A Secret Vengeance

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“Yes,” she admitted, and Luke finally knew the answers to every question he’d been asking himself since he’d first heard her name.

CHAPTER THREE

CELIA stared up at the dark haired and very handsome man standing in the doorway, her memory trying to place him. His face was familiar, and so were his eyes. Almost black, they were. Long lashed and very deeply set.

She was frowning into their inky depths when recognition struck.

“Dear heaven,” she said, her hand tightening on the door knob. “You must be Luke. Lionel’s son.” She kept on staring at him. Impossible not to. It was like seeing Lionel, twenty years ago.

“Right in one, Ms Gilbert.”

The fact that he knew her name took a moment or two to register. As did his simmering anger.

Clearly, Luke Freeman hadn’t come to claim or inspect an inheritance. Somehow, he’d found out about his father’s extramarital affair with her mother, and had come charging up here, far from happy.

But what did he want? To hear first hand all of the sordid details? To confront his father’s mistress personally? To tear strips off her for corrupting his precious parent?

Over my dead body, Celia vowed. Her mother had suffered enough at the hands of one Freeman man. She wasn’t about to let the son finish off what the father had started.

She crossed her arms and gathered herself to do battle. “I don’t how you found out,” she said through gritted teeth, “but I presume you know everything.”

“About your affair with my father, you mean?” he returned in a voice that would have cut diamonds. “Oh, yes, I know. Now. But I suspected the truth as soon as you opened the door. To give my father credit, he had taste. You are one beautiful woman, Ms Jessica Gilbert.”

Celia was too shocked to be even mildly flattered by this back-handed compliment. My goodness! He thought she was his father’s mistress!

She opened her mouth to tear strips off him, but then slowly closed it again, her mind racing to put this puzzle together. If he thought she was his father’s bit on the side, then he actually knew very little. Just a name. Not the woman in question’s age. Nor anything else about her. He certainly had no idea Ms Jessica Gilbert was a forty-two-year-old single mother with a twenty-six-year-old daughter. He definitely had no idea how long the affair had been going on.

Celia could say anything she liked and Lionel’s son would probably believe it.

She thought of her mother and knew what she had to do.

Celia sighed, uncrossed her arms and stepped back out of the doorway. “I suppose you’d better come in,” she said with a wave of her hand, all the while wondering what approach she should take for the part of Lionel’s secret mistress.

His son was no fool, so best stick to the truth as much as possible so that she didn’t slip up. She would simply bring the affair forward twenty years and put herself in her mother’s place.

It would be difficult to pretend she’d loved the ruthless Lionel, let alone made love with him.

But she’d manage.

Somehow.

Luke tried to get a grip on his anger as he accepted her reluctant invitation and stepped into his father’s secret love nest.

He failed wretchedly. But who, exactly, was he angry with? His father, for not living up to his hero status? Or this creature, this incredibly sensual creature of the captivating and cat-like green eyes?

Luke strode across the large open-plan living room, his eyes taking in at a glance the simple yet elegant beauty of the place. The extensive use of wood had his father’s hand stamped all over it, though not everything was made of pine inside, only the kitchen and the walls. The polished wooden floors were boxwood and the high panelled ceiling looked like various types of cedar. The dining room table was made in a rich walnut, the finely carved chairs fashioned in the same wood, with dark green velvet cushions. The huge sofa facing the sandstone fireplace was also covered in the same dark green velvet.

As Luke walked past it, he couldn’t help thinking about what might have transpired on that sofa between his father and his mistress. And on the plush-pile cream rug stretched out on the floor in front of the fireplace. He could see her red-gold hair now, spread out and glowing in the fire light. He could almost feel the warmth of the flames on her pale skin, and practically taste the siren sweetness of her lips, drawing her married lover down, down into the hell-fires where lust ruled and faithfulness was totally forgotten.

Luke wrenched out one of the dining chairs and plonked himself down sideways in it, one elbow on the table, his other on the back of the chair. No way was he going to sit on the sofa. Nor make himself too comfortable. This was going to be a very brief visit.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked politely after shutting the door. “Tea? Coffee? A glass of wine?”

“No, thanks.” No politeness in his voice. It was rough and gruff.

“I think, perhaps,” she murmured in her sweet siren’s voice, “I could do with one.”

He watched her walk over to the galley-style kitchen, his gaze sweeping down her body then up again.

She was mistress material all right, with curves in all the right places. And she dressed for the part. Long, floaty wraparound skirt in a deep burgundy colour. A black knitted cardigan top with a deep scooped neckline and easy-to-undo buttons. No bra. Bare feet.

Luke estimated it would take a man less than twenty seconds to strip her naked, if she made no objections.

The image of his father sweeping through that door and immediately doing just that brought a flood of fierce feelings within Luke. More anger. A degree of disgust. And a perturbing amount of jealousy!

She poured herself a glass of white wine from a bottle in the fridge and came round to slide up on one of three pine stools which faced the kitchen counter. But she didn’t face the kitchen counter. She faced him, her green eyes thoughtful.

“What do you want, then?” she said as she crossed her legs and lifted the glass to her lips.

