Bride Of His Choice

Was he now thinking the same of her? He was wrong, if he did. She hadn’t even cared to sample the chances that had come her way. Somehow an internal barrier went up the moment any man started getting too close to her. As for desiring them…she’d often wondered if desire was linked to trust and that was why she couldn’t feel it. Maybe one day she would meet someone she could really trust to love her as she wanted to be loved.

“Are you happy in the life you’ve made for yourself?”

The apparently artless question snapped Leigh out of her private reverie. Danger signals flared in her mind. Give anything away to a man like Richard Seymour and somehow he’d use it against her. She’d had too much experience of that process in the Durant household to be offering any information about herself.

Keeping her expressive eyes fixed on the path ahead she answered, “Reasonably,” in an even tone, then turned the question back on him. “What about you? Are you happy with what you’ve made of yourself?”

He laughed again, though there was more irony than amusement in the sound this time. “You know, no-one’s ever asked me that question.”

Of course. Brilliant success didn’t exactly invite any such doubt. “Perhaps you should ask it of yourself?” she drily remarked.

“Perhaps I should,” he agreed even more drily. “Though I can’t say it’s ever been on my list of priorities. I’ve always thought happiness an elusive thing, not easily captured and even more difficult to hold.”

Unlike wealth and power.

“Then why ask me about it?”

“Oh, I guess I was really asking if you’ve found a relationship you find satisfying.”

He dropped the question so casually, the impact came in slow motion. Leigh’s first reaction was it was none of his business. Then his previous comment about the approval of “red-blooded men” started to rattle her. Did he fancy a quick fling with her while she was in Sydney? Was this why he’d followed her out here…to ascertain availability and charm his way into her bed? Did he see her as old enough for him now?

The idea was outrageous, yet oddly tantalising. Leigh was tempted to play him along, just to see if it was true. “No, I haven’t. At least, not as satisfying as I would wish,” she answered honestly, then slid him an assessing look as she added, “But I didn’t come home for you, Richard.”

It was a mistake to look at him. He instantly locked onto it with a piercing intensity that pinned her eyes to his. “Am I not one of the ghosts you wish to lay to rest?”

“Why would you think so?” she retaliated, disturbed by the wild quickening of her pulse.

“Because you hated me so much.”

He was raising the ghosts, deliberately and too evocatively for Leigh’s comfort. “Wouldn’t you, in my place?” she snapped.

“Yes. But there was nothing I could do to change your place, Leigh. You had to do it yourself. Which you did. Yet I wonder if all those negative feelings towards me—the bitter resentment and the black contempt—still linger on?”

He was getting to her, digging around in her head and heart, and she didn’t want him to. Realising she’d paused to counter this attack on her feelings, Leigh got her legs moving again, chiding herself for falling into the trap of letting him focus the conversation on her. She tried to switch it back on him.

“I can’t imagine it matters to you.”

“It does. Very much.”

“Why?” she demanded, inwardly refusing to believe him. She would not—not—allow herself to be vulnerable to what Richard Seymour thought or felt about her. She’d been down that painful track, wanting him to shine for her, but he hadn’t.

“I wasn’t your enemy,” he answered simply. “Your hatred was blind, Leigh. As much as I could be, I was your friend.”

Hardly a friend, she thought with a violence that startled her. Let it go, she berated herself furiously. Just let it go and set him aside, right out of your life.

“I don’t view you as an enemy, Richard,” she said as dispassionately as she could. “I don’t think I did then, either. Not personally. If you hadn’t been the favoured protégé, someone else would have won that place, and been used in the same way to show off my father’s dissatisfaction with me.”

“I didn’t enjoy my place in that particular game, Leigh.”

She couldn’t stop herself from seething over how he had conducted himself, even though he might not have enjoyed it. “You didn’t walk away from it,” she tersely remarked.

“As you say, it wouldn’t have changed anything,” he answered easily. “Lawrence would have found someone else. Someone who might have joined in the game with him, making it worse for you.”

