The Billionaire's Defiant Acquisition

He sipped his drink. Outside the busy city was slowing down. He could see the yellow lights of vacant cabs and the unsteady weave of people making their way home, while in here all was ordered and calm. It always was. It was one of the main reasons why he’d joined, because it had an air of stability which had always attracted him.

Antique chandeliers hung from the corniced ceiling and at one end of the room was a polished grand piano. Despite its traditional air, it was a club for movers and shakers—the kind of place to which few were granted entry because the membership requirements were so high. But there had been no shortage of proposers keen to get him onto the members’ list and Conall had defied the odds brought about by youthful misdemeanour. He’d been proposed by a government minister and seconded by a peer of the realm and that fact in itself still had the ability to make him smile wryly. Whoever would have thought that the boy who had been born with so little would end up here, with the great and the good?

He signalled for a fire to be lit and then watched as Amber dabbed at her lips with a heavy linen napkin. Now that the edge had been taken off her hunger, she relaxed back into the leather armchair and began to look around—like a rescued kitten which had been brought from the cold into the warmth. He wondered what the waiter who came to remove her plate must think, because he didn’t usually bring women here, to this essentially male enclave—where deals were done over dinner and alliances formed over summer drinks taken outside on the pretty terrace. On the rare occasions he’d brought a date, they hadn’t been dressed in skinny jeans and a sweater, like Amber Carter. They had worn subtle silk, with shoes the same colour as their handbags and make-up which was soft and discreet—not laden on so thickly that from a distance she appeared to have two black eyes.

And yet not one of them had made him feel a fraction of the desire which was currently pulsing through his blood and making him achingly aware of his erection.

‘So,’ he said heavily, putting his glass down on the table and raising his eyebrows in what he hop

ed was a stern expression. ‘I think you’ve just proved fairly conclusively that independence is not an option— unless you want to take another job like that. The question is whether or not you’re finally ready to knuckle down and see sense.’

Amber didn’t answer straight away, even though he was firing that impatient look at her. She felt much better after the food she’d just eaten, no doubt about it—but just as one hunger had been satisfied, so another had been awoken and she wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

It wasn’t just the unexpectedness of seeing Conall Devlin in this famous London club—which, quite frankly, was the last place she’d ever imagined finding someone like him. And it wasn’t just the fact that he currently resembled the human equivalent of a jungle cat—a dark and potentially dangerous predator who had temporarily taken refuge in one of the beautifully worn leather chairs. No, it was more than that. It was the subtly pervasive scent of him invading her nostrils, which was coming from the soft scarf he’d draped around her neck. And hadn’t she felt a whisper of pleasure when his fingertips had brushed against her skin, even though it had been the most innocent of touches? Hadn’t it made her want more, even though experience had taught her that she always froze into a block of ice whenever a man came close?

She looked into the gleam of his eyes. ‘By seeing sense, I presume you mean I should do exactly what you say?’

‘Well, you could give it a try,’ he said drily. ‘Since we’ve seen what happens when you do the opposite.’

‘But I don’t know exactly what it is you’re offering me, Conall.’

Conall stiffened. Was he imagining the provocative flash of her eyes—or was that just wishful thinking on his part? Was she aware that when she looked at him that way, his veins were pulsing with a hot, hard hunger and he could think of only one way of relieving it? She must be. Women like her ate men like him for breakfast.

He needed to pull himself together, before she got an inkling of the erotic thoughts which were clogging up his mind and started using her sexual power to manipulate him. ‘I’m offering you a role as an interpreter.’

‘Not interested,’ she said instantly, with an emphatic shake of her head. ‘I’m not sitting in some claustrophobic booth all day with a pair of headphones on, while someone jabbers on and on in my ear about something boring—like grain quotas in the European Union.’

Conall failed to hide his smile. ‘I think you’ll find my proposal is a little more glamorous than that,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

She had perked up now and his smile died. Of course she had. Glamour was her lifeblood, wasn’t it?

‘I’m having a party,’ he said.

‘What kind of party?’

He picked up his brandy glass and took a sip. ‘A party ostensibly to celebrate the completion of my country house. There will be music, and dancing—but I’m also hoping to use the opportunity to sell a painting for someone who badly needs the money.’

‘I thought you’d decided that, with my lack of experience, I would be useless when it came to selling paintings.’

‘I’m not expecting you to sell the paintings,’ he said. ‘I just want you to be there as a sort of linguistic arm candy.’

‘What do you mean?’

He hesitated, wondering if her father would approve of the offer he was about to make to her. It would probably be more sensible to give her a lowly back-room job somewhere in his organisation— preferably as far away from him as possible. But Conall could see now that it would be as ineffective as trying to pass fish paste off as caviar, because Amber Carter wasn’t a back-room kind of woman. No way could someone like her ever fade into the background. So why not capitalise on the gifts she did have?

‘The painting in question is one of a pair,’ he said. ‘Two studies of the same woman by a man called Kristjan Wheeler—a contemporary of Picasso and an artist whose worth has increased enormously over the last decade. Both pictures went missing in the middle of the last century and only one has ever been found. That is the one I am trying to sell on behalf of my client, and...’

She looked at him as his words tailed away. ‘And?’

‘I believe the man who wants to buy the painting is in possession of the missing picture. Which means that the one I’m selling is part of a set, and naturally that makes it much more valuable.’

‘Can’t you just ask him outright whether he’s got it?’

He gave the flicker of a smile. ‘That’s not how negotiation works, Amber—and especially not with a man like this.’ He watched her closely. ‘You see, the prospective buyer is a prince.’

‘A prince?’