‘Just more experienced at this game than you are,’ he told her. ‘Though sex across my desk while I talk on the telephone is novel,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe we will try it.’
Her slender shoulders hunched and she lifted up her hands to grab at them as if doing so would keep his outrageous suggestion out. It didn’t matter that she knew she had started it. He was right and he was so much more experienced at this game so all she’d managed to do by taking him on was to walk herself right into his tormenting trap.
‘Do you know where the runaway lovers have gone?’ The question came at her right out of the blue.
‘No.’ She shook her head.
‘Do you know, then, how your hair catches fire in the sunlight coming in through the window behind you?’
That oh, so silky spoken observation flared her hair around her face as she spun around. ‘For goodness’ sake, will you stop playing this crazy game now?’ she shrilled out.
‘No game,’ he denied, and he was lounging in the chair now, so damn sure of himself and everything he’d dared to say to her that she couldn’t take her eyes off him, couldn’t not be aware of the sensual pulse emanating from every part of his long, lean body—like a man with his desire on the rise. The half-lowered eyelids, the low burning glow of gold in his eyes. The mouth that had softened to show its capacity for enjoying the pleasures of the senses and the challenge in his expression that wasn’t really a challenge but a heat-seeking message of absolute promise.
‘Marry me next week and I will lift your sex life from the disappointingly mundane to the bone-melting exciting,’ he offered.
Lizzy gaped. ‘Who told you my sex life was—?’
‘Bianca, who else?’
Her best friend, Bianca, had said that about her—to him?
‘She gave you two different lovers, neither of which lasted beyond the first venture between the sheets. Englishmen, of course,’ he said, ‘with a fumbling lack of finesse.’
‘And you think speaking to me like this shows finesse?’ The heat of dismay and the sharp sting of hurt were crawling all over her. She had never felt so let down by Bianca in their ten year friendship! How dared she speak to him about Lizzy’s personal life—how dared she tell such wicked lies about it? ‘Well I don’t,’ she said grimly. ‘And I am not going to listen to any more of it.’
She turned—once again to leave.
But that relentlessly cool voice was not going to let her go. ‘Marry me next week and I will bail your father out of debt, pay off his loan and send in my own team of experts to help oversee the recovery of his company,’ it continued, bringing her to yet another quivering standstill. ‘Which,’ he added, ‘I will fund until it can stand on its own two feet. Don’t marry me next week, and I will light the litmus under an embezzlement scandal then just stand back to watch it go up.’
The bottom line, Lizzy recognised, the very lowest point he was prepared to go to to save his pride.
‘Someone owes me, Elizabeth,’ he went on grimly. ‘Either you pay the debt or your family pays that debt. The fact that I desire you is the only thing giving you the luxury of choice.’
‘This is just revenge,’ she whispered.
‘Revenge is a form of passion, mi amore. My advice would be to grab my offer while the passion for revenge still rides hot in my blood.’ Words…he was clever with words. So clever he was tying her head and her emotions into knots. Moving in a daze, she went to stand in front of one of the windows, staring out at the glittering lake backed by the misty grey mountains in the distance and the town of Bellagio just a simmering cluster of white on the opposite bank of the lake.
So near yet so far away, she thought bleakly. She could be marooned on an island with Luc as her jailor. As he’d already pointed out, she wasn’t going anywhere without his express say-so.
And Matthew, she considered. Why had he done it? He was older than her, but only by eighteen months, and he’d had good reason to resent their father for his strict refusal to accept that his son had a right to choose what he wanted to do with his own life. Had he taken the money in an angry desire to hit back at their father? Had Bianca encouraged him to do it because it was his father who’d put a stop to their romantic plans to marry two years ago?
Mrs Moreno had told Edward Hadley that he was tackling their romance the wrong way. Ban them from seeing each other and you will create Romeo and Juliet, she’d warned in her dramatic way.
Dramatic or not, it appeared now that what she had predicted had come true—or at least partly true. Lizzy hoped to goodness that the two of them were not going to go the whole hog and drink poison.
But to take things as far as they already had done seemed fantastical to Lizzy, especially when she knew that both of them had been involved in other relationships since their break-up—the most important one being the one involving this man sitting here waiting for her answer.
And, she was going to have to admit it, she was hurt that neither of them had confided in her. Though maybe that part was not so fantastical because she would have tried to stop them and they would have known it.
‘What will happen to them when they eventually resurface?’ she questioned huskily.
‘Bianca has done nothing wrong other than to change her mind about marrying me—a woman’s prerogative,’ he dryly pointed out. ‘As it stands for your brother right now, it has to be up to your father and the bank to say what will happen to him.’
Smooth, blunt and honest. He didn’t even bother to repeat that he was the one holding the axe suspended over Matthew’s head.
Or she was.
‘I won’t wear Bianca’s wedding dress,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t marry you in a church. I won’t let you buy me anything that isn’t absolutely essential for the role you want me to play for you. And I won’t stop working, because I need to earn money to pay you back every penny you invest in Hadley’s.’
‘You will marry me just as everything has been arranged already,’ he countered. ‘You will accept with grace anything I choose to bestow on you and you will not go back to work.’
Lizzy swung to face him and was shocked by the kick she received low in her gut because he was so—’Y-you can’t just slot me into Bianca’s place just like that,’ she said as she attempted to override over what her body was trying to make her feel. ‘The authorities won’t allow it!’
‘At the risk of sounding boringly repetitive, money talks.’
Money talks. And so it did. ‘I think I hate you,’ she whispered.
‘Nevertheless you will take up Bianca’s place with pride and dignity and fool the world into thinking it was you and I and not them who discovered they couldn’t live without each other. And you will not pay me back anything other than with our first child seeded in your womb. With that goal in mind you will come to our marriage bed with warmth and honesty—which means you will not fight against what we both desire.’
‘Can I please go now?’
She was so close to tears she was barely managing to hold herself together and, the choked request brought a soft curse biting at the back of his throat. He came to his feet, made a move as if he was going to come towards her, then abruptly pulled himself up.
‘In a moment.’ The lean, handsome shape of his face had drawn into a cold, hard, impenetrable mask again. ‘We have a few more details left to discuss.’
‘Discuss?’ Lizzy picked up. ‘Doesn’t that imply that I’m allowed an opinion?’
‘Probably—’ he grimaced ‘—but seemingly