Читать книгу Mistresses: Bound with Gold / Bought with Emeralds - Сандра Мартон, Katherine Garbera - Страница 14

REGAN smoothed her trembling hands over his bare chest, skimming her palms over his rippling shoulders and down across the silky pelt of hair to the ridged muscles of his abdomen, thrilling to her rediscovery of his masculine beauty.

Joshua broke his mouth from hers and threw his head back, closing his eyes as he licensed her hands to rove caressingly against his skin, offering himself up like a sacrificial victim to the spearing pleasure of her touch.

‘You remembered how much I liked that…’ he groaned as her fingertips slid through the tangle of curls and nudged against the flat discs of his nipples. ‘Yes…do that again…’ His muscles contracted and his chest rose, pushing against her exploring fingers as she obeyed. He shuddered, his nostrils flaring at the scent of his own arousal. ‘God, what you do to me…’

She could see it in the taut planes of his face, hear it in the harsh sound of his indrawn breath and feel it in the electric tension of his body, and it excited her unbearably to know that he was so violently responsive to her touch that even the lightest stroke could make his desire strain savagely on the leash. It had been the same that night in the apartment…his hunger for her so wonderfully intense that she had felt like the most beautiful and alluring woman in the world…the only woman who existed for him, the focus of all his dreams and the answer to all his desires.

He opened his eyes and smiled slowly at the sight of her flushed face, parted lips and smugly sensuous eyes.

‘Little tyrant, you like having me at your mercy, don’t you?’ he accused, but his deep tone was one of smoky approval. His hands stroked up her arms and spread around her back, massaging the soft cotton fabric of her top against her slender form. ‘You like knowing that you have the power to drive me beyond the bounds of common sense, of decency…’

In a twisted way she did. It satisfied a deep-seated need in her to be the primal source of his actions.

‘I’m the one who should be begging for mercy,’ she said, drawing her nails delicately across his chest. ‘I’m the one who was kidnapped by a pirate. Swept off my feet and carried down to the bowels of his ship—’

‘—to be ravished from head to toe…’ He cupped the side of her face with a scarred hand, his eyes darkening. ‘But not entirely against your will…’

The taunting accusation of rape had wounded him, even if he had swiftly realised that it had merely been intended to goad him into revealing the truth. She turned her head, pressing her lips to the crease of his strong life line. ‘Not at all against my will…’

Her husky confession made him shudder.

‘I don’t want to hurt you—’ The tormented admission was dragged from him reluctantly, a concession to the impossible situation that existed outside the universe of the closed cabin. ‘I’ve made a promise that I won’t—can’t— go back on…too much is at stake…’

She couldn’t tell him that it was too late, that the hurt was already stored up in her heart against the day that she would no longer have any place in his life. She couldn’t lay that burden on him, on top of the ones that he already bore on his broad shoulders. They both knew that what they were doing was wrong, but not as wrong as it would be tomorrow—or in a month’s time, if and when he married Carolyn. Despicable as it might be, Regan wanted to snatch one more precious memory for herself before her conscienceforever denied her the expression of her forbidden love.

It had taken months for her to be wooed around to the idea that she was in love with Michael, but with Joshua there had been no gradual awakening; the knowledge had come like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky—a violent, concussive shock exploding in her consciousness and accompanied by a strong whiff of sulphur. She hadn’t been looking for love—quite the reverse—but it had stormed into her wary heart with a vengeance, and she found she could no more control the unruly emotion than she could the stars in their courses.

But, unlike her first, naive foray into love, this time the portents for a relationship were quite clearly disastrous, and she was prepared for the worst.

‘I know…’ she whispered reassuringly, loving him for his warning. ‘I know you won’t hurt me,’ she added, her hands moving to his belt to unthread the buckle, ‘because I already know what kind of lover you are…strong and virile, and incredibly generous.’

