Taken by the Pirate Tycoon. Daphne Clair
for what they believe in.” She picked up a silver Georgian coffeepot, smoothed a hand over its elegant shape and put it down again.
“What are you passionate about, ice lady?” Jase asked. He sounded genuinely curious, and a voice inside her whispered caution.
She shrugged. “My company, my father’s legacy.”
Making to move on again, she found him blocking her with the immovability of a stone statue. “That’s all?” he queried.
“Isn’t it enough?”
“You had your own business in Australia, didn’t you?”
“A small one.” She wondered where he got his information, although it was no secret. “We specialised in renovations, with an emphasis on sustainability and energy saving.” Things her father had dismissed as “airy-fairy greenie-babble.”
“And you left it to come back and run your father’s company.” He sounded almost disapproving.
“Of course,” she said, oddly angry. “I always knew it would be mine one day. My inheritance.”
He looked as though he wanted to say more, but then he nodded, and shifted so she could step by him.
Jase let her move away, but his eyes followed her for minutes afterwards. He knew she was aware of his concentrated gaze. It was in the set of her head, the tension in her bare, smooth shoulders. Not looking back, she took cursory interest in several things before leaving the tables without buying any of them.
She’d greeted Bryn tonight showing none of the unguarded emotion Jase had seen the first time he’d laid eyes on her. But he hadn’t missed the uncharacteristic warmth of her smile, nor the searching look she directed at Rachel, fleetingly revealing something strangely like sympathy.
That thought brought his brows together and his mouth into an obdurate line as he watched Samantha greet someone else with what he’d come to think of as her company face—the serene, synthetic smile, not reaching the topaz-blue eyes with their enigmatic gaze.
What was going on behind that beautiful, frustratingly emotionless facade? Why would she be sorry for Rachel? Surely that spelled trouble.
His sister might seem to be a mature, successful woman—hell, she was. But there was a touching innocence about her all the same. He suspected she’d been so busy with her studies and career for the past ten years that she’d let personal relationships—male/female relationships anyway—pass her by. And she’d had a crush on Bryn Donovan since she was barely fifteen, something her whole family knew but had never mentioned to her.
Jase was pretty sure that when the family moved away from Rivermeadows after Rachel’s last year at high school, his mother had been relieved. Not that she wouldn’t have trusted Bryn, but a pretty girl with her heart in her adoring big brown eyes must be a temptation to any red-blooded young man. Jase and his brother had found it rather hilarious that Bryn seemed to be the only one at Rivermeadows who hadn’t noticed how she felt about him.
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