Seducing The Enemy

When her eyes flicked up again, it was with a look of bland inquiry. “All relationships have their difficulties, don’t you think?” Then with barely a pause she attacked, needing to get under his skin. “How do you feel about the pattern of corruption in your half-brother’s finance ministry? Does it surprise you?”

His mouth twisted in distaste. “Not really. Barry always had his eye on the main chance.”

So he wasn’t blind to his half-brother’s real character. “Did you know about it before his death?”

“Not in any detailed sense. I had little doubt the rumours were true, but it wasn’t my job to look into them, and Barry would never have confessed the truth. He rarely let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. He was a master of manipulation.”

The honesty of his assessment surprised her. He was pulling no punches on his half-brother’s behalf. Was it possible she could be equally honest with him? Would he be satisfied simply to be told the truth? And let everything lie as it was?

She barely held back the urge to do so. To reach out and... But it was crazy to trust a virtual stranger. Even crazier to confide in any relative of Barry Wolfe’s. He might be feeding her lines to see if he hooked something incriminating.

Nevertheless, his comments on his half-brother’s character certainly made sense of why her sister had fallen for Barry Wolfe. Izzie was so impressionable she would have been an easy victim for a man who had the knack of discerning other people’s needs and weaknesses and had no conscience about playing on them. Annabel nursed a bitter resentment at the callous way her sister had been used.

“He abused trust,” she muttered, her eyes flashing her condemnation of such heartless behaviour.

“People whose trust has been abused at an early age tend not to hold much stock in it,” Daniel Wolfe answered her evenly. “Trust becomes a commodity to be used in their favour.”

“You would have defended him?”

“Everyone has the right to a defence, Annabel.”

“Despite how much they hurt others?”

“That’s the law. It’s always a mistake to rush to judgment. Some people are flawed through no fault of their own. They, too, were once innocent before their circumstances in life twisted them into other paths,” he added quietly.

“That doesn’t give them the right to do as they please.”

“No, it doesn’t. Which is why we have prisons.”

But his sympathies lay with his half-brother. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like his legal argument, either, however reasonable it was. There were plenty of people these days who survived their parents’ divorces without turning into criminals who took from others when it suited them. To her mind, Barry Wolfe was a crook and a cad.

Daniel Wolfe probably didn’t want to hear that. Truth was sometimes very unpalatable. He might try to prove something else. His sense of truth and justice might demand that Izzie pay for falling into the Barry trap, regardless of the circumstances or consequences.

The waiter removed their soup plates.

Annabel picked up her pina colada again. Beyond the lit area around the pool, nightfall was turning the trees into dark silhouettes. She listened for the sound of the surf breaking on the beach, wishing she could recapture the sense of peace she’d felt earlier. It was gone. As was freedom. Daniel Wolfe had to be dealt with, one way or another.

“You’re angry,” he observed.

She gave him a derisive look. “You revive what I came here to forget for a while. That doesn’t exactly please me.”

He held her gaze with piercing intensity as he remarked, “One never really escapes from an uneasy conscience.”

Annabel laughed, determined to throw him off that line. “My conscience is absolutely clear.”

The laser eyes kept boring into her. “Were you personally involved with Barry, Annabel?”

She felt her face hardening and knew her eyes blazed with contempt. “Are you asking me if he was my lover?”

His mouth twisted. “Hormones are not necessarily attached to the brain. Many women found Barry irresistible.”

“I found him eminently resistible.” She bit out the words emphatically.

“Yet you did meet him at the motel.”

“As you so properly pointed out earlier, everyone has the right to a defence.” And she would defend Izzie to her last breath. “I was about to kill his career in the public service,” she explained for the umpteenth time. “In the interests of fairness, I would grant even a man I despised one last hearing.”

“Despise is a strong word.”

“You wanted truth. That’s it. Like it or lump it, Daniel,” she fiercely challenged.

“Such strength of feeling usually denotes that one has been personally hurt. Or—” he paused before adding softly “—someone dear to you has been hurt.”

Danger!

Annabel forced herself to calm down, back off. She smiled. Coldly. “Put it down to the passion of a crusader. Barry Wolfe hurt a lot of people. I found his likability offensive. It was a mask of deceit.”

