Element Of Risk

Her face a mask of scorn, she got to her feet and confronted him fearlessly. ‘What a smug, sanctimonious prig you are, Luke. I don’t understand how Natalie could love you. Listen to me, and don’t forget it, because I’m not going to say it again. I intend to see my children. If necessary I’ll stay in Manley until they come back from wherever you’ve hidden them, and then sneak around to see them. I gave you the chance of doing it properly, but I will see them, whether you want me to or not.’

Ignoring his sharply indrawn breath, she turned towards the door, but before she had reached it he was barring the way, his face set in lines of contempt and anger, aquamarine eyes blazing with frigid fire.

‘Let me past,’ she said between her teeth.

‘Not until I’ve had my say,’ he returned dangerously. ‘Listen to me, Perdita, and for once think of someone other than yourself. Those girls have just come through a traumatic time. They don’t need any more pain. I swear, if you hurt them, confuse them or upset them, I’ll make you suffer so much that you’ll wish to God you’d never been born.’

She had to tilt her head back to look up into his face. Sheer fury turned her eyes to smoky pools, her voice to a molten purr. ‘Then you’d better come with them when I see them,’ she said softly, ‘so that you can monitor my behaviour. Because I am going to see them.’

He swore. Perdita had learned to ignore swearing, but she flinched at the naked hatred in his voice. ‘You little bitch,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought I was rid of you—why the hell did you have to come back?’

An emotion Perdita thought had died forever struggled in painful rebirth deep in some walled-off portion of her heart.

‘You must have known I would, as soon as I found out where the girls were.’

‘I didn’t know you were their mother until I got your letter three days ago.’ His eyes were opaque and hard and lethal. ‘We were told their mother had gone overseas and wouldn’t be coming back.’

‘Whoever told you that was wrong. I’m like Nemesis,’ she said silkily. ‘I never give up. Now, get out of my way.’

He stepped back as though the mere touch of her would contaminate him. ‘I’ll serve you with a non-molestation order,’ he threatened.

‘I’ll go to the media,’ she countered sweetly. ‘It would make good headlines, wouldn’t it? Especially if the British tabloids got hold of it. I’m quite famous, you know—they’d enjoy a good juicy scandal like that.’

He seemed to grow a further six inches. The implacable resistance she sensed in him was converted into a cold, concentrated fury. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said in an almost soundless voice.

She couldn’t allow herself to be intimidated so completely. ‘Are you prepared to bet on that?’ she asked. ‘After all, anyone with my morals and manners has to be untrustworthy by definition.’

His hands slid around her throat. Fear slithered on evil cats’ feet through Perdita’s body, throbbed in the pulse beneath his fingers, chilled the anger in her veins to elemental ice. She saw pitiless determination in the gaze that fixed on to her mouth, smelt the faint, unmistakable scent of male, aroused and relentless.

Once before Luke Dennison had slipped the leash of his control to reveal the primal male to her. Now she saw it again, and as had happened that last time, an elemental terror turned her bones to liquid.

‘I’ve already warned you,’ he said quietly, a thumb coming to rest over the busy betrayer in her throat. ‘You’ve pushed as far as you’re going to, Perdita. Any more, and you’d better be ready for retaliation.’

Common sense told her that there was nothing he could do to her. This was New Zealand, after all.

Instinct knew otherwise.

Yet she didn’t flinch, even though she felt the colour drain from her skin. ‘Stop trying to frighten me,’ she said, green eyes as cold as his, and every bit as determined. ‘None of this drama is necessary, Luke. If you let me meet the children I’ll go on my way, and you won’t need to be bothered by me any more.’

‘I don’t want you anywhere near them,’ he said, levering her chin upwards to an unnatural angle that stretched her throat towards the frail boundary between discomfort and pain.

His immediate, total rejection scored across her heart like the cruellest of whips. She lowered her lashes so that all she could see of his face was the angular line of his jaw, as obdurate as his character, tough and uncompromising. She should have expected this; she, of all people, knew how hard he could be.

