Innocent Mistress

“Put your arms around me?” Cate asked.

“You know where this could lead,” Jude said into her hair. “You’re far too beautiful for me to resist.”

“I want to forget everything for a little while.”

“Is that the only reason?” He turned her to look at him.

“Sex can be very liberating.” There was more than a hint of bravado in her tone.

“I asked if that was the only reason.”

Her expression changed. “You know it isn’t.”

Margaret Way takes great pleasure in her work and works hard at her pleasure. She enjoys tearing off to the beach with her family at weekends, loves haunting galleries and auctions and is completely given over to French champagne “for every possible joyous occasion.” She was born and educated in the river city of Brisbane, Australia, and now lives within sight and sound of beautiful Moreton Bay.

Innocent Mistress

Margaret Way

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

AFTER the well-heeled, well-endowed Poppy Gooding left his office in a swirl of silken perfume, Jude carefully wiped any lingering trace of lipstick from his mouth, then straightened his tie.

“Play it cool, Jude,” he advised himself.

It didn’t help. He knew he’d had about as many of Poppy’s come-ons as he could comfortably deal with. He’d never met a girl so oversexed. He suddenly recalled a movie about sexual harassment in the workplace in which the man was the victim. Poppy’s behaviour wasn’t as dastardly as that woman’s had been but her methods of seduction were at the very least questionable. Poppy completely lacked the degree of reserve one saw in properly brought up young ladies—although maybe that thought belonged in the Dark Ages… She most certainly wasn’t a virgin, but then virginity wasn’t as valuable as it used to be, either. The key point was that Jude had to stop her before she removed her clothes. Or his. He was the guy who’d always considered mixing business and pleasure high risk. In this instance it could see him right out of a high paid job.

After months of trying to fend her off he’d come to the conclusion Poppy had big plans for him. He was even tempted to get it over with and prove a big disappointment. Two of the guys in the firm, fellow associates, had given service beyond the call of duty. Maybe it was a required course of action? At present he was the guy holding out, resulting in a lot of ribbing from his colleagues.

The big problem was that it would be a bad, bad move to offend her. Her father just happened to be his boss, Leonard Gooding, senior partner in the prestigious firm of Gooding, Carter and Legge, corporate lawyers. Being invited into this firm usually didn’t happen for years, if ever, but he’d earned a lot of kudos along the way. He’d graduated top of his law class with first class honours. He was a good athlete, track and field which didn’t hurt, either—even couch potatoes like Leonard Gooding were sports mad. He could only be thankful Poppy had spent the previous six months overseas, no doubt spending a goodly portion of her father’s money. It was Poppy, the collector, who’d made the running almost from the day she laid eyes on him.

Women smiled on Jude. He’d be a fool not to have noticed, though it took them a little time to realize how keen he was on his bachelor status. He was twenty-eight years old. There was a lot of exasperating talk about his “blue, blue eyes” among the girls in the office. Blue eyes apparently scored well. The articled clerk, Vanessa, had even told him she wanted to pass his blue eyes on to her children. Even so Vanessa didn’t put him on the defensive like Poppy.

City life had enforced his entrenched view of women. Every last one of them was after a husband—preferably a rich one—they’d been brought up that way. It was intimidating for guys. Some of them thought Jude, as a husband, would do nicely.

The only thing was, he wasn’t in the running. Not yet. Most guys were happy to start considering marriage when they got to thirty or so but he wasn’t sure he would. Not that he played unobtainable—he’d had lots of nice girl-friends—but there were huge problems after The Knot had been tied. Marriage after the marvellous heady flush of the Big Day was a big letdown. Women seemed to live for the day alone as if they were no ever-after to occupy their time. The fabulous wedding dress—it needed to be white, the veil, the masses and masses of flowers, the picturesque church, the reception, just family and friends that turned into a crowd of four hundred. In his opinion, and on the evidence, they’d been planning it since they changed booties for shoes. The trouble was the excitement didn’t last and lots of times neither did the attraction.

