The Final Seduction

The trouble was that she would believe him. ‘I’d say that you were a model citizen. An upstanding member of the community.’

‘Would you?’ he queried softly, and let his gaze drift unhurriedly over her face. ‘Would you really?’

Shelley shifted. She was used to men staring. That was what men did in Italy. It was acknowledged and recognised as perfectly normal to gaze at a woman in open appreciation, as you would a fine painting, or a delicious meal. But the way Drew was looking at her was making her feel uncomfortable. As if she were some bit of flotsam he had found washed up on the beach.

And he was shaking his head, as though he didn’t like what he saw. ‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’ he demanded in a low, incredulous voice.

He made her feel like Cinderella before the transformation scene. ‘Done to myself?’ Her indignation was genuine. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He shrugged. ‘Well, the dog wouldn’t have knocked you over if you hadn’t been so damned skinny.’

‘Skinny?’ she gritted. The word was insulting—as he had obviously meant it to be. ‘Don’t you know anything, Drew? That a woman can never be too thin—’

‘What a load of rubbish,’ he interrupted with quiet, curling distaste. ‘Haven’t you heard that the waif look is out? You look like you haven’t eaten a square meal in years.’

Should she bother telling him that women in Milan watched their figures like hawks? Which was why they looked beautiful and elegant in the wonderful fashions which the city was so famous for. ‘Clothes look much better if you aren’t carrying any excess flesh,’ she told him smugly. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Well, I prefer to see a woman out of clothes,’ he drawled, noticing with pleasure that she flinched when he said that. Good! He smiled as his gaze lingered in a way which was now very Italianate. ‘And when a woman is naked a few curves are infinitely preferable to looking like a bag of bones.’

‘Bag of bones?’ she repeated in horrified disbelief, feeling quite sick at the thought of him with naked women. ‘Are you saying that I look like a bag of bones?’

He shrugged. ‘Pretty much. You sure as hell don’t look great. Mind you—’ and his gaze narrowed ‘—the clothes don’t help—and what on earth have you done to your hair?’

Shelley could hardly believe what she was hearing! She had learnt a lot about looking good while she had been living with Marco. From a rather wild and windswept girl, she had become high-maintenance woman. She had transformed herself from small-town hick to city slicker. People admired the way she looked these days—her hips were as narrow as a boy’s and she only ever wore neutrals.

But Drew didn’t seem to be one little bit impressed by her new-found fashion know-how.

She glanced down at her admittedly rather crumpled grey linen suit—and then back up into a pair of judgemental navy eyes.

‘I agree that this isn’t what I would normally wear to walk on the beach,’ she allowed. ‘But this suit was designed by one of Milan’s most desirable couturiers.’ She saw him pull a face, and as the events of the last days took their toll something inside her snapped.

‘Most women would give their eye-teeth to own an outfit by this designer!’ she fumed. ‘And as for my hair! For your information, it is shaped and tinted with highlights and lowlights every six weeks, by one of Milan’s finest cutters. Have you,’ she heard herself asking inanely, ‘any idea of how much it costs to look like this?’

But as soon as the words were out and she saw the look on his face she wished she could unsay them.

Distaste wasn’t the word.

‘I should have guessed that money would have been at the top of your agenda! So no change there.’ He gave a scornful little laugh. ‘Well, for your information, kitten—you were done.’

‘Done?’

‘Yeah, done. Conned. Fleeced. Cheated.’

Shelley couldn’t believe her ears. ‘What?’

‘You heard,’ he whispered softly. ‘You’ve become one of those women who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, haven’t you, Shelley? Seems like I had a lucky escape.’

‘Or maybe you just don’t like the way I dress because the clothes I wear indicate that I’m an independent woman now?’

‘Independent?’ His lips curled like an old-fashioned movie star’s. ‘I don’t think so! Being a rich man’s plaything doesn’t usually fall into the category of independent.’

She didn’t have to defend herself to him, so why did she suddenly feel as though she was in the witness box?

She chipped the words out like ice. ‘I virtually ran the art gallery in Milan, for your information!’

‘What? Flat on your back?’

