The Billionaire's Marriage Bargain by Carole Mortimer Read Free Book Online Page A

mother wants him to sell up and take early retirement,’ she added ruefully, aware that she was talking too much in her nervousness of being alone with Dominick. She was sure he didn’t really want to hear all this, and that his interest had just been idle conversation on his part.
    Dominick nodded. ‘And?’
    She shrugged. ‘He says he isn’t sixty yet, and he hasn’t earnt enough money to retire. But they won’t accept any help from me,’ she added with a sigh.
    He could see how Nancy and Donald would baulk at accepting financial security from their eldest daughter. But what—
    Damn it, he had no intention of being sucked into this warmly loving family!
    It was against every principle of aloof self-containment he had lived his life by since he had been able to completely escape his parents’ influence twenty years ago.
    Despite having the grades, he had chosen not to go to college, and instead had worked in a hotel, working his way up from lowly Porter to Assistant Manager, and then Manager by the age of only twenty-three. Then he had gone completely out on a limb to finance the buying of the hotel and had completely turned it around into a profit-making concern.
    That first hotel had only been the start, and now he owned hotels and apartments all over the world, amongst other things.
    Very shortly, when his four months of planning came to fruition, he intended owning a cosmetics company too…
    Before, he had managed to achieve what he had because he had never allowed emotions to overrule his head.
    Until he had met and married Kenzie…
    A chink in his armour.
    But a chink, once he’d had her safely installed in his life as his wife, that he had kept under perfect control.
    Until she’d begun to question why he never told her he loved her.
    Until she’d begun to talk about them having a baby together.
    Kenzie had insisted that the child the two of them had together wouldn’t experience the emotionally battered upbringing he’d had. But Dominick had remained adamant against that argument, a development that had obviously caused Kenzie deep unhappiness.
    As far as Dominick had been concerned though, there had been no reason for them to have children. They had been happy as they were, so why rock the boat?
    Kenzie hadn’t seen it that way, and things had become incredibly strained between them, with their lovemaking no longer the pleasure it had once been, and a barrier seeming to come down between them.
    When Carlton Cosmetics, in the guise of Jerome Carlton himself, had begun to spend a lot of time with her in an effort to persuade her into accepting a lucrative contract to be the face of their new product, that estrangement had deepened.
    Quite to what extent Dominick hadn’t been made aware of until he’d spoken to Jerome Carlton some weeks later.
    And by then it had been too late. Kenzie had made her choice, and it hadn’t been him or their marriage.
    She had accepted the contract Jerome Carlton had offered on behalf of Carlton Cosmetics—and Carlton’s more personal offer that she move into his life!
    Kenzie breathed a sigh, and stood up, the movement bringing Dominick’s attention away from his thoughts. ‘The bathroom is through there.’ She pointed to an adjoining door. ‘Take as long as you like. Don’t come down again at all, if you would rather not. I’m sure my family will accept that you’re tired after working all day and then having to drive here.’
    ‘I’m thirty-eight, Kenzie, not eighty-eight!’ he rasped impatiently. ‘And I seem to remember being perfectly capable of going in to work the next morning as usual after some of our more—strenuous sexual marathons,’ he added tauntingly.
    Kenzie paused in the doorway, her expression pained. ‘And there you have the difference between us in stark reality, Dominick,’ she told him sadly. She knew that difference was everything, and that it always had been, only she had been too much in love with Dominick, too blind to see it,