The Billionaire's Scandalous Marriage

“You’ve played?” Mark asked curiously.

She shrugged. “Since I was a kid, but only at home. It was the one game our father played with us. He enjoyed teaching us the percentages.”

Mark shook his head in bemusement. “Strange childhood you had, Charlotte.”

“I want to make it different for our children, Mark,” she said earnestly.

“And so we will, my love.” He curved his arm around her shoulders, giving her a comforting hug of assurance as he softly blew the same words in her ear. “So we will.”

She leaned into him, wanting her inner turmoil soothed by the loving way he treated her, the easy physical closeness he invited so naturally. The Ramseys were not openly demonstrative in their affection though the family had always been a tightly knit unit, made so from being set apart from the ordinary stream of people by great wealth.

Charlotte had tried to reach out across that barrier many times, only to be rebuffed by hurtful comments like, “It’s all right for you. You’re a Ramsey”—meaning she could have anything she wanted or get away with doing whatever she pleased. Which wasn’t true, but it was how she was perceived by others and nothing she said had ever changed their minds.

Mark was the only man who had looked beyond the face value of her family and cared about the person she was inside, the needs she’d secretly nursed that all the money in the world could not fulfil. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t of her world and was curious about it, interested into probing more deeply than the surface. Whatever the reason, so much personal interest had made him very attractive, excitingly different to the many smugly arrogant heirs to fortunes who usually peopled her social circle.

But to her intense discomfort, she found herself wishing he excited her more sexually. Until this afternoon she hadn’t realised a man could affect her as Damien Wynter had. But that was probably an initial impact thing. She shouldn’t let it worry her. Mark was a very caring lover who was always concerned about giving her pleasure.

The powerful engines of the yacht thrummed with purpose. “Now that everyone’s on board, let’s stroll around to the front deck,” she suggested. “Set ourselves up for the best view of the fireworks.”

They met and greeted other guests along the way, stopped to chat, had their glasses refilled with champagne, sampled some of the gourmet finger food being circulated by the waiters hired for the night. The party atmosphere lightened Charlotte’s private angst. She enjoyed Mark’s quick wit and easy manner. He was good company, always had been for her, always would be, she thought.

It shouldn’t matter—didn’t matter—that her father and brother would always prefer the company of men like Damien Wynter. She didn’t want her life to be like her mother’s, filling in her time with charity functions while her husband wheeled and dealed in his own arena. She felt sorry for the woman Peter married, whomever she might be, doomed to always stand in second place to his business life.

Mark wanted her to be his professional assistant, helping to organise the events he arranged. They would share everything. This coming new year should be marvellous, she thought, the best ever.

Even the fireworks tonight had been advertised as something extra special. The harbour foreshores were crowded with people, waiting to see them. The Sea Lion was surrounded by all sorts of pleasure crafts, loaded with New Year’s Eve revellers. As nine o’clock approached—the time for the first fireworks display for families—Mark shepherded her through the melee of guests to the railing, intent on ensuring a clear view of the spectacular show.

“There you are!”

Her brother’s voice claimed her attention. She turned to find herself confronted by both Peter and the man whose company she definitely didn’t want. His dark eyes instantly engaged hers with a riveting intensity that stirred a determined rebellion. No way would she be sucked in by his alpha animal attraction a second time, not for a minute. He was one of them, so arrogantly confident in his natural domination, undoubtedly expecting a woman to be his possession, not a real partner.

“Damien, you’ve met my sister, Charlotte, in passing, so to speak. This is her fiancé, Mark Freedman.”

The introduction was completed by the man himself. “Damien Wynter.” He barely flicked a glance of acknowledgement to Mark, concentrating his sexy charisma on her as he offered his hand again. “I hope we can further our acquaintance tonight, Charlotte,” he rolled out, pouring on the charm, flashing a smile designed to dazzle.

It raised her hackles to such a bristling height, it took every skerrick of her will-power to keep them sheathed and present a civil demeanour. She forced out her hand to take the one he’d offered, constructed a coolly polite smile, and said, “Well, Sydney is about to put on its best face for you, but I doubt you’ll get much out of me, Damien.”

“I beg your pardon?” He frowned over the rebuff as though he’d never had the experience of being knocked back by a woman.

She raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that your aim in making a connection? How much you can get out of the person? Peter did tell me…”

Her brother laughed. “Charlotte is referring to how you replied to that stupid toast Tom Benedict made to me at the London club last year, declaring I was amongst friends, when in fact, most of them were strangers to me, and the only common ground we had was wealthy fathers.”

Damien shook his head over the reminder. “Tom Benedict doesn’t have a brain in his head.”

“Perhaps he only meant to be kind,” Charlotte suggested. “And being kind does not necessarily rule out a brain.” She paused a moment to punctuate her point. “Quite possibly it’s simply one that works differently to yours.”

