Tycoon's One-Night Revenge

by Bronwyn Jameson

  “Linguine Marinara. My signature dish.”

  “You cooked?” she asked on a note of surprise. “From scratch?”

  “No need to sound so stupefied.”

  “In July, you told me you travelled too much to bother keeping a home. You ate out. You ordered in. So, yes, I am surprised that your culinary skills have progressed from microwave reheating to claiming a signature dish.”

  “There has to be an upside to being off work for weeks on end.”

  Her wary gaze turned serious as she met his eyes. “It’s nice that you could take a positive from that experience.”

  “Learning my way around the kitchen was one,” he supplied with a half-shrug. “Why don’t you take a seat? Your waiter will be along shortly.”

  She hesitated, but only briefly, before crossing to the fireside. In that moment’s pause, Van saw the questions in her eyes, and while he watched her sit on a cushion beside the hearth, he staunched his instinctive resistance.

  He’d snared her curiosity. She would stay. They would talk. He would soothe the remaining apprehension from her eyes, the same as he’d done last night.

  Except this time, he wasn’t leaving.

  “Wine?”

  “Thank you, yes.” Twisting at the waist, she looked back at him over her shoulder. The curiosity he’d detected earlier came alive in her face as she watched him pour and then transfer the appetisers to a serving plate. “Is waiting tables another skill you picked up while you were in stasis…or would that have been superfluous?”

  “I live alone, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I thought, given your circumstances…”

  “That I might have needed live-in assistance?”

  She shuffled her position on the cushion, presumably so she wouldn’t crick her waist or neck looking back at him. The new position afforded him an excellent view of her killer legs, but that was a momentary distraction. Her next comment brought all his attention winging back to her face. “Actually, I wondered if you may have moved in with Mac. She is your only family, right?”

  Ever since she’d asked the question upstairs, he’d known she would return to his relationship with Mac. He hadn’t expected the edge to her tone, however. Hands planted on the bench, he held her chary gaze. “Why do I sense that you won’t believe my answer?”

  “In July you said you had no family. I believed that.”

  “In July I had no family.”

  “And now you suddenly do?”

  “Another of those upsides I mentioned.”

  She shook her head slowly, her expression a mix of confusion and exasperation. “You acquired a grandmother?”

  That pretty much summed it up. And if he concentrated on the upside instead of the hot cauldron of regret and frustration that seethed inside him then he could impart the bare facts. “Mac had an unplanned pregnancy when she was a teenager, a daughter she gave up for adoption. She didn’t track her down until ten years ago. By then my mother was long dead.”

  “But she found you?”

  “She sought me out, became my client. She never intended to tell me about our relationship.”

  “Whyever not?” A wealth of emotion swirled in her eyes as she looked up at him; the kind he’d sworn to avoid. The kind that stirred the hot ache in his gut. “Why did she bother finding you if she didn’t want to claim you as her family?”

  “She wanted to know me, to help me, but she could see I was doing fine without family.”

  “Then why tell you now?” she persisted. Half a second later, she made a rough sound of discovery and distress. “I answered that earlier, upstairs, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, she’s dying.” He shrugged, a tight gesture that did nothing to ease the tension in his muscles. “But that wasn’t the only motivation. When I woke up in hospital with this amnesia, she talked to help me work out what I remembered and what I didn’t. Then when I was recovering, we just talked, a lot. Not only about business or politics or the state of the economy. She told me about her past. Her regrets. When she started talking about my mother, the rest came out.”

  “That must have been quite a shock.”

  He brought her glass of wine and hunkered down to put it in her hand. Then he took his own seat on the floor, close enough that their knees brushed with a frisson of heat. It was a response he welcomed, the physical that he understood and could deal with, that didn’t burn like twisted metal in his gut. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Susannah. As you so accurately put it, I acquired myself a grandmother.”

  “A grandmother you’re going to lose,” she said, and the emotion in her eyes—and his body’s response—blew away the remnant heat of the physical contact. When he would have pulled away from that confronting emotion, she leaned forward and captured him with the quiet intensity of her gaze. “I know you said I couldn’t understand what you’ve been through but some of this I do know.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  She nodded. “He loved to fish. That was his escape from the pressure of corporate life and the pretensions of society. He hated the functions he was forced to attend…he despised small talk. One weekend he went out chasing the big fish and he didn’t come home.”

  “Hence your aversion to boats?” he guessed.

  “No, that’s all about the seasickness. Although I suspect psychologists would have a field day with the connection.” A whisper of a smile touched her lips. “Pappy Horton was…he was so much more than the tycoon robber-baron the media depicted.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So was I. He left me his cabin in the high country where we stayed when he took me trout fishing.”

  Her wistful expression stirred an unfamiliar emotion in Van’s gut. Part was the dull ache of empathy, part the sharper need to stop her hurt, to turn the storm clouds gathering in her eyes to smiles. “You fish? If you think I’ll buy that—” he shook his head, exaggerating his surprise “—how big was the one that got away?”

  “My grandfather taught me how to fly cast when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.”

