Redeemed by Passion Read online

  “You don’t trust me.”

  But he still wants her in his bed

  If event planner Teresa St. Claire can pull off the wedding of the year, she’ll save her career and her troubled younger brother. But her gorgeous ex, billionaire businessman Liam Christopher, interferes, insisting he wants to help. Teresa has to do this alone—to protect both him and her brother. Yet the ties binding her to Liam aren’t so easily broken...

  “Thank you for the offer...”

  “But?”

  Teresa shook her head. “No buts, well, maybe a small one. I am just going to wait until they contact me again, making demands for the money.”

  He leaned forward, his mouth so close to hers that she could smell his sweet, minty breath, count the individual hairs in his scruffy beard, see the small scar on his bottom lip. God, she wanted him to kiss her, to take her to bed, away from thoughts of debt and mobsters and inheritances she didn’t want.

  Teresa lifted her hand and rubbed her thumb against his bottom lip, surprised at how soft his lips were.

  Liam pulled the tip of her thumb between his teeth and bit down gently.

  God, was he ever going to kiss her?

  * * *

  Redeemed by Passion is part of the

  Dynasties: Secrets of the A-List series.

  Dear Reader,

  It was such a joy to write the final book of the Dynasties: Secrets of The A-List series. Working with my fellow Desire authors Cat Schield, Karen Booth and Reese Ryan was a wonderful experience. While this book is a stand-alone, your reading pleasure will be enhanced if you read their books in the series.

  In Redeemed by Passion, I pick up Liam Christopher and Teresa St. Claire’s story, which was detailed in the other books. Liam and Teresa are attracted to each other, but my fellow authors threw obstacle after obstacle in their path. I do, too.

  Teresa is an event coordinator and Liam is a billionaire businessman, but they both bring a mountain of baggage to their relationship. He’s not sure of his parentage, and she has a brother who causes mayhem in her life. There is also someone in the shadows who is determined to destroy Teresa by any means possible.

  Can they find their happily-ever-after, with or without The Fixer’s interference?

  Read on to find out!

  Happy reading,

  Joss

  Connect with me at www.josswoodbooks.com

  Twitter: @josswoodbooks

  Facebook: Joss Wood Author

  Joss Wood

  Redeemed by Passion

  Joss Wood loves books and traveling—especially to the wild places of Southern Africa and, well, anywhere. She’s a wife, a mom to two teenagers and slave to two cats. After a career in local economic development, she now writes full-time. Joss is a member of Romance Writers of America and Romance Writers of South Africa.

  Books by Joss Wood

  Harlequin Desire

  The Ballantyne Billionaires

  His Ex’s Well-Kept Secret

  One Night to Forever

  The CEO’s Nanny Affair

  Little Secrets: Unexpectedly Pregnant

  Love in Boston

  Friendship on Fire

  Hot Christmas Kisses

  The Rival’s Heir

  Dynasties: Secrets of the A-List

  Redeemed by Passion

  Visit her Author Profile page at Harlequin.com, or josswoodbooks.com, for more titles.

  You can find Joss Wood on Facebook, along with other Harlequin Desire authors, at Facebook.com/harlequindesireauthors!

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Montana Seduction by Jules Bennett

  One

  Liam Christopher tipped his head up and tracked the winking light of a jet above him. That could, for all he knew, be Brooks Abbingdon’s jet carrying Teresa away from him. The image of Teresa curled up in Brooks’s lap, him comforting her as she cried—because, hell, if anyone deserved to cry it was Teresa St. Claire—flashed on his retina and his grip tightened on the crystal tumbler in his hand. He heard a sharp crack and a second later, expensive liquor ran over his palm and under the wristband of his watch.

  Liam opened his hand and looked at the cracked glass and its sharp shards. Surprisingly, there was no blood. Transferring the broken glass from his hand to the coffee table on the balcony, he shook the droplets of his Manhattan cocktail off his hand before reaching for his pocket square and wiping the liquid away.

  Well, that was a waste of good booze. Liam looked back into the luxurious Presidential Suite of the Goblet Hotel and saw his friend Matt Richmond pacing the area between the designer sofas and the dining table. Matt was pissed and he had a right to be. His gala evening was ruined and would be long remembered for all the wrong reasons.

  And it was all Teresa’s fault. Well, not her fault exactly—she hadn’t known that her brother would show up and ruin months of work—but as the event planner, the buck stopped with her.

  Would her company recover from this? He doubted it. Would she? Teresa was tough but she’d had a couple of hard knocks lately. When Matt asked her to leave the retreat immediately, taking her brother with her, Teresa knew that her reputation was about to take another beating, and Liam understood why she felt the need to run. Why would she want to stay and witness the pitying looks, the cruel smirks, hear the caustic comments?

  She also wanted to run from him. And that, he understood most of all.

