Dangerous Attraction

by Melinda Cross

  His mouth moved in a half-smile. ‘And you didn’t run like a rabbit? Most women would, confronted with the prospect of being alone up here with the infamous Marcus Flint.’

  Her lips made a line. Of course she hadn’t run like a frightened rabbit. Then again, she wasn’t actually alone with him either. Besides, whatever staff he employed at the house, Victor would be arriving tomorrow.

  He looked away from her, off toward the mountains, and Rebecca studied his profile, searching for the evil Charity Lauder had thought was so visible in his face. Certainly the potential for violence was there. She could see it in the bold, stubborn thrust of his chin, the jut of a strong nose, the sharp delineation between jaw and throat—

  He jerked his head back toward her and caught her staring. ‘Looking for horns and a forked tail?’

  It was so close to what she’d been thinking that she caught her breath. ‘Maybe.’

  For some reason that made him laugh, but the sound was mirthless. He surprised her by extending his hand in a belated and now oddly out-of-place welcome. She looked down at it, confused. You weren’t actually supposed to shake hands with people like Marcus Flint, were you? Wasn’t there some obscure rule in the book of etiquette that said you didn’t have to shake hands with cads and scoundrels?

  He was looking right at her, challenging her with his eyes. After what seemed like a very long moment, he dropped his hand. ‘A perfect beginning,’ he said drily, turning and starting toward the house. ‘Come on. I’ll help you with your bags.’

  Rebecca blinked and took a breath, then followed in his wake through the tall dried grass. She was scowling as she walked, trying to sort out her emotions. She felt guilty for denying Flint the common courtesy of a handshake, and that was just plain ridiculous. She wasn’t here-to establish friendly relations with the man—they both knew that—so why start with a hypocritical pretense of cordiality? Besides, it was his fault she was here in the first place. He’d forced the issue, forced her to come on this dreadful trip. If he expected her to be friendly in those circumstances, he had another think coming.

  She scowled even harder as she followed him up the front steps to a broad porch, wondering why all that logic hadn’t banished the guilt that boiled down to a simple aversion to hurting someone’s feelings. Anyone’s feelings. She’d been on the receiving end of that kind of treatment too many times to be able to hand it out herself without some misgivings.

  He hadn’t spoken a word on the walk back to the house, and now he simply opened the front door and stood aside while she walked past him.

  The brick mansion’s gloomy exterior had left her totally unprepared for what lay on the other side of that door. Rebecca took one step inside, then stopped, her breath caught in her throat.

  The foyer was enormous, every bit as large as Rebecca’s entire house, with a maple floor that gleamed in a strange golden light. Looking for the source, her eyes followed the cathedral arch of carved beams that rose to meet at a stained-glass skylight three storeys above her head.

  On her right, past a pair of ornately carved wooden doors, a grand staircase rose gracefully up a curved wall. She thought instantly of ballgowns and tiaras and champagne bubbling in a fluted glass.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ Marcus Flint’s voice rumbled from behind her.

  She shook her head wordlessly and took a few steps into the entryway, her eyes busy with the exquisite artistry of filigreed woodwork and the muted colors of impressionist wall-covering.

  Her tennis shoes squeaked, and she looked down at the intricacy of the parquet pattern beneath her feet, thinking it would be a perfect surface for dancing. It was an odd thought for a woman who had never once moved to music in a man’s arms.

  She barely blinked as she followed him up the broad staircase, her left hand trailing over the smooth, warm wood of the curved banister. Halfway up she stopped and looked over the rail, feeling like the proverbial country mouse thrust unexpectedly into a world of wealth beyond her imagining.

  She was at eye level with a dazzling crystal chandelier suspended over the foyer’s center. The light from above danced magically in the facets, and she wondered if those hundreds of crystal teardrops wouldmake music in a breeze.

  ‘Mesmerizing, isn’t it?’

  She blinked to break the chandelier’s spell and gazed up at Marcus Flint, watching her from the top of the stairs. A bank of mullioned windows behind him captured the intense blue of an autumn sky and brought it inside. ‘It’s beautiful. Everything in this house is incredibly beautiful.’

