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‘Paul is my friend,’ Flint said coolly. ‘I care about him and his happiness. And I’d hate to see him tied to a calculating little tramp when a few words could save him. That’s what friends are for, surely?’ The last question was drawled with mockery.
She didn’t intend to hit him. In fact, she didn’t even realise she had until the high sweep of his cheekbone stopped her hand with such implacable suddenness that every bone in her arm ached with the impact.
Gulping with shock and pain, she snatched her hand back, cradled it to her stomach and said in a voice she had hoped never to hear again, ‘Don’t you call me a tramp. Don’t ever call me a tramp.’
He hadn’t moved. For long, taut seconds the imprint of her hand, white in the darkness, stood out with stark, disgraceful precision.
So coldly that it congealed even her righteous indignation, he said, ‘Why not? You’re selling yourself to him. That’s what tramps do. Money for sexual services.’
‘I am not selling myself to him.’ Her voice cracked, but she rushed on, hurling the words at him, ‘And it’s not just sex, damn you, you ignorant swine, there’s more—’
‘Not much more. For you it’s security, for him love. You need his money, he wants to spend the rest of your life making you happy. And, not so incidentally, sleeping with you. If that’s the bargain it’s fair enough, I suppose. Just don’t renege on it, Aura, when he’s so far under your spell that the poor sod can’t crawl out.’
It took a vast effort to moderate her tone, to summon the cadences of bored sophistication, but Aura hoped she managed it. ‘Paul is thirty-two—old enough, don’t you think, to fall in love without needing someone to vet his choice?’
‘Paul is a romantic,’ he returned unemotionally. ‘And God knows, you’re enough to turn even the most level-headed man’s brain into mush. However, I’m not in the least romantic. I’ve seen enough women who looked like angels and behaved like the scourings of the streets to be able to ignore huge green eyes scattered with gold dust and a mouth that’s full and sulkily cushioned with promises of unattainable erotic delights. Even so, I took one look at you and found myself wondering.’
‘Wondering what?’ The moment the words trembled from her lips she knew she’d made a mistake. ‘It doesn’t m—’
But he interrupted with blasé precision. ‘Wondering whether in bed you live up to the promises you make.’
Aura froze as nausea climbed her throat. Sexy talk, the kind of sensual, seductive words that men used when they wanted to coax a woman into bed, made her shiver with an unremitting fear.
She had been barely fourteen when the husband of one of her mother’s friends had told her of his fantasies, all of them starring her, as he drove her home from the house where he lived with his wife and three children. He had seemed to think that her beauty gave him the right to tell her specifically just what he wanted to do to her, in bed and out. His words had been detailed and obscene, summoning scenarios that chilled her right through to her soul.
He had made no attempt to touch her, then or ever, but his perverted pleasure in seeing the shock and fear in her face had destroyed her innocence.
Sickened and disgusted, she had spent the next three years avoiding him, until eventually she had found the courage to threaten him with disclosure of his sexual harassment.
Since then other men had accused her of teasing, of being provocative, believing that her face was the mirror of her character, that the intensity of their desire put her under an obligation to respond.
Oh, she had learned to deal with them; she knew when a light touch was needed, when indignation and threats were necessary. But she had been scarred, her inner soul as much mutilated as whatever had slashed through Flint’s skin. And she still felt that sick helplessness when a man looked at her with that knowing speculation, when a certain thickness appeared in his voice. She hated being fodder for fantasy.
Strangely enough, in spite of Flint’s words, she didn’t feel that sinking nausea now.
One of the things she liked so much about Paul was his light touch, his wry, self-deprecating amusement. He never made her feel that he wanted too much from her, and when he looked at her it was without greed, with tenderness. She felt safe with Paul.
Since that first experience she had viewed compliments on her looks as preliminaries to demands she had no intention of satisyfing, but listening to Flint Jansen’s gravelly voice as he passionlessly catalogued her physical assets brought heat bursting through her in a drenching flood of sensation.
