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‘All he’d have to do is wave a wedding ring,’ Aline snapped, adding lamely, ‘Anyway, he might have girls instead of sons.’
Hope’s brows lifted. ‘So? You’re living proof that women can make it in the world of business.’
‘Ah, but I was my father’s son,’ Aline told her, her mouth twisting.
‘He must have been proud of you.’
Relaxing her rigid shoulders, Aline pinned on a smile. ‘I hope so,’ she said, glancing surreptitiously past the baby to where Jake and Keir had been joined by Lauren, all flicking hair and sultry seduction.
Jake looked up. For long, timeless seconds their eyes clashed, duelling across the room.
He radiated energy—a formidable, hypnotic power that sent shivery chills up her spine. Nothing like Michael, who’d been big-hearted and gallant and joyous—and who’d died. Why did death take the best?
Deliberately she broke contact, only to meet Lauren’s gaze; the woman lifted a glass of champagne to her, her smile glittering. Aline forced her lips into an answering curve, grateful when Emma leapt excitedly in her arms, almost overbalancing. Hauling her back to safety, she said crisply, ‘Emma’s not the only one who flirts with Jake.’
‘No.’ Hope’s voice was troubled. ‘Something’s been hounding Lauren for years, but it looks as though she’s getting really close to the edge. Her father’s so worried about her.’
With the confidence of a child who has known nothing but love, Emma raised a commanding hand, worked her mouth earnestly, and eventually produced a sound so close to boo that both women laughed, and Aline forgot Lauren’s hostility.
In a few minutes she allowed herself another glance across the room to see Lauren flirting with another young man, Keir charming a pleasant middle-aged woman, and Jake talking—no, listening—to an earnest Tony Hudson, one of the trustees of Michael’s charitable trust.
Making a mental note to contact Tony again this week and try again to persuade him it was time the trust gave some of its millions of dollars to the young people it was set up to help, Aline relaxed.
But when the hair on the back of her neck stood up in primitive recognition of danger, she knew without raising her eyes who’d joined them. Right in front of her she saw long legs and narrow hips, a man’s confident, almost aggressive stance.
Thank heavens Jake’s negotiations with the bank were over; from now on others would deal with him and his business. She’d no longer wake each morning haunted by the challenge in his dark face, the special note in his voice that reached right down inside her, taunting her with her hidden weakness.
Keeping her head down, she dropped a kiss on the baby’s satin cheek.
Beside her Hope said, ‘Jake! How lovely to see you!’
‘How do you manage to glow like that?’ The practised compliment came easily, but there was no doubt about the pure male appreciation in his voice.
Emma bounced and launched herself forwards, holding out chubby arms with a smile that almost split her face.
‘Well, button, is that a tooth I see?’ Jake’s voice came closer as he dropped onto his haunches and touched the baby’s cheek.
Startled, Aline looked into tawny-gold eyes—eagle’s eyes, she’d thought at their first meeting, piercing and merciless. Subsequent meetings hadn’t changed her mind.
He smiled crookedly at her. ‘Hello, Aline.’
A flutter of pulse at the base of her throat drew his gaze; weighed down by the laughing baby, Aline couldn’t drag her eyes from his face. He was so close she could see the small laughter lines fanning out from the corners of those relentless eyes, the thick black lashes, and the chiselled, beautiful lines of his mouth with its thinner upper lip and disturbingly curved lower.
Always before she’d avoided his scrutiny by focusing just past him; now, her head spinning, her senses afire, she drowned in gold. Something had altered. She sensed a difference in Jake, a deeply dominant shift in attitude.
With an effort of will that took all her strength, she deliberately shut down her treacherous awareness, withdrawing into the guarded fastness only Michael had been able to enter.
Jake’s mouth curved in mocking recognition of her silent rejection. He got to his feet with a lithe grace that proclaimed power and control. ‘Here, give the heroine of the day to me,’ he said, reaching out confident arms.
