The Ruthless Marriage Proposal

by Miranda Lee

  If this was what a man’s thinking was like, Emily decided, it was much better than a woman’s. She vowed to keep it up for as long as she could.

  The doorbell ringing two minutes later rattled her resolve momentarily. But then she squared her shoulders, picked up her overnight bag and went to answer the door.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed when she opened it and saw Sebastian standing there. ‘You’ve changed your clothes.’

  ‘Only partially,’ he replied as he took the bag out of her hands. ‘The suit’s the same. Just the shirt and tie have gone.’

  They certainly had, replaced by a sexy black crew neck top.

  Emily had always thought Sebastian a handsome man. But she’d never thought him overwhelmingly sexy till she’d realised she’d fallen in love with him. It was as though, with this discovery, her eyes finally saw what her heart had subconsciously seen from the word go. That her boss possessed a physical magnetism which was totally irresistible.

  To her, anyway.

  Her blood charged around her veins as her gaze travelled over him from top to toe. What a stunningly sexy man he was. And tonight he was hers, as she was all his.

  Emily could not wait to give herself to him. But not as some kind of sacrificial lamb. Tonight she would take as well as give, without the emotional turmoil which a one-sided love might have brought to their lovemaking.

  ‘Have you got everything you want in here?’ Sebastian asked, nodding down to the bag in his hands.

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  ‘I have to get my handbag.’

  ‘I’ll walk down and put this in the car. You lock up and meet me in the garage.’

  A minute later Emily was running down the stairs, her pulse rate as excited as she was. She told herself to slow down and not start acting like a giddy schoolgirl on her first date.

  But that was exactly what she felt like.

  But then Sebastian wouldn’t date schoolgirls.

  Sebastian was standing by the passenger door of his magnificent silver sports car in the garage, his face breaking into a smile when she hurried in.

  ‘You’re my kind of girl, Emily,’ he said as he opened the passenger door and waved her inside. ‘You don’t keep a man waiting.’

  Lana had, Emily recalled, as she lowered herself into the leather bucket seat. All the time.

  Emily frowned. Darn. She hadn’t wanted to think about Lana.

  Still, he hadn’t asked Lana to marry him, had he, came the reassuring thought.

  When Sebastian closed the passenger door after her, Emily’s nostrils were immediately assailed with the smell of new leather. The car was only a couple of months old, Sebastian’s previous vehicle of choice having been a more sedate BMW.

  ‘I like the smell of new cars,’ she remarked when Sebastian climbed in behind the wheel.

  ‘You sound like you’ve got a lot of experience,’ he said as he fired the powerful engine.

  Emily shrugged. ‘My father’s always trading in his car and getting a new one.’

  Sebastian glanced over at her with curious eyes. ‘You’ve never spoken of your father before.’

  ‘He’s not exactly my favourite person,’ came her clipped reply.

  Sebastian’s eyebrows rose. ‘I suspect he might be a subject best left to another day.’

  ‘I suspect you could be right.’

  ‘In that case I will keep our conversation to more pleasant topics.’

  ‘Please do.’

  Sebastian stopped talking long enough to back out of the garage, swinging his car sharply right once they had cleared the door. It closed automatically, after which Sebastian reefed the wheel to the left and accelerated up the driveway. The large security gates forced a stop, though Sebastian didn’t have to get out to open them. He had a remote control which he always carried with him. Emily had one too, which she kept in the glove box of her car.

  ‘You smell very nice,’ he said whilst they sat there, waiting for the gates to open wide enough to drive through.

  Emily’s initial reaction to his compliment was negative. Because she didn’t think it could be sincere. Clearly, Sebastian would have liked Lana’s heavier perfume, and her own was very light by comparison.

  But she swiftly pushed aside such thoughts. Today was for positive thoughts, not negative.

  ‘You do too,’ she returned with a smile.

  Her own compliment startled him. But then he smiled as well, a wickedly sexy smile, which sent a tremor running down Emily’s spine.

  The gates finally open, Sebastian zoomed through, not waiting till they were fully shut behind them before he turned left and sped up the tree-lined avenue.

  ‘Where, exactly, are we going?’ she asked at the first set of lights.

  ‘North Wollongong. To the Norfolk. It’s a newish hotel right on the beach. I stayed there last year.’

  Emily winced. Not with Lana, she hoped.

  ‘No,’ he said straight away. ‘Not with Lana.’

  Her head whipped around. ‘How did you know what I was thinking?’

  ‘I know how women’s minds work.’

  Emily could imagine that he did, given he must have had relationships with dozens of women during his adult life. Being such a perfectionist, he would have learned all he could about the female psyche, along with their bodies. Clearly, he had no doubts or worries about his performance tonight.

  Still, Emily found Sebastian’s sexual confidence a turn-on.

  Not that she needed a turn-on where Sebastian was concerned. He only had to be in the same room with her these days and she was turned on.

  Being in the same car with him, especially such a sexy one, was doing things to her that were positively indecent. She could hardly sit still in her leather seat.

  No wonder men of the world always drove sports cars, Emily decided with a mixture of admiration and cynicism. They made foreplay almost unnecessary. She suspected that by the time they arrived at that hotel on the south coast she would be in a seriously excited state.

