Mistresses: Bound with Gold / Bought with Emeralds

The odds had been impossibly stacked against her from the very beginning. She had known that loving him was a one-way ticket to heartbreak…but, oh, the joy that she had experienced along the way was almost worth the price of arrival!

The next few days were spent compulsively trying not to think about anything or anyone connected with Palm Cove, which was next to impossible when she half expected a policeman to come knocking at the door…or for Joshua to come bursting in, a one-man posse on a quest for the modern version of frontier justice. He hadn’t exactly ordered her not to leave town, but that had been the gist of his final threat as he had left the house. And when she had arrived home she had been horrified to realise that she was still wearing his expensive platinum watch—another crime for him to lay at her door! And this time he would be right, for she had deliberately done nothing about returning it. By now Sir Frank would have arranged for her cheque to be repaid into the company accounts, but she was afraid to hope that that would be the end of it, not if Joshua felt it incumbent on his honour to exact personal retribution.

Desperate to avoid having to deal with reality, she impressed on Lisa and Saleena she wasn’t in to phone calls—from anyone—and whenever they went out she switched off the answer-machine and took the phone off the hook. She did, however, make one stilted call to Cindy, to tell her that the money had been repaid, and that whatever repercussions there might be from now on would stop with Regan. She had hung up on Cindy’s hysterical thanks in the certain knowledge that she had finally closed the book on her failed marriage.

The following afternoon, on the fourth day of her emotional exile, her brittle shell was cracked by the last person she would have expected to bother to seek her out—Carolyn Harriman, floating on air after her final wedding gown fitting.

‘Hi—you don’t mind I got your address from Granny, do you?’ she chirped to Regan, who did mind. She had refused to wonder if Carolyn had yet plucked up the courage to break the news of her phantom pregnancy, guiltily aware that she had fled without even saying goodbye—unwilling to risk any additional emotional trauma.

‘I couldn’t get through on the phone, but I figured you wouldn’t have another job yet and thought you could probably do with some cheering up,’ breezed Carolyn. ‘Look—I bought Danish pastries to go with our afternoon coffee! Granny told me why you left—about the rotten thing your husband did to you. God, men can be utter pigs, can’t they?’

Regan could detect no hint of falsity in her friendly attitude, and was forced to conclude that Chris must not have blabbed about what he had seen on board the Sara Wade.

It struck her that she had never seen the young woman looking more relaxed as she leant on the stove while Regan put the jug on to boil.

‘You’re still going ahead with it, then?’ she said warily, when she learned where Carolyn had been.

Only Carolyn could simper without looking silly. ‘Well, yes—sort of…Haven’t you got a percolator?’

‘No, we haven’t. What do you mean, sort of?’ Regan forced herself to ask.

‘Uh…with a different groom.’

Regan’s teaspoonful of instant coffee spilled all over the bench.

‘Chris?’

‘Of course Chris.’ Carolyn sounded ludicrously offended that she should ask. At Regan’s expression she offered up a sheepish smile and waggled the new ruby and diamond ring on her finger, ‘Luckily he kept this when I threw it back in his face. We got re-engaged a couple of days ago.’

‘And J-Joshua raised no objections?’ Regan stuttered.

‘Why should he?’ said Carolyn smugly. ‘It’s what he expected all along. Why do you think he bribed the printer to muck up the invitations? He told me when he proposed that he doubted we’d have to actually marry each other. He said he knew that when it came to the crunch Chris loved me too much to let me marry anyone else!’

‘How omniscient of him,’ said Regan, shards of anger thrusting jaggedly up through a smothering blanket of pain. And he had had the nerve to rage at her for being conniving! She hadn’t been the only one with a secret agenda!

‘Well, he was right, wasn’t he?’ Carolyn defended. ‘And if he had been wrong, then he was prepared to genuinely go through with it, for the baby’s sake—and for that I’ll always be grateful to him! It was really strange, though, because he’s been in a really filthy mood about everything else in last few days, but he hardly reacted at all when I fronted up about not being pregnant. He acted like it wasn’t even important. He just shrugged and suggested I tell Chris as soon as possible, so I did, and instead of rowing about it we talked and talked for hours, and admitted that we had both behaved immaturely and I cried and…’ she almost managed a blush ‘…we ended up in bed.

