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Bargaining with the Billionaire: The Blackmail Bargain / The Billion-Dollar Bride / How To Marry a Billionaire

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CHAPTER SEVEN

WINEGLASS in hand, Peta gazed around the art gallery. People chatted, laughed, sipped, eyed each other up—only a few, she noted with faint amusement, were actually bothering to inspect the exhibits.

Her heart contracted into a tight, hard ball when she saw a couple of women frankly ogling Curt. She didn’t blame them; he looked magnificent, the male elegance of black and white evening clothes subtly underlining his effortless combination of sexuality and power. Cold panic hit her like a blow, and she felt again that odd sense of disconnection, as though she had stepped off the edge of her world into another where the rules no longer applied.

Then the chattering around them suddenly fell off into what could only be called a subdued hum. People began eyeing them covertly, and while one couple edged back, a few eased closer.

Anna Lee. Peta braced herself and took refuge in an intense scrutiny of her wineglass.

She heard a rich voice say, ‘Darling, there you are! I wondered if you’d got bored and decided to flee.’

Curt smiled with a trace of irony. ‘Hello, Anna. Have you met Peta Grey?’

Her stomach in free fall, Peta turned. The small blonde beside Curt gazed earnestly around and said, ‘No, where is he? Should I know him?’

Without a flicker of amusement Curt introduced Peta. At least, she thought as Anna Lee gave a peal of laughter, she wasn’t too badly outsmarted in the couture stakes. Not that her long bronze skirt and silk top had anything like the sexy panache of the other woman’s outfit, a startling purple bodysuit with an exquisite transparent kimono draped over it to emphasise her sleek body.

‘Why do people give their children androgynous names?’ Anna enquired of nobody in particular. She sent Peta a glance that revealed her mistake had been deliberate. ‘Tell me, Ms Grey, did your parents want a boy?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Peta said, because her father’s heartfelt longing for a son was no business of Anna Lee’s. Skin prickling at the tension in the air, she forced herself to produce a cool smile.

‘Well, at least he got a big strong child,’ Anna said dismissively, before gazing up at Curt with a confiding smile. ‘How was your sojourn in the wilds of Northland? Too boring, I imagine.’

‘On the contrary,’ he returned, a thread of steel in the clipped words. ‘I found it fascinating.’

Anna’s pout emphasised her lush mouth. ‘Amazing,’ she murmured, lengthening the middle syllable. ‘I didn’t think gumboots and peasants were your thing.’ She turned to Peta and ladled insolence into her smile. ‘What do you think of the modern trends in New Zealand abstract art?’

Peta said tranquilly, ‘I’m afraid I’m an unashamed traditionalist.’

Anna gave a tinkling little laugh. ‘Somehow I’m not surprised. Such a pity—you won’t find many pretty flowers here.’

‘Well, no,’ Peta said every bit as sweetly. ‘Some are a little too derivative of Braque and the Dadaists, but all in all it’s not a bad exhibition.’

‘Oh, you’ve been researching,’ Anna cooed, but chagrin darkened her large eyes. She waved at someone past Peta’s vision and stepped back. ‘I’d better circulate. Lovely to see you again, Curt. Ms Grey.’

Curt waited until she’d left before murmuring, ‘All right?’

Peta turned glittering green eyes on him. ‘You should have warned me that I was being used to break off an affair.’

‘It was already over.’ His voice warned her not to trespass any further.

‘It didn’t look like it to me!’

‘Stop frowning,’ Curt ordered. Behind the narrowed, intimate smile he bestowed on her was an implicit threat.

Although Peta obeyed, she was furious and oddly grieved. Humiliation, she thought stringently, had to be walking into an event where you expected to shine and seeing your ex-lover with another woman, one who was nowhere near so beautiful as you were!

She despised Curt for his effortless handling of the situation. There was something heartless in his self-possession, a dangerous indifference that cut like a knife. Yet his smile sent her blood singing through her veins in a swift rise of desire, darkly intoxicating and perilous.

Being in Curt’s power chafed her unbearably, because it meant they weren’t equals.

