Benjamin put it on speakerphone.
His eyes rested on Freya as the gravelly Spanish tones of Javier Casillas filled the room.
‘You will not receive a cent from me, you son-of-a-bitch. Keep her. She’s all yours.’
Then the line went dead.
This time the silence between them was loud enough for Freya to hear the beats of her thundering heart.
The room began to spin around her, the high ceiling lowering, the wide walls narrowing.
She was going to be sick.
She might very well have been sick had the most outrageous sound she’d ever heard not brought her sharply back to herself and the room back into focus.
Benjamin, his eyes not once dropping their hold on hers, was laughing.
‘How can you think this is funny?’ she asked with a croak, dredging the words from the back of her throat. ‘You’ve lost.’
And she had lost too. Javier had emailed the pictures to her too as a message. Their engagement was over.
‘Lost?’ Benjamin’s face creased with mirth. He threw his head back, his laughter coming in great booms that echoed around her ears. ‘No, ma douce, I have not lost. I told you last night, I cannot lose.’
It was a struggle to breathe. ‘He’s not going to pay the money.’
‘There was only an evens chance that he would. There were only two end scenarios: Javier would pay or he would not. This result is not my preferred one but I can take satisfaction that he will be burning with humiliation at the photographs of us so it is not a loss by any means.’
‘Not a loss for you, maybe, but what about me? He’s never going to take me back. You know that, right? These pictures make it look like I was encouraging you...that I was a part of it.’
Oh, God, that look in her eyes as she’d stared into his...
There was not an ounce of penitence to be found in his glittering eyes. ‘You don’t have to lose anything, ma douce. Your career is safe. You are one of the most exciting dancers in the world. If Javier is foolish enough to sack you then I guarantee another company will snatch you up.’
‘You think I care only about my career?’ she demanded.
His laugh was merciless. ‘My sister says you are the most driven dancer she has ever met, but if it is the loss of your fiancé that grieves you then I suggest you have a rethink. If he had feelings for you he would have fought for you. If he’d believed in your love he would have fought for you. You should be thanking me. I am saving you from a lifetime of misery.’
‘I can assure you, you are not. I told you last night that you don’t know anything about me.’
‘If he means that much to you, now is your chance to go to him and plead your case,’ he said sardonically. ‘He has made his choice, which means you are now free to make yours. Say the word and I will arrange transportation to take you back to Madrid. You can be back there by lunch.’
Rising from her chair, Freya leaned forward to eyeball him. She had never known she could feel such hate for someone. Her heart was beating so frantically against her ribcage she had to fight to get the words out. ‘Believe me, my preferred outcome would be to leave this awful excuse for a home and never have to see your hateful face again. Quite frankly, if I were stuck on a desert island with the choice between you and a rat for company, the rodent would win every time.’
Something flickered on his darkly handsome face, the smug satisfaction vanishing.
A charge passed between them, so tangible she felt it pierce into her chest and thump into her erratic heart.
He gazed at her with eyes that swirled and pulsed before his lips curved into a knowing smile and he too leaned forward. ‘The way you were looking at me in that photograph proves the lie in that.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘I DON’T KNOW what you’re talking about.’ Freya hated that her burning cheeks contradicted her.
Benjamin rose slowly from his seat and walked around the table to her, that feline grace she had seen before taking a dangerous hue, the panther stalking towards its prey.
She twisted around so her thighs pressed into the hard wood, her usually nimble feet becoming like sludge.
And then he was standing in front of her, that strong neck her lips kept longing to press into right there in her eye line, standing close enough for his fresh spicy scent to seep into her senses.
‘I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, ma douce.’ He placed a hand on the arch of her neck and dropped his voice to a murmur. The feel of his fingers on her skin burned through her, the heat from his breath catching the loose strands of her hair and carrying through it to her scalp and down into her bloodstream. ‘The camera never lies. Javier saw the desire you feel for me. I have seen it too and I have felt it, when I carried you back into my home and the moonlight shone on us both. You say you hate me but still you long for my kiss.’
Freya found herself too scared to move. Too scared to breathe. Terrified to make the slightest twist in her body lest her lips inch themselves forward to brush against the warm neck so close to her mouth and the rest of her body, aching at the remembrance of being held so securely in his arms, press itself wantonly against him.
Focus, Freya. The next few minutes will determine you and your mother’s whole futures.
He moved a little closer so his breath danced over the top of her ear, electrifying parts inside her she hadn’t known were there. ‘There is an attraction between us that has been there since we first saw each other in Javier’s garden.’
She gave a tiny shake of her head to deny his words but he dragged his hand from her neck and placed a finger on her lips, standing back a little so he could stare straight into her eyes.
‘Now you no longer belong to him, we are free to act on it.’ Benjamin brushed the finger from her lips to rest lightly on her cheek. She truly had the softest skin he had ever touched, more velvet than flesh.
He’d always known it would be fifty-fifty whether Javier would pay up, which was why he had gone to the lengths he had to make sure that whatever the outcome, he would still win.