Transferring a chuckling baby meant that Aline had to get much closer, had to touch him for the first time except when they’d shaken hands—something she’d tried to limit, only to have him force the gesture every time they’d met and parted.
Her heart thudded painfully; without looking at him she settled Emma into his iron embrace and stepped back, ambushed by the heat radiating from him, and his hard, tensile masculinity.
All right, she told herself as the conversation was taken over efficiently by the others, admit it. You are—you’re aware of him.
The last honest part of her brain sniggered and drawled, To put it bluntly, you want him. Even more bluntly, you want to go to bed with him.
Well, why not? It was merely a ruthlessly physical ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ response, carefully formulated by Mother Nature to perpetuate the species. He was all alpha male, while she was a woman in her late twenties with her biological clock beginning to tick.
She hated being so vulnerable to Jake Howard’s intense magnetism, his elemental strength and determination. Her weakness betrayed everything she’d felt for her husband because not even Michael had delivered such a blazing punch of erotic excitement.
But she’d shared much more with Michael; he’d valued her for many other things besides her femaleness.
Every time Jake looked at her she saw recognition of her as a sexual being in those eagle’s eyes, in the way he spoke and responded to her. Even when they’d been negotiating hard and forcefully he’d made sure she knew he liked what he saw.
And his tactics had worked. Now her skin tightened whenever he came into a room, his presence invading her guarded detachment.
Hope laughed as he tossed Emma into the air. ‘You can do that all day and she’ll still want more—she has a cast-iron stomach. You’re very experienced with children.’
‘I like them,’ he said simply. ‘Nice basic things, kids. You know exactly where you are with them—if they don’t like you they howl and struggle; if they decide you’re a fit person to hold them they smile and coo.’ His glinting eyes moved to Aline’s face. ‘There’s no wasting time with children; they won’t allow it.’
Hope’s brows shot up, but she returned a remark that made him laugh, and then Keir arrived, and for five minutes or so they chatted with relaxed ease.
Too soon, but inevitably, Hope and Keir moved on, taking Emma with them. With her usual store of small talk evaporating fast, Aline cast around for something innocuous to say before escaping.
Jake watched her from beneath his lashes, an unnerving glint of mockery lighting his eyes.
Edgily she summoned a cool smile. ‘I didn’t realise you were going to be here,’ she said, hoping the observation didn’t sound as inane to him as it did to her.
Her hope was dashed immediately. ‘You mean you assumed I wouldn’t be. Do you want me to go?’
‘No!’ She inhaled quickly, sharply, to settle her racing pulses. ‘Of course not,’ she said, encouraged when her voice revealed nothing more than polite interest.
She lifted her eyes, only to find them captured by his. Dazedly, she felt as though she’d fallen into frozen fire, lost all individuality, all reason, all control…
Forcing another tight smile, she went on, ‘I thought you were in Vancouver,’ and wrenched her gaze free of the forbidden imprisonment of his, fixing her eyes on his mouth.
Only to discover that it was as dangerous to her peace of mind as his tawny-gold eyes. Sex, she reminded herself sturdily, that’s all it is. Yes, it was humiliating to be attracted to a man like Jake, a man so unlike Michael they had almost nothing in common except their gender, but she’d get over it now she didn’t have to see him so often.
‘Jets leave Canada every day for New Zealand. I plan to be seeing quite a bit of Keir and his wife in the future.’
‘They’re a lovely family,’ Aline said tautly.
Silence stretched between them, buzzing with hidden significance. He waited, but when she refused to break it he said with smooth insolence, ‘And I plan to be seeing more of you.’
She gave him a small, meaningless smile. ‘I don’t imagine we’ll need to meet again now that we’ve stitched up the deal—’
‘This has nothing to do with the deal.’ He paused before saying in a voice underpinned by steel, ‘This is about us, Aline. You and me.’
The drawing-room was large and filled with people, all at that pleasant state of talkativeness engendered by a glass of excellent champagne. More people had spilled out of the open French doors onto the wide Victorian verandah beyond. It bore the hallmarks of an excellent party, yet Aline sat alone, imprisoned by his inflexible will.
