Читать книгу A Rich Man's Revenge - Miranda Lee - Страница 6

“DO YOU have to play poker every Friday night, come rain, hail or shine?”

Charles glanced in the mirror at the reflection of the very beautiful blonde lying face down across his bed, her glorious golden hair spread out over her slender shoulders, her delicately pointed chin propped up in her hands. Her eyes, which were as big and blue as the sky, locked on to his, their expression beseeching.

Charles hesitated only slightly before continuing to button up his grey silk shirt. As much as the idea of joining her back on that bed was very tempting, his Friday-night poker game was non-negotiable.

“My poker buddies and I made a pact some time back,” he explained. “If we’re in Sydney on a Friday night, we have to show up. Actually, if we’re in Australia, we have to show up. We can only cancel if we’re overseas or in hospital. Although when Rico was in hospital after a skiing accident last winter, he insisted we all come and play in his room.”

Charles smiled wryly to himself as he thought of his best friend and his mad passion for the game. “I suspect on the unlikely event of Rico marrying again he’d ask us to accompany him on the honeymoon, just to get his weekly fix. I, however, was more than happy to give up poker during the entire month of my honeymoon,” he pointed out rather smugly.

“Your wife would have been seriously displeased if you hadn’t.”

“Would she?” He turned and smiled down at her. “How displeased?”

“Very displeased.”

“And are you displeased tonight, Mrs Brandon?”

She shrugged, then rolled over onto her back, stretching languorously against the ivory satin sheets, her hands lifting up over her head to flop against the side of the king-sized bed. Charles tried not to look at her simply perfect body. But it was difficult not to wallow in her physical beauty. Dominique was every man’s fantasy come true. And she was all his.

Charles still could not believe his luck in winning the hand—and the love—of such a glorious creature.

And Dominique did love him. He’d dated enough fortune hunters in the past to know the real thing when he found it.

Dominique sighed as she glanced up at him through her long lashes. “I suppose I can spare you for a few hours. I’m going to have to get used to being by myself, anyway, since you’re going back to work next Monday.”

Back to work…

Charles groaned at the thought, which was a first. For the past twenty years he’d devoted his life to the family brewery business after it had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by his profligate father. And he’d loved every difficult, challenging, frustrating moment.

From the age of twenty to forty he’d lived and breathed Brandon Beer. Marriage and a family had been relegated to the back-burner as he’d gone from being a near penniless undergraduate to one of Australia’s most successful businessmen, putting Brandon Beer back on the world map and buying half a dozen Sydney hotels along the way, each of which now earned him a sizeable fortune from the recent addition of poker machines.

Since meeting and marrying Dominique, however, business had taken a back seat in Charles’s life. His mind had been focused on things other than investment opportunities, market projections and expansion programmes. Even now, with the honeymoon over, his focus remained on things other than work.

The prospect of starting a family in the near future excited him almost as much as did the woman he planned having that family with. Dominique wanted at least two children and had decided to stop taking the Pill next month, which pleased him no end, as did her decision not to go back to work herself after their honeymoon. She’d quit her job in the PR department at Brandon Beer’s head office shortly after she’d said yes to his proposal, saying she didn’t feel right, working there any more.

Charles was well aware, however, that with her looks and personality Dominique could secure another PR or PA job in Sydney at the drop of a hat. And he’d said as much, not wanting her to think he was the kind of chauvinistic husband who expected his wife not to work.

But she’d said no to that suggestion, stating that for the next few years her career was being his wife, and the mother of his children. Maybe, when their last child went off to school, she would consider returning to the workforce.

Whilst not believing himself an old-fashioned man in any way, Charles had to confess he liked the thought of his wife always being there for him when he got home from work, ready to accommodate his every wish and whim, something which didn’t seem to be any hardship for her.

“I’m going to miss you terribly,” she said somewhat plaintively. “Are you quite sure you have to go back to work on Monday?” she asked, then gave him one of the best come-hither looks since Eve flashed that apple at Adam.

Charles’s flesh responded accordingly. He didn’t doubt he could survive being away from Dominique for a few hours this evening, but the prospect of not being able to make love to her during the day whenever he felt like it in future was not to his liking. Honeymoons were obviously very corrupting, as were beautiful brides who never said no to whatever their husbands wanted to do.

“I suppose I could take another week off,” he said, thinking to himself that the office would survive another five days without his making a personal appearance. He could keep in touch by phone and email. “It would give us some time to look for our new house together.” He’d told Dominique to look around for a real home to replace his present penthouse pad, something substantial and stylish in one of the Eastern suburbs. He didn’t want to negotiate the harbour bridge on his way to the office every day.

Dominique beamed at him. “What a wonderful idea! But would you really? Take another week off work, I mean? I know your reputation for being a workaholic.”

