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‘Amodelwith your height?’ Sev teased, gazing down at her with glittering dark golden eyes that made her heart pound like crazy inside her chest.
‘I could be a hand or foot model!’ Amy proclaimed, tilting her head back, long golden hair rippling across her shoulders as she lifted her chin. ‘I had this horrific urge to say I was a hired escort just to shock her—’
Sev’s gaze narrowed in surprise and wonderment. ‘And bang would go my reputation with women!’
Amy wrinkled her small nose. ‘But I know better and I’m not sure I would have had the nerve. My mother was like Eliza. If you dared to answer her back, she bit your head off,’ she recalled ruefully. ‘I learned young to mind my tongue. It was only when I was older that I dared to stand up to her.’
‘It’s amazing that with that upbringing you didn’t turn into a bad-tempered witch as well,’ Sev remarked as he looked down at her with unhidden appreciation and smiled.
And that smile of his, that note of open admiration in his dark deep voice, set Amy on fire with happiness and she marvelled at how close she felt to him in that moment.
‘There are our hosts,’ Sev murmured in a quiet aside.
Amy glanced at the couple, regally dressed as a medieval king and queen with crowns of holly. The man was blond and looked younger than the woman, who wore a silvery-grey bob with panache. ‘They certainly know how to throw a good party,’ she commented.
Sev picked an unoccupied table. They were about to sit down when the Lawsons approached them, the older couple wreathed in smiles of welcome.
‘I’m so glad you were able to come this year, Sev.’ Cecily Lawson beamed. ‘I know how busy your social schedule must be.’
Her husband stretched out a hand to Amy. ‘I’m Oliver...and you are?’
But before she could part her lips, Sev had stepped in to say, ‘This is Amy Taylor, and I’m not quite sure what the etiquette is for introducing a father to a daughter?’
‘A...daughter?’ Cecily queried with a frown of disbelief, her husband echoing her query.
‘Yes, Amy is Oliver’s daughter...not that he’s ever acknowledged her,’ Sev completed smoothly.
‘What age are you, my dear?’ the older woman demanded.
‘Twenty-three next month,’ Sev supplied.
Amy’s tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth by shock. She could feel her knees knocking together beneath her gown while the blood drained from her face and the whole time she was staring at Oliver Lawson with wide disbelieving eyes. Her brain was refusing to function, but she did notice that his hair was the same shade as hers and his eyes the same dark blue. At the same time, he just didn’t look quite old enough to have a daughter her age because she would have assumed he was no more than forty.
‘Do have a lovely evening,’ Oliver’s wife said stiffly, as pale as Amy as she turned to walk away.‘Oliver!’she added sharply as her husband remained frozen to the same spot.
‘I’m Annabel Aiken’s half-brother,’ Sev added in a low voice as the older man turned almost clumsily away and his head jerked back, his face white with shock, eyes stunned and appalled by that revelation as he finally grasped the connection that had led to his downfall.
Nervous perspiration was breaking out on Amy’s clammy skin as the couple disappeared back into the crush.
‘I’ve accomplished what I came here to do,’ Sev told her unapologetically. ‘We’ll head home now.’
He gathered up the clutch bag Amy had laid down on the table, tucked it between her nerveless fingers and ushered her through the crowds back out to the foyer where he spoke briefly into his phone and asked a maid to fetch her evening coat for her.
Amy was feeling dizzy, shock still winging through her in wave after wave as she recalled Oliver Lawson’s dead empty stare and the flash of distaste that had momentarily twisted his lips when her identity was laid bare.Her father?Was that even possible and how could Sev feasibly know who her father was and speak with such authority on the subject?
‘I’ll answer all your questions once we get back home,’ Sev informed her quietly as he neatly threaded her stiff arms into her coat.
‘What you did was...very bad manners,’ she heard herself mumble pathetically for want of anything else to say because she was so desperately confused and shaken that she still felt sick.
‘That’s the least of my worries,’ Sev told her bracingly, hand splaying in a supportive brace to her spine as he guided her out into the cold wintry air. ‘Well, are you pleased to finally find out who your father is? Or disappointed that I found out first?’
‘You knew who I was when you brought me here tonight,’ Amy grasped belatedly, stricken to the heart by that obvious fact.
‘We would never have met had I not found out who you were,’ Sev admitted in a curt undertone. ‘I know you won’t like hearing that, but I refuse to lie to you any longer. What I never counted on was being knocked for six the first time I laid eyes on you. That wasn’t supposed to happen but, now that I know you, I’m not sorry it did. I want you more than I’ve ever wanted a woman and even the fact that you’re that lying bastard’s daughter doesn’t change that!’
Amy felt like a zombie because her brain felt as though it were drowning in sludge. She let Sev walk her out and lift her into the helicopter and she said nothing. He had detonated a bomb inside her head, and she wanted to scream because all of a sudden she was seeing that she had made a cartload of innocent assumptions about Sev and that every one of those assumptions was hopelessly wrong. Naturally she had believed that he was a stranger when they met, but that had not been the case when he had already known who she was.
Apparently, he had deliberately sought her out to use her for some nefarious purpose of his own. The noisy racket of the helicopter combined with the turmoil in her brain in a deafening cacophony.
