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Instead of seizing her as a girl in her business, no doubt, expected, he knelt at her feet as if in worship, his fingertips starting at her toes. Tracing the arch of her narrow foot, he noted how she quivered, goose-flesh springing beneath his lightest touch. When his hand reached the top of her thigh, he forced her legs open.
“My, my…a natural blonde.”
His gaze climbed, fixed on her face. “I have a thing for blondes.”
Her eyes were closed. Was she pretending he was someone else? Brand maybe? Or imagining this wasn’t happening? What was she thinking? He had to know. She had to know she was with him. For some inane reason that was vital. More vital than sex itself.
“Open your eyes,” he commanded.
Her cheeks flamed. Her black lashes fluttered reluctantly.
“Are you sure about this?” he demanded.
Her eyes clung to his in mute desperation, but she nodded.
“Smile, then.”
Her bottom lip wobbled, but she tried. Dear God, she tried. Despite her smile, a tear trickled down her flushed face.
He jerked his hand away. The fact that she didn’t want to look at him, that when she forced that tremulous smile, she wept, angered him. Had she wept in that shack with those goons?
“A girl of your…er…talents ought to be able to act like she wants it…as bad as her client.”
More tears welled. “I’m trying. It’s just that with you…” Her smile died. Her control slipped. She lifted her nose in outrage, stared down its length. Her wet, dilated eyes cut him like daggers. “With you, it’s difficult.”
“More difficult than with other men?” he growled.
“I imagine so.”
“You did say…anything,” he reminded her, trying not to show the dark jealous emotion that had begun to gnaw at him. “And I have a lifetime of fantasies. The girls in my dreams never cry.”
“Would I be the girl of your dreams…if I didn’t cry?”
“No way.”
A blink brought more of the same liquid pooling in those beautiful eyes. “Then turn off the light if you can’t handle a real girl’s tears.”
“Can’t handle—”
She stabbed at the switch behind her. Darkness enveloped them. Then she reached for him. “Dream on,” she whispered.
He felt her shaking, felt her reluctance, knew she was still crying. When he kissed her, she shuddered.
She didn’t want to do this. And, damn it, he wanted her to.
Why the hell did that matter? He would handle it.
She’d sold herself. This was business. He could use her any way he liked.
“What’s your name?” he demanded even as his hand blindly touched her wet cheek to comfort her.
After a breathless pause, she said quaveringly, “Willa.”
More than sex, he wanted to hold her close, to make her feel safe—which was ludicrous.
“I’ve never paid a woman for sex before.”
“You’re the first for me, too.”
Guilt crept over him. If she was telling the truth, if she wasn’t a whore, some desperate need he knew nothing about was driving her to this.
She was a whore. Of course, she was a whore.
He’d bought companies, ruined men of far more worth than she.
His gut knotted.
“Get into bed,” he growled.
As her bare feet scampered in the dark, pictures of a naked golden girl in a dozen way-out fantasies flipped in his imagination.
Sheets rustled. He heard her reluctant sigh.
He was as hard and hot as a brick just out of the kiln.
He couldn’t wait.
She didn’t want him.
Why the hell did that matter?
5
Willa de Mello was afraid of the dark, afraid of going to sleep, afraid of bad dreams. Especially when there was a big bad wolf lounging in the stuffed armchair right beside her.
So, she lay in the dark and wondered how in the world she would get away from Luke McKade. Not that she was really worried. For all his macho bravado, the big, oversexed lug was a pussycat…at least compared to Brand.
She’d known he wouldn’t force her to do it. Not if she didn’t want to. A man like him lived for challenges. He was so conceited he truly believed it would be child’s play to win her, before he bedded her.
Willa was a cat lover. Thus, she understood predators. Cats liked to stalk and wait, to play a bit with their prey. They savored the chase, anticipating the treat. In his mind the treat was a yellow-haired party girl. A lot of men had been fooled by her hair color and sexy looks.
Ha! This was one lady who wasn’t about to serve herself on a silver platter to another oversexed rogue, even if he had paid a thousand dollars for the meal. Under different circumstances, he might have been fun. Not tonight. But Brand, what he’d nearly done, had changed Willa forever. Willa’s secret agenda was a matter of life and death.
Not that McKade wasn’t attractive, if a girl went for tall dark and disturbingly handsome and rich and powerful, which did have a certain appeal to a fan of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters’ novels. But Willa was way too disillusioned and in way too much trouble to take on a new man, especially another know-it-all bully who thought the worst of her. All her life she’d been misunderstood. If her appearance didn’t get her into trouble, then her wacky responses to life and literature did.
What she’d been looking for was someone who believed in her, who accepted her—who respected her, who saw past her sexpot, dumb-blond good looks. She’d known she had to have a man who didn’t mind a woman who was a little different. A man who didn’t expect her to be a deb or a Martha. Here in Laredo, the highest class debs were known as Marthas and Marthas were the equivalents of New Orleans Mardis Gras queens. And Willa had thought, until tonight’s rude awakening, she’d found such a man in Brand.
Desperate moments. Wild impulses. Reckless deeds.
She was used to this sort of thing. Like a cat, she would land on her feet.
It isn’t just you anymore though. You can’t keep flying by the seat of your pants, Willa dear.