Shelley opened her mouth to snap back at him, but no words came. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She had imagined seeing Drew again one day; of course she had. Every woman thought of the man they had almost married from time to time. And she had had lots of imaginary conversations with him inside her head. But they had been nothing like this. Rather, some of them had gone along the lines of him narrowing his eyes in appreciation and giving a long, low whistle while a look of profound regret would give his body a kind of deflated look, before he said something like, ‘Wow!’

Others had been stupidly unrealistic versions involving white lace and rice and confetti, but she had banished those very early on. They used to make her pillow damp with tears.

But not this. She met the mockery in his eyes.

‘Actually,’ she said, with acid-sweetness, ‘while you’ve been busily hammering nails into pieces of wood, I’ve learnt to speak fluent Italian, as well as how to—’ She looked pointedly at where the denim was at its thinnest, stretched tautly over his mouthwatering thighs. She swallowed. ‘Dress.’

‘Just not very attractively,’ he amended silkily. ‘Shelley, your arrogance is simply breathtaking.’

‘Then it’s a good match for yours, isn’t it, Drew?’

‘So where is he?’

She played dumb. ‘Who?’

‘Your lover, your mentor, your stallion—’

‘Please don’t call him that!’

‘Why not? Does the truth offend you?’ He looked around the empty beach with exaggerated scrutiny. ‘I expect he’s somewhere warm and comfortable, is he, polishing the leather of his hand-made shoes?’

‘Why, you…you…Philistine!’ Her eyes swivelled to his feet. He wore a scruffy old pair of canvas deck-shoes, without socks. Without socks! Marco would have sooner gone to prison than gone out in footwear like that! He would have said that those were shoes for a tramp. And yet somehow Drew managed to look nothing like a tramp. He looked, Shelley realised with a lurch of horror, he looked incredibly sexy…

‘You look like you should be standing on a street corner begging for small change!’ She glared at him.

His body tensed, as though he was fighting some dark, internal demon, and then he shook his head slightly. ‘I guess we’ve traded all the insults we need to. Why don’t you tell me how long you’re here for, Shelley? Just passing through? Or have you come to put your mother’s old house on the market?’

She didn’t stop to think, but then maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe she had known all along just what her answer to this would be. ‘Why would I be passing through? Milmouth doesn’t take you anywhere. No, I’ve come home, Drew,’ she told him, observing his frozen reaction more with pain than with pleasure. ‘Home to stay.’

The screech of a gull could be heard over the whining wind and the relentless smack of the waves hitting the beach.

‘You’re staying?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘For how long?’

‘I haven’t decided—and if I had I wouldn’t be telling you! My plans are flexible.’

He considered this. ‘And where exactly will you be staying, Shelley?’

‘At my mother’s house, of course. Where else?’ She glared at him again. ‘Sorry. Have I said something funny?’

He shook his head, still laughing. ‘Ironic more than funny.’

‘That’s a little too subtle for me, Drew. Care to let me in on the joke?’

He shrugged, and Shelley’s eyes were irresistibly drawn to the hard, strong body moving beneath the thick knit. ‘Just that I can’t imagine your rich lover gearing up for a night of passion in your mother’s old house. Apart from the limitations imposed by the room sizes—the walls are paper-thin!’

‘That’s not only coarse, it’s also inaccurate. Marco has never been a snob!’

‘No? Well, then it must be you who has the image problem, mustn’t it, Shelley? Because you never brought him back to Milmouth, did you? Not once!’ he accused. ‘Not even—’ and he drew a deep breath ‘—to your mother’s funeral!’

Should she tell him that it hadn’t seemed right to do so? That her mother had hated Marco nearly as much as she had adored Drew? It would have seemed disrespectful to her mother’s memory to bring along the man she had never stopped blaming for the disintegration of her dreams.

For in Veronica Turner’s mind Shelley and Drew would still have been engaged if Marco had not happened along. For a long time Shelley would have agreed with her, but now she recognised that Marco had probably done her a big favour.

Shelley herself had been sick with grief and regret. In fact she had barely been able to function. But apparently that was the normal reaction to sudden death. It had seemed the easier option to handle things on her own. To avoid situations which might create ugly scenes…

‘Oh, what’s the point in trying to explain?’ she questioned tiredly. ‘You’ll only believe what you want to believe. And I know how much you hate me, Drew.’

