pout appeared on her moist lips. “Then when?” she wanted to know.
What had he ever seen in her? he couldn’t help wondering. Granted, there’d been a time when he would have gladly taken her up on her offer, but he’d been younger then and far more impressionable. He’d like to think he was too smart now to be tempted to lie down with a black widow.
He shook his arm free and then grasped hers. He began directing her toward the front entrance. “Some other time, Candace,” he said forcefully.
Instantly, her face clouded over. “I don’t like being rejected, Luke. Your little party won’t go so well if I make a scene. That’s what they’ll remember, me,” she emphasized, “not you or this little jewelry store display of yours.”
It was a threat with teeth, and they both knew it.
He didn’t react well to threats. “I think you’ll be happier elsewhere, Candace,” Luke told her coldly. He snapped his fingers over her head at someone across the floor.
She didn’t bother looking to see who Luke was summoning. She wasn’t interested.
“And I think I’ll be happier here,” she insisted. Accustomed to getting her way, it infuriated her to be contradicted.
The next moment, they were joined by a third party. Matt Schaffer, the head of security for Montgomery Enterprises, was at her elbow. But rather than look at her, his attention was completely focused on his employer. Matt waited silently for instructions.
Candace always perked up when in the company of a good-looking man, and this time was no exception as recognition entered her eyes.
“Why, hello handsome,” she purred.
Candace had already had too much to drink, Matt realized. He could smell it on her. But he was careful not to allow his disdain to register on his face. Instead, he raised his eyes to Luke’s face.
“Mr. Montgomery?”
“Schaffer, please escort Ms. Rothchild out of the casino,” Luke requested, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “She was just leaving.”
Candace became incensed. “No, I wasn’t,” she insisted heatedly. She gave every impression that she was about to dig in her heels, and if Matt intended to remove her, it was going to have to be by force.
But rather than take hold of her arm and drag her from the premises, cursing and screaming, Matt leaned over and whispered into her ear. “There are a bunch of photographers outside asking about you,” he told the Rothchild heiress smoothly. “You wouldn’t want to disappoint your public, would you?”
Her blue eyes flashed, reminding him of another pair of blue eyes. Matt banked down the memory and the feelings it threatened to usher in with it. He’d made his choice, and he had to live with it…had been living with it these last eight years.
“I don’t want to be disappointed,” Candace told him haughtily.
There was another, more logical approach to this. “You’ll save face if you make it look as if leaving is your idea. Ms. Rothchild,” Matt told her quietly. “But make no mistake, one way or another, you are leaving the casino.”
Candace exhaled angrily, then, right before his eyes, she managed to get herself under control. There was a squadron of cameras waiting to capture her beautiful likeness, she thought, and she knew that when she frowned, she looked closer to her own age. Thirty was a horrible number.
As she moved toward the door, Candace thought she could see that reporter—the sexy one—looking in her direction. Patrick Moore.
Something told her that the evening was not going to be a total waste after all.
She flashed a radiant smile. “I’ll have your head,” she promised Matt through lips that looked as if they were barely moving.
They were almost at the entrance, but Matt knew better than to release her. If he did, she might just double back, and he needed her on the other side of the door.
“From what I hear,” he told her conversationally, “that’s not the part that interests you when it comes to men.”
They made brief eye contact. Just like that, her fury was gone. The smile on Candace’s lips was genuine. “I know you, but I can’t seem to remember your name.”
He saw no point in refusing to answer. From what he knew, she and Natalie hadn’t spoken in a long, long time. She wouldn’t tell Natalie about this. “Matt Schaffer.”
Candace nodded her head, as if absorbing the name. “Right. Of course you are.”
Matt pushed the door open for her. He watched the woman saunter away and swiftly become engulfed by the crowd hanging around the casino entrance. She was in her element.
As he walked back into the casino, Matt could only shake his head. The woman he’d just escorted out was light years away from Natalie. Hard to believe they were actually sisters, much less twins.
The next moment, he forced himself to think of something else. Thinking about Natalie would do him no good. That part of his life was over.
By choice.
Chapter 2
She had to be out of her mind, Anna Worth Rothchild thought.
It was past eleven o’clock, and by all rights, she should have been in bed. The all-night parties that Vegas was so famous for no longer interested her. They never really had, but she’d pretended they did for his sake. Now, instead of curling up in her queen-sized bed, sleeping peacefully, here she was pulling up into her old driveway. Summoned by the distraught note in her ex-husband’s voice when he’d called her less than an hour ago.
She was an idiot for doing this.
What she should have said to him, Anna silently lectured herself as she got out of her ice-blue sports car, was “Tell it to your little bimbo, Rebecca Lynn. Whatever’s wrong in your life isn’t my problem anymore.”
But that was just it—it was still her problem. Her problem because she chose it to be. And that, sadly, was because reasonable, independent woman that she was, she nevertheless still loved the man. Loved him despite the fact that he had, as the old jazz songs went, “done her wrong.”
There was a term for women like her, Anna mused, and if she had half a brain, she’d turn around, get back into her car and drive back home. There was no reason for her to be here.
Yes, between the two of them, they had four daughters in common. Anna’s natural child, Silver, was her ex-husband’s daughter whom Harold later adopted. Silver grew up in the vicinity of three stepsisters from Harold’s first marriage—twins Natalie and Candace and their younger sister Jenna. Raising these girls together would forever bind Anna and Harold to one another. But he had made it perfectly clear he wanted to spend the rest of his life with that gold-digging slut who was only four years older than his twin daughters. He deserved everything that happened to him for being such a fool. For throwing away their marriage after all the years she’d stood by his side, taking care of every detail, leaving him free to handle his
