CHAPTER ONE
‘DADDY’S current bimbo...’
In a room stuffed full of warmly alive, happily partying people Roberta Chandler stood alone, battling to stop herself going white with anger around the edges of her red-faced humiliation, while the person who had just used that cuttingly dismissive description of her moved away from the small group of people she had said it to, without needing to glance Roberta’s way to know that she had been overheard.
Roberta’s heart was pounding, her body trembling with the suppressed desire to retaliate—an urge so strong that she had to force herself to stand very still and stare fixedly at the glass of champagne she was holding to stop herself from doing just that.
Lulu Maclaine would be a much better person if her doting daddy were to wash her nasty mouth out with soap!
What was he? she wondered furiously as the blood continued to pump an angry tattoo inside her burning head. Was he a man at all, or just a pathetic little mouse where his darling Lulu was concerned? Willing to let her behave any way she liked so long as it made her happy?
She glanced up, her glinting green gaze honing directly on to the man who was uppermost in her angry thoughts. He was standing on the other side of the room, talking within a group of people, smiling at some amusing anecdote that one of them was relaying, the corners of his fiercely sensual mouth curved in lazy amusement.
Was he totally unaware of the way she was being treated here tonight? Or just utterly careless of it? Whichever, he was out of order—right out of order—and he was very lucky that her manners were so much better than his daughter’s manners, or he would be tasting a bit of humiliation himself right now!
Damn you, she thought angrily. Damn you to hell for setting me up for all of this!
Laughter rang out, sounding so wickedly amused that it drew Roberta’s gaze because it represented such complete opposition to her own black feelings just now. It was Lulu again. Of course it was Lulu, standing in the middle of another set of guests, holding court in her lovely blue taffeta gown that was such an exact match to her lovely cornflower-blue eyes.
‘Daddy’s bimbo’. Had she just repeated that clever little remark to her new rapt audience to make them laugh like that?
Roberta shuddered, feeling sick. She wouldn’t put it past the vicious witch, since she had been saying that or something like it to anyone who would listen from the moment Roberta had stepped into the house!
And not only Lulu, she reminded herself. Lulu’s mother had behaved no better, offering Roberta the kind of cold shoulder all evening that had been a callous message in itself.
Bitches, both of them. The Maclaine women were nothing but a pair of lousy bitches.
My God! she railed at herself. Why didn’t I listen to my instincts and stay at home tonight, instead of opening myself up for this kind of ridicule?
After all, it was Lulu’s party. Her eighteenth birthday celebration, to be exact, and perhaps the younger girl had a right to enjoy it without having ‘Daddy’s current bimbo’ present to spoil it for her.
Yet she had been invited! Roberta reminded herself fiercely. Mac had done it himself! And, fool that she was, she’d thought, This time—this time perhaps he means to let them all know how much I mean to him!
What a joke! she mocked herself acidly now. You should have known from the moment he palmed you off on his younger brother Joel for the evening that he was going to pretend that you were barely acquainted rather than lovers. Lovers for almost a year now.
And Joel, she thought suddenly, dragging her angry thoughts over to the other important man in her life—Joel being her boss as well as Mac’s brother. Where was he in her hour of need? Chatting up some nubile lady somewhere instead of protecting her from all this flak?
She sparked a hooded glance around the room until she spied him shuffling on the dance-floor with—Lulu’s mother, no less.
The two of them were deep in conversation as they slowly circled the floor. Discussing me, probably, Roberta assumed from the expressions on their faces. Joel would be getting ticked off for bringing her here tonight, and he would be using his sandpaper-dry tongue to deflect the scold.
Delia was not pleased. Lulu was not pleased. The whole darned assembly of close friends and relations were not pleased! And why? Because they were all determined to follow nose to tail on the rudeness of their current leader—Lulu. And even ‘Daddy’ had been very careful to do little more than acknowledge Roberta with one of his benign social smiles so as not to upset his precious daughter!
‘Daddy’s bimbo’. Not to be offered even the barest courtesy.
Roberta quivered on yet another wave of deep, bubbling enmity, and returned her gaze to where Mac was still standing, looking every bit the powerful leader of men he was in his black dinner-suit and white dress shirt.
Mac. Or Solomon Macmillan Hunter Maclaine, to give him his full and most glorious title. A big, strong name for a man born and bred to take on the world—which he did, very successfully most of the time, running the family engineering empire with a crisp, clear foresight that knocked spots off his nearest rivals. It was only when it came to his private life that things around Mac became decidedly shadowy.