He hadn’t expected the destruction of Javier and Freya’s relationship to feel like a victory that would taste as sweet as if Javier had paid in full.
Never again would he be haunted by thoughts of Freya enjoying herself in his enemy’s bed because she had been correct that Javier would never take her back. She could plead with him but Benjamin knew Javier too well. His Spanish foe’s reputation and pride were the fuel he needed to get through the day. In one stroke Benjamin had battered them both and soon he would set his sights on Luis too.
Benjamin was well aware the actions he’d taken made him as bad as the men he sought to destroy but he didn’t care. Why should he? Who had ever cared for him?
His mother had loved him but when he had discovered the Casillas brothers’ treachery the past had come back into sharp focus and he’d been forced to accept that her love for him had always been tied with her love for them. Louise Guillem had loved Javier and Luis as if they were children of her blood because, for his mother, Clara Casillas had been the love of her life. A platonic love, it was true, but with the emotional intensity of the most heightened love affair. Benjamin had been a by-product of that love, a child to raise alongside Clara’s, not wanted as a child should be for himself but more as a pet, an accessory.
His father had long gone, leaving the marital home when Louise had fallen pregnant by accident a decade after Benjamin had been born. Already fed up playing second fiddle to the World’s Greatest Dancer, his father had refused to hang around and raise a second accessory. Benjamin had never missed him—you had to know someone to miss them and he had never properly known his father—but, again, with the past being brought back into focus, he had realised for the first time that his father hadn’t just left his mother but his only son too. He hadn’t cared enough to keep their tentative relationship going.
Then there was Javier and Luis. Their betrayal had been the most wrenching of a
ll because it had made him look at the past with new, different eyes and reassess all the relationships he had taken for granted and unbury his head from the truth.
The only relationship he had left was with his sister but she was a free spirit with wounds of her own, a beautiful violin with broken strings.
Every other person he’d trusted and cared for had used or betrayed him.
He was damned if he would trust or care again.
This beautiful woman with eyes a man could fall into was no innocent. He regretted that he’d had to use her but it had been a necessary evil. He would not regret destroying her relationship with Javier. If she had cared an ounce for his foe she would not be staring at him as if she wanted him to devour her.
Dieu, a man really could fall into those eyes and never resurface...
But there was something else breaking free in the heady depths of those eyes, a fire, a determination that made him drop his hand from her cheek and step back so he could study her carefully without her sultry scent playing under his nose and filtering through into his bloodstream...
The moment he stepped away she folded her arms across her chest and seemed to grow before his eyes.
‘The only thing we’re going to act on is your word.’ Freya’s husky voice had the same fiery determination as resonated in her eyes.
‘You are ready to be taken back to Madrid?’
This time she was the one to laugh, a short, bitter sound. ‘Yes. But not yet. Not until you have married me.’
For a moment it felt as if he had stepped onto quicksand.
He shook his head. ‘You want to marry me?’
‘No. I would rather marry the rodent on the desert island but you told me I would have three choices once Javier had made his. He won’t take me back, not even if I get down on my knees and beg. I need the money set out in our pre-nuptial agreement so going back to Madrid and resuming my single life is not an option either, which leaves just one remaining choice—marrying you. You need to honour the contract Javier and I signed on our engagement as you said you would.’
He stared into her unsmiling face, an unexpected frisson racing up his spine.
Marriage to Freya...?
He had made his threat to Javier with the full intention of acting on it if it came to it but never had he believed she would go along with it, let alone demand it of him.
He tried to envisage Javier’s reaction when he heard the news but all he could imagine was Freya naked in his bed, the fantasies he’d been suppressing for two months suddenly springing to life in a riot of erotic colour.
Marriage had never been on his agenda before. He’d spent the past seven years so busy clawing his business back to health and then into the business stratosphere that any thoughts of wedlock had been put on the back burner, something to be considered when his business no longer consumed his every waking thought.
Now the thought of marriage curdled his stomach. Marriage involved love and trust, two things he was no longer capable of and no longer believed in.
‘Were you lying to me when you gave me your word?’ she challenged into the silence.
‘I save the lies for your ex-fiancé. He’s the expert at them. And I am thinking you must be good at them too seeing as you fooled him into believing you had feelings for him.’
‘I didn’t fool or lie to anyone. Javier and I both knew exactly what we were signing up for.’
‘You admit you were marrying him for his money?’
‘Yes. I need that money.’
‘And what did Javier get out of marrying you other than a prima ballerina on his arm?’
Fresh colour stained her cheeks but her gaze didn’t flicker. ‘The contract we signed spells it out. If you’re the man of your word you say you are, you will duplicate it and honour it.’
‘You are serious about this?’
