Читать книгу Society Wives: Love or Money: The Bought-and-Paid-for Wife - Maureen Child, Bronwyn Jameson - Страница 13

Go home to Australia and let her be?

No, Tristan couldn’t do that. He could never quit a task half-done.

He still needed to know everything about Vanessa, but before he even approached her in the parking lot after the polo match he’d accepted that his motivation had shifted focus.

That’s what drove him to ask why she’d chosen his father.

Frustration. Self-defense. Finding that full-bodied smile trained on him for the very first time, he’d felt a primal rush of possessiveness, a she-should-be-mine kick that transcended desire. He’d needed a reminder, damn fast, of why he couldn’t get in that car and drive her back to his hotel and claim her as his own.

Her fervent response had done the trick. It had also convinced him of one of two things: either Vanessa had genuinely cared for her husband or she was one bloody fine actress.

And if he was out-of-the-ballpark wrong about her relationship with his father, was he wrong about other things?

Questions and conflicting answers chased through his mind all night long. At dawn he plunged his restless body into the hotel pool and slugged out a hundred laps. Afterward he’d intended returning to his suite and to his regular, controllable Monday morning of work, where questions had answers, where decisions triggered action, where results ensued.

Where he never backed down from the tough issues … or from digging too deeply because of a woman’s heartfelt appeal. I’m asking that you respect the privacy of others. Think about it, please. Think about doing the right thing.

That plea still had his conscience tied in knots a week later.

Instead of working, he found himself driving out of town and into the sprawling midcountry estates, heading for White Birch Lane and a score of knotted intangibles. He needed facts. He needed truths.

Not only about Vanessa, but about the father he’d not spoken to since he left Eastwick as a twelve-year-old.

Focused on that result, he didn’t consider the early hour until he was driving up to the closed and silent mansion. It was too early for her to be gone for the day but not too early, he discovered, to find her in the garden.

The morning sun was less than an hour old, its light as pale as her hair. As diaphanous as the shell-pink sweep of nothing that shaped her body. The image was soft and ethereal, an artist’s rendition of Girl with Flowers, and Tristan stood transfixed by her beauty for a minute too long. Twenty yards of lawn and several bays of massed rose bushes away, he sensed her sudden stillness and the shock in her eyes when his presence registered.

The polite thing to do was acknowledge her, maybe with a teasing remark about wandering the grounds in her negligée, then retreat so she could dress in something more … substantial. The sensible thing was to turn on his heel and get the hell out of there without taking any more notice about what she was wearing or not wearing.

But he had noticed. His body ached with its impolite and not-sensible response to noticing.

The best he could do was keep a bed of rose bushes between them as he approached, an extra thorny-branched barrier to the one he was busy erecting in his mind.

She’s out of bounds. She loved your father. She was his wife for five years.

No matter what resulted from their legal wrangle, from the letter’s allegations, from his investigations, she could never be his.

The massed shrubs shielded much of her body from view, but it didn’t help. He could still see her face, her throat, the skin framed by lace at her shoulders and breasts. And he could see what had brought her out of doors so early.

One of her gloved hands held a bunch of long-stemmed blooms; the other wielded a pair of lethal-looking shears. The part of his body that had noticed the diaphanous nightdress and the shape of her body beneath took due note.

“I hope I didn’t startle you too much. Those things—” he inclined his head to indicate the shears “—look like they could do serious damage.”

“I heard you drive up, so no.”

“Yet you looked surprised.”

“I thought you were Gloria, arriving early.”

Her accompanying shrug caused her negligee’s deep neckline to dip, and Tristan’s hand itched to reach out and slide it back into place. With a silent curse he shoved both hands in his pockets, out of temptation’s way. “I’m not Gloria.”

“No,” she said, as soft as the morning. “You’re not.”

Their gazes meshed for what felt like a long time. He could feel the pulse of attraction between them, a silent energy that hummed in the summer’s morning. She felt it too—he could see it in her eyes and in the slight flush of her cheeks.

Hell. She felt it too.

He buried his hands deeper in his shorts. “I should have called first.”

