by Susan Napier
‘Vanessa.’ He shook her panting form roughly. ‘You can’t fling things like that at me in a temper and expect me to take them seriously. Besides, if that farrago of ridiculous nonsense bears any relation to reality I’ll eat my hat. Of course I laughed. To anyone who knows you at all the idea of you being an evil, gold-digging vamp is totally risible. What you know about seduction can be written on the head of a pin! You have no idea what turns a man on. Now, why don’t you just calm down and tell me about your deep, dark, dreaded past properly, instead of waving it in front of my face like a red rag to a bull? You got exactly the reaction you damned well deserved...’
And so had he, thought Vanessa savagely a few fraught moments later, looking in her rear-view mirror to see the masculine figure standing in a cloud of sandy dust as she accelerated recklessly away from the beach. Was he shaking his fist at her? He was certainly furious, his last frustrated yell ringing in her ears.
‘You can’t run away from your emotions forever, Vanessa. I won’t let you use Whitefield as your private bolt-hole to avoid life’s nasty human complications—’
At least she had got the final word in. As she’d slammed the car door, almost catching his fingers in the process, she had yelled back, ‘Why not? You are! I never believed you decided to come down to Whitefield out of the blue just for an innocent holiday. You said you needed to get away and Auckland was too accessible. You’re running away from something, too, so don’t preach your self-serving sermons at me!’
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS a miracle that Vanessa didn’t kill herself on the drive back to Whitefield. She could hardly see the road for tears and she was shaking so badly that the gears ground fiercely with every change.
She wasn’t a masochist, she told herself fiercely. She wasn’t going to set herself up for another lesson in the miseries of unrequited love. Back there on the beach she had realised, to her horror, that she was even more vulnerable to her emotions now than she had been five years ago. Julian’s charm had been largely superficial, his character incapable of a great depth of emotion, and at some instinctual level she must have realised that, for, although his rejection and betrayal had been wretchedly painful at the time, she had survived it by despising him and forgiving herself for her immaturity.
Benedict—clever, cultured, cloaked in layers of intriguing emotional complexity—was impossible to despise. Such a serious man would never love easily—or feign love where it didn’t exist—and he was cruelly honest about his intentions. He was looking for a lover, not a lifelong companion. He was rejecting her love before it was even offered.
Well, this time she was going to be the one doing the rejecting, Vanessa told herself as she spun the car recklessly into the gates at Whitefield. A volatile cocktail of temptation and challenge had temporarily deranged the molecules of her brain, that was all. Her feelings towards Benedict were pure chemistry—and she was a stout opponent of chemical dependencies.
She wasn’t in love with him. She refused to be. She would stick to her original plan and fall in love with Richard and he would be kind and tender and never terrify her with feelings she couldn’t control, or force himself into every crack and corner of her consciousness until she felt her life wasn’t her own any more!
Suddenly Vanessa slammed on the brakes, fish-tailing the car on the gravel as she almost rear-ended the snazzy yellow left-hand-drive Corvette parked crookedly with its boot open on the forecourt.
A short, stocky man with rusty brown hair ran down the steps from the house to jerk open her door so suddenly that Vanessa almost fell out at his feet.
‘My God—is that you, Flynn?’ he said, his incredulity turning to frank amusement. ‘I thought it was Mario Andretti!’
Vanessa recovered herself and straightened to her full height. ‘B—Mr Savage didn’t say that you were expected, Mr Judson.’
He grinned at her stiffness, his twinkling brown eyes curious as she tried to smooth back the curly, wind-swept mass of her hair.
‘I live to surprise him,’ he murmured, pretending not to notice the tear-stains on her cheeks. ‘Though I get the feeling that this time I’m the one in for the surprise. Mrs Riley said you two were on a picnic. Didn’t Ben come back with you?’
‘I didn’t ask,’ she snapped with perfect truth and flushed as his curiosity intensified. She was searching for some innocuous comment to temper her rudeness when a woman emerged from the house behind him.
She was in her late twenties, petite and perfect, a dainty, slender woman who looked as fragile as she was beautiful, her flame-red hair emphasising the pale translucence of her skin and the brilliance of the slanted green eyes. Her classic suit matched her eyes and screamed Chanel.
