Deceptive Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

brown vest was buttoned, emphasizing the powerful spread of his shoulders and flat, narrow waist.
    Schyler played hard. This man might play hard, but he worked hard as well. There was no softness anywhere about him. Each angle and plane of his handsome face was uncompromising and ruthless, and there was an arrogance and surety which boded ill for those who chose to cross him. A man to take what he wanted and a man who would be sure, very sure, of what he wanted.
    Dain, in his turn, was making his own deeper, appraisal. There had to be something more to this woman than what was obvious to the immediate eye! He had met Schyler Van Metre and had sized him up easily. The man was a connoisseur and no thin-blooded, purse-mouthed spinster could hold Schyler's absorbed interest, and absorbed he was.
    Schyler had told Denise frankly, and later Dain, that he had searched for her, finally given up in despair, and had succumbed to his father's pressures to wed after meeting Denise.
    He had found Keri again through some unhoped for stroke of fortune, and this time she would not escape him. He now wished to be released from his engagement so that he might resume his relationship with Keri. Denise refused. She asked for time, pointing out how humiliating it would be if he jilted her within a mere two weeks from the time of their announced intention to marry. She also pointed out that she might be pregnant. Schyler could not deny the possibility. He had agreed to let the engagement stand for a reasonable length of time, for appearance's sake, but he stipulated that he would still be seeing Keri during that period of waiting, and as soon as the allotted time had passed, he would expect Denise to release him.
    Denise had agreed reluctantly, but privately she vowed that Schyler was hers and Keri Dalton would pay for her effrontery. When Dain returned from London, he had been met by a distraught and blotchily tearful sister, who sobbed with calculated abandon on his broad chest.
    The tale of Schyler's perfidy, her possible pregnancy, and the threat her fiance's ex-mistress posed to her ultimate happiness poured fort h in a disjointed, semi-hysteri cal stream of gasping sobs. Dain was disgusted, but she was his sister. He met with Schyler, who confirmed her story in the main, and who reiterated his determination to resume his relationship with Keri, but with a view to marriage this time. Dain's mouth had tightened to a grim line, but he had made no comment.
    "Sit down, Miss Dalton," Dain gestured to a chair and watched as Keri arranged herself, purse on lap, hands tidily folded atop it. Her spine was ramrod stiff and her expression forbidding.
    "You are late in arriving, Miss Dalton. I expect prompt compliance with my orders. Have you any excuses?" His tone was cold.
    "I briefed my replacement, sir." Keri's tone was anything but apologetic.
    One of Dain's eyebrows shot up in disbelief. She was taking him to task! As had Miss Barth before him, he was discovering that the prim exterior hid an extremely efficient set of teeth, and that Keri's bite might well be much worse than her bark.
    Keri was at the stage where she didn't care if he fired her on the spot. All of her instincts told her this man was more of a threat to her than Schyler had ever been. She hadn't liked his thorough appraisal of her face and figure as she stood before him and she feared those shrewd green eyes. Those eyes could all too easily see beneath the make-up-thin layer of her composure, and she wouldn't have to give him an inch before he would take a mile!
    To her surprise he let that thrust pass without further comment. He sat at his desk and eyed her over his steepled fingers. "Mr. Simonds was unstinting in his pra ise of your abilities Miss Dalt on . "
    "Thank you, sir." Keri responded formally and briefly.
    "I understand you speak several languages," he said, switching smoothly into French.
    "I speak five, sir, in addition to English," she responded, also in French. If he