  Seeing movement in the room behind him, Liam turned his head to watch Nadia approach Matt, her eyes on her man. Matt was still on the phone but he held out his hand and Nadia tucked herself into his side, her arms encircling his waist. Matt dropped a kiss on her head before continuing his conversation. Liam’s stomach cramped with what he thought might be jealousy. He’d never believed in true love—hadn’t been exposed to it growing up—but maybe it did exist; maybe it was just as rare as hell. Matt had found his Holy Grail in Nadia but Liam wasn’t naive enough to believe that everybody, most especially him, would be that lucky.

  Love, he was convinced, wasn’t for him.

  Matt threw his phone onto the sofa behind him and pulled his wife into his body, burying his face in the crook of her neck. Although Nadia was a foot shorter than Matt, Liam knew that he was sucking strength from her, that Matt was leaning on her. They were a unit, taking turns to lead and to follow, to give and receive strength. They were two trees growing together, sharing soil and water, their branches and roots intermingling.

  It struck him that he and Teresa were two separate pine trees planted in a regimented row. They both stood tall, took the wind, never bent. They’d been planted too far apart—and too much had happened between them and to them—to bridge the gap to be able to even start to explore anything deeper than flash point sex.

  Liam turned away and walked to the edge of the balcony, gripping the balustrade with tight fingers. Maybe Teresa’s leaving, her breaking it off for good, was—as she’d said—what was best for her, him, Christopher Corporation. For everybody
involved.

  And if that was true then why did he feel like week-old crap?

  Hearing Matt’s footsteps he turned his head and saw Matt approaching him, a bottle of bourbon in his hand. Matt raised his eyebrows at the broken glass and, without words, handed Liam the bottle. Liam took a hefty sip before dropping the bottle to his side, holding it in a loose grip. By the time dawn broke, he was going to be best buds with this bottle.

  “Where’s Nadia?”

  Matt leaned his butt against the railing and rolled his head from side to side to release the knots in his neck. Liam didn’t bother; his knots were now permanent residents. “She went to bed,” Matt replied. He glanced at his watch. “It is almost three in the morning.”

  “It was a hell of a night.” Liam took another hit from the bottle, ignoring his still-sticky hand. He glanced up, saw another jet and forced himself to meet Matt’s eyes. “I feel like I should apologize.”

  “For what?” Matt asked, his eyes and tone weary. “You didn’t cause Teresa’s brother to ruin my gala evening.”

  “Neither did Teresa,” Liam responded, needing to defend her.

  “Tell me about her brother,” Matt said, moving to the sofa and dropping down. He immediately tucked a pillow under his head and propped his feet up onto the coffee table.

  Ordinarily, Liam would never consider divulging someone else’s secrets but this was Matt, his best friend, and he trusted him implicitly. He also needed Matt’s sharp brain to help him make sense of what was, at this crazy hour, the senseless.

  “It’s a tangled mess but I’m going to tell you what I do know, gathered from what Teresa has told me, along with what my investigator dug up.

  “So years ago, Joshua, her brother, liked drugs and alcohol a little too much and got himself in debt with some unsavory characters. They offered him a job to pay off the money. He became a chauffeur—”

  “And he, knowingly or unknowingly, ferried drugs,” Matt finished for him.

  Matt was, by far, the sharpest tool in the shed. “Yep. He was busted and was jailed. Via Mariella Santiago-Marshall, Teresa employed the talents of The Fixer—”

  Matt whistled his astonishment. “I’ve heard of him. He’s—”

  Liam raised an eyebrow. “Effective?”

  “I was going to say ruthless but that works, too.”

  “Anyway,” Liam continued, “he got Joshua’s charges dropped, him out of jail and across the country. The kid didn’t learn and has raked up another huge gambling debt. A mafia-type organization has bought that debt from the original crew and it’s rocketed to an impossible sum.”

  “How much?”

  “Seven million dollars,” Liam replied. “Several weeks back Teresa was told that he’d been kidnapped but that turned out to be BS. Teresa’s been informed that she needs to repay his loan, but she doesn’t have that kind of cash, and they’ve never called her back, as far as I know.”

  “Pay it for her, offset it against the cost of the shares you are going to buy from her when she’s completed her yearlong mandatory stint on the board of Christopher Corporation,” Matt suggested. “As per the terms of your father’s will.”

  “Teresa is hoping that she can delay repaying them until she’s sold her shares. She wants to keep me out of the equation. Hell, maybe she’s shopping around for a better deal for the shares.” The thought of Teresa selling those shares to anyone else made his stomach whirl. If she did that, he would no longer have the thin sliver of control over Christopher Corporation he did now.

  “Nobody has given Teresa, or Joshua, a firm deadline for the repayment of the debt.”

  “Weird,” Matt agreed. “So it should be imperative that he keep his head down, even stay out of sight. Then why would Joshua crash a highly visible, live-streamed event?

  “What does Teresa think?” Matt asked, after a moment’s silence.

  “I don’t know since she blew me off and hightailed it back to Seattle in Abbingdon’s private plane,” Liam muttered his sour reply. He pulled his cell out of his pocket and hit the speed dial number that would connect him to Teresa. It didn’t mean anything that he’d moved his personal assistant, Duncan, to number two on his list and Teresa to number one. It meant nothing. At all.

