The Fiancée Charade

Gaze still caught and held by the purity of sky and sea, he let the soft chill of the night settle around him. An image from the past, of dark red hair across his chest, Gemma soft and warm against him, filled his mind, blotting out the night sky.

In the midst of the grief and betrayal of his father’s death there had been no time for the passion that had hit him like a thunderbolt.

But that was six years ago. Since then the situation had changed. His family had recovered from the double blow of his father’s death and the resulting scandal. The bank’s financial performance had been brilliant, thanks to his careful management and his younger brother, Kyle’s, flare for investment. The only fly in the ointment was Mario and his machinations, which had recently begun to stall business.

The raw relief he’d experienced when Constantine had said Zane was about to get engaged to Lilah Cole, a high-profile designer for Ambrosi Pearls, replayed itself.

His fingers tightened on the parapet as he recalled the earlier sight of Gemma with her arms around Zane’s neck. It was clear that she didn’t understand she had lost Zane to another woman.

The fact that Zane hadn’t had the courage to inform Gemma he was going to marry someone else made his jaw tighten. If he wasn’t mistaken, Gemma was about to be badly hurt.

It wasn’t exactly a repeat of the situation that had thrown them together six years ago, but it was oddly close.

The thought that, after years of careful control, utter focus on his work and family life, he could step into the maelstrom of passion that had swept him away in Dolphin Bay tightened every muscle in his body, but the desire to do so was tempered with caution. He couldn’t forget the power of the obsessive passion that had ensnared his father. There was no way he could abandon himself to desire, and suddenly he had his plan.

Gemma needed relationship stability in order to establish custody of her child. With Constantine unable to guarantee the loan he needed within a forty-eight-hour framework, he could use a believable fiancée, on a strictly temporary basis, to cut through the legal clauses preventing him from taking full control of his company.

A fake engagement would provide the solutions they both needed and in his case, a safe, controlled environment in which to explore the passion that coursed through his veins.

Satisfied, he left the terrace and strolled back into the Castello and the ornate reception room. Gemma was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Zane.

He would find Gemma, it was just a matter of time. Thanks to boyhood holidays spent running wild on Medinos, he knew every nook and cranny of the Castello. He only hoped he didn’t find Zane with her. If that was the case, he decided coldly, he would deal with the situation in the time-honored way, down on the beach and without an audience.

Gemma walked quickly down a small corridor and stepped into an anteroom that was currently used to hold coats and wraps. Closing the door behind her, she leaned on it for long seconds, allowing her breathing and her heart rate to steady.

Pushing away from the cold, dark wood of the door, she searched amongst the jumble of bags to find the canvas bag she had stashed in the room earlier.

Relief flooded her as her fingers closed over the strap. Hauling it from out of the expensive collection of designer handbags, she placed it on an ornate carved table that had probably been in existence for centuries and was no doubt worth an obscene amount of money.

The fact that the Atraeus family could put an heirloom antique in a room that was little more than a storage room underlined the yawning abyss between their lives and hers. Zane was not a typical Atraeus, which was another reason why she had found him so easy to get on with. Even though he bore the name Atraeus, he hadn’t come from wealth originally. He understood what it was like to be poor.

Fingers shaking with an overload of adrenaline, she checked the black lace negligee and a bottle of champagne that was rapidly losing its chill. At the bottom of the bag she had also stowed a glossy magazine she’d found with an article titled “How To Seduce Your Man in Ten Easy Ways.”

After careful thought, she had chosen the birthday surprise scenario, with her as the surprise. Nervous terror clutched at her just at the thought of actually having to resort to that tactic. Even viewing it as a scene she was acting, she wasn’t sure she could go through with it.

At the last minute, she had also slipped into her evening bag an envelope of melt-your-heart snapshots of Sanchia.

Plan C. Just in case she couldn’t go through with the seduction plan.

Gemma hurried down a corridor lined with cold fortress stone and archaic-looking brass lamps that glowed a soft buttery gold in the dimness. Mouth dry, she opened the door to Zane’s private quarters, using the spare key she had obtained from the cleaner’s office downstairs, and stepped inside.

A large sitting room with French doors opened onto a stone terrace. An ultramodern kitchenette occupied an alcove. Opening the fridge, she placed the now warm bottle of French champagne on a shelf to chill.

Briskly, she set about completing her preparations. If Zane had only agreed to talk to her, she wouldn’t have had to resort to these lengths, but as she stepped into Zane’s bedroom and was confronted with what looked like a king-size bed, the risk she was taking suddenly loomed large.