When her skirt fell slightly apart to show more than a tantalising glimpse of shapely leg, Luke struggled to banish the X-rated images that zoomed into his mind.

“I just want to talk to you,” he replied, pleased that his tone was a bit more businesslike and less angry.

Her delicate eyebrows arched cynically, and Luke wondered if his father had told her he only wanted to talk to her when they’d first met.

The image of his father as a ruthless womaniser didn’t sit any better with Luke than the image of him as a seduced fool.

He’d thought he’d known all the answers when she’d opened the door, but that wasn’t true. The physical reality of Ms Jessica Gilbert now raised a hundred more tantalising questions. But one stood out amongst all the others?

“Did you love him?” he asked abruptly, and watched her reactions.

Her lovely eyes rounded, her nostrils flaring in and out as she sucked in sharply. “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” she bit out.

“I think it is, Ms Gilbert. My father visited his solicitor the day before he died,” he went on. “His intention was to gift this place over to you. But he was killed before he could see to the transfer. He revealed that he’d been letting you live here rent-free for the past few years, but that he wanted you to have security for life.”

“I see…”

Her green eyes glittered with contempt. But for whom? Luke puzzled.

“You think I was sleeping with your father for what I could get out of him,” she stated coldly.

“It did cross my mind,” he admitted.

“I’m sure it did. I presume you won’t be signing this place over to me, then, will you?” she added drily.

“That depends,” he said, and watched a speculative interest replace the contempt in her eyes.

“On what?” she asked carefully.

The moment she asked that question in that fashion, Luke at least knew one of the answers he’d been looking for. She hadn’t been in love with his father. She had been in it for the material gain all along.

It made brutal sense. Why else would a girl as young as this be having an affair with a man as old as his father?

Luke wondered how much she’d already gleaned from him in cash during their liaison. Not to mention presents, the sort of presents rich older men gave their beautiful young mistresses. Clothes. Jewelry. Perfume. Lingerie.

She’d look incredibly sexy in black lace…

“On what does it depend?” she demanded to know and, immediately, another X-rated image raised its ugly head, rattling Luke with the power this female had to both arouse and tempt him without seemingly doing a thing.

Luke stared at her and tried to imagine what she would say if he offered her this place in exchange for one weekend being his mistress, giving him everything she’d given his father. And more.

Oh, yes, he’d want more. He was only thirty-two years old, a man in his sexual prime, a man who hadn’t made love to his fiancée in…

Guilt consumed him as his train of thought ended with Isabel: the woman he was going to marry in a fortnight’s time, the woman he’d vowed always to be truthful with in future.

What was happening to him here?

Not that he’d actually done anything. A man could not be hung for his thoughts, especially when in the presence of the temptation sitting before him. Did she have any idea how sexy she looked, swinging her prettily painted toes in front of him, that slit in her skirt falling further and further apart till he could practically see the entire side of her left leg? And all the while she was sipping her wine and watching him over the rim of the glass like a hunter quietly watching its prey.

Luke began to understand why his father had fallen victim to her wiles. She was the devil in disguise.

At the back of his mind, Luke knew he should get the hell out of there. But his curiosity far overrode his common sense.

“It depends on your telling me all about your affair with my father,” he said brusquely.

Her left leg slipped off her right knee, bringing her skirt back to a more modest arrangement. When she put her glass back down, Luke saw that her hand was shaking slightly. “All? What do you mean by…all?”

Luke liked seeing her agitated. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because he didn’t really want her to be a cold-blooded money-grubbing bitch. Luke was afraid that if she was, he might find himself in deep trouble here. For if she’d sleep with a man old enough to be her father, strictly for material gain, then what would she be capable of with him?

Never in Luke’s life had he felt the pulling power of his dark side this much. Sure, during his years at uni, he’d sometimes acted foolishly in the sexual sense. Even recklessly. He’d been a bit of a lad over in London too, perhaps because he’d been away from his father’s supposedly good influence for the first time.

But ever since he’d come back to Australia two years ago, he hadn’t wanted wild sexual thrills any more. He’d wanted a more safe, secure and settled life. He’d wanted what his father had had.

Luke stared at his father’s sexy young mistress and realised ruefully his dark side still wanted what his father had had. The nice little woman at home, and this, waiting for him at weekends.

His heart raced just thinking about it.

But they were still only just thoughts, he told himself firmly. He couldn’t, he just couldn’t act on them, no matter how tempting. He would hate himself for ever if he did.

But he still wanted to know everything about his father’s affair, to try to make sense of it all.

“Exactly that,” he bit out. “I want to know how and when you met my father? Who made the first move and why? How often you met and where? I want to know if he truly loved you, or just wanted you for sex. Tell me the whole rotten truth, Ms Gilbert, and this place is yours.”

CHAPTER FOUR

FOR a split second Celia wanted to lash out at him. But then she saw the pain behind Luke’s anger, and sympathy for him washed into her heart.

It was never nice, being confronted with a parent’s fallibility, especially in matters of the flesh. Even more upsetting, at this time in his life, so soon after both his parents’ tragic deaths.

“You’re very angry with your father, aren’t you?” she said softly.

He didn’t move a muscle, except for the one twitching in his jaw.