The Collector's Edition Volume 1 by Emma Darcy Read Free Book Online

challenge.
    ‘I want Dan to fulfil Monty Castle’s contract. You are going to do that, aren’t you, Dan?’
    She well deserved the name of Dragon Lady! He’d been doing the decent thing in trying to protect her from the clutches of Omar El Talik and she’d turned it into a neat piece of entrapment. Nevertheless, two could play at that game.
    ‘For my wife, yes. I’m looking forward to our living together again while we bring this project to completion.’
    Her smile stiffened.
    She knew and he knew she couldn’t walk away from him this time, not until Monty’s contract was fulfilled. Dan relished the thought of taking every day of the allotted time to do the job. He had a lot of scores to settle with Dragon Lady.
    ‘Starting tonight,’ he hammered home.
    Caught, Dan thought, and the sense of satisfaction that flooded through him salved much of the frustration that had been eating him for two long years!
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
    S ERENELY triumphant was the pose she had to sustain as Dragon Lady, having accomplished what Lin Zhiyong had plainly doubted, but Jayne was boiling underneath it.
    Dan Drayton had appropriated her as though she was a possession he could pick up and do anything he liked with whenever the whim took him. It was a timely reminder of why she had walked out of their marriage.
    The feelings he’d stirred were treacherous. She couldn’t afford to let him mush up her heart with Nina’s baby. And he might be the most com-pellingly attractive man she’d ever met, but if he thought he was going to resume conjugal rights tonight, he had another think coming!
    Two years she had spent trying to establish herself as a person in her own right. For him to claim her as his wife and expect to live with her again without so much as an ‘if you please’, showed a total lack of respect for her position and her feelings.
    There was no immediate opportunity for private conversation. Lin Zhiyong proved himself a diplomat, smoothly breaking up the awkward impasse for Sheikh Omar El Talik by invitingthem all to take refreshment in the pavilion, which, he pointed out to his foreign guests, was a fine example of traditional Chinese architecture.
    Dan deftly relieved Jayne of Baby’s weight with a smug grin that she would have liked to slap off his face. He hoisted the little girl to a perch against his shoulder again—no painful residue from the cramp in his arm—and was fulsome in his admiration of the pavilion’s green-tiled roof with its winged eaves and the red-lacquered pillars and beams that supported it. The designs of flowers painted on the beams drew his particular interest. As an appreciative guest, Dan scored full marks.
    Not so Sheikh Omar El Talik. He was sullenly silent, disinterested in any ornamentation that didn’t have Jayne at the centre of it. He still cast hotly meaningful looks at her and was intensely watchful for any sign of disunity between the supposedly reunited couple.
    He declined a moon cake, despite the variety of unique fillings Lin Zhiyong listed to tempt his appetite. However, he accepted a small cup of Maotai, one of the most famous Chinese wines, a transparent, potent spirit made from sorghum and guaranteed to take the fire out of his eyes and put it in his mouth and stomach. Lin Zhiyong failed to tell him about this effect. He emptied the warmed cup in one gulp and barely saved himself the indignity of coughing and spluttering.
    That was the end of the party as far as Omar El Talik was concerned. He made an abrupt farewell and departed with his men. Jayne was glad to see the back of him. With Lin Zhiyong escorting the trio of Arabs from his garden, there was no one of importance in hearing distance of what she wanted to say to Dan.
    He was feeding Baby little pieces of the sweet cake he had selected, much to her gooing approval. Jayne finished the cup of light rice wine she had taken and moved to the railing at one end of the pavilion, ostensibly to admire the reflection of the