  Eyebrows raised, Van studied her in this new light. Even dressed as she was in his oversize clothes, Susannah exuded class and city style. He couldn’t for the life of him picture her in the guise of fisherwoman. “I am impressed.”

  “Not half as much as when I caught the first bream from the rocks!”

  A reference to their last weekend—to a happening Van didn’t remember. He could have pursued that angle; he could have sought more detail; he could have teased her about the relative merits of their catches.

  But as he watched the play of firelight in her hair and the play of shadows in her eyes, the past held no interest. He wanted to know her, not to engage his memory, not to kill the sale contract on The Palisades, but for himself, for this moment of time.

  “This cabin,” he began. “Do you go there often?”

  “I always seem to be too busy.” She shook her head and made a rueful sound. “And that’s no excuse. I did take Zara once. I taught her the grand tradition of the Pappy Horton fly cast. She was a natural.”

  “Your grandfather didn’t teach her?”

  “He never met Zara. She’s my half sister, you see.” The smile brimming in her eyes clouded with regret. “We only found out about each other a few years back when she came searching for her father.”

  “And she found you?”

  “Fortunately, yes.”

  Her gaze fell away, lost in silent introspection of her untouched wine. Forgotten along with the plate of appetisers. Van wanted to continue feeding a different appetite, reconstructing his image of the woman inside the polished facade. The woman who looked more comfortable in a sweatshirt and bare feet than in a buttoned-up designer coat.

  “Is your sister like you?” he asked.

  She took a slow sip from her wine, her eyes meeting his over the rim of her glass before she lowered it. Something had shifted in the mood, he realised, in the last minute or two. The earlier conflict and mi
strust soothed by a new understanding and empathy. “You asked that same question the first time I told you about my family.”

  “And how did you answer?”

  “I said, not at all. Zara is a knockout. Tall, blond, beautiful. She’s studying medicine, so she’s super smart and dedicated to a future in medical research. And as if that’s not enough, she’s also athletic and works part-time as a personal trainer. If I didn’t love her, I might possibly hate her for all that amazingness!”

  Van smiled at her deprecating tone. “I imagine you’re more alike than you credit.”

  “And that’s also the same response as last time.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m predictable? Unoriginal? Boring?”

  She laughed, a soft, husky chuckle that drew his gaze back to her lips. To the pinkened sheen left by the wine. To the satisfaction of knowing that the vibe arcing between them was here and now and only about them. “Oh, no,” she said softly. “You are many things and not one of them boring.”

  In the aftermath of that admission their gazes tangled in a ripple of sensual energy, as delicate and multifaceted and intoxicating as the pinot noir she lifted to her lips. He could have asked about those many nonboring things, but only one held his focus.

  “Was it like this before?” He gestured between them, illustrating the subtle tension that he couldn’t label with words.

  “Yes. Always.”

  The honesty in her answer was real. No question, no hesitation, no artifice. And whether she realised that she’d been too candid or whether she saw the intent in his eyes—whatever the reason, her expression grew cautious as Van removed the glass from her hand and, eyes locked on hers, set it down on the hearth tiles.

  The wary widening of her eyes sparked a surge of satisfaction deep in his chest. The heat of contact as he rested his hand on her knee sparked something more primitive lower in his body.

  He leaned closer and she drew a swift breath. “No. Don’t.”

  But that was all the objection he allowed her. He didn’t want the spectre of her arranged marriage hovering between them, didn’t want the name of her sainted fiancé on her tongue.

  He took her chin in his hand and silenced any complaint with his lips on hers. Beneath his touch she stiffened in surprise or in denial, and his objective instantly changed shape. No longer intent on simply tasting, he wanted her response, her acceptance, her participation.

  Her kiss.

  Cradling her face between his hands, he gentled the initial pressure of his mouth on hers. He traced the shape of her lips, kissed the corners and the dip in her chin, held her captive in the snare of his gaze before he reclaimed her mouth in a long, slow seduction. For a while he lost himself and the passage of time as he learned her taste and the silky texture of her skin beneath his hands.

  Her hands, lifted initially to push him away, clutched in his shirtfront and the sound against his lips was a throaty mix of satisfaction and surrender. That evocative sound and the first stroke of her tongue against his fired something in Van’s synapses. A burst of vivid memory of her giving mouth under his, his hands twined in her hair as he rolled her beneath him, the sun streaming through glass to set fire to her red-gold hair and to the passion drumming through his blood. And the echo of his voice deep in his mind.

  Now I have you right where I want you.

  He ended the kiss abruptly, shocking Susannah up from the sensual depths with the lash of an earthy curse. She stared up at him, clueless as to its motivation. One second he’d been immersed in the kiss, in her mouth, in sliding his free hand from knee to thigh; the next, abandonment.

  “What’s going on?” she asked slowly. “What just happened there?”

  “I thought I—” He broke off, raked a hand through his hair, let go his breath in a sharp exhalation. And when he started to turn away, Susannah grabbed at his sleeve and forced his attention back to her. “For a moment—not even a second—I had this…flash.”