“It’s fine, really.”

“Really?”

“You saved me a phone call.” A frown of concentration formed between her brows and turned her eyes serious. “I wanted to talk to you about what I said yesterday … or what I didn’t say.”

“About?”

“Your father. The will. I’m not backing down on anything I said, but on my way home yesterday and last night and this morning I was thinking—” She paused and although her eyes were clear, the dark smudges beneath flagged her lack of sleep. “I may have given the impression that Stuart didn’t want you to have anything. That is not true.”

“He left me a thousand bucks. To show he hadn’t forgotten me.”

“That was the lawyers’ doing and not what I meant. He would have made you a beneficiary, Tristan, if you’d come to see him when he asked.”

“Guess I must have missed that.”

“I guess so,” she said with a damn-you note to her voice. With great care she snipped off another pink bud and added it to her collection. The petals quavered—because her hands were shaking?—and when she looked up again, her eyes glistened with moisture. “Ignoring his letter, not even bothering to reply—that was just plain cruel, Tristan. He was your father and he was dying. Would it have hurt to swallow your pride and pick up the phone?”

Hit hard by the husky edge to her voice and the sheen of emotion in her eyes, it took a moment for the words and the message to register. Then everything inside him went still. “What letter?”

“He wanted to see you or at least to speak to you, to explain his side of the story. I suggested he write—that he might find that easier than trying to explain over the phone.”

“And he sent it?”

“I posted it myself.” She stared back at him, at first with that same hard edge as earlier and then with slowly dawning comprehension. “You really didn’t receive it, did you? And when I tried to call …”

He’d deliberately stonewalled her, not taking the calls and then not returning her increasingly insistent messages until it was too late. His father had passed away an hour before.

What-might-have-been frustration swelled inside him, tightening his chest, his throat, his expression. “If he wanted to talk to me so badly, why the hell did he leave it so late?”

“Because he was as proud and as stubborn as you! He poured his heart and his soul into that letter and when you didn’t reply, when he got nothing but stony silence, he gave up.”

“But you didn’t.”

In her eyes, he saw that truth. She’d pushed Stuart to write the letter. And she’d made those calls when his father was hospitalized, a last ditch effort to reconcile them: the husband she’d loved and his only child.

“That’s when he made up his mind about the will.” Carefully she closed the shears and clicked the safety lock into place. The metallic snick punctuated the finality of his father’s decision. Closed, done, ended. “He said you’d made your own life in Australia. You were a success. You didn’t need his money and you didn’t need him.”

She was right. At thirty his time of needing a father had long passed into a faded, bitter memory of the years when he’d silently yearned for that support. Even if he had read the letter or if he’d taken her calls, he doubted it would have led to anything but cold, hard words. “Too little, too late.”

For a moment he thought she might dispute that, but then she changed tack—he saw the switch in her expression and the set of her mouth as she gathered up her bunch of cut roses and started to move off. “You might not believe this,” she said, “but he never forgot you were his son. He told me once how glad he was that your football career took off, because that made it so easy to keep up the connection. The more your star rose, the more stories he found in the press.”

“His son, the famous footballer.”

A vehement spark lit her eyes. “It wasn’t like that, Tristan! Of course he was proud of your success—what parent wouldn’t be? But this was about knowing some part of you, about having that connection. He learned all about your Aussie Rules game and he read all the match reports and stats. He watched the games on cable.

“One night I found him sitting in the dark, in the theater room where he watched the games. And the television was showing, I don’t know, ice-skating or rhythmic gymnastics or something I knew he wouldn’t watch. I thought he’d gone to sleep so I turned on the light to rouse him and send him back to bed.”

She paused in a gap between two heavily-laden bushes, her expression as soft as the mass of creamy-pink roses that framed her slender curves. And, damn it her eyes had gone all dewy again. He braced himself, against the punch-to-the-heart sensation the sight of her caused and against whatever she was about to tell him.

“He didn’t turn around because he didn’t want me to see his tears, but I heard them in his voice. I knew he was sitting there in the dark crying. He told me later that you’d been playing your two hundredth game and they’d run a special on you during the halftime break. He was so proud and I was so damn mad at you both for not doing something about your rift.”

