A Ruthless Passion

His golden eyes hardened. ‘Of course you do,’ he replied scathingly, leaning back in his chair and steepling his hands—just like all the finance managers who’d already rejected her, Cat thought with a flare of temper.

Eyes half closed, he said, ‘As the trustee of Glen’s estate I made sure your annual allowance was transferred to your account four months ago. You’re not entitled to any more for another eight months.’

‘I need an advance.’

‘How much, and why?’ he asked, silkily insistent.

‘Twenty thousand dollars.’

She didn’t know what she’d expected—outrage, anger, disgust? But none of those emotions showed in the harsh, good-looking face, although Nick’s iron control over his face and body blazed a clear warning.

Almost gently he asked, ‘Why do you need twenty thousand dollars?’

Cat opened her bag and extracted a photograph. Her fingers shook as she pushed it across the wide desk. ‘She needs an operation.’

He glanced down. Surprise, then something like black fury replaced the glitter in his eyes. He looked up and asked in a level, almost soundless voice, ‘Is she your child?’

‘No!’ Cat sucked breath into starved lungs.

This time he examined the photograph for long seconds before asking, ‘So who is she, and why do you need twenty thousand dollars?’

‘Her name is Juana.’

He lifted a dispassionate gaze. ‘Are you sponsoring her? Because no reputable aid agency demands twenty thousand dollars—’

‘I’m not sponsoring her. I’m responsible for her, and you can see why I want the money.’

Once more he looked down at the photograph. Still in that calm, toneless voice he said, ‘I can see she needs surgery, but what has that to do with your request for an advance on your allowance?’

‘She has a cleft palate,’ Cat told him crisply. ‘At first the doctor thought that she’d be fine with just the one operation to fix it and the hare-lip, but once they got her to Australia they realised she’d need ongoing surgery. They booked her in for the next operation when she was two, but she’s grown so much she’s ready now. In fact, to be entirely successful it has to be done within the next couple of months. And as she’s from Romit, and therefore not an Australian citizen, everything has to be paid for.’

Nick noted the way her lashes hid her eyes, admired the artistic tremor in her voice. To give himself time to rein in the hot anger that knotted his gut, he got to his feet and walked across to the bookshelves.

Deliberately choosing the position of power, he leaned a shoulder against a shelf and surveyed the woman in front of him. Normally he never bothered with the techniques of intimidation—he didn’t need to. Only with this woman did he craft every inflection in his voice, the movement of every muscle in his body.

He had to give her credit for nerve. After two years without a word she’d walked into his office as coolly as though she had a dozen valid reasons to demand this money, and she wasn’t giving an inch even now.

Of course, a woman with her assets had no reason to doubt herself.

Not that she was exactly beautiful. Cat Courtald—significant that she’d gone back to her maiden name!—had matured into an intriguing, fascinating, infinitely desirable woman, one with the power to sabotage both his will and his conscience. But then, he thought with hard self-mockery, recalling the times he’d touched her, she’d always had that power.

It had to be something to do with tilted blue eyes that smouldered with a secretive, lying allure, and skin like ivory silk, and a passionate, sultry mouth—and that was just her face! Her body almost tempted him to forget that this delicate, sensuous package hid a woman who’d sold herself to his mentor for security.

His rich mentor, he amended cynically. Four years later she’d tearlessly watched Glen’s coffin lowered into the ground, her tight, composed face a telling contrast to the grief she’d shown at her mother’s funeral.

She got to her feet to face him, her body stiff with anger. ‘I need the money for her, Nick, not for myself.’

This from a woman who’d never shown any sign of liking children! Yet, in spite of everything, he wanted to believe her. Like all good actresses she projected complete and total sincerity.

Her attempt to use the little girl in the photograph made him sick and angry.

‘Sit down, Cat,’ he said evenly, ‘and tell me how you got involved with this child.’

After a second’s hesitation, she obeyed, disposing her elegant limbs neatly in the chair before lifting her arrogant little nose and square chin to say in the voice that made him think of long, impassioned nights and hot, maddening sex, ‘I made myself responsible for her.’

Hunger ripped through him, ferociously mindless. Furious at his body’s abject response to that degrading, treacherous need, he turned and walked behind the desk. Hiding, he thought sardonically. ‘Why?’

