Taken by the Pirate Tycoon

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While she hesitated about approaching the couple, Jase appeared from behind them, holding between his hands three wineglasses, two of which he adroitly passed to his sister and her husband.

Then, as if he’d felt Samantha’s gaze, he shifted his stance and his eyes found her despite the crush of people between them.

Someone touched her arm, and she turned gratefully to greet an older couple she’d known since childhood. They’d been among the first to arrive offering sympathy and help after her mother’s death, and had made an effort to console the bewildered and stricken thirteen-year-old. Although hardly able to respond to their kindness at the time, she’d kept in touch with them ever since.

They drifted off after obtaining a promise from her to visit in the near future, and she found Jase at her elbow. Although many of the men were in black ties, he was tieless, a crisp white shirt open at the neck under an out-of-fashion unbuttoned waistcoat.

He still favoured the unshaven look, but the dark shadow on his chin had never been allowed to develop into a full beard. She suspected his style, if it could be called that, owed more to an uncaring attitude than deliberation, yet his dressed-down appearance amounted to a sort of dishevelled chic that few men could have carried off.

His eyes held hers with the intensity of a high-end laser. “Samantha.” His gaze dropped over her low-cut, clinging black dress before his eyes returned to her face. The glitter that had appeared in the darkened depths evoked contradictory emotions in her—wariness mixed with disconcerting pleasure because he couldn’t hide the fact that, unwillingly or not, he found her attractive.

He said, “You look…very glamorous.”

“Thank you.” She realised she was holding her glass in a death grip, and loosened it, giving him her accomplished social smile. “What are you doing here?”

“Supporting a good cause. Like you, I guess. Bryn’s here too with Rachel.”

He was watching her closely—she supposed looking for a reaction. Keeping her expression serene, her voice neutral, she said, “Yes, I saw them.”

It wasn’t the first time since she’d stopped avoiding him that she had run into Bryn. They went on as if nothing had changed. She even listened with only a small hitch in her heartbeat when he mentioned Rachel, although the note in his voice might have made a lesser woman weep with envy.

Jase still held her eyes, and to her surprise quiet laughter escaped from his throat. “You’re something else, ice lady.” There was a note almost of unwilling respect in the enigmatic remark.

Samantha was on the brink of a retort when the subject of their discussion entered her field of vision behind Jase, and she hastily closed her mouth.

Then Bryn was there, his lips brushing her cheek as he greeted her, and Rachel said, “Nice to see you again, Samantha.”

They exchanged chitchat, and then moved as a group to compare opinions on the wares being offered. Rachel looked beautiful but was there a tiny shadow in her brown eyes, and behind the wide smile? An expert in putting on a good face herself, Samantha recognised one when she saw it.

Jostled by punters eager to inspect the goods, somehow Samantha and Jase got separated from the other two, and she found herself standing next to him while he examined a carved jade abacus with a hefty price tag.

“That’s beautiful,” she said involuntarily, admiring the intricate patterns on the beads. “I suppose it’s worth the asking price.” Which was rather steep.

“It is to me,” he answered, then put down the abacus and pulled out a credit card to hand to the person behind the table.

For someone in the forefront of an almost unimaginable technological future, it seemed an odd choice. Curiosity getting the better of her, she said, “What will you do with it?” She didn’t suppose he was going to use it for his calculations, when he had his pick of state-of-the-art computers.

“Enjoy it,” he said. “And admire it, as a fine example of early computing.”

“Oh? I never thought of an abacus as a primitive computer.” And she hadn’t thought of him as a sentimental collector.

“Not so primitive. An example of true genius. Whoever invented the abacus way back sometime BC, when he first spun his beads in a row he was setting us on the road to the computerised society.”

“Or she,” Samantha suggested.

He inclined his head. “Or she,” he agreed, picking up his purchase and nodding thanks to the cashier. “Are you an ardent feminist?”

“I suppose. Ardent may be pushing it a bit.”

“I guess,” he murmured, even as she continued,

“I’m no banner-waving activist.”

He said, “No, you just get on with doing it rather than shouting about it, don’t you?”

“I’m not knocking those who do the shouting,” she told him. “We need them—people passionate enough to fight and suffer for what they believe in.” She picked up a silver Georgian coffeepot, smoothed a hand over its elegant shape and put it down again.

“What are you passionate about, ice lady?” Jase asked. He sounded genuinely curious, and a voice inside her whispered caution.

She shrugged. “My company, my father’s legacy.”

Making to move on again, she found him blocking her with the immovability of a stone statue. “That’s all?” he queried.

“Isn’t it enough?”

“You had your own business in Australia, didn’t you?”

“A small one.” She wondered where he got his information, although it was no secret. “We specialised in renovations, with an emphasis on sustainability and energy saving.” Things her father had dismissed as “airy-fairy greenie-babble.”

“And you left it to come back and run your father’s company.” He sounded almost disapproving.

“Of course,” she said, oddly angry. “I always knew it would be mine one day. My inheritance.”

He looked as though he wanted to say more, but then he nodded, and shifted so she could step by him.

Jase let her move away, but his eyes followed her for minutes afterwards. He knew she was aware of his concentrated gaze. It was in the set of her head, the tension in her bare, smooth shoulders. Not looking back, she took cursory interest in several things before leaving the tables without buying any of them.

She’d greeted Bryn tonight showing none of the unguarded emotion Jase had seen the first time he’d laid eyes on her. But he hadn’t missed the uncharacteristic warmth of her smile, nor the searching look she directed at Rachel, fleetingly revealing something strangely like sympathy.

That thought brought his brows together and his mouth into an obdurate line as he watched Samantha greet someone else with what he’d come to think of as her company face—the serene, synthetic smile, not reaching the topaz-blue eyes with their enigmatic gaze.

What was going on behind that beautiful, frustratingly emotionless facade? Why would she be sorry for Rachel? Surely that spelled trouble.

His sister might seem to be a mature, successful woman—hell, she was. But there was a touching innocence about her all the same. He suspected she’d been so busy with her studies and career for the past ten years that she’d let personal relationships—male/female relationships anyway—pass her by. And she’d had a crush on Bryn Donovan since she was barely fifteen, something her whole family knew but had never mentioned to her.

Jase was pretty sure that when the family moved away from Rivermeadows after Rachel’s last year at high school, his mother had been relieved. Not that she wouldn’t have trusted Bryn, but a pretty girl with her heart in her adoring big brown eyes must be a temptation to any red-blooded young man. Jase and his brother had found it rather hilarious that Bryn seemed to be the only one at Rivermeadows who hadn’t noticed how she felt about him.