Carole Mortimer - The Billionaire's Marriage Bargain

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DOMINICK scowled HIS displeasure as the intercom on his desk buzzed, totally interrupting his train of thought. He should have told his secretary he didn’t want to be disturbed for a couple of hours. After four months of careful planning, he was now on the brink of achieving his goal, and had been sitting behind his desk in his penthouse office overlooking the Thames, relishing that thought in peace and solitude.

Four months. It had seemed longer. Much longer. But to have rushed in four months ago, without giving the problem his usual careful attention, wouldn’t have made the revenge he was now planning half as sweet.

Revenge, he had once been told, was a dish best eaten cold. He was cold now, icily so, and intended savouring every minute of the downfall of the man who had wounded his pride four months ago, when he had taken Kenzie from him.

Dominick turned his chair from the magnificent view outside to press the intercom, the irritation audible in his transatlantic drawl. ‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Masters on line one, Dominick,’ Stella, his stalwart secretary informed him, totally unconcerned by his obvious impatience with her interruption.

His mother was phoning him?

Although why the hell she still called herself Masters, when she had been married—and divorced—twice more after divorcing his father thirty years ago, Dominick had no idea!

‘Tell her I’m busy,’ he rasped.

‘I did,’ Stella came back unruffled. ‘But she says it’s urgent.’

He sighed his annoyance. ‘Remind me to forget your Christmas bonus this year,’ he muttered, cutting off Stella’s knowing chuckle as he accepted the call. ‘Mum,’ he greeted tersely. ‘Whatever it is, can you make it quick? I have—’

‘Dominick.’

Everything stopped. Movement. Breathing.

Just his name, uttered in that sexily husky tone, was still enough to bring his well-ordered world briefly to a halt.

He hadn’t seen or spoken to Kenzie in four months, and he had no idea why she should be telephoning him now. Although the coincidence of it, when he was so close to exacting his revenge, didn’t escape him…

‘Dominick?’

Not his mother, after all.

But the woman whom until recently, he had called his wife. Who was still his wife. Even if she had left him to be with another man. The man Dominick was so relishing bringing to his knees.

He drew in a sharp breath, and his dark gaze narrowed. ‘Kenzie,’ he acknowledged abruptly.

Kenzie easily recognized that coldly forbidding tone. The ice man was what she had called him during the argument that had preceded the end of their brief marriage.

Argument?

No, there hadn’t been an argument, she acknowledged heavily, only Dominick’s coldness and her own disbelief at his accusations.

Her hand tightened defensively about her mobile. She hadn’t wanted to make this call. She would rather have done anything than make the first move after these months of silence, aware that Dominick had hated her when she’d left, and knowing him well enough to realize that his hatred would only have increased during that time.

‘Well?’ he snapped his impatience with her silence.

It was the same old Dominick, she thought. He was always impatient, always caught up in some business deal or other, never having the time to listen, to even try to understand her.

Her shoulders tensed before she quickly shook off these negative thoughts. There was no point in going there. Nothing had changed. She hadn’t. And Dominick certainly hadn’t.

She hadn’t been absolutely sure when she’d made the call that he was in London at the moment, but she could picture him now, sitting behind the glass-topped desk in his luxurious ultra-modern office. The building he worked in was sumptuous recognition of the highly diversified multimillion-pound Masters empire Dominick had made. As well as owning his own airline, a television company and a casino in the South of France, he also had exclusive hotels in all the major capitals of the world.

Yes, she could picture her husband now, with his dark, slightly overlong hair, brooding brown eyes that could turn black during strong emotion, arrogant slash of a nose, and fine chiselled lips above a squarely determined jaw. His wide shoulders, tapered waist and long, long legs would be dressed in one of the expensively tailored suits he bought from Italy, while his shoes would be handmade from the same country.

Just thinking of the way Dominick looked was still enough to make her heart beat erratically and the palms of her hands become damp—

‘Either tell me why you called, Kenzie, or get off the damned line; I have work to do,’ Dominick barked uncompromisingly.

‘So what’s new?’ she retorted.

‘Well?’ His impatience was barely suppressed now as he refused to respond to her sarcasm.

But hearing Kenzie’s voice again like this, completely out of the blue, was not conducive to pleasant conversation.

Not that there had been any chance of that anyway where Kenzie was concerned. None of his emotions had ever been lukewarm where Kenzie was involved. Fierce desire the first time he looked at her. Cold fury when she walked out of his life into the arms of another man.

‘I—need to talk to you, Dominick,’ she told him quietly.

His mouth twisted. ‘Isn’t it a little late for talking? I received the divorce papers a month ago,’ he added harshly.

He had received them, and put them away in his desk drawer unanswered.

But maybe that was what she wanted to talk to him about…

Was she really in so much of a hurry, so desperate to legally end their marriage, that she was even willing to speak to him personally in order to get a positive response?

Because she already had husband number two lined up…?

Jerome Carlton, of course, the man she had left him to be with, who was no doubt willing to give her everything Dominick couldn’t. Was Kenzie actually thinking of marrying another man before the ink was dry on their own divorce papers?

He should never have actually married her, having never thought marriage was in his plans for the future at all until he met her.

After witnessing the mess his parents had made of their own marriage, plus their subsequent ones, Dominick had never considered getting married himself, and had certainly never wanted to bring a child into that minefield of emotions. His own childhood had been a nightmare of pseudo stepfathers and stepmothers, none of which had lasted very long.

But around fourteen months ago he had met Kenzie at a party in London to celebrate the opening of yet another Masters hotel, and it had taken just one look at the tall, beautiful, internationally famous model for him to decide he was going to have her in his bed. Her beauty was dazzling, her sensuality enough to send his pulse racing and, as a woman reputed to remain aloof from any sort of affair, she had been a challenge.