Dangerous Temptation

Caitlin wondered if Nathan had really been to see his father. She knew pathetically little about his background, and what she did know was hardly up to date. She knew his mother was dead and that his father was virtually a recluse—at least, that was the excuse he’d given her for Jacob Wolfe not attending their wedding. And it must have been true, she supposed, or her father wouldn’t have encouraged the match.

Weariness descended like a cloud upon her. What was she really doing here? she wondered disconsolately. Why had she let her father persuade her to make this trip? Whatever had happened, Nathan wouldn’t want to see her. She should have told her father the truth and made him send someone else.

Marshall O’Brien could have done it. Her father’s personal assistant—secretary—henchman—would have handled the less attractive details far better than she. He wouldn’t have felt as helpless as she did staring round this vast foyer, with no earthly idea where her husband might be. And no helpful nurse to direct her. She sighed heavily. Just a cacophony of voices, and squealing gurneys, and—noise!

Yet it was she who hadn’t allowed Marshall to accompany her, even though her father had suggested it. After living a lie for almost three years, she was not about to expose the travesty of their marriage just because Nathan had been involved in a plane crash. Dear God, when she’d first heard the news, for a second—for the minutest, most shameful second of her life—she had actually believed that it was over. In spite of all the guilt and recrimination she had felt later, for that one fleeting second she’d thought she was free….

A harassed receptionist eventually informed her that her husband was in a ward on the twelfth floor. “Just take the elevator, take the elevator,” the woman exclaimed when Caitlin asked for directions. Then turned away almost immediately to answer another query.

She could have been a serial killer and she’d have received the same instructions, Caitlin thought wryly. Any security there had ever been had been eclipsed by the very real demands of the situation. It was no one’s fault; there simply weren’t enough staff to handle it. In circumstances like these, the most you could hope for was a civil tone.

The lifts, when she found them, were jammed with stretchers and still more people. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, and the mix of sounds and dialects was deafening in the ponderous, clanking cubicle. But they ascended, albeit ponderously, to the upper reaches of the hospital, stopping at every floor to disgorge and take on more passengers.

Caitlin inevitably found herself pushed towards the back of the lift, with the iron rails of a gurney crushed against her stomach. She had never felt claustrophobic before, but the panic of confinement rose sharp and unfamiliar inside her. Only the awareness of the injured child on the gurney kept her silent, the bottle of plasma held high by an orderly providing a steadying focus on which to fix her gaze.

They reached the twelfth floor at last, and Caitlin forced herself to step out onto the vinyl landing. The gurney had swished away to her left, and her fellow passengers rushed off to find the nearest nursing station. But Caitlin took a moment to compose herself, as the smells of the hospital washed around her. Nathan would not expect her to rush to his bedside. In the circumstances, her being here at all seemed out of place.

She should never have married him, she thought again, with a sense of vulnerability. It was a feeling she’d had many times before. But it had been what her father had wanted, and after resisting him for so long, it had seemed the most logical thing to do.

How wrong she’d been…

Another lift stopped beside her, and realising she was causing an obstruction, Caitlin began to walk towards the busy nurses’ station. Around her, the tide of humanity continually ebbed and flowed, and listening to the unmistakeable sounds of grief, she wondered how she could be feeling sorry for herself when many of these people had lost friends and loved ones. At least Nathan was alive, and God willing, he’d make a full recovery. She should be glad he’d survived. Not bemoaning her fate…

She waited her turn silently, relieved that she was not obliged to make trivial conversation. It was a huge hospital, with the corridors stretching away to left and right evidently accommodating many wards. The sign, hanging above their heads, announced Neurosurgery and Neurology, and she was just absorbing the significance of this when the busy nurse asked her name.

“Um…” Caitlin looked at her a little blankly. “I—Wolfe. Caitlin Wolfe.”

“We don’t have any Caitlin Wolfe on this floor,” the nurse declared impatiently.

She was already turning to the next inquirer when Caitlin exclaimed, “It’s Nathan. Nathan Wolfe.” She flushed unhappily. “I misunderstood. I thought you wanted my name.”

