At the Billionaire's Bidding Read online

  Mario’s hands were on her shoulders, shaking her, ‘That is the daftest thing I’ve ever heard you say! When I’m done with your makeover everyone will think you do the gardening in Dior—you just wait and see.’

  Shannon smiled a small smile. ‘No one gardens in Dior. I’m sure you can be shot for that kind of sacrilege.’

  ‘Someone somewhere probably does.’ He shook her again. ‘You just listen, my girl.

  Cinders will go to the ball with Prince Charming whether she likes it or not. And when Cinders has the prince wrapped around her little finger she can just persuade him to hand back the nice derelict wreck we all love and adore. And then all the hair-straightening, eyebrow plucking, leg waxing agony I’m about to put you through will all seem worthwhile.’

  The smile became a grimace, but not for the reasons Mario probably assumed. Because Prince Charming had already tried to hand back the building, hadn’t he? And Cinders had basically told him to stick it!

  It didn’t really matter if she got to the end of the evening feeling even emptier than she already did. If nothing else came out of what was going on between her and Connor, she had to somehow try and make sure the people she loved weren’t caught in the fallout.

  Even if accepting the building meant she might feel that, somehow, she had paid for it with sex.

  One night in a Dior given to her by the man she had once loved couldn’t make things any worse than they already were, right?

  C’mon! After all—it was Dior. What was a girl supposed to do?

  Shannon’s transformation became a group effort as the day progressed. So that by the time she was standing outside the front door looking down at Connor, she did feel a bit like Cinderella.

  And if she was, then Connor sure filled the other role to perfection. He was sensational in a tux! Even with his short hair spiking and a bad-boy gleam in his eyes. Rock star chic—

  that was what it was. And he wore it so well! He could have been born in one of those things…

  Lifting one side of her long skirt, she tilted her chin down to make sure she didn’t fall on her way down the steps. It felt like years since she’d last worn heels so ridiculous and impractical to walk in. And shoes were normally her one foray into the ridiculous and the impractical. When she could afford them.

  As she finally stood in front of him he grinned broadly at her. ‘Nice dress.’

  Shannon lifted her nose and blinked disdainfully at him to cover any sense of discomfort she felt as he looked her down and then back up—with torturous deliberation. ‘It’s Dior as it happens.’

  ‘Is it now?’ He nodded at her, his grin still in place. ‘Just something you had hanging around from all those other millionaires you know in Galway?’

  She smiled at the memory from their first conversation. How had he remembered that?

  ‘My other designer dresses are in the dry-cleaner’s.’ She stared at him for a moment and then turned on her heel to give him the full effect of his purchase. ‘Will I do?’

  ‘You’ll more than do. You look stunning.’ His dark eyes swept upwards, the grin fading as he examined her hair. ‘What have you done to your hair?’

  One hand automatically rose to the back of her head to make sure it hadn’t fallen out of the chignon ‘masterpiece’. ‘Mario spent two hours straightening it and putting it up, so I’m under strict instructions to tell you that if so much as one drop of rain touches my head I will “poof up” into the frizz I normally live with.’

  ‘Well, then, let’s give him a fright shall we?’ He stepped in closer. ’Cos he’s watching, isn’t he?’

  Her green eyes widened. ‘Oh, you cannot touch the hair.’

  ‘Well, that’s a given, but it doesn’t mean I can’t kiss you and make him think I might touch the hair.’

  When he leaned closer she leaned back, avoiding his mouth. But it had nothing to do with not wanting to frighten her hair-stylist. ‘You’ll ruin my make-up.’

  Connor’s eyes narrowed at her excuse. Then he nodded, just the once, before stepping back to open the car door for her. ‘Just so you know, that “Get Out Of Jail” card is only valid for use once—at the start of the night.’

  There was silence for a while as Connor pulled the car out, focusing all his attention on getting them off the cobbled street and onto a wider road. But once they were moving properly he glanced across at her.

  And she managed only half a smile.

  Which made him frown briefly. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No. Why would there be anything wrong?’

  ‘Now, you see, I know you well enough to know that’s a lie. So what did I manage to do to make you mad when I wasn’t even here?’

  She glanced across at his profile as he made a turn. ‘Maybe I’m just nervous about going to the “do” of the year. It’s not like I make a habit of wearing designer dresses and mixing with the rich and famous.’

  Connor’s mouth twitched as he glanced at her from the corner of his eye. ‘How do you know that’s where I’m taking you? It’s supposed to be a surprise.’

  ‘Are you telling me that’s not where we’re going?’

  The twitch became a smile. ‘I don’t believe you’re nervous. Nothing fazes you.’

  ‘Well, then, maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do. Lots of things faze me, every day. It’s a fact of life for most people.’

  ‘Like what, for instance?’

  ‘You need a list?’

  ‘An example would do.’

  The temptation to cross her arms was agonizing. But there was no way she was going to crease her dress. She even missed the stupid curl she was always pushing away—at least it gave her something to do with her hands.

  ‘One little one. Go on, give it a go. It’s called sharing. People do that when they get involved, I’m told.’