Statistics proved too many marriages didn’t work out. Some of his clients had been married two and three times and they sure as hell didn’t give the appearance of being happy. In fact most of them had a henpecked look. Jude didn’t want his marriage—if he ever stopped flinching away from the hazards—to be a dismal failure. He didn’t want to see another kid, like himself, suffer. If the saddest thing in the world was a mother losing her child, it was just as sad to be a child losing its mother.

These days he got by playing fancy-free man-about-town. A month ago he’d made it into a list of the Ten Sexiest Men in the city, though he’d never returned the call of the woman journalist who had started the whole nonsense. In any event she turned up a glossy photo of him at a function and used that under the heading Local Heartthrob. There was no point in being outraged. Vanessa had made a bumper sticker of it and somehow managed to fix it to the back of his car. All the beeps and the cheeky little waves finally aroused his suspicions and he had stopped in a loading zone and ripped it off. No one seemed to take it seriously anyway, so he’d shrugged off the ribbing. It was a crazy world. Sometimes it didn’t seem worthwhile a quiet, country boy like himself trying to hold the line.

Nevertheless he’d changed a lot since his university days. Now he had to dress in sharp suits, shirts and ties, even his socks had been labelled cool by that journalist. He could kill her. Cool socks? That was a brain wave. His unruly blond hair—always had too much curl in it—was cut just right according to Bobbi his secretary who from the beginning had taken pity on him and told him the in places to shop, even where to have his hair cut. He no longer had short back and sides and as a result it skimmed his collar. He couldn’t stop it flicking up all over the place. He’d long ceased trying. The guy at the unisex salon who’d cut it told Jude with a roll of his eyes he was a dead ringer for some famous actor. For an eye-popping minute there Jude had thought the man with the scissors was going to kiss him, but no, he settled for a friendly squeeze on the shoulder.

The fact was he’d taken years to get himself together. He’d always liked to be comfortable, even sloppy. T-shirt, jeans, sneekers. He liked going to the gym, working out, as he was still an athlete at heart—he’d even won a bridge-to-city run. For public display he’d had to change in a hurry; he had to look like what he was, a young lawyer on the fast track, cited to get to the top. At the beginning he hadn’t minded Poppy’s advances all that much—he was as open to temptation as the next guy—if only she could have kept it low-key.

He’d never expected it would please Leonard Gooding who had the kind of granite face you wouldn’t wish on anyone—what if it came out in Poppy’s children?—if Jude became involved in a meaningful relationship with his only child. The possibilities for Leonard Gooding’s future son-in-law were limitless. Hints were already being thrown around about a full partnership by thirty, access to the top clients. There would be fresh territory to roam, an introduction to the charmed world of the hyperrich. Jude would have to laugh at all their jokes and let them beat him at golf.

Born and bred in the middle of nowhere, a small North Queensland sugar town, Jude sometimes thought he might be able to get used to that kind of life. He hadn’t studied as hard as he had to be a loser. His much loved Dad had been so proud of him. But then he had to confront a formidable truth. He saw no real possibility of ever selling his soul no matter the rewards.

The only way out for him was if Poppy got interested in someone else and the sooner the better. He realised however hard he worked, however smart he was supposed to be, it wasn’t beyond Gooding to turn on him at a moment’s notice and engineer his dismissal from the firm. Leonard Gooding was a shark.

Jude walked restlessly to the panoramic plate-glass window that overlooked the broad sweep of the River City. At this time of the afternoon the impressive steel and glass commercial towers were turned to columns of gold by the slanting rays of the sun. Any self-respecting shrink could diagnose his deeply ingrained resistance to matrimony as the by-product of his childhood. His mother had abandoned the best and kindest man in the world, his father. She’d abandoned him, her only child. That single event had influenced his entire mode of thinking.

“My gorgeous boy!”

That was the way she’d used to greet him. What a joke! It depressed him to even think about it. She’d never meant it at all. She was only acknowledging that physically he’d taken after her. He’d been a bright kid going on twelve, thinking all was right with his world, when she took off for the beckoning horizons. He only found out years later when his father finally told him the whole pathetic story, that his mother had gone away with a rich American tourist who had been holidaying at the luxury hotel where she was receptionist. His mother in those days was a knock-out. She was probably still able to turn heads with her golden blond hair, big melting blue eyes and luscious figure. According to his all-forgiving father no man could be blamed for falling in love with Jude’s mother, Sally. Sally was perfect.

