for the buying; that she would ever dream of agreeing to the sort of sordid bargain he had just suggested? Her quick brain agilely sifting through their conversation, Brooke thought she had found a way to make sure he would never again look at a woman with the same contemptuous confidence with which he had just smiled at her.
‘Which do you prefer,’ she was asked as she remained silent, ‘cash or kind?’ When she turned shocked gold eyes towards cold grey ones, Adam shrugged and said easily, ‘I do prefer to get these annoying details sorted out beforehand, don’t you? It makes life easier all round.’
‘You prefer paying for your sex?’ Brooke asked him, hardly able to believe she was having this conversation.
The broad dinner-suited shoulders shrugged. ‘I believe in an honest exchange of commodities—yes, and women always intend men to pay in one way or the other don’t they?’ He added less pleasantly, ‘It’s just that the majority of them prefer their payment in emotional coin—far more damaging to the pocket in the long run.’
‘Meaning?’ Again Brooke put the brief question.
‘Meaning that I’m not in the market for emotional involvement,’ Adam told her coolly. ‘I always like to make that clear right from the start.’
‘Very wise of you, I’m sure.’ Brooke hid her surprise under a veil of indifference. From his attitude she wasn’t the first woman he had approached in this way, by a long chalk. How had the others reacted? Or was this the first time he had mistaken his quarry? Brooke wasn’t blind to the fault of her sex; there were women, and she knew plenty of them, who would be quite happy to accept his offer—providing it was more prettily packaged to be sure, and yet one look at him had been sufficient for her to know that he possessed a sexual magnetism that few women would be able to resist, and that they would want him for himself alone.
‘So, do we have a bargain?’
Caution warned her to refuse—to stop the game while she still could, but a deep inner burning anger overruled caution and she heard herself saying calmly, ‘Yes, I believe we do.’
‘So … tonight, then?’
He didn’t waste much time, Brooke reflected, concealing her consternation. ‘Very well, tonight. I live in the Lodge at the end of the drive.’
‘I’ll be there at ten.’
No pretence of wining and dining her first, Brooke noted, one half of her applauding his cynical down-to-earth attitude while the other half was horrified, cringing away from the implications of his comment. Obviously he was a man well used to getting what he wanted, but tonight she was going to blast a hole into that immense self-conceit which she told herself a little fancifully was going to be not just a blow for herself, but for the whole of womankind—or at least that part of it young and attractive enough to catch the eye of Mr—–? She frowned, realising that she didn’t even know his name, subduing the hysterical bubbles of laughter rising up inside her, at the thought that she had verbally committed herself to going to bed with a man whose name she didn’t even know, and who didn’t know hers.
‘I’m Brooke Beauclere by the way,’ she introduced herself, rectifying the omission.
‘Adam Henderson.’ He watched her carefully, but she made no response to the name, which was unfamiliar to her. Nor did he offer to shake her hand, instead, sliding his grip from her wrist to her hand, lifting it palm upwards to his mouth and placing his lips against it. The brush of his tongue against her palm made her jump in surprise, a thousand tiny nerve endings pulsing into life as his lips moved down to her fingers, nibbling erotically at her skin. When he finally released her hand she felt hot and disorientated. No one had ever made her feel like that before, but as she pulled herself together she reminded herself that practice makes perfect, and that no doubt he had learned long, long ago, just how to make a woman responsive to him. He certainly didn’t look the type of man who would expect his partner to lie back and think of England, and he must want something for his money other than an unresponsively receptive body, Brooke thought cynically.
‘Until tonight….’
He let her go and watched her walk out of the door. Brooke was acutely conscious of his eyes on her back, and only realised when she got outside that she had been holding her breath.
A brisk walk down the drive to her lodge did much to restore her normal equilibrium, and by the time she reached the Lodge she was mentally berating herself for her stupidity. It must have been the wine, was her only excuse, but as she had drunk only the one glass it was a feeble one. Never one to deceive herself for long as she opened the door and braced herself to receive the enthusiastic embrace of her uncle’s Afghan hound Brooke acknowledged that it was the man himself who had affected her, infuriating her to the point where she felt compelled to give the antagonism she had felt towards him an actual physical life.
‘Down Balsebar,’ she commanded the dog, grinning as he dropped pathetically to her feet. Balsebar was a dog of positive and slightly eccentric character; a true ham who loved playing to his audience. Right now he was doing a sterling impression of a down-trodden and mistreated innocent—a picture to tear at the heart of sweet old ladies and innocent children. Remembering his many escapades Brooke was unimpressed.
Black with golden paws and chest, his eyes could gleam with a wickedness that made him look almost devilish, but apart from his eccentric nature he was a first-rate guard dog. He also had an aversion to the male sex, excluding only her uncle, and Brooke grinned again at his possible reception of Adam Henderson. For some reason, despite all her determined efforts to stop him, Balsebar slept on the floor at the bottom of her bed—nothing could shift him from his chosen spot, and his normal reaction to any unwary male entering the Lodge was so craftily and cleverly worked out that the victim rarely knew what was happening to him until it was far too late. Not for Balsebar the reaction of other, less Machiavellian dogs—the frenzied barking or the doggy sulks. Every encounter involving Balsebar was a triumph of tactics and canine intelligence over his chosen human victim.
There had been the man who was allergic to dog hairs whose lap he had insisted on sitting on; there had been the one who had announced that he knew exactly the right way to handle recalcitrant dogs—no one was quite sure how it happened, but one moment he had been commanding Balsebar to ‘sit’, the next, for some reason the dog’s claw had caught in the zip of his trousers as Balsebar leapt up in direct disobedience to his command and the poor man had been left standing in her uncle’s drawing room with his trousers round his ankles and his rather stunning striped boxer undershorts on display to the world.
There had been countless others who had retreated in disorder, and Brooke wondered idly as she prepared his meal how Balsebar would deal with Adam Henderson. She also wondered how Adam would react when she told him she had changed her mind and that no matter how expensively he paid her she wouldn’t go to bed with him. Now that she had left the party the tension which had led her to betraying her antagonism towards him had gone and in its stead was the uneasy knowledge that he was not a man who would take kindly to being duped. Her hand brushed the dog’s head and he glanced up at her in mute enquiry. At least she could rely on Balsebar to defend her honour she thought wryly, even if she was incapable of doing so herself.
BY the time the grandfather clock in the small living room struck quarter to ten Brooke was an aching mass of too tense nerve endings, one moment mentally berating herself for her stupidity, the next telling herself that it was time that someone cut Adam Henderson down to size.
She