For the next hour she circulated with him, meeting people she recognised from newspaper photographs, people whose faces were familiar from television, several she’d even seen on the big screen.

In a tense way she enjoyed it; Curt kept his promise to stay with her, and although everyone seemed curious, they were interesting.

And some of the art was magnificent; she found it intensely stimulating to discuss the pictures with people who understood them.

Eventually Curt said, ‘Time to go.’

Outside, she was startled to find that although the sun had set it was still light—the precious few minutes of northern twilight before darkness came down onto the city. As they turned into his drive the first street lamp flicked orange, and the scent of gardenias saturated the sultry air.

‘You did well,’ Curt said, switching off the car engine as the door of the garage came down behind them.

‘Thank you,’ she said tonelessly.

She got out before he had time to open the passenger door for her, and waited for him to disarm the security.

Once inside the house he said, ‘Dinner will be waiting.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not hungry. I’ll skip it and go straight up to my room.’

His expression hardened. ‘You’ve eaten nothing.’

The thought of forcing food past her lips nauseated her. ‘I don’t want anything,’ she said abruptly, and ran up the staircase.

Although he didn’t answer she fancied she could feel him watch her. Safely in her lovely room she stripped the sleek silk clothes from her body and hung them up, creamed the expensive cosmetics from her face, and showered the last bit of Curt’s money off her skin.

Only then, wrapped in her elderly dressing-gown, did she accept that her fury was rooted in jealousy.

Not just jealousy, although that would be bad enough. Disgusted by Curt’s action in producing her as the woman in possession—ha! How bitterly ironic that was!—she was more hurt by the aura of connection that still clung around him and Anna Lee.

Restlessly she paced the floor, arms folded across her waist as though to hold herself together.

You’ve fallen in love with him.

No. To love someone you had to respect him, and she didn’t respect Curt. He’d seen her as someone he could use, and he was deliberately, cold-bloodedly using her.

When had he broken up with Anna?

It could only have been during the three days before she’d come down from Tanekaha, because Nadine had seen them together just before Granny Wai’s party.

Even if he had broken off his affair with Anna, taking another woman to the opening tonight was ruthlessness carried to cruel extremes.

On the other hand, he was doing it for his sister.

And perhaps he’d seen a way of killing two birds with one stone—showing Anna that her affair with him was well and truly over, while scotching Ian’s guilty affection.

Stop looking for excuses for him, Peta told herself sternly, walking across to the window. Anna might not be the kindest or nicest person in the world, but she didn’t deserve humiliation. Nobody did.

A knock on the door startled her. Breath locking in her throat, she froze.

Curt’s voice was coldly forceful. ‘If you don’t open the door, Peta, I’ll break it down.’

‘Come in, then,’ she said, infuriated when her voice quivered in the middle of the defiant challenge.

He’d changed into a T-shirt that showed off his broad shoulders and muscled torso. To her astonishment, he carried a tray. ‘Food,’ he said. ‘Eat it.’

‘Or you’ll force-feed me?’

‘Something like that,’ he agreed.

She could imagine him doing just that. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said dully.

‘Possibly not, but you’re upset, and going to bed on an empty stomach won’t get you a decent night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’re going out on a friend’s yacht so you’ll need to be alert.’

She bit her lip, but her stomach betrayed her, reacting to the delectable scent of food with a beseeching rumble. ‘I’ll eat it when you’ve gone.’

‘I don’t trust you,’ he told her.

She stared at him, met implacable blue-grey eyes, and knew she was beaten.

With a ramrod spine, and shoulders held so stiffly they ached, she walked across to the small table in the window where he’d set the tray down.

Clearly it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d hold out. Well, how could she?

Peta lifted the cover from the plate and stared at a dish of scrambled eggs, smooth and creamy and delicate. ‘Did you get your poor housekeeper to do this specially for me?’

‘No.’ He sounded amused. ‘I cooked them.’

‘Pull the other leg,’ she said without thinking.