‘Oh, Regan, you should have heard what he said! He said that he’d been miserable without me and mad with jealousy when I turned to Jay, that’s why he’d been so nasty! He said that he’d been forced to face up to the fact he hadn’t been fair to me or to Jay. He said he’d have kidnapped me at the altar rather than let Jay have me!’

The idea of Joshua being humiliated in front of two hundred guests had a certain vicious appeal, thought Regan, even if it would have been partly at his own instigation!

She stuffed herself with fattening pastries as she masochistically encouraged Carolyn to happily twitter on, gleaning the fact that Joshua and Ryan were still staying at Palm Cove and that Hazel had conscripted a biddable niece of Alice’s to be her letter-writer. Carolyn herself had made the trip down to her Auckland couturier in the WadeCo helicopter, and she gave Regan a nervous rash when she let slip that she had shared it with Joshua, who was expecting to stay overnight in the city and resume permanent residence in a matter of days.

As she departed, basking in her own happiness, Carolyn gave Regan a hand-addressed silver-gilt wedding invitation.

‘Chris says you have to come,’ she told her gaily. ‘He told me to deliver it to you personally and tell you that he’ll have something to say if you try to refuse!’

Regan gave her a sharp look, but Carolyn seemed to be unaware of any ulterior meaning to her words. The Wade brothers seemed to have a pretty similar line in ambiguous threats, thought Regan savagely as she closed the door and immediately picked up the telephone receiver and slammed it back on the hook. No more avoiding life!

It immediately began to ring, and she snatched it up with a belligerent snarl.

A startled silence. ‘Hello…uh…is that Regan?’

She sucked in a wild breath. ‘Yes, who is this?’

‘Derek…You know—Derek Clarke.’

‘Oh.’ Her heart flip-flopped in her chest. ‘Do you want Cleo? She’s not here—’

‘No, actually, I wanted to talk to you. A really weird thing just happened to me…’

Regan felt like snapping that a lot of weird things probably happened to sleaze-bags like himself.

‘Oh, what was that?’ she asked with immense restraint.

‘Well…it’s this guy I sometimes arrange dates for—he just sent me an e-mail to say he wants me to set him up with someone called Eve tonight…’

The furious roaring in Regan’s ears made it difficult to hear him as he went on, ‘So of course I immediately zapped him with the fact that I don’t know any women called Eve and—this is the weird part—he comes back on my instant message system with your name. I told him that he had to be mistaken, because I knew you weren’t much of a swinger, but he wasn’t interested in anyone else. He was real insistent that it had to be you and only you. He said all he wanted me to do was give you the message that Adam needs to meet you at the same time and place. No other name or specifics—just Adam—and he said, to quote him exactly here: “Tell Eve she can name her own terms.” So I thought, what the hell! I’ve got nothing to lose by asking—’

‘I’ll do it!’

‘After all, you can’t very well slap my face over the—What did you say?’

Regan firmed up her quavering voice. ‘I said, I’ll do it. E-mail him back and tell Adam that he’s got a deal!’

The marble foyer on the fourteenth floor was as coldly stark as Regan remembered it, and the deep-set door just as intimidating, but this time when she rang the bell Regan didn’t hesitate.

She might be crazy to take this chance, but she would be insane not to! Joshua had approached her through a neutral intermediary in a way that gave her the option of accepting or refusing to meet him. In the circumstances, she supposed that using Derek might be considered an implicit threat, but Regan didn’t see it that way. She viewed the offer through the optimistic eyes of love. Trying to duplicate the exact conditions of their first meeting might be Joshua’s oblique way of saying that he wanted them to start afresh, to rewrite their history together. It would be typical of that sophisticated, ironic sense of humour, tinged with unexpected mischief, with which she had fallen in love!

He had said Adam needed to see Eve, and that she could name her own terms—that didn’t sound like someone aggressively seeking revenge. It sounded alluringly close to begging. Perhaps, for once in his life, Joshua was willing to entrust someone with a second chance…

She might be walking into a trap, but if there was any prospect, however small, of any kind of future relationship with the man she loved, Regan owed it to herself to find out.

