“I’m not.”
“No wonder we don’t get along.” KU. She should have known. “Besides, didn’t I hear that you got married?”
“Rumors of my engagement were greatly exaggerated.”
“Hard to imagine with all your redeeming qualities.”
Over on the left, Veronica/Savannah jerked in her chair, her fake eyelashes flaring, her fork clattering down to her plate. As her colored contacts flashed over to Samuel T., the bastard casually wiped his mouth with his damask napkin.
Samuel T. didn’t look at his girlfriend, however. No, he was staring over that bouquet of roses directly at Gin.
The sonofabitch.
Deliberately, Gin turned to Richard and smiled. “Well, I’m delighted with your company.”
Richard nodded and resumed cutting up his filet mignon. “That’s more like it. Please do not stop.”
Gin spoke smoothly, although she didn’t have a clue what was coming out of her mouth. But Richard was nodding some more and answering her back, so she must have been doing a good job of the social stroking—then again, whether it was conversations she had no interest in or orgasms with men she didn’t care about, she’d had a lot of practice faking it.
And yet she was exquisitely aware of what Samuel T. was doing. Achingly so.
His eyes burned as they remained on her. And all the while, just as he’d promised, the tart next to him struggled to retain her composure.
“—saving myself for you,” Richard stated.
Gin frowned, that particular combination of syllables registering in spite of her preoccupation. “What did you say?”
“I was set to get married, but then I came to terms with your father. That is why I ended the engagement.”
“Came to terms with my f—what are you talking about?”
Richard smiled coldly. “Your father and I have come to an agreement about the future. In exchange for marrying you, I am prepared to grant certain favorable terms to the Bradford Bourbon Company.”
Gin blinked. Then shook her head. “I am not hearing this correctly.”
“Yes, you are. I have even purchased the diamond.”
“No, no, no—wait a minute.” She threw down her napkin even though she was not done eating, and neither were the other thirty-one people at the table. “I am not marrying you or anybody.”
“Really.”
“I am quite sure that you ‘bought’ a seat at this table. But no one makes me do a damn thing, and that includes my father.”
She supposed it was a sad commentary that she didn’t question whether her dear old dad could sell her to benefit the family’s share price.
Richard shrugged beneath his fine suit. “So you say.”
Gin looked down the table at William Baldwine, who sat at the head with total command, as if there were a throne keeping him off the floor and the assembled were his subjects.
The man didn’t sense her glaring regard and was thus unaware that this bomb had been dropped—or maybe he’d planned things this way, knowing that Richard would not be able to keep quiet and she might be diverted from making a scene because there were witnesses.
And damn it, her father was right on that one. As much as she wanted to jump up and start yelling, she would not demean the Bradford name in that fashion—certainly not with Sutton Smythe and her father, Reynolds, in the room.
Over to the left, a moan was covered with a delicate cough.
Gin shifted her glare from her father to Samuel T.—whereupon the lawyer promptly cocked a brow … and sent an air kiss her way.
“Yes, you can take her plate away,” she heard Richard say to the uniformed waiter. “She’s finished—”
“Excuse me?” Gin pivoted toward Richard. “But you have no right to—”
“I approve of your lack of appetite, but let’s not chance fate, shall we?” Richard nodded to the waiter. “And she won’t have dessert, either.”
Gin leaned in to the man and smiled at him. In a whisper, she said, “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I remember the days you stuffed your jockstrap with socks. Two pairs because one didn’t go far enough.”
Richard mirrored her. In an equally quiet voice, he retorted, “Don’t pretend you have any say in this.”
“Watch me.”
“More like wait for you.” He eased back and shot her the self-satisfied expression of a man with a royal flush in his hand. “Don’t take too long, though. The carat weight of your ring goes down hourly.”
I am going to kill you, she thought to herself as she looked at her father. So help me God, I’m going to fucking kill you.
As Lizzie took a turn off a country road, the dirt lane she headed onto cut through wide-open corn fields and was barely big enough for her Yaris. Trees stood guard on either side, not in an orderly row, but with a more casual planting pattern, one driven by nature more than a landscaper’s hoe. Overhead, great limbs linked up to form a canopy that was bright green in the spring, emerald colored in the summer, yellow and orange in the fall, and skeletal in the winter.
Usually, this processional was the beginning of her relaxation, the quarter of a mile to her farmhouse a decompression chamber that she’d often thought was the only reason she was able to sleep after a day of Easterly’s issues.
Not tonight.
In fact, she wanted to look over her shoulder to make sure there was no one behind her in the rear seat of the car. Not that you could fit somebody larger than a twelve-year-old back there—but still. She felt pursued. Chased. Mugged … even though her wallet remained in her purse and she was, in fact, alone in her POS.