‘Deadly serious. The ballet company is on a two-week shutdown. I was supposed to marry Javier next Saturday. I presume with all the strings you’re able to pull you can arrange for us to marry then instead. Either that or you can pay me now all the money I would have received from Javier, say, for the first ten years of our marriage.’ Her eyes brightened, this idea clearly only just occurring to her. ‘That can be my compensation for being the unwitting victim in your vindictive game. It comes to...’ her brow furrowed as she mentally calculated the sum ‘...around twenty million. I’ll be happy to accept half that. Call it ten million and I go back to my life and we never have to see each other again.’
‘You want me to pay you off?’ he asked, part in astonishment and part in admiration.
‘That would be the best outcome for both of us, don’t you think?’
He shook his head slowly, intrigued and not a little aroused at the spirit and fight she was showing. No wonder Javier had chosen her for his wife. She was magnificent. ‘Non, ma douce, the choice was marriage or nothing. If I pay you off, I get nothing from it.’
‘Your conscience will thank you.’
‘I told you before, my conscience allows me to sleep well. With you in my bed every night I will be able to sleep even more sweetly.’ His arousal deepened to imagine that wonderful hair fanned over his pillow, the obsidian eyes currently firing fury at him firing only desire...
‘Maybe you should read the contract before assuming I will be in your bed every night. You might find you prefer to pay me off.’
‘Unlikely but, even if that is the case, the knowledge Javier will spend the rest of his life knowing it is my ring you wear on your finger and not his will soften the blow.’
‘You really are a vindictive monster, aren’t you?’
‘You insult me and speak of my conscience when you are a self-confessed gold-digger.’ He smiled and closed the gap that had formed between them and placed a hand on her slender hip. There was no danger of trusting or caring for this woman, even if he was capable of it and even if she did have eyes he could sink into. ‘We don’t have to like each other to be good together...and I think we could be very good together. Marry me and you have everything you would have had if you had married Javier.’
‘And you get continued revenge,’ she finished for him, her tone contemptuous.
‘Exactemente. We both get what we want.’
Freya could smell the warmth of his skin beneath the freshness of his cologne...
Benjamin was not what she wanted. He provoked her in ways Javier never had. Javier was scary but Benjamin terrified her for all the wrong reasons.
She wouldn’t be swapping one rich man for another, she would be swapping ice for fire, safety for danger, all the things she had never wanted, all the things she had shied away from since she had learned sex was the only control she had over her body.
There was not a part of her external body that hadn’t been touched or manhandled; a grab of her arm to raise it an inch higher, rough hands on her hips to twist her into the desired shape, a chuck under the chin to lift it, partners holding her intimately in dance... Her external body was not hers; it belonged to dance. Her body was public property but her emotions and everything inside her belonged to herself.
That the control she’d worked so hard for was in danger of slipping for this man, this vindictive, abhorrent...
She clamped her lips together to contain a gasp.
Benjamin had taken another step closer. Their bodies were almost flush.
For the first time in her life someone had hold of her hip and she could feel it, inside and out, her blood heating and thickening to treacle.
She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, trying to block her dancing senses and contain what was happening within her frame.
‘You know what this means?’ he murmured.
She swallowed and managed a shake of her head.
‘It means you and I are now betrothed. Which means we need to seal the deal.’
Before she could guess what he meant, he’d hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her tight against him. Before she could protest or
make any protective move of her own, he’d covered her mouth with his.
Having no preparation or warning, Freya found herself flailing against him, her hands grabbing his arms as her already overloaded senses careered into terrifying yet exciting new directions. She struggled helplessly to keep possession of herself while his lips moved against hers in what she instinctively knew was the final marker in the game he’d been playing, Benjamin claiming her as his in an expert and ruthless manner that...
His tongue swept into her mouth and suddenly she didn’t care that it was all a game to him. Her body took possession of her brain for the very first time and she was kissing him back, taking the dark heat of his kisses and revelling in the sensation they were evoking in her. Such glorious, heady sensations, burning her skin beneath her clothes, sensitising flesh that had only come alive before for dance. She loosened her hands to wind them around his neck and press herself closer still while he swept his hands over her back, holding her tightly, possessively, devouring her mouth as if she were the food he needed to sustain himself. When his hand moved down to clasp her bottom and grind their groins together, it was her moan that echoed between them.
Her breasts were crushed against his chest, alive and sensitised for the first time in her life, making her want to weep that she had chosen to wear a bra when she so rarely bothered, and as these thoughts flickered in her hazy mind reality crashed back down.
All the clothes she wore, her underwear, her shoes, every item designated as hers under this roof had been bought without her knowledge.
She was a pawn in Benjamin’s game of vengeance and she hated him.
She would not accept his kisses with anything but contempt.
When Freya suddenly pulled out of his arms and jumped back, seeming to leap backwards through the air yet still making the perfect dancer’s landing, Benjamin had to blink rapidly to regain his focus and sense of place.
What the hell had just happened?
Breathing heavily, he stared at her, stunned that one simple kiss could explode like that. He’d known the attraction between them was strong but that...that had blown his mind.
Billionaire's Bride for Revenge (Billionaire?s Bride for Revenge) Page 6
