Saved by the CEO (12 page)

Not the authorities.
Damn it all. How had she ever let the conversation turn in this direction? To the one secret she hoped to never have to say aloud.

“It’s complicated,” she replied. It would be too much to ask for Nico to continue accepting her terse answers at face value. Not this time. He was angry; he would want answers.

Sure enough, his eyes burned dark and intense as he stood, arms folded, waiting for her to continue. Louisa’s skin burned from the intensity. She thought about lying, but she’d never been very good at it. Pretending, masking her emotions, sure, but out-and-out lies? Not so much. Looking back, it was a wonder she’d managed to keep Comparino a secret at all.

“I didn’t have a choice—I had to stay in Boston. If Steven had known I had property in my name—property of my own—he would have...” Angry tears threatened. She looked down so he wouldn’t see them.

“He would have what?” Nico asked.

“Taken it,” she replied, choking on the words. “He would have taken the palazzo the same way he took everything else I had.”

At last, the ugly truth was out in the open and Nico would never look at her the same way again. How could he? She was a stupid, gullible fool who let a master manipulator ruin her life. Shame rose like bile, sour and thick in her mouth. She didn’t dare raise her eyes to look into his face. She couldn’t bear to see pity where there’d once been admiration. There was only one thing she could do.

Spinning around, she took off down the path.

* * *

What the—? Nico stared at Louisa’s retreating figure before sprinting after her. “Louisa, hold up!”

“Leave me alone,” she said. “I have to get to the winery.” She sounded as though—was she crying?

It didn’t take long for him to close the distance between them. When he did, he touched her shoulder hoping to slow her pace, only to have her tear free of his grip so fiercely you’d think he was physically restraining her. She turned and snarled, “I said leave me alone.”

She was crying. Tears streaked her cheeks. Their tracks might as well have been scratches on his skin, they hurt that much to see. This was about more than her thief of a husband stealing property. “What did that bastard do to you?”

“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Forget I said anything.”

She tried to surge ahead again but he had height to his advantage. It was nothing for him to step ahead and block her path. Not unexpectedly, she shoved at his shoulder trying to make him move. “I said forget it.”

“I can’t,” he said, standing firm. Not after seeing those tears. “Talk to me.”

“Why? So you can laugh at what a stupid idiot I am?”

Idiot? Nico shook his head. “I could never think that of you.”

“Then you’re a bigger fool than I am,” she said, jaw trembling. “And I’m... I’m...”

Her face started to crumble. “I’m a damn big one.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

L
OUISA
BURIED
HER
face in her hands. Nico stood frozen by the sight of her shaking shoulders, wanting to comfort her but afraid his touch might make her run again. Eventually his need to hold her won out, and he wrapped her in his arms. She sagged into him, fists twisting into his shirt. His poor sweet Louisa. Steven Clark should be glad he was in prison because otherwise Nico would... Heaven knows what he would do. He pressed his lips to the top of her head and let her cry.

After a while, the shaking eased. “I’m sorry,” she said, lifting her head. “I didn’t mean to lose it like that. It’s just sometimes I think, no matter how hard I try, Steven will always be there, taunting me. That I’ll never completely escape him.”

Suddenly all her comments about needing to be on her own took on new meaning. She was running from more than scandal and a failed marriage, wasn’t she? He could kick himself for not realizing it sooner. He risked another brush of his lips against her hair before asking, “Did he hurt you badly?”

“You mean physically?” She shook her head. “He never laid a hand on me.”

Thank God.
Not all abuse was physical, however. Emotional abuse was insidious and painful in its own way. His parents played mind games all the time, driving one another to madness out of revenge or jealousy. “But he hurt you all the same, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did,” she said, giving a long sigh. Backing out of his embrace, she stumbled just far enough to be out of reach, wiping her tears as she walked. “It’s my fault, really. The signs were all there from the very beginning, but I chose to ignore them. Love makes you stupid.”