She glanced at the couple behind her, hoping for their support, but the woman seemed dull-eyed and lifeless and the man looked right through her. Evidently the news they’d received had left them in a state of shock, and once again Caitlin felt guilty for her lack of grief.

“You’re Mrs Wolfe, is that right?” the nurse asked with more compassion, and Caitlin nodded quickly. For the first time, she felt a prickle of alarm. The nurse was eyeing her with some sympathy now. How serious could Nathan’s condition be?

“I’m going to have to ask you to take a seat, Mrs Wolfe,” the nurse declared at last, compounding her fears. “The doctor would like to speak to you before you see your husband. If you’d just wait over there…”

“He’s not dead, is he?”

Caitlin blurted the words urgently, and this time even the man and woman behind her in the queue showed some response. But the nurse was professionally reassuring. “He’s doing very well,” she declared, shuffling the folders on the desk. “The doctor just wants to talk to you. It’s nothing too serious.” She lifted her hand as if taking an oath. “I promise.”

Caitlin wasn’t sure how sincere the nurse’s promise might be. She was still troubled by those two words: Neurosurgery and Neurology. It must mean that Nathan had injured his head. Oh, God, he wasn’t brain damaged, was he? That would be the cruellest blow of all.

But she wouldn’t think about things like that, she decided, taking a seat on one of the steel-framed vinyl chairs. She had to be confident, and optimistic. Someone would surely have told her if Nathan was in a coma.

A little girl of perhaps two or three was waiting with her mother a couple of seats away. Although she was obviously too old to do so, she was sucking her thumb, and Caitlin wondered what anxieties she was suffering in her own small way. She had to know something was wrong. Her mother had been crying. Was that why she was seeking comfort in the only way she knew?

Caitlin attempted a smile, but it wasn’t returned, and even that effort was too great to sustain. Dear God, she thought, let Nathan be all right. Whatever he’d done, he didn’t deserve to be here.

The little girl continued to stare at her, and Caitlin wondered if things would have been different if she and Nathan had had a child of their own. It might not have changed his character, but he might have loved their child.

Her mind drifted back to her own childhood. When had she become aware that her own father had wished she had been a son? Was it when he’d realised her mother could have no more children after Caitlin? When he’d learned the dynasty he’d hoped to found was never to be?

To begin with, it hadn’t seemed that important—at least not to Caitlin. All through her childhood, all the time she was growing into adolescence, she had never felt she was a disappointment to either of her parents. She had been given everything a child could wish for, and they had had her love in return.

But she had always been a fairly serious child, never happier than when her nose was immersed in a book. She had satisfied every academic hope her parents could have had for her, and following a successful career at school, she had gone on to gain a brilliant degree besides.

Her aim had always been to work for her father’s company. Naïvely, she supposed now, she had seen herself taking over from him one day and running Webster Development. It was an ambition she had formed when he had first taken her to visit the Webster Building, and it was not until she’d gained her degree that she’d realised how unrealistic her hopes had been. Her father was from the old school, to whom the idea of a woman in a position of total authority was something of an anathema. He was prepared to make her an associate director, if that was what she really wanted. But as far as taking over when he retired…

A man in a white coat was approaching, and Caitlin felt her mouth go dry. Oh, God, she thought, please let it be good news. But the man didn’t even look at her. He just walked by, intent on some objective of his own.

Her thoughts returned to Matthew Webster. Not that she could blame her father for her present predicament, she reflected bleakly. Although his attitude might have caused her to rebel, ultimately she had been the one who’d made the mistakes.

And so, much to her father’s dismay and her mother’s quiet amusement, she had found herself a flat in London. Instead of commuting to the office from her parents’ home in Buckinghamshire, as Matthew Webster had expected, she had abandoned her ideas of working for the company and accepted a temporary position in a friend’s art gallery instead.

Of course, from her father’s point of view, she couldn’t have made a more unsuitable decision. The men she met in the course of her work at the gallery were not the sort of men he admired. Mostly, he regarded artists, of any persuasion, as wimps and losers, and he lost no opportunity to ridicule her chosen career.

