Sandra Marton - The Bride Said Never!

Amazing, how a man so willing to risk everything making millions could refuse to take any risks at all, in matters of the heart.

Damian frowned as he looked over the magazines spilling across his desk.

Headlines screamed at him.

Are You Sexy Enough to Keep Your Man Interested?

Ten Ways to Turn Him On

Sexy Styles for Summer

The Perfect Tan Starts Now

Was there really a market for such drivel? He’d seen Gabriella curled up in a chair, leafing through magazines like these, but he’d never paid any attention to the print on the covers.

Or to the models, he thought, his frown deepening as he leafed through the glossy pages. Why did so many of them look as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks? Surely, no real man could find women like these attractive, with their bones almost protruding through their skin.

And those pouting faces. He paused, staring at an emaciated-looking waif with a heavily made-up face who looked up from the page with an expression that made her appear to have sucked on one lemon too many.

Who would find such a face attractive?

After a moment, he sighed, closed the magazine and reached for another. Laurel’s photograph wasn’t where Gabriella had said it would be. Not that it mattered. There’d been no good reason to want to see the picture; he’d directed his secretary to buy these silly things on a whim.

Come on, man, who are you kidding?

It hadn’t been a whim at all. The truth was that he’d slept poorly, awakening just after dawn from a fragmented dream filled with the kinds of images he hadn’t had in years, his loins heavy and aching with need...

And there it was. The photograph of Laurel Bennett.

Gabriella had been wrong. Laurel wasn’t nude, and he tried to ignore the sense of relief that welled so fiercely inside him at the realization.

She’d been posed with her back to the camera, her head turned, angled so that she was looking over her shoulder at the viewer. Her back and shoulders were bare; a long length of ivory silk was draped from her hips, dipping low enough to expose the delicate tracery of her spine almost to its base. Her hair, that incredible mane of sun-streaked mahogany, tumbled over her creamy skin like tongues of dark flame.

Damian stared at the picture. All right, he told himself coldly, there she is. A woman, nothing more and nothing less. Beautiful, yes, and very desirable, but hardly worth the heated dreams that had disturbed his night.

He closed the magazine, tossed it on top of the others and carried the entire stack to a low table that was part of a conversational grouping at the other end of his office. Jean could dispose of them later, either toss them out or give them to one of the clerks. He certainly had no need for them, nor had he any further interest in Laurel Bennett.

That was settled, then. Damian relaxed, basking in the satisfaction that came of closure.

His morning was filled with opportunities for that same feeling, but it never came again.

There was a problem with a small investment firm Skouras International had recently acquired. Damian’s CPAs had defined it but they hadn’t been able to solve it. He did, during a two-hour brainstorming session. A short while later, he held a teleconference with his bankers in Paris and Hamburg, and firmed up a multimillion dollar deal that had been languishing for months.

At twenty of twelve, he began going through the notes Jean had placed on a corner of his desk in preparation for his one o’clock business luncheon, but he couldn’t concentrate. Words kept repeating themselves, and entire sentences.

He gave up, pushed back his chair and frowned.

Suddenly he felt restless.

He rose and paced across the spacious room. There was always a carafe of freshly brewed coffee waiting for him on a corner shelf near the sofas that flanked the low table where he’d dumped the magazines.

He paused, frowning as he looked down at the stack. The magazine containing Laurel’s photo was on top and he picked it up, opened it to that page and stared at the picture. Her hair looked like silk. Would it feel that way, or would it be stiff with hair spray when he touched it, the way Gabriella’s had always been? How would her skin smell, when he put his face to that graceful curve where her shoulder and her neck joined? How would it taste?

Hell, what was the matter with him? He wasn’t going to smell this woman, or taste her, or touch her.

His eyes fastened on her face. There was a hands-off coolness in her eyes that seemed at odds with her mouth, which looked soft, sexy, and heart-stoppingly vulnerable. It had felt that way, too, beneath his own, after she’d stopped fighting the passion that suddenly had gripped them both and given herself up to him. and to the kiss.

His belly knotted as he remembered the heat and hardness that had curled through his body. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so caught up in a kiss or in the memory of what had been, after all, a simple encounter.

So caught up, and out of control.

Damian’s jaw knotted. This was ridiculous. He was never out of control.

What he had, he thought coldly, was an itch, and it needed scratching.

One night, and that would be the end of it.

He could call Laurel, ask her to have drinks or dinner. It wouldn’t be hard; he had learned early on that information was easy to come by, if you knew how to go about getting it.

She was stubborn, though. Her response to him had been fiery and he knew she wanted him as badly as he wanted her, but she’d deny it. He looked down at the ad again. She’d probably hang up the phone before he had the chance to—

A smile tilted at the corner of his mouth. Until this minute, he hadn’t paid any attention to the advertisement itself. If pressed, he’d have said it was for perfume, or cosmetics. Perhaps furs.

Now he saw just how wrong he’d have been. Laurel was offering the siren song to customers in the market for laptop computers. And the company was one that Skouras International had bought only a couple of months ago.

Damian reached for the phone.

Luck was with him. Ten minutes later, he was in his car, his luncheon appointment canceled, forging through midday traffic on his way to a studio in Soho, where the next in the series of ads was being shot.

“Darling Laurel,” Haskell said, “that’s not a good angle. Turn your head to the right, please.”

Laurel did.

“Now tilt toward me. Good.”

What was good about it? she wondered. Not the day, surely. Not what she was doing. Why did everything, from toothpaste to tugboats, have to be advertised with sex?

“A little more. Yes, like that. Could you make it a bigger smile, please?”

She couldn’t. Smiling didn’t suit her mood.

“Laurel, baby, you’ve got to get into the swing of things. You look utterly, totally bored.”

She was bored. But that was better than being angry. Don’t think about it anymore, she told herself, just don’t think about it.

Or him.

“Ah, Laurel, you’re starting to scowl. Bad for the face, darling. Relax. Think about the scene. You’re on the deck of a private yacht in, I don’t know, the Aegean.”

“The Caribbean,” she snapped.

“What’s the matter, you got something against the Greeks? Sure. The Caribbean. Whatever does it for you. Just get into it, darling. There you are, on a ship off the coast of Madagascar.”

“Madagascar’s in Africa.”

“Jeez, give me a break, will you? Forget geography, okay? You’re on a ship wherever you want, you’re stretched out in the hot sun, using your Redwood laptop to write postcards to all your pals back home.”

“That’s ridiculous, Haskell. You don’t write postcards on a computer.”

Haskell glared at her. “Frankly, Laurel, I don’t give a flying fig what you’re using that thing for. Maybe you’re writing your memoirs. Or tallying up the millions in your Swiss bank account. Whatever. Just get that imagination working and give us a smile.”