Vengeful Seduction (Mills & Boon Vintage 90s Modern)

by Williams Cathy

  Oh, God, she thought desperately, will I ever be free? Lorenzo was still the man who held her dreams in the palm of his hand. She could see herself in twenty years’ time and she could imagine the whispers of people around her, saying to each other, She was so beautiful once. Why didn’t she ever remarry? She’ll never catch a man now, of course! Far too old.

  There was a knock on the door and she looked up, startled. If I don’t watch it, she thought grimly, I shall find myself becoming one of those awful women who live in a world of self-pity and can’t see beyond their own miseries.

  It was Jessica. That startled Isobel even more. Not once had the other woman ventured up to her bedroom.

  ‘I wanted to have a word with you alone,’ Jessica said, looking around her with mild curiosity. She was the sort of woman to whom even the Seven Wonders of the World would afford only mild curiosity. She stood in the centre of the room and folded her arms. ‘I wanted to tell you that I’ve been sacked.’ Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Politely told that my accounting services are no longer required.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Please,’ she drawled, ‘spare me the wide-eyed innocence. We’re both women of the world. When I first came here I decided that I wouldn’t see you as a threat. Why should I? Sure, you have those looks, but types like you are a dime a dozen. All beauty and no brains. Look at you, stuck in this godforsaken place beyond the back of civilisation! Not the sort to appeal to the Lorenzo I knew.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ Isobel asked in a tight voice.

  ‘Because I just want to warn you that you haven’t won, even though you may think that you have.’ Jessica was looking positively malicious. A little feline smile played on her well-painted lips.

  ‘We really ought to be going downstairs,’ Isobel decided.

  ‘Not until I’ve said what I came to say. I wasted four years on that man. No one, but no one, takes Jessica Tate for a ride!’

  The vehemence in the voice stunned Isobel back into silence. She could believe that no one had ever taken the great Jessica Tate for a ride. She looked the sort who monopolised taking other people for rides.

  ‘It’s hardly my fault that——‘

  ‘It damn well is! I don’t know what happened between the two of you years ago, but whatever it was, he still wants you.’ She spat that out with venom.

  Wanted, Isobel thought disjointedly.

  ‘But I haven’t invested my time in that man for nothing!’ She made it sound like a business venture that had gone wrong. Isobel could imagine her making up a list of the pros and cons of getting involved with him, working out whether he was worth the time and effort.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Isobel said coldly, not feeling in theleast sorry, ‘if you fell in love with Lorenzo——‘

  ‘Fell in love with him?’ She laughed acidly. ‘I’m not some fifteen-year-old teenager, my dear! He’s sexy, though, I’ll admit that, but most of all he was a good catch. I suppose you thought that your ship had come in when you discovered that he was going to be in town?’

  ‘Quite the opposite.’

  ‘You British!’ she said scathingly. ‘Well, your ship may have docked but it’s not going to remain too long in port. I’ll make damn sure of that.’ She smiled again, hugging something to herself, and Isobel looked at her uneasily.

  With anyone else she would have admitted that she and Lorenzo had nothing, that any reluctant feeling he had had for her had now been extinguished, but she kept quiet.

  But, throughout the evening, her eyes kept flitting back worriedly to Jessica’s over-bright face, the over-wide smile.

  She announced over dinner in a casual voice that she would be leaving within the week.

  ‘No offence, but I’d be stifled here,’ she said in that bursting-with-confidence tone of voice which implied that her departure would leave the community bereft, but what could she do?

  Then she proceeded to launch into a monologue on what a valuable asset she was to the world of business.

  Isobel remained silent, on edge, barely looking at Lorenzo, who appeared to have switched off from the conversation, wondering when she could make an exit.

  She had never thought that hearing him speak to her in those neutral tones, seeing him look at her in that expressionless, courteous way, could have made her heart constrict, but it did. The past was now buried, and his manner towards her now spoke of sublime indifference.

