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CHAPTER THREE
WEEKSLATER,CARRIEWASstill on Damon’s mind.
When he woke on the day of the Caldwell pitch, his first thought was not of the crucial day ahead. It was of Carrie. Exactly as it had been every day since Paris.
Each morning he woke with his naked body tangled in the sheets, dappled with beads of sweat after yet another night spent languishing in a highly sexed dreamscape with Carrie Miller, delighting in the scenarios he hadn’t been granted the opportunity to play out in reality.
Because she’d been gone by the time he woke after their night together. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise. One night was all she’d been willing to give. One night was all that he had asked for. Usually that was enough. So it really shouldn’t have bothered him.
Except waking to cool sheets and an empty bedhadbothered him and, contrary to the reassurances he had issued to himself, that the strange feelings of angst over her silent departure were nothing more than a fleeting phenomenon, it was still bothering him.
He didn’t understand why. As a general rule he didn’t allow himself to form attachments deep enough that ultimately it meant he would miss a person when they were no longer there. And even if that had happened—and that was highly unlikely—he hadn’t known Carrie long enough to actually miss her. And yet at times an uncomfortable feeling lodged within his gut, making him feel as though she had somehow infiltrated him emotionally as deeply as he had penetrated her physically.
He didn’t like it.
Damon didn’t want to be affected by another person. He didn’t want his heart, or any other part of him, to be touched, softened. Weakened. Left open and vulnerable. He didn’t want to have to feel the agonising pain of a loss that could never be replaced. He didn’t want to live day after day with the edges of his heart burning and that inescapable ache threatening to burrow deeper with the slow passing of each second.
With the death of his father and his subsequent abandonment by his mother, Damon had already felt all that too acutely to ever want to relive the experience. And the protective walls he had built around himself were impenetrable.
Which made Carrie’s continued lingering in his mind and his errant thoughts of contacting her once he returned to California unfathomable.
And intolerable.
She was nothing to him—nothing other than a beautiful distraction. It was past time he took control of himself.
Today was the day when he would present the final, all-important bid that would seal the Caldwell project and bring him within touching distance of his revenge. The day that he would look back on as the beginning of the end of Sterling Randolph. And that was the only thing he wanted to think about.
After all, he’d been working towards this day for ever. It had taken time to build his business to the point where he could challenge the Randolph Corporation. And it had taken twenty-hour days and endless networking to manoeuvre himself into a position of industry dominance. But he’d done it. He had achieved in ten years what other men had worked thirty years for, and over the past twelve months Damon had begun to shake the industry’s confidence in Randolph.
But that wasn’t anywhere near enough for him.
He wanted Randolph to feel his success slipping through his fingers as surely as his own father had felt his life slipping away.
And that was where the Caldwell project came in.
The Caldwell Banking Group in London were commissioning a new North American headquarters—a building that was to be a beacon of their global prowess and reputation. Everyone in the world, including Caldwell himself, believed Randolph to be the natural choice to spearhead the project. But for the better part of the past year Damon had been quietly cultivating the Caldwell executives, laying the groundwork to ensure that his bid was the successful one. And when he won it Randolph would be finished, cut down for all the world to witness.
It would not give Damon back any of the things he’d lost, but his father had been a good man, who had only wanted to use his intellect and talent to help people and make the world a better place, so to see the careless, arrogant man responsible for his death brought to his knees would deliver him an indescribable satisfaction.
When the important work of the day was done, he would find some beauty with whom he could while away the evening hours—someone to shunt Carrie completely from his mind. But for the time being he settled for throwing back the sheets and standing under a cold shower, employing the ruthless discipline he’d spent a lifetime mastering to erase all traces of her.
Because there was no room for her—or anyone—in his head or in his life.
He had one focus, one ambition. And he would not allow anyone to stand in the way of him achieving that.
Because his revenge was what mattered.
It wasallthat mattered.
It was Carrie’s day off from the bakery, but she was still working. Sitting back, she looked at the sketch of the five-tier wedding cake she’d been tasked with creating the day before. Pleased with the draft, she set it to the side before bringing up her list of special orders on the computer.
It had grown substantially in the past fortnight, and despite other people’s concerns that Carrie was overstretching herself, her heavy workload was exactly what she wanted. And needed. She loved her thriving small business and she loved baking. The latter had been her salvation on a number of occasions, and throwing herself into her work was a key part of her plan to move forward, look only into the future and forget all about Damon Meyer.
Well, notforget, exactly, because that was impossible. There could be no forgetting the mind-blowing intimacy they had shared and all the ways he had touched and caressed her body that single night, healing the pieces of her that had still been emotionally black and blue. It was more about keeping her thoughts away from him, keeping herself so busy that she had no time to wonder about him, to wonder if he ever thought about her.
She was just reading through the notes that accompanied the order of a fiftieth birthday cake when a light knock on the window heralded the arrival of her mother.
‘I brought you a smoothie, and a little something else,’ Prue Miller announced with her usual bright smile as she walked through Carrie’s door, setting down her gifts on the table and kissing her daughter’s cheek. ‘How are you feeling today? Is your stomach any better?’