Appalled, mortified, she said huskily, ‘Mr—Flint, I know you’re Paul’s oldest friend, and I know you and he are very fond of each other, but you shouldn’t be talking to me like this. I’m going to make Paul very happy. Please take me home.’
‘I hope you mean that,’ he said, every menacing syllable clear and silky above the pounding of her heart, ‘because if you don’t, beautiful Aura, if you find a richer man than Paul one day and decide to shuck him off like an old coat, I’ll come looking for you. And when I find you, I’ll make you sorrier than you’ve ever thought you could be.’
CHAPTER TWO (#u8d3f7ea4-1512-5ab3-a220-b9fd0b188ba3)
WITHOUT waiting for a reply he switched on the engine and backed the car around, then set off down the hill while Aura fought the hardest battle of her life. Never before, not even in childhood when she had been notorious for tantrums, had she been so furiously incandescent with rage, a rage all the more difficult to deal with because it was stretched like a fragile cloak over debilitating fear.
What an arrogant, brutal, cocksure, conceited bastard! Oh, she would like to ruin Flint Jansen’s life, she’d love to have him come begging to her so she could spurn him with a haughty smile. She’d turn sharply on her heel and walk away, she’d make him grovel—
Shaking with frustration and fury, horrified by her thoughts, she dragged air into painful lungs, then set her mind to looking coolly and rationally at the situation.
Eventually, after a huge expenditure of willpower, she succeeded.
In one way Flint’s attitude was rather touching. So often the only feelings men allowed themselves to express were connected with anger. Flint’s suspicions at least showed he had Paul’s interests at heart.
And, viewed objectively, someone who had been engaged twice before had to be a risk in the matrimonial stakes. If you didn’t know the circumstances, such a history did seem to show a certain lack of staying power.
Unfortunately, her eminently rational thoughts did nothing to ease the fury that simmered beneath her imposed and artificial restraint. Flint didn’t know the circumstances; he had just jumped to conclusions, so how dared he accuse her of being a tramp, of not loving Paul, of marrying him for his money?
Nothing would give her greater pleasure than to rub every word in his face, force him to acknowledge that he was wrong…
After another calming breath she tried to convince herself that all she had to do was make Paul happy. If she did that, Flint would be compelled to admit how very wrong he was. Staring blindly through the windscreen, she conjured up a vivid and highly satisfactory scenario of her and Paul’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, when Flint, proud head lowered, would have to grovel. She could see his face so clearly, see the gracious smile with which she received his abject apology…
Much later, she realised that Paul had not appeared at all in this immensely gratifying dream. The scene that sprang fullblown from the depths of her brain had only two players—her and Flint Jansen.
Neither spoke until they reached the unit. Aura made to open the door, but Flint said crisply as he turned the engine off, ‘I’ll see you inside.’
‘You don’t need to,’ she said, curt words spilling into the cold silence like little pebbles thrown into sand.
Taking no notice, he got out and came around the front of the car. For those moments, as the street-lights edged his silhouette in gold, he looked like some dark huntsman straight out of myth, lean and lithe and supernaturally big, an ominous, threatening, purposeful presence in the quiet, seedy suburban street.
Holding herself rigidly aloof, Aura slid her long legs out of the car and stood up, then preceded him down the path. A light inside revealed that her mother hadn’t gone to bed.
The last thing Aura wanted just then was for them to meet. Her emotions were too raw and antagonistic to be properly controlled, so at the door she turned and said with what she hoped was aplomb, ‘Thank you for the ride home. Goodnight.’
Unfortunately, before he had a chance to answer, the door opened.
‘Paul,’ Natalie cooed in the voice she reserved for him alone, ‘dear boy, do come in! I want to talk to you about the new flat—I was thinking that what it really needs is a new—’
‘Paul didn’t bring me home,’ Aura interrupted swiftly.
Her mother peered past her, her eyes widening. ‘Neither he did,’ she said.