Her fingers went to his zip and he caught her wrists, using them to pull her up against him. His mouth came down on hers and he ravaged it with a forceful passion that triggered a gush of moist heat between her thighs. He angled his head, licking and nibbling at the soft, inner tissue of her mouth, drawing her tongue into his mouth and tugging on it with a rhythmic, erotic suction that made her yearn for an even more intimate intrusion into her moist interior.

His hands fisted in the thin, white cotton of her top, drawing the stretchy fabric tight across her breasts as he lifted his head to study the effect.

‘I like knowing that you don’t wear a bra,’ he said thickly. ‘The other night at the party I imagined I could see the shadow of your nipples against the white silk. I knew they’d be as dark as ripe cherries because they were so pointed and hard.’

‘That was because of you,’ she whispered, arching her back and tilting her head to give him a better view. ‘Because your eyes on me made me want you, even though I pretended not to notice…’

He smoothed a hand across the small mounds, cupping and shaping them. ‘They’re hard now, too.’ He found one stiff nub and fondled it gently, then more roughly as he watched her face register the sharp thrill, her eyelids sinking, her cheeks flushing, her damp mouth quivering in inarticulate pleasure.

One hand wrapped around her arched back and she clutched at his shoulders as he pushed the hem of the top up over her collarbone, framing her breasts for his admiration.

‘Look, they’re blushing…’ he said, drawing a finger up one hot, swollen rise, tracing the blue veins that showed through the tight, translucent skin.

‘I’m not surprised,’ whispered Regan shakily. ‘If you knew what I was thinking you’d be blushing, too…’

‘What are you thinking about…this?’ He replaced his finger with his hot, wet mouth, painting the entire surface of her breasts with slow, rasping strokes of his tongue, gradually narrowing his concentration to the glistening nipples. ‘I remember how much you loved me doing this,’ he said, his voice a whisper of sound against her creamy flesh, ‘how you demanded I do it over and over again…I remember how I gave you an orgasm just by pushing my thigh tight between your legs while I sucked on your dainty nipples.’

And she remembered how he had used words as cleverly as he had used his mouth and his hands. Her knees melted, and on the way down he pulled the top over her head and threw it on top of his shirt, supporting her from hand to hand as he efficiently dealt with her trim skirt.

She was embarrassed at the plainness of her unadorned white panties, but he smiled as he hooked his fingers into the elastic.

‘Prim little cottontail,’ he teased as he stripped them down her thighs. ‘Don’t you know how erotic the contrast is between these and your own natural G-string of sexy black lace?’ And he ruffled his fingers teasingly in the soft triangle of dark fur that the panties had concealed.

The throb of the boat’s engine beneath her feet seemed to echo the thrumming of her heart as Joshua threw off the rest of his clothes with an enchanting, almost boyish eagerness. But there was nothing boyish about him when he pulled her back into his arms.

The wide double bunk was built into one corner of the cabin on a pedestal of drawers, its smooth, satiny, dark blue cover glowing under the strip of lights concealed in the bottom row of bookshelves on the wall above the bed, but when Joshua sat down on the edge and tried to draw her down on top of him, Regan resisted.

She sank to her knees between his legs, onto the thick, soft carpet, running her hands up the strong column of his thighs, gliding her thumbs into the sensitive patches of hairless skin on either side of his groin.

When she bent her head, he stilled, his hands cupping her shoulders. ‘Regan—’

Her eyes lifted to his. ‘I want to make love to you.’ And, as his gaze moved hungrily down over her nude, submissive pose she reminded him huskily, ‘The way you did to me…’

His nostrils flared as she closed her mouth over him and proceeded to pleasure him to the brink of madness with her soft tongue and throaty little sounds of seductive enjoyment. His back stiffened, the tendons in his neck cording as he arched his throat and gritted his teeth, fighting the approaching explosion in order to increase the deliciously excruciating torment of unsatisfied desire. He plunged his hands into her hair, guiding her beautifully eager mouth, and when he could bear it no more his iron muscles knotted and convulsed, and a harsh, guttural cry of groaning completion was torn from his heaving chest.

Only then did she allow him to pull her beside him on the rumpled cover and cuddle her up to his naked length.