As Mark’s did.

Which was one of the reasons why she preferred him to Damien Wynter, despite the obvious assets of the man who thought he could just muscle in and capture her interest.

Damien’s mind instantly registered a hit. His gaze narrowed on the brown eyes that remained flat, denying him any entry into what she was thinking. Why was he suddenly getting this flow of antagonism from Charlotte Ramsey? There’d been no trace of it in their brief meeting this afternoon. But that had been a surprise encounter. She’d had time to think about him since then—possibly as a threat she was intent on dispelling?

“Did Peter paint me as cruel?” he asked, cutting straight to the point she seemed to be making.

“Not at all.” She gave a tinkling laugh to remove any offence he might have taken. “He liked your honesty.”

“But you don’t?” he queried, putting her on the spot.

She didn’t miss a beat. “On the contrary, it’s always infinitely preferable to know what one is dealing with.”

“And what do you imagine you’re dealing with, Charlotte?”

Her eyebrows lifted in mock chiding. “I don’t imagine anything, Damien. As it was quoted to me, in reply to Tom Benedict’s toast, you said Peter was not your friend because you’d never met him before, and you were only interested in meeting him because of who he was, what he had and how much you might be able to get out of him.”

Damien smiled at the recollection. “In short, I cut through Tom’s hypocritical bullshit.”

“Winning my trust and my friendship,” Peter tossed in.

“Which is happily mutual,” Damien good-humouredly affirmed.

“Like minds finding each other is always good,” Charlotte said with a suspiciously silky thread of approval. “I know how lucky I am to have met Mark.”

She hooked her arm around her fiancé’s, subtly but emphatically placing herself at his side, having cleverly established that Damien and Peter formed a completely separate unit on a different planet to the one she wanted to inhabit with Mark Freedman.

Damien obligingly turned his attention to the man Peter had described as a smarmy fortune-hunter who had his sister sand-bagged from seeing any sense at all. But she was no fool. Far from it. She had a mind as sharp as knives. So Damien concentrated on taking his own measure of Charlotte Ramsey’s choice of partner.

“I’m sorry, Mark.” He smiled apologetically as he offered his hand. “I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

“No problem,” came the easy assurance. “I was interested in hearing the background to your friendship with Peter.”

His handshake had a touch of deference, aiming to please, not make it a contest of male egos. His eyes sparkled with appreciative interest, wanting to engage, wanting to be part of the world Charlotte seemed intent on turning her back on, Damien thought.

“In fact, it made me reflect on whether all our close associations with people are linked to how much we get out of them,” Mark commented whimsically. “We don’t tend to hang around those who give us nothing, do we?”

It was a disarming little speech, opening up what could have been used as an attack on his integrity where his relationship with an heiress was concerned, then turning the picture around by making the principle a general one.

“We avoid boring people,” he went on, “and naturally gravitate to those who make our lives more interesting and pleasurable.”

He smiled at Charlotte, giving her the sense that she was at the centre of these last sentiments, and Damien felt a surprisingly strong urge to kick him. The man was a master of manipulation, a first-rate charmer, and the smile now lighting up the face that had refused him any positive personal response twisted something in Damien’s gut.

He stared at her—this woman who was stirring feelings in him that demanded action to change the status quo. Was it because she was Peter’s sister and he empathised with his friend’s dislike of her being taken in by a user? Was it because she wouldn’t give him what she was readily giving to her fiancé?

He had met many more beautiful women, yet her smile for Mark Freedman illumined her own unique attraction, making it immeasurably stronger. The graceful turn of her long bare neck struck his eye. Her throat was bare of jewellery and its nakedness somehow evoked a vulnerability that stirred some very primitive instincts. The aggressive hunter and the protector leapt to battle readiness inside him and Damien knew he wouldn’t step back from involving himself with Charlotte Ramsey.

His gaze skated down the dress she had chosen for tonight. It was bright orange—a colour not many women could wear successfully, a colour that reinforced his initial impression that she was confident about herself.

Challengingly confident.

The style was a simple sheath attached to a beaded yoke. Very elegant. Again not overtly sexy yet all the more alluring because it subtly skimmed her curves instead of flaunting them in his face. Damien decided she was a woman who cared more about being seen as a person rather than a sexual object.

Had Mark Freedman played that card to win her?

“Countdown to the fireworks is starting,” Peter said, waving Damien to join him at the deck railing as other guests automatically moved to make space for them.

Millions of voices around the harbour rose in the chant, “Ten, nine, eight…”

Charlotte broke apart from her fiancé to swing around and face the famous coat-hanger bridge that would obviously form the centrepiece of the display. Mark Freedman turned, as well, sliding his arm around her waist to hold her close. Damien stepped up between Peter and Charlotte, determined on making her aware of him whether she liked it or not.

