The Price of Deceit

by Cathy Williams

  “Unfinished business never goes away.”

  “You never really discussed your past with me all those years ago, did you?” murmured Dominic.

  Katherine met his eyes steadily and said with utter truthfulness, “When I met you, I had no past and no future.”

  “Tell me,” Dominic said, and there was a latent urgency in his voice that unsettled her.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me what you’re hiding.”

  She lowered her eyes. She could feel the fine prickle of perspiration. Tell him? she thought. The truth? The long, involved truth that had cost her so dear?

  CATHY WILLIAMS is Trinidadian and was brought up on the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was awarded a scholarship to study in Britain, and came to Exeter University in 1975 to continue her studies into the great loves of her life: languages and literature. It was there that Cathy met her husband, Richard. Since they married, Cathy has lived in England, originally in the Thames Valley but now in the Midlands. Cathy and Richard have three daughters.

  Books by Cathy Williams

  HARLEQUIN PRESENTS®

  2076—A NATURAL MOTHER

  2105—TO TAME A PROUD HEART

  2123—HIS SECRETARY BRIDE (2-in-1)

  Cathy Williams

  THE PRICE OF DECEIT

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  SUMMER had arrived. Katherine Lewis sat upright on the grass in Regent’s Park and felt with a sort of desperate anger the tentative rays of warmth hit her skin. The least the weather could have done on this day of all days was to oblige with grey skies and rain. For the past six glorious months it had rained constantly, a never-ending drizzle that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

  Everything, though, had a beginning and an end. It was the nature of things.

  She shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun and, in that passing moment, she seemed to see everything; she seemed to see her entire life flash in front of her eyes, every detail of it.

  Twenty years living at home with her mother in a cramped, unimaginative little terraced house in the middle of a cramped, unimaginative little terraced street in the heart of London, an existence of trying hard not to let the complaining and never-ending criticism wear her into the ground while she ploughed on with her studies and dreamed of the day when she would be free.

  Well, she had at last tasted her freedom, hadn’t she? It hadn’t come when her mother had died, all that time ago, quietly over a cup of tea in the small unattractive sitting-room, with the television on. No, that had just been release from a sort of slavery.

  Freedom had come only in the past six months.

  She closed her eyes briefly and remembered, as though it was yesterday, the first time she had laid eyes on Dominic Duvall. She had stepped into that crowded room, dressed in Emma’s daring clothes, with her hair in a daring style and her heart beating with terror at this new person which she had created for herself, and she had seen him standing across the room from her, tall, dark, commanding, one hand raised as he brought his glass to his lips, his other hand in his trouser pocket. Their eyes had met for a few seconds over the crowd and she had smiled and blushed and trembled in her skimpy outfit which had felt so peculiar because she had never worn anything like it in her life before.

  Afterwards, he had told her that it had been the sexiest smile that he had ever seen on a woman’s lips.

  She lay back on the grass with her hands clasped behind her head and stared up at the sky. It was a hard blue colour. No clouds. The sort of perfect summer day which seemed designed to remind the British public at large that there was more to the weather than rain and wind.

  Dominic would be here any minute.

  She had decided to come ahead of him because she had a vague idea that being able to watch him approach in the distance would give her the time she needed to get herself together and do what she had to do.

  She had also chosen the spot carefully, describing to him how to find her. Regent’s Park, for some reason, was the one place they had not visited, and she felt that she needed to talk to him somewhere that held no memories for her.

  Memories, she realised now, with a sadness that seemed to fill every pore of her body until it obliterated every other emotion, had no respect for time or place. She lay there frowning and trying to think how she would phrase what she had to say to him, and all she could think of was the way he made her feel.

  Every word he had uttered to her had been a revelation, every smile a new world opening, a world which she had never even known existed.

  As she walked on that tightrope which she had created for herself, he had reached out his hand, and for a while she could fly. The desperate game which had started out six months ago, a game which she knew had to be played before she lost the opportunity forever, had ended with more than she had ever bargained for.

  All those people, she thought, sitting up, who said that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, were fools.

  She squinted against the sun and saw him approaching in the distance and she felt that familiar wild leap of her senses.

  If someone had told her that one man could make colours seem brighter and music seem sweeter, could alter the whole tenor of her life, she would have laughed, but that was what he had done. It was as though her life had been played out in black and white and now everything was in Technicolor.

  He was dressed for work. Charcoal trousers, impeccably tailored, as were all his clothes, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and he was holding his jacket over one shoulder.

  He was a tall man, over six feet, and with the graceful, hard build of an athlete. The sort of man who walked into a crowded room and instantly became the centre of attention. He had much more than good looks, which were no more than an accident of chance. There was something compelling about the way he carried himself, his movements unwasted and graceful, and something mesmerising about the hard lines of his face with that black hair and sea-green eyes.