‘You’re the incredibly generous lover…’ he murmured, propping himself up on one elbow so that he might gauge her reaction to his languorous caresses. ‘For all you know you might have just ruined your chances of being thoroughly bedded…’

She gave a small gurgle of sultry delight. ‘I doubt it, if your previous performances are anything to go by…’ Her breath ended on a little hiccup as his touch feathered dangerously low on her concave belly.

‘Your husband didn’t satisfy you in bed, did he?’ He traced his way back up to her aroused breasts and bent over to softly moisten a rosy nipple.

She shivered. ‘I thought he did…’ she said huskily, ‘…until you…Then I knew. With him it never felt—I didn’t—I never…’

His eyes were moon-silver as he combed her hair across the pillow. ‘You never had an orgasm…’ She blushed at his tone of gloating satisfaction and his soft laugh was tinged with triumphant pride. ‘You were so delightfully frantic that first time—as if you didn’t quite realise what was happening to you—but afterwards you were wildly uninhibited, and so eager to experiment I could hardly fail to oblige…’

He nuzzled at her mouth, deliberately abrading her cheeks with his soft whiskers, kissing her, stroking her until she was moving ceaselessly, restlessly, rubbing herself against him, becoming increasingly excited as she felt him hardening against her belly, and then he was reaching for her, rolling her under him.

‘Miracle-worker…’ he growled sexily as he pushed her thighs apart, settling himself firmly against the juncture of her body.

She felt the blunt force of him testing her readiness and suddenly stiffened. ‘Are you—? Joshua, you’re not wearing any protection—’

He froze and looked down at himself, stunned, then into the yearning violet eyes that were suddenly drenched with unexpressed sorrow.

‘It isn’t safe,’ she told him shakily. ‘I haven’t used the pill since Michael died. He—he never wanted me to have his baby,’ she whispered. She couldn’t stop the words spilling out: how Cindy had confessed that Michael had thought her too brash, too poorly educated, too overtly sexy with her bleached hair and big breasts, to be groomed into a proper corporate wife, whereas Regan had been tailor-made for his ambitions. How, to please Michael, Regan had continued with her law studies, even when she’d realised she wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer; how she’d increased the hours of her part-time job in order to help them afford the big, up-market house in a swanky suburb that he had insisted was essential to his image; how she had acted as his hostess whenever he’d wanted to show off his stable home life, and nobly respected his long hours of work and frequent absences from home.

‘But whatever I did to please him, it never seemed to be enough. And I couldn’t even make him want our child,’ she said bleakly. ‘He let her get pregnant, but he stood over me every morning until I’d taken my pill, to make sure I couldn’t conceive…’

‘Ah, Regan…’ He drank from her trembling lips and rolled his forehead against hers. ‘He was a worthless cheat. Controlling your fertility was just another way for him to exert his domination over a wife whom he knew was his moral and intellectual superior. Don’t be sad—be glad that your babies won’t carry his genes.’ He shaped her breast and stroked the tender peak. ‘One day you’ll suckle a baby at your breast, and I know you’ll make a wonderful mother…’

But not with him…

He rolled off the bed and was back again before she could recover from his shattering words, donning the protection with deft movements that ensured she had little time to think before he was gathering her up again and moving smoothly between her thighs.

Sensing that only passion could banish her lingering tristess, he braced himself over her on locked arms and plunged inside her, each powerful, explosive thrust of his thighs and buttocks forcing her further up the bed. His pace didn’t falter, the added tension in her tautly straining torso and her spreadeagled limbs exciting him to even more reckless heights. In the air-conditioned coolness the sweat glinted on his chest, forming droplets that pearled in the thick mat of hair and trickled down his rippling belly to add to the steamy moisture that slicked their thighs where their bodies met.

His face was hard and glazed, his eyes locked with hers, all his attention focused on her approaching climax as she jerked and shuddered under his rampant assault, uttering heated little whimpers and moans of encouragement that fed his lust to see her come totally apart before his own orgasm destroyed the last of his control.