‘You can’t stop me,’ she said, hating the tremor in her voice, trying to summon courage from some deep inner reserve. ‘Be sensible, Luke. You can’t keep them imprisoned forever, and there’s no way you can run me out of town this time.’

‘Go on,’ he said when she fell silent.

‘That’s all. I’m going to see them.’

‘Damn you,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been haunted by you for bloody years—you must have known that coming back here would put us all in an intolerable situation!’

Then he kissed her.

The fierce possession of his mouth summoned a fire that marked her soul. Searing through the debris and accretions of the past eleven years, it stripped every bit of studied worldliness from her to cast her back into the adolescent turmoil of her first crush, the year she had turned seventeen.

Natalie had given her a watch and a new wardrobe to mark her status as an adult, and, dressed in the clothes his wife had bought for her, Perdita had fallen in love with Luke, helpless in the grip of a blind, unrequited passion.

That same passion, so newly reawakened, thrummed through her now with an intensity she didn’t even try to resist. She melted, her mouth softening, yielding, opening to his like a flower to the sun. Drumbeats pulsed through her in a rhythm of desire. Shivering, she was suffused with heat.

Luke ground his mouth on to hers, but almost immediately the quality of the kiss changed, transformed into seduction pure and simple, as nakedly sexual as the embrace that clamped her hips against his, as the utterly masculine promise that fitted so snugly between the notch in her legs.

Perdita drowned in sensation, sanity and reason wrecked by a flood of carnality.

And then he thrust her from him and said jaggedly, ‘Get the hell out of here, you lying, promiscuous little slut. I don’t ever want to see you again.’

Perdita stared at him from beneath weighted eyelids. Her mouth was tender, slightly too big for its contours, and she was drunk on the taste of him, the scent of him, the feel of him.

Half her brain was shrieking foul, and the other half was cursing because she’d allowed herself to trip into the oldest snare in the world, but below these manifestations of logic lurked a consuming, primitive satisfaction.

‘You’re not going to get rid of me so easily,’ she said, her voice husky and sensual. ‘Like it or not, Luke, you can’t bludgeon me with your money and your power. I mean to see those girls, and there is no way you can watch them so strictly that I won’t.’

His hands were shaking. She watched with awed fascination as he reimposed control, a fascination that had a basis of fear, because she knew what he wanted to do with them.

‘Yes,’ he said when he saw her glance at them, ‘you should be afraid. Get out of here, Perdita, before I do something you might regret.’

‘I’m staying at the Dunromin motel in Manley,’ she told him, and turned and walked away from him through the big, gracious, empty house, out into the sunlight. Constrained by the silk scarf bound around her head, her temples throbbed painfully. She put up a long-fingered hand to draw it off, and with a slow movement shook the flood of hair back.

Tension still ached through her, but she wasn’t going to stretch herself free of it here, where he might be watching. She knew why he had kissed her; it was an unsubtle punishment because she was alive and Natalie was dead. He hadn’t been able to hit back at fate, or cry his despair at the moon, so he had done what men had done to women ever since the world began: used his superior strength and turned anger into sexuality.

She was, she realised with a strange sort of detachment, still shuddering inside, but at least the worst was over. She had seen him. Now all she had to do was find the children.

This voyage into the past had assumed all the qualities of a search for the holy grail. When she saw the children she would know, she was sure, whether they were happy or not.

And if they were happy, that would be it. She’d get into the car and drive away…

Although, sooner or later natural curiosity would drive them to search for their birth mother. Surely, some tempter whispered, that discovery would be less traumatic if she were not a complete stranger. Of course she would never be a substitute for Natalie, but she might make some small place for herself in her children’s lives.

Luke had no right to keep her away from her children. Apart from anything else, he’d behaved very badly, insulting her, manhandling her, kissing her…

The idea was far too enticing. Even as she reminded herself sternly that she had promised Luke she wouldn’t interfere, she knew she was going to consult a lawyer.

Back at the motel she made herself a cup of tea and sat down. Her hand came to rest on the locket around her neck. With a sudden, swift movement she flicked through her purse and found the one photograph she had of her children, a coloured snap one of the nurses had taken of them when they were a week old.

