by Penny Jordan
‘Let me see it.’
Obligingly she raised the hem of the bathsheet, holding her breath as she waited for Paul’s reaction. For some obscure reason it had become overwhelmingly important that she win the confidence of this withdrawn, too thin and pale child. Perhaps it was an innate fellow-feeling that told her that he had been fibbed to and fobbed off too often to accept platitudes any longer, and for the first time since her accident she actually didn’t mind someone seeing the unpleasant scars.
Even when Paul’s small stubby fingers touched the ridged and puckered skin she didn’t flinch.
‘I was knocked down by a car—how did you get yours?’ she asked conversationally.
‘He was in a car accident—with his mother,’ drawled a mocking familiar voice from the doorway.
Shock jolted through Amber as she saw Joel’s lean frame propped up against the door, the brief terry towelling robe he was wearing doing nothing to conceal the potent masculinity of his body. As though it were a magnet it drew Amber’s fevered gaze, hot pulses beating insistently through her veins in mute reaction to the sensuality of the lean-muscled male body. What was happening to her? She had never felt like this with Rob. Was it something to do with the fact that she now knew that there would be no lover, no fulfilment for her? Was that what was making her so intensely aware of Joel Sinclair; a stranger?
‘Oh, don’t look like that,’ Joel drawled, totally misunderstanding the reason for her shocked expression. ‘She got off completely unscathed. You ought to be asleep,’ he told his son, walking across to the bed, which depressed under his weight.
‘I heard him crying,’ Amber explained the reason for her presence.
‘And like the compassionate motherly creature that you are you came to investigate.’
‘Her name’s Amber,’ Paul told his father, suddenly joining in the conversation. ‘And her leg is like mine.’
Over his head golden eyes met grey, and Amber knew that in some part she had been right, unbelievable though it seemed, and that Joel Sinclair had made her that offer of a temporary marriage because of his son’s damaged leg.
‘Are you going to stay with us?’ he demanded suddenly of Amber, adding to Joel, ‘I like her, Daddy—make her stay. I don’t want her to go away like Mummy did.’ Tears filled his eyes, and Amber’s tender heart was wrung with pity. Why wasn’t this child with his mother, wherever she was? It was obvious from what Joel had said that he wasn’t a widower, so where was his wife? Obviously she couldn’t ask in front of Paul.
‘I won’t, Paul,’ Joel assured him softly. ‘Amber is going to come and live with us for a while.’
‘Will she be my new mummy?’
The air was fraught with sudden tension. Amber could feel it in the sudden tensing of Joel’s body, the watchful expression in his eyes.
‘We’ll see, Paul. Now try to go back to sleep.’
‘I want Amber to kiss me first,’ Paul protested, turning towards her.
Amber’s own eyes were damp as she leaned down to kiss the soft childish skin. Paul put his arms round her neck, hugging her fiercely, and it was Joel who released the small clinging fingers and switched off the bedside light.
‘Perhaps I ought to stay with him until he falls asleep,’ Amber suggested in a soft whisper. There was a chair beside the bed, and she would be quite happy to sit in it until Paul drifted off.
‘If you’re sure you don’t mind? I didn’t get back until the early hours.’
It was very peaceful, listening to the gradually deepening sounds of Paul’s breathing, going over what she had just learned. Poor Paul! The accident must have been a traumatic experience for him; doubly so because his mother had been with him at the time. And what of her? How she must have suffered, Amber reflected, especially if she had been driving. She must ask Joel how seriously damaged Paul’s leg was. Slowly her own eyes started to close, and when dawn finally tinged the sky Amber herself was too deeply asleep to see it.
The warm male fingers on her shoulder felt vaguely familiar. Submerged in dreams, she murmured Rob’s name, rubbing her face against the male hand, a slight smile curving the soft warmth of her mouth.
‘Darling…’ The word left her lips of a faint sigh, her eyes opening, golden with happiness and love, trust in the shyly provocative manner in which she raised her face for Rob’s kiss.
