by Sandra Field
Naked as the day he was born, his heart like a cold lump in his chest, he strode into the bathroom. Blankly, his own face stared back at him from the mirror. He turned away from it. The vast living room was deserted. His cloak was gone from the table by the door.
Far beyond pride, he searched every surface in the suite for a note, and found nothing.
She’d gone. Without a trace.
Like a man stunned, Seth walked back into the bedroom and sank down on the bed. The trolley was still there, the leftover pastries looking nowhere near as appetizing as they had the night before. He remembered with aching clarity how she’d sunk her teeth into them, then licked cream from his chin, her lips a voluptuous curve… With an inarticulate groan, Seth lowered his head into his hands. How could he have been so stupid as to fall asleep? To let her escape?
He didn’t know the first thing about her. Not her name, or her occupation, not even what she looked like under that glamorous, all-concealing mask.
The mask she’d refused to remove.
He could scarcely fault her. She’d done exactly what she’d said she’d do—make love to him for one night and then vanish.
As though he’d meant nothing to her.
He dug his fingers into his forehead, forcing himself to recognize the single, dangerous mistake he’d made, out of pride and overweening arrogance. All evening and far into the night, he’d been convinced that he could change her mind. That sooner or later, she’d rip off her mask and tell him her name.
She hadn’t done either one. Instead she’d waited until he was asleep, then fled.
How dare she have left him as though what had happened between them was of no more consequence than a game of cards or a few drinks at a bar?
He got up, marched over to the windows and ripped back the curtains. Sunlight streamed through the panes, making him wince. Far on the horizon, the Eiffel Tower gleamed like a needle in the light.
It should have been raining. A sky dark with thunderclouds, wind scudding through the wet streets.
Sure, he thought, and with the smallest glimmer of humor knew he was being ridiculous. So she’d gone. So what? She was a woman. Just a woman. The world was full of them, and he’d never had the slightest trouble finding one to warm his bed.
But not one of them had ever touched him in the places he’d been touched last night. In his heart. His soul.
He’d never allowed them to. Never wanted them to. But from the moment he’d seen the woman in the turquoise bodysuit, he’d had no choice. In a way he didn’t understand—and bitterly resented—she’d pierced every one of his defenses.
And now she’d run away. Leaving him more alone than he’d ever been in his life.
CHAPTER FOUR
SETH hit his palm hard against the window frame, the sudden pain bringing him to his senses. He was going to shower and get dressed. Then he’d get on the phone and have her traced, his mysterious lover in the feathered mask.
She’d have left a trail. Everyone did.
He’d find her. Sooner or later, and he had the money to pay for sooner. Then he’d tell her exactly what he thought of her for sneaking off under cover of darkness, like a common thief.
His eyes suddenly widened, his hand gripping the window frame with vicious strength. Godalmighty, he thought. Protection. I didn’t use any. I never even thought of it.
He’d broken one of his cardinal rules.
How many times had they made love? Three? And not once had it occurred to him to get out the foil packets he kept in his suitcase.
She hadn’t mentioned protection, either. In a surge of relief he realized she must have been on the Pill. Most modern women were. Took it for granted.
But she hadn’t had a lover in three years. Why would she be on the Pill?
She was an intelligent woman, far too intelligent to get into a stranger’s bed without taking precautions against pregnancy.
He considered himself of more than average intelligence. But last night he’d been thinking with his hormones, not his brains. Why should she be any different?
Again he pounded his fist against the window, trying to stop the desperate seesawing of his thoughts. He’d just have to pray that she wasn’t pregnant. From the time he’d been old enough to think about it, he’d never had any intention of causing a child of his to enter the world. His parents had rid him of that particular desire many years before.
Along with so much else.
He wasn’t going to think about his parents. Not at—he glanced at the bedside clock—seven in the morning, when he’d had no more than four hours sleep. Decisively Seth marched into the bathroom, showered the last traces of the night from his body, and dressed in a pinstriped suit with a custom-made blue shirt and a silk tie. His Italian leather shoes, thanks to the hotel staff, gleamed like polished glass.