As she waited for the doorbell to be answered she didn’t allow herself any romantic fantasies. Now that he was an unencumbered bachelor again, it was highly likely that Joshua might just be on the prowl for some no-holdsbarred, guilt-free sex from an occasional mistress…

Well, she hadn’t found much security as a wife, thought Regan defiantly, maybe she’d be better off as a rich man’s mistress!

She had her smile all ready for the man who opened the door.

‘Hello, Pierre.’

‘Mam’selle Regan!’ His turtle-mouth gaped open and shut.

‘Actually, it’s Eve,’ she teased. ‘Do I have to produce a card this time—or are you just going to invite me in?’

‘Mam’selle!’ His voice crackled with reproach and she laughed, a soft, clear, lilting sound, tinged with excitement, that stole into the apartment ahead of her. Instead of responding, Pierre looked back over his shoulder, and Regan, impatient with the delay, took the opportunity to slip under his arm and stroll inside.

‘Uh, mam’selle, you must wait to be announced—’ Pierre let go of the door and darted across her path.

She laughed again. ‘Oh, you mean you’re not going to tell me he’s delayed in some business meeting somewhere and ply me your fantastic canapés while I wait?’

He frowned. ‘Really, Mam’selle R—Eve—I think you should let me—’

He was interrupted by a deep voice floating up around the glass-brick stairwell.

‘Who is it, Pierre?

Joshua came springing casually up the steps in shirtsleeves and the grey trousers of a suit, glancing over what looked like an architectural plan in his hand. When he looked up from what he was reading and caught sight of Regan he froze in mid-step. His face was unguarded for a split second during which Regan saw a shock of incredulity tauten the skin across the bones of his skull.

‘Regan?’

She looked from his wary face to Pierre’s uncharacteristically deadpan expression and it hit her, then, with humiliating force: both men were so stunned to see her that it was evident her arrival was totally unexpected.

That e-mail hadn’t been an invitation, or a trap—because Joshua had obviously never sent it! And Regan had been so eager to believe that he wanted to see her again that she had never entertained the idea that it might have a cruel joke perpetrated by someone else entirely!

Oh, God!

Her confidence smashed into a million tiny pieces as Joshua’s gaze dipped, his eyes suddenly narrowing with predatory sharpness as he recognised the combination of classic black sheath, black stockings and gold-heeled evening sandals. Even the bag she was carrying was the same one she had been carrying That Night.

‘Regan?’ This time his voice was redolent with heated speculation, and a hint of amusement.

A hot flood of embarrassment welled up in her soul as she sought to extricate herself from her gross folly. She couldn’t bear to be the object of his derision. ‘I—I’m sorry, I—this is a mistake.’

Joshua was up the rest of steps in a flash, the sheet of paper he had been holding wafting unnoticed to the floor. ‘What makes you say that?’

She tried to back away and stepped on Pierre’s foot, ignoring his yelp. ‘I—I must have come to the wrong door…’ she invented absurdly.

Joshua looked at her provocative garb. ‘Did you want the elderly grandmother to the left of me, or the gay art director on the right?’ he asked gravely.

‘Floor. I said the wrong floor,’ she quickly corrected herself, putting her hand to her throat to cover the fluttering pulse on which he seemed to be fixated.

Another mistake. He saw the watch—his watch—still strapped to her wrist and smiled, as if he knew that she hadn’t taken it off for even a second since the day he had given it—lent it—to her…as if he knew that she lay in bed each night with her hand tucked under her cheek, the almost inaudible ticking a lullaby that sang her into her dreams of the man to whom it—and she—belonged.

‘Well, why don’t we make the most of your Freudian slip?’ he purred. ‘Won’t you come in and have a drink for old times’ sake?’

She frantically shook her head, and he lowered his voice to a coaxing murmur.

‘Please…’ He held out a hand, palm up. ‘Eve…one drink with me?’

Unable to trust herself to speak, Regan continued to shake her head, resisting the explicit invitation in his eyes and voice.

‘To keep me company…’ he appealed, and thrust his outstretched hand into his trouser pocket and produced a set of keys. ‘Because Pierre was just going out—weren’t you, Pierre?’

He tossed the keys through the air and Pierre fielded them in one hand. ‘To be sure, m’sieur.’