  His dark brows seemed to lift slightly, but that might have been a trick of the distance. ‘The last woman who visited this house thought this kind of extravagance was pointless out here where no one can see it.’

  ‘Beauty isn’t ever an extravagance,’ she said a little crisply, wondering why most people thought beauty was only justified by a large audience. Her stepmother had been like that, serving the family from plastic plates and dingy flatware while the best china and crystal remained hidden away in a hutch, waiting for company, waiting for someone to impress.

  One of Rebecca’s first purchases when she’d moved out on her own had been a single Waterford goblet she’d used every day in those early lean years. It was ludicrously out of place in that shabby one-room walkup over the laundry, but to Rebecca it had been a single shining spot of beauty that transcended its environment.

  She sighed quietly, feeling an affinity with the person who had built this house so many years ago, who had created all this beauty in the middle of the wilderness. That person would have understood her single Waterford glass.

  Marcus was still looking down at her, and eventually she felt his gaze bearing down as heavily as the train case in her right hand. She looked once more at the chandelier, then climbed the rest of the stairs.

  The second floor hall ran perpendicular to the central hall downstairs, and was almost as wide. Small furniture groupings dotted its length, as if a traveler down this corridor would need to pause and rest occasionally on the journey. Plush, mint-green carpet cushioned their steps as Marcus turned left at the top of the stairs and led her to the first of two doors. ‘Mr Madden will be right down the hall when he arrives…’ He cocked his head in a question.

  ‘Tomorrow morning. He missed today’s flight.’

  ‘I see.’ He opened the door and led her into an oversized room with misty floral wallpaper and thick carpet the color of moss. The spread on a huge fourposter repeated the delicate floral pattern on the walls, and Rebecca felt as if she was stepping into a springtime meadow.

  After placing her suitcase on a quilt chest at the foot of the bed, he gestured toward a white brick fireplace on the opposite wall, flanked by two love-seats covered in a dusty rose corduroy. ‘I’ve laid a fire for later, if you want it. You won’t need it for heat, of course. The furnace runs all night at this time of year.’ He frowned and looked around, then began a brusque, businesslike tour. ‘The bath and the dressing-room are through that door, and I think you’ll find the closet space adequate, if those are your only bags.’

  He walked to the sheer draperies and pushed them aside, exposing French doors. ‘The balcony,’ he said perfunctorily, never commenting on the spectacular view. Rebecca caught a glimpse of vibrant colors walking up a mountainside before he let the drapes fall closed.

  He looked around again, frowning, as if he was trying to remember something. ‘I think you’ll find everything you need. If not.’

  ‘I’ll just ring the front desk.’

  He blinked at her, confused, and in that moment he looked so suddenly vulnerable, so very unlike the person Marcus Flint was supposed to be, that she smiled without thinking. ‘Sorry. It’s just that you sounded like a hotel bellboy.’

  A tight smile tugged at one side of his mouth, and then disappeared instantly. ‘We’ll have supper in an hour. I imagine you’d like to rest until then.’

  ‘Not really.’ Rebecca set the train case on a small dresser with an ov
al mirror. ‘I’ll just splash some water on my face, and then I’d love a whiskey, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all. When you’re ready, I’ll be in the living-room—down the stairs and then left.’

  The moment the door closed behind him, Rebecca turned in a slow circle and examined the room, her face softening at the Degas print over the chest of drawers, the needlepoint pillows on the rose love-seats, the dried flowers in a vase on the side of the hearth—woman’s touches, all, and strangely incongruous in the home of a man Charity Lauder claimed had no regard at all for the gender.

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror—snug jeans, a wind-ruffled cap of blonde, and the boyish suede jacket—and thought she looked like a young tomboy caught in the feminine elegance of an older sister’s room. In deference to her surroundings, she removed the jacket and hung it in the closet. The plain white pullover she wore beneath was neither feminine nor elegant, but it was a step up from the battered suede.

