Her glance strayed to the kitchen clock and she let out a worried sigh. It was more than half an hour now since Matt had driven away. Where had he gone? What was he doing? When would he come back? And then she remembered that night in the cabin at Fortescue Bay. Faced with an explosive, emotional situation he had rushed off then, too, and only returned when he was completely under control. Well, perhaps he would do the same thing now. But even if he did come back looking cool and glib and imperturbable, she would find some way of breaching his armour! Somehow they must talk about what had happened between them. Even if they were going to part—and the mere thought sent a stab of pain like a knife wound through her heart—then she needed to understand what was going on. She must wait until he came back and then make him talk to her.
When the kitchen door swung open behind her, her heart almost stopped beating. Gazing sightlessly down at her hands, she realized that she had been shredding a paper napkin and plaiting it into tiny braids. Clutching at it as if it was a lifeline, she turned slowly and moistened the roof of her mouth with her tongue.
‘Matt—’ she began.
But it was not Matt. It was a jaunty, boyish figure, who darted only one brief, sheepish glance at her before launching into speech.
‘Oh, hi, Lisa. Listen, have you seen the ball of twine or the little box of tacks anywhere? Or that small hammer? I need to crate up my painting.’
Lisa’s only response was to give Tim a burning look, then stride through the kitchen to the laundry. She returned a moment later with her arms full and proceeded to open a box of tacks and pour them out on the floor in front of him. After that, she coiled off length after length of twine from the ball before flinging it in his face. Finally she dropped the hammer right on his feet.
‘Ouch!’ exclaimed Tim, jumping back a moment too late. ‘You’re upset about something, aren’t you, Lisa?’
‘What ever gave you that idea?’ choked Lisa.
And flinging herself down at the table she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears again.
Tim was appalled. He looked longingly at the door, fell on one knee to pick up the hammer and a few of the tacks and then evidently thought better of it. Dropping them again on the floor, he came over and put his hands awkwardly on Lisa’s shoulders.
‘What’s wrong, Lisa?’ he asked.
‘Everything!’ she replied unsteadily. ‘You’ve wrecked everything, telling Matt that I was only trying to get revenge on him. It wasn’t true any more. I really had fallen in love with him.’
‘Fallen in love with him?’ echoed Tim incredulously. ‘You mean…my uncle Matt?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he’s a brute,’ protested Tim. ‘Overbearing, strict, a killjoy.’
‘I know,’ wailed Lisa. ‘But I love him. And now he’s left me.’
Alarmed by the threat of further tears, Tim picked up the ruined napkin and dabbed at her face with it.
‘What’s this? Have you taken up macramé?’
Lisa gave a watery giggle and allowed Tim to hug her.
‘Look, I’m sorry I dumped you in it with Matt,’ he said. ‘I lost my temper when I heard you calling me immature. I’ve always been very mature for my age.’
That made Lisa give another smothered giggle and in a moment she felt recovered enough to return Tim’s hug. Looking relieved, he straightened up and slouched across to the kettle.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he asked.
‘Tim! I don’t think you’ve ever made me a cup of tea in all the time I’ve known you.’
‘Well, if you have ambitions to be my aunt by marriage I suppose I’d better take care of you, you poor old bat.’
‘Old bat!’ cried Lisa indignantly, but she accepted the cup.
‘Is that your ambition?’ asked Tim. ‘To marry Matt?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said huskily. ‘If I felt sure that Matt loved me, yes, nothing would make me happier. But I’m not sure of anything any more.’
‘Have you slept with him?’
Lisa blushed and then nodded. Tim gave a soft whistle. ‘Then you really are serious about him! Did he tell you what he felt about you?”
Her face shadowed. ‘Not exactly,’ she admitted at last. ‘But from the way he was behaving I thought he must love me. Then I started to think about Andrea, and I wasn’t sure any more. Tim, do you think Matt really is Justin’s father?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tim said with a perplexed sigh. ‘It’s hard to see how it can be anybody else, especially seeing how much the kid looks like him. And there’s the fact that Matt knows about the rumours and doesn’t try to stop them. All the same, it doesn’t seem like him to leave Andrea in the lurch, even if he didn’t love her. He’s always so gung ho about responsibility! But if he did do that to her, maybe you’re better off without him.’
‘That’s what I keep telling myself but I don’t feel it. Deep down I don’t believe it. I wish he’d come back and explain it all to me.’
‘He probably will eventually,’ said Tim. ‘Of course he must have been really upset to rush off like that. I’ve never seen him look so dangerous before. But he’s got to come home sooner or later.’
Yet after another half hour there was still no sign of Matt, and Tim was beginning to grow restive. Lisa was just about to take pity on him and send him down to crate up the painting when the door opened. Lisa half rose from her seat and slumped back in disappointment. It was only Judy Barwick!
‘Hello,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Had a nice Christmas? Tell me, what’s all this about your uncle Matt jetting off to Hong Kong?’
‘Hong Kong?’ chorused Tim and Lisa in shocked tones.
‘Yes, didn’t he tell you? He rang me at home a few minutes ago and said he’d decided to go away indefinitely. Some business trip, I suppose. Or perhaps he just felt that he needed a break.’
