Her Bad Boy Billionaire Lover (Billionai - By Bretton, Barbara Page 0,11

it, it wouldn't be enough. It always had been with other women on other days, but this time he knew the rules were different. The moment he saw the flash of fire in her eyes, he'd wanted to toss her over his shoulder like one of his caveman ancestors and cart her off to his lair.

He wanted to own her. To possess her. To brand her with his touch and smell and heat until she belonged to him and him alone. The thought of another man burying himself inside her warmth made him realize he could be capable of murder.

They'd flown through the night to get to the chapel on the Las Vegas strip. Hidden beneath a blanket in the rear of the plane, he'd touched her in ways that made her shudder and it had taken a supreme act of will to keep from having her right then and there. The need in him had been that great--the dark wet heat of her body that intoxicating. He'd taken his fingers, still moist and hot from her, then rubbed them across her lips, urging her to taste herself, to know how good and sweet she would be when he found her with his mouth and tongue.

They rode in silence to the chapel, caught up by the enormity of it all. He bought a bouquet of white roses from a sleepy clerk in the lobby. A simple gesture and an obvious one. She was used to diamonds.

"Oh, Jake," she whispered, burying her face in the blossoms. "They're so beautiful."

He wasn't a man ruled by convention. He wasn't marrying because he needed society's imprimatur on the way she made him feel; he was marrying because there was no other way to make her his own.

"I don't care where we live," she'd whispered later on as the door to their hotel room closed behind them. "Wherever you want to go, whatever you want to do--I don't need anything but you."

#

"You were wrong, Meggie," he said, staring out at the ocean, silvered by moonlight. She'd needed all the trappings of wealth and position that she'd known as Darrin McLean's only child.

He should have left her there on the beach where he'd found her, daddy's little girl still as pure as the day she was born.

She'd made him want things a man shouldn't want: family, security, a house with a picket fence. To get where he wanted to be, you had to be willing to give up the things other men took for granted--and Megan hadn't been the kind of girl who'd wait around for things to get better. She was used to money and the things it could buy. Living hand-to-mouth wasn't her style.

Which was exactly what her old man had told him the first time they met. "Six months tops," Darrin McLean said, with a look at his Rolex. "My daughter needs more than someone like you could give her."

In his mind he saw his sister, dying by inches in that parched cabin on that barren land, her beauty held hostage to responsibility. To poverty. Putting all of her dreams on hold while she tended house for the drunk they had called a father and pretended she had all the time in the world to be happy.

Jake liked to tell himself that was the only reason he hadn't gone after her when she left, but the truth was more complex--and a hell of a lot more painful. She hadn't believed in his dreams and that fact hurt him more deeply than any left hook that had ever met his jaw.

#

Megan double-locked the door to her suite that night. She wasn't sure if she was locking Jake out or herself in. Not that it mattered. Either way she was in trouble.

She tossed her evening bag down on the bed and draped the shawl over the back of the boudoir chair. It slithered to the floor in a puddle of lace and she kicked it away with the pointed toe of her fancy shoe. Reaching back she tugged at the zip of her dress.

The zip refused to give. She tugged again, hard, and was rewarded with the sound of tearing fabric. "Damn," she said, suddenly close to tears. "Damn. Damn. Damn."

She stepped out of the dress and inspected the damage. The zipper had pulled away from the bodice and a long diagonal rip angled toward the waist. It was the last of her good dresses, the elegant designer costumes from the days when names like