‘Hate you?’ He looked at first surprised and then very slightly perplexed, as if she were being hysterical. ‘Hating you would imply that you have some significance in my life, Shelley. And you don’t. None at all. Not any more. Duke!’ The dog came loping over. ‘Come on, time to go.’

And he strode off without a word, or even a glance of farewell. Just like that.

She watched him walking away from her across the pebbles and a great tidal wave of sadness rocked her, overwhelming her with its force. Because she had lost everything that once existed between her and Drew, and that was the brutal reality.

The water on the western side of the shore was a deeper shade of blue than the washed-out sky and in his navy sweater and faded jeans Drew seemed to blur and blend into the landscape itself. Shelley watched him and felt a sudden wrench as she remembered the way he had been able to make her laugh.

Remembered the way he had always looked at her—as though someone had just given him a wonderful present. Compare that, she thought, as she swallowed back the memories, with the icy disapproval she had seen on his face just now.

They had been friends, she realised—really good friends. And she had thrown it all away. With one irrevocable gesture she had sacrificed that friendship and everything that went with it.

She had made her choices willingly—no one had held a gun to her head. But the reality of what those choices had done to her life invaded Shelley’s memory like a dark, stormy cloud.

CHAPTER THREE

SHELLEY had known Drew Glover for as long as she remembered, and she must have known him before that as well.

They had grown up next door to each other in the small, boxy houses which were clustered on the poorer side of Milmouth—a million light years away from the imposing Edwardian villas which overlooked the sea on the western side of the village. She was almost eight years younger than him, and the same age as his youngest sister, Jennie.

Shelley had been brought to Milmouth as a baby, an unsettled, grizzly child whose nature had been forged by uncertainty and insecurity. According to her mother, Drew would bend and pick up the toys she hurled out of her pram and solemnly hand them back to her. But then he had two younger sisters of his own.

‘He was such a sweet-natured boy,’ Veronica Turner had told her daughter with a beaming smile, the day Shelley and Drew decided to get married. ‘And he still is.’

Shelley remembered his curiosity. His protectiveness. He had been the first person who had ever stood up for her—when he overheard one of the other children taunting her.

‘So why haven’t you got a father, Shelley Turner?’

She had been about seven at the time, an age when she’d desperately wanted to be like everyone else. And Milmouth was so small and provincial. Everyone else had two parents.

Her face had started working and her mouth had wobbled and she didn’t know what she would have answered when Drew had appeared from out of nowhere—tall and tough and teenaged—and had announced scornfully, ‘Of course she’s got a father! Everyone’s got a father—hers just doesn’t live with her, that’s all.’

‘Where does he live, then?’ one of the others had been bold enough to ask.

Even now Shelley remembered looking into Drew’s eyes—so deep and blue and encouraging—and knowing that she should never be ashamed of the truth. If only she had remembered that…‘He lives in America,’ she’d told the child steadily. ‘He’s a dentist.’

These two impressive facts had kept the other children quiet for a while, but Shelley had remained an outsider. Veronica Turner had taught her daughter to keep her head down and not make waves. Not to invite people back to the house unless she was really certain that she liked them, and, more importantly, that they liked her. It was better to be considered cold than to risk rejection.

But then, Shelley’s mother had known all about rejection. It was a force that had shaped her whole life—a dark, shameful secret she’d kept hidden away. Only Drew knew the full story and Shelley still remembered the day she had told him.

She had been counting cars, sitting on a low wall which separated their little group of houses from the big main road which brought all the holiday-makers into Milmouth during the summer months.

A red car had whizzed by and Shelley had stuck her tongue out between her lips and wrote it down in her notebook.

Drew had been on his way home from the boatyard, where he worked after school, drinking from a can of cola. He’d peered over her shoulder as he passed, then paused.

‘What are you doing?’

Shelley shrugged. ‘Counting cars.’

He grinned. ‘Oh? Make a habit of that, do you?’

‘It’s for my maths,’ she explained. ‘Averages and probability.’

He pulled a face and came to perch beside her. ‘Who’s winning?’

‘Blue,’ she said. ‘I’ve counted eleven, so far.’

‘Oh.’ He offered her the can. ‘Fancy a slug?’

