Paper Marriage Proposition (4 page)

He gazed at her and struggled not to show the way her words affected him, stirred his deepest, darkest appetites.

He had lied to his brothers.

She was so damned cute like this, murderous and practical, she probably didn’t even know it.

Yeah, Landon had lied.

He
did
want a woman, and she was in this very room with him.

Somber, he rose and started around the boardroom table. His heart pounded a slow, heavy rhythm. “He’ll be humiliated,” he said direly.

“Publicly, I hope.”

He fisted his hands. “He’ll be a babbling idiot by the time we’re through with him.”

Bethany clasped her hands together and grinned. “I love it!”

Some unnamable sensation exploded in his chest.

He’d never had this kind of foreplay. Promising to run over the enemy while already imagining plundering the spoils of war, in this case Bethany’s nice pink mouth. But he’d thought of her awkward kiss all through a sleepless night, and in his mind he’d done what he’d wanted to from the start and had taken possession of that mouth, kissing her wildly, savagely, and he’d been mad with lust when he woke. What was it about her?

He gazed into her eyes, clear blue, specked with gold and glinting with mischief.

In the sunlit space, she appeared younger and less preoccupied than she had last night. Her hair, tied softly behind her, framed a delicate oval face, her pale slim neck adorned by a small gold necklace. Her skin was milky and smooth, but what Landon could not get over was her mouth, and the way he could still feel it on his.

Roughly he whispered, “Did you get a dress?”

“Yes.”

“White and virginal?”

“Beige. And decent.” From her small leather purse, she promptly took out his credit card and a folded receipt. “Thomas is my new best friend. He told me you’d like it.”

His forehead furrowed. “My chauffeur saw it?”

“I wanted opinions. I don’t know your taste.”

“Neither does Thomas.” He took his card back, and the receipt, and felt a prick of disappointment when he couldn’t succeed in brushing her fingers more than a second.

“I bought a ring, too.”

He took the slim fingers she held up within his and surveyed the modest band.

Her hand curled around his and electricity rushed up his arm. The touch flew to his head like a bomb, heating his chest, his groin.

He struggled to tame the lust coursing inside him and thumbed the rock as though it were precious and not a half carat grain of rice. He drawled with deceptive casualness, “This is from me?”

“Yes.” She angled her head back and studied him while he pretended to study the small rock. He noticed loosened strands of wheat-blond hair making her look sweet and vulnerable. “I like simple things,” she whispered.

“It’s small…” Like she was. A small little package, full of possibilities, shining the light upon revenge.

She sighed dreamily, as though she were thinking of that, too.

All of a sudden, everything about Bethany seemed to have an erotic nature. Her silky voice. Or maybe the loose, businesslike clothes which just made a man want to know what was underneath. Or maybe it was the hunger in her eyes, her thirst for blood. Halifax’s blood.

Damned if Landon didn’t find that sexy.

His mouth went dry as he remembered their mouths, blending, hers moving, his tight and burning, too. Surely he was making it out to be more than what it had been.

She was too thin.

And she couldn’t have been softer.

She kissed too hard.

And she couldn’t have been hotter.

Who was he kidding? It had been exactly as he remembered, and it had promised breath to a dead man.

“I worried you’d change your mind today,” she said, retrieving her hand.

There was something perverse about wanting to cover that smile with his lips.

He’d played honorably once. For his son. But Chrystine’s treachery had left him with nothing. He didn’t plan to end with nothing now, not ever again.

He regarded her steadily, crossing his arms. “Has a Gage ever given you his word before?” Halifax’s woman, he thought. And now mine.

“No.”

“Then what gave you reason to doubt it?”

She shrugged. “I’ve learned not to trust what people say.”

Feeling himself smile, he signaled to his adjoining office. Trust was important to him. His brothers trusted him, his mother, his employees—and soon enough Bethany would trust him, he’d make sure of it. “We should get down to business.”

“By all means.” Swiftly on her feet, she clutched her purse and followed him into the wood-paneled office. “Revenge awaits.”

They were smiling as they walked. Smiling, together. And suddenly the thought of living with her and not having her was intolerable, not an option.

