LITMIR.BIZ

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      She looked at her glittering eyes and hectically flushed cheeks. She told herself that she would make an attempt to find Zac Valenti, but if she couldn’t find him—or if she did and he didn’t look at her twice, which she fully expected—then she would go. At least she would know that she’d tried her best.

      And then she would worry about what to do with her father. But at least she would have given it a shot.

      * * *

      Zac Valenti looked around the massive glittering ballroom from his antisocial location leaning against a pillar at the back of the room. The opulent space shone with a thousand priceless jewels that screamed the social status of their skinny owners like lurid neon signs over their heads.

      One woman passed him, literally weighted down with baubles. Her hand looked barely strong enough to carry the enormous ruby cocktail ring on her index finger. Then she caught sight of him and he could see her eyes widen comically behind her elaborately feathered mask as she almost tripped over her feet.

      Evidently his own understated black mask wasn’t an effective shield for his identity. Zac’s mouth tightened. As if he needed proof that he was still the enfant terrible of Manhattan, after delivering the biggest scandal to rock the island in decades when he, Zachary Lyndon-Holt—golden boy and heir apparent to become the uncrowned King of New York—had broken up with his family and given up his inheritance.

      Not to mention leaving his fiancée standing at the altar of one of Manhattan’s oldest Gothic churches in her bespoke Oscar da la Renta wedding dress.

      Addison Carmichael, a blue-blooded WASP from the top of her gleaming blonde head and her blue eyes to her toes, was nothing if not a product of her breeding and background—and she was as tenacious as a Jack Russell terrier. Within a year she’d married into a well-known political family dynasty and was currently the wife of a New York senator.

      When Zac bumped into her now she smiled at him with only the slightest tinge of malice—his ensuing rupture with his family had diluted her public humiliation somewhat.

      He hadn’t been worried about causing her emotional trauma—it wasn’t as if they’d had a love match. His relationship with her had been as much of a charade as the rest of his life at that time. And he could only be thankful that he’d discovered the ugly truth in his family before he’d sleepwalked into a veritable prison of his parents’ making.

      He cursed silently and corrected himself: his grandparents making.

      He’d grown up knowing them as his parents until the day he’d found out otherwise, when his world as he’d known it had exploded out of all recognition.

      But he’d stayed standing.

      And after the shock had passed he’d discovered that all he cared about was the heinous betrayal of the two people who had brought him into this world. A resolve had filled him to honour his real father and mother—not the people who had brought him up as if he was an ill-favoured guest in his own home.

      That day he’d had an incredible sense of his own personal destiny rising from the ashes, outside of the weighty yoke of the great Lyndon-Holt name which he’d never felt entirely comfortable with. And so he’d thrown it off, together with everything else bound with that name. And he’d never looked back.

      He was determined to make the Valenti name as revered as the one he’d been born with. He owed it to his immigrant Italian father, who’d had the temerity to fall for a Lyndon-Holt princess and in the eyes of her family had sullied her aristocratic beauty...

      The fact that a sizeable part of Zac’s wealth now came from his new-found career as a hotelier and nightclub owner caused him no little measure of satisfaction—because he knew damn well how much it would enrage his grandmother.

      Not to mention the tabloid headlines that had followed his latest nightclub opening, when the supermodel currently being hailed as the most beautiful woman in the world had been papped leaving his apartment late the next morning, looking thoroughly bedded and sexily dishevelled.

      So why aren’t you returning her calls? asked a snide little voice, which Zac tried to ignore. The sex had been...adequate. But the truth was that their encounter had reminded him a little too forcibly of that feeling of disconnection he’d experienced when he’d discovered the deceit in his family. As if nothing was really real. As if he was a construct...

      But he wasn’t a construct. He was flesh and blood and very real. And those people could send snide looks and whisper all they wanted—because Zac Valenti was enjoying being a constant reminder that they were all part of the façade, just as he had been. A reminder that they were hypocrites and just as liable to fall from grace as he had. Even though he hadn’t really fallen—he’d jumped.

      He rolled his shoulders in the confines of his bespoke three-piece tuxedo suit, feeling claustrophobic and irritated with the insular direction of his thoughts.

      He looked around, seeking distraction.

      A flutter of movement in his peripheral vision made him look to his right. He found his gaze resting on the slender figure of a woman in a long, black, backless dress.

      She was facing away from him—about ten feet away. So far so unremarkable—Zac had seen women dressed in a lot less in the name of fashion, even if her back was remarkably pale and the line of her spine curved temptingly just before it disappeared under her dress. But something about her kept him looking, and as he did, narrowing his gaze, he realised with a jolt of awareness that her dress was seductively sheer.

      She moved then—shifting her weight, stretching up slightly as if she was looking for someone in the crowd—and the dress revealed slim yet obvious curves, the globes of her pert bottom encased in black underwear. His eyes travelled up her long, slender back to where strawberry blonde hair was upswept, revealing a graceful neck.

      The ends of the black ribbon of her mask trailed in the golden-red strands, and Zac had an insane urge to go over and undo it. Turn her around to face him. He wanted to see her.

      He shook his head slightly, as if to clear it, wondering what the hell was going on. Women didn’t usually attract his attention without trying.

      Then she turned sideways, towards him, and the jolt of awareness became something much earthier and stronger. The black dress teased at an inordinate amount of pale skin, even though she was covered from neck to ankle, and Zac found that he was holding his breath as his gaze landed on her breasts. They were on the small side, but beautifully shaped, pert and upthrust against the fine material.

      Evidently she wore no bra, as the dress was backless. With that realisation a rush of heat went straight to his groin, and Zac found himself reduced to the kind of hormonal surges a teenage boy might feel, captivated by his first pictures of naked women.

      Her features were mostly obscured by the mask, but he could make out a ripe mouth and delicate jaw. Everything about her was graceful...feminine. She held a full champagne glass in her hand, and from where he stood he could see how white her knuckles were. He realised that she looked uncomfortable, or ill at ease.

      He frowned, but just then a waiter passed by and she quickly stepped forward, put her glass on his tray and turned away again. It was as if she’d made some kind of decision. She started walking in the opposite direction, her movements jerky, almost panicked, but she didn’t get far because a large group of men blocked her. She hovered uncertainly, craning forward as if to try and see another way out.

      Zac’s interest was spiked in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time—if ever. Because if there was one thing he knew about this crowd, it was that everyone here felt entitled and no one hesitated...over anything. They barrelled through, regardless of niceties. So she was an anomaly, and Zac was suddenly wide awake and deliciously distracted.

      * * *

      Rose was feeling a mixture of sick dread and relief. She couldn’t see Zac Valenti anywhere. And right now she just wanted to get out of there—out of this stifling room full of people dressed like glittering peacocks, where she didn’t belong, in a dress

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