The young Perdita sat stiffly, holding the two babies with such care that she looked terrified, staring straight at the camera. They were both girls, one thirty minutes older than the other, but even then it had been obvious that they were not identical. She had called them Tara and Melissa.

They were asleep; she had crept into the nursery and taken them outside for the photograph. Her eyes looked glazed because she had been fighting back tears. The next day she had left the nursing home, and the couple who had adopted her children had come and taken them away.

How would she have felt if she had known they were Natalie, whom she loved with the hero-worship of a neglected child, and Luke?

It was better that she hadn’t known. It would never have worked. She’d been far too young to cope with the situation.

She wasn’t, she thought wryly, coping too well with it now, and it was five months since Frank’s call.

The colours in the photograph had faded, but she could remember everything about her children, even their faint scent of baby powder and milk and innocence. A resurgence of the old pain gnawed at her. She had never forgotten, not a thing.

And Luke Dennison was not going to stand in her way. He had money and power, but she had money too, and the power of her threat. Although she hadn’t any intention of contacting the media—she knew how badly hurt its victims could be—it was a threat she could hold over his head.

She was going to see her daughters.

Refusing to think of the way he had kissed her, the angry manifestation of his power used to intimidate her, she drank the cup of tea before ringing an Auckland number.

Frank whistled when she told him what she wanted him to do. ‘I told you not to tell him. You can’t trust people when it comes to children. Any ideas?’

‘Try Mrs Bennet, Mrs Philip Bennet. She used to live in Epsom—I’m almost certain it was Owens Road. She’s the grandmother. Oh, and can you give me the name and address of that solicitor you were recommending— the one who specialises in family law.’

‘Yup.’ He didn’t say again that he’d told her so, but she heard it in the monosyllable.

She scribbled down the name and address he gave her, said goodbye and hung up, then turned to look around her. The room was small and sparsely furnished in motel style, with furniture that didn’t fit her long legs and body. The rush of adrenalin that had sustained her so far faded slowly, leaving her melancholy and thoughtful.

Setting her mouth, she went out into the street and called into the florist’s shop. They weren’t busy so the woman made her a posy of cottage flowers while she waited, looking at her curiously when she thought she was unobserved.

After Perdita had paid for them she said in a rush, ‘You know, you look awfully like that model—the Adventurous Woman.’

Perdita gave her a warm smile. ‘I’m retired, now,’ she said.

The woman’s eyes widened. ‘You came from around here, didn’t you?’

‘I used to spend holidays here with my cousin.’

‘Mrs Dennison at Pigeon Hill.’ She sighed. ‘That was a tragedy. She was a lovely lady.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, well, you must be noticing quite a few changes in the last ten years.’

Perdita smiled again. ‘Quite a few. The place has grown.’

‘Are you planning on living here?’

Until that moment the thought had never occurred to Perdita. She said vaguely, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ but as she walked out of the shop the idea took root and on the way down the hill to the cemetery it flourished. Nothing would give her greater pleasure than to live close to her daughters.

But would it be fair to them?

And how would Luke deal with that? At the thought of his reaction her skin prickled. He was a bad enemy.

The little graveyard had served the district well for over a hundred years. Perdita walked across newly mown grass sheltered by the huge old puriri and totara trees that made a dense barrier around the perimeter. It was very quiet and still.

Natalie’s headstone was plain and austere. With wet eyes Perdita read that she was the beloved wife of Luke, loved mother of Olivia and Rosalind, aged thirty-seven years.

Stooping, Perdita put her flowers with the others there. Death was so final, so impersonally unfair, when it carried off those who were young and good and happy.

She turned away, only then seeing through the sparkle of tears the tall, powerful figure of the man who had made Natalie so happy. Damn, she thought, suddenly exhausted by emotion. Why did he have to come here now?

Head held high, chin tilted, she waited beside the grave. He’d see the results of her grief, but she wasn’t ashamed of it.

His face was set in lines of harsh restraint. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

She said, ‘I brought flowers.’