This little Buffy the Husband Slayer was going to be his wife, and he was making her his woman. This little thing thirsty for revenge would get her deepest desire from Landon, delivered on a silver platter—Halifax on a tray with an apple in his mouth—and Landon would take his own justice one step further.

Bethany, her son, Halifax’s family…

Would be Landon’s.

“I’m organizing a celebration tonight at La Cantera.” He moved behind his desk and derived a purely male satisfaction at the approval in her gaze. “I’m fairly certain it would help your image to be seen at a small, tasteful gathering to announce our engagement. Wouldn’t you?”

She took a seat across from his and thoughtfully considered. “I agree,” she then said, crossing her legs. “Yes. And when would the wedding be?”

Beautiful slim legs. Damn, what were they talking about? The wedding, right.

“Friday at city hall works for you?”

“Of course,” she said, her teeth white behind her smile.

Landon had to tear his eyes away from her, as he punched the intercom button on his phone. “Donna, are my brothers available? I’d like them to come in.”

“I’ll get them.”

It was important for his fiancée to get better acquainted with his brothers before the press flocked around them tonight. Thankfully, within minutes, his efficient assistant led both men inside. They wore their best, politest smiles.

“Donna,” Landon said as he started toward Beth. “Have the car ready in three minutes.”

“Right away, sir.”

He shot both men a “behave” look past Beth’s shoulders and then grasped her arm to lead her forward. “Bethany, you met Garrett, didn’t you?”

“Yes, he seemed very nice.”

“He’s not.” Landon brought her over to Jules. “Julian John, Bethany Lewis.”

“A pleasure,” drawled Julian as they shook hands.

Landon bent his head to hers. “He’s not nice, either, Bethany.”

She grinned.

And when that white grin reached his eyes, Landon thought:
I’m good as dead, just like Halifax.

True, they hadn’t yet discussed their plan in detail, but it didn’t matter. Beth knew a lot of things about Hector. Little rocks to toss in his path. Big boulders, rather.

She couldn’t wait to watch him trip.

“They’re my brothers but they drive me mad. It’s a chemical thing,” Landon said.

As people stared in their direction from their cubicles, Beth frowned. Did they know she was marrying their boss soon? Did they know it was a farce?

“Your clothes are in the car?” Landon asked then.

She spared him a quick nervous glance. Maybe they just thought it odd to see their boss smiling down at a woman. “Yes.”

“Excellent.” His cool nod, combined with that same lingering, totally unexpected curl of his lips, made her return his smile. “There’s apparently much speculation about you around here, Bethany,” he idly commented.

She nodded, already having surmised as much. But now something else troubled her mind. “Where are we going, Landon?”

The elevator doors rolled open, and he guided her inside. “My place.”

“Your place,” she repeated.

“My home. Where you’ll be living with me.”

They stepped off the elevator and crossed the marbled lobby, and Beth was struck with curiosity about what the next couple of months living with him would be like. “It’s a good idea for you to start getting settled in before the wedding. This will make our relationship more plausible.”

Beth could only nod at his logic.

They rode quietly in the back of the Navigator and, twenty minutes later, arrived at the entrance to a gated community. Then passing a sprawling emerald-green golf course and sweeping estates, the car halted at another gated entry.

Beyond the forged iron gates, a two-story, gothic-inspired, gray stone-brick house loomed in view. The lawns surrounding it were perfectly manicured, lush and green.

“Wow. This is it?”

“Yes,” Landon said absently, then seemed to come around from whatever he’d been reading on his phone and met her questioning blue gaze. “You expected different?”

She shrugged. “An apartment, maybe.”

“You forget.” He opened his hand; a beautiful, long-fingered, tanned hand that for some reason made her skin pebble. “I used to have a family.”

A family, yes.

He’d had a family he could not recover no matter what he did.

Her chest gained a thousand pounds at the sad thought. No matter how hopeless her situation had seemed lately, Bethany couldn’t begin to imagine the pain of losing a loved one so abruptly.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

She followed him from the car and up the steps to the arched entrance.

They’d died in an accident—his wife and child. One rainy night.

One rainy night when Hector Halifax had been leaving Bethany with her newborn in her arms to meet with Landon’s wife.

Eyeing his stoic, sculpture-like appearance through the corner of her eye, Beth wondered what else Landon knew. What he didn’t know.