Regan’s vision began to fade around the edges, her mind disengaging as her senses drastically overloaded, unable to process the escalating bombardment of pleasure. Her eyes purpled as she rushed towards the abyss of ecstasy, exulting in Joshua’s fiercely unrelenting possession, thrilling to the intrusion of his hard body, the hugeness of him filling her, loving her to the hilt, and the incredible feeling of swelling tightness that grew and grew until it exploded and she screamed with the agony of blissful release.

Then Joshua was wrenching and groaning and pouring himself into her, and their bodies eased into the sweet aftermath of mutual fulfilment that to Regan felt like the settling of her soul, like coming home…

She rolled over onto her side at the edge of the bed, facing away from him, trying to control the unruly emotions that threatened to spill out of her mouth. She stared, dry-eyed, across the cabin, trying to close herself off from the press of feelings, reaching inwards for the courage to accept what she couldn’t change. Joshua wouldn’t want tears and tantrums—he probably got enough of those from Carolyn. He would want her to be cool and sophisticated. He might even, God forbid, want them to remain friends…

‘I’m sorry…’ She heard the bittersweet remorse in his voice as she felt a finger slowly trace the bony centre line of her back from her nape to the hollow at the base of her spine.

‘I’m not!’ She widened her eyes fiercely, refusing to regret a moment of her glorious physical outpouring of love.

‘No, not for what we’ve just done…’ His finger stroked up again. ‘But for the fact that I can’t offer you any more than this…’ She felt his lips against the wing of her shoulderblade. ‘If I were a different sort of man and you were a different sort of woman we could remain lovers, but we both have too much pride and self-respect to sacrifice honour to a self-serving lie…’

She remembered that he had quoted her Shakespeare about her being a pearl, and now another quotation floated into her mind that summed up her understanding of Joshua Wade…‘Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done.’ She could not love him half so much if he were not a man of such unflinching principle.

‘I know…’

She felt his hand spread out across her back as the breath came sighing from her lungs. ‘Chris wanted a long engagement…he didn’t want to lose Carolyn, but she refused to move in with him and he didn’t feel quite ready for marriage. When she broke the news that she was pregnant they had a fight in which he accused her of trying to trap him and she accused him of wanting her to have an abortion. They both said some ugly things that neither seem willing to overlook—’

‘You don’t have to tell me this—’ she began painfully, but he firmly overrode her.

‘That morning after you left the apartment, Carolyn phoned me from here in hysterics, begging me to come up and help. She and Chris had been rowing for a week, and she was at the end of her tether. She isn’t cut out to be a single mother; she’s tough in some ways but emotionally fragile in others. She had given herself to my brother in good faith and he had turned his back on her when she most needed his support. I promised her that she wouldn’t have to go through this on her own and I have to stand by that promise. I owe that to her—and to Frank and Hazel, for the way that they’d welcomed Chris into their home.

‘Whatever her feelings for Chris, we agreed that if we married, then for the baby’s sake it has to be a real marriage…not simply a temporary sham for the sake of convention. I’ll be a faithful, protective husband and do my utmost to ensure that she’s a contented wife. And the baby will grow up as Ryan’s brother or sister.’

How noble of him. The acid words burned on the tip of her tongue as envy challenged her good intentions at the thought of another woman as the sole object of his cherishing. And yet it was balm to her heart to believe that the reason he had never tried to contact her again after their original tumble between the sheets might not have been because he hadn’t been interested, but because his orderly world had suddenly exploded in emotional chaos and his strong sense of honour had relegated all women but Carolyn firmly into the past.

Only, where Regan was concerned, his past had come back to tempt him to dishonour…

She stiffened as there was a light tap of the door.

‘Ahem…monsieur? Excusez-moi, but I thought you’d like to know that we’ve arrived back at the moorings. The captain is just backing into the slips…and your brother is waiting on the dock.’

‘Chris?’ Joshua swore in a low voice while Regan automatically yanked the edge of the satin cover over her nakedness. ‘What in the hell is he doing here?’ He lifted his voice. ‘Thanks, Pierre—I’ll be right up. Tell Grey not to lower the gangplank until he sees me on deck.’

