The Ultimate Seduction Read online

  He forced himself to hold her hurt gaze, surprised how effective his insult had been. Her startling blue eyes deepened to pools of navy that churned with angry hatred. He didn’t flinch from it, but instead held her gaze as if he was holding a knife in a wound, ensuring he would fully sever himself from a repeat performance of his weakness.

  “How do you propose I tell him?” she asked with a bitterness that bludgeoned him, implacable and final. “Hire a psychic? He’s dead.” She pivoted to the door.

  A blinding flash, like white light, shot through him. Not an external thing, but an inner slice of laser-sharp pain that he felt as an echo of hers. He knew that sort of grief—

  Before he realized what he was doing, he’d moved to catch her arm and spin her around to him.

  She used her momentum to bring her free hand up, sending it flying toward his face.

  He caught her wrist and jerked back his head, his reflexes honed by war and a natural dominance that always kept him on guard. Still, a heavy blanket of regret suffocated him as he held her while she wordlessly struggled. He’d insulted her because he was angry, but he would never wound someone by dangling such a loss over them. An apology was needed, but holding on to her was like trying to wrestle a feral cat into a sack.

  “Stop fighting me,” he ground out, surprised by her wiry strength and unflagging determination.

  “Go to hell!”

  He got her wrists in one hand behind her back, her knee scissored between his own tightly enough to prevent it rising into his crotch. Squeezing her enough to threaten her breathing, he loosened off as she quieted.

  “Big man, overwhelming a helpless woman,” she taunted in a pant.

  “You’re not that helpless,” he noted, admiring her fighting spirit despite his inherent knowledge that he shouldn’t like anything about her.

  She was widowed. That was tremendously important, even though he refused to examine too closely why he was so relieved. Or why he was now determined to learn more about her. He’d been serious about not being corruptible, no matter how his body longed to be persuaded.

  Her shaken breaths caused her breasts to graze his chest, increasing the arousal their struggle had already stimulated. She recognized his hardness and squirmed again, forcing him to pin her even closer to hang on to her.

  “Let me go,” she said in a furious voice that provoked more than intimidated.

  “In a minute.” He reached to remove her mask—

  She tried to bite him. He narrowly snatched his fingers from the snap of her teeth.

  “You little wildcat.” He couldn’t help but be amused by her streak of ferocity. Her bared teeth were perfect, her pinched nostrils as refined as a spoiled princess’s.

  “I’m reporting this assault,” she told him.

  “I have a right to see whose body I was in last night,” he told her, unconsciously revealing with the low timbre of his voice how disturbed he was by the memory.

  “No, you don’t. I’m discerning about who sees any part of me. And maybe I didn’t bring my best game last night because I was bored and wanted it over with. Did you think of that?”

  “I suppose I deserved that,” he murmured, but her insult still landed like a knee in the gut, making his abdominal muscles clench in offense.

  Digging his fingers around the knot of her hair, he tugged lightly, deliberately overwhelming her with his strength, exposing her throat and making her aware she was at his mercy. Not because he got off on hurting women. Never. But she needed to understand that even though she was utterly vulnerable to him, he wouldn’t harm her.

  “Now we’ve both said something cruel, and neither of us will do it again.”

  Her outraged “Ha” warmed his lips, making him deeply conscious of the shape of her Kewpie-doll mouth with its peaks in her top lip over a fat strawberry of a bottom one. Her scent, like Saponaria, somewhere between dewy grass and sun-warmed roses, threatened to erase all thought but making love to her again.

  “I only said what I did because I thought you were married. And you tricked me. I don’t like your trying to take advantage of me. To even the playing field...” He reached for the tailing ribbon that held her mask.

  “Noooo.” The sharp anguish in her voice startled him. She was genuinely terrified, straining into a twist to escape his loosening of the mask.

  He let go of the ribbon and her, horrified that he’d scared her so deeply, but he couldn’t help reaching to steady her when she staggered as she tried to catch the falling mask. Her shaking hands fumbled it before her, turning it around and around, trying to right it so she could put it on again. A desperate sob escaped her.

  It was too late. He’d seen what she was trying to hide, and the bottom dropped out of his heart. He touched her chin, wanting a better look.

  She knocked his hand away and flashed a look of fury at him. With her jaw set in livid mutiny, she stopped trying to replace her mask and stared him down with the kind of aggression that would make him fear for his life if she’d been armed.

  “Happy?” she charged.

  Not one little bit.

  As he took in the mottled shades of pink and red, all he saw was pain. He’d been in battle. He knew what bullets and flames and chemicals could do to the human body. That’s why his world had stopped last night when he’d thought a bomb was landing on the ramparts of the club.

  But these were healed injuries, as well as they’d ever get anyway. The ragged edge of the facial scar followed a crooked line like a country’s border on a map, sharply defining rescued flesh from the unharmed with a raised pink scar. It hedged a patch from over her left eye into the corner of her lid—she might have lost her sight, he acknowledged, cold dread touching his internal organs. Under her eye, it cut diagonally toward her nose before tracing down to the corner of her mouth and under her jawline, and then wound back to her hair.