  She bleakly switched off from her surroundings too, listening to the thoughts whirling around in her head, while Jessica, who seemed to be burning with inextinguishable sparks of energy, talked about the opportunities waiting for her back in Chicago.

  She had made a fool of herself, Isobel thought. Or at least she believed so, in rushing out here at Lorenzo’s beckoning, and now she was extricating herself as efficiently as she could, so that she could think later that she had been lucky, that she had had a narrow escape.

  ‘Of course, I shall pull strings to make sure that you get a good job,’ Lorenzo said when there was a break in the conversation, and Jessica threw him a deadly smile.

  ‘That won’t be necessary. I have quite a few valuable contacts of my own.’

  He shrugged, and a flash of rage crossed the hard, tight-lipped face.

  This was getting distinctly uncomfortable. Isobel stood up, ready to take her leave and extricate herself from the thick, highly-charged atmosphere, but Jessica looked at her with a small smile of pleasure, and said tightly, ‘Oh, before you go, Isobel.’ It was the first time she had called her by her name, Isobel realised. ‘There are just a few little things I feel you ought to see.’ She walked across the room and picked up her briefcase which had been lying on the chair by the door.

  Isobel hadn’t even noticed it.

  ‘What little things?’

  ‘Oh, a few bits and pieces to do with your father’s company. I know no deal has been formalised, but I had some spare time last week and I thought I’d mosey along and see what the company accounts looked like. I told them that the deal was more or less wrapped up and of course they believed me. Wonderful, these little hick towns.’

  Lorenzo threw her a furious look but she was beyond the reach of his fury now.

  ‘What the hell do you mean by this?’ he asked, standing up so that even Jessica cringed back involuntarily. ‘Does the word “unethical” mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not always,’ she said languidly, bored.

  ‘You had no right,’ Isobel said, white-faced, and Jessica laughed.

  ‘Admittedly not,’ she said unapologetically, ‘but I was curious to see why Lorenzo wanted the company so badly. I wanted to see what hidden reserves there were. If it had been big enough, and if your deal had fallen through, well, let’s just say I knew a certain fish that might have wanted the bait, and I knew that you would be in a desperate position with no other buyer in the field.’ She was still smiling with a chilling lack of humour. ‘And it was certainly an interesting forage, I can tell you!’

  She clicked open the briefcase and, after a while, Isobel sat back down. She didn’t like the expression of triumph on the other woman’s face. It frightened her. Was it really so quiet in the room or was it her imagination? She could hear the sound of the wind outside, and inside the shuffling of the papers on Jessica’s lap.

  There was a tension about Lorenzo as well. She sneaked a glance at him from under her lashes and wondered what he was thinking.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jessica,’ he snapped impatiently, ‘is all this really necessary at——’ he consulted his watch ‘—quarter past twelve? It’s been a long day and I’m not about to stay here discussing business until all hours of the morning.’

  ‘I won’t be a minute,’ Jessica said, not looking at him. After a while she glanced up with satisfaction and said, ‘There. Now——’ she looked at them both ‘—who would like to be the first to peruse these very interesting documents?’

  She sounded like someone who was about to start an auction
going, and was fairly guaranteed an enthusiastic response.

  She was holding a small wad of papers in her hand, and all of a sudden, in one sickening moment of realisation, Isobel knew, knew with a sense of building dread what those ‘very interesting documents’ were.

  She had not found the incriminating evidence among Jeremy’s things, had she? But that hadn’t worried her. She had assumed that they would turn up sooner or later. After all, she had hardly really searched in depth for them. Too much had been going on for her to devote time to that.

  How was she to have known that he hadn’t concealed them in the house after all?

  ‘Where,’ she asked, white-faced, ‘did you find those?’

  ‘Oh, interested suddenly, are you?’ Jessica smiled smugly. ‘Accountants. You’d be surprised what we find in nooks and crannies. I was rummaging through your late husband’s desk drawer, where I had been cheerfully escorted and left on my own, and imagine my amazement when I discovered that it had a false bottom. I thought that sort of thing only happened in movies! Naturally I prised it open.’ She was deriving great pleasure from telling them all this.

