Society Wives: Love or Money: The Bought-and-Paid-for Wife. Maureen Child

unspiked. Scout’s honor.”

      “So you say, but you don’t look like a Boy Scout. Can I trust your word?”

      Something flickered in his eyes and in her blood. Perhaps that was the last gurgle of Ms. Pragmatist going under, because she appeared to be flirting with him. She, Vanessa Kotzur Thorpe, who had never flirted in her life.

      He filled one of the slender glasses, then handed her the bottle. She regarded it suspiciously. “Take it,” he said. “So I can defend my Boy Scout honor.”

      Their fingers brushed as she took the bottle, a thrilling little contact of skin on skin. She had barely recovered when he lifted the glass to his mouth. Their eyes met over the rim as he took a long, slow sip and the connection somehow seemed steeped in intimacy.

      Without breaking eye contact, without saying a word, he held out the glass and temptation whispered through her blood. She wanted to take it from his hand, to place her lips on the same spot, to taste his heat on the icy cool glass.

      More, she wanted to stretch on her toes and lick the golden chill from his lips. To kiss him the way she’d wanted to the first time.

      “You still don’t trust me?”

      Vanessa wet her lips. “It’s not that. I’m not drinking.”

      “Driving?”

      “I don’t drink.” She volunteered the information without thought … and then kicked herself sharply. Pay attention. She didn’t want to explain why she never touched alcohol, nor did she want to see in his eyes that he’d worked out the reason by snooping into her background.

      She switched her gaze to the game, pretending to watch without seeing anything but a blur of activity. A team of monkeys mounted on camels could have taken to the field and she wouldn’t have noticed … although she supposed they’d have needed extra-long-handled mallets.

      After a moment the thick ache in her chest reminded her to relax and breathe. Today Tristan appeared relaxed, as if he were enjoying this as a social occasion rather than as an investigative opportunity. Perhaps he’d taken her appeal outside the Marabella to heart.

      Perhaps he was biding his time.

      Play thundered by close to the sideline and the air thickened with the scent of sweat and earth and the clash of contact between players. Vanessa blinked and focused. The umpire blew a foul eliciting a heated debate on who’d crossed whose line on the ball.

      “How are you enjoying the polo?” she asked, genuinely curious.

      “I like the game.”

      “But not the rest?”

      He considered that a long moment, appearing to give it more weight than the casual inquiry commanded. “I’m enjoying today more than I’d thought. I hadn’t realized so many people would remember me or want to know me. Given your popularity, I thought I might be the pariah.”

      “You’re not?”

      His small smile caused a large clamor in her system. “Can’t say I haven’t felt some coolness.”

      “Which hasn’t dulled the curiosity.”

      “No.”

      Vanessa cast a glance over the crowd and found a degree of that curiousity trained on them. Many of the locals—her friends included—would be conjecturing over her chumminess with the enemy. A frown pulled at her brow so she considered the changed dynamic between them. She couldn’t work out what had changed. The heat, the awareness, the attraction, she’d felt before, but today there was another element she couldn’t pin down.

      They weren’t exactly comfortable and relaxed together but the tension had altered.

      It reminded her of the one time she’d sat on a horse. The riding lessons were a birthday present from Stuart, but when the instructor hoisted her into the saddle she hadn’t enjoyed the sensation one little bit. She’d hated losing touch with earth, of not knowing if the exhilaration would last or bring her crashing onto her backside.

      She cast a cautious sideways glance at Tristan and caught him watching her. A weird sense of yearning fluttered to life in her chest, and her frown deepened as she quickly looked away. Oh yes, Ms. Pragmatist nodded. You are so going to land on your backside.

      “Worried about what they’re thinking?” he asked.

      “Well, I am fraternizing with the enemy.”

      “I’m not the enemy, Vanessa.” He eyes on hers were darkly serious. “Your real enemy is the person who wrote that letter.”

      Vanessa lost Tristan to Delia during the halftime divot-stomp and didn’t see him again—no, that wasn’t true, she couldn’t help seeing him, but she didn’t talk to him again—until she was walking toward her car at the end of the day. This time her wow-where-did-you-spring -from reaction wasn’t contrived. One second she was picking her way carefully across a soggy patch of ground, trying not to identify the heavy weight pressing down on her chest as going-home-alone gloom, the next he was there at her side.

      The weight lifted leaving her feeling ridiculously pleased … until she felt his gaze fix on her smile for an unnervingly long moment. Then she thought, must stop grinning like a loon. Must think of something to say that doesn’t sound like I’m ridiculously, pleased.

      “Did you enjoy the second half?” she asked, getting the smile under control. “I lost you during the break.”

      “I didn’t know they really did that.”

      “Walk the divots? It’s a time-honored tradition and the perfect chance to mix. Don’t they do that at your Aussie football games?”

      “Our mixer tradition is aimed at the kids. They all flock onto the ground for a kick at halftime.”

      Picturing the mayhem of hundreds of kids let lose on a football field, Vanessa allowed herself a half smile. “Slightly wilder and noisier than a divot-stomp, I imagine.”

      “Slightly.”

      “You looked as if you were enjoying yourself.” Straight away she wished she’d kept that observation to herself. She also wished that the sight of Delia hanging off his arm, laughing, reaching up to brush something—or nothing—from his collar wasn’t stuck in her visual memory. She had no hold on him and no right to the sharp stab of possessiveness.

      “I enjoyed today,” he said noncommittally.

      “You seemed to fit right in.”

      He cut her a sideways look, as though trying to work out if she was having him on. Then something shifted in his expression, his gaze grew keen with perception. “And you, Vanessa. You fit in as if you were born to this life.”

      The warm glow of enjoyment brought on by his seeking her out and fanned by their banter, faded and died. But she might as well confirm what he’d probably already gleaned from Gloria or who knows where else. “My parents both worked for people like these, in the city. I spent some time observing the life.”

      “And you dreamed of living it?”

      She shrugged. “What girl doesn’t dream? It’s the Cinderella fantasy.”

      They stopped beside her car, the last left in this row of the parking field, and she was searching her purse for her keys when he asked, “Why my father?”

      Vanessa looked up sharply, not quite sure she’d heard him correctly. If she had, then she didn’t understand the question. Intense blue eyes collided with hers for a heart-jolting moment before he looked away.

      Before he waved a hand at the field still littered with Bentleys and Porsches and Mercedes. “You wanted this life, you could have had it with any man you wanted. Why my father?”

      For a second she stared back at him, stunned by the question and then by its subtext. She’d set out