Million-Dollar Love-Child. Sarah Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ eyes mocking ‘—you are afraid of those things I made you feel, are you not? You are afraid of your own response to me. That is why you deny your feelings. It is so much easier to pretend that they don’t exist.’

      The breath she’d been about to take lodged in her throat. ‘I don’t feel anything—’

      He gave a lethal smile. ‘You forget, minha docura, that I was once intimately acquainted with every delicious inch of you. I know the signs. I recognise that flush on your cheeks, I recognise the way your eyes glaze and your lips part just before you beg me to kiss you.’

      Completely unsettled by his words, Kimberley rose to her feet so quickly she almost knocked the chair over. ‘You’re insufferably arrogant!’

      Her heart was pounding heavily and everything about her whole body suddenly felt warm and tingly.

      ‘I’m honest,’ he drawled, swivelling in his seat so that he could survey her from under slightly lowered lids, ‘which is more than you have ever been, I suspect. It is so much easier to blame me, is it not, than to accept responsibility yourself? Why is it that you find sex so shameful, I wonder?’

      She couldn’t catch her breath properly. ‘Because sex should be part of a loving relationship,’ she blurted out before she could stop herself and he gave a smile that was totally male.

      ‘If you believe that then clearly maturity has added nothing to your ability to face facts.’

      Tears pricked her eyes. ‘Why are you so cynical?’

      He shrugged. ‘I am realistic and, like most men, I don’t need the pretence of love to justify enjoying good sex.’

      How had she ever allowed herself to become involved with this man?

      They were just so different. ‘I—I hate you—’

      ‘You don’t hate me—’ his relaxed pose was in complete contrast to her rising tension ‘—but I know you think you do, which makes this whole situation more intriguing by the minute. You would so much rather be anywhere else but here. Which makes your greed all the more deplorable. You must want money very badly to risk walking into the dragon’s den.’

      ‘I’ve told you why I need the money and this situation has nothing to do with us—we’ve both moved on.’ Her fingers curled into her palms. ‘I know you’re not still interested in me, any more than I’m still interested in you.’

      ‘Is that a fact?’ His voice was a deep, dark drawl and he lounged in his seat with careless ease, contemplating her with lazy amusement. ‘And what if you’re wrong? What if I am still interested in you?’

      Her mouth dried. ‘You’re being ridiculous.’

      ‘A word of advice—’ His voice was suddenly soft and his eyes glittered, dark and dangerous. ‘When you’re trying to relieve someone of an indecent sum of money, don’t accuse them of being ridiculous.’

      She swallowed. How could she ever have thought she was a match for this man? She was a different person around him. Her brain didn’t move and her tongue didn’t form the right words.

      She should never have come, she thought helplessly. ‘If you won’t lend me the money then there’s no more to be said.’

      She’d failed.

      Panic threatened to choke her and she curled her fingers into her palms and walked towards the door.

      ‘Walk out of that door and you won’t be allowed back in,’ he informed her in silky tones. ‘Come back and sit down.’

      Would he be ordering her to sit down if he had no intention of lending her the money?

      Hope mingled with caution and she turned, her hand on the door handle and her heart in her mouth.

      ‘I said, sit down.’ His strong face was expressionless and, with barely any hesitation, she did as he ordered and then immediately hated herself for being that predictable. For doing exactly what he said.

      Wasn’t that what her whole life had been like for that one month they’d spent together? He’d commanded and she’d obeyed, too much in love and in lust to even think of resisting. Completely overwhelmed by him in every way. And here she was, seven years on, in his company for less than an hour and still obeying his every command.

      Well, it wasn’t going to happen that way again.

      She wasn’t that person any more, and being in the same room as him didn’t make her that person.

      Her expression was defiant as she looked at him. ‘It’s a simple question, Luc. Yes or no. It doesn’t matter whether I sit or stand and it doesn’t matter whether I leave the room. All the information you need is in that letter in front of you.’

      The letter he clearly thought was a fake.

      She watched in despair as he gave a casual shrug and pushed it away from him in a gesture of total indifference. ‘I have no interest in the letter or in your stories about phantom pregnancies. What does interest me, meu amorzinho, is the fact that you came to me.’

      She froze. ‘I already told you, I—’

      ‘I heard—’ he interrupted her gently, ‘you came to me to tell me you would do absolutely anything for five million dollars and now I simply have to decide exactly what form absolutely anything is going to take. When I’ve worked it out, you’ll be the first to know.’

      CHAPTER THREE

      BACK in her hotel room, Kimberley dragged off the jacket of her suit and dropped on to the bed, fighting off tears of frustration and anxiety.

      She’d blown it. She’d totally blown it.

      She’d planned to be calm and rational, to tell him the facts and explain the reasons for having kept Rio’s birth a secret from him for so long. But from the moment he’d walked into the room her plans had flown out of the window.

      She’d been catapulted back into the past.

      And she had less than twenty-four hours before the deadline came and went. Less than twenty-four hours in which to persuade a man with no morals or human decency to deposit five million dollars into the blackmailer’s bank account.

      The blackmailer he didn’t even believe existed.

      She took several deep breaths, struggling to hold herself together emotionally. It had been the hardest thing in the world to leave her child at this point in time, when all her instincts as a mother told her to keep him close. But she had known that to bring him on this trip would have been to expose him to even greater danger. And she’d hoped that she would only be in Rio de Janeiro for two days at the most. And after that—

      She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. She hadn’t dared think further than this meeting. Hadn’t dared think what would happen if Luc refused to lend her the money.

      Even now, with the letter still lurking in her handbag, she couldn’t quite believe that this was happening. Couldn’t believe that someone, somewhere, had discovered the truth about her child’s parentage. She’d СКАЧАТЬ