Strapless by Leigh Riker Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t know. Days, weeks.” She’d already told him that, too. Didn’t he listen? “Whatever it takes to negotiate the space we want for the new store.” Whatever it took, not just in Sydney, to heal her broken heart. Forever.
    Darcie tried not to focus on Merrick. When his beautiful child bolted from the nearby table straight into his arms, Darcie flinched at her sweet voice.
    â€œWould you buy me this one, Daddy?”
    She thrust a pink, plastic-windowed package in his face. International Barbie. Dolls of the World. It seemed just right to Darcie.
    Holding Darcie’s gaze, Merrick grasped the box hard.
    â€œSure, kiddo.”
    The little girl gave him a coy smile. “Do you want one, too?”
    Merrick managed a small laugh. “Nice try. We’ll just buy this today.”
    Darcie stared over his daughter’s head into Merrick’s dark-blue eyes. Then she tightened her grip on Buster the zebra—and marched toward the escalator.
    â€œDarcie. Wait!”
    She kept going. She didn’t look back. It was the upside escalator, of course, but Darcie only needed to escape. Suddenly the setting, the noise, the displays seemed absolutely fitting. For once, she had the last word.
    â€œDaddy already bought himself a doll—or so he thought.”
    Merrick didn’t know it, but he needed the Returns Department. As for herself…
    Australian Barbie.
    Merrick Lowell would never see her—a.k.a. Darcie Elizabeth Baxter—again.

Chapter
Three
    â€œâ€˜W altzing Matilda,’” Darcie sang to herself. “‘Once a jolly swagman…’” Losing the lyrics again, she hummed a few bars. “‘Dum-de-dum…his billabong…’” For some reason her eyes filled.
    Jet lag, she thought, and tipped her head back. She hadn’t thought it would be this bad. The new Westin Sydney, with its open expanse of chrome, glass and satiny wood led her gaze upward to a vast skylight showing a night-black canopy full of twinkling, but unidentifiable, stars. New to the southern hemisphere, Darcie sat in the hotel bar digesting the beef tenderloin en croute she’d eaten earlier in one of the trendy lower level restaurants with Walt, and nursing a glass of local Chardonnay to settle things.
    Wearing her pinstripe suit, even alone she shouldn’t feel this out of place. In New York—ten thousand miles to the east, as her long, sleepless night on a Boeing 747 from San Francisco could attest—women wore black, too, particularly after five. With a good strand of pearls, her mother would advise. In most big cities of the world, you couldn’t go wrong in dark colors, but Darcie frowned intoher glass. She wasn’t wearing pearls, and opals seemed the gem of choice in Australia, if she believed the many shop displays she’d passed on her way to the hotel tonight. And according to the group of what appeared to be thirtyish executives at the next table, beer had it over wine.
    Idly, Darcie studied them.
    She couldn’t concentrate. A continued low-down cramping had made her order the glass of wine she didn’t really want, or need.
    â€œThank God he didn’t get me pregnant,” she said of Merrick.
    Bastard.
    His being married wasn’t the issue. She might be naive at times but she was no brainless ingenue. As a woman of the new millennium, sexually free and unencumbered, she could handle his being married—even if that little fact rankled some deep down remnant of tradition in her own character. Thanks, Mom and Dad. But Merrick’s failure to reveal the truth? That still hurt.
    Darcie hated lying. Liars, most of all.
    Blinking, she straightened in her roomy club chair. Her glass clicked onto the marble tabletop. What if he carried some STD? That’s all she needed to remember Merrick Lowell—genital herpes or warts. As if she didn’t feel enough of a sexual outcast.
    She pressed a hand to her