‘She was born on the first of November last year.’

Nick frowned. ‘So?’

‘So it was exactly a year to the day after my mother died.’ The colour faded abruptly from her skin, sharpening her features. Yet she said steadily, ‘I was in Romit. Her mother died having her. I—I made myself responsible for her.’

Clever, he thought objectively, to choose Romit as the scene of this drama. Unable to do anything to stop the carnage, unable to get help to the victims, people had watched in worldwide anguish as the images of a savage civil war had flicked with sickening vividness across their television screens. Even now, with the rebels beaten and a peace-keeping force in residence, the people of Romit were the poorest of the poor. Residual guilt should certainly prise his hands from the pursestrings. ‘I see. Which agency is organising this operation?’

‘None.’

His mouth thinned. ‘Only a total idiot would fall for a story like that,’ he said callously. ‘What do you really want the money for, Cat?’

The light died out of her eyes, leaving them a flat, opaque blue as hard as her voice. ‘I knew you’d accuse me of lying, so I’ve brought my passport and a letter from the nun who runs the clinic where Juana’s being cared for. Sister Bernadette’s explained where the money will go and why it’s necessary now.’

Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t this.

He frowned as she opened her bag and held out a battered envelope and her blue New Zealand passport. Her long fingers flicked open the pages. ‘Here are the dates I went into Romit,’ she said coldly, ‘and came out.’

How would those fingers feel on his skin? Would they cling and stroke? A volatile, potent cocktail of guilt and desire charged his body.

Repressing it, he focused on the stamped pages. God, he thought, fighting back a chill of fear. ‘What the hell were you doing in Romit in the middle of a civil war?’

‘I was working in a hospital—well, it was more a clinic, really.’

The customs stamps danced before his eyes as he recalled the hideous stories that had come out of the uprising. ‘Why?’

She stared at him as though he’d gone mad. ‘I told you— I was working.’

‘You? In a Third World country, in a hospital?’ He laughed derisively. ‘Pull the other leg, Cat.’

With a sudden twist of her body that took him by surprise, she got to her feet.

Automatically he followed suit. Before he could speak she said in a tight voice, ‘Read the letter, Nick.’

‘I don’t doubt for a moment that it purports to be from a nun in a clinic somewhere on that godforsaken island,’ he said curtly. ‘Easy enough to fake, Cat. You must have forgotten who you’re dealing with. What were you doing on Romit?’

She shrugged. ‘After my mother and Glen died a friend suggested I go and stay with her on the island—her father was attached to one of the UN agencies.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘The clinic was next door to their compound and running on nothing. When the fighting started at the other end of the island refugees poured in and they were desperately overworked at the clinic, so Penny and I helped. Then her father was pulled out; he insisted she go with him, but I stayed.’

‘Why?’ he asked harshly.

She stood with her head averted, hands held clenched and motionless by a fierce will. Outside a cloud hovered across the sun. In spite of everything, Nick had to stop himself from taking three strides and pulling her into his arms.

‘I don’t know,’ she said at last in a muted voice. ‘They were—are—so valiant. They had nothing at all, but they laughed and they were kind to each other and to me. The children liked me. And I had no one else.’

Oh, she did it well. Cynically he thought that she was lucky; those fragile bones made every man long to protect her.

Furious at his weakness, he said, ‘Couldn’t you get out? The Cat Withers I knew would have run like hell in case something happened to her pretty little hide.’

‘Courtald,’ she flashed back at him. ‘I’m Catherine Courtald! And you don’t know anything about me—you never did. You looked at me and your prejudices sprang into life without reason or logic!’

‘I had reason,’ he said caustically. ‘Or are you going to tell me that you were passionately in love with Glen when you married him—that you didn’t even think that with his money you could take care of your sick mother and secure your own future?’

She flushed violently, and her gaze fell, her thick lashes hiding her eyes. ‘I told you then—I was in love with him,’ she said in a stifled voice.

‘How could you be, when you looked at me and you wanted me—almost as much as I wanted you?’

‘Have you never done anything stupid?’ she demanded, squaring her shoulders.

‘Yes. Six years ago I looked at my best friend’s fiancée and lusted after her,’ he said cruelly.

The colour fled from her skin. She made an abrupt gesture, then forced her hands back by her sides, her face into an exquisite mask.

