Billionaire’S Bride For Revenge: Billionaire’s Bride for Revenge. Susan Stephens

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       CHAPTER SIX

      ‘I DON’T KNOW what you’re talking about.’ Freya hated that her burning cheeks contradicted her.

      Benjamin rose slowly from his seat and walked around the table to her, that feline grace she had seen before taking a dangerous hue, the panther stalking towards its prey.

      She twisted around so her thighs pressed into the hard wood, her usually nimble feet becoming like sludge.

      And then he was standing in front of her, that strong neck her lips kept longing to press into right there in her eye line, standing close enough for his fresh spicy scent to seep into her senses.

      ‘I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, ma douce.’ He placed a hand on the arch of her neck and dropped his voice to a murmur. The feel of his fingers on her skin burned through her, the heat from his breath catching the loose strands of her hair and carrying through it to her scalp and down into her bloodstream. ‘The camera never lies. Javier saw the desire you feel for me. I have seen it too and I have felt it, when I carried you back into my home and the moonlight shone on us both. You say you hate me but still you long for my kiss.’

      Freya found herself too scared to move. Too scared to breathe. Terrified to make the slightest twist in her body lest her lips inch themselves forward to brush against the warm neck so close to her mouth and the rest of her body, aching at the remembrance of being held so securely in his arms, press itself wantonly against him.

       Focus, Freya. The next few minutes will determine you and your mother’s whole futures.

      He moved a little closer so his breath danced over the top of her ear, electrifying parts inside her she hadn’t known were there. ‘There is an attraction between us that has been there since we first saw each other in Javier’s garden.’

      She gave a tiny shake of her head to deny his words but he dragged his hand from her neck and placed a finger on her lips, standing back a little so he could stare straight into her eyes.

      ‘Now you no longer belong to him, we are free to act on it.’ Benjamin brushed the finger from her lips to rest lightly on her cheek. She truly had the softest skin he had ever touched, more velvet than flesh.

      He’d always known it would be fifty-fifty whether Javier would pay up, which was why he had gone to the lengths he had to make sure that whatever the outcome, he would still win.

      He hadn’t expected the destruction of Javier and Freya’s relationship to feel like a victory that would taste as sweet as if Javier had paid in full.

      Never again would he be haunted by thoughts of Freya enjoying herself in his enemy’s bed because she had been correct that Javier would never take her back. She could plead with him but Benjamin knew Javier too well. His Spanish foe’s reputation and pride were the fuel he needed to get through the day. In one stroke Benjamin had battered them both and soon he would set his sights on Luis too.

      Benjamin was well aware the actions he’d taken made him as bad as the men he sought to destroy but he didn’t care. Why should he? Who had ever cared for him?

      His mother had loved him but when he had discovered the Casillas brothers’ treachery the past had come back into sharp focus and he’d been forced to accept that her love for him had always been tied with her love for them. Louise Guillem had loved Javier and Luis as if they were children of her blood because, for his mother, Clara Casillas had been the love of her life. A platonic love, it was true, but with the emotional intensity of the most heightened love affair. Benjamin had been a by-product of that love, a child to raise alongside Clara’s, not wanted as a child should be for himself but more as a pet, an accessory.

      His father had long gone, leaving the marital home when Louise had fallen pregnant by accident a decade after Benjamin had been born. Already fed up playing second fiddle to the World’s Greatest Dancer, his father had refused to hang around and raise a second accessory. Benjamin had never missed him—you had to know someone to miss them and he had never properly known his father—but, again, with the past being brought back into focus, he had realised for the first time that his father hadn’t just left his mother but his only son too. He hadn’t cared enough to keep their tentative relationship going.

      Then there was Javier and Luis. Their betrayal had been the most wrenching of all because it had made him look at the past with new, different eyes and reassess all the relationships he had taken for granted and unbury his head from the truth.

      The only relationship he had left was with his sister but she was a free spirit with wounds of her own, a beautiful violin with broken strings.

      Every other person he’d trusted and cared for had used or betrayed him.

      He was damned if he would trust or care again.

      This beautiful woman with eyes a man could fall into was no innocent. He regretted that he’d had to use her but it had been a necessary evil. He would not regret destroying her relationship with Javier. If she had cared an ounce for his foe she would not be staring at him as if she wanted him to devour her.

      Dieu, a man really could fall into those eyes and never resurface...

      But there was something else breaking free in the heady depths of those eyes, a fire, a determination that made him drop his hand from her cheek and step back so he could study her carefully without her sultry scent playing under his nose and filtering through into his bloodstream...

      The moment he stepped away she folded her arms across her chest and seemed to grow before his eyes.

      ‘The only thing we’re going to act on is your word.’ Freya’s husky voice had the same fiery determination as resonated in her eyes.

      ‘You are ready to be taken back to Madrid?’

      This time she was the one to laugh, a short, bitter sound. ‘Yes. But not yet. Not until you have married me.’

      For a moment it felt as if he had stepped onto quicksand.

      He shook his head. ‘You want to marry me?’

      ‘No. I would rather marry the rodent on the desert island but you told me I would have three choices once Javier had made his. He won’t take me back, not even if I get down on my knees and beg. I need the money set out in our pre-nuptial agreement so going back to Madrid and resuming my single life is not an option either, which leaves just one remaining choice—marrying you. You need to honour the contract Javier and I signed on our engagement as you said you would.’

      He stared into her unsmiling face, an unexpected frisson СКАЧАТЬ