For Revenge or Redemption? (7 page)

Instead, her fine features ravaged by her darkest emotions and the things that she must never, ever tell him, and with her eyes fixed on a pastoral watercolour on the far wall that she had bought for next to nothing at a car-boot sale, she asked, ‘Just how much persuasion did it take on your part to get Corinne to hand over her share of the company?’

‘What is it you want me to say, Grace?’ He inhaled deeply, sitting back, mercifully withdrawing his arm as he did so. ‘That I’m sleeping with her?’

Unable to help herself, she sent a swift glance towards his hard-hewn face, breathing normally again now that he had released her, or as normally as it was possible to breathe in his devastating sphere. ‘Are you?’

His lashes came down, veiling the perfect clarity of his eyes. ‘You think I’d kiss and tell on any woman I bed?’

She laughed, a humourless sound strung with tension, as images of him naked on that beach, and as he would be in bed now—his long limbs entwined with others that were paler, more submissive in their passion—rose to threaten her far-too-vulnerable defences. ‘Are you trying to tell me you have scruples?’

Seth’s mouth compressed. ‘No more than you.’

She turned away from him, her chin lifting in spite of the reminder. A cold feeling seemed to settle right in the place where his arm had lain.

‘Does it matter to you, Grace?’

‘What?’

‘Whether I’m sleeping with her or not?’

‘Hardly,’ she sneered.

He laughed softly, the warmth of his breath stirring the fine hairs at her temple, making her stiffen. ‘Such protestation!’ he mocked. ‘I just wonder why the lady deems it necessary to deliver it with such force.’

‘I would have thought that was obvious.’ She leaped up now, dreading that she might have given him cause to suspect how her body reacted to him against her will, against her rational thinking. ‘You’re despicable!’ she breathed.

His mouth moved carelessly. ‘Shouldn’t you be saying that to those closer to home?’

He meant Corinne—and Paul.

Turning wounded eyes in his direction, she noticed the grace with which he moved, brought his tall, lithe frame to his feet.

‘She sold you down the river, Grace.’ His words were hard, blunt, unsparing. ‘So did your precious Harringdale.’

‘He isn’t
mine
,’ she flared, hurting, wondering how he—how both of them—could have pulled the plug on her and left her and the company to the mercy of a man like Seth Mason. ‘It’s over between us—as you so subtly pointed out at that launch party. It was over months ago.’

‘Ah, yes. What really happened there? Did you just get tired of him?’ he asked, sounding bored suddenly, while ignoring her barbed accusation. ‘Or were you as butterfly-minded and fickle as Harringdale said you were? What was it?’ His thick brows pleated as he pretended to search for the words which were obviously at the forefront of that shrewd, keen mind. ‘“Grace Tyler’s only interested in having fun and when that wears off, which is surprisingly quickly, so does her sense of loyalty”.’ His mouth compressed. After all, hadn’t he been on the receiving end of what could only be described as her capricious behaviour? Perhaps he did have reason to think badly of her, she accepted painfully. But that was all in the past.

‘I don’t think my relationship with Paul is any of your business,’ she murmured, catching her breath after the hurtful remarks her ex-fiancé had made to the press when she had broken off their engagement only a few weeks before their wedding. Wearily, she added, ‘Perhaps you’re just too influenced by what you read.’

‘Perhaps,’ he concurred, without sounding wholly convinced. ‘Perhaps Harringdale was just being spiteful, in view of the way you jilted him. Or perhaps he was right. Perhaps loyalty and respect are two things you still need to learn.’

His words had an ominous ring to them. ‘Believe that if you want to,’ she objected, so tense that she flinched as the clock on the mantelpiece suddenly struck the half hour. ‘Just like every sensation-seeking journalist I’ve come across, you’ve got your own prejudiced opinions and nothing I say will change them.’

‘Try me.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t answer, but his eyes were so commanding in their intensity that she found the words slipping away from her before she could stop them.

‘If you must know, it was something I drifted into with Paul as much as anything else. I thought we had a lot in common, so it seemed like a good idea for the two of us to get engaged and to merge our business interests. It was what both our families wanted, my grandfather in particular.’ She couldn’t forget the hints Lance Culverwell had dropped, the silent but eternal pressure he’d applied to see her settle down with the heir to the Harringdale fortune.