His eyes were rueful as they met Dominique’s in the mirror. “You know I’d do just about anything you asked me to.” Anything except give up any more of his Friday-night poker games.

His shirt safely buttoned, he turned and braced himself on the mattress on either side of her upside down face. “But you already know that, don’t you?” he murmured, his mouth hovering just above hers. “You’ve bewitched me good and proper.”

“Have I?” Her voice went all soft and smoky in that way which always turned him on. Charles groaned. It was incredible, really, given he was nearly forty-one years old, not some young buck in his prime. His desire for Dominique sometimes bordered on insatiable. Charles had never known a woman like her. Or a love like the love he felt for her. It was all-consuming. Possessive. Obsessive, even.

Her hands lifted to touch him, her eyebrows arching. “Mmm. Charles darling, I can’t see you concentrating on cards in such a deplorable condition. Surely your poker buddies wouldn’t mind if you were just a teensie weensie bit late…”

He ached to give in to her. But feared that once she started on him, he wouldn’t want to stop. If he didn’t show up at poker tonight, Rico would have his hide.

No. He’d have to be strong and not let Dominique have her wicked way with him this once.

Which perhaps was just as well. Always getting your own way was never good for anyone, but especially a wife, he imagined. He’d already spoiled Dominique shockingly since she’d become Mrs Charles Brandon. He’d spent a small fortune on designer fashion during their fortnight in Paris. And quite a bit on Italian handmade shoes and other accessories during their stopover in Rome.

But enough was enough. Now that their honeymoon was technically over, he really had to start the day-to-day routine of his marriage as he meant to go on. And he meant to go on playing poker every Friday night.

“On the contrary, my sweet,” Charles said with a wry smile as he pulled back out of her reach. “Re-directed sexual energies can be very effective. Frustration gives a man an edge. That’s why boxers abstain the night before they fight. I guarantee I’ll win at the table tonight, and when I finally get home so will you, my love. Now, do stop trying to seduce me, wench. Cover yourself up with a sheet or something till I can get myself out of here. That body of yours should be registered as a lethal weapon.”

She laughed, and rolled over onto her front again. “Will that do?”

“Better, I guess.” Though goodness knew her rear view was almost as tantalising as her front. He loved the way her spine curved down her long, slender back, dipping in at her tiny waist before rising to disappear between her peach-shaped behind. Like the rest of her, there was nothing even remotely boyish about Dominique’s bottom. It was lush and pouty and perfect. A temptation of the most devilish kind.

Charles knew he wasn’t the sort of man most women lusted after on sight. Never had been. As a teenager, girls hadn’t looked at him twice. He hadn’t fared much better as a young man. Of course, once he became seriously rich it was amazing how many gorgeous girls suddenly found him irresistible. But whilst his looks had improved considerably with age, one could still never call him handsome. Not in the way his father had been handsome. Or Rico. They were both movie-star material. So, Charles had often suspected some of his lady-friends had an eye on his money, rather than being genuinely attached or attracted to him.

Yes, the mirror told Charles the truth when he shaved every morning. He was now a passably attractive man, his main physical assets being his height, his fitness and that inherited gene which meant he’d never lose his full head of thick dark brown hair.

Baldness did not run in the Brandon family.

Of course, Charles had to concede that his successes in life had leant a certain air to the way he conducted himself nowadays. Some financial journalists described him as impressive and imposing. Others inclined towards ruthless and arrogant.

He didn’t care what they wrote and said about him, really. Or even what the mirror told him. All that mattered was what Dominique saw when she looked at him.

Clearly, she found him attractive enough. Very attractive, actually. She’d confessed to him on their wedding night that her first emotion on meeting him was worry over how incredibly sexy she found him.

Charles could still remember the intense emotion which consumed him when he had first come face to face with his future wife. Rico had insisted it was just lust, but Charles knew differently. He knew he’d fallen in love at first sight.

The occasion was the company Christmas party last year, barely five months ago. Dominique had just started work at Brandon Beer that week after moving to Sydney from Melbourne. They hadn’t met prior to the party, though he’d been aware of her appointment to their PR division. He’d seen—and approved—her CV.

He knew she was twenty-eight years old, a Tasmanian by birth, with no fancy education or degree to her credit, but a string of night-school diplomas which showed the sort of hard work and drive he admired. Her previous position in Melbourne had been with a sports and entertainment management company, her first job as a personal PA. To the boss of the place, no less. She’d been with him over two years and the reference he’d supplied was glowing. Prior to that she’d worked in reception and guest relations at some quality Melbourne hotels, a step up from her first job of being a housemaid.

Charles had been informed by the man who’d hired her that she was a very good-looking blonde, but seeing Ms Dominique Cooper in the flesh had literally taken his breath away.

