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187 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published May 1, 1997
Cynicism soured his mind as he continued to observe her meticulous assessment of the male half of the company. If he was her mark, he was in the mood to string her along for a while before delivering a comeuppance she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. He despised freeloaders. He’d worked damned hard to get where he was. A pretty face and a beguiling body bought nothing from him. Except space in his bed if he really felt enticed to take what was offered.
She came through the archway that linked the two rooms on the first floor of the gallery. Jim tensed as her gaze swung towards him. Any second now, the moment of truth. He waited, a savage challenge brooding in his mind, his eyes simmering with dark intent.
She found him, her eyes widening as he stared straight at her. A questioning? An expectation of some response from him? Almost as if he should recognise her. Well, she was bound to disappointment if she thought that old line would work on him. He’d never seen her before in his life.
If there was one thing Jim prided himself on, it was total recall, people, places, figures. It was his one great talent, the means by which he had climbed to the pinnacle he now occupied, the hottest financier in town. The woman in yellow was not, and never had been, part of his world. Her expression changed. It was as though she had mentally stepped back from her first reaction. She studied him with an intensity he found oddly discomforting. He could feel her trying to burrow under his skin to see the man inside.
Beth barely had time to gasp. His mouth covered hers, invading it with shocking swiftness, no pause for persuasive or seductive preliminaries. His tongue embroiled hers in an erotic tangle, darting provocatively, sweeping her palate with sensational effect, inciting a fiercely primitive response. It was as though he’d pressed some dormant trigger in her, exploding a deeply buried mine of sexuality that demanded satisfaction.
A torrent of feelings pumped through her—anger to have waited so long to experience this, frustration that he’d never come for her, never invited her to share in his new life, a fierce jealousy of the women he had given himself to, a seething desire to take all he offered, experience it to the hilt, make him remember her for the rest of his life, whether he wanted to or not.
She clawed her fingers up his leather jacket, thrust them through the thick mat of his hair, curled them around his skull, urging on the passionate plunder that could not be called a kiss. Not from him. Not from her. A kiss was an exchange of good feelings, warm feelings, a wish to give and take pleasure. This was the boiling blood of a battlefield, each of them striving to win concessions from the other.
She sensed his drive for submission from her. She wouldn’t give it. With sheer wanton provocation, she rubbed her lower body against his, feeding the frenzy of released feeling, exulting in the hard bulge of his erection, hating him for being so aroused by a woman he’d merely picked up. A nobody to him. Yet he could do this to her, with her, an intimacy that had no grounds for intimacy on his side. Just sheer animal lust, taking, uncaring of the object being taken.
It was obscene.
She wanted to kick him. She wanted to kill him. She wanted him to want her because she was Beth. Damn him! Damn him to hell for closing his door on her! Forgetting her!
“Not once have you used my name,” he said with slow deliberation. “Now you’re going without telling me yours. Did you intend all along for us to be ships passing in the night?”
She shrugged, dismissing the point as of no real importance. “It was always a possibility.”
His mouth twisted. “Why do I have the feeling there is more to this encounter than you’re letting on?”
“Why worry?” she asked him flippantly. “You won the contest. You didn’t let me get to you. You stayed on top.”
“If you go, I lose,” he stated with a certainty that puzzled her.
“I’m sure you can generate great sex with any amount of women,” she said sceptically.
“No. It was the mental fight. Something... quite different.” He hesitated, seemingly feeling his way along uncharted territory. “I think I’ve been looking for someone like you for a very long time.”
The sickening irony of those words cut deep.
“No, you haven’t,” she retorted with blistering certainty.
“Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?”
“If you’d been really looking, you’d have found me long before this.”
His eyes narrowed on the burning derision in hers. “Perhaps I’ve been blind.”
“No.” The bitterness of total defeat poured into words before she could stop them. “You’ve been too busy being Jim Neilson. I think you’ll never be anyone else but Jim Neilson now. So I’m leaving, because I didn’t come for Jim Neilson and I don’t belong in Jim Neilson’s life. Is that enough recognition of your name for you?”
“For whom did you come?” he asked her, homing in instantly on the one significant point.
She sighed, wrung out by this futile confrontation. She looked at him with dull, weary eyes, seeing the aggressive vitality of the conqueror determined on climbing another mountain. But her mountain had been climbed, and she was returning to the valley he’d put behind him.
“Who are you?” he demanded, propelled from his stance at the window of his private eyrie, high in the sky above the city he’d made his. He came straight for her, unprepared to let her go when he wasn’t satisfied.
The urge to hit him in the face with it was strong. Her deep disappointment, the long years of wondering and the final frustration of last night’s intense campaign to reach him—all surged together in a compelling need for some kind of recognition from him, a glimmer of memory...even if he hated it.
“I’m Beth Delaney.” She shot the words at him.
It stopped him dead in his tracks. Shock, confusion, a wild searching for features that would confirm her identity to him, a glassy stare at her eyes, recoil, then slowly the dawning of realisation, a look of appalled horror at her reemergence in his life and the form it had taken.
It gave Beth savage satisfaction to see he hadn’t completely forgotten her. The years they had shared were not a blank to him, either. Though Aunty Em was right. He didn’t like having them recalled. But be damned if she would let him off scot-free now. He’d forced the issue. She proceeded to give him the answers he’d demanded, straight between the eyes.
“I came looking for Jamie.”

