A Past Revenge Read Free Page B

thought the two of them had planned together that she should share his bed as a way of helping him forget his impending divorce. It was also obvious that he had mistaken her virginity and inexperience as a mechanical response to his lovemaking, so how was she now supposed to tell him she had fallen in love with him on sight, that he had taken her virginity! She couldn't, not when he saw her only as a mild diversion in his bed.
    'I'm going to take a shower now,' he told her. 'You can use the other bathroom if you want to, but I want you to have left by the time I get back.' He picked up his jacket for a second time, taking out a leather wallet, pulling several notes from inside it, putting them on the dressing-table. 'Take a cab home,' he ordered. 'I don't feel like going out again tonight, and I don't want you walking alone at this time of night.'
    'Please—'
    'Not enough?' he raised dark brows mockingly, misunderstanding the reason for her protest. 'Maybe not,' he acknowledged with a humourless smile. 'But you aren't very experienced at this sort of thing yet. Complacence may have been what I wanted tonight, but I can assure you most men will want more than that. Maybe you could give me a call when you've learnt to show a little more fire and enthusiasm,' he dismissed derisively, pausing at the door. 'And don't try and rip me off once I've gone to shower,' he warned in a pleasantly threatening voice. 'I'll have you arrested so fast you won't know what's hit you.' He closed and locked the bathroom door behind him, the shower running seconds later.
    Ellie had listened to him with increasing wide-eyed incredulity, the reality of what he thought her to be becoming apparent by the second. He certainly didn't believe her to be a friend of Carly's! She moved slowly from the bed to pick up the money he had thrown down so casually, counting it as if in a dream. Two hundred pounds!
     
    Danielle came back to shuddering reality, the humiliation she had suffered at Nicholas Andracas's hands that night something she had never forgotten. It had been the first time in her nineteen years that someone had treated her with such contempt, and although he may have forgotten her existence in the last seven years— may have forgotten her the moment he entered that bathroom for all she knew!—she had never forgotten him, not even for a day.
     
    The news of Nick's divorce had hit the newspapers a couple of days after she met him, his wife accusing him of adultery several times over. After her own experience with him she could quite well believe that Beverley Andracas probably deserved the millions of dollars she received in settlement from him. Any woman who could stay married to such a man for four years deserved everything she could get out of him.
    But her main worry now was whether or not he would recognise Danielle Smith, successful portrait painter, as Ellie Smith, the girl he had once paid for going to bed with him? God, that must have been a novel experience for him, he had probably never paid a woman for sex in his life before! He would never need to.
    But she was still worrying about whether he would recognise her as she waited for him and Audra McDonald to arrive at her apartment the next afternoon. If he didn't remember her she could carry out this meeting with some degree of dignity, but if he should remember her. . .! The consequences of that didn't bear thinking about, and she tried not to.
    When the doorbell rang promptly at two o'clock she took her time about answering it, checking her appearance in the mirror one last time. The denims and loose green top weren't an act of defiance on her part, more a need to be wearing something so completely different than the sophisticated black evening gown she had been wearing the last time she met Nick Andracas. Her outward appearance had changed the last seven years, her hair was styled shorter now, her once slightly rounded face smoothed out to high cheekbones and angled features, her