A week later Lisa was kneeling on the floor of her bedroom in the flat in Melbourne with an array of half-packed suitcases and boxes around her. She had a headache and her eyes felt swollen and scratchy, but that was nothing new. She had been feeling that way ever since she and Tim flew out of Tasmania. Tim had turned out to be surprisingly kind once they both realized that Matt wasn’t going to return. In addition to packing up his painting, he had packed up Lisa with almost equal tenderness. Faced with her distraught condition, which was quite beyond his understanding, he had treated her as if she was a very young child. Organizing her bags, driving her to the airport, urging her to eat her snack on board the plane. And after delivering his painting to the judges, he had even offered to come home and keep her company. But company was the last thing Lisa wanted right now. When Tim finally accepted this, he left with obvious relief in search of Barbara. Apart from a brief phone call—‘Lisa? I’m at the beach house in Portsea if you need me’—Lisa hadn’t heard from him all week.
Just as well, really, she thought with a sigh. She was still very fond of Tim, but there was no denying that his presence reminded her of many things she would rather forget. Besides, she didn’t want to infect him with her gloom, when he was so full of high spirits about the prospect of going to study in Paris. And he would only be in the way while she was packing. He had tried to persuade her to stay on in the flat indefinitely, but Lisa had been immovable on that issue. The place belonged to Matt and there was no way her pride would let her go on living there even if she never set eyes on Tim’s uncle again. Besides, Matt might want to let the place out to a genuine tenant, if Tim did go overseas to study.
Well, there was no point sitting here brooding! She must get on with tossing out a few more crumpled sketches and find all the odd socks that seemed to be missing from her drawers. She was just dumping out her underwear drawer on the bed when the doorbell rang. For a moment Lisa froze, with a wild hope thudding in her chest, then she forced herself to take a deep, calming breath. Don’t be stupid, she thought. Tim’s probably come up to town with Barbara and forgotten to bring his key. But it wasn’t Tim who wa
s standing on the front doorstep. It was Matt.
He looked just as suave and well groomed as ever in lightweight grey slacks and a striped blue and white shirt. As usual his face gave nothing away, but Lisa was annoyed to feel the old, familiar lurch of excitement at the mere sight of him. Instinctively she gave ground and stepped back a pace or two, looking at him nervously. Matt promptly took advantage of her retreat to step calmly inside and close the front door behind him.
‘Any chance of some coffee?’ he asked.
Coffee? Why on earth did he want coffee? This request seemed as bizarre to Lisa as if it had been made while she was in the midst of fleeing for her life from a tidal wave or a volcanic eruption or some other natural disaster. Yet the force of Matt’s personality mesmerized her.
‘I suppose so,’ she said unsteadily and turned to lead the way upstairs.
Once in the kitchen she switched on the percolator and the normality of the surroundings helped to steady her nerves a little. Why had he come? What did he want? But Matt showed no sign of wanting anything. He strolled casually into the dining room and was looking around it approvingly.
‘It’s much tidier than it was the first time I met you,’ he remarked.
Colour flooded into Lisa’s face at the reminder.
‘Yes, I cleared away all the paints and brushes,’ she muttered. ‘I suppose Tim and I should never have used it as a studio without your consent, but I don’t think anything’s been damaged. Look, I’ll go and get the coffee.’
She sidled out of the room and returned a few minutes later with a tray. Matt rose to his feet and came towards her.
‘Forget the coffee!’
‘Why are you here?’
They both spoke together and to Lisa’s ears it sounded like the salvo of gunfire at the start of a war. She heard the cups rattle as she set down the tray and realized that she had made no progress at all in feeling indifferent towards him.
‘Why are you here?’ she repeated bitterly.
Matt gave a harsh laugh.
‘If I told you I couldn’t stay away, would that be an adequate answer?’
‘No.’
‘Then what if I tell you that Tim phoned me and said you were going to pieces with misery?’
‘Tim phoned you?’ she echoed. ‘How could Tim phone you? Judy told us you were in Hong Kong!’
‘They have telephones in Hong Kong.’
Lisa stared at him in disbelief. ‘And you came back here because of that?’ she demanded.
‘Is it really so unlikely?’ He took a step closer. ‘Is it true, Lisa? Are you miserable?’
‘No,’ she choked.
‘So your red eyes and pale face are just a sign that you’ve been out on the tiles enjoying yourself, are they? I must say you look as if you’re pretty ecstatic.’
‘Stop tormenting me!’ flared Lisa and then gasped as he gripped her by the shoulders.
‘You’re the one who’s tormenting me,’ he corrected. ‘Lisa, Tim also swears that you really are in love with me. I’ve got to know…is that true?’
She took a long, shuddering breath.
‘What does it matter? Why do you want to know? You’re still collecting trophies, are you?’
Matt swore under his breath.
‘I never have collected trophies! I never will. All right, I admit that there were other women in my life before I met you, but they were only ever women that I respected and liked. And when we parted it was mutual.’
Lisa thought of Andrea and her lips twisted sceptically.
‘Was it?’ she asked.