Yet he still wanted to believe her. He strove to control the repressed lust and angry remorse—and a debilitating urge to shelter her.

Aloud he said, ‘It’s a good story, Cat, and you’ve done your research well, but I’m afraid I’m finding it very difficult to believe a word of it.’ He flicked the photograph. ‘Or a picture of it.’

Sheer stubbornness kept Cat upright. She couldn’t go to pieces now; she’d never forgive herself—or Nick—if his dislike and distrust stole Juana’s future.

‘Why don’t you at least make an effort to find out whether I’m telling the truth?’ she asked woodenly, picking up her bag. ‘You can take the money out of next year’s income.’

He lifted his brows. ‘Twenty thousand dollars? What would you live on? Unless you’re planning on finding another rich man to marry,’ he said, adding with pointed courtesy, ‘But as your trustee I have to remind you that if you do that you give up any further claim on Glen’s estate.’

‘I’m planning on finding a job,’ she said between her teeth, and walked across the room.

Without looking at him, she closed the door behind her with precision, listening to the sound reverberate off every shiny surface.

Forcing herself not to flee cravenly, she nodded at the elegant, startled PA, who was hurriedly getting to her feet at her desk, took the lift down and strode out into the sunlight, greedily soaking up the heat. Chills rose through her, tightening her skin so that she felt as though she was suffering from a fever.

Nick Harding fever, she thought desperately. It hadn’t gone away after all—instead it had lodged like a deadly virus inside her, waiting for one look, one touch, to set her afire again.

For heaven’s sake, woman, get a grip, she commanded. You have to work out what you’re going to do if he refuses to advance you that money.

Whatever happened, however she raised the money, Juana was going to have her chance.

CHAPTER TWO

A TENSE week later Cat was walking out of the university library when her companion nudged her and growled, ‘Whooor! Fantasy fodder at eleven o’clock.’

It was Nick, leaning indolently against a long, low car of the sort that had even the carefully sophisticated students looking sideways.

‘What’s my favourite colour?’ her companion asked rhetorically. ‘The colour of the last piece of clothing that man takes off in my bedroom!’

Cat unclenched her teeth to say with a lightness she hoped sounded real, ‘Sinead, you’ve already got Jonathan—don’t be greedy. Anyway, this one would break your heart.’

‘Hearts mend, and from the look of him it’d be a wild affair, the sort you shock your great-grandchildren with.’ She stopped as Nick straightened up and scrutinised Cat. ‘Hey, you know him?’

The spring sun beat down on Nick’s black head, glowed lovingly along the high, flaring cheekbones. He looked like a pirate—ruthless and forceful.

‘I know him,’ Cat said. ‘Not well, but enough to be very wary.’

‘If you don’t want him, introduce me?’ She laughed at the glint Cat couldn’t banish from her eyes. ‘It was worth a try. Go on, off you go—you can tell me all about him tonight.’

Alone, Cat walked over to the car, shoulders held stiffly, her face composed.

Nick’s dark suit clung with the finesse of superb tailoring to his wide shoulders and narrow hips, but the formidable assurance and the slow burn of danger came from him alone.

Foolishly, Cat wished she’d worn her pretty blue suit again; jeans, even when topped by a cream shirt and a jersey the colour of her hair, couldn’t live up to his clothes.

‘Hello, Nick,’ she said as she came up to him, her voice so constrained she sounded like a prim schoolgirl.

His mouth curved into a speculative smile. ‘Cat.’ He pushed the door open and held out a hand for her bag.

After a moment’s hesitation she handed it over.

‘This is far too heavy for you,’ he said, frowning, as he dumped the bag in the back seat.

‘Books always weigh a lot. Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere that isn’t quite so public as this.’

She nodded and slid past him into the car, folding her hands in her lap with a stern mental command to them to stay still. Resolutely she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, although she registered nothing of the streetscape until they arrived at an elderly Art Deco apartment building beside one of Auckland’s mid-city parks.

‘This isn’t your office,’ she said sharply.

He switched off the engine. ‘No.’

Just one word, but she sensed there was no moving him.

When she reached for her bag he said, ‘It’s all right where it is. I’ll take you home later.’

At her straight look he smiled, a cool, intimidating smile that pulled every tiny hair on her body on end. He was up to something—but what?