“He was also an accomplished liar,” he reminded her, his nerves bristling when she mentioned the word
love
. From everything he’d heard of the man so far, Steven Clark didn’t deserve Louisa’s affection, and he certainly didn’t deserve her self-recrimination.

If his underlying message made it through, it wasn’t evident in Louisa’s answering sigh. “He certainly was. But he was also incredibly charming and romantic, and I was twenty-one years old.”

“Barely an adult.”

“True, but I was certain I knew everything.”

“What twenty-one-year-old isn’t?” he replied.

His attempt to lighten the moment failed. Tired of standing, and suspecting getting the entire story would take some time, Nico motioned for her to follow him a few feet ahead, to a small gap between plants. He sat down beneath the branches, the dirt cool and damp through his jeans, and patted the space beside him. Louisa hesitated for a moment before joining him.

“How did you meet him?” he asked when she finally settled herself. He told himself he was asking because he wanted to understand what happened, and not because of the burning sensation the man’s name caused in his chest.

“At work. My first job out of college. I was so psyched when I got the job, too,” she said, in a voice that still held lingering pride. “Clark Investments was the hottest business in the city at the time. Steven was a rock star in Boston financial circles.”

A rock star with twenty years on his starry-eyed employee, Nico thought, gritting his teeth. “You must have been very good to get the job.”

“I was.”

There was such gratitude in her smile, as if it had been a long time since someone had acknowledged her abilities. Nico laid the blame at the feet of her ex-husband. “Anyway, I met Steven a couple months after I started—on the elevator of all places—and all I could think was
Steven Clark
is talking to me.
Later, he told me he was so impressed he had to ask me out.”

That, thought Nico, might have been the most honest thing Steven Clark had ever said. What man with two eyes wouldn’t be impressed by her?

“I felt like Cinderella. Here I was, a girl from a single-parent family in a blue-collar town while Steven was sophisticated and had experienced things I’d never dreamed of doing. Things like skiing in the Alps and diving with sharks.” She scooped a handful of dirt and let it sift through her fingers. “I should have known then, the stories were too outrageous to be true, but like I said, love—”

“Makes you blind,” he finished for her. Why that phrase bothered him so much, he didn’t know. Of course she’d loved the man; he was her husband.

“He flew us to Chicago once because I said I liked deep dish pizza. Who wouldn’t fall for a gesture like that?” she asked. “I thought I’d met Prince Charming.

“My friends didn’t think so. They said he made them feel uncomfortable. Steven said it was because they were jealous.”

“Perhaps they were.”

“My mother, too?” she asked. “She didn’t like him at all. Called him a slicker version of my father and said she didn’t trust him.”

That was why they were estranged. Nico could guess what happened. Her mother didn’t approve, and Steven took advantage of the disagreement to push them further apart.

“We had this awful fight,” she told him. “I accused her of not wanting me to be happy, that because she was alone and miserable, she wanted me to be alone and miserable, too. When I told Steven, he said, ‘that’s all right. I’m all the family you need now.’” The fresh tears in her eyes had Nico moving to take her in his arms again. She shook him off, getting to her feet instead. “I didn’t talk to her for almost five years. She could have died and I wouldn’t have known.”

“That’s not true.” She was letting her guilty conscience color her thinking.

“Isn’t it?” she replied, turning around. “Who would tell me? I cut myself off from everyone I used to know. Because they didn’t fit with my new life.”

And Nico could guess who had put that thought in her head. A chill ran through him as he slowly began to understand what she meant by Steven taking everything from her.

She’d turned away from him again, her face turned to the foliage. Nico could see her fingering the edge of one of the leaves. Her hands were shaking.

“You tell yourself you’re too smart to fall for someone’s lies,” she said. “You read stories of women trapped in bad relationships and you can’t understand how they can be so foolish. That is, until it happens to you.”

“Louisa, don’t...”

“Don’t what? Blame myself? Tell the embarrassing truth?”

Don’t tell me at all.
Rising to his feet, Nico walked behind her and curled his hands atop her shoulders to steady her. There was no need for her to go on; he’d heard enough.