He was no longer in the garb of a highwayman. Although he still felt like one. Picking up the phone, Seth got to work.
Twenty minutes later, he’d covered all the angles. He’d talked to the concierge, the doorman and the manager, none of whom had been of the slightest use. He’d then contacted a professional investigator, ordering him to alert taxis, buses and the Métro; to phone every last place in the city that rented costumes; and to advertise very discreetly for anyone who’d seen a woman on the streets of Paris after 3:00 a.m. wearing a long black cloak over a turquoise butterfly costume.
Seth could have contacted all these sources himself. But he was too well known, and the last thing he wanted was the press getting hold of this. It was too private. Too personal. Too close to the bone.
He might be desperate to find her. But he couldn’t splash her image over every newspaper in Europe.
Putting down the phone, he scowled at the ormolu clock sitting sedately on the carved marble mantel. Now all he could do was wait. Wait and hope.
He left the suite and ran downstairs to the waiting limo. He was going to focus on the job at hand, he told himself forcefully as he hurried outside into the spring sunshine. Business as usual.
Some high-powered negotiations, followed by a meeting with his Paris staff, took up the whole day. Seth finally left the office at seven-thirty and walked to his favorite café on the Champs-Elysées, loosening his tie as he went. Snagging a table on the sidewalk, he ordered coquelet and crème brûlée, two of the house specialties. Then he took out his cell phone and punched in the investigator’s number.
Five minutes later, his face set, he put down the phone and took a big gulp of an excellent merlot. The investigator had located the shop that had rented the turquoise costume; but the woman who’d chosen it had been wearing dark glasses and an all-concealing floppy hat, and had given a false name and address.
This dead end had been accompanied by many others. No one, it seemed, had seen anyone in a long black cloak on foot, in a taxi, on a bus, on the Métro, at an airport or in a hotel. In terms of concrete information Seth had gained exactly nothing. Rien. Zero. Zilch.
His butterfly had disappeared from the face of the earth.
No, he thought slowly. He’d learned a little more than nothing. She’d disguised herself and given a false name when she’d rented the costume, which was well before she’d met Seth. Why had she done that?
She must in some way be famous. Her name so well known, at least locally, that she didn’t want her actions traced.
That really narrowed the field, Seth thought sarcastically. Now all he had to look for was a famous young woman who loved to eat French pastries at midnight and whose naked body he could have described in embarrassing detail.
Nothing to it.
One thing was sure. She wasn’t after his money.
Which differentiated her from most of the people he met.
A plate of thinly sliced rare meat decorated with julienned carrots and haricots was put in front of him, and his wineglass topped up. Blindly Seth stared at the food. His appetite had deserted him; a chunk of ice had congealed in his gut and his hands were as co
ld as if this were winter, not a warm spring evening.
What if he never saw her again?
Three weeks later, striding along Broad Street on his way to his broker, Seth suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. Two men cannoned into him; he muttered an apology and stepped to one side of the pavement.
That was her—wasn’t it?
A leggy blonde in a chocolate-brown Chanel suit had stepped out from between two of the massive Corinthian columns of the New York Stock Exchange. Something in the confidence with which she was looking up and down the street was irresistibly familiar. Then, as if she sensed him staring at her, she turned around.
Too tall. Too thin. The angle of her jaw all wrong.
She gave Seth the once-over with a calculation she didn’t bother to hide, and said with a smile that masterfully combined interest with hauteur, “Can I help you?”
“Thanks, no—I thought you were someone else,” Seth said.
“Have we met before?”
Oh, yeah, he thought, underneath that patrician glaze you’re definitely interested. “No. My apologies for bothering you,” he said, smiled at her with no particular sincerity and walked away.
