Read Online The Billionaire Affair by Diana Hamilton - Free Book Online

Nevertheless, it did begin to take the sharp edge off her anger.
    She pulled in a breath. For some no doubt nonsensical reason, she wanted him to believe her. What he thought of her shouldn’t be important but on some deep, troubled level it was.
    One more mouthful of the potent liquid, and then she explained tightly, ‘Dad was at Oxford with Jeremy’s father and they kept in touch. After all, they only live twenty-odd miles away. Dad was Jeremy’s godfather and when I was young I used to spend school holidays with them. I think Lady Curtisthought I needed mothering, and Dad was glad to get me out from under his feet.
    Then, when I was around thirteen, Lady C. was killed in a riding accident, and my visits stopped. But we still saw Jeremy. He and his father were about the only people we ever saw socially. Dad wanted me to marry him.’
    She shrugged slightly, memories clouding her eyes. Marrying Jeremy, and the Curtis fortune, would have been the one and only thing she could have done to actually please her father.
    â€˜Was the poor devil in love with you?’ Ben demanded. His voice was harsh, a strand of bitterness threading through the obvious scorn.
    It was a question he had no right to ask. Besides, she didn’t know the answer. Oh, she’d caught Jeremy looking at her in ways that had made her feel uncomfortable and she’d been the unwilling recipient of a couple of clumsy, slack-lipped kisses. But love—no, she didn’t truly think so. Lust was more like it and a willingness to fulfil their respective fathers’ wishes in that rather spineless way he’d had.
    She merely shrugged, took another gulp of the brandy-spiked milk and widened her eyes in shock as he castigated abruptly, ‘Still a heartless bitch!’ Then his voice flattened, as if control had been sought and found, and he said, ‘Your letter telling me my services were no longer required was obviously written a little too late. Because by then he must have found out that you’d been having somefun on the side and the engagement never took place. The man must have been gutted.’
    He took a pace forward, bending to thrust his face close to hers, his black eyes brimming with contempt. ‘And all you can do is shrug!’
    Anger as hot and sharp as his pulsed through her. How dared he act this way! Putting her mug down on the faded Persian carpet she got to her feet, the tilt of her chin mutinous as she countered scathingly, ‘You’re trying to put the blame on me for what happened to hide your own guilt—it’s what people do, isn’t it? Why should you be any different?’
    His dark eyes flared as he took a step towards her. Caroline stood her ground. The situation was explosive but she wasn’t going to run away from it. He had been guilty of almost every sin in the book, not she!
    The palms of her hands were slick with sweat and the heat of his body consumed her, as if the fire of their anger was pulling them closer instead of pushing them further apart.
    His lips curled thinly in a parody of a smile. ‘Is that so? Then you deny writing to tell me you never wanted to see me again? You didn’t even do me the courtesy of telling me to my face.’
    Of course she couldn’t deny it! She wanted to hit him for trying to put her in the wrong. ‘You weren’t around.’ She spat the words out scornfully. ‘After my father had been to see you, you’d taken off, remember?’
    Even now she could hear her father’s thin, sarcastic voice, ‘You can forget your loutish lover. I offered him money to make himself scarce, and he couldn’t take it fast enough. He won’t be back and, if that’s not enough to cool your ardour, ask young Maggie Pope who fathered that brat of hers.’
    Caroline expelled a shaky, emotional breath. She hadn’t wanted this bitter confrontation, or the dreadful effect it was having on her body,