He didn’t even look at Alicia. His gaze went straight to Alicia’s daughter, and for a most satisfactory moment that she knew she wasn’t imagining Devon saw blank shock rigidify every muscle of his face. She lowered her lids demurely, as befitted a woman with very little experience. A woman whose packaging, to quote him, didn’t warrant a second look. Then she allowed the most innocent of smiles to play on her lips.
But when she looked up, her smile was directed solely at Benson.
Right up until the last minute, Jared had thought he’d have to give Alicia away: a duty he would have performed punctiliously and with genuine loathing. But as he and Benson had left the house via the conservatory, his father had said, “Alicia’s going to ask Devon to give her away. So you’re off the hook.”
Annoyed with himself for having made his distaste for the task so obvious, Jared said shortly, “I met her. The daughter, I mean. She’s not what I’d expected. She’s tall and frumpy with a tongue like a chainsaw.”
“Really? Alicia showed me a photo—I thought she was very pretty.”
“A good photographer can make a rose out of a cactus.”
Benson said abruptly, “Have you got the ring?”
“Yes, Dad—you’ve asked me that twice already.”
“There’s Martin, waving at us. Time to take our places.”
Martin was the butler; his signal meant that Alicia was ready. Jared glanced at his watch. Seven minutes past six. Devon Fraser was remarkably prompt. For a woman.
He followed his father under the shade of the awning, nodded at the clergyman and studiously avoided looking at the guests. Lise was presumably somewhere in that crush. She’d cajoled him for an invitation, and he’d made the mistake of sending her one. He was going to have to decide what to do about Lise, he thought, and winced as Aunt Bessie attacked the portable organ with her usual gusto and total disregard for the printed score. If he, Jared, were ever foolish enough to get married—a stupid proposition; he had no intention of allowing himself to be tied for life to one woman—he’d get married on his yacht. Aunt Bessie suffered from seasickness. Aunt Bessie wouldn’t set foot on anything remotely resembling the deck of a ship.
From the corner of his eye he saw his father turn and smile at his prospective bride. He was about to become her fifth husband. Anger coiled tight in Jared’s gut. He’d done his best to talk his father out of this ill-advised wedding, and then he’d tried a little judicious bribery of Alicia. Neither of which had worked. Even though he’d offered Alicia a very considerable sum.
She could get more from a divorce settlement; that, he was sure, had been her reasoning.
He was damned if he was going to smile at Alicia. At least the clergyman had insisted the photographer keep his distance during the ceremony. So if he, Jared, didn’t feel like smiling at anyone, he didn’t have to.
Devon Fraser had claimed he was sulking because he hadn’t gotten his own way. Had he ever known a woman to get so quickly and so thoroughly under his skin?
Another of Aunt Bessie’s chords screeched along his nerves. Surely Alicia and her daughter were nearly at the altar—they could have walked from Central Park to the Bronx by now. Fighting down his impatience, Jared looked around to check on their progress.
A tall woman in a shimmer of turquoise was walking toward him, looking straight at him, her head held high.
Her beauty slammed into his chest as though he’d been punched, hard, on the breastbone.
Her hair was heaped on her head, and shone like ripe wheat, baring the slim line of her throat. Her shoulders rose from her dress in impossibly elegant curves; the swell of her breasts made his heart thud as though he’d dropped a twenty-kilo weight. Ripe breasts. Full breasts. Voluptuous breasts, their pale sheen like the petals of the orchids she was carrying. In her cleavage a blue stone shot sparks of fire.
Her hips swayed gracefully as she walked; under the gleaming silk skirt her legs seemed to go on forever.
But it was her eyes that held him. Those exquisitely wide-spaced eyes that had so disconcerted him when he’d pulled off her sunglasses on the front step. He’d been expecting mousy brown, or light gray. Anything but irises the brilliant blue of a tropical sea. Eyes he could drown in.
As his groin tightened involuntarily, Jared knew with every fiber of his being that he wouldn’t rest until he had Devon Fraser in his bed. Until he possessed her in the most primitive of ways.
This was the woman whose packaging he’d derided? The woman he’d labelled a frump? Was he losing his marbles?
With a faraway part of his brain, the only part that still seemed to be functioning, Jared suddenly realized that Devon was fully aware of the effect she was having on him, and that his response had pleased her enormously. Then she dropped her lids, the smallest of smiles playing on the soft pink curves of her mouth.
A kissable mouth. A deliciously seductive mouth.
Damn you, Devon Fraser, Jared thought vengefully. You took me in with your high-necked blouse and your rumpled suit and your washed-out cheeks. Took me in but good. But you won’t do it again. Not twice in one day.
Because I’m going to teach you a lesson. I don’t know how yet. But I’ll figure out something.
I don’t like being jerked around by a woman. Made to look like a fool. I don’t like that at all. Before this farce of a wedding’s over, you’re going to wish you hadn’t done it.
With a small jolt he realized the clergyman was clearing his throat, and that the four of them were now neatly lined up in front of all the guests. Pay attention, Jared. Forget Devon Fraser, at least for the next few minutes. You’re supposed to be the best man.
May the best man win.
He didn’t know where that line had come from. But he did know he meant it as far as Devon was concerned. She might have won the first round. She wasn’t going to win the second. He was going to get his revenge one way or another.
Revenge was a strong word.
The sonorous, old-fashioned words of the marriage service rolled over him. Devon’s profile was turned to him: a straight nose and decided chin, the gleaming weight of her hair. He wanted to pull out the pins and let it tumble to her shoulders. He wanted to thread his fingers in its soft sheen, and through it caress the rise of her breasts. He wanted to push her flat on satin sheets and lower his body onto hers until… He was doing it again, he thought viciously. What the hell was wrong with him? She was a woman, that was all. One more woman.
She’d be willing. Of course. They all were.
Which was the crux of the problem.
He was an extremely rich man. He wielded a lot of power in the places where it mattered. Plus there was something about his looks and his body—he knew this without vanity—that women found attractive. Add to that the fact that he was unmarried and what did you have? A challenge that every female between the ages of eighteen and forty-five thought they should take up.
It would be a change, he thought cynically, to be seen for once as a man. Just a man. Instead of a corporate figurehead wrapped in thousand dollar bills.
Some chance. Women didn’t operate that way.
Trouble was, he was also bored to the back teeth with all the games. He knew every move from beginning to end. The first date, the artful questions, the intimate dinner—during which he always made his boundaries plain: the relationship had to be on his terms or not at all. But very few of them listened, and if they did they took it as another challenge—to achieve what other women hadn’t been able to. Then there was the first kiss, the gifts he got his secretary to send, the flowers. The lovemaking, the pouting when he made it plain that, no, he wouldn’t stay overnight; he never did. The inevitable