But, once her mind was made up, Caitlin had proved to be as obdurate as her father. She liked the idea that people listened to her opinion; that she was treated as an equal instead of being ignored. And the work was easy. She could have done it standing on her head. It was pleasant, it was civilised, and she’d managed to convince herself it was what she wanted to do.

In addition to which, she had a social life at last. Instead of burying her head in a book every evening, she’d started accepting invitations to the theatre, and to parties, and to various exhibitions. She still had no illusions about her popularity, of course. Growing up as Matthew Webster’s daughter had made her cynical, and she couldn’t throw that cynicism off overnight. She knew she was neither incredibly sexy nor incredibly beautiful, and for all her independence, she was still too willing to accept that her father’s wealth was pulling strings.

“Mrs Wolfe?”

A nurse was standing in front of her, and Caitlin jerked her head up so quickly she went dizzy for a moment. “Yes?”

“Dr Harper says he’s sorry to keep you waiting, Mrs Wolfe,” the nurse explained, urging Caitlin back into her seat when she would have stood up. “He’ll be with you very shortly.” She paused. “There’s a dispenser over there if you’d like to help yourself to some coffee.”

Caitlin made a negative gesture, the dizziness receding. Machine-made coffee was usually unpalatable in her experience, and although she’d come to the hospital straight from the airport, her stomach was not yet attuned to the fact that it was only midday here in New York. It was already five o’clock in London, and on any other day she would have been either at the flat, or working.

“It’s the pits, waiting,” remarked the little girl’s mother suddenly, in an accent that Caitlin found harder to understand than that of the nurse. She sniffed. “I guess you’re here for the same reason I am. You got someone injured in the crash?”

Caitlin nodded. “My husband.” She hesitated. “Did you…?”

“Yeah. Emmy’s father was on the same flight,” agreed the woman, pulling a used tissue out of her sleeve and blowing her nose hard. “He was on his way to England to see his sick mother. Leastwise, that’s what he told me.” She grimaced. “Who knows about men?”

Well, not me, thought Caitlin ruefully. She exchanged a wistful smile with the little girl. When David Griffiths had come along, she’d been vulnerable and far too willing to believe what he said.

David was the brother of the friend who’d invited her to work at the gallery, and, for some unknown reason, he had been instantly attracted to her. Had he seen how naïve she was? How inexperienced? Or had he sensed what a pushover she’d be?

Whatever, he had certainly made her feel special. The tall, shy young woman, who had come to help his sister sell her paintings, had been transformed into a glowing creature who believed everything he said. She’d sometimes wondered if he’d ever cared about her. Or if she was the kind of person who only saw what she wanted to see.

His sister, Felicity—Fliss—had approved of the alliance. She’d assured Caitlin that she was good for her brother and that he’d never been so happy before.

Sometimes, Caitlin had found him a little impractical. She was still her father’s daughter after all, and his attitude towards money gave her pause. But he taught her that life was not just a series of balance sheets and that personal fulfilment meant more than being a success.

Their affair had not been a passionate one. In lovemaking, as in everything else, David preferred to take it very much at his own pace. Caitlin doubted he had ever felt strongly about anything that didn’t directly affect his own wellbeing. He was selfish and self-indulgent—but he was fun.

The only aspect of their relationship that did trouble her was his moodiness. For all his happy-go-lucky ways, there were days when he was not approachable at all. And because in all the time she’d known him he had never had a job, Caitlin had got it into her head that he had financial problems; that although he seemed quite content to borrow money from either her or his sister, secretly he worried about the future.

She remembered she’d even mentioned her fears to Fliss quite early in their relationship. But Fliss had just dismissed them out of hand. David had always had these cranky days, she assured her carelessly. If she had any sense, she’d just leave him alone and he’d come round.

And she had, until that fateful day when she’d entered the small flat he’d occupied above the gallery and discovered him unconscious on the floor….

