Mistress Of Deception

So that when she swept her arms up around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers in a kiss far more brutal than any she’d ever sought before, his only thoughts were of what awaited him behind her bedroom door.

‘I hate you,’ she choked out when he scooped her up into his arms and carried her into that bedroom.

His blue eyes glittered in the semi-darkness. ‘I love the way you hate, Ebony. Keep it up.’ And with that, he dropped her on the bed and started stripping off her clothes.

CHAPTER TWO

EBONY woke the next morning knowing that she finally hated Alan Carstairs.

It had been a long time coming.

At fifteen, she had hero-worshipped him. At sixteen, she’d developed a full-blown schoolgirl crush. By seventeen, she was constantly fantasising about him, till finally, at eighteen, she’d made an utter fool of herself over the man.

She cringed at the still sharp memory of her throwing herself at him in the library that night four years ago, gushing with adolescent stupidity that he must love her if he’d paid for her out of his own pocket all these years. He hadn’t known what had hit him when she’d upped and kissed him. How ironic that it had probably been his momentary but stunning response to that foolish kiss that had been responsible for what had happened three years later.

Oh, he’d stopped the kiss soon enough, well before he could have been accused of tampering with her morals. But the memory of his tongue thrusting deep into her mouth, of his arms tightening like steel bands around her even for a split-second, had been enough to keep fuelling her fantasy that underneath his bluster he loved her and wanted her.

And she’d naively told him so.

Of course, he’d torn strips off her at the time, telling her she was acting like a silly little fool, that his paying for her had been his way of showing gratitude to her father who’d once lent him money when no one else would, that he considered her guardianship a sacred trust that could not and would not be sullied by him, that his briefly kissing her back had been meant as a savage lesson on what could happen if a hormone-filled teenager like herself fell into the wrong hands.

She’d finally believed him that night, shame and embarrassment making her flee his presence. How she had cried and cried! Nothing Mrs Carstairs said—and the dear woman had tried everything— could make her stop. All Ebony had been able to think of was that she couldn’t stay in that house, seeing Alan every day, reliving her moment of humiliation, living off his charity. She had seized on this last reason as an excuse to flee him, and his house, as soon as she could.

But she hadn’t been able to forget him, no matter what she’d done. Hard work and a busy and varied social life had filled her hours, but not her heart.

Gary Stevenson had come into her life when she’d been a very vulnerable twenty. Still a virgin, despite her physical beauty attracting many admirers, Gary had become first her photographer, then her friend, and finally her lover.

Why had she given in to him and not the others?

He’d been good to her. Sweet. Kind, And one night he had caught her at a very weak moment. Afterwards, there had seemed to be no going back. And in truth, she’d found much comfort in the human closeness of their affair, in having Gary hold her and tell her that he adored the ground she walked on. Oh, he hadn’t pretended to really love her, which had been a relief in a way. His being in love with her might have made her feel guilty. But he’d liked her and desired her and, in the end, had even asked her to marry him. They would go to Paris together, he’d said, and become a raging success.

She had had to refuse, of course, and, though disappointed, Gary had not been heart-broken, taking himself off to Paris anyway while she had gone on with her modelling here in Sydney. For a while, she’d been very depressed and lonely, thinking she’d done the wrong thing. But then the unexpected had happened. Alan had become her lover, and she’d quickly found that what she’d experienced in bed with Gary had not prepared her for the intoxicating excitement and wickedly irresistible rapture of being in Alan’s arms.

Which is why I’m here now, she groaned silently, and threw a pained look across at Alan’s sleeping form.

God, why do I let him do this to me—take my self-respect and pride and grind it into the dust, make me say and do things when I know he doesn’t love me? He told me the morning after the first night I slept with him. He loves Adrianna. What he feels for me is nothing but lust, an uncontrollably mad lust.

Ebony could still recall the horror she’d felt when he’d told her that, and then added that he wanted to keep their relationship a secret from the world, and especially his mother. Their passion for each other would pass, he’d claimed. No need to hurt anybody with the knowledge of their liaison when it was only a fleeting thing.