  The side of her neck was only a little discolored, but the way the color fanned at the base of it made him suspect the scarring went down her arm and torso, too, maybe farther.

  As he brought his gaze back up to her face, he met eyes so bruised and wounded, he was struck with shame at causing her to reveal herself. He hadn’t been trying to humiliate her. This wasn’t meant as a punishment.

  The hatred in her eyes took it as such anyway, stabbing him with compunction.

  “I wouldn’t work for you if your country was knocked back into the Stone Age and we were overinventoried in animal fur and flint. I’m leaving. Now.”

  He didn’t try to stop her, sensing he’d misjudged her on a grand scale.

  She tied her mask into place without looking at him. When she pressed the button to open the doors, they didn’t cooperate, remaining closed while she swore at her watch.

  “Tiffany,” he cajoled, pulling her name from what he’d read, but not sure what he would say if he could persuade her to stay.

  “Die,” she ordered flatly.

  The doors opened and she walked out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FOR THE FIRST time in months, Tiffany cried. Really cried as she hugged her knees in the shower and released sobs that echoed against the tiles. They racked her so hard she thought she’d throw up. She hated her life, hated herself, hated him.

  She’d still been processing his remark about her efforts being second-rate when he’d yanked back her curtain and looked at her as if she was an object of horror. As though he was repulsed.

  Sex was not worth this. Men weren’t. She was old enough, and educated enough, to know that having a husband and kids were not necessary ingredients to a woman’s happiness. Why then was she so gutted every time she was forced to face that no man would ever want her? That a family life would never be hers?

  It was self-pitying tripe, and she had to get over it.

  Forcing her weak
legs to support her, she turned off the shower and leaned against the wall, cold and dripping until she worked up the energy to pull on a robe. As she moved into her room, she felt empty. Not better, not depressed, just numb.

  That was okay. She could live with numb.

  Perching on the foot of the bed, she stared at her wrinkled fingers and wondered what she should do. Hide in her room until this ridiculous clubhouse opened its doors again? Fake appendicitis for a helicopter ride to the mainland? She felt sick. She was damp and feverish, aching all over, weak and filled with malaise.

  A yawn took her by surprise and she thought, Siesta. One small thing in her favor. Crawling up to her pillows, she escaped into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  The sun crept around the edge of his balcony, likely to begin blistering his bare toes soon, but Ryzard was ready to stretch away the stiffness in his body anyway. He’d been motionless for over an hour as he read through the report he’d been provided by the Q Virtus staff.

  Davis and Holbrook was an exceptional organization, very well regarded in the international construction industry. He could definitely do worse as he looked at rebuilding the broken roads and collapsed buildings in his city centers. They had wanted to land on his radar as he moved toward those sorts of goals, and now they were.

  The rest of the report, about Mrs. Paul Davis, was even more interesting. She had started out as a wealthy society darling. Her marriage to a family friend had all the markings of a traditional fairy tale, right up to the wedding gown with a train and the multitiered cake.

  Except a wedding gift from the bride’s brother of a prestigious sports car had been more temptation than the drunken groom could resist. He’d taken it up to ninety between the courtyard and the gates of the golf and country club, detonating it against a low brick wall before the guests had stopped waving.

  After a flurry of death and memorial announcements accompanied by touch-and-go mentions of the bride, the reports had dried up. Fast-forward two years and his widow was taking the reins of her dead husband’s corporation. Her brother had held her power of attorney during her recovery, but his talents were better suited to hands-on architectural engineering. The plethora of awards he’d earned spoke to that very loudly.

  All of this would have been flat information if it didn’t reinforce to Ryzard that he’d made a mistake in assuming she’d been trying to influence him with sex. What reason would she have? Her company was flourishing—somewhat surprisingly, given that her credentials amounted to an arts degree and attitude, but her grades were exceptional. She was certainly intelligent.

  And he could personally attest that she was a ballbuster, he allowed with irony. He had no doubt she was more than a figurehead. If she had a vision, quite likely one formed in her husband’s name, she would achieve it.

  Turning from that disturbing thought, he allowed that if Bregnovia had already attained recognition, she might have tried for an advantage while he had a wider playing field to draw from, but it would be a risky move until his government was recognized.

  Did their interest in his business mean an acknowledgment for Bregnovia was in the works? Or was their rendezvous exactly what it seemed to be: two healthy people enjoying the pleasures of the mating ritual.

  Heat pooled in his lap as he dwelt on the possibility she’d welcomed him because she’d been as caught up as he had in their physical compatibility.

  A twinge of conscience followed, but he had long ago rationalized that his heart and his body were separate when it came to sex. He had the same basic needs as any living thing, requiring nutrition, a sheltered environment and a regular release of his seed. If a peculiar mix of chemistry intensified his reaction when that last happened, well, he couldn’t be held responsible. It was hormones, not emotion.

  It was not infidelity against Luiza.

  And Tiffany would have no reason to pursue him for sex to gain his business. It would only complicate what might otherwise be a wise and lucrative association.