  In all the months they had gone out together, she had never really recovered from the wonder of knowing that he was attracted to her. Her!

  But, she thought now, he wasn’t, was he? He had never been attracted to her. He had been attracted to a vibrant, vivacious girl, a make-believe person who didn’t really exist.

  Katherine Lewis, she told herself with a resigned sigh, wasn’t vibrant or vivacious. She was ordinary, reserved, cautious. The persona she had borrowed for the past few months, for reasons which she could never explain to him, belonged to someone else, and now she had to give it back.

  She had tasted freedom, but freedom had its price and the piper had to be paid.

  As he approached her he smiled, and she saw the dark charm that could entice a response from a block of ice.

  ‘Katherine,’ he said, when he was still a little way away. ‘So we made it here at last.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Katherine saw the two girls who had been sunbathing a few yards away shield their eyes and covertly look at him from under their lashes. He always had that effect on the opposite sex.

  ‘I’m sorry if I dragged you away from something important,’ she said, by way of response, as he sprawled down next to her and tossed his jacket on the grass.

  She didn’t want to get too close to him. That would be fatal.

  ‘Are you?’ he asked lazily, turning to face her, and she tried not to succumb to t
he sexual warmth of his voice. ‘It seems a shame to be confined to an office building when the weather is like this.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ she said, nervously keeping her distance, ‘you can afford to indulge your desires to be outside, since the office building belongs to you.’

  She looked at his long brown fingers and remembered the way they had touched her that first time, slowly, gently, setting her alight, so that her whole body had burned with the thrill of sensations waking for the first time.

  He laughed. He had once told her that she was the most forthright person he had ever met.

  ‘Most people seem to undergo a personality change when they’re with anyone rich or powerful,’ he had said. ‘But you don’t.’

  What would he think of her if only he knew?

  ‘Fortunately,’ he agreed, slanting his eyes across to her.

  ‘And how is it going with the project?’ she asked, deciding to give herself a bit of time before she plunged into what she had to say. I love you, she told him silently in her head. I love you and I’m sorry.

  ‘You don’t really want to sit here and discuss work with me,’ he drawled, lying down beside her with his arm behind his head. With a swift movement, he reached out and pulled her down beside him, laughing under his breath at her gasp, then he draped his arm over her, so that she was lying with her head on his shoulder and his hand inches away from her breast.

  She felt a momentary panic and had to force herself to relax.

  ‘I can think,’ he murmured into her ear, ‘of a thousand things I’d rather be doing with you than discussing work. Or at least—’ he laughed, a low, amused sound that invited her to join in ‘—one. Why don’t we go back to my apartment with a couple of bottles of champagne and some smoked salmon and let the day go by?’

  ‘No, really, Dominic,’ she muttered hurriedly, struggling to sit up.

  She drew her knees up and clasped her arms around them, looking down at him. He had his eyes half closed, and his long, thick eyelashes flickered against his cheeks. There should have been something effeminate about him, but there wasn’t. In fact, his face was starkly masculine.

  How much you’ve given me, she thought; have I been selfish and cowardly? Or perhaps I have only been human.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, opening his eyes to look at her. ‘Really too nice to be cooped up anywhere, even in an apartment. How about a drive?’ There was a lazy glitter in his eyes that made the blood rush round her veins like a tidal flood. ‘We could get in my car and just keep driving until we see somewhere we want to stop. I rather like the thought of the seaside.’

  ‘Seasides here aren’t like the ones you know,’ Katherine told him, propping her chin on her knees. She knew that this aimless conversation wasn’t going to get her anywhere, that she ought to say what she had to say, but now that the moment of truth had arrived she was driven by a desperate need to prolong things, to take in as much of him as she could, while she still could.

  ‘The sea will probably be grey, the sand will be gritty and there’ll be thousands of people.’

  ‘Thank God you don’t work for a travel company,’ he said, and she smiled reluctantly.

  ‘I’ve never been to Scotland—’ you gave my life meaning, she thought. You made it all worthwhile. Have I taken too much? ‘—but I think the beaches up there are different. Wild and isolated.’ She had never actually been anywhere. Her father had walked out on them when she was five, and from that day on her mother had counted pennies, constantly reminding her daughter that they barely had enough to buy a new pair of shoes, never mind traipse away on holidays.

  ‘Sounds tempting.’ He sat up and cupped her face in his hand. ‘Let’s go to Scotland.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said, reddening. His cool fingers against her skin sent a jolt of alarm through her.

  ‘Wouldn’t they give you the time off work?’ he asked softly. ‘I’m sure I could persuade them. Or else I could just buy the company and give you the time off.’

  ‘No!’ She had made sure not to be specific about what she was doing in London. Emma, the friend whose flat she was sharing, had fabricated that little gem to Dominic, and Katherine had consequently found herself enmeshed in a lie which she had found increasingly difficult to untell.

