Paper Marriage Proposition (Gage Brothers 1)

He’d been betrayed. Just like Beth had been betrayed.

And when you stopped believing in people, deep down there would always be a part of you that you would never give, that nobody could ever again reach.

Landon wouldn’t trust Beth—but he would help her. And how, she marveled, had she enlisted such a man’s aid? She knew a gift from the universe when she saw one.

And there he was, sitting across the table—beautiful and ruthless. God help her.

No, God help Hector Halifax when Landon Gage was through with him.

The thought invigorated her, exhilarated her. It could’ve been foreplay for the way her body responded to the idea of her new husband stomping all over Hector for all the times he’d stomped on Beth.

Relaxing in her seat, she confessed with a mischievous grin, “I’m still marrying you, Landon. Toss any more hoops you want me to jump through, but I’m still marrying you.”

A flicker of admiration passed across his face. Then the awesome silver in his eyes turned molten, his jaw bunched tightly—and he appeared shockingly…eager. A strange gravity entered his voice. “How about you sign those papers now, Bethany?”

The white-haired lawyer nodded in the direction of the document. “Miss Lewis? If you please?”

Bethany.

No one ever called her that.

Trying to dismiss the fact that he’d made it sound so intimate, like Bethany were his pet name for her, Beth signed the dotted line with a flourish and pointed the end of the pen at Landon. “Mrs. Gage,” she said, correcting the lawyer.

Landon’s eyes flashed. For a slow heartbeat, Beth pictured him lunging across the table, hauling her to him, and feasting on the lips he’d rejected the night before.

“I’m a Gage now,” she whispered.

“Not yet.” Slow and sure, his lips formed the wickedest, most dangerous grin she’d ever seen. “Gentlemen, I’d like to be left alone with my fiancée.”

Four

A tense silence descended as soon as the doors sealed shut with a soft click. Then Bethany spoke. “I think we should talk about our plan. I want Hector groveling, Landon. I want him penniless, honorless, childless and whimpering like a whipped dog.”

Landon’s eyebrows rose.

He gazed at her and struggled not to show the way her words affected him, stirred his deepest, darkest appetites.

He had lied to his brothers.

She was so damned cute like this, murderous and practical, she probably didn’t even know it.

Yeah, Landon had lied.

He did want a woman, and she was in this very room with him.

Somber, he rose and started around the boardroom table. His heart pounded a slow, heavy rhythm. “He’ll be humiliated,” he said direly.

“Publicly, I hope.”

He fisted his hands. “He’ll be a babbling idiot by the time we’re through with him.”

Bethany clasped her hands together and grinned. “I love it!”

Some unnamable sensation exploded in his chest.

He’d never had this kind of foreplay. Promising to run over the enemy while already imagining plundering the spoils of war, in this case Bethany’s nice pink mouth. But he’d thought of her awkward kiss all through a sleepless night, and in his mind he’d done what he’d wanted to from the start and had taken possession of that mouth, kissing her wildly, savagely, and he’d been mad with lust when he woke. What was it about her?

He gazed into her eyes, clear blue, specked with gold and glinting with mischief.