For Revenge or Redemption? (12 page)

Fear threatened to rise like a dark spectre, but she fought it back. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—let herself think about that now, for the same reason she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Seth what had happened before. It was a part of her life
that she wasn’t particularly proud of and she had paid for it dearly—then pressed it so far to the back of her mind that it was as though that girl she had been and everything that had happened to her had happened to someone else. It wouldn’t help her or him in any way, she reasoned with a kind of muddled logic, to dig it all up now.

So with the muted tones of Seth’s voice conducting business over the phone in the other room, and the elusive scent of him surrounding her in his personal bedding, she made her decision, safe in the knowledge that whatever his feelings towards her he would always be there to love and support his child. And that was all that mattered, she told herself resolutely. Wasn’t it?

A
BSENTLY
Grace toyed with the slim gold band on her finger, noticing how brilliantly it shone in the high Mediterranean sun.

‘What’s the problem Mrs Mason? Still having difficulty digesting it?’ Propped up on an elbow on the sun deck of his luxurious yacht, wearing only a pair of dark bathing briefs, his bronzed body slick with oil, Seth was watching her where she lay sunbathing on her back on the soft mattress beside him. His face was alight with teasing. ‘Perhaps I’d better give you another dose of something to make it slide down more easily.’ His eyes gleamed wickedly as he leant closer to her, his black hair falling forward. ‘Or slide up,’ he murmured tantalisingly in her ear in a way specifically designed to arouse her, as he had been doing, much to her shaming delight, for the past five days.

She still couldn’t quite believe it had taken less than seven weeks from that evening in his apartment, when he had practically demanded they get married, to lying here with him in nothing but the lower half of her shimmering blue bikini. She was unable to get enough of his hands and lips on her body, her deliciously tender nipples already hardening in anticipation of his special therapy, that secret place at the apex of her thighs contracting, burning for him, because he hadn’t made love to her for at least two hours.

When she rolled over onto her stomach so that he wouldn’t recognise the naked need in her face, the betrayal of her shamelessly aroused body, he laughed knowingly and moved to draw a slow, sensuous line with a finger over the sensitive length of her spine, creating havoc in her as his hand ran caressingly over the smooth, silky mound of her buttocks, temptingly enhanced by the separating blue string at their crease.

‘Don’t think you can pretend modesty after all that we’ve done,’ he mocked softly against the nape of her neck, causing a pleasurable shudder to shake her still slender body as she thought of the shocking intimacies they had shared since their wedding night—the way he had shown her how to please him, things that she would never have imagined herself doing to any man, but which had only enhanced the pleasure for her too.

‘I think from now on you’d better leave these off,’ he advised as he peeled her bikini bottom away from her slick, hot body like a sybarite unwrapping an epicurean feast.

Exposed, open to his probing hands and eyes, she squirmed beneath him like a restless filly, groaning into the pillow, a sound both of sensuous delight and defeat. Her excitement was only heightened as he breathed, thrillingly aware, ‘I’m sorry. I forgot how reluctant you always are to do this with me,’ and pulled her round onto her back to accept her fate.

Much later, lying in the darkness in the big bed in the master cabin, tender in several places after a long evening of making love, Grace marvelled at the iron control that Seth had exercised during the weeks leading up to their marriage—whenever since he had shown himself to be not only a sensational lover, but an insatiable one. too.

After agreeing to be his wife—but only, as she had made clear to him to deflect him from her true feelings, for the sake of their child—she had resolved to refuse to move in with him
before the wedding, had he asked her to. But he hadn’t. Nor had he even attempted to get her into his bed.

Perhaps he had been busy saying goodbye to his glorious bachelorhood and the women who’d currently figured in his life.
Like Corinne
, she’d thought painfully, although she had refused to dwell on any relationship he might have had with her grandfather’s beautiful widow then, and she refused to do so now.

She still wasn’t totally sure whether Corinne Culverwell was anything other than a business associate, as Seth had first implied she was, although the reason he had given for being on Corinne’s yacht that day in Madeira had been borne out a few days later during a telephone call she’d taken from one of his colleagues. He had unknowingly confirmed what Seth had said, that it had been purely to tie up some loose ends with the takeover, since it was on the way back from the neighbouring Canary Islands where he’d been spending Christmas and New Year with his family. As to any previous intimacies he might have had with the model, Grace had no intention of questioning him further. If she did, she decided, then he might realise the truth—that his new and reluctant bride was already dangerously in love with him. Dangerous to
her
, that was, because she knew full well that he wouldn’t have married her if she hadn’t been carrying his child.

