Free Fiancee for One Night by Trish Morey Page B

them out. ‘It wasn’t like we ever had to meet. If you hadn’t needed a pretend fiancée tonight, you would never have known.’
    ‘Oh, I get it. So it’s my fault, is it, that all this time you lied to me.’
    ‘I never lied.’
    ‘You lied by omission. You knew who I was, you knew what had so very nearly happened, and you failed to tell me that I knew you. You walked in here and hoped and prayed I wouldn’t recognise you and you almost got away with it.’
    ‘I didn’t ask to come tonight!’
    ‘No. And now I know why. Because you knew your dishonesty would come unstuck. All that talk about not deceiving people and you’ve happily been deceiving me for two years.’
    ‘I do my job and I do it well!’
    ‘Nobody said you didn’t. What is an issue is that you should have told me.’
    ‘And would you have contracted me if I had?’
    ‘Who knows? Maybe if you had, we might be having great sex right now instead of arguing.’
    Unfair
, she thought as she sucked in air, finding it irritatingly laden with his testosterone-rich scent. So unfair to bring up sex right now, to remind her of what might have been, when she was right here in his suite and about to lose the backbone of her income because she’d neglected to tell him about a night when nothing had happened.
    ‘Let me tell you something, Evelyn Carmichael,’ he said, as he trailed lazy fingertips down the side of her face. ‘Let me share something I might have shared with you, if you’d ever bothered to share the truth with me. Three years ago, I was aboard a flight to Santiago. I had a fifty-page report to read and digest and a strategy to close a deal to work out and I knew what I needed to be doing, but hour after hour into the flight I couldn’t concentrate. And why couldn’t I concentrate? Because my head was filled with thoughts of a blonde, long-limbed PA with the sexiest eyes I had ever seen and thinking about what we both should have been doing right then if I hadn’t had to leave Sydney.’
    ‘Oh.’ It had never occurred to her that he might have regretted his sudden departure. It had never occurred to her that she hadn’t been the only one unable to sleep that night, the only one who remembered.
    ‘I felt cheated,’ he said, his fingers skimming the line of her collarbone, ‘because I had to leave before we got a chance to…get to know each other.’ His fingers played at her shoulder, his thumbs stroking close to the place on her throat where she could feel her pulse beat at a frantic pace. ‘Did you feel cheated, Evelyn?’
    ‘Perhaps. Maybe just a little.’
    ‘I was hoping maybe more than just a little.’
    ‘Maybe,’ she agreed, earning herself a smile in return.
    ‘And now I find that I have been cheated in those years since. I never had a chance to revisit what we had lost that night, because you chose not to tell me.’
    She blinked up at him, still reeling from the impact of his words. ‘How could I tell you?’
    ‘How could you not tell me, when you must know how good we will be together. We knew it that day. Werecognised it. And we knew it earlier when I kissed you and you turned near incendiary in my arms. Do you know how hard that kiss was to break, Evelyn? Do you know what it took to let you go and take you to dinner and not take you straight to my bed?’
    She shuddered at his words, knowing them to be true, knowing that if he’d taken her to bed that night, she would have gone and gone willingly. But he’d left her confused. He’d been angry with her a moment ago, yet now the air vibrated around them with a different tension. ‘What do you want?’
    ‘What I have always wanted ever since the first time I saw you,’ he said, his eyes wild with desire and dark promises that kept those dark, secret places of her humming with sensation and aching with need. ‘I want you.’

CHAPTER SIX
    ‘T HIS won’t work,’ she warned weakly, her hands reaching for the wall behind her as his mouth descended towards