In all fairness, she couldn’t accuse Richard of aiding or abetting the cruel baiting that had gone on during the mandatory-attendance Sunday luncheons in the Durant mansion. She remembered him diverting the conversation into other topics, taking the focus off her, but she’d hated him for that, too, feeling he pitied her.

She’d wanted him—willed him—to stand up and fight for her, though Lawrence would never have tolerated that from him. With an older, wiser head on her shoulders, she could see that now, but at the time…

She took a deep breath, trying to clear herself of the burning turmoil Richard Seymour could still stir. Applying cold hard reason, it was possible to agree with his point of view. He may well have meant to be a friend to her, as much as he could, within the parameters of retaining his position.

“Well, thank you for thinking of my feelings,” she said, trying to be fair and wanting this highly unwelcome contretemps finished with. “As it happens, I don’t hate you any more, and you’re not a ghost I need to lay to rest.”

“Good!” He sounded relieved.

His response nagged at Leigh. Why did he care what she felt? Unless, of course, he did want to bed her, and ghosts wouldn’t be good in that scenario. But was that really likely? She was no longer sure what was likely with him. He kept on walking with her, seemingly deep in thought, and she couldn’t shake the feeling all his thoughts were focused on her.

They reached the ornamental pond. Wanting to reduce any sense of gathering intimacy with a man she could have nothing in common with beyond the memories of imprisoned hours together in the long-ago past, she sat down on the wide sandstone blocks which formed a flat platform on top of the pond’s circular enclosure and trailed her fingers through the water, making the fish dart into flashing movement, their luminous colours catching the light.

So beautiful, Leigh thought. Did they know they were prisoners, bought by the wealth of Lawrence Durant for his casual pleasure? Would freedom mean anything to these fish, or would they be lost in a world beyond this confinement? They were well fed, but being well fed wasn’t everything. It was good to feel free. Yet even away from this place and all it represented, Leigh knew she was still emotionally tied to it, which was why she’d come back, hoping for…what?

It looked like she was only messing herself up again.

“I’m glad you came back, Leigh.”

The soft intonation made the comment sound very, very personal. Leigh instantly steeled herself against its warming effect. If she started wanting too much from Richard Seymour, bitter disillusionment would surely follow. Any closeness with him had to be dangerous. As it was, she was acutely aware of him standing barely a metre away. That distance didn’t feel far enough.

“I needed to be here today,” she answered flatly, still watching the fish. “The funeral made Lawrence’s death real…the coffin…the cremation…ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He doesn’t have the power to hurt me any more.” And I won’t let you do it, either, she added resolutely.

“Your mother and sisters…from what I saw, none of them ever stood up for you. Do you expect that to be different now?” he asked, the soft tone projecting a caring she wouldn’t let herself believe.

He hadn’t stood up, either, though Leigh had to concede he had done more than the others to stop Lawrence’s games. On the other hand, as an outsider, he hadn’t been personally subjected to them. She wasn’t the only one in the family who’d suffered verbal abuse. It had a repressive effect on all of them.

“I don’t know if it will be different,” she answered honestly. Suddenly and fiercely wishing for some open honesty from him, she lifted her gaze for direct confrontation. “Lawrence pulled the strings then. It looks like you pull them now. So what do you want, Richard? What is this conversation about? You’ll do much better with me if you don’t play games.”

He cocked his head slightly, assessing the strength of that statement. His eyes held no warmth whatsoever. They were coldly calculating and Leigh sensed a ruthless gathering of purpose. When he spoke, there was no preamble, no dressing up with persuasive intent, just the bare bones of what he’d been leading to from the very beginning of this encounter.

“I want to marry you, Leigh.”

CHAPTER THREE

LEIGH stared at Richard Seymour, too stunned to really believe her ears, but her eyes didn’t pick up any messages that changed what she’d thought she’d heard.

He was watching her with intense concentration, waiting to weigh her reaction. His body looked relaxed but she could feel tension emanating from him. More than tension. Will-power was beaming out of those compelling blue eyes, asserting absolutely serious intent and firming up the wobbly ground inside her mind.

There was only one question to ask so she asked it. “Why? Of all the women you could choose to marry, why me?”

