Cole Cameron's Revenge

“…and whatever scheme you were up to then was more important.” Faith stood up. The floor tilted slightly and she gave herself time to recover by smoothing down her skirt. “Not that it matters now.”

“Oh, it matters.” Cole folded his arms over his chest. “After all, today’s payoff time.”

“Payoff time?”

“Sure. Finding out how much the Cameron estate is worth.” His smile was all teeth. “Big doings, huh, baby?”

“And that’s the reason you showed up, isn’t it? To stake your claim?”

“Yes. Exactly. I’m here to claim what’s mine.” He let his eyes move over her with slow insolence. “You might want to button your jacket before we meet with Sam Jergen.”

She looked down at herself, then at him. He saw the soft rush of pink rise to her cheeks and he gave her a slow, knowing smile.

“I opened it after you passed out. You were warm. Warm, and wet.” Deliberately, he dropped his voice to a whisper. “That’s what you were always best at, baby. Being warm and wet for me.”

She bunched her hands into fists and he knew she wanted to hit him but she wasn’t a fool. This was her big moment. Faith wasn’t going to show what she was all about this morning. He saw her fingers shake as she closed the buttons but when she spoke, she sounded calm.

“It’s difficult to believe you and Ted were brothers. He was a gentleman.”

“That’s why you were able to fool him into marrying you.”

The cool facade dented. “I didn’t fool him into anything.”

“Sure you did.” Cole caught her wrist as she started past him. “I’d never have fallen for that trick.”

“Let go of me, please.”

“It’s the oldest game in the world.”

“Let go, Cole.”

“Telling a man he’s made you pregnant—”

Faith swung toward him. “That’s not the way it was!”

“—and after he’s done the right thing, married you and given you his name, you bat your eyes and say, whoops, sorry, I made a minor miscalculation—”

“What?”

“But Ted was a good guy. He was too decent to say, okay, the joke’s over and I want a divorce.”

She stared at Cole in amazement. Yes, she’d made Ted promise not to tell Cole about her child but was it possible he still didn’t know?

“‘Pregnant? Let me see a lab test,’ another guy would have said, but not Ted. How’d you work it, Faith? It couldn’t have been easy, first luring him into bed, then making him think you were having his baby—”

“Damn you! You know it all, don’t you?” Her voice trembled with rage; her eyes glittered with it. “But that’s not the way it was. I didn’t…” Faith stopped herself in midsentence. Why tell him more than she had to? “He said—he wanted to marry me.”

Cole’s hand tightened on her wrist. “What’d you think, huh? That maybe my old man would change his mind about a slut like you if he thought Ted was going to give him a grandson?”

“Let go of me!”

“You can’t run away, Faith. Not yet.” Cole grinned. “It’s payoff time, remember? The will. Don’t you want to know what you’re getting?”

She wrenched her hand free and this time he let her. “I hate to disappoint you,” she said softly, “but I already know. Ted told me.”

“Did he,” he said, but she knew it wasn’t a question.

“I never wanted the Cameron money.”

“Of course not.” Cole’s eyes narrowed. “Money wasn’t why you married my brother.”

I married your brother because I was pregnant with your child. The words were on the tip of her tongue but Cole would never know that. He never had to know she had a child at all. All she had to do was get through the next hour. He’d leave Liberty and she’d never have to see him again.

“Believe what you like,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me. Nothing about you matters to me. I came here to see Sam Jergen, not to be insulted.”

Cole could feel his anger growing. She was playing at being a lady. She looked the part, even sounded it, but he knew exactly what she was.

“Damn you,” he growled, grabbing her shoulders and pushing her back against the wall. “The worst part of this is trying to figure out how the hell Ted and I could have been such fools.”

“Take your hands off me!”

“There was a time you wanted my hands all over you.”

“Stop it.”

“What’s the problem, baby? Don’t you like being reminded of how things used to be?”

“You—you bastard!”

Cole laughed. “Scratch the surface and find the truth. The lady bit is only skin deep.”

“Let go of me. Let go, or so help me, I’ll—”

“What? What will you do?”

His hands slid from her shoulders to her wrists. She winced and he knew he was hurting her but he didn’t care. She’d hurt him far worse, not that it mattered anymore. He’d been over her for a long time, purged himself of the memory of her scent and taste in the arms of a hundred other women. What he couldn’t get past was knowing that she’d made him hate his brother for so many years, and for what? There wasn’t a way in hell she’d ever been worth the pain she’d caused.

“What did you figure, Faith? That maybe, if you were lucky, I’d never come back? That way, you’d get it all. The name, the money…”

She was crying now, tears he knew were supposed to melt his heart and turn him to clay in her hands. She’d wept in his arms that night he’d made love to her.

“Don’t, sweetheart,” he’d whispered, feeling clumsy and helpless, afraid he’d hurt her, and she’d kissed him and said she was crying because she was so happy, because of how it felt to belong to him, at last.

“I didn’t want any of it. Not the name, not the money…”

“Sure you didn’t.” Cole clasped her face, forced it up to his. “You married my brother because you fell head over heels in love with him. Oh, yeah. I’ll just bet you did.”

“I told you. I don’t give a damn what you believe—”