‘I’ll bring it anyway,’ she said evenly.

‘Then I’ll carry it.’ He hauled the bag out in one smooth, powerful movement.

The modernised lift whisked them up quickly and silently, but once inside Nick’s apartment Cat noted that the high ceilings and worldly charm had been left intact.

Nick ushered her into a huge sitting room that overlooked a sea of budding branches in the park. The usual municipal obsession with neat rows of flowers hadn’t prevailed there; instead, showered by soft pink petals from a cherry tree, a graceful marble goose acted as a fountain, standing in a pond bordered by clumps of irises and freesias and small, starry, silver-blue flowers.

Grass stretched to a line of oaks; a few weeks previously they’d exploded into huge lime-yellow ice-creams and were now settling down with a dignified, dark green mantle. Their branches stirred with austere beauty in the lazy wind that was all this unusually warm season could produce.

Just keep your cool, Cat told herself, swallowing to relieve the stress that had built up beneath her breastbone.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’ Nick asked.

‘No, thank you.’ Not even though her mouth and throat felt as dry as the Gobi Desert.

‘I’m thirsty, so excuse me,’ he said abruptly, and disappeared through a door.

Tensely she looked around the room. If Nick had chosen the furniture he’d made a good job. It suited him, the proportions matching both the big room and his height and presence, but the black leather chairs and sofas, the exquisite Persian rug and the stark abstracts on the wall, intimidated her.

This, she thought distractedly, was how children must feel—helpless, ineffectual in a huge adult world.

Well, small she might be, but ineffectual she was not. Squaring her shoulders, she marched across to the bookshelves, oddly cheered when she noted some well-thumbed favourites of her own.

She was glancing through one when Nick returned with a tray. Setting it down on the table, he said, ‘I made some for you too. Sit down and pour, and for heaven’s sake stop looking at me with the whites of your eyes showing. I’m not going to leap on you.’

With a distrustful glance, Cat put the book down and lowered herself onto a cold, smooth leather chair. At least the coffee gave her restless hands something to do. She poured his as he liked it, black and strong and fierce, and added a lot of milk to her own.

Nick had seated himself opposite, long legs stretched out. Accepting his cup, he asked, ‘Why did you go back to your maiden name?’

Startled, she kept her gaze on the milky surface of her coffee. ‘I wanted to.’

It was the wrong answer, but with Nick there were no right ones.

‘You still wear his ring on occasion.’ Smile hardening into contempt, his gold eyes flicked over the telltale lack of white skin on her bare finger. ‘No doubt only when it’s expedient to remind me that the man you married gave me a future.’

Shamed heat burned her cheeks; she’d used the ring as a talisman because it gave her the illusion of safety. ‘Then you should understand how I feel about Juana. Glen gave you a future; I want to do it for her.’

‘That’s very clever, Cat,’ he said softly. After a taut silence he went on, ‘I checked with the clinic. What whim persuaded you to take responsibility for the child?’

Filled with a strange reluctance, she muttered, ‘She only had an aunt—her mother’s sister Rosita, just fourteen. Her father had been killed by the insurgents and I don’t know what happened to the rest of her family. Rosita couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say.’

‘That hasn’t answered my question.’ When she didn’t go on he probed uncompromisingly, ‘What made the baby your responsibility?’

‘Rosita had no money and no way of earning any. They were refugees. I couldn’t just let the baby die when I knew she could be saved.’

He frowned. ‘How did you find out about her?’

‘I was there when she was born. I held her while the doctor tried to save her mother.’ She gave him a swift glance from beneath her lashes, but his face was stern and unreadable. ‘And she was special because she was born on the day my mother died. It seemed—significant, somehow. Symbolic.’

She waited for a sneer, for anger, but none came.

He was watching her through half-closed eyes, his mouth an unreadable line. ‘Do you want to adopt her?’

She shook her head. ‘Sister Bernadette convinced me she’ll do better in her own culture with an aunt who loves her. Juana is all that Rosita has left—the only thing she has to live for.’ Cat lifted her cup and drank some of the hot liquid, then set the cup down and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I want to make sure she has all the surgery she needs—the doctors in Brisbane said there’ll be at least a couple more operations, and she might need a dental plate too.’

