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“Has he?” The words emerged choked.
Rocco swiped the card against the control panel and the elevator whooshed upwards. His phone beeped audibly. In the reflection of the elevator doors, she watched him remove it from his pocket, read a text then put it away again.
“Your girlfriend?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
His tone lacked emotion.
“Lover? What exactly do you call the women you date?”
His lips smirked and, in the reflection, their eyes met, so her pulse ratcheted up uncomfortably.
“Why so interested?”
“I’m not,” she said, surprised that it didn’t quite ring true. “Okay, fine,” she said with a lift of one shoulder. “I’m interested in how men like you operate.”
“Men like me?”
“Men who think women exist for their personal entertainment. Who don’t see the value in anyone or anything unless it’s commercially sound.”
“You sound pretty sure about the kind of man I am,” he said, without giving anything away in his voice.
“You think I’d come to see you without doing my research first?”
“And? What does your research tell you?”
“That you’ve made an artform out of two things in your life.” She whirled around to face him. “Changing women more often than you change underwear and destroying culture and heritage in the name of ‘progress’ and profit. Honestly? You make me sick.”
Had Maddie stepped towards him? Or had he stepped towards her? The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end when she realized they were literally toe to toe. “Do I?”
“Yes,” she clung to that, and also to her anger. To the inviolable sense that she hated everything this man stood for. “You couldn’t possibly understand that knocking down houses like these goes against everything that matters in life. You couldn’t possibly understand the importance of history and nostalgia, the sense that?—,”
“That nothing should ever change?” he supplied, his lips tightening, a hint of anger in his eyes. Good! Inspiring him to anger felt good. No, it felt great. It felt like she was pushing him to be real, to feel something like what she’d been feeling since her grandfather had first told her about the property offer.
“Some change is inevitable,” she contradicted. “But you seem pathologically unable to leave anything as a testament to the past. Movie theaters from the twenties, old art deco banks, that glorious apartment building in France you ripped down to build a steel office block?—,”
His lips tightened a little more. Power rushed to her head.
“I’ve done my research,” she reminded him. “You tear down things of beauty and replace them with inanimate, modern monstrosities and expect to be lauded for it. Well, not by me, and not when I have a say in what happens to Honeybee Lane.”
A muscle jerked in his jaw. “You can fight and fight and fight all you want, but you do realise that I’m going to win, don’t you, Maddie?”
She stared up at him, her pulse making it hard to think straight, much less stand up. “You’re wrong.”
His smile was ice cold. “I’m never wrong, and I always win.”
“You’ve never been up against someone like me before. You can’t buy me, Rocco, and you can’t buy my grandfather.”
“Everyone has a price.”
“Not me.”
“I just haven’t worked out what it is yet,” he moved a little closer. “But I will, and then you’ll be begging me to take the house off your hands.”
“You are such an arrogant shit.”
One side of his lip twisted in a mocking smirk. The doors pinged open, startling Maddie, who’d half-forgotten where they were.