‘Have you found out where Benedict is yet, Dane? Goodness, who on earth is this?’ The amused drawl and the slow, critical sweep of the green eyes made Vanessa’s hackles rise instantly.
‘I’m Mr Savage’s butler,’ she said crisply.
‘You’re kidding? She’s kidding, right?’ The woman arched incredulous brows at Dane who shook his head with a grin as he lifted a suitcase out of his car.
Vanessa found herself on the receiving end of a careless shrug of dismissal. ‘Oh, well, I suppose Benedict likes to have his little eccentricities. What does he call you?’
Darling, Vanessa was tempted to reply caustically.
‘Flynn.’
‘Well, Flynn, if you are a butler you’d better help Dane bring in the suitcases.’
‘You’re staying?’ Vanessa blurted inadvertently.
‘Of course we’re staying,’ the woman answered impatiently. From her accent she was an American and Vanessa wondered if she and Dane were an item. It was fortunate that Vanessa had assumed her professional mask of polite rigidity because the next comment came as a searing bolt out of the blue.
‘I certainly didn’t come all this way to be fobbed off on any hotel. Benedict and I have a lot of planning to do. He’s under a lot of pressure and I can understand him needing a break, but he has to make some decision about our engagement—’
‘Engagement?’ Vanessa echoed helplessly.
‘Yes. I’m Lacey Taylor.’ She said her name as if she expected thunderous applause, or at least a glimmer of recognition. She got neither.
‘He—Mr Savage never mentioned a fiancée,’ Vanessa managed to say.
‘Benedict is a very private man. I don’t suppose he sees any need to discuss his personal relationships with domestic staff,’ she was informed pointedly. ‘Now, perhaps you’ll direct me to my room so that I can freshen up before he gets back from wherever he’s disappeared to. Come, Dane.’
Then she was gliding away, her high heels crunching prettily over the gravel.
Vanessa looked at Dane Judson blankly.
‘Why do I feel like a dog being called to heel?’ he said ruefully. ‘If you see Ben before I do, tell him not to blame me. When Lacey gets an idea in her head it’s pretty tough to shift and I didn’t think Ben would appreciate her turning up here on her own.’
‘But...who is she?’ Vanessa was trying to come to terms with the knowledge that all the while that Benedict had been stubbornly burrowing his way into her heart he had already been committed to another woman. So much for not being able to despise him. He was worse than despicable!
‘An architect—a very clever one, too. She works for his father’s firm. Her parents are great friends of the Savages.’
Oh, great. Loaded with brains as well as beauty, and almost part of the family already. If Vanessa hadn’t been so furious she would have burst into tears.
‘How long have she and B—Mr Savage been engaged?’
‘Ask me that again in a couple of hours and I might be able to give you an answer,’ Dane said drily, picking up the two heaviest cases and carrying them up the steps, leaving Vanessa to trail behind with the other one as she turned his cryptic words over in her head.
Did he mean that the engagement had been secret, even from Benedict’s b
est friend? Come to think of it, she hadn’t noticed any engagement ring on those slender fingers...
She found out why a couple of hours later as she served afternoon tea in the drawing-room.
Whatever Benedict’s relationship with Lacey Taylor, he wasn’t in love with her. His body language spoke volumes. While Lacey leaned into his every word, smiled at him and laid her hand on his arm every chance she got, Benedict was all but rolled into a defensive ball of armoured politeness. Yet Lacey behaved as if his cool reserve were a gushing welcome. She didn’t so much flirt as brazenly assume, and Vanessa found herself almost admiring her for her gall.
Dane, sprawling sideways in his chair, winked at Vanessa as she bent to offer him a slice of Kate’s Madeira cake.
‘Lucky I’m here to act as chaperon. As you can see, loverboy can hardly keep his hands off her,’ he whispered wickedly.
Since Benedict had moved to stand against the window on the far side of the room to Lacey, his hands clasped firmly behind his back, the comment made Vanessa bite her lip to hold back an unprofessional smirk.
As she straightened she caught Benedict’s smouldering gaze and hastily returned her mouth to its former primness.