‘Have a good time, and don’t forget to set the deadlock when you leave—I don’t want anyone breaking in on me while you’re gone…’

Pierre had already slipped out of the door before Regan realised the implications of the message that had been passed over her head. She grabbed at the heavy brass handle but it was too late; the door refused to even rattle on its hinge.

She closed her anguished eyes, raising her fist to rest it helplessly against the wood.

‘You must see that now that you’re here I can’t let you go,’ he said quietly.

‘No, I don’t see!’ she cried. ‘I told you, my being here is a mistake—’

‘Dressed like that? I don’t think so,’ he said with that same awful, quiet certainty. ‘You came here to see me, didn’t you? And you came in the persona of Eve, because Eve isn’t as vulnerable as Regan.’

She whirled around, her back flat against the barrier to her freedom. ‘What do you know?’ she scorned proudly.

But his eyes weren’t gloating or triumphant, they were beautifully solemn. ‘About you? Not enough, it seems. About me? Not as much as I thought I did. I thought I had everything under control, including myself. I was wrong. Quite spectacularly wrong.’

He approached her soft-footed, holding her captive with that hypnotic gaze. ‘By the way, you might be interested to learn that I’m not marrying Carolyn.’

‘I know, I saw her this morning—’ She broke off, biting her lip as she saw his eyes light up at the nugget of information. Now he was really locking himself into the mindsetthat she had come rushing over here to grovel for his attention.

‘I’m a cynical swine,’ he continued, on his original course. ‘Experience has taught me that it’s safer to expect the worst of people instead of trusting to the best—’

‘Is this an apology?’ Regan cut him off stonily. All she could think was: He didn’t invite you here. He thought she had come crawling back to him.

He met her aggression with a soft answer. ‘Oh, I think you’ll find it’s much more than that. Won’t you come in and sit down? You may as well accept that I have no intention of unlocking that door—even if I did know where Pierre kept his keys.’

He held out his hand again, but she ignored it as she stalked past him down the stairs. He allowed her to evade him until they reached the level of the sunken lounge, then his fingers curled around her elbow as he turned her to face him.

She tried to jerk it away. ‘Don’t touch me!’

‘I can’t help it,’ he said, cupping her other elbow and drawing her towards him. ‘It’s a compulsion. Since the first time I met you I can’t be near you without wanting to have my hands on you. You churn me up, and in the beginning I wasn’t sure I liked that; I wasn’t prepared for it—it interfered with my plans. I wanted to be able to push what I felt for you aside until I was ready to deal with it. But do you know what I’ve found that I don’t like even more, Regan…?’

What I feel for you? She shook her head, dazed with feverish apprehension, her eyes huge in her face, unable to believe that this was real and not just a figment of her reckless imagination.

‘I don’t like you being away from me. I don’t like not having you around to churn me up—to intrigue me, infuriate me, comfort me, excite me and, yes—to enrage me.

Even when I’m furious with you I still want you near me…’

She began to tremble and he eased himself into contact, his trousers brushing her legs. ‘I don’t like knowing that I hurt you. That I prated on about family responsibility and honour and then failed to respect that you felt a duty to protect yours. I’m so used to people expecting me to handle their problems for them that I didn’t know how to act when I ran up against someone who was so determined not to demand anything of me. I should have admired you for having the courage of your convictions and for your stubborn loyalty. Instead I was furious that you’d continued to squander it on that crooked bastard you married rather than transferring it to me, even though I’d done nothing to earn it! I knew I couldn’t afford to make another mistake with you, so I’ve spent the last few days racking my brains to think of a logical reason I might use to persuade you to see me again.’

His fingers tightened and his voice roughened. ‘But it isn’t logic you want from me, is it, Regan? You can’t imagine how I felt when I saw you just now, when I realised that you’d been willing to sacrifice your pride to reach out to me, even after the contemptible way I treated you, that your desire to be with me was so strong that it conquered all your fears—’

‘Don’t!’ she choked, her fierce elation tempered by the knowledge she was a fraud.

His tender smile was a kiss upon her sight. ‘You’re going to stop me now? When I’m humbling myself for you?’

‘It’s not necessary—’

‘But it is. For me, it is. You’ve done your bit, now it’s my turn to do the risking.’

Much as she longed to let him do just that, she had to put him right before he went any further! ‘Joshua—’

She turned her head, searching for the right words, and suddenly caught sight of the frozen picture on the bigscreen television behind him. ‘What’s that?’

