Revenge is Sweet. Sharon Kendrick
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gave her a long, steady look and Lola curled her nails hard into the palms of her hands in a deliberate attempt to distract herself from the power of that gaze.
‘Well, that is what you were implying, isn’t it?’ she demanded.
‘You’re being very defensive,’ he murmured, and poured her some mineral water.
‘So what if I am?’ she retorted, drinking some of the water thirstily. And who wouldn’t be defensive, she thought wryly, when they’d had to cope with as many snide innuendos as she had that evening? ‘Anyway, I’ve talked far too much. Tell me some more about you.’
‘What else could you possibly want to know?’ he drawled.
‘You haven’t even told me what you do for a living!’ she realised aloud. ‘Or how you know the mysterious Dominic Dashwood.’
‘I deal in money,’ he told her curtly, his grey eyes as cold as an arctic sea. ‘Dominic I met during my time at Oxford.’
She remembered the small but significant pause after he had introduced himself at the tennis club. ‘And should I have heard of you?’
‘Not necessarily.’ He shrugged. ‘Only if you happen to read the financial pages—and then I’ve been in New York for the past ten years so it’s unlikely you’d have heard of me anyway. I’ve only just come back.’
‘And what brought you back?’
Another pause. ‘Family business,’ he said finally, his face hardening forbiddingly.
Lola took no notice. ‘So what does someone who deals in money actually do?’ she persisted.
His face grew even colder. ‘I buy and sell,’ he told her tersely. ‘That’s all.’
Lola registered the superb quality of the suit he wore. Clearly buying and selling, as he put it, was very lucrative indeed! ‘You make it sound so simple,’ she said slowly.
There wasn’t a flicker of emotion on his face as he watched her unconscious assessment of him. ‘I prefer not to make it sound anything at all,’ he told her flatly. ‘But you asked the question, as women inevitably do—’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Lola glared at him. ‘You asked me exactly what you wanted; what did I do that was so different?’
‘You homed straight in on the money side of it, didn’t you, sweetheart? Sometimes I really think it would save time if I produced a bank statement for women to peruse at their leisure!’
‘Oh, sor-ry!’ said Lola furiously. ‘I didn’t realise you were so touchy about money!’
‘When you’ve met as many women with dollar signs flashing in their eyes as I have,’ he mused with distaste, ‘then being touchy about it is inevitable.’ He gave a self-deprecating shrug of his shoulders, before he said, ‘Were your parents very rich, Lola?’
The deep, velvet undertone of his voice sent new shivers skating down Lola’s spine, but she could not quite decide whether it was excitement or fear which had caused them. ‘Why do you ask that?’ she queried.
His eyes glittered. ‘Isn’t it rather obvious? Your house on St Fiacre’s for one thing. How did you happen to come by a house like that on your salary?’
‘How do you think I came by it?’ she retaliated as she encountered the oh, so familiar judgemental expression on his face.
‘A man, I suppose?’
Lola met his gaze and read the condemnation there and didn’t care. How dared he judge her without even knowing her? ‘That’s right,’ she said steadily.
‘A rich man?’
She saw the censorious look which soured his expression and decided that she would like to sour it even more! ‘You’ve got it in one!’ She smiled and noticed his knuckles whiten as the bread stick he had picked up was reduced to dust by the inadvertent clenching of that strong fist.
‘A ve-ry rich man,’ she purred deliberately, and saw a muscle begin to work violently in his cheek. ‘Much richer than you, probably. Why, I expect he could buy you out a hundred times over, Geraint!’
He let the bread dust trickle out of his hand into the large, cut-glass ashtray, so that it looked like sand running through an egg-timer. His eyes were full of mocking amusement as they caught her in their cool gaze. ‘I doubt it,’ he contradicted her with soft confidence.
And Lola doubted it too; that was the trouble. She found herself wondering why she hadn’t stormed out of the restaurant, but one look at the lean, autocratic face in front of her reminded her that it was not easy to walk out on someone this gorgeous. She drank more wine in an effort to calm herself.
‘So what was it between you and your generous benefactor?’ he asked eventually. ‘The love-affair to rival all love-affairs?’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ she answered flatly, then sighed, wondering just how much to tell him. The trouble was that there was nothing much to tell—but nobody ever believed her! Lola had grown used to people who didn’t really know her drawing their own tacky conclusions! But for some reason that cold look of disapproval on the face of Geraint Howell-Williams was more than she could bear.
She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands to look at him earnestly. ‘I don’t really like talking about it,’ she admitted.
‘Oh?’
Lola glared at him. ‘Because nobody believes me, and because people tend to pre-judge me—they all seem to think that I’m some kind of amateur hooker who played for very high stakes—and won! A horrible, critical look comes over their faces—a bit like the expression you’re wearing now!’
‘Am I? Sorry.’ He lifted his shoulders in a gesture of appeal which had something of the little boy about it, and it stabbed at Lola’s soft heart.
‘Of course the other reason I don’t talk about it,’ she explained, her blue eyes glinting with mischief, ‘is because now that I own a prime piece of real estate I’m very wary of would-be fortune hunters.’
‘And do you put me in that category?’ he asked her softly.
She looked at him with a wry expression. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she snorted. ‘Fortune hunters don’t usually come kitted out in handmade Italian suits!’
‘Thank you,’ he said gravely, though Lola thought she detected a reciprocal glitter of humour lurking in the depths of his stormy eyes. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I?’
Lola went pink. ‘If you want.’
‘So why don’t you tell me all about the house?’ he suggested. ‘And let me judge for myself.’
What harm would the truth bring? Lola thought. Anything would be better than him believing that she had been Peter Featherstone’s lover. She began to pleat her napkin with fidgety fingers. ‘About three years ago, I first met Peter Featherstone on a flight to. Brussels—’
‘Did he have a woman with him?’ he demanded quickly.
Lola frowned at the interruption. ‘No.’
He nodded. ‘And so you got chatting—naturally?’
Lola gave him a long-suffering look. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, with sardonic emphasis. ‘We aren’t discouraged from chatting to passengers, you know. Do you have a problem with that, Geraint?’
His face was expressionless. ‘I guess not.’
‘Peter used to travel all over Europe quite regularly, and often I was among the cabin crew. And then one day, while we were chatting, quite by coincidence I discovered that he was on the board of a charity I’m involved with—’
‘Charity?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘You’re involved with a charity?’