“Cruise? I thought I was supposed to schmooze! Anyway, Lauren doesn’t fit that category. She’s a friend.”
“Cruise, schmooze,” Tom had said, ignoring the issue of Lauren Van Shuyler. “You’re a capable man. You can do both.”
Subject closed, apparently. And now here he was, schmoozing on the outside while his inner spirit was a million miles away.
So he had welcomed the approaching lightweight distraction of this fair vision in black and diamanté at first, before he had any idea that she would stop at his table. But when their glances had connected just now, he’d felt something—a mysterious, intuitive quickening of interest. Not the sort of thing he normally admitted to, and it had spooked him.
“But I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake about who I am,” he began. Why was he reluctant to disillusion her?
Then he saw that she had realized her mistake, too.
She clapped her hands dramatically to her mouth, then let them fall again. “Oh, I am most frightfully sorry!” she gushed. “I thought you were Alasdair Corliss-Bryant, an old friend of mine from the Gloucestershire Hunt. But I can see now that of course you’re not.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Patrick answered. It was a formula response. He was aware that, on his left, local councilman Earl P. Wainwright, one of his schmoozing options for the evening, was now listening with eager attention to the new arrival. Hardly surprising. Miss England was gorgeous.
Patrick made a cool-headed assessment.
Maybe not quite as cool as he would have liked.
She was about thirty-five years too young for Wainwright, but that didn’t seem to concern the man. Untamable blond hair framed her face, and her eyes shone like brown sugar melting with butter in a hot skillet. She had long lashes, a glove-tight dress, full lips and a fabulous figure.
Of course, he’d seen it all before, Patrick quickly decided. Of course he had! He’d seen it bigger, better and sexier.
Still, he was intrigued. Not by the packaging but by the motivation. No one else had been watching her performance as she sashayed past. That it was a performance, and not at all genuine, Patrick was already quite certain. And this made him wonder about a few things.
Why, for example, had she pretended to recognize him? That recital about Alasdair Double-Barrelled-Moniker and the Whatsit-shire Hunt was too complicated. He was annoyed that she had chosen such a strategy. Overly elaborate. Unnecessary.
He frowned.
Wouldn’t it have been a lot simpler just to trip over the carpet and lunge at his knee? A woman like this surely wouldn’t begrudge a spilled glass of champagne and a dry-cleaning bill for his suit in a good cause, would she?
And why the phoney British accent? It was good. Very good. None of the vowels had slipped. Still, he was in no danger of believing it to be genuine. He’d learned in business never to take anything at face value. So…why?
He considered the issue, enjoying the fact that his mind was engaged now.
Presumably it was the Most Eligible Bachelor thing. He regretted the publicity that had given him, now. There had recently been a couple of how-to books written expressly for gold diggers. Maybe this was all written down in black-and-white in chapter four. “Capture his attention by pretending to be a card-carrying member of the British aristocracy.” Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown was the name she’d selected for the evening, apparently.
He examined his options with a degree of relish. Challenge her at once? She deserved it, but for some reason he was tempted to play along with her game.
He had just decided on this second option when he made a very disconcerting discovery. Astonishingly, he, Patrick Simon Callahan, aged thirty-six, with a net worth upwards of twenty million dollars and still climbing, and a not-insignificant quantity of personal appeal as well, was not Lady Sugar-Eyes’s target at all.
“Councillor Wainwright, I’m so pleased to meet you,” she gushed, ending the round of formal introductions. Patrick hadn’t paid much attention to any of it until now. He slumped back in his seat, pushed aside by the sheer force of her determination.
“Lady Catrina, it’s an honor,” the councillor replied earnestly. “I love your country. I visit England every chance I get. In fact, you may know some friends of mine…”
“Oh, really? How marvelous!”
She was leaning past Patrick. On display was a tastefully moderate yet very alluring quantity of silky-skinned cleavage. Fixing her warm, liquid brown eyes on Councillor Wainwright, she nodded encouragement at the man’s words, denied knowledge of his old friends, and offered some no doubt fictional names of her own. Lord Peter Devries? The Honourable Amanda Fitzhubert?
For some reason, the very appealing effort that she was putting into hunting completely the wrong quarry immediately irritated Patrick up to the eyeballs. What was it that mom had drummed into him and his seven brothers as children? It had been one of the more annoying sayings of an otherwise excellent and well-beloved parent.
“If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
He now discovered to his horror that he agreed wholeheartedly with these prim words of mom’s. If a woman was going to be a fortune hunter, if she’d gone to all the trouble of shimmying herself into that delectable, form-fitting dress, gate-crashing this event, inventing an upper-crust identity, perfecting the accent and wangling an introduction, then she should at least be good at it. She should aim high. She should choose the right man.
Him.
Leaving aside any other considerations, such as age, physical endowments and suitability of temperament, Patrick was streets ahead of Councillor Wainwright where it really counted to a woman like this.
In the bank.
It wasn’t that Patrick himself measured his masculinity in financial terms. He didn’t come from a moneyed background, but from a good, solid family in which other values—honor, love and Christian charity—took precedence.
Occasionally he was cynical about those values, but deep down he believed in them. He’d started to realize just lately that one of the reasons he still wasn’t outrageously in love and blissfully married like his brothers Tom, Adam and Connor, was because he just couldn’t respect or love a woman to whom money and possessions and regular appearances in magazine gossip columns were the be-all and end-all.
The pity of it was that when you were widely known as a rich young gun in the world of computer commerce, you attracted such women—beautiful and sophisticated women, many of them—in droves. The fictitious Lady Catrina was clearly one of them. That was strike one against her. The fact that she was doing it all wrong was strike two.
So there was no excuse at all for what Patrick said next.
“Would you like to dance?” His abrupt question cut right across the honeyed conversation taking place between Earl Wainwright and Lady Catrina.
The latter turned to him with a frown. As well she might. His interruption had been extremely rude.
Still, Patrick was astounded to hear himself apologize. He felt his neck grow hot inside his collar. “I’m sorry. When you’ve finished your conversation, of course.”
“No, no…!” Wainwright waved a paternal hand. “Take her, my dear old chap.” Like cheap gilt, some of the fake accent and British vocabulary had rubbed off on him.
“Please, Councillor Wainwright, do finish your story,” Lady Catrina cooed.
She hadn’t even glanced at Patrick, who was now pressed hard against the back of his seat by her single-minded determination to lean across him. Her bare, lovely shoulder was turned to him, so close that he could have nuzzled it with his lips if he’d wanted to.
Not