Yet all the while he’d been saying this, she had been hurting. More than hurting—breaking into little pieces. She’d argued with him on this last score, wanting him at least to recognise in public that she was his woman. But no…People would not understand, he’d said. They’d talk.

So he’d kept her as a hole-and-corner mistress, to be visited in the dead of night, to be used for his pleasure in private while the world at large saw them as almost enemies.

And she had gone along with it, despising herself while counting the days till he came to her again, then vainly trying to salvage some pride by never showing any affection or special consideration towards him, by reducing his visits to nothing more than raw sexual encounters, with no love or warmth involved. There was a perverse pleasure in taunting him with her cold indifference to whether he came or not, in letting him think that there were plenty of other fish in the sea to fill her empty bed if he wasn’t in it, in feeding his crazed jealousies that she might actually do some of the things she did with him with other lovers.

As if she would. Not even Gary had been able to coax such intimacies from her, or such abandonment. Only Alan…

Tears filled Ebony’s eyes, but she dashed them away with the backs of her hands. The time for tears was long gone. Now it was time for action.

Last night had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that she had no strength against Alan’s sexual power over her. No matter how angry with him she was, he only had to touch her and she was lost.

And it would always be that way, she agonised. Love him or hate him, she was his for the taking whenever he wanted her. It was this mortifying realisation that propelled her not to change her mind from what she had already decided she must do— go to Paris with Gary.

Shivering a little, she slipped out of the warmth of the bed and dragged on her white bathrobe over her naked and vaguely aching body. She flushed guiltily to think it had been herself—and not Alan— who had been the insatiable one last night. Was it because she had known this would be the last time?

Probably. Even now, the temptation to return to that bed, to rouse him from sleep with her hands and lips, to…

A bitter taste filled her mouth. Maybe it was just that she needed to clean her teeth, or maybe it was the self-hate rising from within. Whatever, she suddenly felt unclean, wicked, rotten to the core. She had to get away from him, from Sydney, from Australia. That was the only answer.

Slipping quietly out into the lounge-room, she picked up her telephone and dialled the number she’d written on the notebook resting beside it.

‘The Ramada,’ the hotel receptionist answered.

‘Could you put me through to Gary Stevenson’s room, please?’

‘Certainly, madam.’

Ebony’s eyes flicked anxiously over at the bedroom door while waiting for Gary to answer. She hoped Alan wouldn’t wake up. Instinct warned her she must keep her plans a secret. Alan must never find out, not till she was safely on that plane.

A bleary-voiced Gary finally came on the line. ‘Hello.’

‘It’s Ebony,’ she said quickly, huskily. ‘I need to see you. This morning. Will you be in around nine?’

‘Sure thing, love. What’s the urgency? You’ve already turned me down. Again.’

‘I’ve had second thoughts. Sort of.’

‘Only “sort of”?’

‘We need to talk.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Not on the phone.’

‘Why not?’

She hesitated, then said softly, ‘I’m not alone.’

Gary’s chuckle was dark. ‘So that’s the way it is, eh? What’s the problem? Won’t he take the hint he’s no longer wanted?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I see…’ His sigh was weary. ‘Well, get rid of him temporarily, love, and get over here pronto. If you feel as bad as you sound, then methinks you need a shoulder to cry on.’

A lump filled her throat. ‘You’re so good to me, Gary.’

‘Yeah, yeah, all my exes say that. I’m a good bloke. But tell me one thing. How come in the movies—and I suspect in life—it’s always the bad guy who ends up with the girl? Oh, never mind. I’ll be here when you get here, love. See you.’ And he hung up.

Ebony lowered the receiver silently back into its cradle, but, when she turned, there was Alan, standing in the open doorway, thunder on his face.

‘You can’t marry Stevenson,’ he ground out. ‘You don’t love him.’

She glared at him, standing there in the nude, as arrogant as you please. And as lethally attractive. Not an ounce of fat graced his tall, lean body, a light covering of dark hair giving him a primitive appeal. Put a spear in his hand and he would make a good savage, she thought bitterly.