  Involved? She blinked at him. But when it was met with another smile she gave up and stared out of the dark-tinted windscreen, searching her mind for a non-Connor-related-faze-her topic to share as an example. ‘Large families faze me.’

  So much for the non-Connor part. It was getting to the stage where nigh on everything kept coming back to him, didn’t it?

  ‘That’s not true. I come from a large family and they never fazed you—it was like you’d always been there from the first day Tess brought you home from school.’

  It was a tad close to the bone to discuss anything related to their past. From the time when everything in her life had been so wrapped up in him. As it was getting to be in the here and now.

  ‘No, they fazed me. For years.’ She took a deep breath and let it out. ‘To someone like me, a family like yours—the way you all are together—well…Let’s put it like this—it’s like going into a room where everyone is laughing at a joke and I’m the only one that doesn’t get what’s funny. Only all of you all knew the joke from birth so when you try to explain it to me, you only say the punchline, expecting I’ll get it—so there’s no way I’ll ever understand. Even after years of going in and out of your house I still didn’t completely get it, no matter how much I wanted to or how many times I tried asking someone to explain it to me. Eventually I understood most of it. But I never laughed the way you guys all did. And I felt left out. That fazed me.’

  Connor went silent for a long while as Shannon hid the expanding emptiness inside her with another smile. ‘You see, I knew you wouldn’t get that. Why would you? You knew the joke.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t understand. It’s just you put it into a very clever, if rambling, analogy and it’s going to take me a minute to think up one as smart.’ He glanced her way again as he made another turn, smiling at her in a way that almost looked affectionate. ‘You do know that you babble when you’re nervous too, right?’

  Shannon frowned. He knew her better than she liked to think he did.

  His deep voice dropped an octave as he reached across to wrap his fingers around her cold hand. ‘What you’re saying is that you always fel
t like an outsider? Right?’

  ‘Probably. A little.’

  ‘Well, let me just put something straight, Sunshine—you were never an outsider.

  Everyone loved you.’

  Everyone except the one person she had wanted to love her. But she couldn’t say that, could she? And as they pulled up outside the museum the emptiness inside her almost doubled her over.

  Connor parked the car, turning in his seat to look at her with a thoughtful expression—

  until she could take no more. ‘What now?’

  ‘Look at me.’

  Forcing strength into her spine, she turned to face him, her eyelashes slowly rising until her gaze locked with his. And the air tingled between them as it always did, his sensual mouth curving up into a smile that sent hundreds of lights flickering through the dark depths of his eyes. It wasn’t fair. Men like him weren’t supposed to exist outside female sexual fantasies—they really weren’t. It wasn’t that he was perfect, she knew that. But he was Connor. And there was just something about him that had always fascinated her—

  drawn her in—made her want more.

  So much more than he had ever been able to give her.

  She watched in silence as a large hand rose to her face as it had so often of late, his fingertips stroking tenderly against her cheek, his hand turning—knuckles grazing along her jaw and down the column of her neck.

  And when he spoke his voice was husky. ‘You look very beautiful tonight. And there isn’t a single person that won’t turn to look when you walk through those doors—’

  ‘Not helping with the nervous thing.’

  Connor chuckled. ‘You meet people every day, Shannon. You talk to them, listen to them. It’s what you do—so just be yourself.’ He leaned closer. ‘And trust me—if I hadn’t already said I would be here, then we would be heading to my hotel right now and we wouldn’t be leaving the room for the next twenty-four hours.’

  Truth was, any nervousness she had probably had less to do with where they were or who they might meet than it had to do with the prospect of another night in his arms. Having sex—not making love.

  But it wasn’t as if she could tell him that.

  He leaned further across the centre console, a wicked smile in place. ‘Sooner we go inside, the sooner we can leave.’

  Shannon’s eyes narrowed, despite the smile she could feel growing on her face. It was just so difficult to focus when he was like this—so charming and persuasive and damned tempting and with that silent amusement in his eyes.

  Yeah, he had her and he knew it, didn’t he?

  She should hate his guts for that ability to draw her in every single time. But she didn’t hate him.

  And as he leaned in to mess up her make-up a little Shannon had a sudden realization.

  Not hating him any more was the biggest problem of all, wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER TEN

  CONNOR COULDN’T TAKE his eyes off Shannon. And he couldn’t remember ever being so proud of the way that one person could manage to look so confident, so beautiful and yet so unaware of how beautiful she was. She was truly amazing.

  Her small hand had been cold inside his warm grasp when they had first walked in, and she had clung to him through the first introductions and conversations. Selfishly he had liked that she had clung to him that way, relying on him being beside her. Even if he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the independent Shannon he knew would soon step up.

  Fairly soon her smile and her wit had people stealing her from his side to introduce her to other beautiful people or to talk to like-minded supporters of community projects.

  She was a hit.

  Connor wouldn’t have expected anything less.

  Finally extricating himself from a group who had been most eager to bend the ear of the new owner of Devenish Enterprises, he stood to one side of the room to watch her.

  She really was beautiful. The dress had caught his eye in a shop window when he had been stuck in traffic going to an early meeting. The exact green of her eyes when she was aroused, he had known instinctively it would look stunning on her. But it took her to be wearing it for the dress to take on a whole new dimension.

