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 racing up his spine.
Marriage to Freya...?
He had made his threat to Javier with the full intention of acting on it if it came to it but never had he believed she would go along with it, let alone demand it of him.
He tried to envisage Javier’s reaction when he heard the news but all he could imagine was Freya naked in his bed, the fantasies he’d been suppressing for two months suddenly springing to life in a riot of erotic colour.
Marriage had never been on his agenda before. He’d spent the past seven years so busy clawing his business back to health and then into the business stratosphere that any thoughts of wedlock had been put on the back burner, something to be considered when his business no longer consumed his every waking thought.
Now the thought of marriage curdled his stomach. Marriage involved love and trust, two things he was no longer capable of and no longer believed in.
‘Were you lying to me when you gave me your word?’ she challenged into the silence.
‘I save the lies for your ex-fiancé. He’s the expert at them. And I am thinking you must be good at them too seeing as you fooled him into believing you had feelings for him.’
‘I didn’t fool or lie to anyone. Javier and I both knew exactly what we were signing up for.’
‘You admit you were marrying him for his money?’
‘Yes. I need that money.’
‘And what did Javier get out of marrying you other than a prima ballerina on his arm?’
Fresh colour stained her cheeks but her gaze didn’t flicker. ‘The contract we signed spells it out. If you’re the man of your word you say you are, you will duplicate it and honour it.’
‘You are serious about this?’
‘Deadly serious. The ballet company is on a two-week shutdown. I was supposed to marry Javier next Saturday. I presume with all the strings you’re able to pull you can arrange for us to marry then instead. Either that or you can pay me now all the money I would have received from Javier, say, for the first ten years of our marriage.’ Her eyes brightened, this idea clearly only just occurring to her. ‘That can be my compensation for being the unwitting victim in your vindictive game. It comes to...’ her brow furrowed as she mentally calculated the sum ‘...around twenty million. I’ll be happy to accept half that. Call it ten million and I go back to my life and we never have to see each other again.’
‘You want me to pay you off?’ he asked, part in astonishment and part in admiration.
‘That would be the best outcome for both of us, don’t you think?’
He shook his head slowly, intrigued and not a little aroused at the spirit and fight she was showing. No wonder Javier had chosen her for his wife. She was magnificent. ‘Non, ma douce, the choice was marriage or nothing. If I pay you off, I get nothing from it.’
‘Your conscience will thank you.’
‘I told you before, my conscience allows me to sleep well. With you in my bed every night I will be able to sleep even more sweetly.’ His arousal deepened to imagine that wonderful hair fanned over his pillow, the obsidian eyes currently firing fury at him firing only desire...
‘Maybe you should read the contract before assuming I will be in your bed every night. You might find you prefer to pay me off.’
‘Unlikely but, even if that is the case, the knowledge Javier will spend the rest of his life knowing it is my ring you wear on your finger and not his will soften the blow.’
‘You really are a vindictive monster, aren’t you?’
‘You insult me and speak of my conscience when you are a self-confessed gold-digger.’ He smiled and closed the gap that had formed between them and placed a hand on her slender hip. There was no danger of trusting or caring for this woman, even if he was capable of it and even if she did have eyes he could sink into. ‘We don’t have to like each other to be good together...and I think we could be very good together. Marry me and you have everything you would have had if you had married Javier.’
‘And you get continued revenge,’ she finished for him, her tone contemptuous.
‘Exactemente. We both get what we want.’
Freya could smell the warmth of his skin beneath the freshness of his cologne...
Benjamin was not what she wanted. He provoked her in ways Javier never had. Javier was scary but Benjamin terrified her for all the wrong reasons.