A niggling doubt surfaced. Encountering Zane’s coolness at the launch party had leached away her confidence. The fear that she had resolutely suppressed, that proposing a real relationship was a ludicrous solution, came back to haunt her.

The idea of proposing a fake engagement was seeming more and more viable.

The fact that she had an alternative solution cheered her up and brought her normal positivity and optimism bouncing back to the surface.

Heart beating even faster, she walked through to the bedroom, her gaze automatically flinching from the king-size bed.

Now that it had come to the crunch, her seduction plan seemed basically unworkable because of one chilly little fact. Sexually, so far, she hadn’t really felt anything for Zane.

It was a glitch she had happily glossed over, but that now loomed large—a fatal flaw in her plan.

She didn’t know why she couldn’t quite whip up the enthusiasm to fall passionately in love with Zane, despite both working and socializing with him. According to magazines and tabloids, practically every other woman on the planet was desperate for her ex-boss.

Instead she was shaking like a leaf and suddenly the whole idea of touching Zane, of actually shifting out of the comfortable casual friendship they’d shared to actually kissing him, seemed absurd.

An image of Gabriel and his cool, assessing gaze flashed into her mind. She stopped dead in the middle of the high-ceilinged lounge decorated in the spare but dramatic Medinian way, with dark furniture and jewel-bright Kilims scattered on the floor, her already shaky resolve wavering further. In that instant an oil painting featuring a woman draped in vivid, hot pink silk caught her eye. Pink was Sanchia’s favorite color.

The thought of her daughter and their predicament was a timely reminder.

Grabbing the bag with the negligee, she walked resolutely through to the bathroom. Keeping her gaze averted from a wall-length mirror in a heavily carved gold frame, another exotic museum piece, she quickly changed into the negligee.

As she straightened and shoved her dress into the bag she caught a full frontal view of herself and blushed. With her hair tousled, her eyes dark, her pale skin gleaming through the lace, she looked like a high-priced courtesan.

That was the whole idea, of course, so she could hopefully shock Zane into seeing her as a woman instead of just a friend. But crazily, she still felt as if what she was planning was some kind of betrayal of Gabriel.

Although why should she feel guilty that after two years of dating she was finally attempting to launch her relationship with Zane on to a proper, intimate footing?

Unless, in her heart of hearts, she did still carry a torch for Gabriel?

She blinked at the thought, which had been at the edge of her mind ever since she had overheard the conversation in Gabriel’s mother’s hotel suite.

It would explain her emotional reaction, then the tension that had zinged through her when she had caught sight of Gabriel tonight. Not just tension that he was in the room and could possibly find out about Sanchia, but an acute feminine reaction that had shivered along her nerve endings and heightened all of her senses.

The kind of reaction that had hit her six years ago, and that had ended in a pregnancy.

The kind of reaction she had failed to feel for Zane.

The stark realization that she had been incapable of falling for anyone since the passionate interlude with Gabriel hit her with enough force that she froze in place.

She drew a shaky breath, feeling faintly ill. It was time to take her head out of the sand. The utter lack of sex and passion in her life wasn’t because she was too busy as a working mother, and simply too tired to date. Or that she was ultrapicky about a man’s qualities because, first and foremost, she needed to choose someone who would be good for Sanchia.

It was because somehow Gabriel Messena did still matter to her in a deep, intimate, personal way.

Blankly, she walked out of the bathroom. Stomach tight, legs feeling like noodles, she came to a halt in the middle of the sitting room. Dazed, she stared at the cool white walls, the rich trappings of the room. She didn’t know how it could have happened, just that it had.

On an intellectual level, she had convinced herself that she had cut ties with Gabriel and wasn’t attracted to him in any way. But the problem was that she had been a virgin when they had made love. Gabriel was her first and only lover. She had never fallen for anyone else in her entire life, including her teenage years. All of her experiences of love, sex and passion were bound up with Gabriel.

It was no wonder her body had reacted. She had seen Gabriel and the emotions and sensations she had only ever experienced with him, and that she had never gotten closure for, had resurfaced.

A knock on the door sent adrenaline shooting through her veins.

Logic told her it couldn’t be Zane; he wouldn’t knock. The thought that it could be Gabriel made the breath catch in her throat, although the whole idea that, after glimpsing her at the party, he would come after her, or even know that she was in Zane’s room, was ridiculous. He hadn’t contacted her in years, so why would he now?