‘And, with dear Granddad out of the way, you didn’t have to.’

‘No, strange though this may seem to you, I consider principles to be more important than doing something just because it’s expected of me.’

‘Really?’ Dark, winged brows lifted mockingly. ‘And when did you first cultivate that admirable virtue?’

‘You can scoff all you like. It’s true.’

‘And your stepmother?’

‘Step-
grand
mother,’ she corrected with emphasis.

The look he sliced her left no doubt that he had picked up on that unintentional censure in her voice, and his mouth pulled at one corner, as though he were weighing up the age difference between the ex-model Corinne Phelps and Lance Culverwell, questioning the whole viability of the match.

‘It’s peculiar how sex drives a man—or a woman, for that matter—isn’t it, Grace?’

She regarded him warily. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he wasn’t prepared for someone from my background to soil the pedigree of his precious family, but he had no such qualms when it came to himself and a woman who didn’t mind being photographed in some of the more, shall we say,
graphic
newspapers.’

‘What my grandfather found out
after
they were married had no bearing on his judgement. And we aren’t all like you, Seth Mason. My grandfather didn’t marry Corinne for…’ She couldn’t even bring herself to say it, hating having to listen to someone else voicing the doubts about Lance Culverwell’s good judgement that she had harboured in silence, alone. ‘He married her because he was lonely.’

Those steely eyes seemed to strip her to the soul. ‘If you believe that, then you still haven’t grown up, Grace, despite all your claims to the contrary. He might have advocated high standards and good breeding—which he obviously found in the woman he spent most of his life with—but at the end of his life he was no more immune than any other man to the wiles of a pretty gold-digger who has about as much refinement as a bag of raw cane-sugar.’

‘Coming from someone as basic as you, that’s rich!’ she
shot back, hating him for saying these things to her. ‘All I can say to that is that it takes one to know one.’

From the anger that flared in his eyes, she realised she had hit a raw nerve.

Scared by the fury she had provoked, she started to move away, but he was too quick for her, and she gave a helpless little cry as he caught her, dragging her into his arms.

Her robe had slipped off one shoulder and, tugging it off the other so that her arms were trapped inside it, he pulled her towards him before his mouth came down hard on hers.

She struggled in his grasp, protesting little sounds coming from her captured lips, but her wriggling only made him more determined, his mouth growing more insistent in its demands.

Her fruitless movements caused her robe to separate. She could feel the rasp of his suit against her stomach, her thighs, her naked breasts.

She groaned again, only this time it was the muted sound of desire. She hated him and yet she wanted him! How sick was that?

The revelation shocked her even as she realised that he had recognised it too.

In response his arms came around her, pulling her into the hard warmth of his body, his mouth leaving hers only to force her head back for his teeth to graze with humiliating purpose over the far too sensitive column of her throat.

Sensations ripped through her such as she had never known for eight long years. Why him? she asked herself savagely, clenching her teeth against all that he was doing to her. Was he destined to be the only man that she could ever respond to?

Hating herself for her weakness, fingers curling tensely against the shoulders of his jacket, she battled with the traitorous responses of her own body so that she was standing
breathless and trembling with her eyes closed when he finally lifted his head.

His face was flushed, his mouth taut from the desire he was holding in check, but his eyes were unmistakably smug.

Even so, he seemed to have a struggle drawing breath before he said in a voice that was softly mocking, ‘Where are those principles now, Grace?’

‘You bastard.’ Her lashes parted to reveal the self-loathing in her eyes. ‘Was that why you came here tonight?’ she demanded shakily, pulling out of his grasp. ‘To try to humiliate me?’ Her hands were trembling so much she could scarcely do up her robe.

‘If it’s of any consolation to you, Grace, humiliating you wasn’t my intention.’

‘No? Exactly what did you intend? To try and soft-soap me with your supposed concern for my welfare, and hope that that and a few well-chosen flowers would have me falling at your feet?’

‘Just let me remind you, Grace, that there were two of us involved in that kiss—and
you
responded to
me.
As for my takeover of Culverwells, one day you might just thank me for stepping in when I did.’

‘Never!’

‘Never say never,’ he ridiculed. ‘So, we can do this the easy way by being civil and trying to get on…’

‘Giving in to your assaults, you mean?’

‘Or we can go on just the way we’re going,’ he said, ignoring her remark, ‘And keep up this pointless war. It makes little difference to me.’