His mouth curved into a half-smile. “I could give you many reasons, Leigh, but since they’re mostly from my point of view, I doubt you’d see them as valid.”

Valid!

She laughed. Couldn’t help herself. The situation was so wildly improbable, a sense of sheer hysteria bubbled out of her. King Richard wanting Cinderella as his wife? It might be understandable if he was madly in love with her, but that idea was as far-fetched as his proposition.

Leigh couldn’t resist pursuing it, her eyes dancing a challenge as she asked, “Just give me one of those reasons, Richard. One I might be able to believe in.”

His eyes seemed to twinkle knowingly at her as he said, “We’re fellow travellers on a road that started a long time ago. Who else will understand what went into the journey?”

A straight stab to the heart, killing any urge to laugh and instantly evoking a sober and vehement reply. “I got off that road.”

“Did you?” he softly challenged. “Not quite, Leigh, or you would never have come back.”

“I’ve explained why.”

He nodded. “I listened, and what I heard is it’s not finished for you. You’re still seeking…” He paused a moment, his eyes boring into hers. “…justice.”

He was crawling into her mind, plucking on heartstrings that did yearn for what had never been given.

“What better justice can there be now than to balance the scales…with you taking all that was taken from you?” he suggested with a terrible, insidious appeal to the darkness deep inside her. “I can give it to you, Leigh.”

She wanted to look away, to escape this awful intrusion into her private soul, yet if she did, he would know he had hit truly and the vulnerability was there to be played upon. The darkness was not good. She’d tried to escape it, hating how it blighted her life. She realised now she had come back to confront it, make it go away. But how could marrying him turn it around? Wouldn’t it be more of the same?

She’d been right about not giving him information to use against her. He was too clever at reading it. He wouldn’t have succeeded Lawrence Durant if he wasn’t both diabolically clever and ruthless. And she hadn’t forgotten how the game was played. Hiding the hurt defeated the victory. She kept her gaze firmly on his and turned the darkness back onto him.

“Let’s cut to the real point, Richard. I don’t believe you want to marry me, so marriage to me has to have a purpose. What advantage is there in it for you?”

He laughed, completely disarming her for a moment, and his eyes danced at her in open admiration, disarming her even further. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I love you,” he tossed at her, moving closer to the sandstone rim of the pond, then lifting a foot onto it, leaning forward, resting his arms on the bent knee.

The pose brought him effectively closer to her, setting up an intimate togetherness while still respecting her personal space. And suddenly there was a sizzle in his eyes that set all her nerve ends twitching.

“But don’t think I don’t want you, Leigh,” he said in a low purring voice, stirring even more havoc inside her. “There’s nothing about you I don’t want, including your blazing directness, which I find more refreshing than you could ever begin to believe.”

Her heart was pumping so hard she couldn’t think of a word to say. Her mind was jammed with sexual signals. And the terrible part was she couldn’t push them out. There was a dreadful fascination in this crazy physical response to Richard Seymour. She remembered how his presence had always tied her in knots when she was a teenager. She hadn’t recognised it then as sexual attraction. But now…

Did he know?

Did he feel it?

Sheer panic kept her silent.

He was not the least bit perturbed by her lack of response. He went on talking with easy confidence, knowing that she understood what he was spelling out. “You were supposed to be the son to carry on Lawrence’s name and dynasty. And you paid one hell of a price for not being that son. What you don’t know—yet—is he never lost the obsession of having his own flesh and blood carry on from him.”

“But that’s impossible now,” Leigh murmured, struggling out of her distraction.

“No, it’s not impossible…if he has a grandson with the right capabilities. And Lawrence thought of that before he died. Thought of it and planned it.”

A grandson! It was sickening. An innocent little baby boy created for Lawrence Durant’s massive ego, life and goals all rigidly mapped out before he even started living. As hers would have been if she had been the right sex and the right material for moulding into the right monument to a man who didn’t deserve any kind of monument.

“Did he pick out the name, too?” she asked in savage disgust. “Mine was supposed to be Leigh Jason. The Jason part was dropped when I turned out to be a girl.”