As for the way he was with her in bed…

Well, he was only behaving the way any healthy, redblooded male at the peak of his fitness would behave with any reasonably good-looking woman who had given him licence to her body, wasn’t he? she reminded herself. Although deep down she was beginning to realise that he was as enslaved by his desire for her as she was by her own for him.

He was attentive in public, too, practically proprietorial—something that Corinne, only recently informed about the baby, had commented on at the wedding.

‘Well, you’re both a pair of dark horses, aren’t you?’ she
had remarked in that affectedly polished voice with a smile that left her long green eyes cold, her brightly painted lips stretched falsely wide as she caught Grace momentarily alone. ‘You do know how much you’ll have to give to please a man like that, don’t you?’ Jealousy was stamped all over Corinne’s beautiful face, though she was battling to hide it and failing miserably. Grace had felt almost sorry for her. ‘I really think you might have bitten off more than you can chew this time, sweetheart. He’s behaving like he owns you already.’

‘Don’t I?’ Seth had enquired, overhearing, looking dynamic in a pale-grey suit, white shirt and silver tie. He’d turned around from the little group of guests he had been talking to and had slipped an arm around Grace, studying the slender hand he caught in his and which bore his shiny new ring.

Fresh from the register office in her short and simple white sixties-style smock dress, with a sprinkling of white flowers interwoven in her pale, elegantly swept-up hair, Grace had worried that there was more behind his supposedly teasing question than he’d been letting show. A hard arrogance that had said he had her where he wanted her—her master in the office and a soon-to-be-willing plaything in his bed.

It had been a pleasant enough day, in spite of that. At Grace’s request, and in view of the relatively short time for arranging everything, it had been a small and very private wedding away from the prying eyes of the press, with only very close friends and family members attending, with Beth and an old friend of Seth’s as witnesses. The reception had been a simple affair, too, held in the palm court of one of the West End hotels.

‘Grace, I think it’s time you met my mother.’

Seeing the grey-haired, tired-looking but straight-backed lady in the moss-green dress and jacket, waiting with a much younger, copper-haired woman as they arrived at the hotel, Grace allowed Seth to lead her across to them, her heart coming up into her mouth.

He hadn’t seen fit to take her to meet his foster mother during those few weeks before they were married, and it hadn’t taken long for Grace to realise why: this was the woman who had cared for him since he’d been a young teenager until he had been forced to leave home when Lance Culverwell had had him sacked from that boatyard. It was because of her, Grace, and the way she had led Seth on, practically seducing him on that beach and then unknown to him conceiving his child, that her grandfather had made him pay. He had used his influence to crush him, deprive him of his livelihood, splitting the family up and causing them unnecessary hardship when Seth had left town to try to find work elsewhere. But Nadia Purvis, as she was introduced to Grace, couldn’t have accepted her son’s new bride with a warmer greeting as she kissed Grace on both cheeks and welcomed her into the family circle, putting Grace instantly at ease.

‘I apologise for not having been able to meet you before now,’ her new mother-in-law said. ‘But we’ve been on a trip to Canada and the Rockies—a present from Seth for my birthday.’ The way she looked up at him showed nothing but gratitude and immense pride for the tall dark man to whom she had once given a home—and a lot of love too, Grace knew without being told. ‘My special birthday.’ Her weary eyes were bright with laughter as she turned back to Grace, making them all laugh with her as she added, ‘Although I’m not saying which one. Then we finished up in New England visiting Alvin—’

‘My twin,’ the long-haired beauty who had been waiting patiently beside her chipped in. ‘He’s at uni there. We’re supposed to be identical but fortunately, I’m happy to say, not in every way.’

Grace laughed again, as the others did, deciding that the girl couldn’t have been much older than twenty. ‘I’m Alicia, by the way.’

Taking the bangled hand that was being offered, Grace
leant forward and kissed her. ‘Hello, Alicia.’ And then, as recollections kicked in, she was murmuring before she realised it, ‘Aren’t you…?’ and only managed to stop herself in time.

