A Seductive Revenge

by Kim Lawrence

  ‘What shares would those be?’

  ‘What shares?’ Alec shook his head disbelievingly. ‘The man says what shares!’ he repeated to Flora.

  ‘I heard you the first time, Alec.’

  ‘I’ve made a small fortune!’ his agent enthused. ‘I could retire, not that I’m going to,’ he added hastily.

  ‘I’m relieved,’ Josh responded drily. ‘And happy for you.’

  ‘Why,’ Flora wondered out loud, ‘would you take Josh’s advice about shares?’

  Alec looked from Flora to Josh. ‘She’s joking…right? She does know…?’

  ‘Know what? Do you dabble…?’ She broke off as Alec broke down laughing like a drain. ‘Why do I get the feeling I’m missing something here?’ she appealed with growing impatience to her husband.

  ‘When Jake and I were eighteen we inherited some money from our grandmother about the same time we were given a project in school which involved investing—on paper—a given amount of money on the stock exchange to see if we could make a profit.’ He shrugged and laid down his brush. ‘I did make a profit, only I did it for real with gran’s inheritance.’

  ‘That was reckless,’ she murmured. But not entirely unexpected, she thought wryly, having come to know her husband’s reckless streak. Though he was more the mother hen upon occasion with her than the bold reckless pirate he reminded her of.

  ‘That’s what my mother said, amongst other things, when she found out. The outcome of that first foray was that I discovered early on that I had a knack for making a bit of money,’ he explained diffidently.

  How much? she wondered as she watched Josh frown repressively at his agent, who seemed to find his last offhand statement incredibly amusing.

  ‘Being a card-carrying member of the financial establishment must have hurt your credibility as the rebel artist with attitude.’

  Josh grinned at this side swipe. ‘On the plus side it meant I didn’t have to dance to the tune of money-grubbing philistines like Alec here—nothing personal, mate.’

  ‘Today, my friend, you can do no wrong,’ Alec assured him sunnily.

  ‘You’re rich, aren’t you…?’ Suddenly she understood the fact he hadn’t shared her concern about the extortionate price label attached to their lovely new home. He could obviously afford to be blasé. ‘I mean really rich.’

  ‘It’s all relative, but I suppose I am,’ he conceded, wiping an oily smear from his hand with a cloth.

  Flora’s eyebrows arched. ‘And it didn’t occur to you to mention this before we got married?’

  ‘I was having a hard enough time getting you to the altar as it was,’ he reminded her candidly. ‘I didn’t want to risk you having moral qualms about being hitched to a dirty capitalist. Besides, it doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  Alec, a very literal soul who had missed all the subtle interplay, began to bear the worried look of a man who was witnessing serious marital discord. ‘He gives loads of stuff away, Flora,’ he piped up anxiously. ‘That new ward at the children’s hospice… The research…’

  ‘Shut up, Alec!’ Josh snapped.

  ‘Yes, shut up, Alec,’ Flora mimicked, her warm glance still resting on her husband’s flushed face. ‘Can’t you see you’re embarrassing Joshua?’

  Alec gave a relieved sigh. ‘She doesn’t mind, then.’

  ‘No,’ Flora agreed softly, ‘she doesn’t mind. Besides, like the man said, it doesn’t really matter.’ Her glowing blue eyes were transmitting an unambiguous message of love as she gazed over at the tall man she’d married. ‘We’ve got our priorities straight,’ she explained.

  ‘I love you!’ Josh, much to his agent’s acute discomfort, breathed fervently.

  Flora smiled contentedly as a warm glow enveloped her. ‘If you two gentlemen will excuse me…I thought I might have a nap before Liam gets back from Oliver’s. What time are the Smiths bringing him back?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, you just rest. I’ll deal with Liam.’

  Flora stifled a yawn. ‘Maybe I’ll let you. You know, there are compensations for having a husband who works from home.’

  ‘Even if I am always under your feet?’

  She appeared to consider the question. ‘On balance,’ she conceded grudgingly. ‘I think I quite like having you around.’

  Josh looked in and found Flora still asleep after he’d bathed Liam later that evening. He decided to put the little boy to bed without disturbing her. Several stories later—he’d resorted to simple and effective bribery when the toddler had taken some convincing he couldn’t go and climb into bed with Flora—Josh closed the door quietly on the sleeping cherub.

  Anxious not to disturb his wife, he cautiously opened their bedroom door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ He looked with a confused frown when he discovered her kneeling on the bedroom floor with her upper body resting on the rumpled bed.

  Flora paused in her panting to cast him a withering look; her face was blotchily red and sweaty. ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Oh, God!’ Josh went completely still. ‘You’re not…you can’t be!’

  ‘Want to bet…?’

  Josh’s white, bloodless lips moved, but nothing emerged. The aghast silence lengthened as no coherent words formed in his frozen brain.

  The almost feral sound that emerged from Flora’s lips jolted him from his catatonic trance.

  ‘Ambulance…’ he gasped. ‘I’ll ring, or shall I drive…?’ He thrust his shaking hands into his trouser pockets and hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. ‘And the Smiths will come over for Liam. Don’t go anywhere!’