Only there was no Rob any longer, but the knowledge came too late to stop the swift downward descent of a dark male head, predatory lips capturing the softness of her own in a kiss that tingled warmly right through her body to her toes, bringing it fully alive for the first time in months.
Joel’s hands gripped the slenderness of her body beneath her arms, and hauled her effortlessly out of the chair.
‘Well, well!’
Fully awake, Amber saw the dangerous glitter in the grey eyes she had previously thought of as cold. Now they were hot, burning with an anger that threatened to destroy everything in its path.
‘And just who is Rob?’
‘He was my fiancé.’ When she had told him about her accident and her mother’s remarriage, Amber had omitted to mention Rob and their now defunct engagement.
‘Rob?’ The razor-sharp word warned her that she was treading treacherous ground.
‘We were engaged,’ she told him. ‘He’s a doctor, but he wants to specialise, and specialists can’t afford invalid wives.’
‘So he ditched you?’ he asked crisply.
Stung, Amber retorted, ‘What makes you think that?’
‘If he hadn’t, you wouldn’t be dreaming about him the way you were. Don’t ever mistake me for another man again, Amber, and just to make sure you won’t…’
She could feel the palms of his hands resting against the gentle swell of her breasts and her heart started to thunder in panic, but there was no avoiding those punishing lips, bent on exacting revenge for her mistake, and teaching her that he was most definitely not Rob. Rob had never kissed her like this, with a cool skill that demanded contempt, but which instead brought from her trembling lips a response that astounded her in its intensity. She tried to pull away, and felt her bathsheet begin to slip, her face crimsoning as she realised that Joel was gazing with frank enjoyment as the swelling femininity of her breasts.
‘I take it there’s no chance of a reconciliation with this Rob?’ he questioned softly as Amber secured her towel.
She shook her head.
‘No, and even if there was I wouldn’t want one.’
‘You’re after bigger game now, is that it? A struggling physician is no longer your beau ideal?’
In his bed Paul stirred, and Joel frowned. ‘I came to tell you it’s nearly eight. Let Paul sleep on this morning. I want to talk to you before I leave for Kendal.’
‘I’ll be downstairs in half an hour,’ she promised curtly.
In her own room, dressing in the same clothes she had worn the previous day she tried not to remember how she had felt when Joel kissed her. Since Rob had left her she had been driven by one ambition and one only: to recover her old mobility and then confront him with all that he had thrown away when he had turned his back on her love because she was no longer the whole, unharmed girl she had been before this accident.
This compulsion had been the only thing that had kept her going; the only reason she had even considered Joel Sinclair’s outrageous suggestion, and yet now she was experiencing another emotion—compassion for Paul, a child who was obviously suffering as much as she was herself. poor little boy. Why wasn’t his mother with him?
Perhaps if she stopped dawdling in her room and went down for breakfast she might find out, she told herself briskly. In the bright morning light her clothes looked dowdy and dull, and just for a moment she regretted the new, pretty things she had bought for the holiday she and Rob had planned, but that moment was swiftly banished, and the fierce light of battle entered her eyes as she remembered how Joel Sinclair had looked at her and kissed her. She wanted the twenty-five thousand pounds he was offering her b
adly enough to accept his proposition, but she fully intended to make it absolutely clear to him that their marriage would be a business arrangement only, a big step along the road to achieving her ultimate goal; although he was not to know that. The way in which she intended to spend the money he paid her was nothing to do with Joel Sinclair.
She found him in a large, beautifully modernised kitchen with dark oak units and a mellow tiled floor. To Amber’s amazement he was standing by a hob frying bacon, the rich aroma filling the room. Nearby coffee percolated, and the table had been set for breakfast, with grapefruit in two bowls and cereal in the third.