Looking back now, she could quite see why Fliss had been as angry as she was when Caitlin burst unannounced into her office. She had been dealing with a client at the time, and Caitlin’s hysterical belief that David had suffered some kind of stroke had not helped the proceedings. “My God,” she’d said later, after David had been carted off to a drug rehabilitation centre, “if you hadn’t recognised my brother’s little habit for what it was, you must have been living on another planet!”

And Caitlin supposed she had. Or in another world anyway, she conceded ruefully. But afterwards, she’d found it impossible to forgive him, or Fliss, for deceiving her as they had….

“You’re English, aren’t you?”

Emmy’s mother was speaking again, and guessing she needed the comfort of a shared confidence, Caitlin conceded that she was right.

“I flew in from London this morning,” she admitted as Emmy left the shelter of her mother’s skirt long enough to touch the glossy sable fur that trimmed Caitlin’s cashmere coat. “Um—how about you? Do you live in New York?”

“Can’t you tell?” The woman was philosophic about her accent. “Yeah, Ted and me, we live on Staten Island. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been there. Believe me, you’ve missed nothing.”

Caitlin smiled. “I’m afraid this is my first trip to New York,” she said, grimacing at her ignorance. “I’ve been to Florida and California, but I’ve never been to the Big Apple before.”

“The Big Apple.” The woman repeated the words as if she liked the sound of them. “Yeah, well, I’ve never been to London. But Ted—he was born there, see.”

“He’s English, then?”

Caitlin found talking about something other than her own problems was comforting to her, too, and the woman nodded. “Sort of. His father was a G.I., see. His mother’s English, of course. But Ted, he always wanted to live in the States.”

“Ah.”

“His old lady didn’t,” went on her companion, pulling a wry face. “There was no G.I. bride bit for her. I guess you could say she wasn’t much interested in Ted, either. She let his father bring him back to the U.S. That’s why him dashing off to see her now she’s s’posed to be ill sounds pretty thin, don’t you think?”

Caitlin made some reassuring comment about time healing all wounds, but she wondered whom she was kidding. Her first opinion of Nathan had been coloured by the way David had treated her. The assured, confident American had seemed to possess all the attributes the other man hadn’t. He was good-looking, well-educated, ambitious; and she was no longer the naïve idealist she had been.

In addition to which, her father had liked him. She’d left the art gallery after her break-up with David, and it was while she was recovering her spirits at home that she’d met Nathan at the party her parents had given for her twenty-sixth birthday. He’d been at Harvard some years before with the son of one of her father’s business acquaintances, and because he was staying with the Gordons at the time, he’d accompanied them to the celebrations.

To begin with, she and Nathan had appeared to have so much in common. Like herself, Nathan was a university graduate. He was an older man, of course, but from a business background as she was. He’d told her his father owned a busy sawmill in New Jersey, and that he was visiting England to study British business methods.

His host, Adrian Gordon, had spoken very positively of his interest in the environment. And when Matthew Webster had offered to show him a little of the way he operated, Nathan had been eager to accept. He’d seemed so open, so enthusiastic, so eager to please. So much so, that she’d been completely taken in.

Their marriage was an instant disaster. She’d learned, at the start of her honeymoon, that Nathan had no feelings for her; that he cared for no one but himself. Her hopes, her fears, her needs, were not important. He’d married her because she was Matthew Webster’s daughter and because he believed that ultimately her father would give the control of the company to him….

“You come back here, Emmy.”

Caitlin came back to the present to find that the little girl had sidled up to her now and was stroking the fur that edged her cuff. “It’s all right,” she said, almost glad of the diversion. “I expect she’s missing her daddy. Just like you.”

“You got children, Mrs Wolfe?”

The woman moved into the seat next to her, and Caitlin gave her a rueful glance. “Unfortunately not,” she said, the pain of Nathan’s betrayal still sharp inside her.

She sighed.

She had certainly had a rude awakening. Until they were married, Nathan had held back from making love to her, and she, poor fool that she was, had imagined it was because he respected her. She winced. How wrong she had been. Nathan hadn’t touched her because he’d known his lovemaking would disgust her. She couldn’t respond to his violent sexuality, and by the time they came home from Tahiti, she was in a state of shock.

