The Billionaire's Captive Bride

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Elation had bubbled through Erin as Peter Ramsey rose from the table to greet her, looking stunned by this more glamorous version of herself, but there was something wrong with his smile. It didn’t reach his eyes. And it curled into a twist of irony.

Her fluttering heart closed its wings and shrunk inside itself. Her mind cringed with embarrassment. She’d misread his invitation to dinner. The attraction she felt towards him wasn’t mutual and she’d just made a gigantic fool of herself.

Defence instincts sprang into action. The fertile creativity in her mind was fast-tracked into finding a scenario that would wipe out his impression of availability signals being flaunted.

“Hi!” she said brightly, quickening her step towards him, holding out her hand, fixing a wry little smile on her mouth. “Excuse the glad rags. A bit out of place here. But I’m going on to a party afterwards and it was easier not to have to do a change of clothes later.”

“Please don’t apologise. No man could look at you tonight without feeling a sense of pleasure,” he rolled out, politely intent on putting her at ease, though the hand holding hers made that impossible. It gripped hard, almost possessively, sending a charge of heat into her bloodstream. “Meeting up with your boyfriend?” he asked, a laser-intensity in the blue eyes scanning hers, jolting her into giving up the truth.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

An arched eyebrow expressed surprise. “Then I’m sure there’ll be plenty of contenders for the position at the party.”

She wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, given the blatant sexiness of her dress. “But will I click with any of them?” she tossed out a touch ruefully, knowing how very rare that had been in her life, and the one possibility of it happening tonight was distancing himself from her.

“Very elusive, that click,” he remarked dryly.

“You find that, too?” She was babbling—babbling because she was so knotted up inside, any words were better than silence.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

The hard challenge in his eyes made her feel silly. It derided any assumption that everything was easy for him. She really had no idea what his life was like, had come to find out, but…this wasn’t why he was here and she was putting every foot wrong.

“I’m sure you have a bigger choice of candidates for the click than I have,” she shot out defensively.

“Believe me, that doesn’t make it any less elusive.”

“I’m told you’ve had a lot of women, Peter.”

“Trial and error. How many errors have you made, Erin?”

She shook her head, completely rattled by the swift riposte and the highly personal probing in his eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how we moved onto this stuff. You wanted to know about Mrs Harper.”

“And the errors made there,” he agreed, releasing her hand and gesturing to the chair opposite his. “Are you in a hurry to get this dinner over with?”

The question flustered her. Everything about this meeting seemed to be going hopelessly awry, including her fiction about a party, which he naturally assumed would put a limit on this meeting. “No. No. Time doesn’t matter,” she muttered, settling on the chair and shooting him a look of appeal for a less pressured feeling to this meeting. “It’s Thomas who matters. His life is being screwed up by warring parents.”

“You care more about the child than the father?” Peter queried as he resumed his seat.

It made Erin pause to consider. “I guess I empathise more with Thomas. My own parents divorced when I was seven.”

“Were you the only child?”

“Yes.” She grimaced, remembering all too well the sense of being deserted. “A very lonely only child.”

“Who got custody of you?”

“My mother.”

“Was that what you wanted?”

“I wanted them to stay together.” She flashed him a look of burning conviction. “You shouldn’t have children if the marriage isn’t rock solid.”

“Is that why you haven’t married? You’ve never felt secure enough in a relationship?”

This conversation was going right off the rails. She didn’t want to analyse herself, not to him or anyone else. As it was, he’d drawn stuff from her she never talked about and it was none of his business. “We’re not here to talk about me,” she tersely reminded him.

“Just curious about where you’re coming from,” he said amiably, reaching for the bottle of wine, which was resting in an ice-bucket. “This is a Margaret River Chardonnay. Would you like to share it with me?”

No way was she going to add alcohol to the volatile mix of feeling emotionally torn up by this man. Her tongue was running out of control and she needed to put a guard on it. She nodded to the corked bottle on the table. “I’ll stick to water, thank you.”

“Saving yourself for party drinks.”

Erin paused to take stock of what was happening here. The party lie kept spawning questions that were pricking at her private life. Why was Peter Ramsey putting her so much on the spot if he had no personal interest in her?

His reaction to her attempt to look as attractive as she could had definitely been negative, yet since she’d dismissed her dressed up appearance as nothing to do with him, he seemed intent on finding out more about her than the main purpose of this meeting warranted.

Feeling uncomfortably confused with the situation, she looked him straight in the eye and belligerently stated, “No. I just prefer water. I like to keep a clear head.”

“Even at a party?”

“Especially at a party.”

“Had a bad experience,” he assumed.

“No. And I don’t want to invite one.”

“Sounds like being in control is of prime importance to you.”

He was boring in again, the piercing blue eyes focused so intensely on hers, answers to his questions had been spilling out as though drawn from her by a magnet. Despite being stone cold sober, Erin felt hopelessly out of control with Peter Ramsey. Her pulse was racing and her mind was struggling to keep up with his.

“I will not give control of my life to someone else,” burst from her lips before she even realised how revealing that was about herself.

He zoomed straight in on it. “Being independent is safer than trusting anyone, Erin?”

“When the people you should be able to count on keep shuffling you around for their convenience, you learn independence pretty darned quick,” she answered with considerable heat, feeling him burrowing under her skin, going deeper and deeper. “And that’s probably what’s in store for Thomas Harper,” she added emphatically, trying to move this conversation onto the track it should be taking.

Needing action to break the highly charged current flowing between them, she turned and grabbed the bottle of water, proceeding to fill one of the glasses provided with a long, cool drink.

“I’m sorry. I should have done that for you.”

The apology grated on her frayed nerves. “Why?” she shot at him.

He shrugged, his mouth twitching into a bemused little smile. “It’s what a gentleman does for a lady.”

“And what does a lady do for a gentleman in your world, Peter?”

She goes to bed with him.

The cynical thought was in her mind, even as she posed the question. Nevertheless, it came as a shock when she read it in his eyes, the sudden simmer of desire directed straight at her.

Even his smile seemed sensually seductive as he answered, “In my world a gentleman looks after a lady who answers his needs.”

Her mind was in an absolute whirl. “What need am I answering?” shot straight out of her mouth.

“My need to talk with you.”

His reply was so smooth, his expression shifting so swiftly to serious sincerity, Erin wondered if she’d imagined the hot flash of desire. But her skin was still tingling from it.

Fortunately the waitress arrived at their table to take their meal orders, diverting Peter Ramsey’s attention and giving Erin a breathing space. She needed a blast of oxygen in her brain to clear her confusion and get some reasonable perspective on what had eventuated from this meeting so far.

She had paraded her wish to be desirable to him with blatant honesty.

He hadn’t liked it.

Yet now…did he find a hard-to-get scenario more stimulating—the challenge of winning over resistance? Perhaps he’d had too many women offering themselves to him on a platter and he’d envisaged her being different—more of a novelty for him, like her choice of this restaurant.

She sighed.

Nothing in real life was simple.

Which was why she much preferred living in the stories she made up in her mind. She had total control over how her characters acted and what their response to each other would be.

“Erin?”

Peter’s prompt snapped her out of fantasy and back to the immediate demands of the present. She smiled at the waitress. “I’ll have the Chilli Jam Prawns.”