Shelley shook her head. Money was tight in the Turner household. Never take what you can’t repay—her mother had drummed that in to her time and time again. ‘No, thanks.’

He stared at her serious little profile. ‘Why do you never see your father?’ he asked suddenly.

Shelley shrugged. If it had been anyone other than Drew who had asked it, she might have told them to mind their own business. But Drew was Drew.

‘I saw him once,’ she explained. ‘When I was a baby.’

‘Just the once?’

‘That’s right. I was three weeks old.’

‘And didn’t he want to see you again?’

Shelley blinked furiously as she ticked off another black car in her column. ‘That’s seven black,’ she gulped.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said instantly. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s all right for you!’ she said, her voice wobbling. ‘You’ve got a mother and a father, and two sisters!’

He laughed cynically. ‘Oh, yeah—it’s all right for me! When there are five of us crammed into a house you can’t swing a cat in. And my parents are always arguing. So are my sisters! I’ll tell you something, Shelley—sometimes I just want to smash my way out of there and never come back!’ His blue gaze was piercing. ‘Do you really think that everyone’s life is so perfect except your own?’

Shelley shook her head in amazement. Drew felt like that inside? ‘Of course I don’t!’

‘I won’t ask you about your father again,’ he told her gently. ‘It isn’t important.’

But it was important. He had taken her into his confidence and she wanted to tell him. Secrets could become unbearable burdens if you didn’t share them.

‘My father was…is a dentist. My mother used to work for him—she was his nurse. They had, like, a big romance. Well, my mum thought it was a big romance,’ Shelley shrugged. ‘She’d come down from Scotland and she didn’t know very much about men.’

Drew nodded thoughtfully, but he didn’t say anything.

‘Then she found out she was pregnant with me, so she told him…she told him…and he got really mad with her. Said that it had all been a big mistake. And that there was no point in her trying to trap him into marriage—because he already had a wife and children, and they were his “real” children—’

Drew scowled. ‘And your mother didn’t know that?’

Shelley rounded on him. ‘Of course she didn’t know that! If she had done she would never have got involved with him in the first place! What sort of woman do you think she is?’

‘I didn’t mean to insult your mother, Shelley,’ he told her, with dignity. ‘It just makes me mad when men treat women that way.’ He brushed dark, untidy hair back from his face. ‘So what happened?’

‘Oh, he went back to America with his wife and “real” children and Mum brought me here to live. That was the last she ever saw of him.’

‘And why Milmouth?’ he asked, with interest.

She was grateful for the fact that her instinct had been correct—that Drew wasn’t judging her or her mother and finding them wanting.

‘She wanted somewhere cheap to live, and couldn’t face going back to Scotland with a baby and no father. And she loves the sea.’

He smiled. ‘So do I, as a matter of fact. I never want to be away from the sea.’

‘Me neither,’ she said shyly, smiling back, realising that she had found her true-life hero.

But after that she rarely saw him—their lives diverged and the age-gap was all wrong. Seven years could seem like a generation gap. She knew that he had done well in his school exams, and knew that his teachers had been disappointed when he became an apprentice carpenter. Everyone thought that he’d go away to college.

‘It’s because he’s good at making things,’ his mother explained to Shelley on the way back from the shops one day. ‘Good with his hands. And he likes the open air—says he doesn’t want to be cooped up inside in an office all day. Good luck to him, I say!’

Shelley saw him on the day he left school, with the best grades of his year, and it took every bit of courage she possessed to go up to him and congratulate him. ‘I hear you’re going to be a carpenter?’

He narrowed his blue eyes at her assessingly. ‘What’s the matter, Shelley—don’t you think I’m aiming high enough?’

She shrugged her shoulders awkwardly. She was only eleven—so what did she know? ‘It’s not that,’ she lied.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No. I just thought that you’d be—’

‘A pilot?’ he grinned. ‘Or a doctor?’

‘Maybe.’

‘It’s an insecure world, kitten—and people always need houses.’

‘I guess they do.’ And she blushed with pleasure to hear him call her ‘kitten’.

Sometimes, when Shelley was up in her bedroom reading, she used to glimpse him wandering home, stripped to the waist, all honed muscle and bronzed perfection. And the words used to dance like hieroglyphics on the page in front of her.

