Restless Billionaire

 
          
ABBY GREEN

 
          
BAD BLOOD

 
          
RESTLESS
BILLIONAIRE

 
          
ABBY GREEN
got hooked on Mills &
Boon
^®
romances while still in her teens, when she stumbled across
one belonging to her grandmother, in the west of Ireland. After many years of
reading them voraciously, she sat down one day and gave it a go herself.
Happily, after a few failed attempts, Mills & Boon bought her first
manuscript.

 
          
Abby
works freelance in the film and TV industry, but thankfully the 4am starts and
the stresses of dealing with recalcitrant actors are becoming more and more
infrequent, leaving her more time to write!

 
          
She
loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her through her website at
www.abby-green.com. She lives and works in Dublin.

 
          
This is for my fellow ‘Bad Blood’
contributors—

 
          
Sarah, Janette, Caitlin, Lynn, Robyn,
Jennie and Kate—thanks for all your help and encouragement along the way!

 
          
ANEESA
ADANI was stuck in a waking nightmare. She battled a surge of panic as her
younger sister and aunts led her forward towards the place where her fiancé
waited to make her his wife.

 
          
The
elaborate wedding sari she wore constricted her movements, adding to the sense
of cloying claustrophobia. Heavy jewels literally dripped from her head, ears,
throat, arms and hands, weighing her down.

 
          
Fighting
an overwhelming urge to break free and escape she told herself once again that
she only had herself to blame for her predicament. If she hadn’t been so
blinkered, so unforgivably naïve … so impossibly complacent, then she might not
be here right now.

 
          
She
was propelled forward again and suddenly her fiancé and her parents saw her
arrival. A hush descended over the crowd in the huge and beautiful inner
courtyard, lit with the seductive glow of hundreds of lanterns. This courtyard
was the centrepiece in one of the most exclusive hotels in Mumbai—the jewel in
the hotel’s crown. The sheer opulence of it all terrified her
now,
the reality of what she was doing hitting her anew.

 
          
With
an awful sick feeling of impending doom and fatality Aneesa reluctantly moved
forward, but just then a small movement caught her eye from the side. She
glanced around and, for a moment, was blinded by the icy blue gaze of a man. He
was slightly obscured, in the shadows, but even that couldn’t hide the fact
that he was so tall and good-looking he momentarily distracted her from her
surroundings.

 
          
As
she registered the darkly handsome foreigner who had no doubt snuck in to ogle
the most prestigious wedding of the year, reality slammed back into her again,
heightened now by seeing him—as if he represented some kind of escape or
freedom to her. And she knew in that moment that she hadn’t been able to
disguise the fear or turmoil in her eyes. He’d seen it all and she could only
be thankful that he was a complete stranger. Tearing her eyes away, she
mentally steeled herself and walked forward to meet her fate….

 
          
* * *

 
          
Sebastian
Wolfe still reeled slightly from the searing glance he’d shared with the bride
as she’d arrived. She’d looked around only briefly and yet had honed in on his
gaze as if she’d felt the weight of it.

 
          
He
shrugged off the prickling sensation. He had to admit that he didn’t think he’d
ever seen a more beautiful bride. He smiled cynically—not that he ever had any
intention of watching one walk down an aisle towards
him
. Coming from a large family of mainly half-siblings, having
been born to a man who’d married three times, had numerous affairs and begat
eight children, to say that Sebastian had a jaundiced view of the holy sanctity
of marriage was a huge understatement.

 
          
With
an iron will, he concentrated once more on his surroundings and not the
potential minefield of his family, who had dispersed from their ancestral home,
Wolfe Manor, as soon as they’d been able to escape.

 
          
In
the huge and ornately decorated inner courtyard a stunning marquee covered in
silken swathes of material took up the centre space under a dusky evening sky.
The bride, while being of average height, stood with a regal and graceful
bearing that made her appear taller.

 
          
Her
face was a smooth mask of intent concentration, and given the elaborate ritual
of the traditional Indian wedding, he couldn’t blame her. It seemed to him to
consist of a dizzying array of minutely observed events, each as important as
the last and all following a strict code. It had been going on for days now,
culminating in this ceremony here tonight. Incense was burning, ladening the
warm air around him with a rich and luxuriant smell.

 
          
A
short while before, Sebastian had watched the arrival of the groom carried
aloft on a gold chair, where, bedecked in a long tunic of spun silken gold and
close-fitting matching trousers, he’d been greeted by his in-laws, his face
obscured by a curtain of fresh marigold flowers.

 
          
And
then the bride had been brought in, her slender arms encased in silver, red and
gold bangles, led by attendant women. Sebastian had seen the intricate henna
tattoo that adorned her hands up as far as her lower arms. In her glittering
red-and-gold sari and elaborate headdress and with a pearl-and-diamond jewel
nestling at the centre of her forehead, she’d looked like an Indian princess
from the Mogul Empire.