  So many half-truths, so much shade between the light, but when you were soaring for the first time in your life it was so hard to face the crash of coming back down.

  ‘It’s nice now,’ she said weakly. ‘You know what the weather’s like over here. By the time we made it anywhere, the sun would have changed its mind about shining and it’d be raining.’

  ‘I’ll take you to my place in the Caribbean,’ he murmured. ‘When it rains over there, people breathe a sigh of relief because it’s good to get away from the heat.’

  ‘Dominic Duvall, you have too much money.’ Let me see you smile like that one last time, she thought, a smile that’s just for me. You’re the only person who did things just for me. Could you blame me for feeling special when I’ve never felt special in my life before?

  He was looking at her, his green eyes teasing. ‘Do I hear the tones of someone about to deliver a lecture?’ he asked, his voice a caress, and she looked away abruptly. ‘Tell me why I have too much money for my own good. No one’s ever told me that before.’ He trailed his finger along her arm and she shivered. ‘Least of all a woman.’

  ‘You don’t know what hardship is,’ Katherine said, ignoring her response to his feathery touch. ‘It’s like living in a bubble.’

  ‘That makes me sound irresponsible,’ he answered, smiling, ‘but don’t forget that my companies are responsible for the livelihoods of thousands of people.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said, and he sat up.

  ‘And, believe it or not, I do care about them.’

  ‘You don’t have to justify your lifestyle to me.’

  ‘Oh, but I do.’ He stared at her so intently that her head began to swim. ‘Not to anyone else—but you, yes.’

  She laughed uneasily, looking away. ‘It’s too hot to be discussing this.’

  ‘It’s something that has to be discussed. Would you find the sort of life I lead unbearable?’

  ‘What are you saying to me?’

  He didn’t answer. He fished into his jacket pocket and then held out a little box to her, and Katherine stared at it, dumbfounded and horrified.

  ‘Go on. Take it,’ he said roughly.

  She still had her arms around her knees, and her fingers were digging into her skin. How could she take that box? She had known, of course, that their relationship was becoming deeper—it was one of the reasons that she had known that the time had come to break it off—but this she hadn’t foreseen. She knew what was in that box. An unexploded bomb was in that box.

  She reached out for it and found that her hand was shaking. Perhaps it’s just a chain, she thought wildly, or a brooch, or something else harmless.

  He was looking at her, and she knew that he must be misreading her nerves as excitement.

  ‘I’m thirty-four years old,’ he said in a husky voice, ‘and I’ve never come close to doing this. Except now.’

  She still hadn’t opened the thing. She dropped her knees to sit cross-legged opposite him, and looked down at it in her hands. A warm breeze lifted her brown hair and blew it gently across her face. Forgive me, she thought, one day. She brushed her hair away from her face.

  Before, it seemed like a thousand years ago, in another life, she had always worn her hair tied back, pulled away from her face and coiled into the nape of her neck. When she had flown to London, running as fast as her legs would take her, away from the little Midlands town where she had lived and taught, ever since her mother had died, in a little cottage that seemed to satisfy everything and nothing, away from the catastrophe that had shattered her placid existence, the first thing she had done was to unpin her hair. She had been looking for something, an adventure, and adventures did not happen to women who tied thei
r hair at the back of their necks.

  ‘I’ve known a lot of women, Katherine,’ he said gravely, ‘and they’ve all been like ships that pass in the night.’

  ‘Surely not.’ She could hardly speak. Was there glass in her throat?

  ‘Women have always seen me as a good catch. Rich women, women looking for a man with the right-sized bank balance, who thought that if they agreed to everything I asked they could eventually get me to agree to putting that gold band around their finger. I enjoyed their company, but I was never tempted to settle down.’ He paused. ‘Open the box.’

  She opened it. There was a ring there, nestled on a bed of black velvet. A gold band with two diamonds entwined on the top. She stared at it, feeling sick, hating herself for what she had to do and hating Fate for giving her this glimpse of happiness which she knew could never be hers.

  ‘You’re different from the rest of them, Katherine Lewis. You’re genuine.’

  No! she wanted to shout at him. No, I’m not!

  ‘I can’t accept this, Dominic.’ I love you, she thought, and love has made me strong and made me weak at the same time. Will you ever understand that? No, of course you won’t. I can hardly understand it myself. It’s a new world and one with which I’m unfamiliar.

  ‘You think you need time? Is that it? I feel as though I’ve known you forever.’ He was frowning.

  ‘That’s not it.’ Her grey eyes were wide and miserable. ‘I just can’t, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t accept that,’ he told her, not taking the box, in fact not paying the slightest bit of attention to it whatsoever. ‘You must have known that I was falling in love with you.’

  In a perfect world, she thought. But she could hardly complete the thought, because it wasn’t a perfect world. In a perfect world there would be no tears and no regrets, no words to be uttered that were so hard that every syllable tore at your soul.