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‘Why not you?’
Only by digging her teeth down hard into the softness of her lower lip could Imogen hold back the bitterness that almost escaped her. The morning she’d woken to find that both her mother and her sister had gone, and no one could tell her where, was etched into her memory with the burn of acid. She knew why, of course, or at least she could explain it now. But how could anyone explain to a seven-year-old that her mother had wanted her younger sister—but not her?
Unable to get a word out without risking her precarious self-control, she waved a hand in a rather wild gesture that indicated the view from the door, the expanse of green fields, the stable buildings away to the side.
‘The stud was not your mother’s sort of thing?’
It was written all over her face so she didn’t really need to answer, Raoul acknowledged inwardly. But still she nodded silently, those blue eyes cloudy and unfocused. She looked exhausted, worn out by the long day of explanations and rearrangements. Her delicate face was paler than ever, drawn tight over the fine bones, a touch of blue showing underneath where her pulse beat at her temples and the base of her neck.
It made him want to reach out and pull her towards him, to press his lips to the spot where the throb of her blood revealed the depth of her feelings. But, at the same moment, it disturbed him, and the fact that he’d even noticed it bothered him most of all.
Wasn’t this why he had come here in the first place? To make sure this wedding didn’t go ahead? To stop her from proving herself to be the gold-digger he had always believed her to be by marrying a wealthy man without love? The man she had chosen so soon after their relationship had fallen apart because he hadn’t been prepared to be taken for a ride by any other woman.
And, into that toxic mix, he had to add the little sister who had seduced his brother-in-law and almost ruined his sister Marina’s marriage, as well as the father who had tried to pull a fast one in the business deal they were supposed to have by claiming he had the stud rights to the magnificent stallion Blackjack, when in fact they would belong to Adnan and his family.
But nothing had worked quite as he’d planned since he’d arrived. So much had changed and complicated the revenge he’d determined on.
He’d never expected to find that Imogen was still as beautiful—if not more so—than he remembered. He hadn’t thought the fiery pull of the sexual hunger he had felt for her would still be there, scrambling his thoughts and turning them into a molten pool of need. He hadn’t expected to like Adnan Al Makthabi, or to find the sister to be so charming. And he certainly hadn’t expected to feel the painful twist of an uncomfortable conscience to see Imogen now, when his plan was more than halfway to completion, with the grey marks of tiredness and strain around those shadowed eyes, etched along that gorgeous mouth.
He had certainly never anticipated that he would want to help the woman who had only come after him for his money, and who had cold-bloodedly got rid of his child before he had ever even known the baby existed.
‘My mother was terrified of horses,’ Imogen was saying now, her mouth twisting slightly on the low words. ‘She never understood my father’s fascination with them—or mine. So she didn’t feel the connection with me that she obviously had with Ciara. Or that we thought she had. She wanted a girly girl—one who would enjoy clothes and make-up and perfumes as much as she did. And I’m sure she wanted to take her younger daughter because then she could pretend that she wasn’t the age she was—knock a few years off the total. And of course she always thought Ciara was the prettier of her daughters.’
‘She actually said that?’
A slow nod of her head was her silent answer.
‘Then your mother was a blind fool,’ Raoul growled, unable to hold back the disbelief he felt. ‘Ciara is a little glamour puss, there’s no doubt of that—that burnished hair, those emerald eyes, will be many men’s fantasy.’
His brother-in-law’s, for one thing, and look where that had led.
‘But you are the real beauty in the family. You have a natural elegance and grace. Your hair—’