She didn’t know how he had got back to the house from the beach but it had taken him an hour and he had arrived in a full-blooded fury, slamming the front door so that the whole house had seemed to shudder and yelling for her in a voice that had promised savage retribution. Fortunately, his unexpected guests had promptly appeared to thwart his temper and since then Vanessa had been grateful to Lacey for sticking to him like fly-paper.
Now he beckoned her with an ominously grim expression, and, holding the plate in front of her like a shield, Vanessa approached him warily.
‘What was he saying to you?’ he demanded in an undertone as Lacey replied to some remark of Dane’s. ‘Whatever it was, don’t believe him. I had no idea they were going to turn up.’
She looked at him serenely. ‘I don’t imagine you did. It must be very awkward to have your intended mistress and future wife under the same roof.’
Her cool whisper made his eyes narrow but she immediately turned away to pour the tea before withdrawing, nervously aware of Benedict’s brooding gaze following every step of her dignified escape.
Later, when she was clearing away the tray, he managed to extricate himself long enough from his guests to waylay her outside the door. ‘It’s not what it looks like, Vanessa. Lacey’s not my fiancée, damn it!’ he said fiercely.
‘That’s odd. She seems to think she is!’
‘We went out together a few times. All right, more than a few,’ he admitted raggedly as she stiffened. ‘But that’s all we did. Go out. It was a mistake. I never asked her to marry me. You have nothing to be jealous of—’
‘Jealous?’ she said with coolly calculated surprise, as if the idea had never even occurred to her, and watched his eyebrows twitch sharply together into a scowl.
‘Benedict—?’
He jerked, cursing under his breath at the snip of heels that accompanied the plaintive call.
‘You’d better run along, Benedict,’ Vanessa goaded, enjoying his harassed expression. ‘Your fiancée’s getting anxious.’
Dinner was even more enlightening. When Vanessa ventured into the room with the soup tureen Benedict turned to Lacey in an excellent imitation of a man to whom servants were wholly invisible and stated deliberately that, as he had already told her a number of times, he had no intention of pandering to their parents’ archaic notion of a dynastic marriage between their offspring.
Her answer was to pat him condescendingly on the hand.
‘Now, Benedict, aren’t you carrying this rebellion against your father too far? So what if he told you he would like to see us married? That’s no reason to sacrifice our future. And it’s rather insulting to both of us to suggest that the only reason I could want to marry you is to consolidate our inheritances. Why, I’ve always adored being in your company and we get on splendidly. I don’t think we’ve ever had an argument in all the years we’ve known each other! And you can’t deny that our backgrounds and careers are incredibly compatible. Don’t you agree, Dane?’
‘Oh, incredibly compatible,’ murmured Dane obediently, earning himself a ferocious look from his friend.
And so it went on throughout the entire four-course meal, Benedict baffled at every turn by Lacey’s unshakeably confident belief in their shared destiny.
Seated between two men in elegant dark suits and looking quite stunning in a simple green cocktail dress, Lacey was obviously in her social element but, by the time she brought coffee, Vanessa no longer wanted to scratch out the gorgeous green eyes. She actually felt sorry for the beautiful and bossy Miss Taylor. Benedict had done everything but yawn in her face to demonstrate his lack of interest and she hadn’t even noticed.
No wonder she and Benedict never argued. Lacey had obviously never roused the man behind the smooth manners and seamless sophistication.
It was evidently only with Vanessa that he was a savage, for, when she had served the final liqueurs and requested permission to retire, Benedict leaned back in his chair and asked silkily, ‘Are you sleeping in your own bed tonight, Vanessa?’
The atmosphere in the dining-room dropped ten degrees in two seconds.
‘I thought her name was Flynn?’ said Lacey sharply.
‘Flynn is her surname,’ supplied Benedict smoothly, not taking his eyes off his quarry. ‘Vanessa?’
She could just imagine what was going through the other woman’s head. And Dane Judson’s. If his eyebrows rose any higher they would disappear into his hairline.
‘Yes,’ she bit off, and then breached one of the cardinal rules of etiquette by delivering a gratuitous little speech about how she used to air the empty bedrooms.