Hands clenched by her sides, she said, ‘No,’ the word a stone dropped into echoing silence.
Strong fingers closed around her wrist, shackling it. ‘I can feel your heartbeat against my fingertips,’ Jake said thoughtfully. ‘It’s going twice the normal speed.’
Before she tried to twist free he released her. ‘No,’ she said again, the meaningless word splintering into the tension between them. ‘And don’t ever do that again. I don’t like being manhandled.’
From behind came a sly voice, soft, heavy with innuendo. ‘She’s never liked being touched. Except by her husband, of course,’ Lauren Penn said. Her smile bubbled into laughter, low and mocking. ‘And you know, that’s a joke. Just the biggest joke in the world.’
‘Lauren…’ Aline’s glance swerved to the half-empty glass of champagne in the other woman’s hand.
Lauren swallowed the rest of the wine, setting the empty glass down with exaggerated care on a table. ‘Lauren,’ she mimicked. ‘Lauren, shut up. Lauren, go away. Lauren, stop making a scene. You know, I’m so sick of you. Ever since he died you’ve worn your grief for your darling lost Michael like a bloody crown. Other people grieved too, but that never occurred to you, did it?’ Her glance darted to Jake’s angular face.
As though encouraged by his dispassionate regard, she purred, ‘You see, Jake, poor Aline has a little problem. She really doesn’t like being touched—and that’s straight from the horse’s mouth. Mike said she was like turquoise, cold and smooth and shallow—nothing but surface colour. He called her the Untouchable—sometimes the Snow Queen. He said that when they had sex it was like worshipping at some shrine instead of loving a flesh-and-blood woman—’
‘That’s more than enough.’ Jake’s voice held such crackling menace that Lauren went white. Her eyes moved from Jake’s grim face to Aline, locked in a hideous stasis.
Jake said softly, ‘Get out of here.’
Lauren whispered, ‘It’s time she knew. She’s eating her heart out for a lie. I loved Mike and he loved me. We’d been lovers for a year when he died.’ Her eyes glazed with tears and her mouth trembled. ‘He wanted to come away with me, but he didn’t want to hurt her. We were going to get married.’
Unable to hold back, Aline retorted in a shaking voice, ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Because you don’t want to.’ Open antagonism sharpened her words. ‘Do you know what happened when he died? I lost our baby.’
Her anguished glance across the room to Emma, smiling in her father’s arms, struck both Jake and Aline mute.
Bitterly she went on, ‘If you hadn’t clung so hard he’d have left you, and then he and my baby would still be alive. I wouldn’t have let him fly across the sea looking for some idiot solo yachtsman who’d got himself lost. You killed Mike—and you killed my baby because you wouldn’t let go!’
That was when Aline knew she was telling the truth.
CHAPTER TWO
IT HURT, Aline realised, to breathe. It even hurt to think. The last time she could remember such pain was when they’d told her Michael was dead. The irony almost knocked her to her knees.
Lauren said softly, ‘You’re so stubborn and self-centred, so sure you’re always right, but tomorrow you’ll have to believe me. I even lent the author Mike’s letters.’
Jake’s eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he asked in a tone that wilted Lauren’s antagonism.
Defiantly she said, ‘Aline refused to talk to the writer—Stuart someone—when he contacted her about a biography of Mike. But I did. I told him everything about Mike and me because I wanted people to know he loved me. Tomorrow morning everyone in New Zealand will read that Aline gave Mike nothing, and I gave him everything.’
Locked in a savage agony of rejection and betrayal, Aline closed her eyes, listening to the meaningless words buzz around inside her head. She craved numbness, forgetfulness, with the avid hunger of an addict.
‘And that book’s coming out tomorrow?’ Jake demanded so silkily that Aline’s lashes flew up.