She was seventeen when he went travelling, originally for a year, but the wanderlust caught him and he was gone for much longer.

She remembered one of the last times she had seen him before he’d left. She’d gone sunbathing further up the bay with a couple of schoolfriends—hidden, they thought, by a large screen of rocks. Feeling liberated and daring, they had removed their bikini tops. But Drew had been out running along the beach, and had seen them. He had gone absolutely ballistic, with Shelley in particular, and her friends had teased her afterwards and said that must mean that he fancied her. And she’d told them that of course he didn’t fancy her, because he had barely spoken to her again after that.

And suddenly he had gone.

Shelley had missed him. Missed him like mad. Sometimes she used to go out with his sister Jennie, on Saturday nights. They would go to the Smugglers pub or occasionally to one of the dances at the village hall, or get the bus into Southchester. She’d look at every man and find him wanting, by simple virtue of the fact that he wasn’t Drew.

‘Has your brother mentioned anything about coming home?’ she asked Jennie casually one evening.

Jennie grinned. She was used to women asking her questions about her handsome big brother.

‘Nope. Shall I write and say you were asking?’

‘Just you dare!’

He came back three years later, just before Christmas—when the fairy lights in the pubs twinkled like rainbow drops, reminding him of everything he had missed about England.

Shelley was on her way home from her job as receptionist in Milmouth’s upmarket car showroom when she saw him, and had to bite back her pleasure, because she didn’t want to gush all over him like a silly little girl.

‘Hello, Drew,’ she said softly. ‘Jennie said you were coming home.’

‘Is that really you, Shelley Turner?’ he enquired, almost groaning when he realised that this tousled-haired stunner from next door was even more gorgeous than when he’d left. He hadn’t thought that was possible. But some time in the last three years she had developed the kind of figure that drove men to sin, and her hair was a glossy sheet—the colour of caramel. And he’d forgotten how delicate her skin was and how pale the aquamarine of her eyes.

‘Of course it’s me!’ she giggled. ‘Who else did you think it was?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he answered slowly, his blue eyes looking dazzling in his tanned face. ‘Are you going out tonight?’

‘Just try and stop me! It’s my birthday tomorrow,’ she confided. ‘And a whole gang of us are meeting up in the Smugglers.’

‘Your birthday?’ He frowned as alarm bells rang loudly in his brain. ‘How old are you?’

She was slightly disappointed that he couldn’t remember, but clever enough not to show it. ‘I’ll be twenty.’

‘Wow! You’ll be twenty? Well, isn’t that just dandy!’ His grin showed his relief. ‘Mind if I join you?’

Mind? She would have spent all her birthday money on a red carpet if it hadn’t looked so obvious! ‘No, I don’t mind at all,’ she answered coolly.

He gave her a boab nut he’d picked up on his travels, with a piece of glittery tinsel tied round it, and sat beside her in the pub, and Shelley didn’t want to talk to anyone else but him.

‘So did you miss me, little girl?’ he quizzed.

She had not yet learnt guile. ‘Yes.’ But something told her not to let him know how much. ‘And I’m a big girl now.’

‘So I see.’ A pulse began to work in his temple. ‘So I see.’ To her surprise, he trailed a finger along her cheek and gently tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, then frowned. ‘Since when did you start wearing mascara?’

She blinked at him, perplexed. ‘But I’m not.’

‘You mean your lashes have always been that long?’ he teased. ‘And that dark?’

She laughed. ‘I think so! Have you only just noticed, Drew?’

‘Mmm. Right this very moment.’ He looked terribly thoughtful, and suddenly leaned across and kissed her softly on the lips, in front of the whole pub—and that was that. They became an overnight item. Drew and Shelley. Shelley and Drew. As inseparable as eggs and bacon or peaches and cream.

Drew worked hard for his money. He took a regular job at the boatyard and any other job which came his way—and plenty did. Craftsmen of his calibre were rare enough but coupled with youthful vigour and dedication—well, it seemed that everyone wanted a piece of him. Once a week he went on day release to college and night-times he studied for higher certificates in construction and building.

And the only person who seemed to be missing out was his girlfriend…