Blackmailing the Society Bride

‘Wendover Square. Number twenty-one.’

‘Arncott Street.’

They had both spoken together.

‘Make yer mind up,’ the cabbie complained.

‘Wendover Square,’ Marcus repeated, before Lucy could speak, leaving her to glower angrily at him.

‘It would have been easier if he’d dropped me off first, Marcus.’

‘I want to talk to you,’ Marcus told her coolly.

‘So talk,’ she said recklessly.

‘In private,’ Marcus informed her in a very gritty voice.

The taxi driver was turning into Wendover Square, its elegant Georgian houses overlooking one of London’s most attractive private squares.

Marcus’s house—the same house his grandfather and his great-grandfather had lived in, in fact all his ancestors right back to the Carring who had first begun the bank in the days of the Peninsular War—had just about the best position in the whole square. Four storeys high and double fronted, with a proper back garden, it was a true family house, and Lucy could see how impressed the cabbie was as he pulled up outside it and unlocked the door for them.

‘I do hope that whatever you want to say to me isn’t going to take too long, Marcus.’ Lucy was trying to sound as businesslike as possible—a difficult task when suddenly, for no discernible reason, her tongue seemed to be slipping and sliding over her words, and the motion of the taxi had made her feel very dizzy indeed.

‘No Mrs Crabtree?’ she managed to articulate, when Marcus opened the door and there was no sign of his housekeeper. As Lucy knew, the woman treated her employer as though he were at the very most one step down from god status.

‘She’s gone to stay with her daughter, to help look after her new baby.’

‘Oh!’ Lucy gave an exclamation of surprise as she semi-stumbled in the hallway.

‘I told you you’d had too much to drink,’ Marcus said grimly. ‘And you’re certainly in no fit state to go anywhere on your own.’

His accusation stung—and all the more so because it was just not true. She didn’t drink! But before she could say so, he was continuing curtly, ‘You’re out of touch, Lucy. The tipsy, thirty-something, Bridget Jones-type female is over. The in thing now is the committed working mother with two children and a husband—and if you don’t believe me take a look at your own friends. Carly and Julia are both married now, and both mothers.’

As though she needed reminding of that! Lucy thought miserably.

‘I am not thirty-anything,’ she told him crossly instead. ‘And, just in case you had forgotten, I’ve been married.’

‘Forgotten? How the hell could anyone forget that?’

‘And I have not had too much to drink,’ Lucy added forcefully.

The look Marcus gave her made her whole body burn, never mind just her face.

‘No? Well, all I can say is that if this is the state you were in when Nick Blayne picked you up, it’s no wonder—’

‘It’s no wonder what?’ Lucy stopped him. ‘No wonder that I went to bed with him? Well, for your information, I went to bed with him because—’

‘Spare me your reminiscences about how much you loved him, Lucy,’ Marcus told her flatly. ‘Blayne saw you coming and took advantage of you—financially, emotionally, and for all I know sexually as well. He used you, Lucy, and you let him. Couldn’t you see what he was?’ he demanded in exasperation. ‘I should have thought even a sixteen-year-old virgin could have recognised that the man was a user.’

‘Sixteen-year-old virgins probably have better eyesight than twenty-plus unmarrieds,’ Lucy retaliated flippantly. How many times had she used flippancy as her defence against the powerful blasts of Marcus’s irritated broadsides? Surely more than enough to know how much they increased his ire. But what else could she do? Without her protective shield of nonchalance she might just break down into a sobbing wreck of pleading female misery, and he would like that even less!

‘I loved Nick,’ she lied wildly.

‘Did you? Or did you just want to go to bed with him?’

‘A girl doesn’t have to marry a man in order to have sex with him these days, Marcus. She doesn’t even have to love him. All she needs to do is simply do it.’

She could see the contempt flashing through his eyes as he looked at her.

‘Have you any idea just how provocative that statement is? Or how vulnerable you are?’

Lucy stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that right now any man could get you into his bed.’

‘That is so not true!’

‘No? Want me to prove it to you?’

‘You couldn’t,’ Lucy objected recklessly.

‘No?’

He reached for her so suddenly that she didn’t even have time to think about evading him, never mind actually do so. One minute she was standing in his hallway, the next she was in Marcus’s arms, held securely against him. His mouth came down on her own, hard and sure, hot with male pride and anger, and he took her half-parted lips in a victor’s kiss. And she didn’t care, she didn’t care one little bit. A feeling far more potent than the bubbles from a thousand bottles of champagne hit her emotions. He was kissing her. Marcus was kissing her.

Marcus was kissing her.

Marcus was kissing her!

CHAPTER THREE

‘OH. MMM. Oh…’ Greedily Lucy clung, both to the sensation and to the man delivering it, reaching up to wrap her arms tightly around Marcus’s neck as she caved in to her own need. She had wanted him too much and for too long to resist this…this miracle of miracles, she decided headily, and she moved even closer to him, trying to ease the ache deep inside her body by arching into him and moving her body against his.

‘Oh, Marcus…’ she sighed ecstatically, as she felt the unmistakable surge of his erection pressing into her.

‘Lucy…no!’ He pushed her sharply away.

Bereft and stunned, she stared reproachfully at him.

‘You see, this is exactly the kind of situation I’ve brought you here to avoid,’ he told her brusquely. ‘If I’d let you make your own way home—’

‘But what if I don’t want to avoid it?’ Lucy demanded provocatively. ‘What if I want…’ What on earth was she saying? Another minute and she’d be telling Marcus that this was what she had been dreaming from the first time she had stood opposite him in his office. Dreaming of, lusting after, longing for…

‘Never mind what you want,’ Marcus told her acerbically. ‘What you need right now is to sleep off that champagne.’

Reddening and humiliated, Lucy started to walk towards the door. ‘Well, in that case I’d better go home, then, hadn’t I?’ she said petulantly. The truth was that, whilst she wasn’t drunk, the glass and a half of champagne she’d had was a whole glass more than she normally had to drink—on an empty stomach, too. And there was no doubt that the combined effect of Marcus’s presence, the privacy of his house, plus the intensity of her feelings for him were all working together to make her want to put into practice the feverish lust-filled desires she had kept hidden for so very long. However, dizzy with lust and longing though she was, she was still in control enough to recognise that the best place for her right now was somewhere with a comfortable bed and no Marcus.

‘No way.’ Marcus stopped her. ‘You can sleep it off here. Come on—this way.’