed it across the table towards him.

It was a cheque.

A cheque!

His breathing jerked and his jaw felt suddenly as though it was hewn from basalt. He didn’t move, didn’t even lower his gaze, just kept his eyes locked on her face as with effort he held on to the fast-fraying threads of his temper.

‘What’s that?’ he asked softly.

Her mouth thinned. ‘I don’t know how your mind works, Max, and I don’t want to, but I know why you’re here. It’s the same reason you were here ten years ago. Money.’ Margot gestured towards the cheque. ‘So why don’t you just take it and go?’

He was watching her thoughtfully, his expression somewhere between incredulous and mocking. But there was a tension in him that hadn’t been there before.

‘That’s amazing,’ he said finally. ‘I didn’t know people actually did this kind of thing in real life. I thought it was just in films—’

‘If only this was a film,’ she said coldly. ‘Then I could just leave you on the cutting room floor.’

Max gazed across the room, anger shrinking his focus so that all he could see was the small rectangular piece of paper lying on the tabletop. Of course it would come down to money. That was all their relationship had ever been about. Or, more precisely, his complete and utter lack of it.

Margot was a Duvernay, and Duvernays didn’t marry poor outsiders. His breath seemed to harden in his lungs. Not even when they had claimed them as family, welcomed them into their home and their lives.

Briefly he let the pain and anger of his memories seep through his veins. Officially he might have been just on the payroll, but for nearly three years he had been treated like a member of the clan—and, stupid idiot that he was, he had actually come to believe in the fiction that although blood made you related, it was loyalty that made you family.

Later, when his perception hadn’t been blunted by desire and emotion, it had been easy to see that any invitation into the inner sanctum had been on their terms, and it had never extended to marrying the daughter of the house.

Only by then he had lost his job, his home and his pride. He had been left penniless and powerless.

But times had changed. Leaning back, he smiled coldly. ‘It’s not enough.’

Margot clenched her jaw, her brown eyes glowing with anger like peat on a fire. ‘Oh, believe me, it is.’

Even if she had written a row of zeros it would be more than he deserved. He had already cost her enough—no, too much—in pain and regret.

‘So take it and go.’

He shifted in his seat, and she felt another stab of anger that he should be able to do this to her. That after everything he’d already taken he could just swan back into her life, into her boardroom, and demand more.

Controlling her emotions, she closed her chequebook with exaggerated care and looked up at him. ‘Why are you here, Max?’

He shrugged. ‘Isn’t that obvious? I’m a shareholder and a director now, so I thought we should talk.’

‘You could have just telephoned,’ she snapped.

‘What?’ His mouth curved up at one corner. ‘And miss all the fun.’ He let his eyes home in on the pulse beating at the base of her throat. ‘Besides, I wanted to choose my office.’

She watched almost hypnotised as he gestured lazily around the room. ‘Pick out a desk...wallpaper maybe...’

Folding her arms to stop her hands shaking, she glowered at him. The shock of everything—her father’s phone message, Max buying the shares, his sudden and unwelcome reappearance in her life—was suddenly too much to endure a moment longer.

‘Just stop it, okay? Stop it. This is insane. You can’t seriously expect to work here. Or want to.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Is there a problem?’

She looked at him in disbelief. ‘Yes, of course there’s a problem. You and me...our history—’

Breaking off, she fought to control the sudden jab of pain at the memory of just how cruelly one-sided that history had been.

‘I don’t care how many shares you buy, you are not stepping foot in this boardroom again. So how much is it?’ She forced a business-like tone into her voice. ‘How much do you want?’

She waited for his reply but it didn’t come. And then, as the silence seemed to stretch beyond all normal limits, she felt her spine stiffen with horror as slowly he shook his head.

‘I don’t want and I certainly don’t need your money.’

Watching the doubt and confusion in her eyes, he felt suddenly immensely satisfied. Buying the shares had been an act of insanity on so many levels, but now, having Margot in front of him, knowing that his mere presence had dragged her here, it all felt worth it.

Colour was spreading slowly over her cheeks.

‘Take the cheque or don’t—I don’t care.’ She lifted her chin. ‘But either way this conversation is over. And now I suggest you leave before I have you removed—’

‘That’s not going to happen.’ His voice sounded normal—pleasant, even—but she felt a shiver of apprehension, for there was a strand of steel running through every syllable that matched the combative glint in his eyes.

‘I’m not just the hired help now, baby. I’m CEO of a global wine business. More importantly, as of today, I’m a bona fide director of this company.’

He paused, and she felt as if the air was being sucked out of the room as he let his gaze linger on her face. Pulse racing, she realised that only a very foolish woman would underestimate a man like Max Montigny.

‘Your company.’

He lounged back, and suddenly her heart was thumping against her ribs.

‘Although that may be about to change.’

‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was like a whisper. She cleared her throat. ‘What are you talking about?’

He shrugged. ‘Right now you might live in the big chateau, have a private jet and a chauffeur-driven limousine, but I’ve seen your accounts.’