  Emily had always liked sex. Mark had not been her first lover, by any means. But she had never craved it as she craved it at this moment. Had never wanted the kinds of things she was suddenly wanting with Sebastian.

  She hoped he would not be gentle with her. Or sweet. Or, heaven forbid, loving. She wanted it rough, and wild.

  The first time.

  After that, she wanted it slow and sensual, so that she could wallow in the experience. Finally, she wanted the opportunity to give, rather than receive. She could see herself now, stroking him all over, kissing him all over, forcing him to lie back whilst she made mad passionate love to him.

  Emily’s heartbeat took off at the images which flooded into her mind.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Sebastian said. ‘You don’t get car sick, do you?’

  Emily swallowed, taking a moment to clear the breathtakingly exciting fantasy from her mind.

  ‘Not usually. But you do drive fast, Sebastian,’ she added as he zipped around a corner and down a narrow side street.

  To be honest, Emily had no idea where she was. She never did in Sydney if she didn’t stick to the main roads. Which Sebastian obviously hadn’t.

  ‘I’m an impatient person by nature,’ he replied.

  ‘Really? I wouldn’t have said you were.’

  ‘Most people wouldn’t. But I am. I just hide my flaws better than most. I’m very impatient, and inclined to lose my temper far too quickly.’

  ‘You never have with me.’

  ‘No one could lose their temper with you, Emily.’

  Emily wasn’t so sure that was a compliment. It made her sound very boring. And lacking in passion.

  ‘Unlike Lana, you mean,’ she couldn’t help saying.

  ‘Lana who?’ he quipped.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘So that’s how it is with you, is it? Once out of your life, a person doesn’t exist any more.’

  ‘That’s right.’
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br />   Emily shook her head. ‘I wish I could do that.’ As much as she tried to hate her father, she knew she didn’t. She still loved him. And whilst she didn’t love Mark any more, she would never forget him, or the callously insensitive way he’d treated her.

  ‘It takes practice,’ Sebastian said so coldly that it sent a shiver down Emily’s spine.

  How bitter he sounded. And ruthless.

  It was at that point she realised how little she actually knew about Sebastian. Oh, she’d read the articles about his brilliant business acumen, and seen a short segment on TV outlining how his career had got started; how he and a friend had started up one of the first Australian mobile phone companies when they’d been in their early twenties. Sebastian had had the brains and his wealthy friend had provided the backing, Sebastian revealing during that programme that, unlike his rich business partner, he’d had to work his way through university, his family being very working-class.

  Both young men had made an absolute fortune when their chain of Mobilemania stores had been bought out by an international conglomerate. His friend had disappeared from the business scene after that. But Sebastian had started up his own company, Armstrong Industries, developing a wide range of business interests, from holiday resorts to day-care centres to cattle stations and even pine forests.

  Sebastian had made the Richest Two Hundred in Australia list by the time he’d been thirty. Recently he’d made the top ten, one of only a select number of billionaires.

  The public at large knew about his bank balance, and his single status. But what did they really know—Emily included—about his background?

  Very little.

  Maybe the media would have dug deeper if he’d been the kind of man who sought publicity.

  But he didn’t. He kept a very low media profile for a man of his wealth and power.

  Emily did know he’d been an only child, courtesy of a remark he’d made during her initial interview when she’d said she was was one too. But she knew nothing of his parents, or his extended family, except that they never visited him.

  Presumably his parents were dead.

  Although curious, Emily was not about to ask.

  Because today was about the pleasure of the moment, not bringing up awkward subjects.

  ‘Now I know where I am!’ she exclaimed when Sebastian finally directed his car out on to a main road. ‘That’s the Olympic stadium over there.’

  ‘Did you go to the Olympics?’ Sebastian asked.

  ‘No. I wanted to, but my boyfriend at the time wasn’t into sport.’

  ‘Are you talking about that Mark fellow?’

  ‘Er…no. The one before him.’

  His eyes speared her for a brief but intense moment. ‘You’re not the quiet little mouse you’ve been pretending to be, are you?’

  ‘I haven’t been pretending anything,’ she said defensively. ‘I simply needed to withdraw from relationships for a while.’

  ‘And now you’re ready to go back into them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Complete with a new look.’

  ‘Well I wasn’t about to snare myself a husband looking the way I did, was I?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. You captured my interest.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Sebastian. You hardly recognised me as a woman till you saw me in my birthday suit.’

  ‘You’d be wrong there. But you did change my perspective on your personality when I found you skinny-dipping in my pool.’

  ‘You didn’t think I had it in me?’

  ‘I thought it was out of character.’

  ‘Well. Just shows you that you don’t know everything. Even if you think you do,’ she added saucily.

  He laughed. ‘You delight me, Emily.’

  ‘I’m not trying to.’

  ‘I know. That’s what delights me. Do you have any idea what most women would do, if they were in your circumstances today?’

  ‘I can guess. But I have a different agenda to most women.’

  ‘Would you care to elaborate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Damn it, Emily, I might be tempted to lose my temper with you after all!’

  ‘Won’t do you any good.’

