Mistress on His Terms Page 9

  She heard the rustle of fabric, the sound of him moving around the room, the faint creak of the armoire doors being pulled open. Moments later, the mellow tones of a clarinet seducing the night fused with the musical clink of crystal.

  “How about a glass of wine?” he suggested. “I don’t have any champagne chilling, but I’ve got just about anything else, including a very respectable sparkling burgundy.”

  She turned to find him watching her intently and, despite the music, the room all at once seemed filled with a taut, waiting silence that left her feeling inexplicably uneasy. That he’d shed his jacket, pulled his bow tie loose and undone the top button of his dress shirt, didn’t help. It served as too vivid a reminder of how casually he’d climbed out of his clothes that night in the motel, and had her wondering, irrationally, if he was planning a repeat performance now.

  Swallowing to relieve her dry mouth, she said, “I’d just as soon get straight down to business, if you don’t mind.”

  For the first time since she’d known him, he looked thoroughly disconcerted. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he took a turn across the room and back again, then swung to a stop in front of her. “I like a woman who knows what she wants, Lily, make no mistake about that,” he finally said, “but I confess I’m not keen on one who’s in such a hurry to get to the main event that she can’t be bothered with a little foreplay, even if it’s only the social kind.”

  She stared at him, stunned. “I don’t think I heard you correctly. Did you say foreplay?”

  “I did.” He closed the distance between them and hooked a finger under the shoulder strap of her gown. “What would you like to call it?”

  “I…I…!” Realizing her mouth was hanging open, she snapped it closed and blinked. “I didn’t realize straightforward communication required any sort of…preliminaries!”

  “You prefer to hoist up your skirt and just get on with it, do you?” He stroked the side of her neck lightly. “No lingering over the finer points of seduction?”

  If she’d confounded him moments earlier, his reply reduced her to utter bewilderment now. “Are you drunk?” she asked nervously, edging away from him and wishing suddenly that she’d insisted they remain in the garden.

  He tracked her movement with eyes far too clear and observant for him to latch on to that as an excuse for his bizarre behavior. Nor did he try. “I’m beginning to wish I was,” he replied, barring her way with one arm braced against the wall. “Exactly what is it you want of me, Lily?”

  “What I’ve always wanted from the first—information about my birth. What did you think I wanted?” Then, seeing the disbelief on his face dissolve into ironic amusement, which he tried to hide by shielding his mouth with his other hand, the disjointed parts of their conversation over the last half hour came together in an interpretation entirely different from the one she’d originally understood. “Oh, my stars, you thought I wanted you?”

  He looked at her from hooded eyes. “The thought did cross my mind, particularly in light of the way you came on to me.”

  “Came on—? I did no such thing!”

  “I think I can be forgiven for believing otherwise.” His voice dropped to a mocking whisper. “I was hoping we could slip away from here, Sebastian…anywhere, as long we’re alone and won’t be disturbed….”

  “I was referring to our not being overheard by anyone else.”

  “Well, the next time, don’t preface the remark by rubbing up against a man until he’s ready to explode. And you can wipe that appalled expression off your face. It’s a bit late in the day for a woman your age to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “I didn’t! I had no idea…!” She stopped, and bit her lip, ashamed. Hadn’t she entertained the suspicion, however briefly, that when they were dancing, he was enjoying having her in his arms? “A lot of people like dancing close. It has more to do with…with style, than sex.”

  He let out an exclamation of disgust and strode to the armoire. In seconds, the music came to an end and one of the doors slammed shut. Reaching inside the other, he pulled out a bottle of brandy and splashed an inch into a cut-glass snifter. “Just as a matter of interest, what made you think I’d break down tonight and give you information I’ve repeatedly refused to divulge every other time you’ve brought up the subject?”

  “Natalie promised she’d talk to you this afternoon, and try to convince you to change your mind. So, when you suggested we leave the party, I naturally assumed she’d succeeded since it obviously isn’t something either of us would discuss in front of other people.”

