Vengeful Seduction (Mills & Boon Vintage 90s Modern)

by Williams Cathy

  ‘Did you think that I might use the information to get back at you, Isobel?’ His mouth curled into a sneer. ‘You insult me by implying that I would have done any such thing!’

  ‘I…I don’t suppose I thought that you would. No, deep down I knew that you wouldn’t, but I wasn’t about to take the chance. My mother is ill, vulnerable…’ She saw another flash of immense fury in his eyes and shivered. ‘Besides,’ she continued defiantly, ‘when you returned here, you returned a stranger. You weren’t the same person I knew all those years ago! I couldn’t confide in you. I no longer knew you. You talked of revenge, hatred…’

  ‘What it boils down to, Isobel,’ he grated harshly, ‘is that you didn’t trust me. You never trusted me.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ She leaned towards him but there was no softening in his face.

  ‘No?’ he mocked. ‘I could have talked to him, made him see sense.’

  ‘He would never have seen sense. I should know, I lived with him for four years.’ Her eyes clouded over with memory. ‘Jeremy never really grew up. Oh, he acted the part of the adult, he could make witty conversation when it was necessary, but deep down he was like a child. If things didn’t go his way, he could throw the most frightful tempers. I learned to get out of his way. I learned to keep myself apart, detached.’

  ‘You learned to sacrifice your life. You walked out on me.’

  She hung her head, not knowing what to say, tired of defending herself.

  ‘Don’t tell me that you spent all that time pining,’ she muttered unsteadily. ‘I should think that you quickly recovered from the body-blow to your pride. After all, you showed up here with Jessica Tate in your wake, making it obvious what your relationship with her was! Where did she fall in the queue of women, Lorenzo?’

  They stared at one another, and in the semi-darkness of the room her heart skipped a beat.

  She stood up. Her legs felt wobbly.

  ‘Not so fast,’ he murmured from next to her. ‘When you walked out on me, you left unfinished business behind.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about this.’ He reached out and pulled her towards him, and his mouth met hers with the force of anger and desire.

  Isobel groaned and struggled against him, but he wasn’t letting go and, under the force of his embrace, she found her lips parting, her tongue flicking with excitement against his.

  She knew what he was doing. Emotionally he had expunged her from his system, but against his will there was still desire there, and desire was what he now aimed to clear once and for all.

  There was an urgency in him, emanating from his body, and with a gesture of defeat she wound her arms around his neck and surrendered to her impulses.

  Why fight it? she thought to herself. If this was to be their bitter parting, then why not yield? Hadn’t she fantasised about this for a long time? His image had followed her every day and every night for as long as she could remember.

  He lifted her up in one swift movement and carried her across to the rug in front of the fireplace. She didn’t have to see his face to know that every touch was fired by a sort of savage passion. But there was a savage passion burning inside her as well, only she knew that this would not expunge him from her system because emotionally he was still there and always would be.

  He unbuttoned his shirt unsteadily, tugging it out of his trousers, then lay down next to her, holding her face between his fingers and kissing her until she gasped for breath.

  ‘I can’t stand the thought that he touched you, Isobel,’ he muttered against her neck, his voice rough, and there was enough possessive passion there to send her spirits soaring, but not for long. She had hurt him, but not fatally, not as he had hurt her in the end.

  His hand slipped beneath the cotton jumper and he massage her breast through the lacy bra until she writhed with pleasure.

  With shaking fingers she unhooked it from the front, pulling it aside so that there was now no barrier between his fingers and the soft swell of her breasts, their nipples swollen with aching anticipation.

  He groaned and pushed up the jumper, seeking her breasts like an infant searching for its source of food. She watched his dark head as his mouth fastened to her nipple and he pulled at it, drawing it into his mouth.

  She knew that she would gain so much and lose so much by making love to him, but she couldn’t begin to reason it out. She just knew that it was inevitable.

  As he suckled on her breast, he unzipped her skirt, pulling her free of it and tossing it on one of the chairs, then her lacy underwear followed so that she was lying against him, naked.

  He half raised himself to look at her, and she watched him with a mixture of sadness and pleasure. There was no concealing the primeval want in his eyes.

  He stood up, still staring at her, his breath coming and going as quickly as hers was, and she looked as he undressed, taking in every smooth, hard line of his body as though she had never seen it before.

  He stooped beside her, moulding her with his hands, her breasts, her stomach, her waist, then he bent and kissed her thighs, working up until his mouth had found her most private places, sending her into a vortex of raging desire. She parted her legs to accommodate the flicking of his tongue as he explored every inch of her, and when she thought that she could no longer contain the dam of excitement waiting to burst, he eased himself on her and buried his face against her neck.

  She could hear him muttering her name over and over again. There was no tenderness there though.

  ‘I don’t want to feel this way about you,’ he muttered unsteadily, and he looked at her with darkening eyes. ‘This passion…’

  And I don’t want to feel this way about you, Lorenzo Cicolla, she told herself. I don’t want to feel this overwhelming love, to know that I shall never be able to escape. If only all she felt for him was passion. Passion could be sated. It was a monster that could evaporate once it had been fed to its satisfaction, but love was something else entirely. Love ate away at you and then, when you thought that there was nothing left, it started all over again.