  ‘What the hell is all this about, Jessica?’ Lorenzo asked in a dangerously soft voice.

  She didn’t answer. She held out the papers and said sweetly, ‘Bedtime reading for you.’ She stood up and dusted herself down. ‘Now, I really must be going.’ She turned to Isobel. ‘I won’t see you again. I’m sure you’ll be as sad as I am at the thought of that. Now, I’ll leave you two together, shall I? There’s a lot, I suspect, that you’ll want to discuss.’

  With that she left, closing the door behind her, and Isobel stared at Lorenzo with wide eyes. Then she did something she had never done in her life before.

  She blacked out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN Isobel next opened her eyes, she was on the sofa, lying down. It took her a few seconds to try and work out what she was doing in this peculiar position, then she sat up suddenly, her body tense as she looked at Lorenzo’s downbent head.

  He was reading the papers, his long fingers flicking through them, re-reading bits, absorbing it all.

  In a way it was a relief that everything would now be out in the open, at least between the two of them.

  He glanced up at her with expressionless eyes and said in a hard voice, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Isobel licked her lips. ‘How could I?’ she asked helplessly, and he flung the papers down on the table and began pacing the room, his movements restless, his hands shoved into his trouser pockets.

  She followed him with her eyes, compulsively drinking in his movements, the angry hunch of his powerful shoulders, the tight line of his mouth.

  He stopped in front of her and stared down. ‘Very easily,’ he said coldly, in a voice that made her flinch.

  ‘Try and understand my position…!’

  ‘Your “position” was that you allowed yourself to be blackmailed by a man intent on getting what he wanted at all costs!’

  ‘Oh, what’s the point?’ she muttered, sinking down into the chair. ‘What’s the point in trying to explain anything to you? You don’t want to understand.’

  He sat down on the coffee-table in front of her and she reluctantly watched him.

  ‘What your father did was not the end of the world,’ he said in a tight voice, and her eyes flashed angrily back at him.

  ‘Not the end of the world, no! But if it had ever become public knowledge, my parents’ lives would have been destroyed. In a town of this size, where everyone knows everyone else, where my father was a big name, God help him, the publicity would have ruined him.’

  ‘When did Jeremy find out about it?’ Lorenzo asked. ‘And don’t,’ he added icily, ‘try and walk out on an explanation now. I intend to hear every word of what you’ve got to say, if I have to nail you to the sofa personally.’

  His eyes were full of hatred. The frozen politeness which had been there before had gone.

  Isobel sighed and lay back, half closing her eyes.

  ‘He telephoned me one night at university,’ she said quietly. ‘He always telephoned me. I never told you because I knew you would fly into a blind rage. Jeremy——’ she hesitated ‘—couldn’t seem to let me go. He hated the fact that we were going out together. He hated your presence in my life. That night he sounded excited, on a high. He told me that he had found out something, something that could affect me personally. He said that he wanted to come up and see me to discuss it, and naturally I told him to get lost.’ She laughed to herself. ‘I told him that I…’ She remembered what she had told him, that she was in love with Lorenzo Cicolla, but for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to say that now. ‘I told him that I was involved with you and that I didn’t want him to contact me again.’

  ‘You damn well should have said something to me about all that!’ Lorenzo informed her, with fury in his voice, and she opened her eyes to look him fully in the face.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been worth it. Besides, I suppose I felt sorry for Jeremy. We had known each other since our childhood days, and even if he had gone a bit off the rails then there was still enough of a shared past for me to want to try and avoid hurting him. Unnecessarily.’

  ‘So what was his next move?’ He stood up and walked across to the bar in the corner of the room and poured himself a drink, offering her one, which she refused. Then he returned to where he had been sitting and swallowed the lot in one mouthful.