  He regarded her over the rim of his glass and took a sip of the brandy.

  Dismayed by his silence, she tugged nervously at the shoulder strap he’d dislodged. “She didn’t get in touch with you, did she?”

  “She did not, although she tried several times. I just never got around to returning her calls.” His mouth tightened in annoyance. “Not that it would have mattered, anyway, because I’ve already made it very clear I won’t tell you what you want to know, and you had no right asking my sister to intercede on your behalf.”

  “Perhaps,” she said testily, “it’s time I made a few things clear to you, the first being that I won’t allow you to go on dictating my actions. I didn’t come here to be given the runaround, and I’m frankly tired of being told to butt out of something which, by any sane person’s definition, is most definitely my business. I resent your attitude. I’m not the bad guy here, Sebastian.”

  “Nor is Hugo.”

  “Perhaps not. But if you continue holding to your code of silence, you leave me no choice but to go to him again, and this time I’ll insist he answer all my questions, even though I know the fact that he more or less abandoned me as a baby is painful for him to relive.”

  “And if he refuses to accommodate you?”

  “I’ll be out of here within the hour and none of you will ever see or hear from me again.”

  She was bluffing, of course, and felt sure he knew it. Blood ties, however tenuous, were not so easily severed, and she could no more walk out of Hugo and Natalie’s lives than she could forget her own name.

  Surprisingly, though, Sebastian appeared to take her at her word. “That would kill him.”

  “It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.”

  He swirled the contents of his glass meditatively, then pinned her in one of his famous legal-eagle stares. “Okay, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you what you want to know, if you’ll answer a question for me, first.”

  “Ask away,” she said, dismissing the tremor of unease that spiraled through her as nothing more than anticipation at finally achieving her goal. “I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

  “If you believe that, you’re in for a nasty surprise.”

  He sounded almost sorry for her, but she wasn’t about to be sidetracked by cheap displays of concern at this point. “Get on with it, Sebastian. What’s your question?”

  “Have you never asked yourself why your mother chose to keep you in the dark about events surrounding your birth? Did it ever occur to you that the reason might be that she didn’t want you to know?”

  “That’s two questions, but I won’t quibble over trifles since the answer in both cases is, no. Mom and I were very close. There was nothing we couldn’t share. I think she was simply waiting for the right time to confide in me.”

  “You’re twenty-six years old, Lily. I doubt there was ever going to be a right time.”

  “You didn’t know my mother.”

  “And you’re quite sure you did?”

  “Positive.”

  He paced to the window and stared out. “What would you say if I told you she was an adulteress who had an affair with her obstetrician and left your father before you were born so that she could be with her lover?”

  Another tremor, stronger than the first, shook Lily but she stood her ground. “I’d say you were lying. My mother would never do such a thing.”


  Still with his back toward her, he said, “I’m telling you the truth. Genevieve Preston ran away with her doctor— Neil Talbot, the man you thought was your father—and left behind a husband who adored her. She stole his child, she humiliated him before the entire town, she broke his heart. And if that wasn’t enough, she asked him not to pursue his right to know you after you were born.”

  “I don’t believe you! No man worth his salt would agree to such a demand.”

  “Hugo did, because he was too proud to beg, and because he sincerely believed you’d be better off not being torn between parents who lived at opposite ends of the country.”

  “He didn’t have to agree to that. He could have insisted on his rights.”

  “He could have ruined Neil Talbot. Do you know what happens to doctors who abuse their positions of authority and trust? They’re stripped of their right to practice medicine. Left without the means to earn a decent living. Disgraced in the eyes of society. If I, as a lawyer, were to behave as your adoptive father did, I’d be disbarred. And I can promise you, if ever I were treated as Hugo was, I’d destroy the man who stole my wife and child, not let him leave me the laughingstock of the area. He’d live to regret messing around with what’s mine.”