He grinned and leaned against the wall. ‘I can cook three things,’ he said calmly. ‘Scrambled eggs is one of them.’

The eggs were as delicious as they looked. After the first mouthful had gone down she asked, ‘What are the others?’

‘Steak and chips, and Thai red curry,’ he told her.

She swallowed another mouthful. ‘Why those three in particular?’

‘Because I like them.’

Well, yes, of course. Oddly enough the turmoil in her stomach had eased with the arrival of food. Anna’s reference to her as a peasant popped into her head; she grimaced.

‘Did I get a piece of eggshell in there?’ Curt asked.

‘No,’ she said shortly, glad to be reminded of his perfidy. It astonished her how the simple act of scrambling eggs for her had mellowed her attitude. Clearly she was a pushover.

She said, ‘I assume my main function on the yacht is to hang on your arm and gaze adoringly at you?’

‘My ego doesn’t need stoking quite that badly,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Besides, I don’t want to ruin my reputation for finding both brains and beauty in my lovers.’

Peta had got to her feet and was putting the cover onto the plate. His words startled her into looking up. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said sharply, because of course she didn’t believe him. ‘I’m intelligent enough, I suppose, but I’m not beautiful.’

Curt walked across the room towards her. ‘The first time I saw you I thought you were the most stunning woman I’d seen for years.’

Hands clenched on either side of the tray, she stared at him. His voice had been unemotional, but as he got closer she realised that his eyes were lit by a blue flame. An answering flame burst into life inside her.

She swallowed to ease her dry throat and croaked, ‘I don’t believe that for a moment. I was covered in mud.’

‘And exceedingly disdainful,’ he agreed, removing the tray from her hands and putting it back onto the table. ‘I had to stop myself from kissing that sneer from your lovely mouth.’

‘You were as arrogant as you could possibly be.’

‘As far as I knew, you were my brother-in-law’s lover,’ he pointed out, and kissed her, his hands tangling in the sleek weight of hair at the nape of her neck.

Shivers of erotic delight leapt from nerve end to nerve end. She’d gone rigid, but his mouth melted her resistance so that she sagged into his arms, lifting her face in mute, open invitation, everything banished from her mind but the sheer physical excitement of his touch.

Rapturously she yielded to the fierce demand of his mouth, the iron power of his arms, the hard support of his body as he cradled her against him—to her own craving, a longing infinitely more complex than simple, straightforward lust.

Something different about the quality of the kiss should have alerted her to danger, but she was so lost in pleasure she didn’t notice until it was too late to react.

‘Sweet and fiery and potent,’ he said against her lips, his voice raw and deep.

Heat scored her skin, but she met his hooded gaze unflinchingly, the golden fire that smouldered in the depths of her eyes matching the blue intensity of his.

Raw need beat up inside her, wild and reckless, and for the first time in her life Peta understood how the lightning strike of passion could shatter everything—all common sense, all the strictures that kept you safe. With Curt she didn’t want to be safe—she wanted to follow this white-hot primeval hunger to wherever it took her.

Curt touched his lips to the corner of her mouth in a kiss as soft as it was sensuous, then gently bit the side of her throat.

Peta’s heart filled her body with erotic drumming.

When she gasped his name he said, ‘You’ve got such a lazy, throaty voice, a summer voice, and then you look at me and I see storms and a desperation that almost matches mine.’

His words seemed to come from far away, and she thrilled to the authentic note of need in them, stark and carnal and consuming.

Hunger beat up through her, so ferocious she could taste it in her mouth, feel it stabbing through every cell in her body.

‘I know,’ she said, and something in her snapped.

Or perhaps it slotted into place and she knew her mind for the first time in her life. Even if this was wrong—if Curt was lying to her—she wanted him. For once she was going to emerge from the safe blandness of the life she’d constructed so carefully, and follow her questing heart wherever it led her.

So when his hand slid beneath her robe, she reciprocated with fingers splayed across his shirt. But she could only clench her hand on the thin material because her whole body tensed unbearably while he stroked gently, knowledgeably towards the tightly beaded centre of her breast.

