Page 5 of No Mistress Of Mine

That shot hit the mark, he could tell. A flash of answering anger showed in those extraordinary eyes, reminding him that Lola was not only a redhead, she also possessed the passionate temperament often associated with hair of that shade. “I wouldn’t know,” she countered with asperity, “since I was never your mistress. I was your lover.”

He shrugged, in no frame of mind to debate the rather blurred distinctions of their past relationship. “And which were you with Henry? His lover, or his mistress? Or were the two of you just good friends?”

She flinched, but if he thought such caustic questions would send her scurrying off, he was mistaken. Instead, she lifted her chin and stood her ground.

“Is there any point in rehashing the past?” she asked. “It’s really the future we need to talk about, isn’t it?”

“The future?” he echoed, baffled. “What do you mean?”

That question seemed to take her back though he didn’t know why it should. “But surely you knew—” She broke off, catching her full lower lip between her teeth, staring at him for a moment before she spoke again. “You haven’t heard.”

He frowned, feeling suddenly uneasy. “I heard Henry is dead if that’s what you mean.”

“It isn’t... quite.”

“Is that why you’re here? Now that Henry’s gone, you want to take up where we left off?” He knew it was absurd even as he said it, and yet he could not imagine any other reason for her presence or her words about the future. “You want me to take care of you?”

“No man takes care of me,” she countered with asperity, reminding him of the scrappy, saucy girl he’d met so long ago, a girl who’d kept him at arm’s length for over a year and driven him nearly mad before at last becoming his. “I take care of myself. I thought I made that clear six years ago.”

“So you did, and yet, Henry seems to have taken care of you nicely. From what I hear, the show he backed for you is quite the thing in New York. Becoming his mistress paid off handsomely for you.”

She opened her mouth to reply, then bit her lip. “Please don’t pick a fight with me, Denys. I didn’t come all this way for a quarrel nor to see if we could take up where we left off.”

Her words brought no relief, for if she wasn’t here to reconcile, that meant something else was in the wind. “And yet, you talk of us having a future. What could ever lead you to believe we have one?”

She sighed. “Henry’s will.”

“His will?” Denys stared at her, and suddenly, it felt as if the earth were opening beneath his feet, as if he were being pulled down into some dark abyss.

“Yes.” She opened her handbag of crimson silk and pulled a folded sheet of paper from its interior. She held it up between white-gloved fingers. “He made me your new partner.”

Chapter2

Lola had known calling on Denys with no advance notice would give him a shock, but she’d deemed it a wiser course than to write ahead and request an appointment. This way, he had no chance to refuse to see her.

He could, however, toss her out the window. The grimness of his countenance told her that was a distinct possibility.

“My partner?” he echoed her declaration through clenched teeth. “In what enterprise?”

“The Imperial. Well, technically, I’m your father’s partner, but since you manage all his holdings for him—”

“You’re mad.”

Lola rustled the sheet of paper in her fingers. “This letter to me outlines the exact details of Henry’s bequest. The week before I left New York, Mr.Forbes assured me he’d sent a similar missive to your father, along with the news of Henry’s death. Obviously, Conyers informed you of the latter, but did he not tell you about the former?”

Denys didn’t reply. Instead, he continued to stare at her in stone-faced silence, and watching him, Lola realized all the rehearsing she’d done on the voyage over to ready herself for this meeting hadn’t done her a bit of good.

For one thing, he didn’t seem aware of the terms of the will. She’d come prepared to face him on the assumption he’d be equally prepared to face her. That, it seemed, was not the case.

Worse, however, was the fact that this man wasn’t at all like the Denys she’d known. That man had been easy and carefree, with an irresistible boyish charm and a deep, passionate tenderness. Lola could find little trace of those qualities in the man before her.

This man had Denys’s lean cheekbones and square jaw, but there was nothing boyish or carefree to soften them. This man had Denys’s brown eyes, but as their gazes met, she could see no hint of tenderness in their dark depths. She’d heard what a shrewd man of business he’d become, and looking at him now, she had no trouble believing it.

The changes had cost him, though, for there were faint creases at the corners of his eyes and across his forehead that hadn’t been there before, lines that spoke of responsibilities the Denys she’d known had never been forced to assume. His mouth, once so ready to smile, was now an uncompromising line—though his lack of humor on this occasion might be due to her arrival rather than the burdens of duty.

She’d hurt him, she knew that. She’d taken any affection he felt for her and shredded it. But there’d been no other way to make him see that a girl like her, a girl born beside the cattle yards and slaughterhouses of Kansas City, who’d spent her childhood amid the smells of manure, blood, and rotgut whiskey, who’d started stripping down to her naughties in front of men before she was sixteen, could never make a man like him happy.

Pain pinched her chest, and Lola suddenly couldn’t bear the harshness in his face—harshness she knew she had put there. She tore her gaze away.

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