“…three, two, one…”

The great arch of the bridge was brilliantly outlined as white fireworks sprayed up from the entire span.

The start of something big, Damien thought, the excitement of this first explosive burst fuelling anticipation for what was to come. It reflected precisely how he was feeling about Charlotte Ramsey. One way or another he would take her from Mark Freedman, free her of a bad mistake.

Free her for himself.

CHAPTER THREE

THE night sky bloomed with magnificent bursts of colour, erupting over the spectacular white sails that roofed the opera house and above the great sandstone pylons of the bridge. The massive cascades of light were beautiful, awesome, yet the joy Charlotte had expected to feel in them was somehow sucked away by the presence of Damien Wynter.

Which was totally, totally wrong.

And upsetting.

Mark was holding her. Mark was talking to her, sharing his delight in the fantastic display, pointing out the marvellous special effects that particularly impressed him. Mark should have her undivided attention. And she tried to give it, tried to respond as she should be responding quite naturally.

Yet she was still bridling over how Damien Wynter had been looking at her just before the countdown started, taking in every detail of her appearance as though measuring it against some standard in his mind. She told herself he probably did the same to any woman who came into his firing line and it was totally irrelevant how he scored her in his estimation of female attraction. What he thought simply didn’t matter. Which made it all the more intensely irritating that he’d set her nerves so much on edge.

Even his voice distracted her from what Mark was saying, her ears suddenly super-sensitive to the deep timbre of it as he made comments to Peter, comments that told her he was enjoying the show.

And why not?

No other city in the world had a more fabulous setting for such a night as this and the Sea Lion gave them a dress-circle view of everything. She was probably the only spectator wishing for the end of the fireworks. Only then would her brother lead Damien Wynter away and she’d be rid of this horribly acute awareness of him.

A crescendo of rockets built up to the fifteen-minute finale. A golden rain fell from the bridge and just below the centre of the arch, a huge red heart appeared, pulsing with graduations of light.

“The heart of Sydney,” she murmured appreciatively.

“The heart of love,” Mark breathed into her ear.

Which should have made her own heart beat with happiness, but her mind was too busy being sceptical about how much heart Damien Wynter had. No doubt he gave a sizeable slice of his wealth to charities, as a tax deduction, which didn’t actually mean caring. Did he care about anything beyond staking out his territory and increasing it at every opportunity—all he could get?

“That’s it for now,” Peter told him. “There’ll be a bigger show at midnight.”

“Hard to top that,” Damien commented. “Leaving the heart glowing is a nice touch.”

“Yes, it really stands out in the darkness,” Peter replied.

“A reminder to give,” Charlotte couldn’t resist tossing at them.

A mistake.

Damien Wynter’s dark eyes instantly locked onto hers, glittering with speculative interest. He smiled, slowly and sensually, his teeth so white, the old saying, all the better to bite you with, slid straight into Charlotte’s mind.

“Instead of to get?” he asked, provocatively raising her issue with him.

She tried to shrug it off, inwardly cursing herself for opening another conversation with him. “The two should go hand in hand, don’t you think?” she answered blandly.

“Yes, I do.” The quick agreement was instantly followed by a challenge. “Does that surprise you, Charlotte?”

Peter saved her from answering, chiming in with, “Damien gives an enormous amount to self-help development programs for Africa.”

It surprised her enough to ask, “Why Africa?”

“Have you been there?” Damien queried.

“No. I’ve always thought of Africa as a scary, violent place, best avoided.”

“Then let me take you. You’d be safe under my protection and you could see for yourself how I do my giving.”

A part of her actually wanted to. Dangerous curiosity, she told herself, and retreated to safe ground. “Thank you for the invitation but Mark and I are getting married in a couple of weeks…”

“And I understand you’re busy right now, but when it’s convenient…” He smiled at Mark. “Would touring Africa as my guest appeal?”

“Absolutely,” Mark rushed in, without discussing the choice with her.

They didn’t know the man. Why would Mark want to be his guest on a tour through Africa? It wasn’t on. Not with Damien Wynter. It felt wrong. Apart from anything else, no way could she feel comfortable in his company.

“You’d better take Damien down to the saloon if you’re playing poker with Dad, Peter,” she reminded her brother, wanting this encounter ended.

“Are you playing, Mark?” Damien asked, apparently happy to have her fiancé included in the poker party.

Charlotte resented the gambit to separate them as though she didn’t count. Mark wouldn’t desert her for some all male fun. Certainly not on the first New Year’s Eve they were spending together.

“Not my game, I’m afraid,” he said, which wasn’t as positive about remaining with her as she would have liked. In fact, Mark had sounded downright rueful over missing out.

Damien’s compelling dark eyes targeted her again. “What about you, Charlotte?”

The impertinence of the question left her momentarily speechless. As if she would when Mark couldn’t!