It took Jude years to come to the realisation that when it came to his mother, his father had been one gullible fool. Even as a kid he’d been edgily aware that his mother who the gang he hung around with described as “hot” was a habitual flirt. She gave off allure like a body scent. Probably the rich Texan hadn’t been her first affair. At the time his father told him his mother needed a more exciting life. The town was a rural backwater.

“Sally wants a real taste of life. She’s so beautiful! She deserves more than I can give her.”

Did that excuse being unfaithful? Jude didn’t think so. His father had let himself be seen as dull and boring when the fact was he had been a clever, industrious, respected town lawyer. He loved books, revered literature. He loved music, too, classical, jazz, opera and he adored big game fishing. He had such a great sense of humour. Much as Jude’s father had grieved, extraordinarily he’d never held a grudge against his wife.

Jude did. Unlike his father he’d never wished his mother all the best. He and his father had been betrayed and Jude had learned the lesson that women weren’t to be trusted. They cheated on their husbands. If they didn’t get what they wanted, they moved on. If his father continued to love his mother until the day he died, Jude took the opposite stand. He might be thought hard and judgmental, but he hated her for sucking all the life out of his father who died soon after Jude made it into the firm. His father had flown to Brisbane so they could have a celebratory dinner together. He’d been so proud, telling Jude before he left, his dearest wish was that Jude would have a much better life than he had.

“Find the right girl. Marry her. Give me grandchildren. You’re the one who always kept me going, Jude. I’ve lived for you, son. You’ve done me proud.”

Trying to make his father proud was what had given him the edge, driven him to succeed. Then his father up and died on him. At least he’d been doing what he loved—big game fishing. He and a couple of his life-long pals were out on Calypso when a freak electrical storm hit. The waves, reportedly, had been huge. His father and one of his friends had been washed overboard. Both perished in the Coral Sea. Despite a wide search their bodies had never been found.

How I miss him! Jude thought, grief locked deep inside him. The town had given him all the sympathy in the world when he flew home for the memorial service. He and his dad had always been popular. He was the local boy made good. Now that he had a real chance of making it up to his dad for all his sacrifices his dad wasn’t around. Successful as he’d become the loss of his father shadowed Jude’s life. There’s no end to love in the human heart; no end to grief when love is lost.

Bobbi, Jude’s secretary tapped lightly on his door, breaking up his melancholy reflections.

“Manage to get rid of her?” Her hazel eyes were full of wry humour. Bobbi was petite, attractive, power dressed and happily engaged. Since he’d been with the firm she’d proved a real friend and a great legal secretary, loyal, thorough and accurate. He got on well with her sports reporter fiancé, Bryan as well.

“Don’t look so damned happy,” Jude groaned. “It was really, really hard.” He moved back to his desk. “Poppy Gooding has deluded herself into thinking she fancies me.”

“And how!” Bobbi choked on a laugh. “I nearly had cardiac arrest when she shoved past me. She mightn’t look like Leonard—she must get down on her knees every night and thank the Lord for it—but she’s a bulldozer just like him. She only wants you for your body, friend.”

“Why the heck me?” he asked in extreme irritation.

He really means it, Bobbi thought. Jude Conroy, every girl’s dream! A drop-dead gorgeous hunk with those dreamy, dreamy blue eyes! He even had a fan club in the building. If she and Bryan weren’t destined for each other Bobbi thought she’d have thrown her own cap in the ring.

“Want me to put around the rumour you’re gay?” she asked drolly.

He shot her a sharp glance that softened into his white lopsided grin. It made even the faithful Bobbi’s heart execute a little dance. If he wanted to, Jude could star in a toothpaste commercial.

“I doubt that would stop Poppy. She’d think she was the one girl who could turn a man around. What I need right now is a vacation.”

His cell phone rang when he was walking to his car later that afternoon. It was Bobbi on the line, her voice flustered.