  He cupped her neck with his hand as his mouth descended over hers. He thrust into her, his movements slow to start with, then quickening until they found a rhythm of their own and their bodies were joined in unison.

  Isobel placed her hands in the small of his back and flung her head backwards as the fire that had been building in her reached its apex, filling her entire being, taking her into another orbit, at least for a while.

  She was still trembling when he lay down beside her with his hand behind his head.

  There had always been things to say, long ago when they were lovers. Now she listened to the silence, and knew that this would be the last time that she would ever feel that glorious body next to hers.

  What was going through his head? Had he been released by their lovemaking?

  He turned to her and said in a toneless voice, ‘I think it’s time for me to go.’

  He might as well have told her that he thought it was time for him to leave planet Earth and set up camp on the moon. She could feel the tears pricking the back of her eyes and she didn’t dare to look at him because that would have been courting disaster.

  In all their discussions about Jeremy, he had never once mentioned feelings, he had never once hinted that he might have felt anything for her beyond all those emotions generated by lost pride. At least she had spared herself the final humiliation of having him know how much she still loved him and always had.

  ‘I’ll pack my clothes. I can be out of here within an hour.’

  ‘Yes.’ She stood up, woodenly, and began putting on her clothes. She hadn’t even thought about contraception, but she knew, with a strange sense of disappointment, that she was not in a fertile period. There wasn’t even a chance that this would have led to a baby.

  He dressed in silence, then they faced each other across the room.

  ‘Will you make my apologies to your mot
her when she returns for not staying on?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I will,’ she said with the same feeling of unreality eating away inside her. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘To London for a few days, then I shall fly to Italy. You’ll find another buyer for your father’s company. Let Clark advise you. My days here are finished.’

  Now that there was such a sense of finality between them, she had a compulsive need to keep the conversation going. Whereas before she had been too full of nervous awareness of him to be in the same room, now she would have kept him here as long as she could because she knew that this was the end of the line.

  ‘What will you do about the cottage?’ she asked, and he shrugged, moving towards the door.

  ‘There would be no point,’ he murmured. ‘If and when I do come over here, I can always stay at the hotel.’

  ‘The Edwardian?’

  They smiled at each other and she felt a dart of pain.

  ‘It is a bit grim,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? Perhaps things there might improve.’ He began walking up the stairs. It was quite black here and her eyes had to adjust to the dark shape ahead of her. At the top he turned to her and said softly, ‘Goodbye, Isobel.’

  She couldn’t see his face. It was just too dark, and she was glad that he could not see hers.

  ‘Goodbye, Lorenzo,’ she said, hoping that her voice would see her through and not crack up in mid-sentence. ‘And good luck.’

  He nodded slightly and then turned away, his footsteps soft and stealthy on the carpet.

  Isobel went to her room and sat on her bed with the lights switched off. She felt completely drained. After some time she heard him walk past quietly, and she had to imagine the rest. The soft click of the front door closing behind him, the throb of the engine as he started the car, the headlights beaming as he drove away. Out of this small town that had been responsible for so much, and out of her life.

  * * *

  The following day she felt like someone recovering from a state of shock.

  ‘But why did he have to leave at such an extraordinary hour?’ her mother asked when she telephoned later that day. ‘Did he have a call? Is his mother ill?’

  ‘There were a few problems that needed sorting out straight away,’ Isobel replied. ‘He felt that he had to go immediately.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure Lorenzo would have remained unless it was important,’ Mrs Chandler said, ever ready to give people the benefit of the doubt. ‘You’ll miss him, Isobel, I know.’

  She couldn’t face an outright lie to counteract that one so she held her tongue and stared at the wall in front of her.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ Mrs Chandler said gently.

  ‘No. He won’t.’

  ‘My dear, if you still love him, why did you ever marry Jeremy?’

  Isobel’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘B-Because…’ she stammered, ‘because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ her mother sighed from miles away, not pressing the point. ‘But Lorenzo will come back, I’m sure of it.’

  When hell freezes over, Isobel thought, when the cow jumps over the moon and the dish runs away with the spoon. It was pointless dwelling on it and, when she replaced the receiver, she decided that the only thing to do would be to carry on, to smile and smile and smile for the outside world. She had had enough experience of that.

  In fact, she spent the next two days smiling. It certainly convinced the patients that she was in a very good mood indeed, which was something, but the minute she was alone the mask fell away and she found herself contemplating, without any need to disguise it, the long, dark tunnel ahead of her. A thousand pages of a thousand calendars turning over, as the months grew into years and the bleakness in her heart set ever harder by the day.

  What had happened to the golden girl who had it all? she wondered. It seemed strange that everything could slip away so completely, like sand between open fingers. One minute the future was in front of her, promising everything, and the next she was confined to a prison, without hope of remission.