Of course. That day all those years ago. Hand in hand, sated with love-making, Seth had taken her back to a modest little house on the edge of the woods. She hadn’t gone in. He had only taken her there to give her a lift back home on the bike. But as she’d been putting on her helmet a little girl had come running out of the house. A little girl in pyjamas who had begged him to take her for a ride, and whose bright curls he had ruffled before gently but firmly sending her packing back inside.

Amazingly, it seemed that Seth hadn’t told his mother just who had been responsible for him losing his job at the boatyard, and secretly she could only thank him for that. But then it only bore out what he had always maintained—that it wasn’t his style to kiss and tell. Even when he had been humiliated and demoralised he hadn’t stooped to smearing her or her family’s name. Instead he had kept it to himself with that private and very personal resolution of one day making them pay…

‘You’re Seth’s sister,’ she finished now, amending what she had been going to say, and guessing that the word “foster” would have been dropped from this family’s vocabulary a long time ago.

‘And the baby of the family,’ Seth added, ‘as she was born fifteen minutes after her brother. And consequently indulged and spoiled beyond belief.’

‘But not by you.’ Big hazel eyes twinkled mischievously up at the elder brother whom she obviously adored and who had been around for most of Alicia’s young life. Grace calculated that the twins must only have been about two years old when Seth had entered their world. ‘Although he
has
said he’s going
to buy me a BMW convertible if I do well in my exams. I’m doing interior design,’ she clarified for Grace’s sake.

‘He’s said nothing of the sort,’ Seth denied, though with that charming smile of his, obviously used to Alicia’s ploys to try and twist him round her little finger.

‘And you better had do well, young lady,’ her mother warned. ‘After all it’s costing him to put you through that college.’

Grace laughed again, liking his sister, liking them all, and wishing with all her heart that this marriage had been one built on love, trust and respect. But an exchange of glances with her new husband showed no more than a fervid desire for her within the closed, inscrutable depths of his eyes.

‘I’m sorry my younger son couldn’t be with you,’ Nadia was saying to Grace. ‘But he’s in the middle of very important exams, too, although he does send his apologies.’

He had also sent a huge bouquet of mixed roses and a congratulatory telegram that morning which was now displayed, with the simple bouquet of lilies she had carried that morning, on either side of the two-tiered wedding cake. ‘Exams are very important,’ Grace commented, guessing that Seth was probably funding the best possible education for Alicia’s twin brother too, a thing he himself had been deprived of. She had recently learned he had studied long and hard, way into the night, after he had left school.

Simone joined them then with her accountant husband, breaking up the intimate little party, and some time afterwards Alicia came and looped her arm through Grace’s, asking her about her gallery. Grace was happy to discover that they shared surprisingly similar tastes in art.

Not long after the cake had been cut and a toast made by Seth’s best man, Seth ushered Grace away to the airport, from where they flew out to the Mediterranean island and Seth’s private yacht to begin their three-week honeymoon.

‘I thought it might be more to your liking than that crude
little boat I made the mistake of thinking I could first woo you on,’ he remarked, as he lifted her through the sliding doors on the bough into the vessel’s luxurious saloon, where a champagne dinner was waiting for them. But his tone had been cynical and self-derisive, so she responded with a slightly defensive edge to her own voice as he set her down on her feet.

‘As a matter of fact, I loved that little dinghy. It was simple and honest. Uncomplicated.’ Not like this floating temple to wealth and success that screamed of his power and influence, and was bigger and more luxurious than anything her family had ever owned.

‘Uncomplicated?’ His laugh expressed something not far short of disdain. ‘I suppose something about that day had to be.’

‘I meant real. Unpretentious.’ She struggled to explain, trying not to let the scorn that still festered inside him get to her, to spoil the day. She wasn’t able to keep the regret out of her voice as she said it, though, and realised, with an ache of remorse in her chest, that she had let him know that eight years too late.

They returned to England and moved into Seth’s apartment on a sunny spring day that was still rather cool after the kinder climate of the Mediterranean. The place had been cleaned and aired by a discreet staff and there was a ‘welcome home’ bouquet, professionally arranged in a clear glass vase on the dining room table, from Nadia.

There was a card, too, among their post, sent jointly from the twins, which from the postmark, Grace smilingly noted, had obviously been chosen, signed and posted by Alicia. Even Corinne rang to welcome them home, but not until the following evening, because she had forgotten on which day they were supposed to be coming back.