  He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when she started to come down a few moments later, her face rosy with a recent scrubbing, her short hair damp and tucked behind her ears. He watched as she scampered down the graceful arch of the grand staircase, her tennis shoes squeaking on the polished wood. Halfway down she slowed, like a child remembering a parent’s admonishment not to run in the house. Her first image of ballgowns and diamond tiaras descending this very staircase stuck in her mind, and she suddenly felt foolish and out of her element. His expression didn’t help. There was something about the way he was looking at her that made her feel terribly young and naive, and that particular sensation was totally unfamiliar. Her stepsisters had always called her ‘the little old lady’, and that was the way she had always seen herself.

  ‘The sun’s warming the front porch,’ he said simply, opening the door for her.

  They sat side by side on primitive redwood chairs and drank whiskey from crystal tumblers that made rainbows on their hands. The setting seemed more appropriate for the quiet companionship of old friends than the initial conversation of adversaries, and that made it awkward for Rebecca. What did she say now? Thank you for the beautiful room and the drink, Mr Flint, and, incidentally, are you really as much of a bastard as Charity Lauder says you are?

  ‘Is that chair uncomfortable?’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘The chair’s fine. It’s the situation that’s uncomfortable.’

  ‘The situation?’

  ‘You’re treating me like a house guest, Mr Flint, and in the circumstances it just doesn’t seem right. I should simply listen to what you have to say and then leave.’

  He nodded politely. ‘I see. I should have refused to give you a drink. Made you sleep in your car.’

  She jerked her head to look at him, and found him smiling.

  ‘Really, Miss Hutchinson, I understand your concern, but not staying here would have been very impractical. We’re two hours from the nearest hotel, and your producer did promise to give me a fair shake. We agreed that meant getting to know me a little and forming your own opinions—not just listening to my side of the story.’

  Rebecca sighed and looked away over the hills. ‘I know that. It’s still awkward.’

  ‘You’re a writer, Miss Hutchinson. Use your imagination. Just pretend we’re guests at the same hotel or something—at least until Mr Madden arrives.’

  ‘Forget everything I already know about you?’

  His eyes darkened, and his voice was quiet. ‘You don’t know a damn thing about me, Miss Hutchinson.’

  Rebecca blinked, a little taken aback by the underlying anger in his tone. She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t read the book, of course; she couldn’t simply erase Charity Lauder’s accusations from her mind…but maybe she could pretend that she was pretending…‘When did you buy this place?’ she asked him.

  He sipped from his glass, then propped it on a jean-clad knee, his eyes fixed on the hills rising on the other side of the meadow. ‘Five years ago—no, almost six. On my twenty-fifth birthday, in fact.’

  ‘Did you know the previous owners?’

  ‘Hardly. He’d been dead for over twenty-five years. I bought it from a corporation that had been using it as a tax write-off. A string of managers lived in the house and kept up routine maintenance, but its only real owner was the man who built it at the turn of the century.’

  ‘He must have been extraordinary,’ she murmured, and Marcus Flint chuckled over the rim of his glass.

  ‘The locals claim he was actually quite mad.’ He drained his glass and let his eyes course over the virgin landscape. ‘You think this place is isolated now? In those days it was almost another planet, a two-day journey by horse and buggy to the nearest neighbor. Apparently he used every penny of a very sizeable inheritance to build this enormous, dreary house, and then lived here absolutely alone until the day he died.’

  Rebecca sighed quietly. How could he call this beautiful house dreary? And how could he think that the man who had conceived and created such a wondrous thing was mad? She turned to look at him and saw that the lowering sun had turned his face bronze and painted gold tips on the ends of his black hair. ‘And yet here you are, doing essentially the same thing he did,’ she pointed out. ‘The book said you gave up everything to buy this place. A seat on the New York exchange, all your blue-chip stocks, a Park Avenue penthouse…’

  ‘I managed to hang on. to a few things,’ he said cryptically, draining his glass without looking at her. ‘And the rest…I didn’t care about. It was just means to an end, and this place is it. This was my dream.’