  “You remembered?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know that it was an accurate memory or a…” He lifted a shoulder and let it drop, but the enormity of his frustration resonated in the deepened rasp of his voice. “I don’t know what I recognised. It was just an impression of you and a line of dialogue.”

  “I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.” Apart from the fact of her tongue being elseways occupied, the overwhelming impact of his kiss had stolen her ability to think in whole words. “Was it something you remembered me saying?”

  “No, not you, me. And I don’t know if it’s something I said to you. It was there in my mind, as clear as if a light had switched on, and then gone—” he clicked thumb against finger “—like that. I’m left with one pinpoint of illumination in a big, dark void and I don’t know if it’s a memory or a figment of fantasy.”

  A reflection of that fantasy flared in his eyes for a moment, alerting Susannah to its erotic nature. She relinquished her grip on his sleeve. She didn’t want to pursue this. She wanted to spring to her feet and run, hard and fast, from everything this man aroused in her—the physical, the emotional, the then and the now.

  The knowledge that she could never have him; that she could never tell him what they had shared for such a fleetingly fragile piece of time.

  But the storm of frustration raging in his eyes—not sexual frustration, but the exasperation of not remembering—plumbed the depths of her heart. How could she turn her back? How could she not try to help?

  “It may well have been a memory,” she commenced cautiously. Nervous fingers, the same ones that had gripped his shirt and held his mouth hard against hers, curled into the cushion beneath her backside. She tightened her thighs, tucking her knees closer beneath her in a vain attempt to quash the heat he’d ignited in her body. “Do you want to tell me about that line of dialogue?”

  He stared back at her for a long second, the frustration honed to razor’s-edge sharpness. “Just tell me one thing. Did I make any promises to you?”

  Susannah’s heart thumped heavily against her ribs. She couldn’t tell him. Opening up that wound in her heart would serve no purpose.

  Mustering every ounce of bravado, she met his eyes and for the first time in her life, she straight-out lied to him. “There were no promises, Donovan. None whatsoever.”

  Van didn’t believe her but he curbed the desire to call her on the lie. Pushing to establish the truth about past promises would put her on the defensive again. Right now he needed—and wanted—to concentrate on the present and keeping her in the same room, in his company, was tantamount to his plans.

  Putting a stop to her marriage, he realised, had become more than a means to securing a deal. Through dinner he watched her eat, drink, talk, and all he could think about was that mouth beneath his. Not as a conduit to the past, but because he wanted. For him, for now.

  The craving coiled more tightly with each passing minute, every awkward pause, each time her gaze slipped away from his. And with each passing minute the certainty grew that she, too, was steeped in the same sweet agony of wanting. It was in the heightened colour that traced her cheekbones, the unsettled play of her fingers against glass and tableware, the falsely cheerful bursts of small talk that grew less frequent and more desultory as the meal stretched on.

  Van could have picked up the conversational reins, but some perverse part of him enjoyed the crackle of tension in the lengthening silences. He let it play out as long as he could, until she set down her napkin and started packing up the plates. “Leave them,” he said. And when she looked like protesting, “The dishes aren’t going anywhere and neither are we. They’ll still be there in the morning.”

  “And so will we,” she said, and the spark in her voice was reflected in her eyes as they met his. This time they didn’t drift away. “For how many more mornings?”

  “Why don’t we take this conversation to the fireside,” Van suggested smoothly. “I’ll make coffee.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “
Okay, so no coffee.”

  “And no fireside conversation,” she added. “Please, Donovan, just answer my question. When is Gilly returning to pick us up?”

  “When our business here is finished.”

  “Our business?” She leaned forward in her chair, her fingers tight on the plates she’d yet to relinquish. “How can we even start to sort out this mess when we’re stuck here?”

  “That’s not the only business. We have unfinished business.”

  For a moment his words hung between them, and Van felt a kick of anticipation when their meaning registered in her expressive eyes. They darkened to a turbulent sea-green as she shook her head.

  “You’re denying there’s something between us? After that kiss?” Van’s voice deepened with the memory, with the impact, with the certainty that he would have that mouth under his again. “I can still feel it, Susannah. I can still taste you in my blood.”

  “That doesn’t change anything.”

  “Doesn’t it? What if I hadn’t stopped? What if that kiss had continued the way it started? What if you’d ended up naked with me inside you?”

  “Then I would know that you’d succeeded,” she replied. “You brought me here for one reason. You want to end my marriage plans—what better way than by seducing me?”

  “It’s not only about the deal, Susannah. You’re discounting this burn between us.”

  “I’m not discounting it. How can I?” she asked simply, but the heat of passion was in her eyes, in her cheeks, in the throaty ache of her voice. “But as much as I want you, Donovan Keane, there is one thing I’m determined not to do. My father cheated, with Zara’s mother and Lord knows how many other women, and he hurt a lot of people in the process.

  “I would never do that to Alex,” she continued in the same softly impassioned tone. “I would never do that to anyone I respected, and I don’t believe you would want me to. Not even to win this deal for Mac.”

  Eight

  V an had no argument and no countermeasure. If he forced the issue, he would lose her respect and sometime during the past twenty-four hours that had assumed a vital importance.