AllFreeNovel
Share Us
All you’ve gotta do is find yourself a woman who is greedy or desperate enough to be bought.
‘Any job that will keep me at Calhouns. I’ve been managing the stud for the last five years. I know racing and horses, including everything there is to know about the ones we have left here.’ She paused and he saw sadness and possibly even shame cross her face. ‘My… My father stopped working with the horses after my mother died… So the successes we’ve had on the track in the last five years have been down to the team I’ve put together here. I’d really like the opportunity to keep working with them…’
She carried on talking, rushing through a list of her credentials and successes, which might or might not be true, but he was only listening with half an ear now as he turned over the possibility forming in his head.
He’d dismissed Dane’s suggestion he take a wife in name only out of hand four hours ago. It was extreme and unnecessary and frankly ludicrous. But the benefits of keeping his father off his back—perhaps with an arrangement slightly less extreme—and having a Calhoun on his arm when entering the world of racing began to appeal to him as he watched her breasts rise and fall under the utilitarian shirt. Her eyes had widened with expectation as she continued to plead for a role at the stud.
He would need a lot more than simply her say-so to give her a position in management here, but he had another position that she could well be perfectly suited for. His reaction to her in the stables had been an anathema. She was the exact opposite of the sort of woman he would normally wish to have in his bed. Plain and unsophisticated, and far too slender… Although…
‘How old are you?’ he interrupted her frantic stream of information about herself.
‘Umm, twenty-two.’
Relief coursed through him. So not a teenager. Thank God.
She might look fresh faced but from the awareness he had seen flash into her eyes when he had first discovered her in the stables, and the way her body had visibly responded to him, he suspected she was far from innocent. Even better.
‘I’ll consider giving you a job on my team here,’ he said, deciding he could offer her that much, once he no longer had need of her. ‘And throw in an extra million euro to keep your sister and yourself solvent after the sale goes through,’ he added on the spur of the moment. It was only money after all and he wanted her compliant for what he had in mind. ‘But I have a different position in mind for now.’
‘That… That would be incredible,’ she said, the blush turning her face to a becoming shade of pink. ‘Whatever the position is I’m sure I can do it. I’m very adaptable. I realise you don’t know me,’ she said, getting ahead of herself again as he continued to study her. ‘I’m happy to work a probation period, as long as I can keep working with our horses,’ she added, a little frantically, the leap of desperate hope sparkling in her deep green eyes.
Desperate was good, eager to please even more so, it made her all but perfect for the role he had in mind. Except…
He let his gaze drift over her slender frame again, the boyish clothes, the lack of make-up and the wild hair now beginning to curl around her ears, and still felt the inexplicable ripple of arousal that had surprised him in the stables, annoyingly.
But perhaps it was easily explained. She was pretty enough and her gauche, guileless demeanour made her quite different from the women he usually dated. Her novelty value would soon wear off, though, making this inexplicable reaction easy to control going forward. Not only that, but he planned to make finding a new mistress a top priority as soon as he returned to London. Once he had another woman in his bed, his attraction for this only passably pretty, artless tomboy would surely cease altogether.
‘What job did you have in mind for me, Mr Khan?’ she said, having finally wound down long enough to ask.
‘I want you to become my fiancée, Ms Calhoun.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘W-WHAT DID YOU SAY?’ Orla croaked, the shock blasting up her torso with a humiliating surge of heat.
Had he just proposed to her? No, he couldn’t have. She must be having some kind of weird auditory hallucination to go with her even weirder physical reaction to his sharp, dispassionate gaze—which she’d imagined a moment ago was assessing her as if she were one of the stud’s prize brood mares.
‘I said, I want you to become my fiancée.’ The words left his lips and reached her eardrums, bringing with them another surge of inappropriate heat. But they still didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Perhaps she had lapsed into a coma? Or was this some bizarre pseudo-erotic dream? Maybe she hadn’t woken up at all this morning, hadn’t spent an hour on the gallops exercising Aderyn and another five hours mucking out the stalls? Perhaps she was still in her bed upstairs, having fallen asleep scrolling through images of this man on the Internet…
‘I… I…’
she stuttered, wishing she could pinch herself to wake up. ‘You want to marry me? But you don’t even know me! We’ve never even dated.’
Or kissed, she thought irrationally, because that was all she could seem to focus on, along with his firm, sensual lips and that incredible face, which even with the inscrutable frown made him overwhelmingly gorgeous.
His eyebrows rose and then his mouth quirked in a wry smile. The once-over he gave her made every one of her pulse points pound, not to mention making the hot sweet spot between her thighs go molten—which had been overheating ever since she’d stood in front of him in the stables, soaking wet with torpedo nipples.
‘I don’t wish to marry you,’ he said. ‘Or date you,’ he added as if she’d suggested something mildly amusing. She felt the bubble of anticipation she hadn’t even realised was under her breastbone deflate and the renewed wash of humiliation roll over her. ‘It would be an engagement in name only,’ he continued. ‘For which we would sign a binding contract. I would require you to be on my arm, and to act the dutiful, loving, soon-to-be wife, at any and all social and business events I frequent, to maintain the impression of a real relationship. We would have to establish that for the press—and for the racing fraternity, where I will use your connections to establish myself in the racing world…’
Connections? What connections?
She didn’t have any connections in the racing world, because she’d always worked furiously behind the scenes, maintaining the fiction that the great Michael Calhoun was still the holder of the Calhoun legacy, long after he’d lost himself in his grief and his addiction. She had worked closely with the jockeys and the trainers and other stud managers, but she didn’t know any of the big movers and shakers in the racing fraternity personally. Only the Quinns, the owners of the neighbouring stud, and after the devastating end of her engagement to Patrick they’d shunned her.
She’d been happy to remain anonymous, out of the way. Doing the work she loved with the horses. The socialite aspects of the racing world were something she had no interest in whatsoever and no aptitude for. Patrick had made that very clear to her.
She chewed on her bottom lip, knowing she couldn’t tell Karim Khan the truth of the matter or he might withdraw his bizarre offer—which she was more than desperate enough to be seriously considering.
