it. Her face and body were plumper, but in a good way. She’d needed to round out her curves, though he’d thought she was perfectly well formed at the time. This extra weight, however, made her into a sultry, beautiful woman rather than a naive girl.
A girl who’d tried to trick him. He hadn’t forgotten that part. His jaw hardened as he remembered the way she’d so blissfully confessed her deception to him. She’d come to New York armed with perfume samples that she hoped to sell to his company, and she’d cost him valuable time and money with her pretense. It wasn’t the first time a woman had tried to use him for her own ends, but it had been a pretty spectacular failure on his part. He’d had to scrap every picture from the photo shoot and start again with a new model, which had been a shame when he’d seen the photos and realized how perfect she’d been in the role.
He’d wondered in the weeks after she’d gone if he’d overreacted. But she’d scraped a raw nerve inside him, a nerve that had never healed, and throwing her out had been the right thing to do. How dare she remind him of the things he most wanted to forget?
Still, it had taken him weeks to find the right model. Even then, he hadn’t actually been the one to do it. He’d been so discouraged that he’d delegated the task to his marketing director. It wasn’t like him to let anything derail him for long, but every time he’d tried to find someone, he kept thinking about this woman and how she’d nearly made a fool of him.
How she’d taken him back to a dark, lonely place in his life, for the barest of moments, and made him remember what it was like to be a pawn in another’s game. He shook those feelings off and studied her.
The model they’d hired to replace her was beautiful, and the fragrance was selling well, but he still wasn’t satisfied. He should be, but he wasn’t.
There was something about this woman. Something he hadn’t quite forgotten over the past year. Even now, his body responded with a mild current of heat that he did not feel when Bridgett, whom he’d left fuming at the baccarat table, draped herself over him.
“The perfume business did not work out for you, I take it?” he asked mildly, his veins humming with predatory excitement. She was still beautiful, still the perfect woman for his ad campaign. It irritated him immensely.
And intrigued him, as well.
Her pretty blue eyes were hard beneath the dark eye makeup and black liner, but they widened when he spoke. She narrowed them again. “Not yet,” she said coolly. “I’m surprised you remembered.”
“I never forget a face.” He let his gaze fall to her lush breasts, straining beneath the fabric of the tight white shirt the casino made her wear. “Or a body.”
Her chin lifted imperiously. He would have laughed had he not sensed the loathing behind that gaze. Her plan hadn’t worked and now she hated him. How droll.
“Well, isn’t that fortunate for you?” she said, her Southern accent drawing out the word you. “If you will excuse me, sir, I have work to do.”
“Still angry with me, cara? How odd.”
She blinked. “Odd? You seduced me,” she said, lowering her voice to a hiss. “And then you threw me out.”
Drago lifted an eyebrow. She was a daring little thing. “You cost me a lot of money with your deception, bella mia. I also had to throw out a day’s worth of photos and start over. Far more regrettable than tossing you out the door, I must admit.”
The corners of her mouth looked pinched. But then she snorted. “I’m waiting tables in a casino and you talk to me about money? Please.”
“Money is still money,” he said. “And I don’t like to lose it.”
She was trembling, but he knew it wasn’t fear that caused it. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Di Navarra,” she began in a diamond-edged voice. “I made a mistake, but it cost me far more than it cost you. When you spend every last penny you have to get somewhere, because you’ve staked your entire future on one meeting with someone important, and then you fail in your goal and lose your home, and then have to provide for your—”
She stopped, closed her eyes and swallowed. When she opened them again, they were hot and glittering. “When you fail so spectacularly that you’ve lost everything and then find yourself at rock bottom, working in a casino to make ends meet, then you can be indignant, okay? Until then, spare me your wounded act.”
She brushed past him, her tray balanced on one hand as she navigated the crowd to deliver her drinks. Drago watched her go, his blood sizzling. She was hot and beautiful and defiant, and she intrigued him more than he cared to admit.
In fact, she excited him in a way that Bridgett, and any of the other women he’d dated recently, did not. And, damn her, she was still perfect for the ad campaign. She wasn’t quite as fresh-faced as she’d been a year ago, but she now had something more. Some quality he couldn’t quite place his finger on but that he wanted nevertheless.
And he always got what he wanted, no matter the cost. He stood there with eyes narrowed, watching her deliver drinks with a false smile pasted on her face. There was something appealing about Holly Craig, something exciting.
He intended to find out what it was. And then he intended to harness it for his own purposes.
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