Page 54 of His Last Gamble

At last she let out a long, slow breath. ‘No. No I wasn’t,’ she admitted.

He nodded, but surprisingly didn’t look very angry. Instead he slipped his hand around her arm and led her out of the airport. His sports car was illegally parked (naturally!) and she let him settle her inside with a dull feeling of resignation. When he roared away from the airport and drove them to a tiny, deserted, crescent-shaped beach, she tried not to think about the agony that lay ahead.

She should have known she could never fool a man like Payne. He’d probably seen right through her like glass. So it was going to be a head-to-head confession after all, and all the pain and angst she’d tried to spare them was now ahead of them.

Her heart ached as he wordlessly took her hand and led her onto the sand. Pink shells littered the beach, and out in the bay, a cheerful red, green, blue and yellow windsurfer’s sail bobbed up and down on the waves. A tiny crab scuttled for cover, but apart from themselves, it was the only thing moving on the beach.

He sank down onto the white sand and patted the patch next to him. ‘Come on. I won’t bite.’

Not now, Charmaine thought. But just you wait. The irreverent thought actually made her smile.

Payne watched her as she sank next to him, and resisted the urge to reach out and kiss her. To lay her down against the sand and ravish her.

Ever since he’d taken her virginity, he couldn’t wait to teach her more and more. He had a king-sized four-poster bed back at the Palace just waiting for them in his master suite; he wanted to introduce her to it and not let her out for the next year.

Or ten years.

Or the rest of their lives. But first they had to get things sorted.

‘All right, first of all, let me apologise,’ he said, making her nearly faint. She snapped her head around so fast, she went dizzy.

‘You apologise? What on earth for? You haven’t done anything wrong.’ He’d been the only innocent one in all this sorry mess.

‘For the way I made you accept my proposal at the casino. It was unfair, but in my defence, I wanted to make you see that we were meant to be together.’

Charmaine felt tears fill her eyes and quickly blinked them back. ‘You knew you were going to win that bet, didn’t you?’ she said, with something approaching awe in her voice. ‘I mean, there was never even the slightest doubt in your mind that if I’d said red, it would be black, or if I’d said black, then it would be red?’

Across the space of the few inches separating them, Payne smiled softly. ‘No, sweetheart, I didn’t have the faintest doubt. I knew that it was meant to be.’

Charmaine swallowed back a hard lump in her throat.

‘I also knew it was going to be my last gamble,’ he said, making her eyes widen even further.

‘But why?’ she’d breathed. Gambling was like meat and drink to him.

‘Because, after that, there would never be anything worth gambling for again,’ he said simply. Then he smiled. ‘Besides, after we’re married, I wouldn’t want our kids to get into bad habits.’

She gulped. Tears blurred her vision, and she looked away. ‘Payne, I can’t marry you,’ she choked.

‘Why? Because you tried to con me?’ Payne said offhandedly. ‘Because you thought I’d done the dirty on your sister and you wanted to teach me a lesson? Forget it. I already have.’

Charmaine nearly fainted. ‘Wh-what did you say?’

Payne smiled wolfishly. ‘I’d already guessed why you’d come to the island. I thought it was rather sweet, actually, the way you charged to Lucy’s defence. The maiden rushing to the desert island to slay the dragon. A bit of a twist on the old fairy story, but I liked it.’

‘Payne, this isn’t funny!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you see? I was out for revenge. I would have had it too, if things hadn’t turned out the way they did. So . . . so you see how impossible it is,’ she said at last. ‘I knew after we’d made love,’ she blushed as she said this, ‘that I couldn’t marry you, not without telling you about everything. And I knew once I did that, you’d be furious and want nothing more to do with me. I thought I could spare us all this by flying to England and then . . . just not coming back.’

Payne waited until her voice had trailed away, then sighed. ‘Charmaine, do I look furious?’ he asked at last, and watched, his breath lodged somewhere in his throat, as she slowly turned towards him.

Her eyes looked full of bewilderment and hope. He thought it was quite possible that he’d never love her more than he did in that moment.

‘N-no,’ she said at last, still a little uncertainly.

‘That’s because I’m not. Oh, I grant you, at first I wasn’t best pleased. And yes, maybe my ego took a bit of a battering. But it didn’t take me long to find out that this thing between us was far stronger than my hurt pride. But far more importantly, what I really needed to know was — had you fallen for me as hard as I’d fallen for you? And there was only one way to find out. And that was to propose.’

Charmaine blinked. ‘But how was that going to tell you anything?’

‘Simple. If you jumped at the chance, then it meant you were still working to your plan. It would have suited you perfectly to publicly dump me at the altar, right?’

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