  With her back to him, the halter neck afforded him a mesmerizing view of creamy skin from her shoulders to the slight inward curve above the base of her spine and with her hair up he couldn’t help watching the way her long elegant neck turned, how the movement of her head as she talked would frequently offer up that sensitive section of skin below her ear that he loved so much.

  And his body tightened in response to the thought of running his tongue along that skin, just so she would make those little sighs she made.

  Her head turned, her large glittering eyes searching the room until she found him. And when she smiled, for the first time in his life Connor understood what people meant when they talked about someone being the only one they could see in a crowded room.

  Someone sought her attention again, drawing her down the room so that Connor got to watch the long skirt shimmer around her legs as she moved. He wondered how it felt against her skin, how she felt with it against her skin. He even took a deep breath as he debated what she was wearing underneath it that was so invisible to the naked eye—and decided there and then that they had stayed as long as they needed to.

  But before he could stalk over to reclaim her he noticed the group she was being introduced to—some of their faces very familiar to him. And he smiled a knowing smile.

  All right, he could wait. Once she’d finished talking to them, she’d come to him.

  ‘Connor.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  His younger brother walked straight over and embraced him in a manly, back-slapping, brief hug, before standing back and grinning at him. ‘Hottest ticket in town? Where else would I be?’

  Connor laughed. ‘You might have mentioned you were coming when I saw you at the weekend.’

  ‘You never asked.’

  Connor shook his head, a broad grin on his face. ‘I take it there’s a woman involved in your decision to be here.’

  And Mal laughed in return. ‘You know me.’

  ‘How did I guess?’ Connor smiled.

  Then Mal’s expression changed and he took a deep breath before lowering his voice.

  ‘Mum rang today.’

  Connor sighed impatiently. ‘I thought we agreed to leave me be on this. Remember? Just about ten minutes before we went jumping off a mountain at the crack of dawn on Saturday?’

  ‘She really wants to see you.’

  Feeling the familiar dark cloud descending above his head, Connor automatically sought Shannon across the room, watching as she laughed, her hand lifting to brush an invisible lock of hair behind her ear. And he could almost hear her voice in his ear telling him in no uncertain terms just what she thought of him not talking to his mother—which made him smile wryly.

  ‘I’ll go see her next week.’

  ‘You will?’ His brother’s expression of disbelief told the tale of how unexpected Connor’s answer was. ‘Just like that? When half the family has been trying to speak to you for weeks and you haven’t been answering their calls?’

  Connor shot him a warning glance. ‘And I told each and every one of them that if they’d had the same bombshell dropped on them I did then they’d have needed some space too.

  Remember that bit?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but this is the family we’re chatting about here. They were never going to leave it be, you know that. You’d have been the same if it had been one of us.’

  Yes, he would. But he doubted any of the rest of them would have taken the news the same way he had. If he hadn’t already been so unsettled, so jealous of his older brother’s happiness, so desperate to get away from the responsibility he had unwillingly shouldered for years, then maybe he wouldn’t have felt that discovering he wasn’t a full member of the family was some kind of retribution for not appreciating what he’d already had.
>
  Blaming his mother for something that had happened before he was born wasn’t going to fix what had already been wrong with him, was it?

  Mal wasn’t done. ‘You need to speak to Rory too.’

  Connor could feel any semblance of the good mood he’d had trickling away like water through his fingers. ‘Rory knows where to find me.’

  ‘I don’t think he thinks it’s his job to come to you.’

  ‘Well, he can think what he wants.’

  ‘You two are too alike, that’s the problem. If you’d just both—’

  Connor fixed him with a steely stare, his mouth a thin line. ‘Well, you see, that’s where you’d be wrong. We’re nothing alike.’

  ‘Mal?’

  Connor frowned hard as he watched Shannon smile broadly at the younger man—who gaped at her in return. ‘Shannon? No way! Wow, girl—you look fantastic!’

  She leaned in closer to inform him, ‘That’s your brother’s doing—he bought the dress.’

  He gaped all the more at Connor. ‘Did he now?’

  There was no way Connor was going to stand there and let his brother look at him with that knowing look. Hell, no. Already a grin was growing that, if he knew Mal, would be followed by at least an hour’s worth of ribbing…

  ‘We’re leaving now. Good to see you, Mal.’

  Shannon frowned up at him. ‘What if I don’t want to leave?’

  ‘You didn’t want to come in not two hours ago.’

  She tilted her head to the side, which left the exposed part of neck Connor had been appreciating not five minutes ago exposed to Mal’s sweeping gaze. ‘Maybe I changed my mind. Women do that.’

  Connor scowled hard as Mal looked down past her neck. ‘Mal—’ the warning tone was enough to get his attention ‘—has a date of his own somewhere to attend to.’

  ‘Maybe I’d like to meet her.’

  Oh, he knew that edge to her voice. Only too well. When she said the words so calmly and so carefully, it meant they were two steps away from yet another argument. And there was no way he was letting that happen where they were. Or in front of his kid brother.