  “Because you’re arrogant and vindictive!” she cried, her insides churning. “And if Hugo really did as you’re suggesting, and made no attempt to enforce his paternal rights, he was weak and undeserving!”

  In two strides Sebastian was at her side. His eyes were cold, his fingers around her upper arm iron-hard. “He was the best thing that ever happened to Genevieve Talbot! Before she married him, she was nothing. Nothing, do you hear? Trailer trash! Slinging hamburgers in a truck stop by day, and hanging around bars at night, offering God only knows what in exchange for the price of a drink.”

  Lily’s bid to laugh in his face emerged as high-pitched and devoid of amusement as a crow’s dying screech. “Now I know you’re lying, because if she was all those things, how did she ever meet such a fine, upstanding pillar of the community as Hugo Preston?”

  “A police officer friend of his talked him into representing her when she filed assault charges against one of her barfly associates. Seems that even battered and bruised, she made a beautiful victim. Even though Hugo was twice her age, he fell head over heels in love and married her. It’s a familiar enough story—wealthy, sophisticated older man rescues helpless young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, and gives her a better life. But instead of repaying him with loyalty, she dumped him two years later for her young stud of a doctor.” He tossed back the rest of his drink and swiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Once a slut, always a slut, I guess.”

  Lily had never hit anyone in her life; never been hit, either, come to that. Her mother couldn’t abide violence in any form. But at Sebastian’s last remark, she lifted her hand and landed it flat across his cheek in a stinging slap. The noise cracked the night like a rifle shot.

  He didn’t flinch. Showed no reaction at all, in fact. He merely continued to hold her glance and said quietly, “That won’t change the truth, Lily.”

  “It has to,” she quavered, clinging desperately to beliefs suddenly and shockingly undermined by facts that made a hideous kind of sense. “You’re mistaken. It was never like that.”

  “It was exactly like that. But you don’t have to take my word. There’s plenty of other evidence. The letter she left behind when she ran away, the others she wrote when she wanted Hugo to agree to a divorce and give his permission for Talbot to legally adopt you. It’s all there in black-and-white, with her name signed at the bottom.”

  “No! You’re protecting Hugo. The truth is, he didn’t want to be bothered with a child at his age, and that’s why my mother left him.”

  But she was grasping at straws, and even if she hadn’t been willing to admit it, Sebastian wasted no time setting her straight. “If that was the case, why, when he married my mother four years later, did he not take steps to prevent Natalie’s being conceived? And why, for pity’s sake, did he take on a stepson who, at twelve, showed every sign of being a royal pain in the rear as a teenager?”

  She twisted her face away, beset by the conclusions crowding her mind. Little things she’d taken for granted as part and parcel of her mother’s personality suddenly took on new and painful significance. Genevieve had never touched a drop of liquor; had detested overindulgence in others. She’d volunteered her time at a shelter for battered women. She’d insisted on Lily’s attending college because she herself had never finished high school and the lack of formal education had cost her dearly when she was young. She’d displayed a compulsive need to better herself, taking one night class course after another until she’d accumulated enough postsecondary credits to earn a degree in fine arts.

  “Well?” Sebastian continued regarding her patiently. “Why did Hugo take on another man’s family, Lily?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, turning aside her face to hide her brimming eyes, “and I don’t care. I just want to know why he didn’t fight to keep me.”

  Sebastian cupped her cheek and forced her to look at him. “He made a mistake. He let hurt pride dictate his actions and by the time he came to his senses, you thought Neil Talbot was your father. He loved you enough then to give you up, and he loves you enough now not to want to tarnish your memories of your mother by telling you how things really stood.”

  “My mother!” she wept bitterly, the truth sweeping over her in huge, unforgiving waves. “Genevieve Talbot, the elegant, gracious doctor’s wife. The accomplished hostess. The morally upright citizen whose whole life was built on a lie. And I believed every word that came out of her mouth. How that must have amused her!”