  By the Friday she felt that she was going out of her mind, so on the spur of the moment she decided to get in touch with Abigail. Abigail could always be relied upon to bring her back down to earth. For some reason, and although she was very close to her mother, she couldn’t face talking to her about what had happened. For a start there would be too many bits and pieces that would have to be left out, and there wasn’t much chance that she would be able to get through an edited explanation without her mother becoming increasingly suspicious along the way.

  The only problem with Abigail was, of course, her schedule. In a fairly nomadic profession, her bases tended to jump from one part of the country to the other, when she was in the country at all.

  Isobel wrinkled her brow and tried to remember what her friend had told her about her jobs. Where was she now? London? Manchester? Birmingham? She had been doing something, Isobel was sure, at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, but was that now finished?

  She dialled her London number. It rang three times, and then on came the chatty, pre-recorded voice of Abigail, informing her that she wasn’t available at the moment, but would get back to the caller ‘with the speed of light’. The message breathed sincerity, and Isobel half smiled, knowing that her friend only ever got back to a few of her callers, and rarely at the speed of light.

  She was mistaken, though. The telephone rang ten minutes later and Abigail said breathlessly down the line, ‘I was in, Izzy, but I couldn’t be bothered to get to the phone.’ There was a massive, uninterrupted yawn down the line and Isobel said drily,

  ‘Too much sleep is bad for you.’

  ‘Try telling that to my nervous system,’ Abigail said. ‘You never phone me, Isobel, which is why—and, please, there’s no need to be grateful—I’m phoning you back. What’s the matter?’

  Isobel sat down. In this huge, empty house, she could talk unhindered for as long as she wanted, and she really wanted to, to pour it all out, but naturally she now found that she couldn’t.

  ‘I just thought I’d find out how you were,’ she said, postponing the confession.

  ‘Thriving, now that you ask. I’m doing an absolutely marvellous play at the moment here. Not too strenuous, but with some nice, witty dialogue. It’s a bit of muchneeded light relief before I vanish off to distant shores. New York, to be precise.’

  ‘Oh, what a hard life you lead,’ Isobel said jokingly. ‘London, New York. Next you’ll be telling me that you’re honing up on your Far Eastern dialects and will be flying out to Tokyo to dazzle them with your talents.’ She laughed, but her fingers played compulsively with the telephone cord.

  Abigail must have detected the slight nervous edge to her voice because she said seriously, ‘Whatever is wrong, Izzy? I don’t have to see you to know that you’re not exactly on top of the world. Is it your mother? She’s all right, isn’t she?’

  ‘It’s me, Abby,’ Isobel said flatly. ‘I have no one else to turn to.’ Damn, she was beginning to feel tearful. She took a deep breath and began telling her friend about Lorenzo. Really, she had meant to keep it brief. Who liked being overdosed on someone else’s problems? Even a good friend’s? But the more she spoke, the more she found that she had to say. It surprised her how much she had taken in of him—had she really noticed him in such agonising detail?

  She never mentioned a word about Jeremy, or the reason that she had married him, but she talked and talked and talked. At the end of which, Abigail said, with her usual forthrightness, ‘You’re a mess.’

  ‘Is that any way to cheer a friend up?’ Isobel asked shakily. The tears which had been threatening for the past ten minutes dripped silently down her cheek and she wiped them away with the back of her hand.

  ‘Of course, you’ll have to come up here.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you can and of course you will. No ifs and buts. You can travel up tomorrow
morning and spend the weekend with me. I’ll get you a ticket to my play, you lucky, lucky girl.’ Which had the desired effect of making Isobel smile. ‘I shan’t be at my flat in the morning, so you’ll have to make your own way there, but you still have the spare key, don’t you? Yes, I can tell you’re nodding. Make your way to my flat, help yourself to my food, which won’t be very appetising because I’m on a new and improved diet which, as usual, doesn’t appear to be working, and then go shopping. That’s an order. Go shopping. Buy something wonderful to wear to the theatre. It’s the last night that the play’s on and there will be all sorts of semifamous faces attending. The really famous ones were there on first night, I’m afraid. We’ll have a late supper when the play’s finished and the applause has died down. Read my lips, Isobel: You are going to have a stupendous time!’

  So at three-thirty the following afternoon, she found herself walking along Bond Street with a cold sun putting in a rare appearance to remind the country at large that it did exist, and browsing for the mandatory outfit for An Evening at the Theatre.

  It was quite a few months since she had been to London. She was a country girl at heart and usually found London very claustrophobic, but right now it was wonderful. It just felt good to be somewhere different, and even if thoughts of Lorenzo continued to buzz through her head like a swarm of bees, some of her depression was lifting.

  She found herself a glamorous long-sleeved dress in fine, bright green wool and was blushingly flattered when the salesperson asked her whether she was a model. Then she bought some costume jewellery, some shoes, and returned to Abigail’s flat at six-thirty, far more heartened than when she had set out on the train down several hours back.

  Maybe, she thought as she dressed carefully for the evening, she and her mother could spend an indefinite amount of time travelling. Maybe several years of travelling would get Lorenzo Cicolla out of her system. She flirted with the thought for a while, then ruefully decided that running away from reality never solved problems, it only generated a few more, and made it to the theatre with only minutes to spare.