An Heir for the Millionaire Read Free

line, every plane, every lean contour, every sooty lash, every indentation around his sculpted, mobile mouth. He’d stared into her eyes from the depths of his own dark, midnight eyes, and there had been something in the way he’d looked at her that had made her heart turn slowly over.
    He’d said another word in Greek. She hadn’t known what it meant, hadn’t cared, had only gazed down into his eyes, her heart slowly turning over, like a satellite in space, dissociated from the common earth.
    It was that look, that long, endless exchange, that she clung to now. It had become a symbol, a beacon that she was now about to test her fate upon.
    He cares for me. I know he does. It’s not just the consideration of a lover, the conventional courtesy of a man towards his mistress. It’s more than that.
    How much more she did not know, dared not hope. But therewas something there—a seed, nothing more as yet, but enough, oh, enough for her to feast on!
    But she must not feast—she must be frugal in her hope. And she must not, must not , seek to harvest it before it had time to grow, blossom to fruition.
    Automatically she paused in her pacing, lifting her hand to her abdomen, and placing it there. She felt, as always, emotion welling up in her. So much depended on that harvest.
    If he cares for me then it will be all right. It will all be all right.
    But what if she were wrong? Chill shuddered through her.
    Too much depended on his reaction. Her whole life. Her whole future.
    And not just hers.
    Again, in an instinctive gesture as old as time, she cupped her abdomen.
    â€˜It will be all right,’ she whispered to herself.
    Clare went off to the kitchen to make herself a cup of calming herb tea. The kitchen—fearsomely modern—still made her breath catch whenever she went in. So did the whole apartment—but then so did Xander’s apartment in Paris, not just the one here in London, and the one in Manhattan.
    She still found it strange that he seemed to have no fixed abode anywhere. Nowhere he called home.
    But then, neither did she. Since her father’s death two years ago she had had no home. Both her parents had been only children, and her mother had died when she was thirteen. The tragedy had thrown her and her schoolteacher father very close together, and his death from a long drawn-out cancer, when she was twenty, had been devastating.
    And it had made her vulnerable. Susceptible. With the death of her father she had been entirely on her own. She had gone back to college, her studies having been interrupted when her father’s illness had demanded full-time care, but her heart had not been in them. She had gone to London, preferring the anonymity of a huge city, far away from everything familiar and painful. The casual come-and-go of city life had suited her, teeming with people, none of them important to her, or her to them. She had taken temporary jobs, undemanding and unimportant, her emotions completely on hold after all the trauma of her father’s death.
    And then, without the slightest expectation, her emotions had sprung to life again. Vividly, terrifyingly alive. Alive in every nerve, every sense, every shimmering awareness.
    Because of one man. She could remember in absolute detail the moment she had first seen him.
    Clare had been sent by her temping agency to cover for a sick receptionist, and on her very first day, as she was sitting behind a plush, modernist-style desk, a covey of suited men had swung in through the doors. Her eyes had gone to them automatically—and stalled.
    The man at the centre of the group had been the most arresting male she had ever seen—she hadn’t been able to take her eyes from him.
    He’d been tall, easily six foot, and lithe, and lean. His suit had been fantastically cut, making him look smooth and svelte and…devastating. And that was even before she’d registered the rest of him.
    The sable hair,