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even know it.
    Yeah, Landon had lied.
    He did want a woman, and she was in this very room with him.
    Somber, he rose and started around the boardroom table. His heart pounded a slow, heavy rhythm. “He’ll be humiliated,” he said direly.
    “Publicly, I hope.”
    He fisted his hands. “He’ll be a babbling idiot by the time we’re through with him.”
    Bethany clasped her hands together and grinned. “I love it!”
    Some unnamable sensation exploded in his chest.
    He’d never had this kind of foreplay. Promising to run over the enemy while already imagining plundering the spoils of war, in this case Bethany’s nice pink mouth. But he’d thought of her awkward kiss all through a sleepless night, and in his mind he’d done what he’d wanted to from the start and had taken possession of that mouth, kissing her wildly, savagely, and he’d been mad with lust when he woke. What was it about her?
    He gazed into her eyes, clear blue, specked with gold and glinting with mischief.
    In the sunlit space, she appeared younger and less preoccupied than she had last night. Her hair, tied softly behind her, framed a delicate oval face, her pale slim neck adorned by a small gold necklace. Her skin was milky and smooth, but what Landon could not get over was her mouth, and the way he could still feel it on his.
    Roughly he whispered, “Did you get a dress?”
    “Yes.”
    “White and virginal?”
    “Beige. And decent.” From her small leather purse, she promptly took out his credit card and a folded receipt. “Thomas is my new best friend. He told me you’d like it.”
    His forehead furrowed. “My chauffeur saw it?”
    “I wanted opinions. I don’t know your taste.”
    “Neither does Thomas.” He took his card back, and the receipt, and felt a prick of disappointment when he couldn’t succeed in brushing her fingers more than a second.
    “I bought a ring, too.”
    He took the slim fingers she held up within his and surveyed the modest band.
    Her hand curled around his and electricity rushed up his arm. The touch flew to his head like a bomb, heating his chest, his groin.
    He struggled to tame the lust coursing inside him and thumbed the rock as though it were precious and not a half carat grain of rice. He drawled with deceptive casualness, “This is from me?”
    “Yes.” She angled her head back and studied him while he pretended to study the small rock. He noticed loosened strands of wheat-blond hair making her look sweet and vulnerable. “I like simple things,” she whispered.
    “It’s small…” Like she was. A small little package, full of possibilities, shining the light upon revenge.
    She sighed dreamily, as though she were thinking of that, too.
    All of a sudden, everything about Bethany seemed to have an erotic nature. Her silky voice. Or maybe the loose, businesslike clothes which just made a man want to know what was underneath. Or maybe it was the hunger in her eyes, her thirst for blood. Halifax’s blood.
    Damned if Landon didn’t find that sexy.
    His mouth went dry as he remembered their mouths, blending, hers moving, his tight and burning, too. Surely he was making it out to be more than what it had been.
    She was too thin.
    And she couldn’t have been softer.
    She kissed too hard.
    And she couldn’t have been hotter.
    Who was he kidding? It had been exactly as he remembered, and it had promised breath to a dead man.
    “I worried you’d change your mind today,” she said, retrieving her hand.
    There was something perverse about wanting to cover that smile with his lips.
    He’d played honorably once. For his son. But Chrystine’s treachery had left him with nothing. He didn’t plan to end with nothing now, not ever again.
    He regarded her steadily, crossing his arms. “Has a Gage ever given you his word before?” Halifax’s woman, he thought. And now mine.
    “No.”
    “Then what gave you reason to doubt it?”
    She shrugged. “I’ve learned not to trust what people