of the company that came under the massive umbrella of Cadman Leisure, Warren had swept Annie off her feet. With her parents embarking on their dream to emigrate to New Zealand, change and excitement seemed to encompass them all when, within a month of their departure, Warren had asked her to marry him and they had become engaged.
He was never madly passionate, but he was kind and caring—or so she had thought. He was also clever, perhaps a little calculating where his clients were concerned, and he was humorous. Sometimes a bit too flippant, Annie had felt occasionally, but that had merely seemed to add to making him fun to be with.
It was at a seminar they had both attended in Birmingham that she had seen Brant for the first time.
‘I’ve got to get to talk to him,’ Warren told her after the talks were over, and skittered across the room, pulling Annie in tow, determined as he was to get himself noticed by Brant Cadman.
Clean-cut, impeccably dressed in a tailored dark suit and tie, his hard-headed brilliance and formidable authority was a mixture that would have arrested attention even without the smoky sexuality that transcended all these other attributes. He looked fierce, Annie recalled. Fierce and terrifyingly attractive and he scared her half to death. And she’d never been so drawn to any man in her life!
She couldn’t even remember what had been said. Only the way Brant looked at her while he was talking to them both, indulging them, she decided, because Warren’s eagerness to ingratiate himself with the big boss was embarrassingly obvious. But she felt the man’s gaze on her afterwards wherever she was in the room, discreet yet unmistakably appraising. She wasn’t even sure she liked him, but she was shockingly aroused by his interest nevertheless. That shamed and disturbed her, because she had thought herself head over heels in love with Warren. Brant, too, was obviously involved with someone else—it was afterwards, outside the hotel, that she saw his chic, tall companion climbing into his car. Someone—she couldn’t remember who now—told her the woman’s name. Naomi Fox. It suited her, Annie thought, telling herself she had imagined those glances from him. Telling herself that her reaction to them was only from the mere excitement of being noticed by a man way out of her league, that she was engaged to be married, eager to settle down and be happy.
Yet alone in bed that night, trying to concentrate on her fiancé and her forthcoming wedding, it was Brant’s dark features that kept rising before her eyes and which troubled her dreams so that she awoke agitated and feverish and disliking him even more.
It wore off, of course. The reality of a looming wedding with all its attendant concerns kept her occupied and focused on her main aim in life—that of becoming Mrs Warren Maddox. But two weeks before the due date he told her that he couldn’t go through with it; that he had met someone else and that he was sorry, but he was calling it off.
Annie was devastated. Hurt and shell-shocked, with everyone at Cadman’s aware that they had split up, it was trial enough seeing Warren in the office when he wasn’t off finding potential clients. But having to attend that party two weeks later to celebrate the opening of a new hotel and sports complex was the most humiliating of all.
Her boss insisted she go and she didn’t want to let him down. Besides, she thought, even if she was feeble enough to ring in sick, everyone would guess the reason why. Everyone, that was, who made up not only the art and design department, but Sales and Marketing too. Which meant that Warren would be going and, as partners were invited, most certainly his new girlfriend, and there was no way, she decided, that she would give either of them the satisfaction of seeing her buckle, let them—let anyone—guess at the agonies she was suffering from his cruel betrayal. What she didn’t anticipate, however, was that Brant Cadman would be attending too, that he’d be staying at the hotel that night.
Glass in hand, a daringly low-cut black dress emphasising her slim figure, she was chatting rather over-brightly to Katrina and her boss, trying to look cheerful, pretending that the sight of her ex-fiancé and his new blonde bombshell, wrapped up in each other not six feet away, didn’t matter to her at all, when she saw him standing, tall and erect, at the bar.
He had been talking to various people until then, employees and clients alike, desperate to make his acquaintance. But now he was alone, and he was looking straight at her.
Annie’s heart seemed to stop and then start again, beating slightly faster than before. She lifted her chin in a somewhat challenging gesture, not sure how to respond to his blatant interest.
He smiled then, a lazy, sensuous, cognizant smile that would have shattered any woman’s immunity.
She smiled back.
‘Wow!’ she heard Katrina exclaim.
Emboldened by a couple of glasses of wine, Annie excused herself from her little group and, with what she considered afterwards could only have been subconscious intent, moved over to the bar. At the time it felt as though those beautiful eyes alone were drawing her to him.
‘Hello,’ was all he said, but his deep voice oozed a lethal charm that didn’t altogether fool her. Behind the smooth urbanity was an even more lethal brain.
She responded, flashed him a brilliant smile.
‘What happened to your…friend?’ He didn’t look in Warren’s direction, but he had to be aware of the situation. Instead his glance touched on the ringless finger curled around her wine glass.
‘Friends fall out.’
‘And lovers?’
She took a breath, swallowed. God! What was she doing? She stole a covert glance in Warren’s direction. He was looking at her—at them both, displaying a shock that matched Katrina’s moments before when she had realised where her friend was headed. She flashed Brant another smile, and in a voice as silvery as the threads running through her clinging black dress, murmured, ‘And you, Mr Cadman…’
‘Brant.’
‘Are you…involved?’
He seemed to consider her question, before lifting his hands. They were long and well-tapered. ‘I’m as you see me. I’m not, however, quite so sure about you.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
His eyes strayed to Warren and the blonde, who were now dancing to a slow, sultry blues number.
‘She’s welcome to him.’ She tried desperately for nonchalance, her lashes veiling the dark anguish in her eyes. ‘She’ll find out he’s a louse.’
‘And you think I’m not?’
She lifted her chin, her lips a scarlet invitation to him, though she was dying inside. ‘Are you?’
‘Do you know what I think?’ he said.
‘What?’
He reached to take the glass out of her hand, put it on the bar.
‘I think you’ve had too much to drink.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ In truth, she had had barely two glasses, but on an empty stomach, having eaten very frugally for days because of her misery and then her apprehension over having to facing Warren with Caroline, it had obviously been too much.
‘OK, so you haven’t,’ he accepted, humouring her. ‘So tell me about Annie Talbot.’
She
