Tycoon's One-Night Revenge Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning—did that have the face of one of your attackers painted on it?”
    A hint of amusement touched his lips as he took the chair next to hers. “Something along those lines.”
    “Did it help?”
    “Not as much as hitting the real guy.”
    “You went down fighting?” Eyebrows arched in faux surprise, Susannah asked the question even though she knew the answer.
    The day in July when he’d walked into her office unannounced, when she’d told him she wasn’t available to take him to Stranger’s Bay, warned her that he never gave up on anything without a fight. Then he’d set to work negotiating a price she couldn’t turn down, talking her into dinner, seducing her with disarmingly direct words and the silvery smile of his eyes. She’d been charmed to the mat before the bell ended round one.
    And now he’d returned to pursue the same fight, and a fight meant winners and losers. That foresight settled deep in her bones and when she lifted her gaze to Donovan’s, all sign of amusement was gone.
    “So I’m told,” he said in response to her question about going down fighting. “I don’t remember, but apparently I put one of them in hospital with me.”
    Although she strived, Susannah failed to keep the edge of dismay from her face. It didn’t help that the chilling action played through her mind like a scene from a movie. Her gaze drifted up, to the shorter hair. Funny how that little detail hadn’t really registered until now. “You were hit over the head?”
    “And rendered unconscious,” he confirmed, “thus ending the fight.”
    She nodded, swallowed. Her restless eyes shifted over him, searching out what else she may have missed, before returning to his eyes. “Do you remember anything from before the accident?”
    “Everything, up until I left America. I remember bits and pieces of the days I spent in Melbourne. Meeting with the CEO at Horton Holdings. The hotel where I stayed. It was the Carlisle Grande,” Van said with an unamused smile. Selected before he knew anything about Alex Carlisle and his family-owned group of hotels, other than he liked the beds and the service was impeccable.
    “You don’t remember coming here to Stranger’s Bay that weekend?”
    “No.”
    She shook her head and puffed out a short note of scepticism. “I thought amnesia only happened in books and movies.”
    Van’s eyes narrowed on hers. “You think I’m making this up?”
    In the pause, in the hint of a shrug, Van read her doubt. He jackknifed to his feet and stalked away a few paces.
    “I believe you, I just find it so difficult to imagine not remembering anything.”
    That quietly spoken comment turned him back around. She sat straight and tall in the stiff-backed chair, her ivory coat still buttoned to the base of her throat. Against the rain-lashed windows, her hair was a bright splash of colour. Her eyes remained unsettled with a mixture of compassion and doubt.
    It struck him like a blast of that rain-fuelled wind that he’d spent a whole weekend with her, here in these rooms. That coat he may well have unbuttoned and tossed aside. He might have stripped those boots from her legs. Kissed her in all the places that had drummed through his mind in those seconds he’d held her pinned against the door.
    “I look at you sitting there,” he said, his voice low and laced with the frustration of not knowing, “and I find it hard to believe that I don’t remember you.”
    She blinked. A slow-motion movement of dark lashes against pale cheeks. “That must be a little…odd.”
    Van gave a hollow laugh. “There’s one description.”
    “How have you dealt with it?”
    He swirled the wine in his glass, wondering whether to answer. How much to share. But then he recalled the compassion in her eyes and, what the hell, he’d likely shared a whole lot more than this with Susannah Horton. “I talked to the people I was dealing with that week. I retraced my footsteps. I reconstructed. I cursed a