  Hearing the rising hysteria in her voice, he put his arms around her and drew her firmly to him, even though she tried to fight him off. “Don’t,” he murmured, his hands stroking in long, strong, comforting sweeps up and down her spine. “Don’t beat yourself up like this. You were the innocent victim caught in the middle. None of this is your fault.”

  “No,” she sobbed, beside herself, “it’s yours. Oh, I hate you, Sebastian Caine, for what you’ve taken away from me tonight!”

  “I hate myself,” he said grimly. “I wish to God I’d kept quiet about what I know. Lily, honey, please don’t cry like this. You’ll make yourself ill.”

  “I don’t care!” She lifted her tear-ravaged face to his. “Do you know how empty I feel inside? How ugly?”

  “You’re not ugly,” he insisted, holding her face in his hands. His voice dropped a notch, took on a husky edge that rendered it almost tender. “You’re beautiful and desirable and…!”

  And then he was kissing her, his mouth coming down on hers as masterfully as though, by the sheer force of his will, he thought he could undo all the pain he’d brought to her. Kissing her with a dedication and passion so fierce that it kindled a tiny flame in the cold, empty wasteland that seemed to fill her.

  She felt his hand at her throat, at her shoulder. Touched her fingertips to his chest and found the rapid, uneven thunder of his heartbeat. Saw, just before her own fell closed, the smoldering heat in his eyes. And the flame grew; flickered and strengthened into a blazing torch radiating through her blood to chase away the chilling horror of the last few minutes.

  As quickly as they’d surfaced, all the ghastly details he’d disclosed shriveled in its heat and left behind a rapacious need to belong. To be possessed and cherished as if she were the only woman of any consequence left on earth. She wanted to be loved, honestly and without reservation or secrets, if not forever, then at least for a little while.

  Her hands roamed the starched front of his shirt, searched out the pearl studs holding it closed, and tugged them loose with feverish impatience.

  He caught her fingers in his, crushed them gently to his bare chest. “This isn’t a good time to give in to impulse. Neither of us is thinking straight.”

  “I don’t want to t
hink. I want to feel…to heal.” She kissed his throat softly and finished on a sigh, “Help me to do that, Sebastian.”

  “Be careful you don’t start something you’re not prepared to finish,” he muttered, then floundered into a groan when, undaunted, she dipped her head and circled the tiny bud of his left nipple with her tongue.

  “Make love to me,” she begged against his skin.

  His breath caught in a harsh, agonized rasp. “You didn’t want that earlier.”

  “I want it now,” she told him, bisecting the line of dark hair arrowing into the waist of his trousers with the tip of her fingernail.

  “It won’t make the truth about the past any less ugly.”

  “This isn’t about the past, it’s about the here and now. About me—” she skimmed her fingers over his flat, hard belly; toyed with the straining fabric of his fly “—and you.”

  “Li…ly…!” Her name hovered on the labored whisper of a man fighting a hopeless battle against overwhelming odds.

  She swirled her tongue in the hollow of his throat. Massaged the heel of her hand against the rigid contours he couldn’t hope to disguise. Let her palm define the shape of him. Felt the life force pulsing urgently for release beneath her fingertips.

  He shuddered. Groaned again. Attempted to hold her away.

  Whimpering with need, she clawed at her dress, freeing it from her shoulders and letting it glide in a silken whisper to her waist. She wore no bra underneath; no camisole. Nothing but a tan line dividing decency from forbidden pleasures.

  His gaze seared her nakedness and she knew, from the sudden flood of color darkening his face, that she’d won. Dipping his head, he kissed her ear and whispered, in language erotically explicit, how he was going to love her and make her forget. And then, he proceeded to show her.

  He cupped her bare breasts and took their aching peaks in his mouth, drawing so deeply at their core that she felt her soul slip away. He trailed his tongue in a slow, tormenting path down her cleavage to dally with her navel, then toured back, circuitously and at excruciating leisure, to her mouth.