‘How do you know?’ she said, using her fingers to comb her tangled hair back from her face till it fell into a sleek black curtain down her back.

‘Because you’re incapable of loving any man,’ he stated harshly.

Her short bark of laughter was half disbelief, half mocking. ‘Certainly not a man like you!’

His blue eyes blazed for a second before adopting an expression of cold contempt. ‘Then why keep going to bed with me?’

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps I’m a masochist.’

‘A hedonist, perhaps, not a masochist. You enjoy pleasure, Ebony, not pain. And you can’t deny I give you pleasure.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of denying it.’

When she moved to brush past him on the way to the bathroom, his hand shot out to enclose her upper arm in a vice-like grip. ‘You can’t go from me to Stevenson,’ he rasped.

She locked eyes with him, aware of nothing but the emotional quaver in his voice. Could that be love talking? she puzzled briefly before dismissing such a stupid notion. No. Not love. Possessiveness. Jealousy. Male ego. But not love. Alan’s heart already belonged elsewhere. If he had a heart, that was. She was beginning to doubt it.

‘I have to talk to him,’ she admitted, then added, ‘I have to tell him personally that I’m not going to marry him.’

There was no way she could have mistaken the relief in Alan’s eyes. But that didn’t prove anything, except he wasn’t ready yet to give up his private supply of free sex. Free in every way. Emotionally, financially and physically. What man would want to give up such a cushy arrangement?

When he went to draw her back into his arms, she yanked out of his grasp and took a step backwards. ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘I have to shower and dress. Then I’m leaving.’

‘What happened to breakfast?’

‘I’m not having any. If you want some, get it yourself.’

His smile was sardonic. ‘So kind of you.’

‘Oh, but I’m not kind, Alan. There again, you don’t want me for my kindness, do you?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Then don’t complain. You’ve got your way. I’m not marrying Gary. What more do you want from me?’

‘Not a thing,’ he bit out.

‘Then if you’ll excuse me?’

He watched her sweep into the bathroom, black anger in his heart. What more did he want of her? He wanted her to grovel at his feet, to beg him to visit her more often, to suffer from the same type of blind, obsessive need that was even now sending the blood pounding through his veins, making his flesh expand into a tight, painful instrument of torture.

Only an instinct that seducing Ebony this morning might rebound on him in some way made him put that solution to his frustration aside. All he could do was wait for her to leave and then he would plunge his pained body beneath the coldest of showers till he could comfortably face the day ahead.

Meanwhile he would dive back under the bedcovers and pass the time contemplating the many and varied ways he could exact vengeance on this creature who had been tying him in knots for years.

Yes, years!

Four, to be exact. He couldn’t count the first three. She’d spent most of them in boarding-school. And while at fifteen she’d been a budding beauty, her shy, almost introverted nature at that time had protected her from male admiration, his own included.

Not that he would have dreamt of seeing Pierre’s daughter in that light, especially at such a tender age. No, he was not guilty of that, thank God. Still, he remembered having enjoyed her company when he’d taken her on the occasional outing back then, finding her opinions surprisingly mature and her gestures of gratitude towards him quite touching. He actually still kept a pair of gold cuff-links she’d given him for his twenty-eighth birthday, after saving the money herself from delivering pamphlets during the school holidays.

Where had that sweet child gone to? he wondered. When had she turned from virgin to vamp?

A type of guilt twisted his heart. Surely it couldn’t have been his fault, could it? That night, in the library…She’d caught him unawares, kissing him like that. For a few seconds he’d completely lost control. Hell, he could still recall how it had felt as her soft, breathless mouth had flowered eagerly open to accept the thrust of his tongue, as well as the way her heart had beat madly against his.

For a split-second, he’d wanted to forget his conscience and just drown in her delicious young body. He’d been tempted to take it for his pleasure and his pleasure alone, knowing he could seduce her virginal flesh quite easily, knowing he could mould and form her, body and soul, to his wants and needs.