‘Are you sure?’ His voice was guttural.

‘Absolutely.’

Curt forced himself to examine her face, trying not to swear because her tentative caress had shredded his control. She’d said the single word like a vow, her eyes blazing, her head held high and her mouth—oh, God, her mouth—firm, for all its lush promise.

He had to fight down the reckless urge to grab her, fling her on the bed and sink into her, lose himself in her sweet fire. Clenching his jaw against stark desire, he let his hand fall. ‘I can stop now; soon I won’t be able to.’

A savage wanting twisted inside Peta and she shivered. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

His hard, beautiful mouth compressed, then relaxed into that shark smile. ‘Thinking is a real problem right now,’ he murmured, a lean hand finding the tie around her waist.

He gave it a rapid, sure tug. The belt dropped free and the front of her gown swung open, revealing that she had nothing on beneath it.

Curt froze, and she looked at his profile, so close, so absorbed, the bold angles and lines clamped into a mask of hunger that should have terrified her.

Instead, her sharp craving exploded into keen torment, fuelled by his closeness and the dark intensity of his gaze on the soft golden curves of her breasts. A rush of pride reinforced her courage; his trademark self-control was shattering in front of her.

He looked into her eyes. Slowly, giving her time to stop him, he pushed the shoulders of the wrap back. The soft material whispered over her skin, licking against it in slow, delicious provocation.

Need savaged her, half pleasure, half pain. Her breath panted between her lips, and it took every scrap of willpower to stand still. At last the gown fell to the floor, and she stood in front of him, tall and slim and naked.

Moving quickly, he hauled the shirt over his head. Lamp-light glowed bronze on his big, lithe body, collecting in pools of light and shadow. The unsparing strength of his desire coiled around her, stoking hers to create a conflagration.

‘Last chance,’ he said harshly.

Peta shook her head.

She expected him to strip off the rest of his clothes, so when he picked her up and carried her across to the bed she gasped.

Muscles coiling, he stooped, hauled the coverlet back and lowered her onto the sheet. Its coolness contrasted with the heat collecting in all the hidden places of her body. Bemused, she ran her hand across the swell of his biceps, letting her fingers loiter sensuously against the fine grain of his skin.

‘That’s not a good idea,’ he said between his teeth.

Humiliation searing through her, she snatched her hand back, but he caught it in mid-air.

‘I like to be touched,’ he rasped, and kissed her fingers, ‘but for this first time, take it slowly.’

He released her and while she lay dazed with excitement because he was planning a future for them, he kicked off his shoes and undid the fastening of his trousers and stepped out of them.

Peta’s heart shut down. Sleek-skinned, powerfully made, he was big everywhere, she thought dazedly—big and experienced—and she had no idea whether she was going to be able to take him. She knew enough about sex to understand that most women could accept most men, and she certainly wanted him, but—

Surprisingly, he understood. ‘Don’t worry—it will be all right,’ he promised in a thick, heated voice, and came down beside her, one arm sliding beneath her neck so that her lips were only a centimetre away from his.

She couldn’t control the tension that stiffened her muscles and dried her mouth, but instead of the onslaught she unconsciously feared he kissed the pulse in her throat, and the erotic little caress eased her into pleasure again. She turned her face into his hair, inhaling the subtle, intoxicating scent of his skin.

Enslaved by his kisses, his slow, worshipful caresses, her mind drifted until all she was aware of was the sleek slide of his body against hers and the building excitement inside her—a different kind of tension, one she welcomed because Curt made it so easy.

His mouth and his hands discovered other pleasure points: the sensitive place where her throat joined her shoulder, a certain spot at the back of her neck. Some he kissed, some he nipped, slowly, exquisitely letting her become accustomed to his touch.

At last he said against the upper curve of her breast, ‘Not nervous any longer?’

‘No,’ she said languidly, afloat on a tide of honeyed delight. If she called a halt now she’d never forgive herself.

She lifted a heavy arm and buried her fingers in his hair, warm from his body, black against her skin. If he wanted to pull away she didn’t have a hope of holding him, but the pressure of her fingers reiterated her need and her desire and her surrender.