“Listen, I just had a guy on the phone, kind of snarly sort of guy I bet kicks his dog, severely put out you weren’t here—name of Ralph Rogan. Says you know him. Wants to speak to you ASAP. Sounded like you were sleeping with his wife. I told him you were due for an important meeting that should break up around four. Number is—your part of the world curiously—got a pen?”

“Give it to me, I’ll remember.”

She laughed. “Jude, you’re a human calculator.”

“Right.” He had a special thing with numbers. Even as a kid he’d been able to add up stacks of them in his head not that kids used those skills anymore. Bobbi gave it to him and from the area code he immediately identified his area of Far Northern Queensland. He didn’t need any introduction to Ralph. Ralph Rogan was the son of the richest man in his home town of Isis and one of the richest men in the tropical north. Jude’s dad had been Lester Rogan’s solicitor and close confidant. Rogan Senior had trusted no one except Jude’s father. Jude and Ralph had gone to school together but they had never been friends. More like adversaries. The hostility was an on-going state of affairs exacerbated by Ralph’s “problems” with his domineering father. Rogan Senior had wanted and expected his son to shine, to come out on top. Ralph never had. Even as a boy he’d been to use Bobbi’s word, “snarly,” a bully who traded on the fact his father practically owned the town and huge tracts of land for development. It had to be something serious for Ralph to get on the phone to Jude. As soon as the meeting was over he’d place a call.

Piercing screams woke him, screams that echoed around the mansion. The minute Ralph Rogan heard his mother’s frenzied cries, he knew something was very wrong. It had to be his father. His father had been diagnosed with atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries. It wasn’t surprising after a lifetime of indulgence, eating, drinking, smoking, womanising. Despite the warnings it never occurred to him to give anything up. With any luck he was dead. Ralph had lost every skerrick of affection for that big bull of a man who was his father. He didn’t consider he closely resembled his father at the same age.

Ralph shot out of bed, pulling on jeans and a shirt in a great hurry. He didn’t bother finding shoes. He rushed into the hallway, covering the not inconsiderable distance to his father’s suite in the west wing in record time. His mother and father hadn’t shared a bedroom in years. In his arrogance and insensitivity—Lester Rogan thought of his wife and children as property—he’d brought in workman to turn several rooms of the family mansion into a self-contained suite for himself. Ralph’s long-suffering mother had no back bone. She was a thin pitiful thing these days and she’d been left out in the cold. His father was like that: a law unto himself. That’s what came of too much money and power.

Inside the massive bedroom with its heavy Victorian furniture inappropriate to the climate Ralph found his mother slumped to the floor beside his father’s bed. She was sobbing bitterly, her thin body convulsing as though shocked and grieved out of her mind.

“I couldn’t sleep. I knew something had happened.” She turned her head, choking on her tears. “He’s gone, Ralph. He’s gone.”

“And good riddance.” Ralph Rogan let a lifetime of bitterness and resentment rip out. For moments he stood staring at his father’s body, his heavy, handsome face dark with brooding, a thick blue vein throbbing in his temple. Eventually he moved to check if his father was indeed dead. A huge man in life, in death Lester Rogan looked surprisingly lighter, shorter, his mouth thrown open and his jaw slack. His eyes were still open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Ralph reached down to shut them, but abruptly drew back as if the corpse would rise up and bite him. He didn’t want to touch the man who had treated him so badly, who had never shown an ounce of pleasure or pride in him. All he’d received were insults and humiliations, comparisons with that clever bastard, Jude Conroy, the Golden Boy.

“He’s dead all right!” Coldly he informed his weeping mother, throwing the sheet over his father’s face with something approaching violence. “I’ll get Atwell over. He’ll have to sign the death certificate.” Ralph cast another disgusted look at his mother, before drawing her to her feet. “What the hell are you crying about, Ma?” he demanded in genuine amazement. “He treated you like dirt. He never had a kind word for you. He kicked you out of his bed. He had other women.”

“I loved him,” his mother said, disengaging herself from her son’s hard grasp and collapsing into one of the huge maroon leather armchairs custom built for her husband. It dwarfed her. “We were happy once.”