‘You started it,’ she said, and couldn’t help cringing at how childish that sounded even to her own ears.

‘Oh, no. You began it, my love.’ The endearment made its mark, but only because he spoke with such lethal softness. ‘Way, way before I’d done anything to earn your contempt.’

‘But now you have earned it, so will you just please leave?’

Stooping to pick up his car keys, he didn’t stay to argue, only turning as he reached her sitting-room door.

‘Get an early night. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,’ he informed her with all the blandness of an employer to a subordinate.

A couple of seconds later she heard him close the hall door after him. Biting back tears of frustration, Grace spotted the flowers still lying on the table and, picking them up, hurled them across the room in the direction that he had gone.

S
ETH
wasn’t in when Grace arrived at the office the following morning and she couldn’t have been more relieved.

After all her protestations yesterday about not winding up in bed with him, it had taken only one kiss from him to show her that, where he was concerned, she had no more control over her physical responses than she did over the weather.

As she slipped off her jacket, hung it over the coat stand and then tried to settle down to work she wondered—just as she had done until she’d fallen into a heavy slumber the previous night—she wondered why she had responded to him so disgracefully. Why, when his only interest in her was to seek revenge?

Was it because all her emotions had been so highly charged yesterday—because she had been shattered from a sleepless overnight flight, even before she had suffered the shock of Culverwells being taken over? Or was it simply because she had no resistance whatsoever where Seth Mason was concerned, and that nature—or whatever one could call it, she thought witheringly—would try its utmost to get them into bed whenever they were alone together?

She groaned to herself as she opened her post, staring down at a letter she had unfolded and reading it without digesting a word.

She was still the same woman who had got into that taxi
yesterday morning, determined to fight Culverwells’ new CEO for all she was worth, wasn’t she? So, she might have played right into his hands and made a total fool of herself, but she still had her fighting spirit and her determination to do what was right for the company.

When the internal phone on her desk buzzed, though, and Seth’s deep voice came over the line insisting that she came up to his office, Grace’s heart started to pound.

Was he going to fire her, now that she had been weak and stupid enough to show him that she was still as affected by him as she had been as a senseless teenager? she worried. Or was he determined to hold out for the ultimate prize that would make his vengeance complete—her total capitulation in his bed?

He was rifling through the filing cabinet when she walked into his office and she gritted her teeth, steeling herself for the worst.

‘Good morning, Grace.’ He pushed the drawer closed without even looking up. ‘I trust you slept well?’

Following his impeccably clothed figure with mutinous eyes, she had the strongest desire to hit him as he moved back to his desk.

Restraining the urge, she dragged her wayward appreciation from the silver-grey jacket spanning his broad shoulders to answer bitingly, ‘I’d had less than three hours’ sleep the previous night. What did you expect?’

He sat down, picked up a gold pen and began writing with it. ‘Does that mean you’re in better shape to deal with more pressing matters today?’

‘What’s come up?’ She swallowed, despairing at the way her voice faltered. Did this mean that he hadn’t summoned her here to fire her?

‘The Poulson account. I believe you were dealing with it.’ He looked up at her now, and she could have kicked herself from the way the smouldering intensity of his eyes made her
stomach flip. ‘It seems they’re quibbling over assignment dates. It appears from previous correspondence that they can be very difficult to deal with. It also appears that they will only listen to you.’

Grace tried to steady her voice, even though her whole body seemed to be trembling. ‘I’ve built up a rapport with them.’ It seemed wrong, talking to him like this, discussing business like formal colleagues, as though those impassioned moments in her flat a little over twelve hours ago had never happened. ‘They can be rather awkward at first, but I’ve found that with a little bit of diplomacy and persuasion they come around.’

From his position of authority his eyes made a cursory survey of her dark-blue slimline skirt, the rather prim little green and navy blouse and her neatly swept-up hair. ‘Most people do.’

He applied just the right amount of sexual undertone in the way he said that to bring the colour flooding into her cheeks. There had certainly been nothing diplomatic or persuasive about the way he had urged her into responding to him!

Trying not to look at him, she moved around the desk to pick up the letter he had laid aside for her to look at, at the same time as he reached for his memo pad. His sleeve brushed her bare forearm, a touch so light and yet so sensual that she recoiled from the contact, feeling as though an electrical current was suddenly zinging through her.