Aura watched her regroup as she surveyed Flint. Over her mother’s face flashed the famous smile that had reduced so many men to abject submission.
‘Darling,’ she purred languidly, ‘don’t just stand there letting me make a fool of myself, introduce us.’
With angry resignation Aura complied, heard her mother invite Flint inside, and his immediate acceptance. It was useless glaring at Natalie, who was invulnerable to suggestion, but Aura sent a contemptuous glance at the man smiling with cynically amused admiration down at her mother.
As though it impacted physically on him he lifted his head, returning Aura’s fulminating glower with a long, considering look from narrowed eyes that challenged her to object.
To her fury and despair, Aura couldn’t meet his gaze. Turning away, she dumped her bag on the table with a short, abrupt movement.
‘How kind of you to bring Aura home, Flint. You must have a nightcap before you go,’ Natalie said sweetly, making expert play with her lashes as she ushered him into the cluttered little sitting-room. ‘Whisky, surely? You look like a whisky man. I think we’ve got some somewhere.’
His expression reminded Aura of the smile on the face of the tiger. ‘Not for me, thank you.’
Aura bit her lip. She should have been pleased at this unusual interest. Following Lionel’s death and the subsequent revelations of his shady, secret life, her mother had sunk into a dangerous apathy that developed into a fullblown nervous breakdown when she’d realised that the only assets she had left were a small annuity Lionel hadn’t been able to get his hands on. It provided barely enough money to keep her.
For the first time in her life, Aura had found herself needed by her mother. At first she hadn’t understood how ill Natalie was, but when she’d come home from a much-wanted job interview to find her unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills and tranquillisers, she had realised that for the time being she was going to have to give up her ambitions to make a career in marketing.
Even then, she had hoped that she would have time to finish designing a market research programme she had begun at university. Unfortunately, Natalie had needed her constant attention, and as the tap of the computer’s keys seemed to drive her to a frenzy, Aura had given up on it for the time being.
It had been a miserable six months. The only thing that had sustained Aura was meeting Paul. It had helped Natalie, too. She was slowly returning to her normal spirits.
Witness, Aura thought grimly, her swift reaction to Flint Jansen.
It was difficult to see what was going on behind the clear, hard glitter of Flint’s eyes, but Aura was prepared to bet that it was appreciation. The clear skin and sultry green eyes Natalie had bequeathed to her daughter were almost unmarred by the years. Tiny lines of petulance and self-indulgence were beginning to etch into the ivory skin, drag the full, lush mouth down at the corners. Even so, Natalie was exquisitely beautiful.
‘No?’ she said now, with a knowing, flirtatious smile. ‘Well, then, a cup of coffee, and while it’s being made you must sit down and tell me how you come to be driving Aura home.’
‘Paul had to wait for a phone call from Britain,’ Aura interposed curtly, not caring whether he thought her rude, ‘so Flint very kindly offered to take his place.’
‘Only for the drive back,’ Flint said in a voice as smooth and bland as cream.
Flakes of colour heated Aura’s cheeks. ‘Naturally,’ she retorted too quickly.
‘I’m staying with Paul until the wedding,’ Flint told Natalie, ‘so if you want me to take a message to him, I’ll do it gladly.’
Aura’s brows drew together as she stared significantly at her mother, willing her to be silent. But Natalie had learned that the best way to get what she wanted was to use a mixture of cajolery and sexuality on the most powerful man within sight, and it was too late for her to study new tactics.
‘No, no,’ she said, smiling at Flint as though he was the most fascinating man she had ever met, ‘it’s just the new flat. I couldn’t work out what I didn’t like about it, and only a few minutes ago when I was sitting looking at this hideous affair here I realised that it was the carpet. Too middle class and tacky. We’ll have to get it changed, but don’t you worry about it, I’ll discuss it with Paul when I see him next. Now, do sit down and tell me all about yourself. Aura, aren’t you going to make us some coffee, darling?’
