His Mistress by Blackmail

‘What? No, I’m—’

‘Perhaps you didn’t hear me just now instructing my pilot to ready my plane?’

Her hand dropped. ‘You’re going to France?’

Cold silver eyes met hers. ‘Of course. Why would I not?’

‘I... I thought you’d have your security people retrieve your property.’

‘You thought wrong.’

She heard the faint voice on the phone and started to raise it to her ear.

Xandro held up a staying hand. ‘If you want this business over and done with quickly, hang up the phone,’ he instructed tersely.

She pressed the end button. ‘But...why would you want me to fly with you?’ His cold dismissal still rang in her ears, breaking her heart.

His lips flattened. ‘I’m not prepared to sit around waiting for you to make your way across the Atlantic in case your brother is intransigent about revealing the whereabouts of the necklace. So we’ll fly together. If you can bring yourself to do that?’

She hesitated, probably too long. The icy crevasse between them widened, even as she nodded. ‘Thank you.’

When he spoke again, his tone was even more remote and chilling, nothing like the man she’d danced with under the Californian sky. ‘We leave in an hour.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HE’D BARED HIS soul to her. Completely and utterly. And now he was totally exposed.

He had no experience in that particular area, which was why he’d been reluctant to go there in the first place. He could claim his brain had been addled by sex. But he knew he could’ve avoided revealing his soul to her if he’d wanted. She’d asked. And he’d granted her wish.

And now, too late, he was painfully reminded that there was a reason he’d avoided return journeys into his past. With anyone. It was why he’d discouraged it with the women he’d dated before Sage.

But he wasn’t dating her. Hell, they didn’t even like each other.

Liar. Had he not dragged her out to dinner each night in the weeks before they’d slept together because it’d been the only way he could have her in his arms, even though it’d proven to be more torture than pleasure in the long run? And afterwards, those carefully planned trips so he could avoid the media and have her to himself. Touch her. Engage in a conversation that didn’t start and end with an argument.

He’d watched her dance and felt as if he was experiencing something pure and transcendental. Something beautiful and special he didn’t want to let go.

Only to have it tossed away at the very first opportunity. To think he’d left her this morning toying with the idea that he would be okay if Ben Woods stayed hidden for a little longer. He’d even considered an offer of rehabilitation when Ben returned if it would...what? Make Sage regard him favourably? Make her want to accommodate him in her life?

Dammit. Yes.

He cursed the mocking laughter in his head as he flipped open his seat belt and walked to the front of his plane. They’d been in the air for three hours and for all that time she’d had her nose stuck in a magazine, pretending he didn’t exist.

‘I have a life to get on with,’ she’d said.

A life that didn’t feature him at all. Did he need anything more definitive than that?

No. Whatever he’d thought he could find with Sage Woods had only been in his imagination. And, like she said, they’d already spent too long on this exercise. It was time to get back to the real world. It was time to take his life back, too.

So why did the thought of her not standing at the east window, of not hearing strains of music from his guest bedroom or, thee mou, the thought of not being able to touch her again, fill his chest with such black dread?

He threw himself into a club chair, clicked the remote and raised the volume of the financial news playing on his flat screen TV. Anything to drown out the thoughts tearing through his mind and the sinking sensation that, in a shockingly short space of time, he’d given the most beautiful woman he’d ever met something much more than he’d ever parted with before. And he had no damn idea how to get back on an even keel.

* * *

‘What’s he saying?’ Sage demanded urgently as a man in blue scrubs and white coat tossed out long streams of French.

After a strained flight where she’d vacillated between pretending Xandro wasn’t sitting in icy silence across from her and wishing the conversation in the ballroom hadn’t happened, they’d landed in Nice and raced to the hospital to find out that Ben wasn’t there.