He closed his eyes as though she couldn’t have said anything more painful. On a note of bitterness she finished, ‘I loved her too, Luke.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he said heavily, looking down at the bunch of cottagey flowers, bright cornflowers and spray carnations in a froth of white gypsophila.

‘She was so kind to me,’ Perdita said.

He jerked his head away but she saw the flash of naked emotion in his pale eyes. Gripped by compassion, she touched his arm. He had rolled up his sleeves, so her fingers were pale and slender against the tanned forearm with its light dusting of hair. The heat of his skin burned through barriers she hadn’t been aware of. Something moved deeply inside her. Snatching her fingers away, she had to resist the temptation to cool them in her mouth.

Hastily she went on, ‘She taught me how to dress and how to behave, that I wasn’t strange because I liked to read. In a funny sort of way she gave me my career. If she hadn’t taken me to Clive’s that Christmas to buy my clothes he wouldn’t have recommended me to the model agency. My life would have been as narrow and circumscribed as my mother’s. Natalie gave me everything, and she did it with such grace and empathy. She never made me feel that I was a gawky nothing.’

‘She groomed you to take her place,’ Luke said bitterly. ‘I wonder what she’d have thought of that.’

His words drove every vestige of colour from her face. Instinctively she stepped back, casting a swift, horrified glance at the mute grave.

His mouth curled into a mirthless, wolfish smile. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘She can’t hear you. She’ll never know that you betrayed her love by seducing her husband. She’ll never know that the children she adopted and loved so much were yours and mine. She’s dead, Perdita, and you and I are left to wonder just what would have happened if she hadn’t died. Because you’d have come back just the same, wouldn’t you?’

Perdita’s lips trembled. ‘Yes.’

‘And created even more damage than you did when you crawled into my bed that night.’

She shook her head, but he went on relentlessly, ‘Why did you do it?’

‘I told you. I was asleep when you came to bed. I didn’t expect you home that night,’ she said indistinctly.

The sun summoned auburn fire from his hair. His eyes were as cold as his laugh, as completely lacking in amusement.

‘Even though it was the bed Natalie and I slept in every night?’ He let the pause linger for endless moments, then brought it to an end by saying smoothly, ‘I find that very difficult to believe.’

She had slept in their bed because Luke was due back from three days spent in Wellington, and Natalie had decided to go halfway to Auckland to meet him at the house of friends.

‘He’ll be tired after three days’ arguing with the government,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll meet him at the Gardiners’, and we’ll stay there, then come back tomorrow after he’s had a good night’s rest. You won’t mind staying here, will you?’

Of course Perdita didn’t mind.

‘Just in case you’re nervous, why don’t you sleep in our room?’ Natalie suggested. ‘The phone’s right by the bed. Oh, and if you find it difficult to sleep in a strange bed my sleeping pills will be in the drawer. They’re quite harmless. They don’t knock you out, they’re more like calming pills than sleeping pills, really.’

‘I won’t need them,’ Perdita said.

Natalie hugged her. ‘What it is to be young and able to sleep on the head of a pin! I’ll leave one there just the same. Right, now that that’s organised, I’ll go and ring the hotel so he knows about the change of plans.’

But the anonymous someone in Luke’s hotel in Wellington hadn’t handed on the message, and Luke had driven all the way home, to find Perdita, slightly drugged with the pill because lying in Luke’s bed had given her too much of a secret, forbidden thrill, asleep in the innocent abandon of childhood. She hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t realised until she woke in his arms that he had thought she was Natalie. And by then she had been unable to think…

But she couldn’t tell him that now. After it happened she had tried to explain, and he had refused to believe her, cursing her for stealing something that had been Natalie’s, exiling her to Auckland and her mother, who didn’t want her and had never forgiven her for driving her father away.

‘It’s a bit late to be putting flowers on her grave,’ Luke said curtly. ‘You repaid Natalie by betraying her.’

The words were like fiery arrows, tearing Perdita’s composure to shreds. Stung, still racked by guilt, she flung back, ‘As you did!’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t have to try to make me feel guilty, Perdita. I’ve never been free of it since that night.’