She’d been wearing white, he recalled. A calf-length dress with a deep V-neckline which displayed her fabulous figure. Her hair had been up, tiny tendrils kissing her elegantly long neck. Her full lips had been shiny and pink. Pearl drops had dangled from her ears. When he drew closer, his nostrils had been filled with her perfume, an exotic and provocative scent which he now knew was called Casablanca.

He’d asked her out within minutes of being introduced, his desire already at fever pitch. Charles was used to getting his own way with women by then, so he’d been shocked by her refusal, especially when she admitted on further questioning that she wasn’t seeing anyone else at the time. She’d told him politely but firmly that she would never date her boss, no matter how attractive she thought he was.

“So you do think I’m attractive,” he countered, flattered yet frustrated at the same time.

She gave him an oddly nervous look, whirled on her high heels and fled the party.

Smitten and intrigued, he pursued her doggedly over the Christmas and New Year break, ringing her at home every evening and sending flowers to her flat every day—her number and address were in the personnel files at work—till she finally agreed to a dinner date. She still insisted he meet her at the restaurant rather than pick her up. She did not want him taking her home afterwards, which intrigued him further. Clearly, she was afraid to be alone with him. Why?

He didn’t find out why till dessert, when she’d explained with quite touching agitation that she’d been foolish enough to date her last boss, then been even more foolish in becoming his secret mistress. He’d promised her the world, but in the end had dumped her and married some society girl with the right connections. That was why she’d moved to Sydney, to get right away from the awful memories, at the same time deciding that she would never again date her boss. Such men could not be trusted. They used silly girls like her because they were pretty and easily impressed. But they didn’t love them, or marry them. They just screwed them, and screwed up their lives.

Charles set out to prove her wrong, but she was very difficult to convince. She did accept further invitations to dinner with him and showed him in many incredibly sweet ways that she liked him a lot, but she continued to spurn any advances. Charles became even more enamoured, and vowed to show her that his feelings for her were above board.

He could still remember the look on her face when he told her over dinner one night in early March that he loved her more than words could say. But when he asked her to marry him, producing the most beautiful—and the most expensive—diamond ring he’d been able to buy, her shock quickly turned to disgust.

“You don’t mean that,” she retorted. “You’re just saying it to get me into bed. You think you can buy my love, but you’ve wasted your money on that rock because the pathetic truth is I’ve already fallen in love with you. I was going to go to bed with you tonight, anyway.”

He wasn’t able to contain his delight at this announcement. Or his desire. He’d never been so hard.

“Oh, just put the rotten thing on my finger if it makes you feel better,” she swept on irritably. “Then take me to wherever it is you have in mind to take me. But you and I both know you won’t go through with any wedding. After you’ve had what you want, you’ll dump me like my last boss.”

“You’re wrong,” he insisted passionately as he slipped the sparkling rock on her engagement finger.

And he proved her wrong by marrying her a month later without having so much as laid a finger on her. The kiss he gave her after their very small and unostentatious ceremony was their first proper kiss. It had been sheer and utter hell to control himself for so long but he’d managed by focusing on the big picture.

Rico called him insane, marrying a woman he hadn’t been intimate with before. A strange sentiment for a man of Italian heritage. Weren’t they into virgin brides? Not that Dominique was a virgin. She’d never pretended to be.

But there was a touchingly virginal air about her when she came to him on their wedding night, trembling in her white satin nightgown. Clearly, she was nervous, afraid perhaps that she’d made a big mistake herself, marrying a man she’d never been intimate with. For all she knew he could have been the worst lover in the world!

But their wedding night was magic for both of them. Sheer magic. When he witnessed his new bride’s awed joy, his own pleasure and satisfaction was boundless.

“I didn’t know what real love was till this moment,” Dominique had told him as she lay still snuggled up to him somewhere close to dawn. “I love you so much, Charles. I’d die if you ever stopped loving me back.”

Impossible, he’d thought at the time. And he still thought the same. If anything, he was more in love with her than ever. He’d be the one who’d die if she ever stopped loving him.

“I have to go,” he told her gently, feeling slightly guilty for leaving her alone now. “I’ll try not to stay too late, but—”

“Yes, I know,” she broke in with a sigh. “I understand. Rico will try to keep you there till all hours.”

Dominique clenched her teeth at the thought of Charles’s best man doing just that. And it had nothing to do with Rico being a poker addict.

Enrico Mandretti’s scepticism over her love for Charles had been evident from their first meeting. Clearly, he thought her a devious fortune hunter. He didn’t have to spell out his suspicions. They were there in his dark, cynical eyes.

The trouble was…he was right. Yet oh, so wrong.