Breath held, she urged her feet to carry her over to the filing cabinet, her head swimming. She couldn’t concentrate, or even think straight, when he was near her.

‘What’s wrong, Grace?’ He was there, his tanned, very masculine hand rammed flat against the drawer, preventing her from opening it. ‘Unwilling to acknowledge what I can still do to you? What we still do to each other?’

Every muscle locking rigid, Grace could scarcely breathe from the alluring, masculine scent of him, from that lethal
sexual magnetism that seemed to be pulling her into its dangerous sphere.

‘If you’re referring to last night, I scarcely knew what I was doing.’

‘No?’ He looked sceptical.

As well he might!
she thought despairingly.

‘Why would I want that?’ she croaked, clutching the letter she was holding to her breast like it was a lifeline. ‘Why, when I despise you? When there aren’t words strong enough to describe what you’re doing?’ A jerk of her head indicated what had been her grandfather’s desk and the power it gave the man who sat behind it.

‘Because you can’t help yourself, Grace, any more than I can.’ He was leaning on the cabinet now, his indolent manner unable to conceal that underlying restless vitality about him as he stood supported by his bent arm, one long finger resting against his tough, implacable jaw. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong—you aren’t my idea of the perfect partner, either. But we aren’t talking about a loving, trusting relationship, are we?’

As that finger moved to touch her cheek, Grace twisted her head away in angry rejection.

‘I wouldn’t have a relationship with you, Seth Mason, if you were the last man left on earth!’

‘Such a cliché!’ He laughed, a flash of perfect white teeth. ‘But I’m not the only man left on earth, am I?’ he drawled, that steely gaze dropping to the soft pink bow of her trembling mouth. ‘Just the only one you want. And, if that response last night was anything to go by, in as intimate a relationship as it’s possible to get.’

As if she needed reminding!

Her throat tight with tension, she flung back at him, ‘I had no resistance. I was exhausted—jet-lagged, for heaven’s sake!’ She brought her chin up to face him squarely, trying to convince him, if not herself, that that was all it had been.

‘And have you recovered from your jet lag?’

‘Just about. But I…’ The pale curve of her forehead puckered, and a guarded look sprang into her cool, clear eyes as she realised where his question was leading. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned, backing away from him.

‘I told you not to present me with a challenge, Grace,’ he reminded her, his arm shooting out as she almost tripped over the waste-paper basket. ‘And you seem to make a habit of not looking where you’re going.’ He laughed softly as that arm snaked around her, but it was the laughter of a victor, of the conqueror claiming his prize.

‘Let me go!’

As he swivelled her round, he was still laughing, ignoring the pummelling of her fists against his shoulders as he took her mouth with his in a brutal kiss.

‘Why must you always put up a show of fighting me when you know you’ll only respond to me eventually?’ he mocked softly, lifting his head when her hands gave up trying to make an impression on his hard shoulders. They were now clenched against them in a vain effort not to show him how much they wanted to slide over the smooth cloth spanning his broad back. ‘You couldn’t help yourself then, last night, and you can’t help yourself now, can you?’ She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say anything, because right at that moment she was too affected by him to speak. ‘Perhaps you’re one of these women who get their kicks out of being subdued by a man? Is that what it is? Because I’ll play that game with you if you want me to—only we’ll both know that that’s all it is, won’t we, Grace? A game.’

Despising herself, Grace wondered how her body could still continue to react to him in the way it did in the light of what was only his need to avenge himself for what she—her family—had done to him in the past. She dragged herself up out of a cauldron of traitorous sensations to toss up at him, ‘Go to hell!’

‘Oh, I’ve been there, my love. And I can promise you,
it isn’t very pleasant.’ His features were chiselled into uncompromising lines. ‘But, if making love to me is hell to your pride, then you’re going to have to get used to it being scorched raw. Because we’re going to burn this thing out between us until there’s nothing left but cinders. So don’t worry—what we want from each other is so fierce it can’t fail to consume itself in the end.’

‘And then what?’ she asked, shuddering from his determination and the furore of sensations his words were producing in her. ‘We both walk away?’

His heavy lids drooped so that she couldn’t see the expression in his eyes. ‘Naturally.’

