An Heir To Make A Marriage. Эбби Грин

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СКАЧАТЬ ridiculous, tainted. Garish. With her hot cheeks and the slash of red lipstick. In a fit of self-disgust she grabbed some tissue and wiped the lipstick off her lips.

      She couldn’t do this. She should never have agreed to such an outlandish plan.

      She stood up, galvanised into leaving this place and informing Mrs Lyndon-Holt that she could find someone else to be her sick baby bait. But the reason she’d agreed to it in the first place came back like a slap in the face, and she sat back down again heavily.

      Her father. His face full of pain. Pale. Losing hope. Far too young at fifty-two to be facing certain death if he didn’t receive the operation he needed.

      The kind of operation that was far beyond the reach of an ex-chauffeur and a humble maid, with only the most basic of health insurance.

      It was a fact that Mrs Lyndon-Holt had seized upon to use to her advantage, capitalising on Rose’s fear and panic. Her father had worked as the Lyndon-Holts’ driver until Mr Lyndon-Holt had passed away, after which Mrs Lyndon-Holt had taken on new staff, without so much as a thank-you for years of service. Rose had kept her job, however, and it had been a relief at the time.

      Shortly afterwards her father had started to feel unwell, and this had culminated in the diagnosis of a rare heart condition, fatal if not treated.

      Rose battled with her conscience. The thought of her father succumbing to an inevitable decline was too much to bear. She’d lost her mother already—far too young. Her father was all she had left. They had no other family in America. And he could be saved easily. If he had the operation. The operation that Mrs Lyndon-Holt had agreed to pay for if Rose did this...

      She looked at her glittering eyes and hectically flushed cheeks. She told herself that she would make an attempt to find Zac Valenti, but if she couldn’t find him—or if she did and he didn’t look at her twice, which she fully expected—then she would go. At least she would know that she’d tried her best.

      And then she would worry about what to do with her father. But at least she would have given it a shot.

      * * *

      Zac Valenti looked around the massive glittering ballroom from his antisocial location leaning against a pillar at the back of the room. The opulent space shone with a thousand priceless jewels that screamed the social status of their skinny owners like lurid neon signs over their heads.

      One woman passed him, literally weighted down with baubles. Her hand looked barely strong enough to carry the enormous ruby cocktail ring on her index finger. Then she caught sight of him and he could see her eyes widen comically behind her elaborately feathered mask as she almost tripped over her feet.

      Evidently his own understated black mask wasn’t an effective shield for his identity. Zac’s mouth tightened. As if he needed proof that he was still the enfant terrible of Manhattan, after delivering the biggest scandal to rock the island in decades when he, Zachary Lyndon-Holt—golden boy and heir apparent to become the uncrowned King of New York—had broken up with his family and given up his inheritance.

      Not to mention leaving his fiancée standing at the altar of one of Manhattan’s oldest Gothic churches in her bespoke Oscar da la Renta wedding dress.

      Addison Carmichael, a blue-blooded WASP from the top of her gleaming blonde head and her blue eyes to her toes, was nothing if not a product of her breeding and background—and she was as tenacious as a Jack Russell terrier. Within a year she’d married into a well-known political family dynasty and was currently the wife of a New York senator.

      When Zac bumped into her now she smiled at him with only the slightest tinge of malice—his ensuing rupture with his family had diluted her public humiliation somewhat.

      He hadn’t been worried about causing her emotional trauma—it wasn’t as if they’d had a love match. His relationship with her had been as much of a charade as the rest of his life at that time. And he could only be thankful that he’d discovered the ugly truth in his family before he’d sleepwalked into a veritable prison of his parents’ making.

      He cursed silently and corrected himself: his grandparents making.

      He’d grown up knowing them as his parents until the day he’d found out otherwise, when his world as he’d known it had exploded out of all recognition.

      But he’d stayed standing.

      And after the shock had passed he’d discovered that all he cared about was the heinous betrayal of the two people who had brought him into this world. A resolve had filled him to honour his real father and mother—not the people who had brought him up as if he was an ill-favoured guest in his own home.

      That day he’d had an incredible sense of his own personal destiny rising from the ashes, outside of the weighty yoke of the great Lyndon-Holt name which he’d never felt entirely comfortable with. And so he’d thrown it off, together with everything else bound with that name. And he’d never looked back.

      He was determined to make the Valenti name as revered as the one he’d been born with. He owed it to his immigrant Italian father, who’d had the temerity to fall for a Lyndon-Holt princess and in the eyes of her family had sullied her aristocratic beauty...

      The fact that a sizeable part of Zac’s wealth now came from his new-found career as a hotelier and nightclub owner caused him no little measure of satisfaction—because he knew damn well how much it would enrage his grandmother.

      Not to mention the tabloid headlines that had followed his latest nightclub opening, when the supermodel currently being hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world had been papped leaving his apartment late the next morning, looking thoroughly bedded and sexily dishevelled.

      So why aren’t you returning her calls? asked a snide little voice, which Zac tried to ignore. The sex had been...adequate. But the truth was that their encounter had reminded him a little too forcibly of that feeling of disconnection he’d experienced when he’d discovered the deceit in his family. As if nothing was really real. As if he was a construct...

      But he wasn’t a construct. He was flesh and blood and very real. And those people could send snide looks and whisper all they wanted—because Zac Valenti was enjoying being a constant reminder that they were all part of the façade, just as he had been. A reminder that they were hypocrites and just as liable to fall from grace as he had. Even though he hadn’t really fallen—he’d jumped.

      He rolled his shoulders in the confines of his bespoke three-piece tuxedo suit, feeling claustrophobic and irritated with the insular direction of his thoughts.

      He looked around, seeking distraction.

      A flutter of movement in his peripheral vision made him look to his right. He found his gaze resting on the slender figure of a woman in a long, black, backless dress.

      She was facing away from him—about ten feet away. So far so unremarkable—Zac had seen women dressed in a lot less in the name of fashion, even if her back was remarkably pale and the line of her spine curved temptingly just before it disappeared under her dress. But something about her kept him looking, and as he did, narrowing his gaze, he realised with a jolt of awareness that her dress was seductively sheer.

      She moved then—shifting her weight, stretching up slightly as if she was looking for someone in the crowd—and the dress revealed slim yet obvious curves, the globes of her pert bottom encased in black underwear. His eyes travelled up her long, slender СКАЧАТЬ