“Lawrence,” came the dry reply.

“Of course. One Lawrence gone. Another coming up.”

Something infinitely dangerous and determined flashed through the clear blue of his eyes. “He can’t reach that far from the grave, Leigh, and his purpose can be defeated.”

She was tantalised by the brief glimpse of something she didn’t know—a force driving him that went beyond her previous judgement of his character. “Go on,” she urged.

“I was the one who took your designated role, insofar as I met the expectations he would have had for his son. My much publicised position as his successor is not ironclad. It is provisional to my fulfilling the terms of his will.”

“Which are?” she prompted when he paused, although she could guess what was coming, and another painful emptiness yawned inside her.

His mouth curled into a mirthless smile. “If I marry one of his daughters and produce a son, I get the necessary percentage of company shares which will make my position as his successor unassailable.”

The right material wedded to the Durant genes.

Hence the proposal of marriage.

Except she couldn’t be the chosen one…never the chosen one.

There was one huge flaw in Richard Seymour’s selection of her as his bride, and Leigh wasn’t the only one who knew it. Her mother certainly did. Her four sisters might very well be aware of it, as well. They’d tell him soon enough, if it served their interests, and the evidence of her own observations pointed that way.

All five of them undoubtedly knew the contents of the will. Whomever Richard chose to marry would be sitting pretty in the world they knew. It explained why her mother and sisters had been so focused on courting his favour and not paying any attention to the return of the prodigal daughter. It was the same old sick game, sucking up to power.

Leigh found her gaze had dropped to the leg Richard had propped on the sandstone platform. The fine woollen fabric of his suit trousers was pulled taut over a strongly muscled thigh. Her mind fuzzed over an image of how he might look naked, all that male power energised by desire, wanting her…

Another fanciful dream turned to dust, she thought, feeling the same old ache of disappointment Richard had always left her with. If she told him the truth he wouldn’t want her, not as a wife. Even if he still fancied her—the woman she was now—she couldn’t allow anything to come of it, knowing he would inevitably choose to make one of her sisters his bride. Best to cut it dead right now.

She dragged her gaze up and kept it levelled on his as she delivered her rejection. “The answer is no, Richard. I won’t marry you.”

Then to emphasise the matter was closed, she was up on her feet with her back turned to him and heading towards the steps that led down to the next terrace, away from him, away from the house that had dominated much of her life, away from the family who cared more for what it represented than they’d ever cared for her.

“Why not?” Richard shot after her.

She waved a dismissive hand without glancing around. “You have four other daughters to choose from. You just struck out on me, that’s all.”

“I don’t want any of the others,” he declared vehemently.

She shook her head over the black irony of that statement and kept on walking, down the steps to the summer-house which presided over the terrace of rose gardens. She could hear his footsteps following her and fiercely wished he’d leave her alone.

It was so perverse of him to choose her ahead of the far more suitable daughters, the beautiful blonde accomplished socialites with the right blood in them, only too eager to snap him up and grace his arm, his bed, and his bank balance. Felicity, Vanessa, Caroline, Nadine…such pretty, feminine, classy names.

The impulse to shove one truth she’d had to accept down Richard Seymour’s throat made Leigh pause by the summer-house and cast a derisive look at him. He was already at the foot of the steps and striding towards her.

“You know, Richard, most people don’t get everything they want. You may not be used to that but I’m sure compromises sometimes have to be taken, even in your world.”

He kept on coming. “You can have everything you want from me, Leigh.”

The strong conviction in his voice clutched at her heart, but only for a moment. He wasn’t offering love. He probably didn’t know what love was, any more than she did. The sheer sweep of his extravagant promise suddenly evoked another wild laugh, peeling into a wind that carried it away from her as swiftly as it arose.

It didn’t stop him. His eyes didn’t waver from hers, determined on burning away her scorn and supplanting it with possibilities that could breed hope. But there was no hope.

“It’s very simple, Richard,” she said flatly. “Regardless of what you can give me, I can’t give you what you want.”

