Читать онлайн «The Millionaire's Seductive Revenge»

For Andrea Johnston, Suzanne Barrett,

and Noelene Jenkinson, Critique Partners,

Mentors, and Friends

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Coming Next Month

One

Every man in the room was staring at Kia Benton. And Brant Matthews was one of them. He’d seen many beautiful women in his life but none who affected him like the woman who’d entered the ballroom of Darwin’s Shangri-La Hotel. Australia’s most northerly city may possess a tropical lifestyle that was the envy of the rest of the country, but it still didn’t hold a candle to this woman’s beauty.

Dressed for an evening that promised glitz and glamour, Kia looked stunning tonight, with her ash-blond hair pulled back in a stylish chignon, her perfectly made-up features accentuated by the black liner circling her eyes.

The eyes of a seductress, Brant mused, his gaze sliding down over bare shoulders to the shimmery silver dress that hugged her breasts, then slid over slim hips and long legs.

But it wasn’t just her looks that coiled sexual hunger in the pit of his stomach. She had something that called to him on another level. A quality he’d never found in another woman, not even in his ex-fiancée, Julia. Hell, definitely not Julia. Julia had only been about one thing.

His mouth tightened. He had to remember that Kia was no different. Both women wanted the same thing.

Money.

He’d been suspicious of Kia from the moment he’d stepped onto the plane on his way back from Europe and caught sight of a photograph of her and his partner Phillip in the society section of a Darwin magazine. It was being read by the man next to him, and the picture had shown her arm in arm with Phillip at a cocktail party, looking very pleased with herself. The last he heard, Phillip still had his secretary from years back. This Kia was a total shock.

The caption had read, “Has one of Australia’s richest bachelors finally been hooked by his new personal assistant? Miss Kia Benton obviously knows a thing or two about getting ‘personal. ’”

Yes, this woman knew how to get her hooks into someone all right. But what she didn’t know was that he’d heard her on the telephone when he’d gone into the office the next day.

Of course I’m working on getting myself a rich man, she’d been saying when he’d passed by Phillip’s office and seen her leaning against the desk, looking for all the world as if she owned the place. Then she’d laughed and said, It’s as easy to love a rich man as a poor one, right?

This was the reason she’d made herself indispensable to his business partner so quickly. Within two months she’d had Phillip eating out of her hand. Oh, yes, she was a gold digger, this one. A beautiful, deceitful gold digger.

“Oh, don’t they make a lovely couple?” one of the executive wives tossed into the conversation going on around him, pulling Brant from his thoughts and dropping him back into the Christmas festivities that were a necessary evil at this time of year.