Secrets Of His Forbidden Cinderella. CAITLIN CREWS

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СКАЧАТЬ her in disbelief, she continued. “If you count backward, you’ll find that it matches right up with the Masquerade.”

      “Thank you, Miss Ransom,” Teo replied after a moment, in the frigid tones that usually made those around him quail, scrape and apologize. The woman standing just inside the door of his study looked notably unaffected. “I am capable of performing simple mathematical equations.”

      All she did was smile. As if she doubted him, but was magnanimously keeping that opinion to herself.

      It…irritated him. And Teo was rarely irritated by anything—because his life was arranged to avoid anything and anyone who might dare to annoy him in any way.

      Perhaps he should have expected something like this. Pregnancy claims upon him were always and forever naked attempts to grab a chunk of the de Luz fortune and then bask in the glory of the many titles, honors and estates that went along with the name. It wasn’t really a surprise that this impertinent, insolent creature of questionable parentage had developed ideas above her station when she’d spent those mercifully brief years thrust into the exalted realm of his family.

      Teo understood it, on some level. Who wouldn’t wish to be a de Luz?

      Amelia Ransom, still cursed with those indecorous purple eyes, stood before him on a rug so old that its actual provenance was still hotly contested by the historians who periodically combed through the de Luz house and grounds and wrote operatic scholarly dissertations on the significance of the family collections. That she should be deeply shamed by her presence here—and the fact that the carpet beneath her feet boasted a pedigree while she did not—seemed not to have occurred to her.

      Especially while she was issuing preposterous accusations. Involving fancy dress and dyed hair, of all things.

      It was all so preposterous, in fact, that Teo could hardly rouse himself to reply further.

      Because he was the current head of one of the most ancient houses in the world, and the favor of his time and good temper was not granted to any bedraggled creature who happened along and turned up at his door.

      Not that many creatures, bedraggled or otherwise, usually dared “turn up” in his presence. Or managed to “happen along” in the first place even if they did dare, as he employed what he’d believed until now to be an excellent security service. He made a mental note to replace them. Before the next dawn.

      And remembered as he did that Amelia’s mother had been notable chiefly for the things she’d dared. All of which she’d gone ahead and executed without the faintest notion of her own gaucheness.

      Hadn’t he always known that her daughter would turn out just like her?

      “I’ve learned many things since September,” said the creature before him. He had recognized her on sight, of course, though he had not intended to gift her with that knowledge. Because she should have assumed that she was entirely unworthy of his notice and his memory alike. Instead, she was talking at him in that same offensively friendly voice that made him think of overly bright, manic toothpaste commercials. “One of them—which you would think ought to go without saying—is don’t disguise yourself and have relations with your former stepbrother and think there won’t be repercussions.”

      “I have yet to accept that any ‘relations’ occurred,” Teo said in what he thought was a mild voice, all things considered.

      “Acceptance, or the lack of it, doesn’t change the facts,” Amelia replied, and Teo saw a glimpse of something steely in those garish eyes of hers. “And the fact is, I’m pregnant with your baby.”

      “How convenient for you.”

      He watched her from his position against his desk, where he felt significantly less at his ease than he had moments before. Amelia, meanwhile, did not seem particularly thrown by his reaction. There were no tears. No wilting or wailing, the way there normally was during outlandish pregnancy claims—if the reports he’d received were to be believed. If anything, she brightened.

      “I’m informing you because it’s the right thing to do,” she told him, with a hint of self-righteous piety about her, then. “Not because I need or want you to do anything. Consider yourself informed.”

      She turned then, and Teo almost let her go. Purely to see if she would do what he thought she meant to do, which was march straight off—but only so far, as it was difficult to extort money from a man once ejected from his presence. He assumed she knew it.

      He decided he wouldn’t play her game. “Surely the point of disguising yourself, as you claim you did, and then deciding to have ‘relations’ with me under false pretenses, would be to stay. Not to flounce off because I’ve failed to respond as you would like.”

      It would have been easy enough to find photos of the Masquerade, he told himself. He had danced with a luscious redhead, then disappeared with her for a time. Anyone might have guessed what they’d been up to.

      That certainly didn’t mean that this woman was that redhead. His mind reeled away from that possibility even as his body readied itself, remembering.

      Amelia waved a distinctly impolite hand in the air, and compounded the disrespect when she didn’t turn back to face him. “I don’t care what you do with the information, Teo. I think we can all agree that it’s appropriate to inform a man of his paternal rights. That’s all I wanted to do, it’s done, the end.”

      “Surely a letter would have sufficed.”

      She did turn then. Not all the way. She looked back over her shoulder, and he was struck against his will.

      Hard.

      Teo truly hadn’t believed that Amelia Ransom, of all possible people, was the mysterious woman he’d enjoyed so thoroughly at the Masquerade last fall. But he remembered…this. Almost exactly. The hair had been a bright red, the eyes a dramatic shade of green that now, in retrospect, he should have known was false, and she’d worn an intricate mask that took over the better part of her face. The mask had been a steam punk design and so intricate, in fact, that she’d claimed she couldn’t remove it—and he hadn’t cared, because her mouth had been sweet and hot, her hands had been wicked, and he’d had his fingers deep inside her clenching heat mere steps from his own damned party.

      “Right,” she said. Drawled, really. And “disrespectful” didn’t begin to cover the tone she used. Or that direct stare. “Because you would have opened a letter that I sent.”

      “Someone would have.”

      “And believed it right away, I’m sure.”

      “I don’t believe it now, Miss Ransom. I’m not certain what you thought a personal visit would accomplish. All you have done is remind me of the low esteem in which I hold your entire family.”

      “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you don’t have a lot of feelings about my poor grandma in Nebraska. I doubt you know about her at all, so lowly is her existence next to this whole…display.” And Teo felt the umbrage of nearly twenty generations of de Luzes rise within him as she managed to do something with her face to indicate how little she thought of him, this grand house where history had been made and was still revered, and more or less everything he stood for. “So that low esteem, I’m guessing, is aimed directly at my mother.”

      “Your mother is little better than a СКАЧАТЬ