‘May I go now, sir?’ she said woodenly, when this small exercise in embarrassment was over.
To her horror Benedict rose and sauntered towards her.
‘Don’t be so stuffy, Vanessa; we don’t have to pretend to be formal in front of my friends.’ He slid his fingers under her elbow and turned her towards the door, tossing casually over his shoulder, ‘Excuse us for a minute, won’t you?’
Out in the hall Vanessa wrenched her arm away and stormed off to the kitchen. Kate had left after she had dished up the main course and there was no one to hide behind as Benedict followed hot on her heels.
‘Get out of here! Do you know what they must be thinking?’ she raged at him. ‘Especially after that stupid remark about where I was sleeping. I’ve already had my reputation stolen once by some spoiled young buck and I don’t intend to have it happen again. Go back to your fiancée!’
‘Oh, no, you can’t convince me you still believe that canard,’ he dismissed contemptuously. ‘Not after you’ve seen her in action.’ He leapt back as she angrily turned on the tap over the kitchen sink full-blast, sending a jet of water bouncing off the dessert plates, nearly drenching the front of his pale grey silk shirt.
‘For goodness’ sake, Vanessa, this is not about your reputation—or mine,’ he said, reaching across her to turn the tap off so firmly, she couldn’t get it to budge again. ‘Stop trying to frighten me with your lurid past. I don’t care what happened back in England—except that whatever mess you got tangled up in obviously hurt you badly enough to colour your whole attitude towards love and sex. I’m sorry if I seemed to treat your alleged notoriety lightly, but I was angry at your lack of faith in me. Whether it was a mix-up or a set-up I know you could never have done the things you claim you were accused of. That’s an example of my faith in you.’
Vanessa was in no mood to be coaxed. She turned and, finding herself trapped against the sink, lifted her chin belligerently. ‘So?’
‘So...that pot-shot of yours on the beach about running away wasn’t entirely off-target. I did desperately need a break, but for the last few weeks Lacey’s been popping up wherever I go and I thought she’d never follow me here.
Lacey hates small towns. Even Sydney isn’t big enough for her.’
Detecting a hint of softening in her rigid expression, he moved in closer again, using the husky, confiding tone that turned her bones to wax. ‘She doesn’t love me, Vanessa. My parents have egged her on to think that I’m secretly dying to be drawn back into the family fold and Lacey is ambitious; she can’t bear to fail—in anything...’
‘She can’t force you to the altar, for goodness sake,’ said Vanessa, torn between anger and unwilling sympathy. Lacey Taylor did seem to be an oppressively single-minded woman. ‘All you have to do is say no...’
‘I have. And she tells me I’m just gun-shy about giving up my selfish, bachelor independence—’
‘She’s an intelligent woman; she’ll get the message eventually—’
‘Yes, if I’m sufficiently brutal about it in a public enough way I’m sure I can humiliate her into never even speaking to me again, but she doesn’t deserve that kind of cruelty. I’m not in love with her but before she was encouraged in this fixation we had a good platonic friendship, and as a professional she still has my greatest respect.’
He took off his glasses and blinked at the harsh fluorescence of the kitchen lighting, and Vanessa was sunk. ‘You can understand my wanting to avoid beating her over the head with her pride, can’t you, Vanessa?’ he said softly, placing his hands on either side of her on the bench. ‘If she knew I had someone else tucked away in my life she could blame me instead of herself for her failure to pin me down...’
His hips had crowded her buttocks against the stainless-steel bench and the tip of his tongue was stroking the seam of her primly sealed mouth.
‘You want to pretend that we’re involved?’ she murmured distractedly.
‘I don’t think any pretence will be necessary,’ growled Benedict, nipping at her lower lip, his thighs grinding lightly against her.
Vanessa shivered. ‘I won’t lie—’
‘I know. You won’t have to...’ He nuzzled into the prim white collar above her jacket to kiss the betraying pulse-beat in the curve of her throat, his hands holding her hips as his left knee flexed, pressing inexorably forward against the constriction of her skirt, pulling it taut between her thighs until he was resting his knee against the cupboard door behind her.