As they entered the spacious limestone-floored house, Beth noticed two huge mastiffs near the darkened fireplace. They rose up on their wide black paws when spotting Landon, tails starting to wag as they padded over.

“Mask and Brindle,” Landon crisply said. She supposed the fawn-colored, two-hundred-pound beast with the black face was Mask, and the striped, black-and-brown, two-hundred-pound beast was Brindle.

She took a step back as they approached to sniff her, swallowing back a gasp when she bumped into Landon’s solid chest behind her.

Dogs!

And she thought this would be easy?

Landon steadied her, his hands on her upper arms, his voice in her ear. “They don’t bite.”

A shiver that had nothing to do with fear skittered up her spine. “Oh.”

“Sit.”

The dogs sat. Their tongues were a mile long and dangled lazily while they waited to do more of Landon’s bidding.

“See?”

He still had not let go of her. She angled her head just a fraction, and their noses almost bumped. “A dog bit me when I was little,” she confessed, for some reason thinking it appropriate to whisper. As though she were in a church or a library. “I’ve had a healthy respect for them ever since.”

“Yet you still married one?” He smiled.

“I married a snake—it’s an entirely different species.”

When he continued to smile that almost-there smile, she could almost feel it against her lips. At this close distance, Beth spotted the darker silver rim around his irises spreading like smoke across his eyes. Her knees went weak. He really was gorgeous.

Was he seducing her? God, it was working. His touch, his voice, the heat in his eyes.

“These two are a bit heavy to roll over,” he said quietly, clenching her shoulders a bit, “but you can ask them to shake your hand if you’d like.”

“Later,” she said, blushing because she began to see a little complication. This man had an effect on her. A huge effect. He didn’t even have to kiss her for that. His presence was an open, blatant call to all things feminine inside her which she shouldn’t, for the love of God, embrace right now.

“Good doggies,” she said, staying clear of the intimidating pair while at the same time putting distance between her and Landon.

After commanding, “Release”—a word which sent the dogs plopping back down before the fireplace—he led her up the sweeping limestone staircase.

The bedroom they entered at the far end of the hall was spacious, sparsely furnished, decorated in a black-and-white palette that went heavy on the black and sparse on the white. A guest room, she supposed.

But a string of unexpected words popped into her head.

“If you want to sleep with someone, you’ll sleep with me.”

Her stomach twisted as though she’d just taken a plunge on a roller coaster, and she had trouble shaking off the thought of sharing that very big bed with the very big man standing to her right.

There was no denying there had been some serious vibes going on between the two of them back in the conference room. But Beth had to concentrate on what was important: getting David back.

Her life was a mess and she’d taken fretting to a whole new art form. She didn’t need more worries.

Hopefully, Landon wasn’t getting any bed-sharing ideas.

She peered up at his hard profile. Of course he wasn’t. Landon was in it for the little black book, and for what she could tell him about Hector.

He’d entered the room first and pulled off his jacket as she followed. “This is your room.” His jacket fell with a thud atop a corner chair. “Unless you want to sleep in mine.”

She wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not and didn’t have time to decide. “I’ll keep this one, thank you.”

His white cotton shirt pulled attractively across his shoulders as he calmly held out his hand. “The book? Do you mind if I have a look now?”

“Yes, I do mind, actually.”

He wiggled his fingers. “Come on. Give it over, Bethany.”

She frowned. “I said you could read it when you married me, didn’t I?”

His eyes sparkled in amusement. “We’re more than halfway there—the sooner I see what that bastard’s after the sooner I can skin his ass on a platter.”

The thought of Hector laid out like a dead pig on a tray was too lovely to deny. It brought butterflies to her stomach. “All right, but only the first two pages. You can read the rest after the wedding.”

She waited for Thomas to bring up her suitcase, then extracted the black book from the outside zippered compartment. “Okay, so let’s talk about our plan. I want Hector to be left with nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Landon’s lips twitched, and when she noticed she felt herself respond. Damn, how did he do that? Every time he smiled she found herself smiling back like a dope.

After handing over the black leather book, she followed Landon’s stealthy movements as he hauled a chair out from behind a desk and sat. He calmly paged through it.

“So why did you marry him?” he asked.