  Something he should take under consideration, he supposed, scraping the side of his thumb against the stubble coming in on his jaw. It didn’t matter how he cast their tryst. It shouldn’t happen again.

  Except there was one other fact from this report that kept teasing him.

  Mr. Holbrook, Tiffany’s father. An architect by education, he’d quickly become a career politician who’d worked his way up the ranks of local councils into a senator’s mansion. He was now running for the presidency.

  Suppose last night had been pure coincidence. Why then had the Holbrooks requested he meet them here, under the discreet curtain of Q Virtus? If they feared making a play for his business would hurt the senator’s chances, they wouldn’t have met him at all. No, it must mean they knew the United States was leaning toward recognition.

  A flush of excitement threatened to overtake him, but Ryzard reminded himself to be patient. Backing from the United States would influence many other countries to vote in his favor, but nothing was confirmed.

  Still, one thing was clear: he needed another meeting with Tiffany Davis.

  * * *

  Tiffany woke foggy-headed to a noise in the main room like dishes rattling on a cart. Leaping from the bed, she staggered to the door into the lounge and found Ryzard Vrbancic directing one of the petite q’s to set a table on the balcony.

  “What are you doing?” She turned the lapel of her robe up against her cheek.

  “I thought you were showering, but apparently you went back to sleep.”

  “What?” Tiffany scowled at him. “How do you know what I’ve been doing? I thought these rooms were completely secure,” she charged the woman in the red gown.

  “I used my override to bring in the meal you ordered...didn’t you?” The young woman looked suspiciously at Ryzard, but he was quick.

  “We did, thank you. I’ll manage from here. You can go.” To Tiffany, he said, “Don’t confuse the staff just because we’ve had a tiff.” A mild snort and, “You’re aptly named, aren’t you?”

  “Get out of here,” she cried.

  The petite q, already hurrying, ran to the door and out.

  Goggling at Ryzard, whose mouth twitched, Tiffany said, “Seriously?”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “I want you to leave.”

  “I’m about to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Quit hiding and accept.”

  She narrowed her eyes on his back as he moved onto the balcony, not interested in anything from him except assurances her family would never find out what had happened between them. Not that she was willing to say so.

  It took everything in her to stand tall and say, “What kind of offer?” She was writhing inside at everything that had happened, yet had wound up dreaming about him. It had been erotic until it had turned humiliating.

  “I can’t hear you,” he called from the balcony.

  Clenching her teeth, she wavered in the doorway, hanging back while telling herself not to let him get away with this manipulation. At the very least, she ought to cover up. She didn’t so much as go for milk in the middle of the night without concealer for fear of frightening the staff at home. The only reason she’d forgone it this morning was because she’d expected to keep her mask on.

  Ryzard Vrbancic had seen her, however, and she was still flopping like a fish out of water, gasping for air, waiting for the boot that would send her careening off the boat.

  Everything in her cringed with a need to hide, but maybe seeing her again like this would repel him into moving along.

  Yanking tight the tie on her robe, she marched to the open French doors and said, “I’m not interested in any offers from you. Please leave.”

  “I thought you were dressing,” he remarked, squeezing fresh lemon across raw oysters in their half shell. They were arranged on a silve
r tray of ice. Next to them sat a tapas platter of fritters, flatbread, shredded meat, guacamole, salsa and something that looked like burritos but they were wrapped in a type of leaf.

  Her stomach growled. She tried to cover the sound with her hand, but he’d heard.

  “You’re hungry. Eat,” he urged magnanimously. As if he wasn’t trespassing in her room.

  “I prefer to eat alone.” She indicated the door, not subtle at all.

  He picked up an oyster and eyed her as he slurped it into his mouth, chewed briefly, then swallowed. Raw oysters were supposed to be an aphrodisiac. She’d always thought they were disgusting, but what he’d just done had been the sexiest thing she’d ever seen. She followed the lick of his tongue across his lips, and a wobbly sensation accosted her insides.

  Reacting to him made staring him down even more difficult than it already was, but she held his gaze, inner confidence trembling as she waited for another flinch to overtake him like the one this morning. His expression never wavered, though. He let his gaze slide to her scarred cheek, but then it went south into her cleavage, where the swells of her breasts peeped from between her lapels. His perusal continued over her hips, lingered on the dangling ends of her belt and ended at her shins, one white, one mottled.

  Involuntarily, her toes curled as she reacted to his masculine assessment. She couldn’t tell if she was passing muster or being found wanting. She told herself it didn’t matter, that she didn’t want his approval or any man’s, but in her heart she yearned for a hint of admiration.

  He pulled out a chair. “Sit down.”

  Swallowing, telling herself to keep a straight head, she deliberately provoked a reaction to her flaws by saying, “I’m not supposed to go in the sun.”

  He shrugged off the protest. “It will set in twenty minutes.”

  “Look, I’m running out of ways to tell you to get lost without pulling out the big one. I don’t want anything to do with you. I was against giving you that letter in the first place, and I’m sorry I came here at all. We won’t work for you.”