Ally Blake - Bargaining with the Billionaire - The Blackmail Bargain / The Billion-Dollar Bride / How To Marry a Billionaire

Peta tensed, torn between relief and hurt pride. ‘I see,’ she said woodenly.

‘She’ll make it as painless as she can. I know how you feel; I hate shopping with a passion and so does my husband. Liz always says that because someone had to do the shopping in our household she was forced to develop a taste for it! Shall we go in?’

Far from resembling the Tanekaha homestead, Curt’s house was a gracious relic from the early twentieth century. On the path to the front door, Peta’s nostrils quivered at a familiar perfume—a gardenia bush spread its white velvety flowers across the path, their scent filling the air.

Another woman opened the door. How the heck many people did Curt employ?

‘Mrs Stable, the housekeeper,’ his personal assistant told her quietly.

The housekeeper, a wiry woman in her mid-forties with improbably red hair, showed her to a room that overlooked the harbour. Peta eyed the huge bed, the exquisite furnishings, and the magnificent painting on one wall—and wished herself back home. Damn Curt. How dared he go ahead and organise a shopping spree when she’d specifically told him she wouldn’t accept any money from him?

Well, why was she surprised? That was what men like him did—ploughed their way through life, trampling anyone who got in their way.

But she was nothing like her mother. Although she found Curt dangerously desirable, she certainly wasn’t in love with him. And even if she had been, pride wouldn’t let her follow like a dog at his heel.

And to be fair, the assistant’s daughter might have selected clothes from a hire firm…

Peta washed her face, and had just finished storing her pathetically few clothes in the huge wardrobe when someone knocked on the door.

Curt?

Consuming eagerness drove her across the room; she had to take several steadying breaths before she opened the door to a woman whose discreet chicness and resemblance to Curt’s PA gave away her identity.

‘You must be Liz,’ Peta said, masking searing disappointment with a fixed smile.

‘I am, indeed. Can I come in?’

‘Of course.’ She stood back, somewhat startled when the other woman surveyed her with impersonal intensity. ‘No offence, but I’m not too happy about this shopping idea,’ Peta said, hiding her awkwardness with a brisk overtone.

‘It’s Curt McIntosh’s idea, so we do it.’ Liz seemed to come to some decision. ‘OK, I can see which designers will be on your wavelength, but can I check the clothes you’ve brought? Curt said you’d be going to the opening night at a gallery and a dinner party, and spending a day on a yacht. He also said that although the clothes need to be good, they should be useful too, so no wildly impractical stuff. And he said that you’ve got great colour sense, which is perfectly obvious now I’ve seen you.’

Pleasure tingled through Peta, temporarily shutting down her indecision.

Liz glanced around, spied clothes through the open door of the walk-in wardrobe, and set off towards them like an elegant bulldozer. Peta opened her mouth.

And then closed it. Feeling alien and abandoned, she stood irresolute.

Liz took down a shirt. ‘Did you make this?’

‘I—yes.’

‘Good finishing.’ She directed a quizzical glance at Peta. ‘Curt warned me you’d probably object.’

‘Did he?’ Peta said through gritted teeth. Liz was probably wondering why on earth Curt had allied himself to a country hick. ‘Then you can tell him that I didn’t, can’t you?’

Liz gave a swift, sympathetic grin. ‘I’ve known Curt since Mum went to work for him, and one thing I’ve learned—well, me and the rest of the world!—is that if you’re stupid enough to go hand to hand with him, you’ll lose. He fights fair, but he’s ruthless and he’s utterly determined. How do you think he turned his father’s bankrupt business into a worldwide success?’

‘I believe he had to dump his father to do it,’ Peta said with cutting accusation.

‘True, because his father was the problem.’ Liz looked at her and seemed to come to some decision. ‘I’m not telling you anything everyone doesn’t know, so I can say that Mr McIntosh treated the firm like his own personal cash cow. When Curt took it over he turned it on its head and paid off the creditors in an astonishingly short time; he saved the firm and most of the employees’ jobs.’

Presumably her mother was one of those employees. ‘But to shaft your own father…’

Liz nodded. ‘I know. As I said, he’s ruthless.’

Peta walked across to the window and stared down past a green lawn, a swimming pool and a fringe of ancient pohutukawa trees. Between their branches the water of the harbour sparkled like gemstone chips.

From behind her Liz said, ‘But you know, I’d trust Curt with my life.’

A sound at the door made them both swing around. ‘Thank you for that tribute, Liz,’ Curt said smoothly. ‘Would you like to wait downstairs?’

She’d clapped one hand over her mouth, but she removed it to grin at him. ‘Certainly.’

Peta watched with tense awareness as he closed the door. Her heart had kicked into double time and the sensation running riot through her body was undiluted excitement. Three days had only served to hone her involuntary response to his potent male magnetism.

‘We made a bargain, you and I,’ Curt said pleasantly, but his eyes were grey and cold.

Her jaw angled in defiance. ‘I told you I wouldn’t let you pay for my clothes. You agreed to hire them.’

‘It’s not possible.’ He lifted his brows when she made an impatient gesture. ‘But if it means so much to you, you can pay for them.’

‘I can’t afford—’

She stopped because he came towards her, and something about his lithe, remorseless advance dried her mouth and stopped her heart.

‘If you mean what I think you mean,’ she said hoarsely, ‘that’s disgusting.’

‘Disgusting?’ He smiled and her blood ran cold. ‘What’s disgusting about this?’ he murmured, and bent his head.

Peta froze as his mouth drifted across one cheekbone. The elusive male scent that was his alone acted like an aphrodisiac on her, switching off her brain to leave her with no protection from the clamouring demands of desire except a basic instinct of self-preservation.

‘I am not a prostitute,’ she said thickly.

The ugly word hung between them. He laughed softly and said against her ear, ‘If you were I wouldn’t be doing this…’ His mouth moved to the lobe of her ear and he bit gently.

An erotic charge zinged through her, firing every cell into urgent craving.

‘…or this,’ he finished, and his mouth reached the frantic pulse in the hollow of her throat. He kissed it, and then lifted his mouth a fraction so that his breath blew warm on her sensitised skin. ‘And your heart wouldn’t be jumping so wildly.’

Tormented delight clamoured through her like a storm. Peta couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell him to stop using mock tenderness in his subtle, knowledgeable seduction.

She quivered, lost in a rush of desire that burned away the last coherent thought in her brain. Sighing against his lips, she opened her mouth to his.

The other kisses they’d exchanged faded into insignificance; she sensed a difference in him, a darker, deeper hunger beyond the simple desire of man for woman. It fuelled her anticipation into a raging inferno. She shuddered when his hand smoothed up from her waist, coming to rest over the soft mound of her breast. Hot, primeval pleasure burst into life inside her, aching through her body, softening internal pathways, melting her bones…

His touch felt so right, she thought recklessly, linking her arms around his neck and offering him her mouth. She’d been born for this dangerous magic, spent the empty years of her adult life waiting for it.