and leave me to crush them,’ she choked, fighting back a sudden sob and finishing on a shaky quiver of husky despair. ‘I’m sick of being the bad guy.’
Catching the thoughtful expression in his watchful dark eyes, she immediately regretted the bitter addition, and you couldn’t really compare this situation with all the little things like telling Mark he couldn’t ask their foster parents for the expensive trainers he wanted when they were kids.
‘Then why do you let him do it?’
Thrown off balance by the soft question, she stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Why do you let your brother play you like...? Whichever way you look at it, it isn’t healthy—a grown man letting his sister fight his battles.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s emasculating, not to mention manipulative.’
The casually voiced observation whipped angry colour into her cheeks. ‘Are you calling me manipulative?’ she asked in a low, dangerous voice.
‘No, I’m calling your brother manipulative.’
Immediately defensive, Mari lifted her chin. ‘My brother didn’t...doesn’t know about me crashing your wedding.’ She bit her lip and added with a husky question mark, ‘I’d like it to stay that way?’
This was not news to Seb, who considered himself a pretty good judge and had recognised the shallow insincerity behind Mark’s smile the moment they had met. If the brother had known he had no doubt the younger man would have immediately tried to distance himself from his sister’s actions.
‘So you’re asking a favour from me...?’
She shrugged and said in a flat little voice, ‘Stupid idea.’
Experiencing an inexplicable impulse to live down to her expectations of him, he almost asked, ‘What’s it worth?’
Instead he found himself extending his hand.
Not in the plan, Seb, said the voice in his head.
Mari drew a tense breath but didn’t step back. She couldn’t—her feet were nailed to the floor. She stood there quivering as he touched her cheek, only lightly with his forefinger, but there was an element of compulsion about the way he drew a line down the soft downy curve of her cheek, his eyes following the action—then he repeated it.
‘You think I put a price on everything?’
Hot desire pulsed through her body. Her response to the casual intimacy was frightening, exciting and humiliating all at once. It was so tiring fighting, not just him but the way he made her feel. For a split second she let herself wonder what it would be like to stop fighting.
‘Don’t you?’ she asked, her reaction as his hand fell away ambivalent at best.
‘I won’t tell your brother about your wedding-crashing exploits.’
‘Thank you.’ Her relief was heartfelt, but her worried frown lingered. He said that now, but what if he changed his mind?
‘Don’t worry, I’m considered a man of my word.’ He saw her eyes widen in alarm and gave a low chuckle. ‘You really should never ever play poker.’ Unless it was not for money and with him, he thought, warming quite literally to the idea of a slow striptease.
‘I know Mark is bound to find out sometime,’ she admitted. ‘But it would be easier later. He’s not even speaking to me right now.’
‘You know, if you’re not careful you’ll spend your life—’ He shook his head and finished abruptly. ‘No, correction, you won’t have a life of your own.’ The thought made him angry.
Confused by the strength of the disapproval she could feel coming off him in waves, she arched an interrogative brow. ‘And you care why exactly?’
A startled look chased across his lean face. ‘I don’t,’ he denied, and shrugged. ‘For all I know you enjoy it. Maybe it’s symbiotic.’ Displaying his white teeth in a smile that didn’t reach his deep-set eyes, he leaned in and flicked her cheek with his finger. This time there was nothing seductive about the gesture. ‘Slice Mari Jones and you’ll find martyr running all the way through.’
She turned her chin away, hating his sneering suggestion and the way her body was betraying her by reacting to the sensual aura he projected.
‘Slice Sebastian Rey-Defoe and you’ll find sadistic bastard all the way through?’ she countered angrily. ‘You knew when you gave Mark the details of that place that we don’t have the sort of money that it costs—you expect me to believe you did that out of the goodness of your heart?’
Was his cruelty casual or calculated? Mari couldn’t decide which was worse.
‘I’ll pay for the treatment.’
HOPE FLARED BUT was immediately swallowed up by a depressing wave of realism. He was no fairy godmother. It would be hard to think of a less appropriate analogy, even if he had been oozing the milk of human kindness instead of a headache-inducing level of testosterone.
‘And afterwards,’ he continued, ‘I will fund any physical therapy and aftercare.’
When things sounded too good to be true there was often a very good reason.
‘Why?’
She was unable to stop herself—her hostile gaze slid up the impeccably tailored length of him, but she knew during the journey over dark grey suit, white shirt and narrow burgundy tie that it wasn’t hostility that made her stomach muscles tighten and quiver, which was stupid because she had never gone for the ‘groomed to within an inch of his life’ look. It always suggested a vanity that she didn’t find attractive. And he was so groomed he could have stepped right out of one of those glossy ads, the sort that suggested that if you bought the car, the fragrance, the shampoo, you, too, could look like this.
Only you wouldn’t. There might be a few pale imitations but Sebastian was definitely a one-off, and in her opinion one too many. All the same, to look at him was... She just stopped herself sighing; the light flush along the high, smooth curve of her cheekbones she could not control... He would have been easier to tolerate had there been a single thing to criticise. Physical perfection when it came with a massive sense of superiority was not attractive.
Tell that to your hormones, Mari.
The suggestion of a smile touched his expressive lips as he studied her face. ‘Don’t worry, there are no strings.’
She lifted a hand to brush away the heavy strand of dark red hair that a gust of wind had plastered across her face, the same gust that ruffled his close-cropped dark hair up into attractive spikes.
‘I wouldn’t accept charity from you if my life depended on it!’ she told him in a clear, confident voice.
His brows lifted. ‘You can pay lip service to your pride if you want, but it’s not your life we are talking about, is it?’
She