Joshua let her go and quickly scooped up the video remote control from the arm of a chair, pointing it at the machine.

‘Wait a minute.’ Regan snatched it out of his hand as she looked at the freeze-frame. ‘That’s me!’

She moved around for a better look and swallowed a fuzzy feeling in her throat as she pressed the ‘pause’ button and her screen self began to move. ‘That’s the security video from the night I was here!’ she whispered as she watched herself tentatively step out of the apartment building lift.

Joshua sighed. ‘It’s the only picture I have of you,’ he said simply, and her eyes stung as he turned his brooding gaze back at the screen. ‘You look a little nervous here, don’t you?’ he murmured. ‘I’ve watched it over and over, and I definitely think the lady is having some second thoughts, but look there—see—she squares her shoulders and decides: What the hell! I’m going to go for it…’

He was watching the screen, but Regan was watching his softened face. She imagined him sitting here all alone, surrounded by every luxury money could buy, replaying those same few seconds of videotape over and over again, studying her every move and trying to analyse her thoughts, and her heart surrendered itself for ever into his keeping.

‘Oh, Josh…’ She wrapped her arms around him, wanting to protect him from ever being lonely again. Whatever he felt for her, she loved him enough for the both of them.

‘Now you know how I recognised Ryan had a crush on you,’ he said wryly, tipping her face up to meet his. ‘I felt the same way—only mine was the fully-fledged adult version. After that first night I was going to find out who you really were, and make arrangements to see you again,’ he confessed. ‘But then Carolyn called and events overtook me. But you still haunted the back of my mind. So much so that I thought I was hallucinating when I first saw you out the window at Hazel’s.’

She told him about Ryan and the tree, and he laughed. ‘No wonder he took to you so quickly. Hide-and-go-seek used to be one of his favourite games.

‘And speaking of favourite games…’ He leaned forward and whispered teasingly into her ear, ‘Are you wearing anything under that dress?’

Regan went utterly scarlet and he stilled, his eyes widening with stunned admiration as he realised the daring wickedness with which she had hoped to seduce him.

‘You’re not?’ he guessed, erupting into more, very sexy laughter as she shook her head and hid her scalding face in the front of his silk shirt. His hand slid down to trace her shapely naked bottom through the dress. ‘My God, you did come prepared for battle, didn’t you, honey? I never stood a chance!’

She remembered what it was so important for her to make clear and lifted her hot face. ‘It wasn’t actually my idea to come here tonight,’ she told him, her eyes daring him to take back anything he had said. She told him about Derek’s call regarding the e-mail. ‘Naturally, I thought it’d come from you,’ she said, thinking that a sleaze-bag made a rather unlikely cupid. ‘I thought you were making the first move.’

Joshua’s response was a slight touch of colour on his hard cheekbones, but he was too smug at the serendipitous outcome and too intrigued by the puzzle to be truly embarrassed by his error—the supremely arrogant assumption that had prompted him to reveal his deepest emotions.

‘If he was responding to my private Internet address then he would have presumed so, too. I don’t know what’s on there at the moment because I don’t check my personal messages every day. Ryan’s always on my back about—’

He broke off and backed out of her arms. ‘Excuse me a minute!’ He was a lot longer than a minute, but when he had finally hung up the phone and came back to her after his low-voiced conversation his eyes were glowing with dangerous amusement.

‘My son’s doing. It seems that Ryan suffers from a God complex.’ His ruefulness was an irresistible temptation.

‘I can’t imagine where he got that from!’ murmured Regan

He quelled her with the lift of an eyebrow. ‘Apparently he cracked the password on my e-mail account some time back and decided to use it to set us up.’

‘But—how could he know about—? Or that we called each other Adam and Eve?’ she gulped.

He ran a hand through his hair and slanted her a look that was charmingly abashed. ‘I had drink or three too many that night I lost my temper…after I found out you’d skipped out on me again,’ he confessed. ‘I got a little rowdy—and drunkenly maudlin, according to Ryan—in my lecture to him on the evils of doe-eyed women who lead men around by the uh—certain parts of their male anatomy. He says I mentioned that Derek Clarke had arranged for us to meet…and I also mentioned that we had jokingly appropriated our middle names…’