Sure that Flint was too astute to be taken in by her mother’s calculated seductiveness, she watched with astonishment when he gave her mother a slow, tantalising smile and sat down.
Natalie, who adored flirtations and knew just how to conduct one, eyed his hard, unhandsome face with an interest that had something of avidity in it, and proceeded to show how skilled she was in such sport.
Flint responded to her sophisticated coquettishness with a lazy, dangerous charm that had Natalie eating out of his hand in no time. Fuming, Aura had to make coffee and listen to her mother being questioned by an expert. Within five minutes Natalie had artlessly divulged that dear, kind, thoughtful Paul had not only bought a flat for his mother-in-law to be, but had also offered a car.
‘Only to have Aura throw it back in his face,’ Natalie sighed. ‘So middle class and boring and prissy of her! It would make life infinitely less stressful, especially now. As it is, unless friends are generous enough to put themselves out for us, we have to use public transport.’
Her voice registered the kind of horror most people reserved for crawling over oyster shells. Flint’s brows shot up.
Much encouraged by this, Natalie went on, ‘And what difference is there between moving before the wedding and moving after it? I’m not complaining, but it would have made life so much easier for us all if we’d had the new flat, which is four times the size of this dreary little place, to entertain. But no, Aura had some idea that it wasn’t the done thing. As though I’m no judge! Not that it really matters, it just means that I’ll be stuck here until they come home from their honeymoon. I’ve been ill, so I can’t cope with moving by myself.’
Whenever it seemed she might run down, Flint asked another seemingly innocuous question, and away she went again, spilling out things Aura would much rather he didn’t know. Cosseted and adored all her life, Natalie had been valued only for her looks, for her pleasing ways. She naturally gravitated towards men who looked as though they could protect her. Flint filled the bill perfectly.
If you liked that sort of overt, brash male forcefulness. Aura’s fingers trembled as she set the tray. She knew she was being unfair; Flint’s air of competence, of authority, that inbuilt assurance that here was a man who was master of himself and his world, was not assumed. It was as natural a part of him as his smile and the complex hints of danger that crackled around him.
Aura knew better than to display her anger and resentment, but when she appeared with the tray she very firmly took command of the conversation, steering it away from personal things to focus on the man who sat opposite, his lean, clever, formidable face hiding every thought but those he wanted them to see.
Fortunately, Natalie knew that men adored talking about themselves. She demanded the details of his life, so they learned that he was some kind of troubleshooter for his firm, that he travelled a lot overseas, that he had been born in the Wairarapa and still went back as often as he could, and that he was thirty-one, a year younger than Paul.
Which, Aura thought as she sipped her coffee, probably explained Paul’s protective attitude to him at school. He certainly didn’t need protecting now. A more confident, invulnerable man than Flint Jansen it would be hard to imagine. She could see him troubleshooting right across the globe, keen intelligence fortified by disciplined energy and confident control, the hard-edged masculine charisma warning all who came up against him that here was a man who had to be taken very seriously indeed.
He could tell a good story, too. In a very short time he had them both laughing, yet although he seemed perfectly open Aura realised that he was revealing very little of either his work or himself. What they were being treated to was a skilfully edited version of his life, one he’d clearly used before.
A quick, unremarked glance at her watch informed her that he had only been there thirty minutes. It seemed hours. Restlessly, she thought she’d never be able to look around the small, slightly squalid room, rendered even smaller by the furniture that her mother had managed to salvage from the wreck of her life, without remembering Flint in it. Somehow he had managed to stamp the dark fire of his personality on it as Paul never had.
At least he hadn’t paid much attention to her; his whole concentration had been almost entirely on her mother.
Which worried Aura. She knew skilful pumping when she heard it, and thanks to Natalie he now knew that they had no money beyond her pathetic little annuity. Natalie even told him all about Alick’s generosity over the years, thereby reinforcing, Aura thought savagely, his estimation of both Forsythe women as greedy and out for what they could get.
