The Blackmailed Bridegroom. Miranda Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ had spanned Paige’s waist that day, as he’d reluctantly put her aside, then told her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t return her feelings and that he thought of her as a silly little girl.

      Not strictly true, of course. He’d thought of her as a silly big girl, extremely beautiful and extraordinarily sexy. Some evenings, when she’d been home from school and she’d come down to dinner in one of those tight, short low-cut little dresses she’d favoured, he’d been glad to be sitting at a table with a serviette covering his lap. If Paige had been any other man’s daughter things might have turned out differently by the pool that day. But Antonio had had no intention of losing a second job because of the boss’s daughter. No way!

      Perhaps his rejection had been a little rough. Paige’s obvious humiliation and tears had caused him pangs of guilt for a while, especially when she’d run away instead of returning to school, not sitting for her final exams into the bargain.

      He’d got over his guilt soon enough, however, when Lew, Conrad’s personal private investigator, had found her less than a month later, living on a remote North Coast beach with some surfing bum a good few years older than herself. Since the shack they’d been sharing only had one bedroom, it wasn’t difficult to conclude their relationship had been far from platonic. She certainly hadn’t denied it when Antonio himself had travelled all the way up there and tried to bring her back at Conrad’s request.

      Antonio’s male ego had been dented by her indifferent reaction to his arrival on her doorstep, but any lingering concern for the girl had been well and truly dispelled once he’d seen for himself what sort of life she’d chosen to live.

      Paige was trouble, in his opinion, an opinion reinforced every time their paths crossed, which thankfully wasn’t often. The last time he’d seen her had been at Conrad’s Christmas party the previous year. She’d sashayed downstairs, wearing a short strapless red dress which might have ended up around a less shapely females’ ankles, so precariously had it been perched. To his eternal irritation and frustration, Antonio had found himself wanting to sweep her back up the stairs, rip that infernal scrap of red satin from her body and ravage her senseless upon the first available bed. Or floor. Or whatever.

      Instead, he’d had to forcibly keep his eyes away from Paige’s luscious young flesh, pretending to be enraptured by his date, a female lawyer on Fortune Productions’ payroll. To his discredit, Antonio had shamelessly used the woman—both at the party and later—to sate the dark desires Paige had evoked.

      Not that she’d minded. As it had turned out, she’d liked her sex a little rough, and without strings.

      He hadn’t seen Paige since that night, and tried not to think of her at all these days. But he was certainly thinking of her now.

      ‘You can’t be serious about this, Conrad,’ he said disbelievingly.

      ‘I’m very serious.’

      ‘It’s a crazy idea!’

      ‘Why? She was in love with you once, whether you like it or not. And that was before you developed into the man you are today. Do you think I haven’t noticed the way women react to you? You could make any woman fall in love with you. A girl like Paige should be a cinch.’

      ‘But I don’t want Paige to fall in love with me,’ he pointed out icily. ‘And I don’t want to marry her.’ Her, least of all, he thought angrily.

      ‘Why?’

      Antonio did not feel like explaining that he’d been in love very deeply once, with the daughter of his previous boss. He’d thought Lauren had loved him as much as he’d loved her. But when push had come to shove she hadn’t been prepared to actually marry an Italian migrant with a questionable background and nothing to his name but his modest salary as a wine salesman. She’d just been slumming for a while, before moving on from her cosy, cushy life as a rich man’s daughter to the cosy, cushy life of a rich’s man’s wife.

      He’d stupidly turned up at her house on the night of her engagement party and made a big scene. Naturally, he’d been given the sack, with no references. It had been several months before he’d been able to get another job, during which he’d practically had to eat the paint off the walls. When Conrad had hired him to be his assistant and interpreter he’d been eternally grateful, even though he suspected he’d been the only applicant who could speak the five languages Conrad required during his business trips overseas.

      Antonio had worked his guts out to get where he was today. He had no intention of giving it up for anyone, or of sharing his life with the same sort of silly, selfish, shallow creature who’d once almost destroyed him.

      ‘When and if I marry, Conrad,’ he said with cold fury, ‘it will be because I’m so much in love that I couldn’t bear not to.’ Which was about as likely as Conrad himself breasting the altar once more.

      When his boss said nothing to this, Antonio’s black eyes narrowed. ‘If I don’t agree with this plan of yours, is it going to cost me my job?’

      ‘No, of course not!’ Conrad denied expansively. ‘What kind of man do you take me for?’

      Antonio hesitated to say. But you didn’t get to be one of the richest men in Australia by being full of the milk of human kindness. Over the six years in Conrad’s employ, Antonio had gleaned a lot of information about his boss.

      Conrad had started out with nothing, as the son of penniless Polish migrants, changing his name from Fortuneski to Fortune and getting in on the ground floor with television in Australia when it had started, in the fifties, working behind the camera at first before forming his own production company and buying the Australian rights to a successful American game show. It had made him his first million. More game shows had followed, and more millions. Then, in the late sixties, he’d tried one of the first soaps made in Australia, an outrageously sexy series which had made its name with scandalous storylines. Serious millions had begun to roll in, and Fortune Productions had never looked back. Neither had its ambitious bachelor owner.

      Conrad had lived and breathed his work, and had had no intention of getting married. But then, in his mid-forties, Conrad had made the mistake of giving his then housekeeper carte blanche to hire and fire staff, and she’d taken on Paige’s mother to serve at table. During a misguided interlude after a rather lengthy and boozy dinner party, Paige had been conceived.

      Once presented with the reality of a child-to-be, Conrad had done the right thing and married the woman. He’d been hoping for a son and heir to take over the business. Instead, Paige had been born.

      It had not been a happy union, and when his wife of one year had run off to America with a salesman, Conrad hadn’t been shattered. Antonio imagined that his boss also hadn’t lost much sleep over the news, a few years later, that his errant wife had been found dead in a New York hotel room of a drug overdose.

      He was not a sentimental man.

      ‘I’m planning on retiring at the end of the year,’ Conrad went on now, snapping Antonio back to the matter at hand. ‘I’ll be moving permanently to my home in the Bahamas. When I do, the position of CEO of Fortune Productions will become vacant. I intend to promote you, Antonio,’ he said, and Antonio sucked in a sharp breath. ‘But only if you’re my son-in-law at the time,’ Conrad finished.

      Antonio exhaled with a rush. ‘Damn and blast it, Conrad, that’s blackmail!’

      ‘No. That’s good business. Who better to look after one’s interests but family? You, as a born СКАЧАТЬ