She frowned, started to object, but he simply smiled and she fell silent, for there was something knowing in the gaze that was making her skin start to prickle with fear and apprehension.

‘Your father showed them to me. And they make pretty bleak reading. Desperate, in fact. Oh, it all looks good on the outside, but you’re haemorrhaging money.’

Margot could feel the colour draining from her face. His words were detonating inside her head like grenades. Suddenly she was deaf, dazed, reeling blindly through the dust and rubble of the mess she had sought so hard to contain, struggling to breathe.

‘That’s not true,’ she said hoarsely. Her lungs felt as though they were being squeezed in a vice. ‘We’ve just had a difficult few months—

‘More like five years.’ He stared at her for a long moment, his gaze impassive. ‘You asked me why I’m here. Well, that’s it. That’s why. Your family is about to be ruined and I want to be here to see it.’

He stared at her steadily, his eyes straight and unblinking, and Margot stared back at him, stilled, almost mesmerised by his words. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about retribution. You and your family ruined my life, and now I get to watch your world implode.’

Margot shook her head. Stiffening her shoulders, she forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘No, you seduced me, and then you asked me to marry you just so you could get your hands on my money.’

For a moment he didn’t reply, then he shrugged, and it was that offhand gesture—the casual dismissal of the way he’d broken her heart—that told her more clearly than any words that he was being serious.

Watching the light fade from Margot’s eyes, Max told himself he didn’t care. She deserved everything that was coming. They all did.

‘And I paid for that. You and your family made sure I lost everything. I couldn’t even get a reference. No vineyard would touch me.’

Remembering the shock and helplessness he’d felt in the hours and days following Margot’s rejection, he bit down hard, using the pain of the past to block out her pale, stunned face.

‘Now it’s your turn.’

He leaned back against the leather upholstery, his eyes never leaving hers.

‘I only bought shares in your company to get a ringside seat.’

CHAPTER TWO

MARGOT SAT FROZEN, mute with shock, her heart lurching inside her chest like a ship at sea in a storm.

‘How dare you?’ Blood was drumming in her ears, and her body vibrated with anger and disbelief. ‘How dare you stand here in my boardroom and—?’

‘Easily.’

She watched in mute horror as Max stood up and, raising his arms above his head, stretched his shoulders and neck. His apparent serenity only exacerbated the anxiety that was hammering against her ribcage.

‘And I’ll find it easier still to stand in your office and watch the administrators repossess that beautiful custom-made Parnian desk of yours.’

He was walking towards her now, and suddenly her breath was coming thick and fast.

‘That won’t happen.’ She stood up hastily, her gaze locking on his, trying to ignore both the intense maleness of his lean, muscular body and the way her pulse was jumping like a stranded fish in response to it.

‘Oh, it will.’

He stopped in front of her, his eyes—those beautiful hypnotic eyes—pinning her to the floor even as her head spun faster.

‘Your business is in a mess, baby—a bloated, unstable, debt-ridden mess. House of Duvernay?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘More like house of straw!’

‘And you’re the wolf, are you? Come to huff and puff?’ she sneered, her gaze colliding with his.

It was the wrong thing to say—not least because there was more than a hint of the wolf about his intense, hostile focus and the restrained power of body. For a moment, she held her breath. But then he smiled—only it felt more as if he was baring his teeth.

‘I won’t need to.’ He studied her face. ‘I won’t need to do anything except sit back and watch while everything you love and care about slips through your fingers.’

The air was vibrating between them. ‘You’re a monster,’ she whispered, inching backwards. ‘A cold-blooded barbarian. What kind of man would say something like that?’

He shrugged, his expression somewhere between a challenge and a taunt. ‘The kind that believes in karma.’

Margot was struggling to speak. She wanted to deny his claims. Prove him wrong. But the trouble was that she knew that he was right.

The business was a mess.

Her brother Yves might have resented his glamorous parents, but he had been more like Colette and Emile than he’d cared to admit, and five years after his death she was still trying to clear up the consequences of his impulsive and imprudent management style. Only nothing she did seemed to work.

Her heart began to beat faster. How could it? She didn’t have her great-grandfather’s vision, or her grandfather’s ruthless determination and drive. Nor was she full of Yves’s flamboyant self-assurance. In fact, if anything, the opposite was true. She’d found the responsibility of ensuring that the family legacy stayed intact increasingly overwhelming and as her self-doubts grew the profits continued to shrink. Finally—reluctantly—she’d decided to put up the chateau as security.

Her pulse began to beat faster.

Even just thinking about it made her feel physically sick. Not only had the chateau belonged to her family for sixteen generations, in less than two months it was supposed to be the setting for her brother Louis’s wedding.

It had been a last-ditch attempt to reassure the bank. Only it hadn’t worked. Max was right. The business was failing.

She shivered.

Or rather she had failed, and soon the whole world would know the truth that she had so desperately tried to hide.

Watching her in silence, Max breathed out slowly.