Still, it didn’t really matter. Paul knew she wasn’t like that, and Paul’s opinion was the only one she cared about.
Perhaps he had noticed that surreptitious glance at her watch, for almost immediately he rose. Aura overrode her mother’s protests by telling her crisply that Flint had been flying most of the day and must be exhausted.
‘You don’t look tired,’ Natalie murmured. ‘You look—very vigorous.’
Aura stirred uneasily. She was accustomed to her mother’s innuendoes, but her coyness grated unbearably.
Flint’s smile hid a taunt as he responded, ‘Aura’s right, I need some sleep.’
‘Ah, well, we’ll see you tomorrow,’ Natalie said sweetly, looking up at him from beneath her lashes. She held out her hand. It was engulfed by his, but instead of shaking it he kissed her pampered fingers with an air.
Natalie laughed and bridled and, amazingly, blushed.
Austerely, Aura said, ‘Goodnight.’ She did not hold out her hand.
His smile was measured, more than a little cold-blooded. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said, and somehow the words, spoken softly in that sensuously roughened voice, sent shivers down her spine.
When at last he was gone, and Aura was able to breathe again, she said drily, ‘Well, there’s no need for him to ask any more questions. You’ve told him all he ever needs to know about us.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aura, try not to be too drearily bourgeois.’ Into the weary flatness of her mother’s tone there crept a note that could have been spite as she added, ‘You’re not the tiniest bit jealous because he wasn’t interested in you, are you?’
For some obscure reason that hurt. Aura’s lips parted on a swift retort, then closed firmly before the hot words had a chance to burst out. Over the years she had learned how to deal with her mother, and an angry response was the worst way. The nasty incident on One Tree Hill must have shaken her usual restraint.
Smiling wryly she said, ‘No, not in the least. You can have the dishy Flint; your friends might laugh at the difference in ages, but they’ll probably envy you. However, I wouldn’t bore him with any more details of our personal affairs, or you’ll see him rush off to more exciting conversation.’
From her mother’s expression she saw that her shaft had struck home. If Flint Jansen pumped her mother again he’d probably get what he wanted easily enough—he was that sort of man—but with any luck, from now on Natalie wouldn’t spill out unasked-for details.
It had been a strange day. As Aura curled up in her cramped room and closed her eyes against the glare of the streetlight that managed to find her face every night through the gap between the blind and the window-frame, she tried to woo sleep with an incantation that never failed.
In two weeks’ time she would be married to Paul, darling, gentle, kind, understanding Paul, and she would be able to relax and live the serene, happy life she had always longed for.
Of course there would be troubles, but they’d be able to overcome them together. Her mother, for one. Natalie would always demand the constant attention she considered her due. But when they were married, Aura’s first loyalty would be to Paul. Dearest Paul. She intended to make him so happy, as happy as he would make her.
Two weeks. A fortnight. Only fourteen more days.
Firmly banishing Flint Jansen’s fiercely chiselled face from her mind, she turned her head and drifted off to sleep.
She woke the next morning slightly headachey and as edgy as a cat whose fur had been stroked the wrong way. The clear sky of the night before had been transmuted into a dank, overhanging pall of heavy cloud; rain hushed persistently against the window panes.
Listening to the early traffic swish by on the road outside, she wondered why she felt as though she had spent all night in a smoky room. It couldn’t be the weather. It had rained for most of the autumn, so she was quite reconciled to a wet wedding day.
And everything was under control. Mentally she went through the list. The caterer knew to ignore any instructions her mother gave; her wedding-dress was made in the simple, flowing lines that suited both her figure and the informal occasion, not the elaborate and unsuitable costume Natalie had suggested. And the florist had no illusions about the sort of flowers she wanted.
A wedding, even one as small as theirs, was like a juggernaut, caught up in its own momentum, rolling serenely on towards an inevitable conclusion. The simile made her smile, and stretch languidly. This wedding was going to be perfect, from the hymns to the best man—
