Captured by the Billionaire / Sold Into Marriage. Maureen Child
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to know what you’re doing about this.” She moved around the office, trailing her fingers across glossy tables, stopping to peer at the jam-packed, rigidly aligned bookshelves and then moving eventually to the wall of windows behind him. She stared out at the opulent view and while she looked at the ocean, Gabe looked at her.
“I made a few calls,” he lied smoothly. There was no one to call. The authorities weren’t really interested in her. Her resemblance to the jewel thief supposedly running around the islands meant nothing to them. Gabe was the only thing keeping Debbie on this island. And she wasn’t going anywhere until he was good and ready to see her leave.
“And?” she asked.
“And…nothing so far.” He saw the helplessness glint in her eyes as he added, “The authorities are looking into the situation.”
She shook her head slowly, sadly. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
A quick twist of something that might have been guilt shot through him as fast as a lightning flash. He ignored it. “Don’t worry.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Easier than she knew.
She chewed at her bottom lip in a nervous gesture he recognized and Gabe knew how worried she was. Guilt threatened again and was ruthlessly squashed. Hell, he wasn’t hurting her. He was just giving her a hard time for a few days. Soon enough, she’d be back to her life and he’d have had the revenge he was due.
Watching her, as she stood so closely and yet so far from him, it finally came to Gabe just how to exact the payback his pride demanded. He was going to seduce her. Make her want him as he had once so desperately wanted her. And when she was limp with desire, ready to beg him to take her back…he’d cut her loose as surgically as she had done to him so long ago.
If that meant he would be forced to hold her captive on the island for a while longer, then that’s just what he’d do. As he’d already told her…he owned the island and everything on it. Here, he made the rules.
“I called my friend Janine,” she was saying, “and she said she’d get her fiancé to look into this for me, but I don’t know what Max can do.”
“Max?” he asked.
“Max Striver. He’s—”
“I know Max,” Gabe interrupted, and wondered if his old friend really had taken the plunge and proposed to the cute little brunette he’d spent so much time with in the last few weeks.
“You know him?”
“For a few years. And I never would have thought he’d get married again. Are you sure about this?”
“Hmm? What? Oh, yeah. Apparently he followed Janine home to Long Beach and proposed. They’re getting married in London in a few weeks.”
“Amazing,” he mused, sitting on the corner of his desk. Of course, looking back, he could see that Max had been drawn deeper and deeper into the relationship with the woman he’d been paying to pretend to be his wife. Strange that now she’d be his wife for real. “He always said he’d never marry again.”
“People change,” she said lightly.
“Apparently.” He shouldn’t have been so surprised, really. He’d known that Max’s father had been after him to marry and start building on the family dynasty.
Debbie was staring at him, a question in her eyes. “You never got married?”
“No.” He stiffened, then forced himself to release the swift punch of tension gripping him. He hadn’t thought of marriage again until recently. But that wasn’t part of this conversation.
“Gabe…”
“Forget it,” he said, not wanting to hear her explanation of why she’d turned down his marriage proposal ten years ago. It was over. And now, his life was different. He was different. He wasn’t an eager young man following his heart anymore. Now he made decisions based on logic. Cool, clear logic.
“We should talk about it,” she said. “About what happened between us.”
“No point,” he said. “It’s over and done. Let it go. I have.”
Four
Gabe insisted they have a late dinner at Fantasies’ rooftop restaurant.
Debbie wanted to be doing something about her predicament, but since Gabe said all that could be done was being done, she’d had little choice but to try to relax. She wore the strapless, short black dress she’d brought with her on vacation, because it was the only dressy thing she had. But she also loved the way it fit, smoothing over her curves and flaring into a swirling skirt three inches above her knees.
Gabe’s green eyes had fired when he first saw her in it and that little jolt of confidence had done a lot for her.
Now, they sat at a private table, on the corner of the roof, with a wide, black sky glittering with stars above them. The moon’s reflection danced on the surface of the ocean and a soft breeze twisted the candle flames into a frenzied dance. The table was spread with a pristine, white-linen tablecloth and sported a single red rosebud in a crystal vase as a centerpiece. While the other people at the restaurant chatted and laughed, Debbie watched Gabe and wondered how he’d come so far in only ten years.
Physically, he looked much the same—long, thick, dark-blond hair, streaked gold now by the sun, a tall, lanky body that belied the strength in him. His face was sharp angles, piercing green eyes and a mouth that had, long ago, been able to reduce her to whimpers in seconds.
When she had known him, he’d been mostly a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy. Yet tonight, he wore a finely tailored tuxedo and looked as though he’d been born to it. In fact, with that long hair, pulled back at the nape of his neck, his high cheekbones and steady eyes, he looked both elegant and dangerous.
Enough to bring most women to their knees.
And she, Debbie thought, was no exception.
There was an air of tightly leashed power about him now that he hadn’t had ten years ago. She’d noticed how the staff at Fantasies practically came to attention when he entered a room. He seemed to know every employee by name and every one of those employees jumped into action when he quirked a finger.
And she wondered again if there were some remnants of the man she’d once known beneath the veneer of sophistication he carried now.
“What’re you thinking?” he asked, and she just barely caught the low rumble of his voice over the hum of conversations surrounding them.
Debbie smiled, reached for the glass of chilled white wine in front of her and took a sip to ease the dryness in her throat. “Just that you’ve changed a lot.”
There was no answering smile in his eyes, but he nodded his head in acknowledgment. “I had plans. I saw to it that they succeeded.”
If there was a barb in that statement, Debbie chose to ignore it. After all, ten years was a long time. Maybe he really had let the past go. Shouldn’t she do the same? “I don’t understand, though, how you did it? How’d you accomplish so much so quickly?”
He shifted his gaze to a nearby waiter, subtly signaled and had the man bustling over to top off their wineglasses. When the waiter had retreated again, Gabe said, “A combination of hard work and luck.”
“I’m guessing that’s the short version.”
Briefly, his mouth curved into a half smile. “It is.”
“How about the other version?”
He took a breath, blew it out and said, “There were a couple of lean years. Took a job in the Middle East, working security for the oil fields. Big money, not a lot of places to spend it.” One shoulder lifted in a shrug. “I banked my pay, invested most of it.”
Debbie