Unfortunately for both of them, Louisa had unsealed a bottle that insisted on being emptied because she immediately shook her head. “I think maybe I need to tell someone,” she whispered. “Maybe if I say the words aloud...”

Nico could hear her breath rattle with nerves as she took a deep lungful of air before she began to speak. “When it first started, I barely noticed. When you’re in love you’re supposed to want to spend every minute with each other, right?”

“Yes,” Nico replied. His hands were still on her shoulders, and it was all he could do not to pull her tight against him.

“And then, after we were married, when Steven suggested I stop working to avoid gossip, well that made sense, too. It was expected I would be with him at corporate dinner parties and charitable functions. Could hardly do that if I was working full-time.”

Lots of women managed both, thought Nico. Louisa could have, as well. But that would have meant having a life of her own, and it sounded as though having an independent wife was the last thing Steven Clark wanted.

He honestly could strangle the man. Here was one of the things that made Louisa such a treasure. Challenging her was exciting. If Nico had a woman like her in his life, he’d do everything in his power to aid in her success, not pin her down like some butterfly under glass. Steven Clark was an idiot as well as a thief.

“When did you realize...?”

“That I was trapped?”

“Yes.” Actually, he hadn’t known what he’d meant to ask, but her question was close enough.

“I skipped a charity planning committee to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. One of the other members told Steven, and he lost it. Demanded to know where I’d been all day and with whom.” She pulled the leaf she’d been playing with from its branch, sending a rustling noise rippling down the row. “To this day I’m not sure what frightened me more. His demand or the fact there were people reporting my actions to him.”

Neither aspect sounded very comfortable. “You stayed, however.” Because she loved him.

“Where was I supposed to go? None of the assets were in my name. I’d alienated everyone I used to know, and Steven didn’t have friends so much as business associates. I couldn’t trust those people to help me, not when Steven was handling their money. I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I was stuck.”

The proverbial bird in a gilded cage, Nico thought sadly.

“Surely your mother or your friends...”

“And have to listen to them tell me how right they’d all been? I couldn’t.” Nico wanted to smile despite the sad situation. That was his American. Stubborn to the end, even when it hurt her.

* * *

“Discovering I’d inherited the palazzo was torture. Here I had this safe haven waiting for me, and I couldn’t get to it. Even if by some miracle I did find a way to evade Steven’s radar, with his money and connections, he would have eventually tracked me down.”

The leaf she’d been holding fluttered to the ground as she sighed. “In the end it was easier to go along to get along.”

“You mean accept the abuse,” Nico said.

“I told you, it wasn’t abuse.”

They both knew she was lying. Steven might not have hit her or yelled insults, but he’d abused her in his own despicable way. He’d stolen her innocence and her freedom and so much more. Nico could feel the anger spreading through him. If it was possible to kill a man by thoughts alone, Steven Clark would be dead a thousand times over.

Arms hugging her body, Louisa turned to look at him with cavernous eyes, the white-blond curtain of her hair casting her cheeks with shadows.

“The day I stumbled across those financial reports was the best day of my life, because I knew I could finally walk away,” she said.

Only walking away hadn’t been as easy as she made it sound.

The truth wasn’t as simple as she described. Walking away was never easy. The details didn’t matter. Her story explained a lot, however. Why she balked every time he offered to help, for example. It definitely explained why she feared her friends would cut her off.

“Do you still love him?” It was none of his business, and yet he could not stop thinking about her words before. Love makes you blind.

“No. Not even in the slightest.”

If he shouldn’t have asked the question, then he should definitely not have felt relief at her answer. He did, though. To save her heart from further pain, that was all.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I told you before, I don’t want your pity.”

Her voice was rough from crying, the raw sound making him hate Steven Clark all the more. “I don’t pity you,” he told her truthfully. He didn’t. He
admired
her. Did he know what kind of strength it took to pull herself free from the hell she had become trapped in? Not only pull herself free, but to begin again?