Mistresses: Bound with Gold / Bought with Emeralds. Sandra Marton

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      She felt a wicked surge of angry satisfaction and sleeked her hair back behind her ears like a fastidious little cat. ‘Oh, dear, how demeaning for you,’ she sympathised.

      His eyes slitted. ‘Actually, I found the thought rather…stimulating.’ He pushed off the door and came softly towards her. ‘Didn’t you like the bracelet? I know you looked at it while I was in the shower.’

      If it was a guess then her expression as she backed away from him on unsteady legs would have been all he needed to confirm its accuracy. Her brief burst of triumph dwindled to renewed panic as he continued.

      ‘Because that’s my problem with all this, you see. What you did doesn’t quite jell with the image of you as a greedy, blackmailing opportunist, does it?’ He prowled around the desk after her. ‘You had those lovely baubles within your grasp and you deliberately let them slip through your fingers. Why, instead of waiting to accept your due reward, did you creep out and leave me to wake up alone? Apart from anything else, it’s extremely bad manners.’

      Regan backed into a swivel chair and nearly fell over.

      ‘I’m sorry if I offended your sense of etiquette.’

      ‘I don’t think so. I think it was some kind of planned strategy on your part.’ He steadied the swinging chair with his hands as she retreated behind it. ‘After all, you didn’t conjure those cufflinks out of thin air.’

      ‘Will you stop stalking me?’ she shrilled, almost at the end of her tether.

      He was relentless. ‘If you’ll tell me exactly what’s going on?’

      ‘Nothing’s going on,’ she denied hectically. ‘This is all just an unfortunate coincidence.’ She glanced towards the door.

      ‘Don’t bother. You wouldn’t make it,’ he warned her.

      Her hip bumped the corner of the desk and she winced, rubbing at her bruised thigh. ‘How dare you harass me like this? If you don’t open that door people are going to wonder what we’re doing in here—’

      ‘No one saw us come in, and given the crowd out there I doubt if we’ll be missed.’

      ‘Even by Carolyn?’ She drew herself up to her full height, deciding the only remaining defence was attack. ‘It’s not as if you’re in any position to criticise my motives. What about your behaviour? You wouldn’t have any reason to fear blackmail if you didn’t know you’d done something utterly reprehensible.’ A mist of red covered her vision as she got to the crux of her inner anger. ‘You virtually bounced out of bed with me to rush up here and propose to her!’

      His grey eyes went dark. ‘I owed Carolyn no sexual fidelity on the night that you and I slept together,’ he said grimly.

      ‘Don’t play with semantics!’ she cried. ‘What about emotional fidelity? You must have been intending to ask her—’

      His mouth twisted. ‘Actually, no. I had not in the least thought of getting married again when I drove up here that day…’

      Her feet suddenly felt nailed to the spot. ‘Again? You’ve been married before?’

      ‘I’m thirty-six. It would be more surprising if I hadn’t had a previous serious relationship, wouldn’t it?’ he queried, taking advantage of her stunned expression to move closer.

      This new facet of him threw all her previous assumptions into disarray. ‘What did you do? Dump her when you discovered she’d married you purely for your money?’ she said, using deliberate cruelty to distance herself from the odd feeling of melancholy that invaded her bones.

      The twist of his mouth turned into a cold smile. ‘Actually, yes. And it was worth every cent it took to pay her off!’

      She swallowed. On top of all the other blows Chris had mentioned, Joshua had taken a king-hit to his pride—if not his heart.

      ‘That must have been difficult for you?’

      ‘She was the loser, not I. I was a rich man then, but I’ve become a lot richer in the last fifteen years.’

      ‘But money doesn’t necessarily buy you happiness,’ protested Regan.

      He looked at her, his eyes full of silvery satisfaction. ‘What makes you think I was talking about money?’

      ‘I—well, you’re wealthy, and—I just assumed…’

      Her voice tailed off and he said silkily, ‘It’s dangerous to make assumptions when you don’t have all the facts. You seem to make a habit of it.

      ‘The fact is that I do have some experience of courtship,’ he said, when she failed to respond. ‘And I assure you I wasn’t even close to courting Carolyn when I took you to bed.’ His tone became even silkier as he echoed her earlier thoughts. ‘Or rather, when we took each other in all those assorted places…’

      ‘Are you saying you proposed on the spur of the moment? I don’t believe you!’ she said coldly, trying to freeze out the hot flood of excitement his words had provoked. ‘You don’t strike me as a man who ever does anything on impulse.’

      ‘I’m not—that’s what makes the impulse I’m having right now all the more disturbing,’ he mused darkly, making her suddenly aware that all the time they had been talking he had been drifting inexorably closer.

      His brooding expression looked faintly murderous, and Regan clutched her hands to her vulnerable throat as he loomed over her. ‘What impulse?’

      He lifted a hand and she flinched, but all he did was stroke his finger down one dark wing of glossy hair where it swept behind her delicate ear.

      ‘You don’t really want to know.’ His finger lingered in the crease just behind her naked earlobe. He seemed to have a perfect genius for homing in on the most sensitive points on her body, thought Regan shakily—ones that even she hadn’t known were sensitive until he roused them to glorious life.

      ‘Most women deck themselves in jewellery when they dress up—you don’t seem to wear any…’

      ‘I’m allergic to gold,’ she said flippantly, thinking that lying was beginning to become second nature.

      His eyebrows lifted over disbelieving eyes. ‘As well as diamonds?’ he mocked. ‘You don’t even wear a watch.’

      ‘It broke—I haven’t got round to replacing it yet.’ Even a cheap time-piece took second place to digging herself out of a mountain of debt.

      The door to the library suddenly swung open and Regan jerked guiltily away from Joshua’s touch.

      ‘Hello, what are you two doing in here?’ Hazel Harriman’s head ducked around the door, her innocent brown eyes travelling from one face to the other.

      ‘Checking on the silver, Hazel?’ grinned Joshua easily.

      ‘Well, you know what Frank’s like about his blessed first editions! He should have locked the door СКАЧАТЬ