Ralph’s laugh was near wild. “What a load of drivel! It must have been a lifetime ago. There’s never been any happiness in this house. You’ll have to pull yourself together while I phone Atwell. Where’s Jinx?”

“Please don’t call your sister that, Ralph,” his mother pleaded. “Sometimes you’re so cruel.”

He rounded on her, tall and burly, deep-set dark eyes, large straight nose, square jaw, already at twenty-eight carrying too much weight. “I didn’t give her the nickname, remember? It was Dad. Okay, where’s Mel?”

“Here, Ralph.” A light soprano voice spoke from the door. “He can’t be dead.” Melinda Rogan cast one horrified glance at the sheeted figure on the bed, then advanced fearfully into the room.

“He is, darling.” Myra Rogan answered, holding out her hand to her dressing gowned daughter. Melinda was two years younger than her brother, a pretty young woman with her mother’s small neat features, soft brown hair and grey eyes.

“Well I’ll be damned!” Ralph mocked. “He never did a thing the doc told him.”

“It’s such a shock, Ralph.” Melinda swallowed on the hard lump in her throat. Bravely she went to tend to her mother, putting her arms around Myra’s thin shoulders. “Don’t weep for him, Mum,” she said gently, her own eyes bright with unshed tears. Death was death after all. “He never showed you any kindness.”

“He did once,” Myra insisted, rocking herself back and forth.

“Oh, yeah, when?” Ralph busy pushing buttons on the phone looked towards them to bark.

Myra tried to think when her husband had been kind to her. “Before you were born, a few years after that,” she said vaguely. Lester Rogan had taken little notice of his daughter.

“So he never cared for me from day one,” Ralph snarled.

“That’s not true. He loved you. He had great plans for you.” The fact that these plans never worked out was not always Lester’s fault.

Abruptly Ralph held up a staying hand, speaking into the phone to his father’s doctor.

“Here, Mum,” Melinda found a box of tissues. Copious tears were streaming down her mother’s face, dampening the front of her nightgown. Once her mother had been pretty, but for years now she had been neglecting herself, horribly aware her husband had no use for her.

“Atwell will be here in twenty minutes,” Ralph informed them. “Could you please stop all that hypocritical blubbing, Mum, and get yourself dressed. That man in the bed there—” he jerked a thumb over his shoulder “—has done us a huge favour. At long last we’re free of him and his cruel tongue.”

“Surely you mean at long last you can get your hands on the money,” Melinda challenged, suddenly looking at her brother as though he were the enemy. “You’re head of the family now. I tell you what, Ralph, I’ll take a bet you’ll turn out no better than Dad.”

It was hours before Ralph Rogan was able to make his phone call to his old sparring partner, Jude Conroy. Good old Jude, the big success story. The hotshot lawyer. There was no love lost between them. Once when they were kids, around thirteen, Conroy had whipped him good and proper for bullying some new kid, a snivelling little runt, small as a girl, who’d been admitted to their excellent boys’ school on scholarship. Ralph had never forgotten lying on the ground, wiping the blood from his nose and his mouth—a loose tooth. It was easy to beat up other kids. It was humiliating to be beaten up yourself. One day he swore he’d get even with Jude Conroy, school hero, champion of the underdog, young lion. Even Ralph’s mother had said he’d probably deserved his beating, taking Conroy’s side.

His father and Conroy’s father had been real close. Matthew Conroy had been his dad’s solicitor. Conroy knew all the secrets and he’d taken them down to the deep with him. Now Ralph was going to need a solicitor and loathe as he was to contact Jude, he knew he had to. Matthew Conroy had drawn up his father’s will but in the event of his death Lester Rogan had appointed Jude executor.

Lester Rogan’s funeral was underway before a young woman slipped into the back pew of the church. She knelt for a moment, then sat back quietly. A navy silk scarf was wound around her hair in such a way not a tendril escaped. She wore a simple navy shift dress. A few people at the back of the church turned to glance at her. Most were caught up in the eulogies, as first Ralph Rogan, then various towns-people walked to the podium to endeavour to say a few words for the late Lester Rogan, whose real estate kingdom included half the town and stretched for miles.