But she was not a quitter, and although she knew she had made a terrible mistake, she was still prepared to give the marriage a chance. She’d known how disappointed her father would be if she said she wanted to divorce Nathan. Particularly when he’d invested so much hope in their union.

She’d discovered Nathan was being unfaithful to her less than three months after their return to London. Seeing him with another woman had shaken her, and she had listened to his excuses with a heavy heart.

She’d learned Lisa Abbott’s name just a few weeks later.

The woman was an American, she discovered, and he had known her for years. He had apparently invited her to join him in London, and he had been using the credit card her father had given him to pay for a room at a hotel.

Caitlin had been searching, quite legitimately, for her address book when she’d found the damning statement crumpled at the back of a drawer. She probably shouldn’t have looked at it. The very fact that she hadn’t seen it before should have warned her it was nothing to do with her. But curiosity got the better of her, and like any normal wife, she’d wanted to know what it was.

The row that had followed had been painfully destructive, the first real indication that any hopes she still might have nurtured for their marriage had been hopelessly naïve. She’d walked out of the flat afterwards, with every intention of seeing a solicitor. She couldn’t go on living with a man to whom deceit was second nature.

But it was evening when she left the flat. All solicitors’ offices were closed, and rather than go back, she’d taken a room in a hotel. She’d had no knowledge that her father had had a heart attack until she’d arrived at her parents’ home the next day to find an ambulance—and Nathan’s car—already in the drive.

The sight of her father being carried from the house on a stretcher had sent her running towards the pillared portico. Matthew Webster was clearly unconscious, but her mother was there, with Nathan just behind her, and she’d raised accusing eyes to her daughter’s face.

“What is it? What’s happened?” cried Caitlin, convinced in those first few minutes that Nathan was responsible for her father’s collapse. She was quite prepared to believe he had told some cock-and-bull tale to her parents, blaming her for the rift between them and destroying all her father’s hopes for their marriage.

“Where have you been?” retorted her mother tearfully. “If Nathan hadn’t come at once, I don’t know what I’d have done.” She glanced round at her son-in-law gratefully. “We’ve both been trying desperately to find you. If you must continue to go out with your friends, you might at least leave Nathan an address where you can be reached.”

Caitlin’s eyes moved to her husband’s then, and his smug expression was almost her undoing. But how could she accuse Nathan of anything in the present circumstances? With the guilt successfully transferred to her shoulders, it was doubtful if even her mother would believe her.

Of course, Caitlin could tell from Nathan’s expression that he knew she wouldn’t say anything now. That half-amused arrogance, quickly disguised when her mother turned to speak to him, was a clear indication of what he was thinking. There was no question now of Caitlin betraying his falseness. Until her father recovered his strength, her hands were tied.

And, unfortunately, since that afternoon, Matthew Webster had never completely regained his strength. He’d recovered from the attack, but his doctor had warned him there was still a weakness in his heart, and he had to avoid any kind of stress.

For her part, Caitlin had eventually resigned herself to the hypocrisy of her marriage. The awful thing was that, as the weeks and months went by, she had actually begun to ask herself what she had to gain by ruining Nathan’s reputation. She was grateful that the physical side of their marriage was over, but from an objective point of view, he provided a shield. At least no other man attempted to seduce her. As Nathan’s wife, she was protected from men like him.

Gradually, however, she had become aware of a change in her father’s attitude towards her husband. He no longer seemed confident that Nathan was the man to succeed him. These days, he never spoke about giving Nathan more authority, and his sudden appointment of Marshall O’Brien as his second in command had placed a definite strain on their relationship….

“Mrs Wolfe?”

The unfamiliar masculine voice arrested her uneasy thoughts, bringing her abruptly back to earth. Whatever had happened in the past didn’t much matter now. Nathan was injured, maybe seriously, and even her father couldn’t blame him for that.

An elderly man in a white lab coat was looking down at her, and she forced her brain into action. “Dr—Harper?”