Cinderella After Midnight

She was about thirty-five years too young for Wainwright, but that didn’t seem to concern the man. Untamable blond hair framed her face, and her eyes shone like brown sugar melting with butter in a hot skillet. She had long lashes, a glove-tight dress, full lips and a fabulous figure.

Of course, he’d seen it all before, Patrick quickly decided. Of course he had! He’d seen it bigger, better and sexier.

Still, he was intrigued. Not by the packaging but by the motivation. No one else had been watching her performance as she sashayed past. That it was a performance, and not at all genuine, Patrick was already quite certain. And this made him wonder about a few things.

Why, for example, had she pretended to recognize him? That recital about Alasdair Double-Barrelled-Moniker and the Whatsit-shire Hunt was too complicated. He was annoyed that she had chosen such a strategy. Overly elaborate. Unnecessary.

He frowned.

Wouldn’t it have been a lot simpler just to trip over the carpet and lunge at his knee? A woman like this surely wouldn’t begrudge a spilled glass of champagne and a dry-cleaning bill for his suit in a good cause, would she?

And why the phoney British accent? It was good. Very good. None of the vowels had slipped. Still, he was in no danger of believing it to be genuine. He’d learned in business never to take anything at face value. So…why?

He considered the issue, enjoying the fact that his mind was engaged now.

Presumably it was the Most Eligible Bachelor thing. He regretted the publicity that had given him, now. There had recently been a couple of how-to books written expressly for gold diggers. Maybe this was all written down in black-and-white in chapter four. “Capture his attention by pretending to be a card-carrying member of the British aristocracy.” Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown was the name she’d selected for the evening, apparently.

He examined his options with a degree of relish. Challenge her at once? She deserved it, but for some reason he was tempted to play along with her game.

He had just decided on this second option when he made a very disconcerting discovery. Astonishingly, he, Patrick Simon Callahan, aged thirty-six, with a net worth upwards of twenty million dollars and still climbing, and a not-insignificant quantity of personal appeal as well, was not Lady Sugar-Eyes’s target at all.

“Councillor Wainwright, I’m so pleased to meet you,” she gushed, ending the round of formal introductions. Patrick hadn’t paid much attention to any of it until now. He slumped back in his seat, pushed aside by the sheer force of her determination.

“Lady Catrina, it’s an honor,” the councillor replied earnestly. “I love your country. I visit England every chance I get. In fact, you may know some friends of mine…”

“Oh, really? How marvelous!”

She was leaning past Patrick. On display was a tastefully moderate yet very alluring quantity of silky-skinned cleavage. Fixing her warm, liquid brown eyes on Councillor Wainwright, she nodded encouragement at the man’s words, denied knowledge of his old friends, and offered some no doubt fictional names of her own. Lord Peter Devries? The Honourable Amanda Fitzhubert?

For some reason, the very appealing effort that she was putting into hunting completely the wrong quarry immediately irritated Patrick up to the eyeballs. What was it that mom had drummed into him and his seven brothers as children? It had been one of the more annoying sayings of an otherwise excellent and well-beloved parent.

“If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

He now discovered to his horror that he agreed wholeheartedly with these prim words of mom’s. If a woman was going to be a fortune hunter, if she’d gone to all the trouble of shimmying herself into that delectable, form-fitting dress, gate-crashing this event, inventing an upper-crust identity, perfecting the accent and wangling an introduction, then she should at least be good at it. She should aim high. She should choose the right man.

Him.

Leaving aside any other considerations, such as age, physical endowments and suitability of temperament, Patrick was streets ahead of Councillor Wainwright where it really counted to a woman like this.

In the bank.

It wasn’t that Patrick himself measured his masculinity in financial terms. He didn’t come from a moneyed background, but from a good, solid family in which other values—honor, love and Christian charity—took precedence.

Occasionally he was cynical about those values, but deep down he believed in them. He’d started to realize just lately that one of the reasons he still wasn’t outrageously in love and blissfully married like his brothers Tom, Adam and Connor, was because he just couldn’t respect or love a woman to whom money and possessions and regular appearances in magazine gossip columns were the be-all and end-all.

The pity of it was that when you were widely known as a rich young gun in the world of computer commerce, you attracted such women—beautiful and sophisticated women, many of them—in droves. The fictitious Lady Catrina was clearly one of them. That was strike one against her. The fact that she was doing it all wrong was strike two.

