“Mr. Cochrane will see you now, Miss Dempsey,” the smooth assistant said before she stood and threw open the door, presenting Alex like a magician’s trick.

Sam Cochrane raised the gray-green eyes he had in common with his daughter, Darcy. His desk was huge, the largest she had ever seen. Ten megamoguls could have sat behind it, yet Cochrane still managed to infuse the space with his outsize presence. Alex stepped into the room, feeling like she was dragging through a waterlogged cornfield.

“Have a seat, Miss Dempsey. This is unexpected, to say the least.” He gestured at the chair before her, and she sat and sank into the butt-sucking leather, guaranteeing she was lower than him. Classic mogul move.

“Have you come for an apology?”

“I have, but not to get one. To give one.”

That startled him. Humility from a Dempsey, his curious expression said.

“I never apologized for what I did to your car last summer. I was provoked, but it was inexcusable.” She almost choked on the words, but they needed to be said.

A few moments ticked over before he spoke. “You know, Miss Dempsey, your father was a friend of mine. A business partner, but a friend first. We used to box together at that CFD gym where your brother trains.”

Beck trained at a dingy rat hole on the south side—it was where he’d met Darcy’s brother, Jack, and later, Darcy. The start of their teenage love affair. Alex hadn’t given much thought to why the son of a billionaire would be punching leather at that kind of place, but if it held some sort of nostalgia for Cochrane, then she guessed it made a weird sort of sense.

“You and Sean fell out. Why?”

He looked at her sharply, as if no one had dared have the temerity to ask that question. “He stole something from me.” He tapped the table with his knuckles. “But never mind that. I’m curious about why you’re here subjugating yourself after so many months. It’s not as if I can change anything about the story Red Eye ran on you yesterday. My staff has complete editorial independence, and then there’s that whole First Amendment thing.”

“I think you could change it if you wanted to. Run another story, print a retraction, but I don’t care about that. I don’t care what you say because my family will stand by me. They care about me, Mr. Cochrane.” Not like yours, she didn’t need to add.

He smiled thinly, understanding her implication. She could handle the reporters’ barbs, and though she hated that her dating was now a part of the public record, she would weather it with her family by her side. With Eli.

She loved him, but the jury was still out on how he felt about her. He probably liked her, maybe cared a little. But the big L? And even if his feelings could match the depth of hers for him, could the slick politician and the sharp-tongued firefighter make this work?

In an uncanny spot of mind reading, Sam Cochrane said, “You’ll just drag him down, Miss Dempsey. He could go all the way, but not with a woman like you at his side. And even if you thought it would work, do you really think the mayor of Chicago, a man who needs a twenty-four-hour security detail, will let you keep your dangerous job?”

His well-aimed barb struck home. In a million ways, she was not the woman for Eli Cooper, but damned if she’d let Sam Cochrane think he’d won any points here.

“Don’t worry about Eli and me. What you should worry about is that Eli won’t be your puppet any longer, so you’ve decided to try and punish him through me. Well, do your worst, Mr. Cochrane. Sue me, take me for everything I have. It won’t stop what’s important; the people who are in my life will still be in my life. Loving me, faults and all.”

“I don’t doubt it, Miss Dempsey. But I must take issue with one thing you just said.” His eyebrows rose in consternation and, Alex was startled to see, surprise.

“Sue you?”

Eli heard her before he saw her, but then that was so often the case with Alexandra. She was a potent presence in his life before the rest of his mangled senses could catch up.

“I don’t need an appointment,” she snapped at Kelly before the door was thrown open and she crashed into his office.

“What’s happened?” If one of the papers had said something else . . .

Those green eyes flashed her temper. “I talked to Cochrane.”

His heart sank like a bowling ball in his gut. Of course. Did he really think his sins wouldn’t come back to wallop him upside the head? The only question now was which sin Cochrane had chosen to divulge: the sin of the father or the sin of the son.

He stood and came around the other side of the desk. “Have a seat.”

“I’m through following orders from you. I was about to say I can’t believe you did it, but actually I can. Because it’s precisely the kind of behavior I’d expect from you.” Hurt clouded those green pools. “Why, Eli? Why did you pretend he was suing me? So you could use me for your stupid campaign? Milk me for all I was worth?”

Relief flooded his chest. This wasn’t good, but it was the lesser of two evils, for sure. How could he convince her that this scheme was seeded in a moment of madness? A nanosecond of fear that his chance to be with her would vanish into the ether if he didn’t do something fast? He cycled through a number of possibilities.

I’d already saved you from being sued. It was merely . . . a fudging of the timelines.

Too Clintonesque.

You owed me, so I made up that story before you bounced me out of the room.

Too victim blaming.

I wanted . . .

He wanted.

“I wanted you.”

She stared as if he were speaking another language. And in a way, the words were perfect nonsense because of their absolute simplicity. Plainspoken and so not Eli Cooper.

“I wanted to date you, Alexandra,” he clarified.

Those emerald eyes flew wild. “You wanted me for your campaign, you mean, and you knew I wouldn’t cooperate, so you used lies and blackmail.”

“No, Alexandra, listen to me. I wanted you. Just you. In a selfish, ruinous, soul-destroying way. From the minute I saw you in Smith & Jones seven months ago, I’ve wanted you with a ferocity I can’t even fathom. I saw a chance to bring you into my orbit and I took it.”

“Bullshit! If you wanted me, why didn’t you just ask me out on a date? Like a normal fucking person?”

He scoffed. “Are you kidding? You would have shot me out of the water.”

“You don’t know that!”

Anger flared at her refusal to take some responsibility here. “I know this. I used a trick, but you wanted the trick. It gave you the perfect psychological out. You could pretend you were spending time with me under duress, when really it was what you wanted all along. We needed the catalyst to start this thing between us. Convincing you was so easy. You caved—”

“Because I thought my family was under threat! I thought they’d be ruined.”

He shook his head. “You could have found a way, talked to Darcy, rallied the clan, but you didn’t. I held out my hand and invited you to climb aboard to pleasure and hell, and honey, you grabbed at it. You liked how I made you feel just as I liked how you made me feel. So I lied then, but I’m being honest now. How about being honest with yourself, Alexandra, and admit that you wanted me, too?”

So he’d bamboozled her and now he was talking about honesty. Demanding it from her. Twisted, maybe, but there was logic in what he was saying.

Unfortunately, the logic was going unappreciated. “You tricked me, you bastard.”

“Alexandra, asking you out on a date would have resulted in the slapdown of the century, and you know it. So I thought I’d encourage you to come on board by reminding you of all I’d done to save your ass, professionally and financially, and when you still weren’t convinced, I—”

“Lied?”

“Panicked.”