He’d made a fool of himself. Again. How many times in the last twenty-one days had he seen a woman whom he’d been convinced was his butterfly lover? Who’d left his heart pounding in his chest and his body irradiated with hope?
The only place it hadn’t happened had been on a recent trip to the slums of Rio de Janeiro. He’d gone there as the new president, treasurer and, so far, sole member of the philanthropic foundation he was setting up, as a way of figuring out how best he could give away some of his money. He’d been too devastated by what he’d seen in Rio to be on the lookout for a woman of any age or shape.
Back home, the story was different: he’d been unable to forget that single, tumultuous night in Paris.
In the course of those few impassioned hours, had he fallen in love? Surely not! If, as a much younger man, he’d sworn off having children, he’d even more strongly vowed to avoid such romantic claptrap. Falling in love was for teenagers. Not for a man like himself with a family fortune and the driving ambition to quadruple that fortune.
To show his mother and father that he didn’t need their money? Or their love?
Allan, his ineffectual, unhappy father, and Eleonore, his mother, with her cold will of steel: Seth felt equally distant from both of them.
Eleonore wanted Seth married to a woman of her choice, someone who would present no threat to her authority. His butterfly lover wouldn’t do, for sure. Too beautiful, too sexy, too intelligent and much too strong-willed.
Not that Seth wanted to get married. He never had.
He wasn’t in love. He was in lust. A very different thing. Instead of mooning after the unattainable, he should start dating again. Find himself a sophisticated blonde who’d demand nothing more of him than he was willing to give.
Like the woman by the stock exchange?
She was the last woman he wanted.
Fuming inwardly, Seth took the granite steps of his broker’s building two at a time and for the next hour and a half focused his mind on the risks of commodities and the vagaries of currency exchanges. Then he went home to his brownstone near Central Park, and stripped off his work clothes. He hauled on shorts and a tank top, lacing his sneakers with vicious strength.
Enough, he thought, as he stepped on his treadmill and adjusted the slope. He wasn’t going to let a snip of a woman ruin his life. So she’d vanished. Good riddance to her. If she’d gotten under his skin this much in one night, imagine what she’d have done if he’d continued seeing her. He was well rid of her.
He was going to get his life back on track and forget about her. If by any chance he ever saw her again, he’d run like hell in the opposite direction.
Not that he would see her. She’d made sure of that.
Holding fast to his anger, because he liked it a whole lot better than the agonies of regret he’d been suffering ever since that night in a Paris hotel, Seth turned up the speed on the treadmill and started to jog. He was indeed back on track, he thought with a grim smile.
With the past where it belonged. In the past.
And the woman of mystery where she belonged. Out of his life.
Locking her fingers in her lap to control their trembling, Lia stared at the thin blue line. It was the second time in as many days that she’d used the pregnancy test, and it was the second time it had turned out positive.
The first time, she’d convinced herself it was a false positive. She couldn’t be pregnant. She just couldn’t be.
But this evening she could no longer muster such certitude. The evidence was staring her in the face.
She was carrying Seth’s baby.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, joy flooded her. She would bear the child of a man who’d brought her felicity beyond her imagining, and who’d aroused in her a passion she hadn’t known she possessed. Hugging her belly in instinctive protection, she grinned at the opposite wall, her dark eyes luminous with happiness.
She was going to be a mother.
Then, with a jolt, the hard voice of reason asserted itself. Lia’s smile vanished. She was seven weeks pregnant by a man she’d vowed never to see again.
Unable to sit still any longer, Lia walked over to one of the two small windows in her bachelor flat. This one looked out on the iron balconies of the neighboring apartment block; the afternoon sun shone hot on the bricks. She was pregnant with Seth Talbot’s child. Seth, who ran a host of international companies from his headquarters a mere thirty blocks from here, and who was listed in Fortune magazine as one of the richest men in America.
Well done, Lia.
