A Tangled Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

marriage is Lilah’s focus,” Zane said softly.
    Lucas frowned. “Back off, Zane.”
    Confusion gripped Carla along with another renegade glimmer of hope at Lucas’s reaction. She was tired of thinking about everything that had gone wrong, but despite that, her mind grabbed on to the notion that maybe all he was doing was dating Lilah on a casual basis. Just because Lilah wanted marriage didn’t necessarily mean she would get what she wanted.
    Grimly, she forced herself to study the Atraeus bride in the painting again. It was the perfect reality check.
    Her pale, demure gown was the epitome of all things virginal and pure. Nothing like Carla’s flaming red silk dress, with its enticing glimpse of cleavage and leg. The serene eighteenth-century bride was no doubt every man’s secret dream. A perfect wife, without a flirty bone in her body. Or a stress condition.
    Lucas’s gaze sliced back to Carla. “I’ll take you back to the party. Dinner will be served in about fifteen minutes.”
    He was jealous.
    The thought reverberated through her, but for the first time in two years what Lucas wanted wasn’t a priority. Her rules had just changed. From now on it was commitment or nothing.
    Her chin firmed. “No. I have an escort. Zane will take me back to the party.”
    For a long, tension-filled moment Carla thought Lucas would argue, but then the demanding, possessive gleam was replaced by a familiar control. He nodded curtly then sent Zane a long, cold look that conveyed a hands-off message that left Carla feeling doubly confused. Lucas didn’t want her, but neither did he want Zane anywhere near her.
    And if Lucas no longer wanted her, if they really were finished, why had he bothered to search her out?

Three
    L ucas Atraeus strode into his private quarters and snapped the door closed behind him. Opening a set of French doors, he stepped out onto his balcony. The wind buffeted the weathered stone parapet and whipped night-dark hair around the obdurate line of his jaw. He tried to focus on the steady roar of the waves pounding the cliff face beneath and the stream of damp, salty air, while he waited for the self-destructive desire to reclaim Carla to dissolve.
    The vibration of his cell phone drew him back inside. Sliding the phone out of his pocket, he checked the screen. Lilah. No doubt wondering where he was.
    Jaw clenched, he allowed the call to go through to his voice mail. He couldn’t stomach talking to Lilah right at that moment with his emotions still raw and his thoughts on another woman. Besides, with a relationship based on a few phone calls and a couple of conversations, most of them purely work based, they literally had nothing to say to each other.
    The call terminated. Lucas found himself staring at a newspaper he had tossed down on the coffee table, the one he had read on the night flight from New York to Medinos. The paper was open at the society pages and a grainy shot of Carla in her capacity as the “face” of Ambrosi Pearls, twined intimately close with a rival millionaire businessman.
    Picking up the newspaper, he reread the caption that hinted at a hot affair.
    He had been away for two months but by all accounts she had not missed him.
    Tossing the newspaper down on the coffee table, he strode back out onto the balcony. Before he could stop himself, he had punched in her number on his phone.
    Calling her now made no kind of sense.
    He held the sleek phone pressed to his ear and forced himself to remember the one overriding reason he should never have touched Carla Ambrosi.
    Grimly, he noted that the hit of old grief and sharp-enough-to-taste guilt still wasn’t powerful enough to bury the impulse to involve himself even more deeply in yet another fatal attraction.
    When he had met Carla, somehow he had stepped away from the rigid discipline he had instilled in himself after Sophie’s death.
    The car accident hadn’t been his fault, but he was still haunted by the argument that had