 
          
The
memory of the look they’d shared hit him again with a jolt of sensation in his
solar plexus. It was bizarre, but he thought he’d seen something close to panic
and desperation in her huge brown, heavily kohled eyes.

 
          
He
frowned; he must have been mistaken, because now, as he watched the bride and
groom place garlands over each other’s heads, she looked nothing but serene. And
yet, had he just seen her delicate hands shaking? Sebastian mentally chastised
himself—what did he care for the emotional state of a complete stranger on her
wedding day? All he cared about was that everything went smoothly and they had
no cause to fault their venue.

 
          
This
hotel was just one in his hugely successful chain of hotels around the world.
The uberluxurious Mumbai Grand Wolfe Hotel.
And he was here
merely on a whirlwind tour to oversee the society wedding of the year: Aneesa
Adani to Jamal Kapoor Khan, two of Bollywood’s hottest stars.

 
          
From
the report his Indian PA had given him about the wedding, he knew that Aneesa
Adani had been crowned Miss India some years before and following a successful
modelling career she’d branched into Bollywood movies and had since become
their biggest star, with a veritable list of number-one movies to her credit.
The subsequent romance and wedding with fellow Bollywood star Jamal Kapoor Khan
was going to make them the power couple of Indian cinema for years to come.
They were at the very epicentre of mass adulation, which in a country of more
than a billion people was no small feat.

 
          
Sebastian
cast a quick look around, noting to his satisfaction the heavily armed security
guards and plain-clothed police officers, amongst his own highly trained
security team. Nothing had been left to chance and he was quietly confident of
the strict security measures and discretion he could guarantee in all of his
hotels. It was one of the reasons his hotel had been picked as the venue of
choice for this wedding as well as for its ultralavish yet understated stylish
surroundings.

 
          
From
where he stood he could see the rising moon shining over the Arabian Sea and
the floodlit outline of the Gateway of India, Mumbai’s most iconic landmark.

 
          
Sebastian
waited for the usual sense of satisfaction to steal over him when he
experienced a moment like this—the rare chance to stand back and survey his
hard work.
A moment when he lifted his head long enough to
acknowledge the fruits of his success.
But it didn’t come. And it was
only then that he realised that he hadn’t felt it in some time.

 
          
Unused
to and slightly disturbed by that thought and the impulse to self-examine which
he didn’t usually indulge in, he looked once again to the centre of the marquee
where the bride and groom now sat side by side on regal thrones on a raised
dais.

 
          
The
bride’s exquisite face was still a cool mask of serenity but Sebastian felt the
hairs rise on the back of his neck as if he could somehow sense that it was
just a façade.

 
          
And
then he felt a pull of something much
more earthy
in
his groin. Encased in the elaborate wedding costume he could only see snatches
of her pale olive skin, an enticing view of the bare curve of her waist and top
of her hip below the tight bodice. He could imagine the silky texture of that
skin, that it would feel as soft as a fresh rose petal.

 
          
To
his utter chagrin and disgust, Sebastian realised that he was ogling a
bride
in the midst of her wedding
ceremony and that merely looking at her was arousing him to a level that he
hadn’t felt since his last liaison had ended some weeks previously. He
realised, too, that on some very base level he felt
jealous
of the groom, that he would be the one to uncover the lush
secrets of his new wife’s exotic beauty.

 
          
Sebastian
cursed himself. He’d no doubt that Aneesa Adani was like every other girl of
her upper-middle-class upbringing.
A little princess.
Her marriage to this man was merely the next step in a life of luxury and
inherent idleness, despite her career as an actress. And he’d no doubt, too,
that she would be no blushing virgin on her wedding night. Despite the chaste
lovemaking of the Bollywood movies, in the real world the stars were just as
amoral and prone to bed-hopping as in Hollywood, and she’d had a highly
publicised relationship with this man for months.

 
          
Despite
those assertions, turning away took more effort than he liked to acknowledge
and he saw one of his close aides waiting patiently in the wings for his next
move. Sebastian welcomed the distraction and thrust aside disturbing thoughts
of flashing kohled eyes that had emitted what must have been an imaginary
beacon of distress, and equally disturbing erotic images of sensual half-hidden
curves.

 
          
He
walked out of the courtyard, leaving the wedding behind, and smiled grimly. His
mind had been playing tricks on him, perhaps the ritual and incense had gotten
to him for a moment. Striding across the main reception area which was a
glorious fusion of classic Moorish and Portuguese design, he coolly ignored the
admiring looks his tall and powerful frame drew. The attention of women was
something that Sebastian and his brothers had never had to worry about. They’d
effortlessly drawn it as soon as they’d been old enough to know what that
attention meant.