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

If only, she thought and swift, hard tears ached in her throat.

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.