  Liam listened to her phone ring and urged her to pick up. He needed to know that she was okay, that Joshua was okay—God, the kid hadn’t looked, or sounded, good. And he wasn’t talking about the bruise his fist made on his jaw. Her phone went to voice mail and he dropped a hard “Call me” order into her message system.

  Liam placed the bourbon bottle on the coffee table, sat down in the chair opposite Matt and rested his forearms on his knees. He released a series of low but intense f-bombs.

  “That kind of sums up my feelings about this evening,” Matt commented. “I’ve been doing damage control but there’s not much spin you can generate when everything is caught on video and then live-streamed.”

  Liam winced. “How many views?”

  “Far too many.” Matt lifted his glass in a sarcastic salute. “I’ve got to admit, when Teresa messes up, she does it properly.”

  “She didn’t know her brother was in town, never mind that he was going to do that,” Liam retorted.

  “So defending her seems to be your default reaction tonight,” Matt commented, hitting the nail on its head.

  Liam sent his best friend a hard stare. “What’s your point, Matt?”

  “It’s been one drama after another with her, starting with the fact that you thought she had an affair with your dad.”

  “She explained that. My father was her mentor and good friend.”

  Matt rolled his eyes. “They had to be very good friends for him to leave Teresa a twenty-five-percent stake in Christopher Corporation worth millions.”

  When Matt put it like that, all his fears and insecurities about their relationship floated to the surface. Was he being conned? Could he believe Teresa’s version of what happened? In his final hours, Linus did confirm that there had been nothing between them but friendship and Liam wanted to believe him, them. But he’d been raised to believe that everyone lied so how the hell could he trust anything they said? Anything anybody said?

  He thought he could, at least, trust his parents to some degree but their latest lie had been the biggest of his life. As his father lay dying, he realized that it was scientifically impossible that his parents, with their blood groups, could produce a child with his blood group. Ergo, either only one of them was his biological parent or he was adopted. Hell of a thing to realize at the age of thirty-two.

  Was it any wonder he was so messed up when it came to relationships?

  It was late and Liam was done with talking. He wanted this conversation to end so he told Matt that Teresa wanted nothing more to do with him. Liam caught the look of relief on Matt’s face. “You’re happy about that?”

  Matt shook his head. “Happy is the wrong word...” He sat up, swinging his feet off the table. “It’s just that relationships shouldn’t be this hard, bud. Over the past few months you’ve thought that she’s a liar, a gold digger and an opportunist. You’ve slept with her and then slept with other women.”

  No, he hadn’t. “I tried to sleep with someone else to get her out of my system.”

  Matt waved his explanation away. “Whatever. She hit the tabloids, dragging you along with her. Those scum-suckers informed the world that she had an affair with your father and that she only slept with Linus to get her hands on the company.”

  He knew this. He’d goddamn lived it. “Do you have a point and are you going to get to it in the near future?”

  “My point is that, while I actually like Teresa—”

  “You could’ve fooled me.” Liam’s interjection was bone-dry.

  “I do like her,” Matt said. “She’s smart, super-organized and she’s an amazing event planner.
Yeah, I’m mad as hell that tonight ended the way it did, but intellectually, I get that it wasn’t her fault. But her career did not need this and if she was boycotted before, it’s going to be nothing like what’s going to happen to her now.”

  Liam gripped the bridge of his nose. God.

  Matt’s long sigh was audible. “But at the end of the day, my loyalty is to you. And, as your friend, I am telling you that I don’t think she is good for you because, frankly, you look like crap.”

  Well, that wasn’t news.

  “Are you in love with her?”

  Liam’s head shot up and his eyes slammed into Matt’s. His throat closed as panic crept up. In his sappier moments lately, he’d flirted with the idea of love, but that was just a result of hormones and stupendous sex. No, of course he wasn’t in love with Teresa; he didn’t believe in love. But he was attracted to her, stupidly so. And attraction was easily confused for that other emotion. He croaked a “No.”

  Matt stood up and gripped his shoulder. “Can I then just point out that this woman you profess not to love has the innate ability to mess with your head and your life? That’s an enormous amount of power for someone you just like to sleep with.”

  Craphelldammit.

  “Go to bed, Matt.”

  Matt smiled for the first time that evening. “Yep, that’s where I’m heading. Into the arms of the woman who, instead of messing with my head and life, actually makes my life better and brighter.”

  Liam glared at his friend as he walked back into the hotel room and thought about returning to his own suite, to the empty king-size bed waiting for him. But the night was mild, this sofa was quite comfortable and he had a bottle to keep him company. And really, he had too much on his mind to sleep.

  Liam lay back and tucked a pillow under his head and watched the light of airplanes move between the stars.

  * * *

  Right, exactly what level of hell had she reached?

  Teresa St. Claire had experienced hot—Liam Christopher believing that she’d had an affair with his father—and knew what blistering felt like when her face was plastered over the front pages of the tabloid press accusing her of stealing Liam’s fortune.

 
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