Page 4 of Fergus

Thea gave a dismissive shake of her head. “I’m really not here to talk about my mother or the past.”

“Then why are you here?” he prompted huskily.

All the time they had been talking, Thea had been aware of the warmth of Fergus’s hand wrapped about her upper arm. Of how close he was standing to her. So close she could see the darker flecks of green in his eyes as she continuously breathed in that citrus and spicy male scent.

Thea was only five feet and four inches tall, and she was wearing flat Converse, which meant that Fergus towered over her by at least a foot. Those muscular shoulders and chest also dwarfed her slender frame.

He made her feel small and…vulnerable.

She really wasn’t happy about the latter emotion. Not when it was that very same feeling that was the reason she had felt compelled to seek him out in the first place.

Because for the past couple of weeks, Thea was convinced she’d had a stalker of her own.

CHAPTERTWO

“Well?”Fergus prompted seconds later in a hard voice when Thea Morgan still hadn’t answered his question.

He’d been totally surprised when, given the opportunity to have a closer look at the woman following him, and after she’d told him her name was Thea, he had instantly recognized her as the daughter of Jessica Morgan. A woman he had dated briefly ten years ago but had regretted doing so for far longer than that after she had tried to trick him into marrying her.

It wasn’t just this young woman’s name that had revealed her identity to him. It was her eyes too. He had never seen eyes like them, before or since that brief meeting with Thea ten years ago.

Admittedly, their meeting had occurred in far from ideal circumstances. Fergus had driven Jessica to the hospital after an urgent telephone call from her daughter interrupted their dinner together. It was the first Fergus had heard of her even having a daughter.

Nor, when they reached the hospital, had Thea been the infant he had been expecting, but a girl in her early teens.

Thea had been in obvious pain, lying on a gurney waiting to go into the operating theater once her mother had signed the consent form for her to have her appendix removed. But even shadowed with pain, the girl’s gold-colored eyes had been arresting.

Her eyes were still that pure and natural gold Fergus had found so mesmerizing that evening ten years ago.

Well…pure was possibly stretching things a little, considering whose daughter Thea was and that she was now aged twenty-four.

But Fergus knew he had never seen eyes this color before or since he had looked into Thea Morgan’s all those years ago.

He realized he still found her eyes beautiful.

But he now found her arsebitableas well?

His lips thinned at the realization that, yes, he now found Thea’s arse eminently bitable. “I’m rapidly running out of what little patience I have left, so I advise you to start talking,” he warned.

She sighed. “A lot has happened since we last met. Too much to be condensed into a couple of sentences.”

He studied her for several moments before nodding in the direction of an empty bench situated ten feet away. “Let’s sit over there, and you can explain exactly what those things are.” He had no intention of inviting her back to his office, and his next appointment wasn’t scheduled for another hour.

He had to force himselfnotto look at her arse as he followed her across the pavement.

Thea, obviously totally unaware of his inward struggle, waited until they were seated next to each other on the bench before continuing. “My mother remarried five years ago.”

He nodded. “I saw the pictures of the wedding in the newspapers.” His mouth twisted at the memory. “As soon as I knew the name of her bridegroom, the phrase ‘go big or go home’ came to mind,” he derided.

She nodded. “Because my mother married the Russian billionaire Andrei Yegorov.”

“The RussianoligarchAndrei Yegorov,” he corrected dryly. “A man who, like several of his fellow countrymen, stripped Russia of its wealth thirty years ago before moving to live in the decadent West. He was also thirty years older than your mother when she married him.” He stated the facts as he knew them. “Yegorov conveniently died three years later, no doubt leaving Jessica the majority of his ill-gotten gains. Which, in turn, I presume have now passed on to you?”

She swallowed. “All that is true except the part about the money. Andrei and my mother had a prenuptial agreement in which she would inherit a fixed sum of money if he died, and not the majority of his fortune that you’ve just assumed she did,” she explained when he raised a questioning brow. “The bulk of Andrei’s fortune went to his son, Lev Yegorov.”

“Who is just as much of a crook as his father was before him,” Fergus dismissed with disgust.

She nodded. “Since my mother died, Lev has made it clear he wants that money returned to him.”

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