lakes, icy cold one minute, warm and inviting the next, and they spoke of a man who had nothing but revenge on his mind.
She had seen the way women were looking at him. He had such arrestingly handsome features, and his presence was both commanding and brooding—as if he was calculating his next move, like a champion chess player, prepared to take as long as he needed to move his king, making his opponent sit it out in gut-wrenching apprehension.
Gabby felt another shiver of unease pass through her at the thought of being married to him. He had said he expected their marriage to be permanent. That meant there were issues to consider: children, for one thing. She was twenty-eight years old, and she would be lying if she said she hadn’t heard the relentless ticking of her biological clock in the two years since Tristan had died. Children had not been an option while she had been married to him. She would never have brought children into such a relationship. She hadn’t even brought a pet into the house in case he had used it against her in one of his violent moods.
‘You have gone very quiet, Gabriella,’ Vinn observed. ‘Is the thought of having an orgasm with me too hard for you to handle?’
She gave him a withering look. ‘No, in actual fact I find it hard to believe it possible,’ she said. ‘I can’t speak for the legion of women you’ve already bedded, but I personally am unable to engage in such an intimate act without some engagement of emotion.’
He gave a deep chuckle of laughter. ‘How about hate?’ he asked, reaching for his mineral water. ‘Is that enough emotion to get you rolling?’
She put down her glass and signalled for the waiter to refill it.
‘Do you think that is wise?’ Vinn asked. ‘The amount of alcohol in that drink is enough to cloud anyone’s judgement.’
Gabby put up her chin. ‘In the absence of the engagement of emotion, alcohol and a great deal of it is the next best thing,’ she said.
His eyes narrowed to grey-blue stormy slits. ‘If you think I will bed you while you are under the influence, think again,’ he said. ‘When we come together for the first time I want you stone-cold sober, so you remember every second of it.’
Gabby put her glass down with a sharp little clunk. ‘I am not going to sleep with you, Vinn,’ she said, and hoisting up her chin even higher, added imperiously, ‘For that privilege you will have to pay double.’
Vinn smiled a victor’s smile as he reached inside his jacket for his chequebook. He laid it on the table between them, and the click of his pen made Gabby’s spine jerk upright, as if she had been shot with a pellet from the gold-embossed barrel.
‘Double, you said?’
Gabby felt her stomach drop. Her mouth went dry and her palms moistened. ‘Um…I…I’m not sure. I…this…it…I…don’t…Oh, my God…’
He wrote the amount in his distinctive scrawl, the dark slash of his signature making Gabby’s eyes almost pop out of their sockets. ‘There,’ he said, tearing off the cheque from the book and placing it in front of her on the table. ‘Do we have a deal or not?’
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