She wouldn’t have stopped him. He knew it. So in the end he had had to stop himself. He’d thought himself so right, so noble, so…good. He’d been made her guardian, for God’s sake, not her corrupter. Not even her teenage declaration of undying love had swayed his determination to put aside such a wicked temptation. Not then, nor during the subsequent years as she’d gone from child to woman, from a shy and somewhat awkward teenager to a sophisticated and successful model, had he wavered in his resolve.

The crunch had come, predictably enough, at her twenty-first birthday party. He should have known seeing her on that occasion would be his undoing. It had been three years before, on her eighteenth birthday, that his lust had first raised its ugly head. Till then, he’d only ever seen Ebony in either her school uniform or shapeless jeans and tops. Teenage girls never seemed to wear anything else.

But that fateful night, his mother had bought her a white lace dress that might have been virginal on the peg. On eighteen-year-old Ebony, complete with make-up and high heels, it looked so seductive that it was criminal. When Alan had spotted her coming down the stairs, his heart had stopped beating. Not so the rest of his body. It had leapt with a desire so fierce and so instant that he’d been thunderstruck.

He’d stared at Ebony and she had stared right back, those deep black eyes of hers showing not a hint of understanding of what was happening to him. Had she understood? Was that why she’d been so shocked that evening in the library a few months later when he’d knocked her back, scorned her offer of love?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Ebony’s thoughts and motives were a mystery to him. She was a mystery. Sometimes he wondered if those three years of sacrifice had all been a wicked waste. Maybe at eighteen she’d already started on her sexual journey; maybe she hadn’t been a virgin at all.

She certainly hadn’t been a virgin three years later. And how!

There was no peace for his flesh as he recalled what Ebony had done to him the night of her twenty-first birthday. No peace at all.

She’d been a bit tipsy, of course, and the guests had left. But that was no excuse for stripping off all her clothes and blatantly going swimming in the pool in the nude in full view of him. She’d claimed afterwards she hadn’t known he was there, but he didn’t believe her. She’d been watching out for him all night, baiting him, tempting him.

Besides, there’d been no resistance whatsoever when she’d climbed out of the water and he’d come forward to draw her dripping nakedness against him, nor when he’d claimed her supposedly startled mouth in a hungry kiss. She’d been more than willing to let him touch her all over, to take her right there by the pool, to carry her back to his room where he’d worked his will upon her body all night.

Naturally, he had heard the rumours about her, but rumours about models were rife and not always true. For some inexplicable reason, he’d been reluctant to believe she could be as promiscuous as people said she was. He had found out that night that she was all that and more. Never had he known a woman so wild and wanton and willing. She was sex mad, he decided. Totally sex mad. Just like her father.

His first thought the next morning had been that he had to keep what had happened from his mother, as he’d kept from her the rumours about Ebony’s private life. His mother thought Ebony a sweet, old-fashioned girl and he didn’t want to destroy that illusion, or the close relationship the two women enjoyed.

Maybe he had explained it badly to the naked girl in his arms. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, though he suspected he had. But what was to be gained by dressing up reality with false words of love? It wasn’t as though she were an innocent, whose sensitive feelings had to be treated with kid gloves.

They lusted after each other. That was the plain and unvarnished truth. In a way, it was fortuitous that Ebony was of such a highly sexed nature, since not many women would have endured the kind of unrestrained lovemaking he’d insisted upon in an effort to rid himself of his own insatiable need. With a bit of luck, he might not need any repeat performance.

Or so he had deluded himself at the time.

Alan made a scoffing sound just as Ebony came out of the bathroom, made-up but not dressed. She was breathtakingly nude, the exquisiteness of her beauty stabbing at his heart. And elsewhere.

God, but Mother Nature had been cruel, sending a creature like her to torment him. Or was it the devil himself who had fashioned that incredible face and body? Yes, that sounded right. Who but Satan would be wicked enough to combine all those assets, to give one woman everything that a man could possibly want? Long, silken black hair that screamed out to be stroked; exotic, thickly lashed ebony eyes that flashed fire and promised pleasure at the same time; a full-lipped smouldering mouth which would tempt a saint. And that was only her face.