“I was young and pregnant.” Beth plopped down on the edge of the bed, suddenly uncomfortable in her skirt and jacket. “And all right, yes, stupid.”

He flipped to the second page and didn’t raise his head, his hard, aquiline profile unreadable.

“I used to wonder why he’d want to marry me,” she admitted with a shrug. “I felt so flattered. He would call every day and ask to see me. Then I guess he saw what a good daughter I was to my parents. He wanted an obedient, biddable wife—like all men desperate to feel powerful want someone meek.”

Landon looked up, and when his lips smiled and did that eat-your-heart-out thing
again,
she felt a strange elated sensation.

“You were biddable, Beth? What happened?”

She burst out laughing. “Oh, stop it.”

“Did you ever let him medicate you, Beth?”

She frowned at the question, at the hard edge in the word “medicate”. There had been times when Hector had diagnosed her “problems” she needed to grow up, and get serious, and act like his wife. Apparently, he hadn’t had any pills for Beth’s ailments. “Hector specializes in chronic pain—and nothing of mine ever ached except my pride.”

And now she’d grown up, hadn’t she? Now she’d put all her efforts into acting like someone’s wife—
Landon’s.

His finger slid down a page, and he read a name out loud. “Joseph Kennar. He’s one of our reporters.”

“He’s bought.”

Landon appeared anything but surprised. “Everyone’s for sale unfortunately.” He continued reading, his eyes sharp as the point of a knife on the page. “Macy Jennings. Another one of our reporters.”

“Also bought.” Then she added, with a bit of disgust at herself because she could not, for the life of her, explain why she told him all this. “Hector would do anything to ensure he had the best reputation. He wanted to treat anyone that was rich and powerful, and keeping his name clean in the media guaranteed this. But I suspect Hector did more with Macy than just exchange money and favors.”

“And you let him?”

She let him? Had she? Just so he left her alone? “Well I…I guess I ignored him. I thought that…for David I would tolerate it.” God. Stupid stupid stupid. What would Landon think of her?

“But then?”

He seemed so inordinately interested in her that she was grateful his head was still bent over the book. Otherwise, his questions and his unyielding attention would be too much. Still, she felt so stupid over what she’d tolerated.

“But then I couldn’t do it even for my baby,” she admitted. There. All right, that wasn’t bad, that she had finally found her courage and left the sleaze. She’d sold David on the “new adventure” he and Mommy would take, and he’d been excited.

She seized the nearby pillow and clutched it to her chest, suddenly needing to hold on to something. Every time she thought of David her stomach lurched as if she’d been poisoned.

“I left Hector a year ago and took David with me, and I found a job at a flower shop. Hector made contact weeks later. He apologized, said he wanted me back, but all I wanted was to be free. Of him. I filed for divorce and when he found out, he ranted and threatened, said I wouldn’t see a dime. He was right, I didn’t. But I was still happy. Just me and David and Mom. But then he filed for custody.”

“He struck where it most hurt,” Landon said, slapping the book shut with a deafening sound.

He’d read only two pages. As she’d asked him to. And something about that, the respect for her wishes in that action, made the walls inside her crack a fraction.

Wow. An honorable man. Who’d have known she’d ever see one of those? “He
did
strike where it most hurt.” Beth closed her eyes briefly as the pain sliced her anew. “He tore me apart. I couldn’t even explain or say goodbye to my own son.”

And what is my baby doing now? Who hugs him instead of me? And when will I be able to hold him again?

“Hector will be furious when he learns we’ve married,” she admitted, struggling not to shiver.

Landon leaned back in his chair and canted his head, his lips thinning in distaste. “Let the man stew for a bit, Beth. Wonder what we’re concocting.”

But suddenly it struck her that more than angry, Hector would probably be annoyed. He treated patients with chronic pain and he’d always felt above them—like
he
would never feel the kind of pain his patients did. But Beth knew that he did. His wounds were internal; and they had festered.

His entire adult life, he’d seemed irked by the knowledge that there was someone better in this city, someone he couldn’t touch.

Someone the “love of his life” had chosen over him.

Hector had never recovered from that blow.

“I’ve never seen someone hate as powerfully as he hates you,” she admitted, and a wave of embarrassment washed over her.

She should’ve done something before. Sooner. She should’ve run with her son the moment he was born.