  She frowned, puzzled. ‘An “enormous, dreary house” was your dream?’ she quoted him, and he chuckled.

  ‘It’s just beginning to live up to its potential, but it’s taken years to get it to this point. You should have seen it the day I moved in. Tiny, dark rooms, layers of cheap paint on all the woodwork, the old staircase was so steep and narrow, Johnny said I’d need a chair-lift.’

  A shadow crossed his face at the mention of his dead partner’s name, and he hesitated for a moment. ‘Anyway, he wanted to raze it to the ground and I wanted to remodel—so I sold my penthouse and bought out his share of the house, and started to work.’

  My God, Rebecca thought numbly, he’s responsible for this beautiful house? This is the man I thought could understand my Waterford glass? A man so without honor that he would try to seduce his own partner’s fiancée and then…

  She frowned hard, trying to connect the beauty of this house with the ugliness of the terrible deeds in Charity Lauder’s book. It wasn’t possible, was it, for one man to create both?

  Marcus took a decanter from the table next to his chair and reached over to fill her glass. She watched the whiskey rise against the wall of crystal, suddenly wishing that she hadn’t read the book that was weighing her down with prejudgements.

  He splashed a generous portion into his own glass, took a long drink, then looked off across the meadow again, where the sun was. dipping ever closer to the tops of the red maples on the hill. She liked watching him, she realized. It was like watching a photograph, waiting for it to move.

  ‘It’s quite a view, isn’t it?’ he murmured.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed. ‘Does the isolation ever bother you?’

  His brow lowered a fraction. ‘Some people isolate themselves in the middle of a city…’ She winced a little at a description that hit close to home. ‘I just happen to like the scenery here better. Besides, starting in February, it’s very busy here. The crews come in, the bunkhouse is full, the calls of men tapping the maples in the woods fill the valley…that goes on for weeks, and by the time it’s over the quiet is a nice change.’ He turned his head abruptly to look at her. ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘In a small house on the beach, just north of L.A.’ She paused and smiled a little. ‘A very small house compared to this place, but the walls facing the ocean are mostly glass, so it feels big.’

  For some
reason that made him smile. ‘The Pacific Ocean,’ he mused. ‘The glorious compensation for everything bad about living in Los Angeles.’

  She nodded silently, reflecting on the view from her front windows. They faced a confluence of eight-lane freeways weighted down by smog, and a seemingly endless gridwork of closely packed houses flowing toward the horizon. But the back of the house looked out on the vast, rolling emptiness of the Pacific, soothing the eye and easing the spirit, somehow making that other view tolerable.

  ‘Did you always live on the beach?’

  ‘Oh, my, no,’ she said, thinking that it wasn’t so hard to do what he’d suggested: to pretend for a moment that they were simply two people who had just met; two people who knew absolutely nothing about each other. This was precisely the kind of conversation people like that would have. ‘For years I lived in a dreadful one-room walkup over a laundry.’ She shook her head, remembering the struggle to survive during those hard years before her writing started to sell, working at the laundry downstairs during the day, trying to write at night with the dryer vents spewing hot air beneath her only window…She frowned, cutting the memories short. ‘I leased the house three years ago, after I sold my first screenplay.’

  ‘And before the laundry? Where did you live then?’ She hesitated, wondering how such seemingly harmless conversation had come to wander down that particular dark road. Suddenly talking to Marcus Flint had become too easy, too intrusive. ‘At home. With my stepmother and stepsisters.’

  He turned his head to look at her again. ‘Is this a Cinderella story?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ she said sharply, turning away.

  His brows lifted slightly at her reaction, but he made no comment. For a time they both sat without speaking, watching the sun burnish the distant treetops, sipping quietly at their drinks.

  ‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ he said finally.

  Rebecca fidgeted with her glass, wondering how to respond. He hadn’t been prying, really; the natural turns in casual conversation usually found their way to the subject of families. Which was one of the reasons why she’d been avoiding casual conversations for years.