He climbed lithely over Regan’s prone body and began pulling on his discarded clothes.

‘No—you stay here,’ he commanded as she made a move to do the same, checking himself in the full-length mirror on the en suite bathroom door, raking his hair back with his fingers before buttoning the open collar of his shirt to hide the tell-tale red mark glowing on the skin on the unblemished side of his throat. ‘He probably only wants to ask if he can stay the weekend in the condo. I’ll be back as soon as I get rid of him.’ He swooped and sealed his hastily made promise with a brief kiss on her dismayed mouth.

As soon as the door closed behind him Regan scrambled out of the bed and darted across to bolt the door. She picked up her clothes and shook them out. The skirt was a bit crumpled, but luckily the creases wouldn’t show up on the dark fabric, and her cotton-knit top was uncrushable. She would have liked to have a shower, but didn’t know whether the sound of the pipes would be audible above deck and instead contented herself with a quick spongedown in the bathroom before hurriedly dressing.

She dashed warm water in her face from the marble basin and used a comb from the vanity to return her hair to silky smoothness. Her face looked naked without make-up, her lips pouty and swollen, and she could see whisker burns on her chin and throat. To her horror she remembered that she had put her handbag down somewhere in the lounge, when Joshua had been showing her around. Unfortunately the drawers in the vanity yielded strictly masculine toiletries, and without recourse to make-up she had to satisfy herself with a pat of male moisturiser and a dab of cologne.

Although the boat no longer felt as if it was moving, the engine still continued to hum, and even straining her ears she could detect no sound from above. The luxury interior fittings obviously included soundproofing.

However, for added safety, she closed the bathroom door and perched on the closed toilet seat to await her rescue. When fifteen minutes had passed by the tick of the excruciatingly accurate platinum watch on her wrist she paced back out into the cabin and peered out of the porthole, but all she could see was the stylish super-yacht parked in the next slip.

After twenty-five minutes she could bear it no longer. Perhaps Joshua had taken Chris across the boardwalk to his condominium. All the two-storeyed condominiums that edged the dock had electronically coded security gates that opened from the boardwalk into private courtyards, and it might be possible for her to slip off the boat without being seen, unless the two men were standing at one of the huge picture windows overlooking the canal.

She silently cracked open the cabin door and peeped down the empty corridor towards the companionway. Everything was quiet. She decided that she would creep as far as the stairs and see if she could hear any conversation from the lounge. Her hand had just touched the smooth, polished stair-rail when there was a slight sound behind her.

‘Looking for this?’

She spun around, hoping that Pierre had tidied up his accent.

Christopher Wade stood in the open doorway of one of the end cabins, her navy jacket dangling from a coat hanger on his finger.

He was looking very casual in white jeans and a striped T-shirt, and behind him an open suitcase lay on the threequarter bed. Regan realised that whatever had brought him back to Palm Cove for the second consecutive weekend, he hadn’t arrived expecting big brother to give him houseroom. In view of the tension between them he had evidently chosen to stay on the boat.

‘Yes, I was, thank you,’ she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as nervously shrill to him as it did to her own ears. ‘I spilled a drink on myself and Pierre was cleaning it for me.’

‘He left it hanging on the shower door of the main bathroom. I found it when I went in to recharge my razor.’ His gaze went from her slender figure to the cabin door she had foolishly left ajar. ‘I knew it couldn’t be Carolyn’s—she never wears navy.’

She sustained his steady blue gaze with extreme difficulty as he slipped the jacket off the hanger and held it out to her. ‘It seems to be cured of whatever befell it—do you want to put it back on?’

She cleared her throat. ‘No, thanks—I’ll just carry it; it’s a bit warm.’ She smiled as she took it from him, but his expression was uncharacteristically cool.