‘How long will all this take?’

‘At least five years.’

‘A long-term commitment,’ he said coolly. ‘And after that?’

‘At the very least I’m going to make sure Rosita gets onto her feet somehow, so she can continue to care for Juana. Life for a girl with no family, no one to protect her, is difficult in Romit.’

‘So you’re planning the future of two girls?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Silence hummed between them, heavy with unspoken thoughts. Nick said quietly, ‘In his will Glen made it impossible for me, as the trustee, to advance you any more than your yearly allowance.’

Cat bit back a protest; she’d been so shocked after Glen’s death that she hadn’t taken in much of what the solicitor had explained to her. Glen had always seen her as the naïve adolescent he’d swept off her feet, so his refusal to trust her didn’t surprise her as much as it dismayed her.

Nick said deliberately, ‘You could always ask me to help you.’

Why did suspicion darken her mind with ugly speed? ‘I have asked you. You’ve just refused.’

‘I can’t ignore Glen’s instructions. However, he trusted me to look after you.’ He looked down at the letter and her passport. ‘I could make you a personal loan. Or a gift.’

For a moment hope clutched her, but one glance at his hard, hunter’s face killed it. She said with icy, desperate precision, ‘For a price, no doubt. What do you want in return?’

‘Perhaps I don’t want anything,’ he said, his eyes gleaming with a predatory light.

She gave a cynical little laugh. ‘I doubt that very much. That’s not how things work.’

Unblinking, he surveyed her. ‘What are you prepared to give?’

More than anything she wanted to lick her dry lips, drink some more coffee to ease the passage of words through her arid throat. ‘I only give to the people I love,’ she said.

‘By your own admission, you’ve broken that rule twice. Three times if we accept that you didn’t love Glen when you married him.’

Colour burned her skin but she met his cold, golden gaze unwaveringly. ‘But I did love him.’ Because she’d been a starry-eyed innocent, dazzled and overwhelmed by Glen’s sophistication.

‘Setting aside your marriage to Glen, the other incidents were certainly errors of taste.’ His voice was level, almost amused, but each word flicked her on the raw. ‘After all, it’s not done to make passionate love to—’

‘We didn’t make passionate love—we kissed; that’s all,’ she interrupted, hot-faced and shamed. ‘And there were two of us—’

‘Oh, there were indeed two,’ he returned roughly. ‘You and me, kissing as though we wanted to make love right there and then, the day before you married Glen, and the day we buried him.’

Coffee splashed over the edge of the cup onto her hand; Cat dragged in a shuddering breath.

‘Have you scalded yourself?’ Nick demanded, leaping to his feet to crouch by her chair. ‘Let me see.’

He removed the coffee cup from her grip and set it down on the table. In spite of the sunny room ice froze Cat down to her bones.

‘Just as well you drink it with a lot of milk,’ he said, and lifted her stinging hand to his mouth as though he couldn’t stop himself.

Cat’s throat constricted. Dazed, she stared at him with dilating eyes, watching his lashes fall as his beautiful mouth touched the fragile skin of her wrist. Her fingers curled at the warmth of his mouth and sensation poured through her—hot, languid, remorseless as a river breaching its banks.

Shudders racked her body when she tried to pull away, but her strength had gone. She knew what he saw when he looked at her face—drowsy eyes and seeking, sensuous mouth—and she expected his slow, bitter smile. Hunger banished everything but a stark, stripped need; his angular features were stamped with it, the amber eyes smouldering, and his mouth—oh, God, his mouth…

She’d tried so hard to forget how it had felt on hers; for years she’d lied to herself, refused to accept that her desire for this man had never died. Unwanted and baseless, the treacherous physical attraction still burned inside her.

At eighteen she’d known too little of men to understand that Nick had been caught up in the same powerful attraction—until he’d kissed her and she’d gone up in flames, for the first time understanding the force of explosive sexual hunger.

Shocked and afraid, she’d turned her back on it, because she’d been naïvely certain it meant nothing compared to her respect and affection for Glen. During her marriage she’d banished Nick from her mind, only to crash and burn in the powerful force-field of that elemental hunger after Glen’s death. The kiss after his funeral had begun as an attempt to comfort Nick—and ended when he’d pushed her aside and walked white-faced out of the house.