The Billionaire Gets His Way / The Sarantos Secret Baby: The Billionaire Gets His Way / The Sarantos Secret Baby

Something in his tone must have notched a chink in her determination, because her expression, which had begun to grow smug, suddenly went a bit slack. “Um, no?” she replied—in the inquisitive tense, not the demonstrative, which heartened him even more. “No, you can’t?”

“Ms. French, I can not only argue that the book is nonfiction, I can prove it.”

“That’s impossible?” she said. Asked. Whatever. “Because there’s no way to prove it? Because it’s all a figment of my imagination?”

“Really?” Gavin said. Asked. Whatever. Dammit.

This time, Raven French only nodded her reply. Evidently she, too, had realized that she was beginning to sound like an uncertain second-grader.

He strode over to his desk and withdrew his copy of High Heels and Champagne and Sex, Oh, My! from the drawer into which he had crammed it over the weekend. As he thumbed through the pages, he made his way back to where Raven French was standing, this time stopping with even less space between them than before to make her even edgier. Immediately, she took a step in retreat. Without looking up, he completed another step forward. That elicited another one backward from Ms. So-called Raven French.

“Tell me,” he said as he continued to flip through the pages and took yet another step forward, knowing it would be impossible for her to retreat further, since the door was now at her back. “Is Raven French your real name?”

When she didn’t answer right away, Gavin glanced up from the book to see that she’d bowed her head and was fiddling with a button on the sleeve of her jacket. When he looked at her face, he was astonished to find that she was blushing. What kind of high-price call girl blushed?

Immediately, he answered himself,Those whose prices are so high because they’ve become such accomplished actresses.

Doubtless the blushing was a part of her professional persona. Or at least had been when she was making a living on her back—or her stomach or knees or whatever position commanded the most money—before she had begun to support herself with the more honorable profession of libel.

“Ms. French?” he prodded. “Raven? Is that your real name? “

“Um, no. It’s a pen name.”

Just as he’d suspected. “And why would you take a pen name, unless it was to protect yourself from all the men you’d be outing in your book and all the lawsuits that would result once it was published?”

Still not looking at him, but at least giving up on making the button do something it clearly did not want to do, she replied, “Actually, it was the publisher’s idea for me to take a pen name, not mine.”

He nodded, found the page he wanted, marked it with his finger, and studied not-Raven French again. “So they must have wanted to protect themselves from all the lawsuits that would result once your book was published.”

She did look up at that, but the moment her gaze connected with his, it skittered away again. And, once more, pink blossomed on both cheeks. Amazing, Gavin thought.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a conversation with a woman who blushed. Even by design.

“Actually,” she said again, “they didn’t think my name was, um, exciting enough. They thought the book would do better if the author’s name actually sounded like a call girl’s name.”

“In that case, you won’t mind telling me your real name.”

“I guess not….” But her voice trailed off without her doing it.

Gavin said nothing, only did his best to crowd her space some more in an effort to make her even more uncomfortable. And he told himself it was because he wanted to maintain the upper hand and not because he was hoping maybe she’d blush again….

Violet’s breath hitched tighter in her chest when Gavin Mason inched another millimeter toward her, an action she wouldn’t have thought possible since the guy had practically crawled inside her already. And dammit, she really wished her muddled brain had put that another way, because saying anything about him being inside her only made her thoughts even more muddled.

She tried to pretend his nearness had no effect on her. Because his nearness really did have no effect on her. None whatsoever. Not a bit. In fact, she had barely noticed how much warmer the air—among other things—became when he was this close. And she had hardly paid any attention to the scant spicy scent of him that teased her nose, or the way the lamplight in the room somehow made his arresting pale blue eyes even paler and more arresting. And no way had she paid any attention to his broad, broad, oh-my-God-they-were-like-a-football-field shoulders or his chiseled, honestly-he-could-slice-gouda-with-those-things cheekbones.

Nope, the only thing Violet noticed was how his nearness had no effect on her. In fact, she noticed that so much that she continued to gaze at the floor, because it was way more interesting than Gavin Mason.

“Ms…. whatever your name is?” he prodded, making her twitch. “You were going to tell me your real name? “

Actually, she still hadn’t decided whether she was going to do that or not. Even if she refused to tell him her real name, she was sure he’d find some way to discover it. Not that she was taking any great pains to hide it. It had been the publisher’s idea, too, to copyright the book under her pen name. It wasn’t unusual for authors who assumed pen names to do that, they’d told her. To protect their privacy, they’d said. In case they made a gazillion dollars with their books and became big celebrities, she’d been told.

Yeah, like that was going to happen with a big lawsuit hanging over her head.

“Violet,” she heard herself say. Oh. Evidently part of her had made the decision to tell him her name. Would have been nice if that part of her had informed the other parts. “Violet Tandy.” She started to go one step further and tell him that Violet was a nickname, and that her real name was Candy Tandy, but if he didn’t believe Raven French was her real name, he certainly wasn’t going to buy into Candy Tandy.