‘You’re going to have a fairly tender bruise there tomorrow,’ he said quietly, and touched the soft skin at the outermost swell of her breast, where it was exposed by the cut-away armhole of her top. ‘In fact, you’re going to have quite a few by the looks of it,’ he continued, his eyes moving over her bare throat and shoulders. ‘And here I always thought Josh’s bark was worse than his bite…’

Regan fell back a step, clutching her jacket to her chest, feeling worse than naked, her cheeks stinging hot.

‘I—I—’

‘I wondered why he seemed so unusually twitchy when I wanted to come down and settle in. He tried to convince me that I’d be better off at the condo—when we both know I’m the last person Carolyn would want around as a chaperon.’

‘I’m sorry—’ Regan’s awkwardly expressed compassion caused a muscle to jump in his jaw, making him look markedly like his brother did when he was in a smouldering temper.

‘Oh, so you’re already in on that sordid family secret, are you?’ he guessed bitterly. ‘Josh is usually more discreet about his problems. I wouldn’t have thought he was the type to indulge in careless pillow talk, but then neither did I think he regarded sex as a combat sport—’

‘That’s enough, Chris,’ Joshua’s voice crackled out as he came down the stairs two at a time, jumping the final distance and coming up behind Regan. ‘There’s no need to embarrass yourself more than you have already.’

‘I’m not embarrassed.’

‘Well, you should be. You’re insulting a guest and I thought I’d taught you better manners. Come on, Regan, I’ll give you a lift back to the house.’

‘Why hustle her off in such a rush just because I’ve inconveniently turned up? Could it be you’re the one embarrassed at being caught with your pants down?’

Joshua stepped in front of Regan, shielding her from his brother’s crudity.

‘You’re asking for a punch in the mouth!’

‘Why? Because I’ve found out the truth?’ Chris said rawly. ‘That you’re not as lily-white as you like everyone to believe? I always knew you were a manipulative bastard, but to con Sir Frank into bringing your mistress up here so that you can flaunt your affair under Carolyn’s unsuspecting nose—’

‘I am not flaunting her, and she is not my mistress!’

‘You’re going to tell me you two were innocently playing checkers before I came on board? Don’t make me laugh! Regan has your brand stamped all over her—God, she even smells of you.’

Regan went hot all over. She hoped he was talking about the expensive cologne!

‘Dammit, Chris—’

‘No—damn you! Don’t you know how humiliated Caro would be if she knew? She trusts you, dammit!’ His voice was thick with torment. ‘She was so very quick to believe that I would let her down that she wouldn’t listen to anything I said afterwards—but big Josh—oh, no, never! She really believes that you’re the saint and I’m the sinner. And she likes Regan, she thinks of her as a friend…and all this time her new friend and her so-called fiancé have been—’

‘Don’t say it!’ Joshua ground out as Chris teetered on the brink of obscenity.

His brother laughed harshly. ‘I knew you were attracted to her, but I naively thought that—being such a stickler for men doing the right thing by their women—you’d merely suffer the tortures of the damned denying yourself.’

Instead of trying to douse the inflammatory situation with his cool reason, Joshua inexplicably chose to pour gasoline on the flames. ‘Or, if I gave in to the attraction, that I’d feel compelled to confess all to Carolyn? Is that what you were hoping would happen, Chris? So that you could rush in and replay the big dramatic scene that you flubbed a couple of months ago, this time with you as the valiant saviour and me as the faithless villain? Forget it. You had your chance and blew it. As it happens, I’ve decided that Carolyn will make an ideal wife. There’s a distinct commercial advantage in a businessman being associated with a beautiful, well-bred wife bouncing the evidence of his potent virility on her pretty knee…’

Regan felt Joshua’s callous, careless taunt like a blow to her heart, but Chris looked utterly shattered. His young face was haggard as he looked at the brother he had idolised for so many years with an expression of pure loathing.

‘You bastard. You think you’re going to have it all, don’t you? I won’t let you do it! If you hurt Caro—’

‘If you keep your mouth shut and mind your own business, she need never find out!’ Joshua snapped. ‘Get real, Chris—Carolyn may have been the embodiment of your boyish sexual fantasies, but, frankly, my tastes are a lot more mature. Now, if you don’t mind, Regan and I will skip the rest of the moral lecture!’