‘What’s the matter?’ Joel enquired in amusement when she came to an abrupt halt just inside the door. ‘Surprised to discover I know how to fend for myself? It’s one of the first rules of survival, although I admit I’m no Cordon Bleu. Besides, a father bringing up a child alone needs to know at least the rudiments of running a home. I’m fortunate in having Mrs Downs, but in the eyes of divorce judges, housekeepers aren’t particularly adequate substitutes for mothers, which is why I need to furnish myself with a wife—albeit on a temporary basis. Hungry?’ he asked, indicating the pan of sizzling bacon and reaching across for some large brown eggs. On the point of shaking her head, Amber suddenly changed her mind. She had had next to nothing to eat yesterday, or for several days come to that, and the bacon did smell tantalisingly appetising.
‘A little,’ she admitted, surprised that she had lowered her guard for long enough to make the admission. ‘Shall I wake Paul?’
‘No, let him sleep. It will be easier for us to talk without him here. You can see what a dangerously vulnerable emotional state he’s in—a result of a combination of things; his accident and losing his mother mainly.’
It was significant that Joel put Paul’s accident first, Amber thought. He was too hard a man to fully appreciate the effect losing his mother would have on a small child—or to admit perhaps that he might himself be in some way to blame for Paul’s vulnerability.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘He seems to have similar injuries to mine.’
‘Which is one of the reasons I put the proposal I did to you.’
‘I guessed,’ Amber supplied wryly. ‘Have the doctors given you any indication as to how bad it will be?’
Joel shrugged. ‘They’re reluctant to commit themselves at this stage—understandably. Paul’s case is complicated by the fact that at the same time as he received his injuries he underwent severe emotional trauma. I’ve already said that he was with his mother at the time. What I didn’t tell you—couldn’t tell you while he was there—was that she was on her way to see her lover and intended to leave Paul with her friend for the afternoon. They say those most closely involved are always the last to know—a cliché, but true in my case. I had no idea. Oh, I knew there was something, Teri had made that much perfectly plain—I even suspected there were… diversions, but not that one of them was serious enough to make her put her child’s life at risk so that she could be with her lover. He was an American working on the North Sea oilrigs whom she met while he was on holiday here. As the son of a Texan oil millionaire he had a super-abundance of the quality that appeals most to Teri in men—money—a trait she apparently shares with you,’ he added cynically. ‘Which is one of the reasons I decided to put my suggestion to you. A woman who can be bought for a few paltry thousand pounds isn’t going to allow emotion to cloud issues at a later stage. This marriage is most definitely only of a temporary nature—I didn’t want someone who might get the wrong idea and want to make things permanent.’
There was no reason why his words should be like a douche of icy water, and certainly in the circumstances Amber had no right to feel mortally affronted both by his cynical observation and being classed with Paul’s mother, and yet for some obscure reason she did.
‘Where is Paul’s mother now?’ she asked curiously, recoiling a little from the heaped plate of bacon and eggs he put in front of her.
‘Eat it while it’s hot,’ he admonished, putting another plate on the table and pulling up a chair to sit down opposite her. ‘Paul’s mother? As far as I know she’s living in bliss and the lap of luxury as Mrs Hal Bryden the Fourth, somewhere in the good ole U.S. of A.’
‘She divorced you?’
Joel shook his head, his eyes hardening to a flinty grey. ‘I divorced her—not because she was unfaithful—I’m not naïve enough to think he was the first. No, I divorced her because of Paul. She’d risked his life once for her own pleasure, I wasn’t about to let it happen again. I asked for custody and got it—now she’s contesting the judge’s decision, claiming that although at the time of the divorce she wasn’t able to offer Paul a stable family background, now that she has remarried she’s more able to claim full custody. My solicitor believes she has grounds for a good and plausible case, and because I can’t afford to take any more risks with Paul’s life, I’m determined not to give her the slightest opportunity of changing the judge’s decision; and that means being able to provide him with as much of a family background as she can—a father and a mother!’
‘But you said you only wanted to be married for six months?’ Amber protested.
‘The longer I have sole custody of Paul without any problems the less likely a judge is to reverse his decision. I know Teri; patience was never her strong suit. Within six months she’ll be ready to admit defeat.’
‘And Paul?’ Amber asked, suddenly angry on the little boy’s behalf. ‘Has anyone consulted him? Has he been asked whether or not he wants to stay with you?’
