Free Wedding-Night Baby by Kim Lawrence Page A

she felt.
    The wide floor-length window had a view over the city that drew the eyes of anyone entering the room. The panorama was, however, lost on Georgina; a figure with his back to her was deep in apparent contemplation of the vista.
    Broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, he stood well over six feet tall. The loose-fitting Italian suit didn’t disguise the fact that this man was at the height of his physical powers. Georgina didn’t need him to turn around to know he was in his early thirties; she even knew the colour of his eyes.
    The room tilted slightly as she gasped for air, tiny black dots danced across her vision, and a sound like the sea roared in her ears. Confusion, disbelief and a sort of numb dread stole over her simultaneously. What she was seeing was impossible. Hallucination? Had he made such an awesome impact upon her that she was going to see his face and figure everywhere?
    He turned around and the last remnants of colour seeped from her clammy skin. All the classic symptoms of shock, she told herself as a bubble of hysteria rose in her throat.
    â€˜Good morning, Miss Campion.’ The soft voice was no hallucination; neither was the brilliant, icy stare.
    â€˜Who are you?’
    â€˜Have a seat,’ he said, walking around to the other side of the vast, leather-topped desk. He pushed a chair behind her legs and her shaking knees collapsed as she sank into it.
    â€˜The escort company didn’t send you?’
    â€˜I can see how you’ve progressed so rapidly, with that sort of amazing mental capability.’
    â€˜You let me think... think...’
    He’d made a fool of her so completely that she could
hardly grasp the full implications. He knew more about her... He’d cold-bloodedly seduced her and she had fallen like a ripe... A sound of denial escaped her lips and she clenched her hands into two tight fists. Over the past fortyeight hours she’d grown to despise her lack of self-control, and her inability to resist the primitive need that had sent her into Callum’s arms. Now she also felt sick to the core at having her vulnerability exposed to those ruthless blue eyes. This was her reward for abandoning all her idealism and principles for a shallow interlude of intense pleasure.
    â€˜ You told me who I was,’ he corrected her. ‘You could say I did you a favour. If I hadn’t appeared so fortuitously what would you have done? I arrived wanting nothing more than to know why you apparently know more about certain accounts than very senior executives. It seemed amazing that the absence of a PA could virtually immobilise a firm of this size.
    â€˜Did you know your phone is out of order, incidentally?’ he asked, flicking an invisible speck off his immaculate jacket. ‘It occurred to me I might get more insight into a devious character capable of manipulating a shrew old fox like Oliver by going along with your little deception.’ He sounded neither apologetic nor ashamed of his actions and Georgina felt the lick of pure rage race through her shaking body.
    â€˜And did you get much insight?’ she asked in a small, hard voice that was by now quite steady.
    â€˜I got quite a lot more than I’d bargained for.’
    With a gasp she shot to her feet; his implication had been unmistakable. ‘If we’re talking manipulation,’ she yelled, twin flags of colour blooming on the crests of her cheekbones, ‘you’re a regular con merchant, Mr Stewart.’
    â€˜So you know who I am now. Considering I left my bush hat back home, I’m impressed.’ The creases around his eyes deepened but his narrowed eyes betrayed no humour.
‘Which is more, if I recall, than you are with my capabilities of running this vast empire.’ He drawled the term with languid scorn. ‘As we’re on such ... intimate terms, Georgina, perhaps you should make it Callum.’
    The degradation seemed to fuse into a solid mass