Joshua was tight-lipped and broodingly morose on the way back to the house, and Regan made a coward of herself by pretending that she had a headache and ducking dinner. She had no wish to sit across the table from Carolyn and listen to her talk about her latest wedding dress fitting, or speculate feverishly on where Joshua might take her on their honeymoon.

But there was no avoiding the other woman early the next morning when she crashed into Regan’s room just as she was finally managing to doze off after tossing and turning sleeplessly all night.

‘What’s the matter?’ Regan asked blearily, struggling to sit up as Carolyn threw herself dramatically into the chair by the bed.

‘I’m bleeding,’ she moaned, and Regan’s eyes snapped wide, noticing the tear-tracks on Carolyn’s normally flawless cheeks and her unnaturally pasty expression.

‘My God, do you think you’re having a miscarriage?’ she said, leaping out of bed.

‘No—I’m bleeding—I’ve got my period.’ Carolyn wrung her slender hands and rocked to and fro in the chair. ‘Oh, God, Regan—what am I going to do?’

‘But—but—you’re pregnant…’ Regan squawked, and Carolyn shook her head.

‘No—no, I’m not. It was a mistake—’

Regan collapsed on the side of the bed. ‘A mistake? But you had a test…’

‘It was wrong. It happens—not often, the doctor says, but it happens. I never went back for a physical examination, you see. But I started feeling some cramps yesterday afternoon, and so I drove over to Granny’s GP and…’ her big golden-brown eyes filled with tears ‘…and she said she couldn’t feel anything when she palpated me, so she sent me for another test and it came back negative…’

Regan’s brain was reeling. ‘But, how could that be…surely you had all the symptoms?’

‘The doctor said sometimes a woman’s body can mimic the early physical signs if she really believes that she’s pregnant, and I did believe it—I did!’ Carolyn’s light contralto rose sharply, as if to convince herself of her own sincerity. ‘My period didn’t come and then I felt nauseous nearly all the time, and my breasts started to feel sore and I put on weight…of course I thought I was pregnant!’ she shrilled.

‘The doctor said part of it was probably only fluid retention because my cycle was disturbed. I couldn’t believe it—I didn’t dare tell anyone in case it turned out to be another ghastly mistake. And then, when I woke up this morning…I found I had my period! There is no baby—there never was!’ Her exultation held more than a hint of hysteria, and a volatile mixture of joy, misery, relief and despair. ‘I need never have had that fight with Chris. Oh, God, he’s never going to want me now. He’ll hate me even more than he does already. I put us all through this torture for nothing!’ She buried her head in her hands, her hair falling around her body like a golden veil. Then she wrenched her tragic face up again. ‘And Granny—the wedding! Regan—please help me…what do you think I should do?’

Regan forced herself to be calm, not to choke on the throttling hope that threatened to close off her air supply. ’The first thing you have to do,’ she said carefully, ‘is tell Joshua.’

Carolyn looked white-eyed with panic. ‘Oh, no, I can’t tell Jay!’

‘Why can’t you?’ asked Regan hollowly. Was Carolyn now going to proclaim she’d fallen out of love with Chris and in love with Joshua?

‘I just can’t,’ she babbled, clutching the arms of the chair. ‘Not after all he’s done for me. He and Chris had never had a serious argument in their lives until I came along, and now, because Jay stood up for me and tried to help me, even knowing how much I love Chris—Oh, God, neither of them are going to forgive me…it’s all going to be so humiliating…you just don’t understand!’

Better a little humiliation now than a lifetime of unhappiness ahead, thought Regan acidly. How in the world had Carolyn thought she could be happy in a marriage that would have made her a sister to the man she still truly loved? How could even Joshua have been so arrogant as to believe he could make Carolyn content with such a situation? It was a recipe for emotional disaster whether or not the estrangement between the brothers remained permanent.

‘No, I don’t understand,’ she said steadily. ‘But I do know that you can’t go through with the wedding with Joshua still thinking that you’re going to have his brother’s baby. You must know how he feels about honesty. Remember what happened last time he married a woman who tried to use a pregnancy to manipulate him? As a matter of honour—his and yours—you have to tell him.’