Rift? The gap between him and his father had been more in the scope of a canyon. If there’d ever been any chance of bridging it … “That was up to him.”

“Would you have listened?”

For several seconds they stood, gazes locked, the atmosphere taut with that one telling question. And when he didn’t answer, she shook her head sadly. “I didn’t think so.”

“It makes no difference.”

“You’re that callous?”

“I am what I am.”

She nodded slowly. And the disappointment in her eyes hit him like a full-throttle shoulder charge. “You are also more like your father than you know.”

“Kind. Generous. Concerned,” he quoted back at her.

“Proud. Stubborn. Unprepared to step back from your line in the sand.” Her eyes narrowed with a mixture of challenge and speculation. “Why is the inheritance so important to you? Your success at football carried on into business. You just sold your company, advantageously, I gather. You can’t need the money.”

“Money isn’t everything, duchess.”

“Is it the house you want?” she persisted, ignoring his gibe. “Does it have special meaning?”

“Not any more. Does it to you?”

“It meant a lot to Stuart, so, yes.”

“I’m asking about you.” And even as he asked the question, he felt its significance tighten in his chest. “Is this your idea of home, Vanessa?”

“It’s the only place I’ve ever felt happy to call home.”

“You’re happy here, living this life?”

She looked him square in the eye. “Yes, I am. I work hard on fund-raising committees. I love the volunteering work I do.”

“A regular philanthropist, are you?”

It was a cheap shot but she took it on the chin without flinching. He sensed, in the briefest of pauses before she responded, that she’d taken a lot of hits in her life. That she was a lot less delicate than she looked. “I do what I can. And just so there are no misconceptions—I like most everything about my life. I like the security of money, of knowing all my needs are taken care of.”

“Not to mention the things that money can buy.”

“I don’t care about the things.”

Really? “You told me you love your car. Your clothes aren’t from Wal-Mart. And what about the trinkets?” Forgetting the self-defensive caution that had driven him to keep a garden’s width between them, he rounded the end of the bay and closed down that separation. “If things don’t matter, then why were you so upset when the figurine smashed?”

“It was a gift.”

“From Stuart?”

A shadow flitted across her expression but her gaze remained clear and unwavering and disarmingly honest.

“A New York socialite my mother worked for gave me that figurine for my twelfth birthday.”

“Generous of her.”

“Yes and no. It was nothing to her but a kind gesture to the housemaid’s poor daughter. But to me … that little statue became my talisman. I kept it as a reminder of where it came from and where I came from. But, you know, it doesn’t matter that it broke.” She gave a little shrug. “I don’t need it anymore.”

Maybe not, but there was something about her explanation’s matter-of-fact tone that belied the lingering shadows in her eyes. She could shrug it off all she wanted now, but he’d been there. He’d witnessed the extent of her distress.

Damn it all to blazes, he’d caused it by backing her into the corner and shocking her with his kiss.

And here he was, forgetting himself again. Standing too close, infiltrating her personal space, breathing the sweet scent of roses and aching with the need to take her in his arms, to touch her petal-soft skin, to kiss every shadowed memory from her eyes and every other man from her rose-pink lips.

The physical desire he understood and could handle. It had been there from the outset, crackling in the air whenever they got too close. But this was more—dangerously, insidiously more—when he needed less.

“You mightn’t need it,” he said gruffly, “but it matters.”

“No. What matters is how Stuart wanted his wealth distributed. We talked about this—about which charities and the best way to help—but everything is tied up because of your legal challenge. Why are you doing this?” Her eyes darkened with determination. “Why, Tristan? Is it only about winning? Is it only about defeating me?”

“This isn’t about you.”

“Then what is it about?”

The first time she’d asked about his motivation, Tristan had turned it into a cross-examination. And she’d answered every one of his questions with honesty. The least he could do was offer equal candor. “It’s about justice, Vanessa.”

“Justice for whom?”

“My mother.” He met her puzzled eyes. “Did you know she got nothing from my parents’ divorce?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Deadly. After fifteen years of marriage … nothing.”