‘It wasn’t your fault you thought I was Natalie,’ she said. It had been Natalie he’d held in his arms, Natalie who was the recipient of his savage tenderness, Natalie…

“That’s no excuse,’ he returned with raw self-contempt.

There was no answer to that. It was no excuse, and neither was the fact that she hadn’t been intent on seduction that night. She could have kicked and screamed and forced him to realise that she wasn’t Natalie, but when she woke it was too late—her sleeping body had been seduced by his practised caresses, and she had yielded without protest, without making a sound.

He said abruptly, ‘You can see the children.’

She turned a radiant face to him, but before she could speak he went on, ‘On one condition. I want you to sign a document saying that you won’t tell them who you are, and that you have no claim to them.’

Perdita hesitated and he said evenly, ‘No document, no visit.’

She understood his caution. Nodding, she agreed, ‘Yes, all right.’

‘Right. Be at the solicitor’s office at four this afternoon.’

CHAPTER TWO

PRECISELY at that time Perdita presented herself at the solicitor’s office. She had already contacted the expert in family law in Auckland, and been warned to sign nothing that might prejudice her chances of access to the girls.

Actually, he had suggested very strongly that she forward any documents to him for scrutiny, but Perdita had almost made up her mind to sign. She didn’t want to take her daughters away from the only home they had known; she merely wanted to make sure that they were happy.

And perhaps when Luke realised that she wasn’t a bad influence he would allow her to get to know them properly. Although his accusation still rankled, there was, she had to admit, some cause for it. Gossip columnists had had a field day with one or two of her supposed lovers.

The legal document, short and to the point, was waiting for her. She agreed not to tell the children that she was their birth mother, and she agreed that this meeting constituted no claim to further access or custody.

That seemed fair enough. Ignoring the elderly solicitor’s somewhat censorious attitude, she signed, then got gracefully to her feet.

He said, ‘I would urge you to think of the welfare of these children, Ms Gladstone.’

She gave him a cool, remote glance. He had come out to Pigeon Hill occasionally to parties, seeming older then to a teenaged girl than he did now. Their slight acquaintanceship gave him no right to imagine that he could influence her. He, and everyone else who had known her then, would have to realise that the child who used to stay at Pigeon Hill during the holidays, the recipient of her cousin’s charity, had grown up.

‘I don’t think this is any of your business. Goodbye,’ she said calmly, and walked across the room, ignoring the faint sputtering from behind her.

She had just reached the door when the telephone rang. Stepping through, she closed the door behind her, only to re-open it swiftly when her name was called from inside the room.

‘Yes?’ she asked aloofly.

He put the receiver down. “That was Luke,’ he said with stiff precision. ‘He wants to see you out at Pigeon Hill. Now.’

Her brows shot up. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

As she turned to go once more he said, ‘Take some advice from an old man, Perdita. Luke can be ruthless, especially where those children are concerned. They were all that kept him sane when Natalie died. He is intensely protective of them.’

A tight smile barely moved her mouth. ‘Thank you,’ she said sweetly, and left.

Whether or not he meant it kindly, she preferred to treat it as such. Not that he needed to tell her anything about Luke Dennison. She knew all about him, including the fact that he was a superbly tender lover.

But she, too, could be ruthless. First Natalie, then her life as a model, had taught her that she had to stand up for herself, fight for what she wanted and believed in.

And there was nothing she wanted more than to see her children.

What did his summons to the station mean? Were the girls there? Her heart thudded as she got into her car and set it in motion, concentrating on keeping to the left. Where there was other traffic it was simple, but once she got on to the no-exit road to Pigeon Hill she found her attention wavering, and a couple of times had to head back on to the correct side.

As before, Luke met her at the door, his angular face without expression. ‘They’re in the morning-room,’ he said.

Now that the ambition that had sustained her for ten long years was about to be realised, Perdita found she didn’t dare move. Instead, she stared at him as though she had never seen a man before. His image wavered and blurred. Colour leached from her skin as the floor tilted beneath her feet.

‘Perdital’ he said sharply.

Shivering, she was swept up in his arms and carried across the hall and into another room. He put her down on a sofa and ordered, ‘Don’t move. I’ll get you some brandy.’