Bring the Heat, Margot Radcliffe [best novels to read to improve english .TXT] 📗

was damned if I’d let Perry Bingham’s antics prove them right. Especially after going against all my business instincts and signing him onto my deal.

‘There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, Wren. Where’s your brother?’ I steeled my voice because, however much I enjoyed this erotic dance with her, Perry was at risk of tanking everything I’d worked for during the last eighteen months.

Several expressions filtered through her eyes—alarm, worry, irritation, mild disappointment. She finally settled on indignation. ‘Is that why you came?’

‘I told you, I accompanied Aunt Flo—’

‘A ruse to hunt down my brother,’ she interjected.

‘That implies awareness that he’s hiding. Is he?’

A look flickered across her face, gone too quickly but revealing enough to intensify the unease knotting my belly. ‘Tell me where he is, Wren,’ I pressed. ‘He’s been avoiding my calls for almost two weeks and it’s getting really old.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to do your own hunting. I’m not Perry’s keeper.’ Her tense reply gave her away. As did the minuscule tremble in the fingers that held her glass. Both intrigued and disturbed me but before I could push for more, she added, ‘You’ve monopolised me quite enough. Enjoy the rest of your evening, Jasper.’

Just for the hell of it, and because something wild and reckless yearned for another demonstration that she wasn’t immune to me, I brushed my fingertips down her arm. ‘This isn’t over.’

She attempted to cover her tiny shiver of awareness with a wide sultry smile that diverted my attention to her luscious lips. ‘How can something be over when it didn’t start in the first place?’

With that, she sailed away, her hips swaying in that unique way that’d held male and female gazes rapt during her modelling days. Since then, Wren had gained even more confidence in her womanhood, and left a swathe of admirers slack-jawed in her wake. I wracked my brain, trying to recall if she had a current boyfriend. The gut-tightening rejection at the idea of her being attached made me grimace into my champagne.

Until my gaze fell on the woman who placed herself directly in Wren’s path before manoeuvring her away from the nearest guest.

Agnes Bingham—Wren’s mother and powerhouse socialite in her own right.

The tall, slim woman was what Wren would look like in thirty years. Except where Agnes’s beauty was classically cool, Wren was vibrant, passionate, even though she seemed hell-bent on suppressing it.

Why?

None of your business.

But I wanted to make it my business. I wanted Wren in my bed and damn all the consequences to hell. And more and more I suspected I wouldn’t get over this fever in my blood until I’d had her.

Tension of a different kind raced up my spine when mother and daughter glanced my way. The touch of rebellion in Wren’s gaze made me raise my glass in a mocking toast, even while I observed the animosity emanating from Agnes Bingham.

Bloody hell.

Family feuds, Perry Bingham going AWOL and now Agnes Bingham. Three stumbling blocks in my intent to have Wren. But despite the damning words my father had taken pleasure in decimating me with as a child, I wasn’t afraid of a challenge.

All the same, my gut twisted as I made my way back to my aunt, the thought of broaching the subject of my father making my stomach curdle.

‘Everything okay?’ Aunt Flo asked, after smiling an excuse to the guest she’d been chatting to.

I let her fondness wash over me for a moment before I pulled myself together. Wishing her warm concern came from a different female voice had been fruitless when I was a child. It was even more foolish now. The woman who’d given birth to me wasn’t interested in taking up her maternal role. Not for her first or second born, and certainly not for me, her third child. My arrival had spelled the end to her obligation and she couldn’t get away fast enough. Years of hoping, of saving my allowance in a childish hope of enticing her financially had been laughed off. I was no longer ten years old, fighting to stop myself from crying as Damian advised me to give up my foolish hoping.

‘George Bingham. I need to know the full story,’ I said to Aunt Flo, my low voice brisker than she deserved.

‘What’s brought this on? You’ve never wanted to know before,’ she said after eyeing me in frowning silence.

I shrugged, moving her away to the more private edge of the terrace. ‘I’ve never cared enough about the finer details. Now I do because whatever happened all those years ago is endangering an important deal and I’ve just about had it.’

‘Dear boy, money isn’t—’

My bitter laugh stopped her. ‘Do me a favour, please, and don’t finish that sentence, Aunt Flo. We both know money is definitely everything to any red-blooded Mortimer.’

She harrumphed. ‘Well, I don’t agree but, since you seem to have a bee in your bonnet about it, I’ll let it go. To answer your question, it was your father’s last deal before he and your mother stepped away from the company, and the family. He and George Bingham were supposed to go fifty-fifty but George messed up somehow and could only come up with a fraction of the investment by the deadline date. There was a clause in their agreement that it was fifty-fifty or nothing and that loophole gave your father the right to cut him out regardless of how much money he’d pumped into the deal up to then. He didn’t take it well. He wasted money he didn’t have trying to sue your father. But Hugh was a brilliant, if somewhat ruthless, businessman.’

There was no somewhat about it. I’d come across some of his deals while my father had actively worked in the family firm. His cut-throat antics were legendary. If you liked blood and gore with your negotiations.

A memory shot through my head. ‘Was closing that Bingham deal part of my father’s walking-away package?’ I asked.

Aunt Flo sighed. ‘Yes, it was. Back then, every deal closed by