The Billionaire's Blackmail Bride

“Some stranger shows up to tell me I have fathered a child, and I am supposed to just believe it? If I have indeed fathered a child, I assure you, I would be well aware of the fact. Now, unhand me”, the man ordered. Nina Simpson was stunned into silence by her own blatant display of emotions, almost in tears, and this man’s reaction to it. She stared at the man in question, and for a brief moment, forgot how to breathe. He was stunning, almost god-like. All she could think of was how insanely powerful he looked in his tall, broad and muscular frame. Cold blue eyes stared back at her, boring into her with an unflinching arrogance, and perhaps an assurance, that the woman before him must be inside to have accosted him like this. He could freeze anyone in place with those cold eyes of his, but surprisingly, Nina didn’t feel cold. She felt hot…and uncomfortable. And as she stood there, staring at him, Daniel Beaumont calmly, and with an upturned nose, removed the lapel of his expensive suit from Nina’s firm grip. With an almost unnoticeable glance towards his bodyguards, he strode off and out of the gigantic building that housed his offices in Manhattan. He was truly gone, without so much as a backward glance at the petite, bedraggled woman who was still gaping at his exiting back. Who’d not even gotten two sentences out of her mouth before being certified as insane. In a few seconds, Nina found herself pushed out of the building into the pouring rain, and she wished to God that this was just a bad dream because if it wasn’t, Daniel Beaumont was the worst kind of bastard. Nina’s soft mouth tightened into a grim line. Unfortunately, that day a week before hadn’t been a bad dream. It was a stark reality and the reason why she was now seated in a tiny rental car across the road from an exclusively palatial hotel along the coast of The Seine in France. She even had the remnants of a cold as a result of getting pushed into the rain and soaked to the skin that day. Daniel Beaumont had refused to hear her out then, but he wouldn’t refuse to listen to her here, would he? The sun had set a few hours ago, but the sky was still a dark, almost violet colour, a gentle bruise of purple and good that stretched across the horizon. That beautiful moment when day melded into night had come and gone, its beauty unseen. And, across the road, the hotel quite literally shimmered with opulence, adding to this increased sense of beauty. Nina was terrified but she was trying to pretend she wasn’t. Trying not to let the immaculate streets intimidate her, the palpable foreign elegance of the smartly dressed people coming in and out of the hotel. But still not him…yet. This place was thousands of miles away from anywhere she’d ever been, or anywhere she was ever likely to be. She closed her eyes for a fleeting moment; they were gritty with tiredness, weariness weighed heavily on her bones. She knew she was on the fringes of a collapse, but didn’t have the luxury of time to sleep, to catch her breath. She was in such a haze, anger at his recent thoughtless dismissal and sheer nerves keeping her going. This was the only way she was going to get to see him, to make him admit his responsibility. To admit to fathering her sister’s unborn child. A sudden image of Katie’s small, ghost-like face against the hospital bed sheets made Nina’s breath stop painfully. She closed her eyes and tried to will the image away but it only got stronger and she could see with vividness, the scary tangles of tubes and wires that had wrapped around her too thin body with its small bump. Nina felt tears threaten; if anything happened to her…She couldn’t let it. Her eyes snapped open. She needed money now for Katie’s treatment and Daniel Beaumont would be made to accept the part he’d played in this turn of events. Would be made to pay. He was their only way out of this mess. Nina was desperate. Her sister had been involved in a terrible car crash while on her way to see this very man and somehow, by a stroke of luck, she and her baby had survived. But she had suffered a fractured pelvis, among other more minor internal injuries. With the complication of being pregnant, the result was that they desperately needed to get Katie into the care of a consultant who had expert experience with pregnancies which had suffered trauma. He was based in central Manhattan and Nina knew well that this kind of care came privately and with a hefty price tag. With no other close family and no friends who had anything approaching that kind of money to call upon, it had left her no choice but to take this course of action. The ward sister, an old friend of Nina’s from her nursing training days, had assured her that Katie was stable and could be left for a short time. That assurance had led her to feel confident enough to make this drastic, desperate step, along with the promise that she would be notified the minute that any change occurred in Katie’s condition. She looked quickly at the hotel’s beautifully carved doors again, afraid that she might have missed him. Nothing. She’d followed him earlier from his villa on the shores of the river to the hotel, where he had met a gorgeous brunette on the steps. She could only imagine what they would be doing now and wondered if Daniel Beaumont would be taking her back to his villa or entertaining her in an opulent suite inside. Nina chewed her lower lip. She prayed that he wouldn’t bring her back—Nina needed him on his own. Something caught the corner of her eye and she looked across the road again. A valet was bringing a gleaming silver car to a halt outside the door, which was opening. Her eyes widened in trepidation—his car. And then he appeared. Mere feet away. Coming out of the hotel in a black tuxedo, the bow-tie undone at his neck. Certainly looking more dishevelled than when he’d gone in. The beautiful brunette accompanied him down the steps in a glimmering, flimsy silver dress, also looking sexily ruffled, long, dark sparkly hair around her shoulders. She looked thoroughly bedded. Nina wanted to feel repulsed, but as she watched the woman coil graceful arms around his neck and press close, all she did feel was a tingling sensation and something much more disturbing. For a moment, she stood adrift in a haze of bewilderment by the confusing emotion. The man’s good looks and charisma, branded into her senses from the previous week, reached out to her from across the road.across the road. Like any protective, loving older sister, she believed Katie was beautiful and that everyone else loved her too…but Nina knew well that she and her sister were not the type of women to turn this man’s head. He was way out of their league, on a level that hadn’t even been invented yet. A hardness settled in her chest…That was exactly why he had discarded Katie with such callous ruthlessness. The valet had opened the driver’s door of the sleek convertible. Daniel Beaumont extricated himself from the woman and, with a kiss on her cheek, walked down the steps and to his car. After discreetly giving a tip to the valet, he slid into the driver’s seat and, with a roar of the throttle, sped off as Nina watched him drive off, boiling with rage.