He’d waited nearly ten years for this. Ten long years of working so hard that he would often fall asleep eating his evening meal. Unlike Margot, he’d had to start at the bottom. His jaw tightened. His job at Duvernay should have opened doors to him throughout the industry but, thanks to her family, that ladder had become a snake with a venomous bite.

After being more or less banished from France, it had taken him years to claw back his reputation. Years spent working punishingly long hours at vineyards in Hungary, and studying at night school until finally he had got a break and a job on an estate in California.

But every backbreaking second had been worth it for this, and although the shares had been expensive he would have paid double for this moment of reckoning.

His chest tightened. Finally he’d proved the Duvernays wrong!

He was their equal—for he was here, in their precious boardroom, not as some low-paid employee but as a shareholder.

He wanted to savour it. But although Margot looked suitably stunned—crushed, in fact, by his words—strangely, he was finding it not nearly as satisfying as he’d imagined he would.

Confused, and unprepared for this unexpected development, he stared at her in silence. And then immediately wished he hadn’t, for with the light behind her, the delicate fabric of her white dress was almost transparent, and the silhouetted outline of her figure was clearly visible. It was almost as if she was naked.

A beat of desire pulsed through his veins.

Not that he needed a reminder. Margot’s body was imprinted in his brain. He could picture her now, as he’d seen her so many times in those snatched afternoons spent in the tiny bedroom of his estate cottage. Lying in his arms, the curve of her belly and breasts gleaming in the shafts of fading sunlight, a pulse beating frantically at the base of her throat. Each time, he’d felt as though he was dreaming. He’d been completely in her thrall—overwhelmed not just by desire but by an emotion he had, until meeting her, always dismissed as at best illusory and at worst treacherous.

At first he’d tried to deny his feelings, had avoided her, and then, when avoiding her had become untenable, had been offhand almost to the point of being brusque, willing her to brand him rude and unapproachable if it meant hanging on to some small remnant of self-control.

But it had been so hard, for his body had been on fire, his brain in turmoil, all five senses on permanent high alert. He’d wanted her so badly, and for a time he’d believed that she wanted him in the same way. Insistently. Relentlessly.

Unconditionally.

And so he’d proposed—wanting, needing to make permanent that passion, that sense of belonging to someone, and of her belonging to him. He’d had no words for how he’d felt. It had defied description. All he had known was that he had a place in her life, her world. He had believed that unquestioningly. Only of course he’d been wrong.

Margot had wanted him, but her desire had been rooted in the transitory and finite nature of an affair—and more specifically in the illicit thrill of ‘dating’ her older brother’s employee.

He felt anger spark inside him, and his eyes cut across the room to the line of portraits of Duvernays past and present.

Of course proposing to her had been his second mistake. His first had been to believe that his rapport with Yves was real, that it meant something. He had been lured not so much by the family’s wealth and glamour, but by their sense of contra mundum, and the chance to be admitted into their world had been irresistibly potent to someone with his past.

With hindsight, though, he could see that his presence had always been subject to the grace and favour of the Duvernay family. They might have tolerated him, but he had never really belonged—just as Margot had never really belonged to him.

He felt his heart start to beat faster.

As a suitor, he’d always known that he was an underdog, a wild card—but, stupid and naive fool that he’d been, he’d actually respected her for seeing beyond his bank account and his background. Admired her for choosing him, for taking that risk. Now, though, he knew that the risk had been all his.

His hands trembled and he felt a rush of irritation at his naivety. No wonder he wasn’t really feeling this moment. He might have created a business to rival theirs, but what had haunted him—and what still rankled and had made every relationship since Margot a short-lived and deliberately one-sided affair—was the fact that, just like his mother, he hadn’t been good enough to marry.

The Duvernays might have welcomed him into their home, but ultimately they had never considered him worthy of permanently joining their inner circle. Not even Margot. Especially not Margot.

His head was suddenly pounding.

For nearly a decade he’d told himself that watching the House of Duvernay implode would be enough. Enough to erase the sting of humiliation and the pain of being so summarily cast out and ostracised. Only now, here, standing in this boardroom, it was clear to him that there was another, more satisfying revenge to be had: namely, seizing control of the business from Margot.

It was the only possible way to exorcise this lingering hold she had on him. To punish her as she deserved to be punished. For she had wronged him the most. Her betrayal was the most personal and the deepest.

His pulse twitched as for the first time he noticed the band on her wrist, his brain swiftly and efficiently deciphering the cursive writing. He felt warmth spread across his skin. And it just so happened that he knew the perfect way to make his revenge exquisitely and fittingly personal.

Exhilaration hit him like a shot of pure alcohol and, resting his gaze on her profile, he steadied himself. ‘I know how you must be feeling...’

Her head jerked towards him, her long pale blonde hair catching the light as it flicked sideways.

‘I doubt that.’ Dark brown eyes wide with anger and outrage locked on to his. ‘Having feelings would make you human, and you clearly don’t have an ounce of humanity.’