‘He’ll think I’m a moron—so will Chris!’

‘Chris is a doctor, for goodness’ sake—he should have considered the possibility of something like this and insisted you both reserve any decisions until you’d had a proper examination. Of course, that would have been the rational thing to do, and people in love aren’t always rational.’

Carolyn’s eyes suddenly went dreamy. ‘No…that’s true…I know I sprung it on him badly, when we were in the middle of a fight about something else, and he felt cornered—but so did I! Maybe I should tell Chris first. After all, it was supposed to be his baby—and he could tell Jay…’

Regan eyed her cynically. ‘I don’t think it’s the sort of thing Joshua would appreciate hearing second-hand.’

All Regan’s advice seemed to fall on deaf ears, and by the time she went downstairs she had a real headache, which suddenly got worse when Sir Frank greeted her in the breakfast room with cheerful congratulations on her excellent timing—because Joshua had just arrived and was waiting to see her in the library.

‘I put him in there because he said it was business and he wanted somewhere you wouldn’t be disturbed. I hope he’s not going to try and poach you away from Harriman’s before the takeover—but then, that would sort of be like poaching you away from himself, wouldn’t it?’

His chuckle followed her down the hall, but Regan didn’t feel at all like laughing. As soon as she walked into the library and saw Ryan standing slouched beside the desk, nervously pushing his glasses up his nose, her heart sank.

Joshua, standing behind the desk, threw a sheaf of computer printouts on the desk, scattering them like confetti.

‘Perhaps you’d like to explain these?’ Icicles dripped from every syllable.

Out of the corner of her eye Regan could see Ryan wince. Whatever he had done, against her express instructions, she knew she couldn’t let him take any of the blame. ‘I—what are they?’

Joshua’s fist crashed down on top of the papers, the ice melting to reveal the molten volcano of temper beneath.

‘Don’t compound your lies by pretending innocence!’ he roared. ‘No wonder you were so eager to join me on the boat yesterday. It provided you with the perfect alibi!’ He raked her with a look of searing contempt. ‘You had my son back at the office doing your dirty work for you, while you kept me safely out of the way. I compliment you on your technique—suborn the son and seduce the father.’

Regan had done neither, but she could see he was in no mood to listen. She tentatively picked up one of the pieces of paper. ‘But, surely, you must be able to see—’

He lunged forward and dashed it from her hands. ‘I see, all right!’ he erupted. ‘I see that you used him…you used my son—’ in his ungovernable outrage, his passionate protectiveness towards his family had never been more apparent ‘—to cover up a crime! You used his feelings for you to make him an accessory to fraud. When I found these in his room this morning I knew that I was the fool being taken for a ride yesterday.’

‘But, Dad, I told you—Regan said she didn’t want me to—’

‘Be quiet, son, you’re in deep enough trouble as it is! What Regan says and what she means are two different things.’ He swung his attention back to her guilty white face. ‘Was this a set-up right from the beginning—from that first night in my apartment?’

Regan rallied, as outraged as he by the notion. ‘No! You know it couldn’t have been!’

‘And you expect me to believe you?’ he slashed sardonically, but seemed to accept that his accusation was incompatible with subsequent events as he went on, ‘Serendipity, then, when you were given the chance to come to Palm Cove and realised that you might use our former…liaison to help create a smokescreen for your actions. Were those sexual tricks you performed on me yesterday supposed to be your version of a personal insurance policy? Designed to make me reluctant to summon the police in the event of your being found out—’

‘Joshua!’ she gasped in agonised protest, glancing meaningfully at Ryan, who was following the conversation back and forth with a deep, and noticeably unrepentant fascination.

Her concern seemed only to trigger an even greater fury. ‘What? Do you think we might be corrupting his innocence? It’s a little late to worry about that, isn’t it? I think, for his own future protection, it’s about time he learned the difference between an honest woman and a conniving little whore!’