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soon to become my wife.” A rumble of reaction rolled toward them. The women looked at her with envy, the men with appreciation; some, selfishly more concerned with their own private love affairs, seemed only blandly interested.
    Jordan recoiled from their staring eyes. Trancelike, she obliged him when Helmut pulled her into his arms and kissed her chastely on the lips. She was aware of a camera flashing on them. Reeves was taking pictures of her kissing another man.
    Helmut was speaking again. “To seal our engagement, I want to present Jordan with this ring.” From his pocket he extracted a velvet ring box and flipped it open. He took out a platinum ring on which was mounted the largest, most tastelessly ostentatious emerald-cut diamond Jordan had ever seen. He picked up her clammy, limp left hand and slid the ring on her third finger. It felt as heavy as a ball and chain. She looked up at him and smiled sickly. The camera flashed repeatedly.
    She wanted to turn on Reeves and scream at him to stop. This wasn’t real. None of this mattered or had any bearing on what had happened last night, but the flash on the camera was persistent. The crowd undulated toward her to extend their congratulations and view the diamond on her hand.
    Reeves watched as Jordan frantically caught at Helmut’s sleeve. The blood thundered through his veins. He was barely able to restrain himself from grabbing Jordan and shaking her until she begged him to stop. When she was thoroughly contrite and pleading for merciful forgiveness, he wanted to kiss her until she knew without a doubt that she belonged to him. But she didn’t. She was leaning against Helmut with feminine helplessness. Never in his life had Reeves known such jealousy or anger.
    He saw Helmut duck his head and place his ear near her mouth. Her lips barely moved against Helmut’s flesh, but Reeves remembered just how that felt. She whispered something to Helmut and then Reeves read the man’s lips as he answered, “Of course, my darling.”
    Reeves had put his hand in his pocket to find another lens, but his hand had closed around one of the filters his camera often required. When he saw Helmut press his mouth against Jordan’s slightly parted lips, his fingers clenched reflexively. He was impervious to the breaking glass that sliced through three of his fingers.
    It wasn’t until he withdrew his hand and saw the blood dripping from it that he hastened to grab a napkin off the buffet table to staunch the flow. Helmut was making another announcement, obviously at the request of his fiancée.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, Jordan has asked, since you are all friends and there are no members of the press here tonight, that you refrain from notifying them of our upcoming marriage. Understandably, she doesn’t want it to be publicized until she can contact her parents in the United States.”
    Reeves let the crowd stream around him as they exclaimed over the fairy-tale couple. He watched Jordan as she graciously received well-wishes. When a large, buxom, overjeweled matron drew her into a suffocating embrace, he met her eyes over the woman’s massive shoulders.
    Damn her!
Those blue-ringed gray eyes looked at him pleadingly. They were wide and apprehensive, compelling, and totally arresting. How dare she make a prize fool out of him and then look at him like that! He didn’t allow his frigid stare to warm. But his indifference was all for show. Even now he didn’t know which he would rather do, slap her hard across her lying mouth or fling her to the floor and make love to her with the wild hunger that made the pressure in his loins almost unbearable.
    Jordan sank weakly onto a satin Louis XIV chair. She stared absently at the priceless marble floor under her silver sandal. One of the thin straps had cut a deep red groove into her little toe. She longed to ease off the shoe and walk around in her bare feet as she had done last night. Last night.
    She directed her gaze across the