Her body was another dimension, another hell to be endured. High, pointy breasts with large pink areolae and long, sensitive nipples, a delightfully tiny waist, deliciously curvaceous hips and long, long legs that wound their shapely way down to dainty ankles and feet.

Then there was her skin…

What man wouldn’t want to run his hands over her skin, the pale magnolia-like skin whose texture was like cool velvet, till it was heated by desire. Then it would glow. It was glowing now. But not with passion. With the heat of the shower. Her eyes were cold as they raked over him.

‘You still here?’ she said scathingly.

He gnashed his teeth as she went about dressing in front of him, first drawing on a silk black teddy, then sliding into a black woollen jumpsuit.

Black was Ebony’s trademark. She wore nothing else, modelled nothing else. So was her lack of smiling, her full lips looking far better fashioned into a sullen, sulky or seductive pout.

Alan would have thought that such restrictions would have been disastrous to her career, but, surprisingly, it had all worked in her favour, creating an individual and highly sensual image that kept her and her agency busy.

‘I have to go, Alan,’ she said briskly, popping on black pumps before picking up a black holdall and heading for the bedroom door. Only then did she stop for an indifferent look at him over her shoulder. ‘Lock up when you leave, will you? And wash up any mess you make.’

One day, Alan thought as he lay there, fuming. One day he was going to wipe that cool composure from that beautiful face of hers. One day he was going to make her cry. And what would he do? Walk away. That was what he’d do.

Oh, sure, sure, came a dark, cynical voice.

Flinging back the sheet, Alan leapt from the bed and marched into the bathroom where he snapped on the cold water jets. Bracing himself, he stepped under the freezing cold spray, telling himself it was penance for his sins.

He must have had a lot of sins on his soul, for he had to stay in the shower for a long, long time.

CHAPTER THREE

EBONY slumped into the back seat of the taxi, strain telling on her face. The façade she always put on in a vain attempt to punish Alan was beginning to take its toll. How long before she actually became that person for real? Brittle and cynical and cruel.

It was the cruel part that bothered her the most.

There was no doubt about it. She had to get out from under the crippling effects of this appalling affair before she self-destructed.

Sighing, Ebony closed her eyes, her head tipping back against the seat. It wasn’t far from her flat in Randwick to the Ramada Hotel, but at eight-thirty in the morning she was in for at least half an hour’s run into the city. Might as well try to rest.

Rest was not on the agenda for her troubled soul that morning, however. She was too full of regrets and bitter recriminations, the main one being why she had allowed Alan to become her lover in the first place. There’d been no seduction, no courtship, no nothing. All he’d done was look at her a few times on the night of her twenty-first birthday party.

But that was all it had taken to start her heart beating madly for him, not to mention make her grasp at straws where his feelings were concerned, especially when once or twice she had surprised him staring at her with desire in his eyes. Had he too not forgotten that kiss in the library three years before? she’d begun wondering. Could he have been lying that night, saying he didn’t really want her when all along he had?

It would be the sort of gallant thing Alan might do, she’d reasoned, considering his over-active sense of responsibility towards those under his care. He was very protective of all the females in his family, including his mother and that wayward sister of his. Maybe he’d believed that, at eighteen, Ebony was too young for him, far too young to embark on the kind of relationship he might want and need; certainly far too young for marriage.

That possibility had tormented her for the rest of the party, sparking a resolve to confront Alan later that night. She’d long given up any hope of getting the man out of her system, so, if there was a chance that some twisted scruple was keeping them apart, then she’d aimed to try to unravel it. Who knew? Maybe her turning twenty-one had already heralded a change in his attitude towards her. Maybe he was now beginning to think of her as a grown woman, an adult, not the child who’d come into his home as a young and innocent fifteen-year-old.

This train of thought had excited her. Why hadn’t she reasoned this all out before? Of course that was it! His sexual response three years ago had made him feel guilty. But there was no longer any need for guilt. Couldn’t he see that? She couldn’t wait to talk to him alone, to tell him that time had not changed what she felt for him, but that time had changed the status quo between them. He was no longer her guardian in any way. He was simply a man, as she was a woman.