‘Yes, it was! Look, Lisa, never mind the other women in my life, all that’s over and finished. What I want to talk about is us. I want to know what you feel for me now.’
‘I don’t feel anything for you!’ she retorted and was annoyed that she could not keep the tremor out of her voice.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ he snarled. ‘That’s as meaningless as it would be for me to say I don’t feel anything for you.’
‘Well, you don’t!’ cried Lisa. ‘You never liked me, right from the beginning.’
She heard Matt’s harsh intake of breath.
‘That’s not entirely true,’ he said. ‘I disapproved of you in the beginning, but I was violently attracted to you from the very start.’
Lisa thrust down an unwelcome thrill of pleasure at that revelation.
‘Oh, yes? So attracted to me that you called me an ambitious little schemer?’
‘Well, what was I supposed to call you?’ he demanded savagely. ‘You let me believe that you were sleeping with Tim and planning to marry him, didn’t you? I didn’t know whether it was for love or money, but you very soon admitted to me that love didn’t come into it. So was I supposed to admire your fine character?’
Lisa glared at him. ‘And what about your fine character?’ she retorted. ‘You tried to buy me off, didn’t you?’
Matt winced. ‘Yes, and it didn’t work. That’s when I had my first suspicion that money wasn’t really important to you, after all. Still, it was always possible that you were simply playing for even higher stakes. When you burnt my cheque, I was furious. I was even more furious to find that it made me even more violently attracted to you than before.’
‘And that’s why you kissed me in the lift at the State Theatre?’
‘Yes. And that was a mistake. You were sheer dynamite, Lisa! I’ve never been so aroused by a woman in my entire life. I was outraged to think that my callow young nephew could succeed with you where I couldn’t, so I vowed that I was going to have you.’
Lisa looked at him with unwilling interest as a swarm of questions began to buzz in her head.
‘Did you deliberately scheme to get Tim left behind in Melbourne?’ she asked.
Matt gave a throaty growl of laughter.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t think he’d be able to resist the temptation to escape. And he didn’t.’
‘And I suppose you thought that once you got me alone I’d jump into bed with you?’ cried Lisa indignantly.
Matt had the grace to look ashamed.
‘Something like that,’ he muttered. ‘But it didn’t work out the way I expected. You turned out to be much nicer than I thought you would be. You also seemed to have scruples about things that wouldn’t have bothered you if you were a genuine gold-digger. Like paying for your own airline ticket. And then I found that something really alarming was happening to me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was beginning to like you. I began to wonder if I’d misjudged you, but at the same time I was deeply uneasy. I decided I’d try to find out the truth about you. If you really were a mercenary little bitch, I told myself I’d be doing Tim a favour by exposing what you really were. If you weren’t, then…I’d have to reassess the situation. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to make you fall for me.’
‘So if I hadn’t overheard you talking to Andrea, would you really have lured me into bed with you just to show Tim how fickle I was?’ demanded Lisa indignantly.
Matt winced.
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking terribly clearly and most of what I was thinking was pure self-deception anyway. I tried to kid myself that what I was doing was just to save Tim from your clutches, but that wasn’t true at all. The real reason I wanted you to fall for me is that you intrigued me so much. I wanted you to lie awake at night aching for me the way I did for you.’
‘Well, you succeeded,’ said Lisa dryly. ‘I did love you desperately and I was really beginning to fall under your spell until I heard what you said to Andrea. It’s because you had conned me so successfully that I felt so furious when I realised that it was all just an underhanded plot.’
‘And you dreamt up your own underhanded plot for revenge?’
Lisa nodded bleakly.
‘Well, you really turned the tables on me,’ growled Matt. ‘Although it was a stroke of luck for you that Tim arrived when he did.’
‘Luck, noth
ing!’ jeered Lisa. ‘I phoned him in Melbourne and blackmailed him into coming down to Tasmania. Then we agreed to pretend that we were sleeping together.’
‘You really know how to hurt a man, don’t you?’
‘Were you hurt?’
‘I was so jealous that I was seriously tempted to knock Tim down, drag you off by the hair, fling you onto my bed and ravish you. You were driving me insane with desire.’
‘Well, you drove me fairly insane with desire at Fortescue Bay,’ she told him.
Matt gave her a long, searching look.
‘Why did you beg me not to make love to you there?’ he asked. ‘You told me that you were afraid that you’d lose your self-respect. I thought you were talking about your engagement to Tim and I admired you for it. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? You never did sleep with Tim, did you?’
Lisa shook her head.
‘No,’ she agreed huskily. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Matt, especially when you’ve never been completely open with me. But I suppose I might as well tell you the truth. Up until that moment in the cottage at Fortescue Bay I kept trying to convince myself that I could play my silly game of revenge without getting burnt. That I could stop whenever I wanted. Then that night I realised I was in love with you.’
‘In love with me? But you wouldn’t let me make love to you. That doesn’t make sense.’
‘Yes, it does!’ insisted Lisa passionately. ‘I was in love with you, but I thought you were just playing games with me. And I was so upset by what you’d done to Andrea. How could I trust myself to a man like that?’
Mistress For Hire (Harlequin Presents) Page 16