He had started to open the book again, but closed it once more. “Violet?” he asked, his voice reflecting his obvious bewilderment.

Something in his tone made her feel defensive for some reason, and she tipped her head back to look him defiantly in the eye. Doing that, however, only made her defiance crumble. Nevertheless, she squared her shoulders and commanded herself not to look away.

“Yes. Violet. Is there a problem with that?”

He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. Then he shook his head. “Not a problem. It just doesn’t suit you, that’s all.”

Violet thought it suited her quite well, but she didn’t want to make an issue of it, so she said nothing. Gavin must have thought she would, because he remained silent for a moment more, one dark eyebrow cocked in query. Strangely, he seemed a bit disappointed in her continued silence, but then he opened the book to the page he had marked. And then—oh, dammit—he began to read aloud. “The moment I saw Ethan, I knew he was a captain of industry, the kind of man who had built his business from the ground up. He’d begun with dirty fingernails and secondhand clothes, performing backbreaking labor from sunup ‘til sundown to collect a paycheck that barely sustained him. He schooled himself at night, both in the ways of business and the streets, still managing to earn his degrees—yes, he had three of them—”

At this, he took a break from the reading to glance to the left. Violet followed his gaze and found herself looking at three framed degrees hanging on the wall.

“—three of them,” Gavin continued, returning his attention to the book, “earning them in less time than his infinitely more privileged classmates took to earn one. And don’t think the realization of that had humbled him in any way. On the contrary. Ethan’s feelings of entitlement, authority and superiority were all rooted in those early days and had only flourished since.

“Those days were well in his past, however. When I met Ethan, he was wearing a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Canali suit—wool and cashmere, of course—and Santoni loafers that must have set him back at least another fifteen hundred. His tie, I knew, was a silk Hermès—I’d soon learn that all of his ties were silk, which made those evenings when he wanted to tie me to the bed with them that much more enjoyable—and his shirt was a fine cotton Ferragamo. I know my men’s fashion, dear reader, and trust me. Ethan, more than any of the hundreds of men I’ve bedded, knew men’s fashion, too.”

He looked up from the page, closed the book, and stared straight at Violet. “I’m sorry I don’t read out loud with the breathlessness and pretentiousness a passage like this demands, but—”

“Breathlessness?” Violet interrupted indignantly. “Pretentiousness?” she echoed even more angrily. “Roxanne isn’t pretentious. Today’s readers love all that name-dropping product placement. Didn’t you ever watch Sex and the City? Jeez. And she’s only breathless because her clients pay good money for that kind of thing. They want her to sound like Marilyn Monroe.”

Gavin eyed her steadily, a faint smile dancing about his lips. “I thought you said this was fiction.”

Violet felt her defensiveness rising to the fore again, and she straightened, squaring her shoulders once more. “It is fiction.”

“The way you talk about Roxanne, she sounds like she’s real.”

Now Violet lifted her chin an indignant inch, too. “Well, she’s real to me. All my characters feel real when I’m writing about them.”

“Maybe because they are real? Real people you haven’t even tried to disguise except for lamely changing their names?”

“No way,” she stated adamantly. “You ask any novelist worth her salt, and she’ll say she feels like her characters are real, even if she knows they aren’t.”

“Everything you wrote about Ethan in that passage could be said of me.” He smiled in full now, but there wasn’t anything happy in the gesture. “But then, you already know that. How you know it, I’m not sure, because much of it isn’t common knowledge. You must have found someone who knew me twenty years ago in New York and paid them a bundle to reveal the information. Even more than I paid them to keep it quiet.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Violet assured him. “I’d never heard of you before you forced your business card on me.”

Now his smile turned indulgent. Which still wasn’t happy. “Okay. Let’s pretend you’re as ignorant as you say. Let’s act as if you really don’t know anything about me.”

“I don’t know anything about—”

“You saw the letters on my card,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “GMT stands for Gavin Mason TransAtlantic. I started off working as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks, loading and unloading ships for an auction house in Manhattan. Art, antiques, artifacts, that kind of thing. I didn’t have much interest in what was in the crates I pulled off the ships. I just wanted to pay for the college classes I was taking at night. Until one of the auction house guys left a catalog behind one day and I saw how much some of that stuff was selling for. Six, seven figures, most of it. And the auction house got a nice bite of the take. Just for moving the pieces from one land mass to another and unloading it for the seller.”

He smiled another one of those unhappy smiles. “Except that they weren’t the ones unloading the items. I was. They got to stand in a climate controlled place and push around paper. I was the one lugging crates in the rain and snow. From sunup ‘til sundown some days,” he added, quoting the passage from the book. “And all I got was union wages. So I started taking more classes, in addition to studying for my business degree, to learn more about the import business. And I still managed to graduate in less time than my … how did you put it?” He read from the book, even though Violet was sure he had the words memorized. “My infinitely more privileged classmates.”