Claimed By My Ex-Fiancé's Ruthless Brother

The champagne tasted like almonds and something chemical.

Darlene Gilmore set the flute down on the marble ledge of the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom and pressed two fingers to her temple. The room tilted, then righted itself, then tilted again.

Forty minutes ago, Demario Vance had put that glass in her hand.

"Drink it, darling," he'd murmured, his thumb stroking her knuckle, his smile the exact one the society pages photographed. "One glass, and I sign the hospital guarantee tonight. Every cent of Dwight's bill. No more letters from St. Luke's."

She had drunk it.

Because Dwight was eighteen and had not opened his eyes in eleven months. Because the ventilator that breathed for him cost four thousand five hundred dollars a day. Because the letter in her beaded clutch read BALANCE DUE - TERMINATION OF LIFE SUPPORT AT MIDNIGHT.

Now her skin burned from the inside out.

"Darlene?" Demario's voice came from a great distance. "You're flushed, sweetheart. Go up and lie down. Suite 1908 - I had them draw you a bath. It'll pass."

She nodded. She let his assistant steer her into the elevator. She let the doors close.

The hallway on the nineteenth floor was carpeted and silent. Her keycard worked on the first try.

The suite was dark.

The scent hit her before the dark did - not Demario's cloying citrus cologne, but cold cedar, rain, and the bitter, expensive bite of Cohiba tobacco.

"Sit down, Miss Gilmore."

The voice came from the far end of the room. Low. Unhurried. The voice of a man who had never once, in his entire life, been told no.

A silver lighter flared.

In that small blue flame: a jaw cut as if by a blade and then sanded smooth, a mouth with no interest in smiling, and a pair of slate-blue eyes fixed on her with the flat, patient assessment of a man who had been sitting in that chair for a very long time.

The flame went out.

"Who are you?" Her throat was raw. "Did Demario send you? Because if this is his idea of a joke-"

"Your fiancé sent you," the man said. "He did not send me."

He rose. He was tall enough that she had to tilt her head back, and tilting made the room swim. He crossed to her in two unhurried strides and closed his hand around her elbow.

She gasped. His sleeve was chilled tailored wool. Her skin was on fire.

"Hot," she whispered, hating herself. "God-why is it so hot-"

"Who gave you the drug?"

"Drug?" She tried to laugh; it came out broken. "It was champagne..."

His hand slid to the back of her neck, fingers spanning her nape, holding her steady while the world tilted. She should have shoved him away. Instead her hands found the hard plane of his chest, and her forehead dropped against it as if it were the only cool surface left in Manhattan.

"Careful," he said.

"Please." Her fingers fisted in his shirt. "Please-it burns-"

"Look at me."

She couldn't.

He tipped her chin up anyway. The lighter's glow had died, but the skyline through the window was enough - and whatever he saw on her face made something in him go very, very still.

"...So it's you," he said, quietly.

She had exactly one coherent thought - He knows me - and then it dissolved, because she was already rising on her toes, already fisting both hands in his collar and pulling him down.

His mouth came down on hers.

It was not gentle. It was not meant to be. She made a sound against his lips that she would spend the next three days trying to forget, and her body arched into his as though it had been waiting its whole life to.

He tore his mouth free and held her at arm's length.

"Last chance," he said. His breathing was not steady. "Walk to that door. Get in the elevator. Go back down to the ballroom, put your hand on your fiancé's arm, and let him take you home."

She stared at him without comprehension.

Then her body betrayed her again. She swayed forward, her palms flat against his chest, and she heard herself say something incoherent and pleading against his collar.

"Please..."

Something in him gave way.

He swore - one low, furious syllable - and swept her off her feet.

He did not set her down in the sitting room. He carried her through the open bedroom door, past the drawn curtains and the noise of rain starting against the glass, and put her down among cold sheets. She reached for him without thought. He followed her down without a word, and his hand caught both of her wrists and pinned them once, hard, above her head - not to hurt her. To make her understand who was deciding.

She did understand. She understood absolutely, and she still lifted her hips to meet him.

She got one clear memory out of the whole unraveling: her short nails dragging down the width of his back, and the sound he made when she did it - not pleasure, something darker - and then the storm that had been gathering over the harbor all evening breaking inside her too, until she was sobbing a name she had never said out loud in her life, and the dark closed over her completely.

She did not surface.

Dawn was a gray blade under the door when Clayton Montgomery sat up against the tufted headboard, a thin column of Cohiba smoke rising from the lighter in his hand, and watched her sleep.

An encrypted phone vibrated against the marble nightstand.

A text from his assistant illuminated the screen:

Demario has eight tabloid photographers stationed by the service elevator. They're holding for the shot. Ready on your word.

Clayton looked at the woman tangled in his sheets - the torn champagne silk on the floor, the long red marks down his back where she had clawed him, the swollen split in her lower lip where he had not been careful.

"Good," he said, and his thumb moved once across the glass.

"Let him hold. Then erase every card and detain the lot of them."

He drew on the cigarette, exhaled, and set the lighter down beside the phone like a man setting a piece on a board.

"Now we wait for my half-brother to learn what happens when he plays games with what is mine."