Her conscience always had Mrs. Connor’s voice. Dear, soft-spoken Mrs. Connor had been her favorite art teacher at Trinity Elementary. Mrs. Connor hadn’t minded if she hadn’t colored in between the lines, if she’d drawn her own pictures instead. When all the other kids had been coloring red apples on apple trees in their workbooks, Willa had drawn an upside down orange tree floating on a cloud because there had been an orange grove right in her backyard. And sometimes, when she’d lain under her favorite orange tree and stared up at the branches, she’d seen clouds floating above her tree.
If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Connor, Willa wouldn’t have majored in art in college. She wouldn’t have become the biggest success in her class by going on to the grand career of painting T-shirts for a living. Of course, real artists despised her. Or, at least, Willa imagined they did. But she did make a good living. Which was more than a lot of real artists could say.
If things were half as bad as McKade described, you were in a heap of trouble tonight, girl.
Willa always talked back to Mrs. Connor.
Tied to a bed in that vulgar, uncomfortable costume? Who me? McKade probably ripped it off some other woman and then embellished what happened to exaggerate his own importance and humiliate me.
As if he read her rebellious thoughts and saw through her denial, McKade grumbled and shifted his large body in that chair that was much too small for him. Poor boy. He probably wanted to attract her attention, so she’d feel sorry for him and invite him to bed.
Ha!
Not that she wasn’t grateful. If it hadn’t been for him, there was no telling what might have happened to her. But Willa didn’t have the sort of mind to dwell on such things. She believed life was an adventure. She believed in destiny, that everything that happened was supposed to happen—and all for the best. One didn’t have to understand. One had to accept and go on.
But tonight…Brand…
If half of what McKade said was true, and deep down she knew it was, tonight things had gone way too far. Well, she was safe now, or she would be when she got out of town and escaped McKade.
Soon.
Willa was warmhearted and irrational. High drama was her forte. From birth she had been a handful, getting herself into more mischief than ten curious little girls.
Was it any wonder? After all, she’d barely been five before she was the tragic heroine of a grand adventure. Her adoring parents, both every bit as whimsical and reckless as she, had been swept off their yacht in a stormy sea only seconds after they’d lashed poor Willa to the mast.
Willa had survived two days and two nights in that storm while the boat broke up beneath her. Like the ancient mariner in her favorite poem, she’d gone mad with grief and fear, but she’d found her courage, too. That was why, or so her imminently practical if ever-so-scandalous aunt, Mrs. Brown, said, “Willa’s exasperating because she can’t take life, or at least what normal girls consider life, seriously. She can’t plan for the future. She’s too busy living.” Not that the tyrannical Mrs. Brown was always so philosophical about Willa’s shortcomings.
To Willa, the moment was all. Nobody had more fun than Willa. Nobody got into more trouble. As a little girl, she hadn’t cared a fig about making good grades.
“She even fails subjects she’s a whiz in,” her teachers complained. “She could be so brilliant in math. And she’s fast when she takes a notion to be.”
But math had bored Willa. Why should a little girl waste precious life working problem after problem she already knew how to do? Especially when one preferred staring at mysterious creatures such as butterflies or pill bugs and wondering what the world was like to them? Did pill bugs have schools that were dreadfully boring with dull books and endless, repetitive exercises?
She never painted the same design twice on her T-shirts. She never cooked a recipe the same way, either.
Willa, the woman, had a fatal weakness for the wrong kind of man, the bossy, judgmental McKade running true to her type. He wanted to tie her down but blamed her for his own desire.
But surely, surely he wasn’t as horrible as Brand.
Ditch McKade. The sooner the better, said Mrs. Connor.
But he’s so cute. And he thinks I’m cute.
A girl does love to have fans.
I’d think you’d have learned your lesson.
He’s fun to tease.
With McKade on her mind, Willa drifted off to sleep and was instantly enveloped in nightmarish visions from hell.
Ever since her parents’ accident, she’d had bad dreams. Tonight, the monster was Brand. As always he was dressed elegantly. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Unaware that she clawed the sheets, unaware of Luke McKade growing alert in his dark chair, she moaned aloud.
Dreams move more quickly than reality and make connections and reveal secrets that terrify. At first, Brand was sweet and loverly—her very own Prince Charming. Then he was holding a plastic bag over her face and she was gasping, clawing holes in it to get air.
The bag shredded. Brand laughed and said he’d been trying to pull it off.
Then she told him about the baby.
“A baby?” He was smiling; that meant he wasn’t listening. “This is good, princess.”
“Oh, Brand, I’m so in love.”
He was laughing, but there was something dark about his eyes. “In love? With me? This is good. I love you, too.”
“What about our baby?”
“Willa, my princess, you’re so young.”
“You said you loved me.”
“And I do. But are you ready for a baby?”
“I’m pregnant. We have to marry.”
“Of course we do.”
She could tell he wasn’t listening.
“You’ll tell your parents?”
“The sooner the better. They’ll love you. We’ll have a huge wedding. We’ll go to Hawaii for our honeymoon. We have a house in Maui, you know. This is good.”
“We’ll be so happy…as happy as I was when I was a little girl and my parents were alive.”
She thought of all the sexy, shameful things Brand had forced her to do even when she’d told him she hadn’t wanted to. Oh, she’d tried so hard to please him. So hard, she often hated herself after they’d finished making love.
Irrational fear consumed her. Suddenly, she was running from something dark and monstrous that had a fiery green tongue.
Brand was so beautiful and golden, so rich and powerful. She had loved him ever since she’d been a little girl. He’d been so much older, he’d never noticed her back then.
If Brand was smiling, why was she terrified?