“So you weren’t ever taken in by him on a personal level?”

She waved dismissively. “He had a reputation as a womaniser. Such men have no appeal to me, however superficially charming they are.”

“Then you were armoured against him from the start.”

“Armour suggests I might have been vulnerable.”

“I’ve never known Barry to not get a woman he went after.”

“That’s a sweeping statement. Perhaps he only went after those who showed they were interested.”

“And you weren’t.”

“Not in a million years,” she asserted with lofty disdain. “And he knew it. Which was why—” She stopped, appalled at almost tripping into a pitfall.

“Why what?” he prompted.

Why he tried to get at me in other ways. “He didn’t like me,” she finished with a careless shrug.

“And why he would have enjoyed flirting with your sister, who did like him.”

“Did she?” Annabel raised sceptical eyebrows. “Or was she merely returning charm for charm in the superficial way a political wife does at such functions?”

“You would know best,” he conceded, but the cynical glint in his eyes telegraphed blatant disbelief in Isabel’s innocence.

Annabel felt compelled to cast doubt on his sureness. “You seem biased towards the view that women in general fell like ninepins to the inviting twinkle in Barry Wolfe’s baby blue eyes. Did he seduce your women away from you?”

“A few times. It was a game to him. And a useful barometer to me.”

“You mean you used him as a test of their interest in you?” The cold-bloodedness of it shocked her.

He laughed. “Hardly that. Barry was older, more sophisticated, more knowing in the ways of women and the world. A flashy sports car, flowers, flattery, fancy places and fun usually won the day. I could have followed his education in this area if I’d wanted to compete with him, but I wanted something different.”

“So he didn’t take anyone who really mattered to you,” she remarked, secretly glad he wasn’t seduced by the superficial.

His thick black lashes swept down, and there was a stillness on his face that gave him a shuttered look. “There was one who mattered,” he said quietly.

“What did you do?” she asked, aware she was treading on a sensitive area yet too curious about his reaction—the character of the man—to let it pass.

His smile was chillingly dismissive. “Nothing.”

Annabel couldn’t believe it. “You just let her go to Barry, knowing him for the philanderer he was?”

He shrugged. “The choice was hers.”

“You didn’t put up a fight to keep her?”

His eyes flashed with steely pride. “I want a woman who knows her own mind, Annabel. I want a woman who wants me. Exclusively. I’m grateful to Barry for teaching me that.”

Grateful! She shook her head. The hurt behind the lesson must have been dreadful. However much Daniel Wolfe rationalised what his half-brother had done to him, the cruel competitiveness of the game had surely frozen his heart. No wonder he’d perfected icy control, holding back until he could be certain there was to be no shift of interest.

“Is this why you haven’t married?” she asked softly.

“Tell me why you haven’t,” he countered.

“It never felt right for me.”

He nodded, emanating a satisfaction that she could feel curling around her. Her stomach clenched as she comprehended what it meant. She’d passed the test of being immune to Barry Wolfe’s attractions. He wanted her. Exclusively. He wanted her to want him exclusively.

However much the idea might appeal, it was impossible.

She was a twin.

CHAPTER FIVE

DANIEL found it exciting simply having her walking beside him, climbing the hill together, ostensibly to their cabins. But they were climbing other hills in his mind. Many other hills, with peaks he wanted to reach. With her.

Once she stopped lying.

Didn’t she realise it was holding them back? One bold step from her, and they could be past that hump and travelling down the road of truth. He ached for the chance to experience the kind of communication where there were no secrets, no need to suppress anything, no false images. He longed for an honesty that generated mutual trust, where revealing one’s true self was not a fear but a joyous freedom, where knowledge of each other was not a weapon but a shared pleasure.

What would it take to pull her over the line she’d drawn in her mind? To make her open up to him? Open in every sense. Daniel felt his loins tighten. She was so infinitely desirable.

The white pants-suit flowed around her, clinging and floating, tantalisingly modest and seductive. Her hair leapt into a froth of flame under every light they passed. In every way she was an enthralling embodiment of fire and ice. He’d never wanted a woman as much. He’d thought what he craved was unattainable, but Annabel Parker held the promise of it. He could feel it...just out of reach.

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