Roberta was one of those shadows, she accepted grimly. His lady of the night, not fit to acknowledge away from the bedroom!
Yet, shadowy or not, angry with him or not, she found that the simple act of letting her gaze rest on him was enough to set those tiny muscles deep inside her body stirring in heated recognition of their sensual master.
And she despised herself for it, wondering why it had to be him. All right, she argued with herself, so he possessed the kind of dark good looks most red-blooded women yearned to know intimately. But she’d met other men of his calibre before without falling flat on her face for them. So why him? Why this man who was, on the outside at least, little different from those other high-powered, good-looking men she’d known and repulsed quite easily?
He moved, half turning in her direction, to listen to something someone was saying to him, and those tiny muscles deep down inside her stirred again in eager anticipation of his noticing her. He didn’t, but she got the answer to her question.
Mac stirred her senses like no other man had ever done. It was as simple and as complicated as that.
And it probably had nothing to do with his black-haired, square-chinned solid good looks, but with the inner man, the man she yearned to know, and the one she very rarely got to see, simply because he did not let her—did not let anyone, as far as she could see, except his family, of course.
And Roberta was not and never would be family.
That fact was being patently hammered home to her tonight.
‘Daddy’s bimbo’. Didn’t Lulu see that in calling Roberta that she was also insulting her father?
Look at him! she wanted to yell. Does he look like a man whose tastes in women only stretch as far as empty-headed bimbos?
Who cares if the woman beneath you has a brain or not, a mocking little voice in her head yelled back, when it’s not her brain you’re taking pleasure in?
And more than half the women present in this room would not want Mac for his dynamic brain either, she tightly mocked that voice. Not if they knew him as intimately as I do!
And it was that intimate knowledge of him that she used now cynically to strip away the conventional veneer of elegance and sophistication that he wore so well around himself, to see right through to the naked beauty of the man beneath.
Tall—he was tall—and superbly constructed with it. A lean, lithe, sleek construction of tight, satin-sheened skin stretched tautly over hard, healthy muscle. Wide-shouldered with flat, spare hips, and what came in between was so shockingly desirable that it dried up her mouth just thinking about it. Long limbs, powerfully built. Good hands with a light, knowing, sensitive touch that could—
She stopped, sucking in a careful breath of air then letting it out again slowly. It was best not to think about those hands, she decided grimly, and fixed her attention on his face instead. A lean face, with jet-black hair cut to sweep confidently away from his high, intelligent brow. His eyes, darkly fringed by thick straight brows and softly curling lashes, were a most compelling colour of come-to-bed grey; they drew you towards them like magnets, urging, promising, lazily admiring—
Another stop. And she forced her attention away from the eyes to the mouth. A mouth so rawly sensual that it, too, was dangerous even to look at. Thin but nicely shaped, it was such an experienced, expressive, uninhibited mouth that in intimacy it could be quite ruthless in its efforts to draw the response it required.
And what was that mouth doing now? she wondered, once again curbing her thoughts before they went too far. It was smiling lazily, flashing the odd white-toothed, devilishly infectious grin now and then, fielding witty remarks to return them with interest. Like the man himself, supremely at ease, that quick mind of his ten seconds faster and sharper than anyone else she knew.
Joel teasingly dubbed him ‘Mac the Knife’ because of his sharp wits, but he said it fondly. Joel respected his brother deeply for the way he had taken on the mantle of power very young after their father’s first serious heart attack, which had meant Mac’s growing up a whole lot faster than most young men his age would have been expected to do. Yet he had taken up the challenge with barely a qualm and, although Joel was no small fry in the family firm, he deferred always to Mac’s decree.
Which was why Mac had palmed her off on Joel tonight, of course. He trusted his kid brother to look after his woman for him while he was too busy—or too indifferent—to do it himself!
He happened to glance up and catch her staring at him then, his eyes instantly softening to a warm, smoky grey as he sent her one of those little twists to his mouth meant to be a rueful smile, and tipped his glass at her in acknowledgement. It took all she had in her to return the gesture, though an answering smile she could not manage. She was angry with him and was in no mood to hide the fact. Angry that he could take from her everything she had to offer him, flaunt her unflinchingly around London as his woman yet, when it came to his family, pretend that she meant nothing to him at all!
Just an empty-headed bimbo, too thick to notice how his family saw her as dirt!
Her eyes flashed a sudden bright, menacing green. Mac saw it happen and frowned, a silent question entering his own eyes. Roberta’s chin went up, her defiant expression daring him to come over and find out for himself what the look was for!