was no victim!
Not this time, and if he had any doubts... Mari dropped her chin, closed her eyes and exhaled a long shaky breath to compose herself. Then, heart pumping, she lifted her head and stretched out a hand towards him, letting her fingers flutter.
‘You can’t do this, Sebastian,’ she appealed, pressing the hand now to her stomach. ‘Our baby, he will need a father.’ As she said this she couldn’t help but think of her own father. Where was he now?
* * *
The woman had had her audience in her pocket from the first throbbing syllable of heartbreak and desperation, and now Seb felt their attention switch to him, not giving him sufficient time to recover from the shock of recognition that had felt like the vibration of a shotgun blast when he’d turned and seen her standing there. While the aftershocks still reverberated in his skull, he schooled his expression into neutral—less damage control and more an unwillingness to provide entertainment for the masses.
He saw her lips move and read, Do you know who I am?
Know who she was...?
In other circumstances he might have laughed. The number of occasions when he had lost control in his adult life could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and he wasn’t about to forget that particular one, or the woman responsible.
But even if by some miracle he could have conveniently blanked the incident from his mind—it had not been one of his greatest moments—Seb could never have wiped the memory of that primal rush. It had electrified every cell of his body. He had never before or since experienced anything that came close to his response to her innate sensuality.
Did she bring out the same animal response in all men? Men who, unlike him, could not recognise the response as a weakness; men who allowed their passions to rule their lives.
Men who lacked his self-control—without it he might have been a man like his father.
No longer able to fight the compulsion, his eyes dropped, moving in a slow sweep that took in every aspect of her from the glorious flaming head of Pre-Raphaelite curls that framed her perfectly oval face to the length of her endless legs to the sleek, sinuous curves in between. Everything was accentuated by a dress that was probably illegal in several countries...or was that the body?
It was the lust that slammed through him—hard to imagine a less appropriate response in the circumstances—that brought reality like a boomerang rushing back to hit him squarely in the gut. He reacted to the weakness with an explosive rush of anger.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ As he flung out the question in the periphery of his vision he sensed movement coming from the row that was reserved for the royal party. Hell, this was a disaster. Where was Security and where had they been when she had strolled in?
Her smile, sheer, silky provocation, caused him to take an involuntary step forward, fury for a fatal split second blanking logic.
‘Now you know what it feels like!’ Mari flung with a bravado she was not feeling... Actually she was feeling really weird.
The last thing Mari saw before the dancing black dots joined up and for the first time in her life she fainted was those dark implacable eyes staring with skin-peeling intensity at her.
Before she hit the ground, Seb had been pretty sure that the graceful fainting stunt was just as phoney as the rest of her performance.
But she wasn’t moving... If she had knocked herself out, he thought grimly, it would deprive him of the pleasure of making her choke on her words, though not even a full retraction would fix the damage she had just caused.
He had spent years making the Defoe name stand for something, a brand that inspired confidence, and now in a matter of seconds this woman had destroyed it.
Ironic really that he had thought his parents’ absence—they had not been willing to interrupt their world cruise for their son’s wedding—would guarantee a drama-free day.
Seconds ticked and the entire place collectively held its breath, until Seb lost his fight against the instinct to react—someone had to do something!
Did it have to be you? asked the voice in his head.
It was just as well that his grandfather was not here.
One arm under her legs, the other around her back, he heaved her into his arms, wondering how many phones were capturing the moment. The action seemed to break the group paralysis in the place, and as people started shifting in their seats it was filled with a low buzz of conversation that drowned out the soft groan of the woman in his arms.
As her head fitted itself into the angle of his shoulder her crazy cloud of fiery red hair went just about everywhere. He spat a tendril out of his mouth and, eyes flat with suppressed fury, turned his head to look at her face, marvelling than anything that looked so beautiful could cause so much damage.
Her blue-veined eyelids fluttered but stayed sealed, and with another little groan she said a name that sounded like Mark.
Another victim...?
Amazingly, unconscious she looked almost vulnerable, a million miles from the vindictive drama queen of moments before.
Why the hell had she done it?
‘Now you know what it feels like’ suggested simple payback. Seb understood the attraction of revenge, but who waited six years? The possibilities ran through his head as he strode, the cynosure of all eyes, up the aisle towards his bride, the white-hot burning anger he struggled to contain battering at the insides of his skull, his arms full of crazy, delusional or plain evil but definitely sweet-smelling redheaded witch.
‘Keep still!’ he growled under his breath as she squirmed up against him, turning her body so that her breasts flattened against his chest.
When he came level with Elise his iron expression softened. He felt a stab of guilt that he hadn’t given her a second thought, which made him a selfish bastard.
Poor Elise—if this was hard for him he could only imagine how she was feeling under her veil. If there was ever a moment when he would have excused a tantrum this was it, but she was conducting herself with a dignity that contrasted starkly with that of the woman who had just smashed the reputation he had spent years rebuilding. A sound of mingled disbelief and self-disgust vibrated in his throat because half his mind was occupied imagining her naked.
‘Sorry.’ His soft apology coincided with an audible lull in the buzz of conversation. There might have been someone in the most distant corner who hadn’t heard the word, which would undoubtedly be construed as an admission of guilt, but he doubted it.
His jaw clenched. Perfect! Feeling frustration closing in on him, he glanced down at the cause and found a pair of glazed blue eyes looking up at him.
‘I’m not sorry,’ she whispered before the dark lashes framing them came down in a fluttering curtain against her smooth, very pale cheek. Then with a soft murmur, she burrowed in closer.
You will be, Seb thought, struggling to focus on anger rather than his indiscriminate hormones, which were acting independent of his brain to the squirmy, sensationally packaged softness in his arms.
Even without looking he could feel Elise’s dagger stare behind her veil, and who could blame her? Certainly not him. He wasn’t always as appreciative as he ought to be of her composure. He sent up a silent apology for ever having wished she’d show just a little more spontaneity, just occasionally. Ninety-nine out of a hundred women in her place would be having hysterics right now.
‘Door, Jake...?’
His best man, who had been standing there, blinked as though emerging from a trance and grabbed the door to his right to allow Seb to pass through.
‘Look after Elise,’ Seb said as he went through. ‘Take her...someplace, tell her I won’t be long,