Peta waited, while his breath smoked across her skin, and then he smiled and turned his head slightly and his mouth closed around a pleading nipple.

The first strong tug of suction sent a sexual signal ripping through her; her body arched in astonished response, and a note of wonder broke in the back of her throat.

In one fluid movement Curt slid both arms beneath her back, holding her free of the sheet so that her breasts were offered to him while he resumed the drugging seduction.

Peta had never known such rapture. It swamped everything else, rioting through her in scintillating waves, setting her alight and anchoring her intensely in that bed, in Curt’s arms, willing prisoner of his mouth and hands and of the mastery of his lean, aroused body.

When he lifted his head she moaned in dismay, but this time it was to take her mouth, his open hunger displayed for the first time. She responded with ardent agreement, writhing against him, and eventually his hand found the flare of her hips, and delved further into the place that ached for him.

Peta pressed against that seeking hand, gasping when he set up a rhythm, gasping even more when his fingers entered her in a simulation of the intimacy she needed so desperately.

‘Please,’ she muttered helplessly into his neck. ‘Oh, please…’

‘You don’t need to ask,’ he said, his voice abrasive with barely leashed hunger. ‘I’m more than willing to please you.’

He positioned himself over her; she looked up into molten eyes and a face drawn into a hard, triumphant mask. For a moment her heart quailed; he filled her vision, blocking out the rest of the world so that all she could see was Curt.

And then he lowered himself and she felt his blunt probe at the passage that waited for him. Peta’s eyes widened as he eased slowly in. She swallowed.

The cords in his neck stood out. ‘All right?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she breathed, and hooked her arms around his shoulders and pulled herself up around him, enclosing and enfolding him, offering herself to him in the most basic, most primal way of all.

Blue fire swallowed every shard of grey in his eyes; his powerful shoulders flexed and he thrust hard and deep, taking her in one strong push that cracked Peta’s world open and forced her into another dimension.

Colours she had never seen before spun in front of her, unknown sensations ricocheted through her, and she cried out hoarsely and clutched him, fingers digging into his hide as she clenched muscles she hadn’t known to exist around the length of him.

‘Peta?’ he demanded, easing back.

She shuddered at the fierce intensity of his tone. ‘Don’t you dare stop,’ she commanded.

His expression relaxed and he kissed her and began to push again. ‘No,’ he said against her lips.

Peta learned that making love was like a dance, a smooth meshing of bodies, of rhythm, of movement, of breath and touch and the sounds of their loving—soft murmurings, the relentlessly increasing thud of their hearts. Tender when she wanted tenderness, erotically demanding when she needed that, but always in control, Curt led her along undiscovered pathways of passion until she shuddered and bit his shoulder and moaned deep and long, head flung back in pleasure so keenly sharp it was close to anguish because it wasn’t enough…

That was the moment everything changed; a rough, low sound was torn from his throat, and from then on there was nothing deliberate about his movement, nothing controlled or restrained.

Their bodies fought and melded, struggling to reach some unachievable goal in a primitive mating battle that led inexorably to wave after wave of pleasure so extreme she thought she might die of it.

And then a bigger, more dangerous wave caught her and tossed her up into an alternate universe where nothing but ecstasy existed, spreading through her in unbearable delight.

Dimly she heard herself cry out again before she was lost in Curt’s possession. Dimly she heard a guttural sound break from him when he too reached that place, and his big body went rigid and they moved together like a single entity.

And then the slow descent into dazed, exhausted peace sucked her into darkness.

She woke to a different darkness and lay in stunned stillness, trying to work out where she was. She was in her usual position, on one side. She was hot—but not with the usual heat of a summer night. This heat came from within her and beat against her.

Subtle sensory clues wove their way between her defences. A different feel to the bed—no movement, but she knew someone was beside her. When she opened her eyes the memories smashed through, and she recalled everything, from her surrender to those final moments when she’d convulsed with unmatched rapture in Curt’s arms.

.

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