  ‘He wrote to me. He told me that he had come across some papers, that he had evidence that my father had been…’ Her voice faltered at this point. ‘If it had been a question of another woman, I would have been concerned, but that would have been different. My mother would have been dreadfully hurt, and so would I, but people would have forgotten about it within weeks. But this was different.’

  ‘This brought the whole question of his trustworthiness into dispute,’ Lorenzo filled in for her and she nodded miserably.

  ‘He was a pillar of the community. If it were ever known that he had been embezzling money…’ There, it was out, the secret that she had clung on to for so long that it had almost become a part of her, like a dark tumour.

  The silence in the room pounded in her ears and she couldn’t meet Lorenzo’s eyes.

  ‘Jeremy had been going through old files. Files which should have been consigned to the incinerator, but for some reason had not been. Well, you know how Dad was a compulsive jotter. He used to say that he thought better when he could see it in front of him, so he’d jot down things. In this file were jottings. Pages of them. Plans meticulously worked out to defraud the company. Jeremy told me that he knew how it had been done.’

  ‘I suppose he did it between audits?’

  ‘So I gather,’ Isobel muttered, eyes still down. ‘I read all the bits of paper over and over, trying to convince myself that I was mistaken, but it appeared that Dad had set up bogus companies, something like that anyway, with money being paid to non-existent suppliers.’

  ‘You saw the accounts?’

  Isobel shook her head. ‘Destroyed, I suppose, but the jottings were enough. They were Dad’s handwriting. On that alone…It was enough.’

  ‘Did you confront him with it?’

  ‘Of course not!’ She looked at him, horrified at that. ‘I loved my father. I loved him whatever he had done. Jeremy had the information at hand to destroy him if he wanted and I couldn’t let him do that.’

  ‘So you agreed to whatever he wanted.’ It was a cold statement of fact and she winced.

  ‘I had no choice. He was obsessed with me, and with taking me away from you, although until you told me about his background, I never fully understood the reason why.’

  ‘So little Isobel buckled down under pressure and played the dutiful wife.’ The contempt in his voice made her flush with sudden anger.

  ‘And what,’ she suggested fiercely, ‘would you have suggested I did? What would you have done if I had come running to you with th
e story? I know what you would have done! You would have stormed up here to see Jeremy and you would have tried to thrash him into submission!’

  ‘Are you telling me that he wouldn’t have deserved it?’

  ‘I’m telling you that it would have had as much success as plugging a dam with a toothpick! He was always prone to violent tempers, you know that! If you had confronted him, he would have done the first thing that came into his head! He would have announced his little gem of information loud and clear, to all and sundry!’

  ‘And what else did he blackmail you into doing, Isobel?’ He leaned towards her, his face dark and savage. ‘Did he blackmail you into making love to him whenever he wanted you?’

  She gripped the cushions on the sofa. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Tell me, damn you!’ He dragged her head up so that she had to meet his glittering eyes.

  ‘I…’ She took a deep breath, terrified at what she saw on Lorenzo’s face. ‘I couldn’t. He tried, but it was hopeless. I think he must have found…fulfilment with other women. He went on business trips quite a bit.’ Her voice had sunk to a whisper. ‘He was content to have me as a decoration, to see the envy in his friends’ eyes occasionally, to know, I guess, that he had killed whatever the two of us had had.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this when I returned here?’ he asked, and his voice was like a whiplash. He wasn’t about to forgive her. He would never forgive her. His own impulses were not to submission. He would never really understand, she thought despairingly.

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘Jeremy was dead. He had no hold over you any longer.’ He said that flatly, as though it made all the sense in the world, as though her continuing silence had been nothing more than stupidity on her part.

  ‘So what…?’ she asked bitterly. ‘So after four years I should see you staring at me, an opponent, and confess all?’ She laughed harshly, laughter on the verge of tears. ‘You hate me, Lorenzo. You made that clear the minute you returned. And yet you’re telling me now that I should have trusted you?’