  Flora found a cold spot on the bed cover and pressed her cheek into it as a merciful gap occurred in what seemed to be one long, unremitting contraction. What had happened to slow and gradual…?

  ‘I’m not going anywhere and neither are you…please, Josh! I’ve already called the ambulance, but I’m pretty certain that they won’t get here in time.’ Being a relative novice at this sort of thing, she might be wrong—only she wasn’t taking any chances. If Josh wanted to get out he’d have to step over her to do so.

  Josh shook his head. ‘That can’t be right,’ he babbled, raking a shaky, distracted hand through his dark hair. ‘First labours are long, everyone says so…’

  ‘Try telling that to this baby! Oh!’ She gasped, turning a pain-distorted face towards him. ‘It’s started again… Josh!’ she pleaded, stretching a fluttering hand towards him. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  At the sight of her pain-racked little face he grabbed his own gut-freezing fears unceremoniously by the scruff and put them firmly to the back of his mind. Flora needed him, and, inadequate though he felt to the task, he was going to help her through this any way he could.

  ‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ he crooned, getting down on his knees beside her. He brushed the damp hair from her eyes. ‘I’m here.’

  The small hand that slid inside his tightened as she turned to rest her head against his chest. ‘I woke up,’ she said, ‘and it was just happening. I rang the ambulance, I didn’t want to worry you too soon…’

  Josh’s expression tightened. ‘You can forget about tiptoeing around my feelings, angel, I’m fine. Just think about what you’re doing.’

  Right at that moment her body was telling her exactly what she had to do and she couldn’t have ignored the instructions if she’d wanted to. ‘You know how I said I didn’t know what to do…?’

  Josh nodded.

  ‘I do now! I’ve got to pushhh…!’ She groaned.

  Somehow Josh managed to get her back onto the bed. The sweat was pouring down his face, but not from the effort of lifting her.

  Although he’d always known what the end result was meant to be, he’d been too caught up in his recurring nightmare, the one when he lost Flora, to be prepared for the emotional and physical impact of the warm slippery body of their new daughter when she landed in his hands.

  Tears mingled with the other moisture on his face
as he placed the stridently complaining baby on her mother’s chest.

  ‘She’s absolutely perfect!’ he breathed incredulously.

  Then all his attention and concern returned anxiously to the new mother who was quietly sobbing. He placed his hands palm flat on either side of her face and moved them very gently, slowly downwards until they came to rest on her slender shoulders as if to convince himself she was still there.

  ‘You’re all right!’ he breathed wonderingly.

  ‘Better than that,’ she replied, tearing her eyes from the small dark-haired bundle in her arms. ‘Much better. You look better too,’ she added. The moment was made more perfect because she knew that the last barrier to their happiness had been lifted…she watched him realise it too. Two perfect moments in one day!

  ‘I feel…’ He flexed his shoulders and rolled his neck. At a loss to describe the feeling of a planet-sized burden being lifted. ‘I want to laugh like an idiot.’

  ‘Go ahead!’ she advised jubilantly. ‘You did it!’ she told him, triumph shining in her teary eyes. ‘I knew you could.’

  ‘From where I was standing it looked to me like you did it.’

  ‘We did it, I knew we could,’ she purred complacently. It was amazingly easy to dismiss a fraught few minutes back there when she’d thought she couldn’t! Poor Josh, she’d told him so in no uncertain terms.

  ‘We can do anything together! Though next time,’ Josh modified, ‘I’d prefer not to do this much everything…’

  ‘Next time!’ she mocked, grinning at the expression of amazement that spread over his face when he realised what he’d said.

  ‘I didn’t mean that’s up to…’

  ‘I know what you meant, idiot…what’s that?’

  ‘The ambulance crew, I expect.’

  ‘Then you’d better go let them in before they break down the door, or wake Liam.’ Hers eyes widened. ‘What will he say when he wakes up in the morning and finds he’s got a little sister?’

  ‘He won’t wake up to find a little sister because his little sister and his mother will be safely tucked up in a hospital bed.’ His ‘this isn’t negotiable’ glare stilled the protest on her lips. ‘Do this for me, Flora. I want you to have a proper check-over.’

  She nodded. It wasn’t much of a concession to make when you thought about the enormous one he’d made. ‘About her name,’ she called out as he went to leave the room. ‘I thought Emily for my mother. Emily Bridget has a nice ring, I think… Do you…?’ She gave him a tentative half-smile.

  Tears glittered in Josh’s eyes. ‘The day I followed you turned out to be the luckiest day of my life!’ he announced authoritatively, his deep voice throbbing with conviction.

  ‘Mine too, baby,’ she crooned softly to their daughter. ‘You don’t know it yet, but you’ve got the best daddy in the entire world.’ And I have the best man, she thought as she sat back to enjoy a brief, blissful moment of quality time with her new daughter.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-0284-9

  A SEDUCTIVE REVENGE

  First North American Publication 2001.

  Copyright © 2000 by Kim Lawrence.

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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