Only she wouldn’t be able to do that; she was jolted into realizing it. But why? Why, when he meant nothing to her, nothing beyond someone she had had the briefest fling with once? Yet someone whose child she had carried and then lost, as though life had been ridiculing her, exacting payment from her for her naïve and unfeeling indifference.

She closed her eyes against the memories, against the anguish that remembering caused—the longing, the loneliness, the confusion.

‘I can’t do that.’ Involuntarily, the words spilled from her lips; to deflect the meaning he might put on them, she quickly tagged on, ‘Contrary to what you might think, I don’t go in for casual relationships.’

His lips were but a hair’s breadth from hers, so close that even the denial of their consummate touch was a turn on. She brought her eyelids down so that he wouldn’t recognise the hunger in her eyes.

‘Oh, I think you can.’

Her lashes fluttered apart. His face appeared out of focus, a dark, inscrutable image, mouth hard yet oddly vulnerable, cheeks taut, black lashes drawn down against the wells of his eyes.

He was so incredible. So uncompromisingly handsome. And yet so vengeful.

‘Seth, please…’ It was uttered from the depths of her longing for the warm and tender lover he had been all those years ago. A tenderness that had been destroyed by the way both she and her family had treated him. ‘Don’t do this.’

He moved back a little so that he could see her more clearly. ‘Begging, Grace?’

That cruel curve to his mouth showed her, with deepening despair, that there was going to be no reprieve for her.

‘No, just trying to appeal to your better nature, but that’s obviously a waste of time!’

‘Obviously.’ He smiled, an action still devoid of any warmth. ‘How can you expect restraint from someone who’s…what was it you called me?…basic? Now, let me see: what does that mean? Rough? Primitive? Lacking in social graces? Well, don’t worry. I’m sure I can knock all your ex-public-school lovers into a cocked hat! When I make love to you there’s going to be none of the haste or urgency that we were driven by the first time. You’re going to have all the benefit of my cultivated experience in a long slow night of love play befitting a woman of your…sophistication. And you’re not going to get out of that bed until you’re so drunk on sex with me you’ll be unable to stand. Is that clear?’

The hot retort that sprang to Grace’s lips was stalled by a sudden knock on the door.

Pulling out of his orbit, she was still tugging her blouse straight when Simone came in carrying some files.

‘You wanted these, Mr Mason.’

Distractedly, Grace noticed her PA’s eyes dart from her to Seth and then back to her again; she noticed, too, the crisp white handkerchief stained with her lipstick that Seth was pocketing as he turned round, calmly, coolly, as though the air wasn’t charged with a sexual tension so thick that it left
Grace trembling, and which she knew the other woman must surely be able to feel.

‘Yes, thanks, Simone. Did you bring your note pad as well?’

He had known her PA was coming up here, Grace thought, aghast, as the other woman laughed a little nervously at something else he said before sitting down. Yet he had still tried to seduce her again in spite of that? What had been his intention? she wondered, fuming—to hope that Simone was the type of tactless employee who thrived on office scandal and would let everyone in the office know that they were having an affair?

His upward glance at Grace from where he was sitting now was almost one of surprise to still see her there.

‘Thank you, Grace, he said, his tone crisp, cold, formal. ‘That will be all.’

He had the audacity to dismiss her, like she was some temp he could call up or dismiss whenever the fancy took him! Or, worse, some fawning little sex-slave at his beck and call.

Well, if he wanted office gossip, she decided, grabbing the letter off the top of the cabinet she realised he’d taken from her, then she’d let him have it.

‘Don’t keep him too long,’ she uttered, bending, piqued, towards Simone. ‘He’s got a heavy appointment coming up this afternoon. Nasty maintenance case.’ Voice lowered, she wrinkled her nose in a knowing little gesture. ‘Best keep it under your hat.’

From Simone’s obvious discomfort, the woman was clearly unsure whether Grace was joking or not. Although Grace knew that her PA would keep any personal information about her employers to herself, Seth didn’t know that.

She didn’t even bother looking at him again before sweeping out of the office, a tight little set to her mouth, her head held high.

The next couple of weeks passed in a hectic blur of board meetings, legal work and negotiations, then Seth was away for a few days, engaged in aspects of his diverse business-interests elsewhere.

There had been too much to do in the office for other, more personal distractions, and when Seth was called away unexpectedly to sort out yet another problem in his business empire that couldn’t be delegated, Grace couldn’t have been more relieved.