No emotion showed in his face, but his gaze focused on Lauren with the searing lance of a laser. Behind the hard, handsome features Aline saw a predator, menacing, relentless, and lethally dangerous.
Visibly bracing herself, Lauren took an instinctive step backwards. ‘It’s being launched next week, but tomorrow there’ll be a big extract in one of the Sunday papers.’ From somewhere she produced an aggressive tone. ‘Mike put New Zealand on the map with his single-handed sailing voyages around the world, and he cared enough about kids to set up the Connor Trust and raise millions of dollars for it. Some of the money from the book’s going to the Trust, yet Aline would have stopped publication if she’d been able to.’ She cast a scathing glance at Aline. ‘People need to know what a wonderful man—a truly great man—he was. I’m not ashamed of loving him, and I’ll be proud until I die that he loved me.’
Jake would have liked very much to wrap his hands around that slender throat and throttle the life out of her, but he needed to get Aline out of there before the confrontation—already drawing covert attention—went any further. White and frozen, her subtle cosmetics displayed for the mask they were, she hadn’t moved since Lauren had started her attack.
It was the first time he’d seen her at a disadvantage, and he was startled by the fierce protectiveness that unexpectedly gripped him.
Ignoring Lauren, he stepped between the two women and touched Aline’s arm. When she didn’t respond he said gently, ‘Aline, come with me.’
After a taut moment she shivered.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, relieved when she let him steer her out of the nearest door and into the entrance hall, mercifully empty of onlookers.
With a firm hand at her elbow, he led her across the gleaming wooden floor with its priceless Persian rug; he wondered if the door to Keir’s study would be locked, but it yielded to his urgent hand.
Mentally thanking Keir for his trust in his guests, he pushed it open, noting with a half-smile that Keir wasn’t that trusting; everything but the desk and the bookshelves had been locked away in a bank of cupboards.
Obediently, silently, Aline went ahead, finally stopping in the middle of the room to look around with dazed bewilderment. Succumbing to his concern, Jake folded her slim, cold hands in his, but although she didn’t resist it was like touching a statue.
‘She could be lying,’ he said harshly.
‘She’s not lying.’ Aline’s voice sounded distant, muted, empty of the subtle sexy texture that made it so erotic beneath the surface crispness.
‘How do you know?’
She shuddered. ‘He used to say my eyes were like the very best turquoise. How would she know that unless he told her?’
Pillow-talk, he thought savagely. ‘It could have slipped out in conversation.’
She shook her head. ‘Keir must know; he was Michael’s best friend,’ she said. And then with a half-sob, ‘Yes, of course. That’s why…’
‘Tell me,’ he commanded when her voice trailed away into nothingness.
She didn’t ask him what business it was of his. The shock of Lauren’s revelation had smashed the barriers he’d tried so hard to penetrate these past months. Ruthlessly practical, he decided it might be a good thing; if she’d been living in a fool’s paradise the truth could only set her free. It might even help the small personal crusade he’d embarked on—finding out exactly what was going on in the Connor Trust.
But, God, he hated to see her in such pain.
In that same empty monotone she said, ‘About a year before Michael died I noticed a distance between them, and after that we didn’t see much of Keir. I asked Michael why, and he said that it was the natural way of things—married men didn’t have so much in common with their single friends.’ She lifted her lashes and looked at him with blank eyes like enamelled jewels, their vivid colour framed by long black lashes. ‘You believe people when you love them because it hurts too much not to.’
Looking into that lifeless, beautiful face, Jake thought violently that if he could kill a dead man he’d do it right then.
A soft sound from behind alerted him to the opening of the door; instantly he swung around, thrusting Aline behind him as their host entered the room.
Frowning, Keir demanded, ‘What’s going on here?’
Jake stood to one side and let Aline tell Keir exactly what Lauren had said.
He was good, Jake thought with respect; their host’s ice-grey eyes registered only a single flash of fury, but of course Aline noticed.
She whispered, ‘Was Lauren the only one?’
‘Yes,’ Keir said brusquely.