She did love Charles. More than she’d ever thought herself capable of loving any man. But before she’d met her future husband she’d been exactly what Rico believed she was. A gold-digger. A good-looking girl using her looks and her body to achieve her main goal in life: to acquire a wealthy husband, a gold-plated insurance policy that she would never have to suffer what her mother had suffered.

Dominique was sure that rich men’s wives didn’t go through what her mother had gone through. They were protected from such ignominies. They could at least die with dignity. That was, if they had to die at all.

After her mother’s lingering and very painful death, Dominique had vowed that she would marry money, if it was the last thing she did. Becoming a rich man’s wife, however, proved not such an easy task, not even for a girl with her looks. Rich men married women who moved in their own social circles. Or girls who worked with them; sophisticated, educated creatures with university degrees.

Unfortunately, Dominique’s education had been sadly lacking during her teenage years, her schooling constantly interrupted then totally terminated so that she could stay home and nurse her mother till she passed away. By the time she was eighteen, Dominique knew it would take years before she had the skills which would put her into the immediate vicinity of wealthy businessmen.

But she had youth on her side, and tenacity, and she’d finally achieved her aim a couple of years back, that of being in the right place, working alongside the right kind of boss. Single. Good-looking. And rich.

Unfortunately, her target had been even more ruthless than she was. His life’s plan did not include getting hitched to some no-account girl from the backwoods of Tasmania, no matter how hard she’d worked to educate herself, or how much he fancied her.

Sleeping with her was fine. Lying to her perfectly OK. Marrying her? Never in a million years!

After her mission to become Mrs Jonathon Hall had failed, a distressed and a slightly bitter Dominique had taken her over-generous severance pay along with Jonathon’s guilt-ridden, glowing reference and headed for the bigger fish pond of Sydney. Once there, she’d plotted out her strategy for becoming Mrs Charles Brandon with cold-blooded resolve. More cold-blooded than ever.

But there had been nothing cold-blooded about the feelings Charles had evoked in her during their first meeting. She’d already seen photographs of him and thought him quite attractive—Dominique knew she couldn’t bear to marry a man who was physically repulsive to her—but she’d found Charles in the flesh so intensely sexy she’d been totally thrown.

Those icy grey eyes of his had cut right through her defences to that part of her which she’d kept locked tightly away all her life. Dominique had never fallen in love before. Or even into lust. She had felt varying degrees of attraction to members of the opposite sex over the years. She’d even slept with a few. Jonathon, she’d been very attracted to. Sex with him had been quite pleasurable, but she’d never been carried away by it, or really needed it. Oh, no. All her responses with Jonathon had been totally faked.

Yet when Charles had stared at her body none too subtly that first day, she’d found herself staring right back at his own tall, lean body and wanting it so very badly.

Panic best described her reaction to this alien craving. It was no wonder she had fled, totally abandoning her plan to seduce Charles Brandon. She wanted to marry a rich man, not fall in love with one. Love made a woman weak and foolish and vulnerable. Love brought misery, not happiness.

But Charles wouldn’t leave it at that, would he? And here she was, his wife; his adoring and besotted wife.

Now she knew what her mother had meant when Dominique had once asked her why she’d married a man like her wretched father.

“Because I loved him to death,” had been her mother’s reply.

Words of considerable irony.

As Dominique watched her husband put on his jacket, she tried not to worry about loving him so deeply. She supposed that with Charles she could afford to be a little weak and foolish and vulnerable. Because he loved her back. And he wasn’t anything like Jonathon.

How perverse, she thought, that she’d targeted Charles for that very reason. Because he wasn’t as young or as handsome as Jonathon. She’d thought that would make Charles more susceptible to seduction. She’d thought that would give her more power over him.

But just the opposite had happened. He’d been the one who’d exercised all the power over her, coercing her to go out with him, despite her fear of falling for him.

Yet she was happy, wasn’t she? Deliriously so. There was nothing to be afraid of. Charles was a wonderful husband and lover. And he’d make a wonderful father.

That was another thing which constantly surprised Dominique. Her desire now for children. She’d never thought of herself as maternal before. Never wanted to be the little woman at home. Now she simply couldn’t wait to have a baby with Charles. Not just one, either. Suddenly, her idea of Utopia was being his little woman at home with the patter of little feet around her.

Of course, her home would be nothing like her mother’s home. Not a shack, but a mansion. Her husband was a man of substance who could provide in abundance for his wife and any number of children, not some pathetic failure of a man who couldn’t even look after himself, let alone anyone else.

“I’m off now,” Charles said as he swept up his cellphone and car keys from the bedside chest. “You know my number if you need me. Be good, now…” And he threw her a wry smile.

A premonition-type panic gripped her heart as she watched him walk towards the bedroom door.

“Charles!” she called out, and he turned, frowning.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I…I love you.”

“I know,” he said, smiling again, a little smugly this time. “Keep it warm for me.” And he left.