“Is that how you count yourself, Tristan? As nothing?” Her voice rose with abject disbelief. “Is that how your mother counted what she took from Stuart?”

He’d heard the same message from Liz Kramer. She took you, Tristan, the most valuable thing.

But the other side to that equation set his jaw and his voice with hard-edged conviction. “She counted herself lucky to gain full custody.” Except to do so, to prevent an ugly court battle and a possible injunction preventing her move to Australia, she’d ceded her claim on a property settlement. “I guess that kind of payoff made me worth a hell of a lot.”

For a long moment his words hung between them, a cynically-edged statement that conveyed more of his past hurt than he’d intended. He could see that by her reaction, by the softening in her expression and the husky note in her voice. “He thought Andrea would reject that offer. He thought they would negotiate and reach an agreement of shared property and shared custody. He didn’t want to lose you, Tristan.”

“Then why didn’t he fight to keep me?”

She shook her head sadly. “He didn’t want to take you from your mother. It broke his heart to lose his whole family like that.”

“He kicked us out. He divorced my mother. His choices, Vanessa.”

“I was under the impression that Andrea was at fault,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “That she had an affair … which Stuart found out about and forgave. The first time.”

Tristan went still. “What do you mean, the first time?”

“I mean …” She paused, her face wreathed in uneasiness. “How much of this do you know? I’m not sure it’s my place—”

“You don’t think I need to hear this?”

She nodded once, a brief concession to his point, and moistened her lips. “He took her back because he still loved her and because she promised it was a once-only thing, because she was lonely, he was working too hard. He took her back and when she announced she was pregnant, he was ecstatic.”

“I know the twins aren’t Stuart’s,” he reassured her grimly. “I know they’re only my half sisters.”

“And that’s what broke his heart, don’t you see? She never told him. She let him believe they were his and she kept seeing the father before they were born and afterward.

When he caught her out again, when he did the paternity test and discovered the truth … that’s why the marriage ended, Tristan. And that’s why Stuart felt so strongly about adultery.”

He didn’t have to believe her but he did. It made too much sense not to. It tied everything together in a neat bow … and brought them looping back to his reason for being here in Eastwick. His reason for wanting, so vehemently, to defeat her.

“That’s why he added that clause to his will,” he said slowly. Not a question, but a statement.

Not because he suspected Vanessa of cheating, as Tristan had believed, but because of his own mother’s infidelity. Not one mistake, as she’d led Tristan to believe, but repeated betrayals. Which put her subsequent choices into perspective, too.

Her acceptance of the divorce settlement.

Her flight to Australia, in pursuit of the twins’ father.

Her objection to his challenge of Stuart’s will.

“Does Andrea know why you’re doing this? Is it what she wants?”

Vanessa’s soft voice cut straight into his thought process, as if she’d read his mind.

And when he didn’t answer, she added, “I thought as much.”

That jolted him hard. The initial questions, the way she’d read him so accurately, the knowledge that she’d turned his beliefs inside out.

Yet this had been his pursuit for two years, his conviction for longer. He would not toss it without hearing the truth from his mother. Not without considering all he’d learned this morning, away from the influence of steady green eyes and rose-scented skin.

Resolve tightened his features as he nodded to her bundle of flowers. “Shouldn’t you be putting those in water?”

She blinked with surprise, as if she’d been so intent on their discussion that she’d forgotten her morning’s purpose. “I … yes.”

“I need to go. I have some decisions to make.”

Hope fluttered like a bird’s wing in her eyes. “You’ll let me know … once you’ve decided.”

“You’ll be the first.”

He nodded goodbye and had gone maybe ten strides before she called his name. He paused. Turned to look over his shoulder and was floored again by the picture she made with the sunlight silhouetting her body and legs through that filmy pink robe.

Like the roses, he figured she’d forgotten her state of dress. Or undress. For both their sakes, he wasn’t about to point out what was clearly defined by the unforgiving light.

“The letter I told you about, from your father—I kept a copy. It’s yours, Tristan. If you like, I can go and get it for you.”