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘I dare say it wouldn’t. You wouldn’t want to marry a man who yelled at you.’

  ‘Absolutely not. And I wouldn’t want to marry a man I didn’t know, either. When I marry, I want to feel secure in my choice. I don’t want any nasty surprises.’

  ‘But you do know me. Hell, Emily, you’ve been my housekeeper for eighteen months. You’ve seen me in all sorts of situations and moods. More importantly, I haven’t been trying to impress you, or hide things from you. My life is an open book. How long do you think it’ll take you to get to know whatever new man you’re going to meet at that conference centre? Years, if you want to know everything about him. By the time you feel secure enough to marry, your biological clock will be well and truly at midnight. And a baby is what you want more than anything, isn’t it?’

  Emily’s heart lurched. What she wanted more than anything was his baby! To go along with his love…One without the other would be too bitter-sweet for her.

  ‘Agree to marry me,’ he swept on before she’d answered him. ‘And we could start on the baby-making project tonight.’

  Emily gasped, her head snapping round to stare at him.

  ‘You are a truly wicked man, Sebastian Armstrong.’

  ‘A determined man, Emily Bayliss. So what do you say?’

  ‘I’m positively speechless.’

  ‘That’s a cop-out. Tell me what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’m thinking I made a big mistake being here with you,’ she snapped. ‘I should have known you’d know exactly what buttons to push to try to force my hand and get your own way. You’re a clever man, Sebastian. But a far too cold-blooded one. I wouldn’t want such a man as the father of my children.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  EMILY’S vehement criticism of his character stunned Sebastian.

  He’d honestly thought she liked and respected him.

  His shock swiftly gave way to angry frustration. What was the point in going on if that was the way she felt? Clearly, she wasn’t about to say yes to his proposal of marriage, no matter how good a lover he was.

  Sebastian came to a quick decision, zapping his car around the next corner, before braking to a sharp stop at the kerb.

  ‘It’s very easy to fix your big mistake, Emily,’ he ground out as he glared over at her startled face. ‘I’ll take you back home.’

  Her expressive eyes betrayed an intriguing truth. She didn’t want him to take her home.

  Which meant only one thing.

  She might think he was a total bastard. But she still wanted him to take her to bed.

  Sebastian’s eyebrows arched. Maybe he wasn’t the only one in this car who was a bit on the cold-blooded side.

  Still, he understood full well the perversities of sexual attraction. He’d wanted Lana from the first moment he’d seen her. Had wanted her, despite knowing she was a vain, shallow, temperamental creature of whom instinct warned he should steer well clear.

  It was damned hard to act sensibly when your hormones were up and running.

  ‘You don’t want me to take you home,’ he stated baldly, and watched her reaction.

  She looked away, as a lot of women did when they were faced with an unpalatable fact.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting sex, Emily,’ he argued. ‘From what you’ve told me, you’ve been without a man for four years. That’s not natural, not for a woman who’s had an active sex life, which I gather you did have, once. Look, we’ll forget about marriage and babies for tonight and just have a good time together.’

  Slowly, very slowly, her head turned back. Sebastian was taken aback to see that her eyes were glistening.

  Her distress upset him, far more than Lana’s copious tears and tantrums ever had. This was no cold-blooded creatur
e sitting next to him, he realised, but a deeply feeling, highly sensitive woman.

  Her eyes dropped to her lap as she shook her head unhappily from side to side.

  ‘I won’t let you run away from your feelings, Emily,’ he persisted. ‘You might not like me, but you need me.’

  Her head jerked up and round to glare at him. ‘Need you? I don’t need you,’ she threw at him as she dashed her tears away with the back of her hands.

  ‘Yes, you do. Well, maybe not me, especially. But you need a man. Someone who can get rid of that build-up of sexual frustration you’re obviously suffering from. Someone who can show you that you don’t need love to enjoy sex.’

  ‘You have absolutely no hope of doing that, Sebastian.’

  Sebastian was not a man to take a challenge lightly.

  ‘Really,’ he grated out. And, before she could do more than blink at him, he leant over and kissed her.

  When Sebastian’s lips crashed down on hers, Emily tried not to moan. Or to melt. Or, heaven forbid, open her own instantly treacherous mouth.

  But it was like offering a starving woman a delicious dish of food and expecting her only to have a tiny taste.

  So she moaned…And melted…And opened her mouth…

  And it all felt fantastic. His lips, his tongue, his hand curving possessively around her throat, pushing her back against the leather seat, holding her captive.

  How passionate he was, she thought with an almost delirious joy. How masterful. Exactly as she’d imagined in her fantasies.

  When the pressure on her mouth eased, Emily’s left hand instinctively lifted to cup the back of his head and keep the kiss going. She didn’t want him to stop. Ever.

  Sebastian groaned as he battled to gain control of himself.

  Who would believe that kissing Emily would do this to him?

  If he didn’t stop kissing her soon, he’d be forced to do something he hadn’t done in years. Have sex in the front seat of a car. In broad daylight.

  This was not what he’d planned.

  Still, nothing had gone as he’d planned.

  If only she’d stop making those sexy little noises—stop squirming…stop digging her nails into him.