Peter laughed, clapping his friend on the back. “Believe me, Damien, you don’t want to play with Charlotte.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because she’ll take you. My sister is a killer player.”

His mouth formed a very sexy moue. His eyes, which hadn’t left hers for a second, simmered a sexy challenge. “I think I’d like the experience of being taken by your sister, Peter.”

Charlotte burned.

Damien Wynter wasn’t talking poker. He’d looked her over, decided he found her desirable, liked the spice that she was engaged to another man and supposedly unattainable, and was now laying out his line, dangling the bait of beating him at a game based on taking chances.

The outrageous arrogance of the man was insufferable. Her mind sizzled with ways to puncture his ego. Before she could come up with the perfect putdown, Mark intervened.

“You know, I’d like to watch that,” he said musingly. “Are spectators allowed at this game?”

Annoyance sharpened her tongue. “Mark, I don’t want to play. I want to be with you.”

“Mark can come and watch, Charlotte,” Peter put in, suddenly eager to oblige his friend’s whim. “He can sit right at your shoulder.”

“That’s not the same,” she shot at her brother.

“Truly, I would enjoy it, darling,” Mark pushed, smiling persuasively as he added, “It’s a part of your life that’s still a mystery to me. I’d like the chance to watch and understand what you were talking about…the percentages.”

“I thought we were going to dance,” she protested, hating his unwitting collusion with a man who would take her if the opportunity presented itself.

“We can dance any night,” he soothed.

“Course you can,” Peter said dismissively. “Come on, Charlotte. You know you love to play. It’s in your blood.”

The sense of being railroaded increased the angry tension Damien Wynter had evoked, and Peter sounded so like their father with his blood comment, she almost stamped her foot in exasperation. “It’s just a game, Peter. I can choose to play or not. I don’t need it in my life!”

“Sorry, darling,” Mark back-pedalled in concern. “Of course, it’s your choice.”

“But it would please all of us if you played,” Damien slid in silkily.

Painting her as a selfish spoilt brat if she refused.

Charlotte grimly took stock. Mark could watch a poker match on television if he was so keen to understand percentages. That seemed like a very specious argument to her. More likely, the drawcard for him was being with Peter and Damien Wynter—part of the privileged circle at her father’s poker game.

A nasty suspicion crawled around her mind. Was Mark using her as a stepping stone to where he wanted to be?

She didn’t want to think that. She didn’t want to but…why leap at the chance of being Damien’s guest in Africa?

Damn Damien Wynter! He’d already spoilt her night with Mark.

“All right! I’m in!” she decided, a reckless streak of belligerence prompting her to take on a straight out fight with the man who had stirred so much unwelcome turmoil inside her.

“Splendid!” Damien approved, grinning like a wolf seeing the jugular of his victim bared.

If luck is with me, it’s your blood that will be spilled, Charlotte thought viciously, turning a smile to Mark. “Let me know when you find it boring and I’ll surrender my chips,” she said, deliberately making it known she was indulging her fiancé, no one else.

Mark touched her cheek in a gentle salute of admiration, his eyes beaming warm pleasure at her. “My brave girl,” he murmured. “I suspect you’ll be swimming amongst sharks at this poker table but I’ll rescue you whenever you say the word.”

The tightness in Charlotte’s chest eased a little. Mark did love her. It was stupid to get worked up over a few little things that could be put down to natural curiosity. Damien Wynter somehow emanated a magnetism that was skewing her thoughts.

As she turned to her brother and said, “Lead on, Peter. We’ll follow you down to the saloon,” she caught Damien staring at Mark as though measuring him for deep, dark annihilation.

So much for wanting him as his guest in Africa! He’d probably feed Mark to the lions so he could have her to himself! That was what he was angling for. Was his pride wounded because she hadn’t instantly been smitten by him, worshipping at his feet for who and what he was, not to mention how much he was worth? Men like him always thought they could get any woman.

Not this one, she silently vowed, aiming the message straight at his back as Peter steered him away from the railing, heading for the lower saloon. Moreover, she wouldn’t engage in any contest with him at the poker table. He’d like nothing better than for her to take him on.

Thwarting him should be the plan, not trying to beat him. If he was betting on his cards, she’d withdraw from betting on her own, regardless of how promising they were. No blood spilled…no grounds for any future comeback.

Satisfied that she had worked out a sensible course—one that Damien Wynter wouldn’t like one bit—Charlotte felt calmer and considerably more confident of handling the situation without any heartburn.

Music started in the upper saloon just as they reached the top of the stairs. The DJ had put on a great upbeat track to get the guests into a dancing mood. Charlotte smiled ironically to herself as she recognised Nancy Sinatra’s voice belting out “I’ll Be Your Good-Time Girl”.

She might have lived up to that for Mark tonight, if he’d wanted to dance instead of watching a poker game.

But she was never going to live that role for Damien Wynter!

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