The Highest Price to Pay

It made her feel ill, and it shouldn’t make her feel anything at all.

“Good. Great. Have fun.”

She turned and walked out of the club, embracing the chill of the night air as it hit her face. She needed it, needed a good dose of reality. What had happened in there wasn’t real. It wasn’t possible for a woman like her. And even if it were, she couldn’t think of a single man she should want less.

It didn’t change the fact that her heart was still pounding wildly and her body felt empty and unsatisfied. Didn’t change the fact that when she closed her eyes it was his face that she saw.

CHAPTER FOUR

“IT’S headline news in the society pages,” she said, still feeling numb with the shock of her discovery.

“The press has an unhealthy fascination with my sex life,” Blaise responded, his voice still rich and enticing, even over the phone.

Ella stared down at the picture of the two of them, shrouded in near darkness in a secluded corner of the club, their lips nearly touching. Her stomach contracted and heat flooded her face. His body, so near to hers, so hot and dangerously tempting.

She shook her head and tried to banish the rogue thoughts. “I thought you said the press always printed the truth about you.”

“Usually, if I’m with a woman, she’s my lover. Or she will be by the time the night has ended.”

That thought made her scalp prickle, made her breasts feel heavy. “Well, I’m not.”

“No, but we were together. And they know I recently purchased your loan, a move that they presume was a bailout, a way for me to help out the current woman in my life.”

“Shoddy reporting,” she said tightly. “Someone needs to write a letter to the editor.”

She sat down in front of her laptop and pulled up the statistics for her website. It was something she did out of habit every day. She liked to know what brought people to her website, to get a window into the kind of people that viewed her work and to help get an idea of where she needed to buy advertising.

Her eyes widened when she saw the number of visitors she’d had, and they widened even more when she saw the keywords that had brought them to the site. Blaise Chevalier and Ella Stanton lovers. Blaise Chevalier Ella Stanton girlfriend. Blaise Chevalier Ella Stanton engaged. The last one made her inhale the sip of tea she’d been taking. She coughed into the phone.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I…I have about four times the normal amount of traffic to my website and…almost everyone was searching for information about the two of us.” She looked back down at the article in the paper. “I…wow.”

“That is the kind of press you need.”

“And I got it at the kind of event you said was beneath me,” she said, feeling the need to point it out because his superior tone grated.

“It helped that you were keeping the proper company.”

That rendered her speechless for a full three seconds. “Your ego really is staggering,” she managed to say.

“I fail to see how acknowledging my appeal to the media is evidence of my ego.”

“Hmm.”

“You disagree?”

She couldn’t deny that she never would have gotten such a prominent feature in the society pages if it weren’t for him. She couldn’t deny that Blaise’s aristocratic heritage, his reputation for being completely ruthless and his status as a first rate womanizer, and the fact that she was with him, were probably the key elements to the fact that there was any interest in her attendance at the party. But she didn’t have to like it. And she could still think he had a big ego. Because he did. Any man who could callously walk off with his brother’s intended bride and then, after the damage had been done, abandon her as well, was hardly a man of humility.