So there was no excuse at all for what Patrick said next.

“Would you like to dance?” His abrupt question cut right across the honeyed conversation taking place between Earl Wainwright and Lady Catrina.

The latter turned to him with a frown. As well she might. His interruption had been extremely rude.

Still, Patrick was astounded to hear himself apologize. He felt his neck grow hot inside his collar. “I’m sorry. When you’ve finished your conversation, of course.”

“No, no…!” Wainwright waved a paternal hand. “Take her, my dear old chap.” Like cheap gilt, some of the fake accent and British vocabulary had rubbed off on him.

“Please, Councillor Wainwright, do finish your story,” Lady Catrina cooed.

She hadn’t even glanced at Patrick, who was now pressed hard against the back of his seat by her single-minded determination to lean across him. Her bare, lovely shoulder was turned to him, so close that he could have nuzzled it with his lips if he’d wanted to.

Not that he did, he reminded himself.

“Heavens, no, Earl! The story’s not very interesting,” said one of the women farther around the table. She was watching Lady Catrina suspiciously. “Do go and dance, you two!”

The woman was dressed magnificently in chartreuse beaded satin, and her cheeks were rosy-bright from champagne. She looked to be about fifty-five, and it suddenly clicked. For heaven’s sake, this was Darlene, Earl Wainwright’s wife!

Patrick wanted to coach his gold-digging, pseudo-British friend, “Get real! Sheesh, woman! You can’t make a play for the man in front of his own wife!”

Perhaps Lady Catrina had realized this herself. Trying unsuccessfully to disguise her reluctance, she stood up.

“Dancing! How splendid!” she exclaimed unconvincingly. She tossed a frown back at Earl Wainwright, then apparently accepted the inevitable and took a step towards the ice.

Patrick glanced down at her spiky black heels. “Better take my arm, I think. We have to navigate that ice.”

“There are escorts for that,” she told him absently. “On skates. Here.”

She reached the edge of the carpet and was joined by a bladed male. A skate bunny took Patrick’s arm and helped him skitter across to the comparative safety of the wooden dance floor. Now he was face to face with her, and the music was slow. He took her into his arms.

Inwardly, Cat was still cursing the stranger. What had he said his name was? Patrick something. Callahan, that’s right, “Managing Director of Callahan Systems Software,” someone had said.

It wasn’t important. The only reason she’d accepted his invitation to dance was because it would have drawn too much attention if she hadn’t. She certainly didn’t want to upset innocent Mrs. Wainwright any more than absolutely necessary.

She tallied up the details of Patrick Callahan’s incredible good looks with less warmth than she’d have shown in assessing the shape and size of a Christmas tree in a wintry sale yard. Yeah, sure, he had it all. The height, the build, the hair, the shoulders, the Grecian nose and jaw, the healthy tan on his skin, the air of confidence, assurance and bone-deep entitlement.

He was the kind of man she detested, no doubt about that. An upmarket version of how Barry Grindlay must have been fifteen or twenty years ago. Barry Grindlay, the sleazy developer who was poised to bulldoze sweet, frail Cousin Pixie’s family home the moment the rezoning of lower Highgate Street went through in the middle of August. Barry Grindlay, who had no intention of paying Pixie market value for the place if he could possibly help it. Barry Grindlay, who refused to accept the fact that Pixie didn’t even want to sell in the first place.

In other words, Patrick Callahan was…had to be…arrogant and totally ruthless in his wealth and good looks. He had that sense of unquestioning entitlement written all over his face. He was the type who’d do anything for money, Cat was quite sure. And he undoubtedly believed that money could do anything for him, including pick up any woman he wanted, close any deal he wanted, buy any opinion he wanted.

In contrast to Grindlay, however, the CEO of Callahan Systems Software wasn’t important enough in Cat’s life to take the trouble of loathing. All she had to do was get this dance over and done with as smoothly as possible.

Doable. Easy.

He took her hand and held her in the middle of her back, and they began to waltz. Cat was thankful for Jill and Pixie’s dance lessons over the past couple of days. Patrick Callahan had done this before. He didn’t make the clumsy man’s mistake of trying to cover too much ground at once. They just pivoted gently in one spot, in three-four rhythm, leaving him plenty of time to gaze intently into her eyes.

Which, for some reason, he seemed keen to do.

They didn’t talk at first. Cat had to concentrate very hard in order not to start muttering, “one, two, three, one, two, three,” under her breath.