He came to a halt, barely a metre away, totally un-perturbed by her claim. His eyes challenged it with ruthless intent as he said, “Because you’re not Lawrence Durant’s daughter?”

Shock reverberated through her. “You know?” The words spilled from her lips before she could catch them back. Had he guessed or had he pushed her into admission? His proposal made no sense if he knew. A churning turmoil of shame and pride robbed her of any movement as he stepped towards her, a mesmerising satisfaction written on his face.

“I knew the day I first met you, Leigh. You didn’t belong to Lawrence, not physically, not mentally, not emotionally. No bond at all and nothing of him in you. Nothing.”

It wasn’t proof, she thought, but he went on, shattering that thought.

“Lawrence confirmed it when you went away and I suggested someone should be hired to keep track of you in case you were in need. ‘She’s my wife’s child, not mine!’ was what he said, then swore me to silence on the subject. A proud man like Lawrence didn’t care to have it known that you weren’t his.”

The power of his total self-assurance held her still, though her heart was pounding wildly and tremors of shock were still running through her.

“Legally, you are his.”

“No.” Her voice sounded hollow but the words had to be said now. “He disinherited me when I left.”

“He made no provision for you in his will, Leigh, but nowhere is there a claim that denies you are his child. And since Lawrence was cremated today, there can be no DNA tests to prove you aren’t. I can marry you in good faith with the terms of his will.”

Instinctively she fought against the relentless beat of his logic. “My mother could name my real father.”

A grim little smile curled his mouth. “It’s not in her best interests to do so.”

The manipulation of wealth! Leigh’s hatred of it spurred her to argue. “What makes you think my real father wouldn’t come forward if he saw money in it?”

That killed the smile. Yet, even more disturbing, his eyes seemed to soften with sympathy. “It won’t happen, Leigh,” he said quietly. “Your mother paid for him and his family to go back to Italy before you were born. From the date of their departure, I’d say he knows nothing of you.”

“Go back to Italy?” she picked up in bewilderment.

“You didn’t know he was Italian?”

She shook her head. On the terrible night she had learnt Lawrence Durant was not her father, her mother had refused to reveal the true circumstances of her birth. The argument between Lawrence and his wife had raged over her head, and had more to do with financial arrangements than the infidelity that had brought her into their world. They had forgotten her in hurling threats at one another. She’d simply slipped away, packed her things and left.

Italian…well, that explained her colouring. There weren’t too many blonde Italians. It probably explained her non-boyish figure, as well. The only Italian actress she could think of was Sophia Loren, whose curvaceous femininity was legendary. Leigh supposed a hot-blooded Italian lover would have made a tempting contrast to Lawrence Durant, but her mother had hardly been wise in having a child by him, risking the possibility of producing the cuckoo Leigh had turned out to be.

“He was the gardener here at the time of your conception,” Richard explained.

It shocked her into speech. “A gardener? My mother took a gardener as her lover?” It seemed unbelievable. Her mother was a dyed-in-the-wool snob who invariably disdained to notice what she considered the lower classes.

“He had four sons, Leigh.”

Ah…the logic of it was instantly crystal clear. No escaping that connection. A man who fathered sons was precisely what was wanted when four daughters had been delivered and a son was required.

Leigh closed her eyes, revolted by the calculation that had gone into her conception…the payment that had been made for a service rendered. No doubt, if there’d been ultrasound scans done all those years ago to determine the sex of the baby, the pregnancy would have been terminated and she wouldn’t even be alive today. Her mother had probably gambled on having a child that took after her in looks and colouring. No wonder she’d been unwanted. She represented failure in every sense.

“How do you know all this, Richard?” she asked, raising lashes that felt unnaturally heavy, but needing to see the answer in his eyes.

“I made it my business to find out.”

“Why?” A weary, aching cynicism prompted her to add, “To ensure there was no wild card that could upset your plan?”

“There was no plan when I set about getting the information. That was six years ago, Leigh.”

She frowned, realising the terms of the will would only have been revealed on Lawrence’s death. “Then what use was it to you?”