Once in Paris by Diana Palmer Page B

my bed. I’d break your young heart. You wouldn’t be able to let go, and you’d have to. I’m a loner. I don’t want a wife.”
    â€œYou married me,” she said, making an accusation of it.
    â€œYes, to protect you from Sabon,” he agreed. He studied her. “You’re barely twenty, naive and aching to lay your heart at my feet. Don’t. I want you. I could take you and enjoy you and walk away from you the next morning with my heart intact. You couldn’t. You’re too intense for me, Brianne.”
    â€œYou mean if I could just have sex with you and disappear, you’d let me stay,” she said stiffly.
    â€œThat’s it in a nutshell,” he agreed.
    â€œPerhaps I could.”
    â€œNot you,” he returned immediately. “You’re already halfway in love with me,” he added, and watched the shock ripple across her features. “Did you think it didn’t show?” he asked softly. “You’re an open book. Youhaven’t yet acquired the sophistication it takes to hide your feelings.”
    She took a deep breath and pushed back her hair nervously. She stared out the tinted window of the limousine instead of at him. “So where do we go from here?”
    â€œYou go to college and I get on with my new project,” he said carelessly.
    â€œYou wouldn’t like to sleep with me?”
    â€œOh, I’d like it,” he said bluntly. “I’d love it. But I could take it in stride and you couldn’t. We’ll save it until you’re a little older.”
    She turned sad green eyes up to his. “It was a glitzy ceremony in a vulgar place, so you don’t consider those vows binding? So now we go our separate ways.”
    His heavy eyebrows lifted sharply. He’d only heard the first part of her comment. “Vulgar place?”
    She turned away. “What would you call it?” she asked quietly.
    He hadn’t thought about it at all, until she hit him with the reality of their ceremony. It had been a vulgar place, a tawdry little legalized sex operation that made it easy for girls to forget their principles for a quick wedding that could be followed by an even quicker divorce.
    He scowled. Brianne, for all her modern outlook, was a throwback to earlier times. She was the sort of girl who would expect to be married in church, in a trailing white gown with bridesmaids and a flower girl. Margo had been given just such a wedding. But Brianne had been hustled into a marriage mill. Despite the reason for their wedding, he could have found a more conventional way to bring it about.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said, and genuinely was. “I was so preoccupied with getting it done that I didn’t quite think about the details. You’d rather have been married in church, wouldn’t you?”
    She didn’t look at him. “Were you, the first time?”
    â€œOf course,” he replied. “Margo said that she wouldn’t feel married if we didn’t have a proper service.” He saw Brianne wince, and for the first time he realized how badly he’d hurt her.
    â€œThen we did it properly,” she said in an amazingly calm and collected tone. “It’s a sham marriage to save me from a worse fate. Having it in church would be a sort of sacrilege. I’m sorry I said anything. I should be gratefulto you for what you’ve done, instead of criticizing how it happened.”
    He reached out and took her cold hand in his. “We don’t know each other very well,” he said, feeling the resistance in her fingers. “I suppose we’ll step on each other’s feelings a good bit until we become better acquainted.”
    â€œNo, we won’t,” she said. “Not with me in the States, and you in Nassau.” She turned to him and smiled at him vacantly. “That’s the way you want it, too, isn’t it? Even if I weren’t being