In two days she was flying to New Zealand to take part in a festival of young musicians. In a wave of panic Lia felt the tidy rows of bricks blur in front of her eyes. How could she fit a baby into her life? She couldn’t. It was impossible. She had concerts booked as far ahead as three years from now; and her career was taking off in a way that both exhilarated and challenged her. She couldn’t abandon it for motherhood.
Abortion?
Everything in her cried out in repudiation. Seth’s child? She’d never be able to live with herself. Besides, she was responsible for this baby’s existence: Seth hadn’t forced himself on her. She’d gone willingly to his bed and now was paying the consequences.
Seth was also responsible.
So what was she supposed to do? Phone him up at work and say, “Remember me? The woman you had torrid sex with in Paris? Guess what, I’m pregnant.”
She couldn’t imagine doing that. Wouldn’t he assume she was trying to trick him into marriage? He was a very rich man, and it was one of the oldest gambits in the book.
Oh God, she thought in despair, what was she going to do?
Go to the doctor. Find out for sure she was pregnant. Then she’d have the long flight to Auckland to sit quietly and consider her options.
She’d been right to worry, when she’d first met Seth, that he could derail her life.
He had. By making her pregnant.
Two weeks later, Lia sealed two identical letters, one addressed to Seth at his Manhattan headquarters, the other to an address in the Hamptons that she’d found on the Internet. The Hamptons boasted beachside homes for the extremely rich; she could only assume it was his retreat from the city. She was almost sure he must have a Manhattan address; but he would, of course, guard it from general knowledge. She, of all people, understood the value of personal privacy.
The decision she’d come to over the last few days was that she owed Seth the truth about her pregnancy: for pregnant she was, the doctor having merely confirmed something she’d already known.
Yet she dreaded him getting the letters. She couldn’t bear to tarnish that magical night in Paris with accusations that she’d neglected to warn him she was unprotected against pregnancy; or, worse, with suspicions that she’d planned the whole thing to entrap him
into marriage.
Whatever his reaction would be, she was sure of two things: it would be forceful and it would be disruptive. The owner of a company as far-reaching as Talbot Holdings hadn’t gotten there by being nice. Lia got up from her desk, carrying the letters, took the stairwell to street level and pushed open the door. The July heat hit her like a blow, and for a moment she wavered, attacked by the dizziness that so far was her only symptom; she had, to her enormous relief, avoided morning sickness.
With a sense of putting herself in the hands of fate, Lia pushed away from the wall, walked two blocks and thrust the letters through the slot in the mailbox. There. She’d done it. The rest was up to Seth.
CHAPTER FIVE
LIA lay back on the chaise longue. Over her head, palm trees rattled their fronds in the warm Caribbean tradewinds, while a torrent of bougainvillea spangled her with shadows. On the blindingly white beach only a few feet from her private cottage, waves splashed gently up and down. Another kind of music, she thought idly. One she didn’t have to work for.
Heaven. Utter heaven. How often did she lie back and do absolutely nothing?
Never was the short answer.
She’d get up soon and shower, put on her jazzy new sun-dress and wander to the least formal of the three restaurants that the resort boasted. Tomorrow afternoon, after a morning snorkeling on the reef, she had an appointment at the spa.
So what if the few days she was spending here were straining her budget to the breaking point? She’d gotten off-season rates, and only once a year did she treat herself to time spent entirely on her own.
She’d been here just over seven hours, and already she felt like a new woman. Just wait until tomorrow, she thought. A massage, a pineapple scrub and a dip in the thalassotherapy pool. Whatever that was.
She was quite willing to find out.
Lazily she got up from her chair and wandered toward her charming, air-conditioned cottage, which was nestled in a miniature botanical garden where brightly hued butterflies lit on the blooms, opening and closing their wings as they feasted on nectar. Lia stood on the stone walk, watching them for a moment. So careless, so hungry for the world’s sweetness…once she’d been like that. But she’d changed in the last eight years.