Page 9 of His Wedding Day Revenge

Her smile wilted and her mouth opened as she raised her eyes a long way to the face of the man standing in her doorway, his dark head brushing the supporting beam of the open oak porch.

‘Draco...! Mr Andreas,’ she hastily corrected.

If his male aura had made her uncomfortable in the village hall, here she felt pummelled to tight-throated, heart-thudding, mind-emptying confusion by being this close to his unique brand of raw masculinity.

‘Oh, make it Draco,’ he drawled. The lift of one corner of his sensual mouth became a full mocking grin complete with flash of white teeth as he stared down at her from under his heavy-lidded dark eyes, the lashes so long they touched the razor-sharp contour of his cheekbones. ‘I’m on first-name terms with almost all the women I’ve slept with,cara.’

His lazy mockery stung and jolted her free of her confusion—sometimes being angry was very mind-clearing, also it distracted you from thoughts of his mouth. ‘And you remember all their names. I’m impressed,’ she snapped back waspishly.

Draco took a mental step back. She was no longer trying to make herself invisible, a tactic that had always amused him—the adult equivalent of a child believing she had vanished if she closed her eyes—and now she was right up there in his face.

Did she actually believe that a flame-haired woman who looked like she did, with eyes like that...a body... He cut off the line of thought before it made an extremely uncomfortable situation even more painful.

He felt a surge of self-contempt, remembering how, in the days after she had humiliated him, he had lain awake at night and in between drinking, aching for her. Now he looked at her and admired the tilt of her nose, the wide-spaced, dramatically green eyes, the kissable lips, the stubborn tilt of her chin... A faint frown interrupted his self-congratulatory list. The stubborn chin—had it always been that way?

You can congratulate yourself as much as you like, Draco, but you’re still hard as a rock, mocked the voice in his head.

An image of the bundled-up child on her back flashed into his head and the taunting inner voice helpfully pointed out, You won’t be getting any, but someone else is.

This was a departure and not at all the way he had anticipated things going. The Jane he had known always had a warm sense of humour and a gorgeous laugh but sarcasm—that was a major divergence.

He studied her, admitting to his spark of curiosity but not his hunger as he took in the details of the soft contours of her heart-shaped face. Her big wide eyes, darkly fringed, looked back up at him, wariness shining in the shimmering depths, her mouth was still temptingly generous, but the angle of her rounded chin suggested a stubbornness he did not recognise.

As if anxious to dispel any impression that she’d been counting his lovers, Jane added haughtily, with a frown that knitted her feathery dark brows, ‘Were you looking for me?’

He straightened up to his full, impressive, lithe and muscular six feet three and looked down at her, the flinty flecks like ice in his eyes and the mildness of his contempt making it all the more coruscating. ‘Was I meant to look for you?’

Had she anticipated he would, and had she expected that reaction? Had she engineered this situation? The suspicion lingered, but she would have been disappointed. He had not chased after his fleeing bride. To do so would have made him his father—a man who had been so obsessed with a woman that it had broken him.

Obsessed to the point of insanity. In his father’s case, his obsession had been the second wife he had left Draco’s late mother for.

Antonio Andreas had indulged his second wife’s every whim and all her whims involved money. And when the money to feed her appetite for luxury and excess had run out, and there were no more artworks for his father to sell, she’d predictably left him for someone able to give her what she wanted, leaving behind her young son, his half-brother, who would have cramped her style.

Without her around things could have got better—Draco had hoped they would—but they hadn’t. His father, unwilling to accept the reality, had stalked his ex-wife online, and also in person on a number of excruciatingly embarrassing public occasions, begging her to come back to him.

He never seemed to lose his appetite to be humiliated, and, despite everything she had done, would never hear a bad word against her. When Draco, unable to hold back any longer, had spoken out, his teenage self had experienced not just the rough side of his father’s tongue but his clenched fist.

Undoubtedly growing to despise his father had influenced his reaction to being dumped at the altar. The objective part of him recognised this. It had been a point of principle not to look for his runaway bride, not to allow himself to even ask why or where, let alone search for her.

And yet here she was. If he’d believed in fate he would have said it was meant to be, but Draco believed that a man made his own fate, not that he wouldn’t take advantage of opportunities when they came his way.

Was this an opportunity? he asked himself.

If so, for what?

The revenge his anger craved?

Answers he wouldn’t even admit to himself he needed? That he wanted to demand?

A guilty flush ran up under Jane’s skin. She didn’t pretend not to understand his reference and the double meaning—it wasn’t the here and now he was referencing.

‘No, I didn’t expect that,’ she said quietly, adding huskily, ‘Why are you here?’

With his mouth lifted into a lazy, self-mocking half-smile, he asked himself the same question now.

To confront her, accuse her of engineering this situation?

Curiosity?

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