that might come your way.’
‘Thank you.’ She took care to keep the sarcasm from her tone, but there was something innately insulting in such a cold assessment of her character. In this man thinking she would appreciate being seen as nothing more than an animated wife-doll who would stand at his side and make all the right noises.
‘You’d have anything you wished, of course—within reason.’ He waved a hand. ‘As my wife, you would enjoy a wealthy lifestyle.’
All those millions, offered so casually. Had he any idea what he was throwing out there? She wasn’t avaricious, but he couldn’t know that. Couldn’t know just how driven she was in the money department at the moment.
Nothing was worth sacrificing her ideals about love and marriage, though. Not even a convenient way to end her cash problems a little more quickly. Not that she would ever take advantage of marrying him to get money. Besides, her efforts to take care of the situation were going okay. She was getting there. Slowly.
Nicholas was, ironically, the key to her plan, but as her high-paying boss, not as a potential life mate conveniently loaded with the green stuff. Claire was well shot of him, too, if this was the best he could offer.
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Or perhaps she just didn’t know how to say it. Or whether there would be consequences to saying it. She had seen him crush business opponents who got on the wrong side of him. Just how would he react to her turning him down? It was the smart choice. Despite everything, her heart protested at this. But she quelled the reaction.
‘Don’t you, Claire? I believe you’ll say yes.’ His gaze held hers briefly before it dropped away. One long finger drummed on the desktop, then stopped abruptly. ‘It’s a valid offer. One I think you’ll understand and appreciate.’
‘You think I’ll agree?’
A part of her was tempted. The part that was still stupidly attracted to him, against all odds. But one irrefutable fact remained. A fact that happened to be important to her. Nicholas didn’t love her. His feelings came nowhere near that. From his attitude right now, she imagined they never would.
Her chin lifted in determined defiance. She didn’t love him, either. Oh, maybe a little…But, no. She really, really didn’t love him. At all. He attracted her, yes, but it wasn’t the same thing. Those other little twinges hadn’t meant anything. Really. At least she had been smart enough not to fall for him completely.
She put her notepad and pencil down on the edge of the desk as her heart began to beat hard again. ‘Theoretically, if I didn’t take you up on this offer, what would happen?’
‘Examining all the angles, Claire? You never can contain that thoroughness, can you?’ Again his gaze sloughed over her and slid away, and again his face closed into an arrogant, confident mask.
‘Not really, no. It’s too ingrained in my nature.’
She had always been the thinker, the one to worry about consequences, while Sophie took life by the throat and couldn’t care less.
The chalk and cheese sisters, their parents used to call them, and it was apt. Sophie still played at life without a safety net. And Claire still worried about, and dealt with, consequences.
Hence Sophie’s stupid action of ‘borrowing’ money from her boss to fund the high-flying lifestyle she thought would impress the man she wanted to marry.
Sophie had lost track of the extent of her borrowing. She had snared Senator Tom Cranshaw in the end, but a month before the wedding was due to take place the man she was working for had discovered what she had done and decided it would be a good opportunity to blackmail her.
Either she met his demands to pay instalments of money that added up to far more than what she’d stolen, or he would reveal her actions to both the police and the press. Sophie would go to jail for embezzlement, and, because he was about to marry her, the Senator’s career would take a hit from which he would probably never recover.
Sophie had run crying to her sister, of course. Confessing all and begging for help. That had been over a year ago, and Claire was still working her way through the mess, with one final payment to take care of three months from now.
She didn’t like that Sophie had hidden the truth from Tom—any more than she liked that her sister had dumped almost all of the financial responsibility for this onto Claire. But it was too late now. They were in too deep. There was no going back.
‘If you declined my marriage offer, you’d go back to the clerical pool earlier than planned.’ Nicholas’s words brought her train of thought to an abrupt halt. ‘After today’s discussion, I would prefer to go onward working with someone less aware, shall we say, of my personal aspirations.’
He delivered this verdict on her fate without a blink, even though he had just issued her with a devastating and thoroughly untenable ultimatum. His shoulders tensed beneath the suit. ‘Not that I expect a negative outcome.’
What was she supposed to do now?
You’ll be able to fix it, Claire. You always know what to do. Sophie’s words rose to haunt her.
I love my sister, and I will protect her, and one day she’ll realise how much I care about her and love me back. She loves me even now. She just isn’t very good at showing it, that’s all.
Claire would figure a way out of this—because Nicholas couldn’t send her back to the clerical pool yet, and that was all there was to it. ‘Why demote me if I say no? It would result in a massive pay-cut for me. That doesn’t seem fair.’
Now that she had her feelings under a bit more control, it frustrated her that she was trying to be noble, not to have a mercenary bone in her body. And here was Nicholas, threatening to take her nice fat paycheque away from her unless she married him.
As administrative assistant to the boss she received five times her normal salary, and she needed every cent.
‘Janice isn’t due to return for ages yet.’
‘I’m aware of that.’ His reserved tone matched the cool green flecks in his eyes. The jut of his jaw sent warning signals blasting over her. ‘Just as you’re aware that this position has never been guaranteed. You could have found yourself back in the clerical pool at any time, for any number of reasons. Or for no reason, if I happened to decide I wanted to make a change.’ He sat forward in his chair with a jerk. ‘Let’s get to the point. What’s your answer?’
Did she have a choice? It would be madness to accept him. Yet how could she say no? She had to have that extra money.
‘What you’ve outlined,’ she ventured, knowing it was a last-ditch effort to stave off the inevitable but unable to stop herself anyway, ‘doesn’t sound a very cosy sort of relationship.’
Heat sparked into his eyes for just a moment, in a wave of scalding intensity. ‘Oh, I think you’d find we’d be perfectly cosy.’
The sheer sensual power of his statement stole her breath. She reacted to him with a responding wave of sexual heat. She might have disabled her emotions, but her hormones were a little more difficult to subdue, apparently.
‘I never realised you—’ She broke off, and this time her sense of panic was even greater.
Things