‘No,’ Joel told her evenly, ‘and for the simple reason that ever since the accident he has never once—until last night—mentioned his mother. In point of fact he didn’t see much of her before the divorce. Teri spent a good deal of time in the States with her family, and she always refused to take Paul, claiming that he was too young to travel. Too young to travel, but not too young to send away to school, or so she was trying to persuade me. Oh, I’m not trying to put all the blame on her. I was equally neglectful,’ Joel admitted. ‘My business takes me away a good deal, and weeks would go by with me only seeing Paul for the odd half hour when he was in bed. It took the accident to show me what was happening; how I was missing out on my son’s formative years, depriving him of the love and affection which as my son he had a right to expect from me. In time, with care and a stable background, he should outgrow the trauma of what happened—he was trapped in the back of the car when it crashed. Tori always drove far too fast. She left him alone when she ran back to the telephone kiosk she’d passed to ring her lover and warn him not to expect her, and the poor kid must have thought she’d deserted him for good. He was hysterical by the time the doctor got to him, and in trying to pull himself free had worsened the injury to his leg.’
Amber was appalled, sickened by the crass selfishness of Paul’s mother. How could any mother desert her child at a moment like that?
‘The doctors believe that once the emotional scars start to heal his leg will respond better to treatment, but another emotional upheaval like being suddenly forced to go and live with Teri could set him back years.’
Amber could well understand Joel’s dilemma.
‘I’m hoping to persuade an aunt of mine, who at present lives in Australia to make her home with us and act as a surrogate mother to Paul, someone he can come to rely on and trust. He never trusted Teri; she was too changeable, her moods too violent for him to know where he was with her. She never wanted a child; Paul’s conception was a mistake. In more ways than one,’ he added under his breath. ‘Once she knows I’ve remarried, Teri will do everything she can to try and get the court to revoke their decision in her favour, and for that reason, to the outside world at least, our marriage must be seen to be completely normal. Her husband is an extremely rich man; rich enough for Teri to be able to hire private detectives to spy on us in public. Inside this house, when we’re alone, we can live as strangers, but to the rest of the world you must be a
girl I’ve fallen deeply in love with and who loves me in return. You will share my bedroom and my bed.’ He saw Amber’s expression and raised a mocking eyebrow. ‘Something wrong?’
Amber forced herself to meet his glance squarely, reminding herself how desperately she needed his money.
‘Our marriage will be strictly a business arrangement?’
‘By which I take it that you mean no sex?’ Joel countered coolly. ‘But of course. I thought I’d made that plain; even if you were Venus herself you’d be perfectly safe. Mercenary women have no appeal for me—in fact I find them a complete turn-off; and your charms…’ His eyes flicked cruelly over her too thin body and misshapen leg before returning to her paper-white face, ‘such as they are, are not sufficient to change my mind. In public we will be newly married lovers; but there’s no likelihood of me forgetting that it’s just a charade. Want to back out?’
The words which would free her from his taunting presence hovered on her lips, but before she could utter them two pictures flashed through her mind. The first, surprisingly, was of Paul, small and vulnerable as he watched her with wary eyes; and the second was of Rob, embarrassed and uncomfortable as he left her hospital bedside for the last time. Together they were powerful enough to bridle her tongue, and taking her silence as a denial, Joel continued smoothly, ‘Very well. There’s no point in delaying unnecessarily. I’ll organise a special licence—it will make our marriage appear all the more romantic; there’s something recklessly foolhardy about a man who marries with all the haste implied by a special licence, don’t you agree?’ Without waiting for her reply he added, ‘Oh, there’s just one more small detail. Before we do marry I should like you to sign a document I’ll have drawn up acknowledging the temporary nature of our marriage and the fact that you’re being paid to serve in the capacity of my wife for a brief period. A form of insurance for me just in case you get any silly ideas.’
‘You flatter yourself,’ Amber gritted at him. ‘Hasn’t losing one wife to another man taught you anything about the opposite sex?’