The Tempted

by Amanda Stevens

  Tess.

  Funny how he hadn’t thought of her in years, but the moment he’d returned to Mississippi, the instant he’d smelled the roses at the lake house, her image had popped into his head. He’d been transported back in time, to the very moment when he’d first realized that Tess Granger, the daughter of his mother’s housekeeper, had grown into a beautiful, desirable woman.

  He was just back from his graduate work at Harvard that summer, home for the first time in nearly two years. The family—including Royce and his new wife—had all driven up to the lake house for the weekend, but by Sunday afternoon, everyone except Jared had gone back to the city. He was finally alone, and the solitude suited him at the time because he’d been feeling pressured by everyone in his life, especially by his father, who insisted it was time for Jared, as the eldest son, to assume his rightful place in the company. And then there was the endless competition with his younger brother—it had all become overwhelming.

  Jared had been restless that afternoon, in desperate need of a diversion. And just like that, there she was. A sun-kissed Eve, tempting and beguiling, skinny-dipping in his swimming pool.

  Tanned and slim, her golden-brown hair trailing like a mermaid’s behind her, she glided through the water like a dream. She didn’t have a stitch on, but she seemed completely oblivious to her blatant sexuality.

  Who was she? Jared wondered as he watched her from the French doors that looked out on the pool. And what was she doing trespassing on private property?

  Not that he cared, of course.

  When she turned and floated on her back, he saw that she’d pilfered one of his mother’s prized roses and brazenly tucked it behind one ear.

  Opening the French door, he stepped out on the patio. She didn’t appear to hear him, but floated serenely on the water, eyes closed.

  “Hello there.”

  She gasped, sank, swallowed water, then began to flail wildly. Finally getting her balance, she plunged lower into the water, covering her breasts with her hands. “I…thought everyone was…gone,” she managed to sputter.

  Jared grinned. “Obviously.” He walked over and picked up a towel from one of the patio tables and offered it to her.

  It took her a moment to regain her composure, but she did so admirably. She gave him a cool, reproving look. “Turn around, please.”

  Jared complied. Behind him came the sound of splashing water as she swam to the side and hitched herself out of the pool, then grabbed the towel from his hand.

  “You can turn back around now.”

  Swathed from neck to knee in white terry cloth, she lifted her chin defiantly. “I suppose you’re going to tell my mother about this.”

  “Tell your mother?” How could he, when he didn’t know who she was or where she lived? On the Eden side of the lake? Most of the locals did. The north side was reserved for vacation homes and exclusive estates owned mostly by out-of-towners, and was sometimes derisively referred to as Sin City by the locals.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” she challenged.

  “Should I?”

  “I’m Tess.”

  “Tess?”

  A look of annoyance flickered across her features. “Joelle Granger’s daughter. You remember Joelle, don’t you? Your housekeeper?” She said it almost as a jeer, as if she was chiding him for something other than his faulty memory.

  Joelle had served him breakfast on the patio just that very morning, so, of course, Jared remembered her. But he also remembered her daughter as a scrawny kid with wild, curly hair and braces. This couldn’t be Tess.

  “My God,” he said incredulously. “When did you grow up?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, let’s see, I think it was just after you left for your Ivy League education up north. Harvard, wasn’t it? I guess you didn’t get back down here to the sticks very often after that. Except for the wild party you threw one New Year’s Eve that my mother and I had to clean up after.”

  He winced at the censure in her tone. “Sorry,” he muttered, not knowing exactly what to say in the face of her animosity. “You were paid for your services, weren’t you?” He knew it was the wrong thing to say the moment the words left his mouth, and sure enough, her expression darkened.

  “Oh, of course. We’ve always been well paid for our services, Mr. Spencer.”

  “Call me Jared.”

  “That wouldn’t be appropriate.”

  “Why not?”

  She gave him a withering look. “Because my mother works for you.”

  “She works for my parents. That doesn’t have anything to do with you and me.”

  “Sure it does.” She picked up her clothes.

  “Wait,” Jared said impulsively. “Don’t go yet.” He hadn’t met a girl he’d found this interesting in ages.

  “I have to go. My mother sent me over here to make sure the house was locked up after everyone was gone. But since you’re here, you can look after things yourself. You don’t need me.”

  You’re wrong, Jared thought. He did need her. He hadn’t been a bit lonely until she showed up, but now the prospect of spending the evening alone…without her… “Look. We’ve obviously gotten off on the wrong foot here. Stay, and let me make it up to you.”

  “How?”

  “We could just hang out for a while. There’s no one here but me. I could fix you dinner, wait on you for a change.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And what would you expect in return?”

  He hesitated a fraction too long. The towel she’d been clutching slipped a bit, and Jared’s gaze dipped.

  When she saw the direction of his stare, her face flushed bright pink. “In your dreams, buddy.”

  “Hey,” he said to her retreating back. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  She turned at that.

  He nodded toward the soggy rose that still clung to her hair. “You’ve trespassed on private property and stolen one of my mother’s prized roses. Serious crimes that usually entail dire repercussions. But if you stay and have dinner with me, we’ll just forget all about it.”

  She gave him a hard, measuring look. “There are two things you need to know about me, Mr. Spencer. One, I don’t respond well to threats.” She reached up and snatched the rose from her hair, tossing it to the ground at his feet. “But here. By all means, take back the rose. I don’t care much for the expensive hybrids anyway. All show and no substance, if you ask me. Like some people I know.”

  “Ouch.” He grinned. “That hurt. What’s the second thing I should know about you?”

  She gave him a sly smile. “Don’t worry about it. You’re never going to get close enough to need that information.” And with that, she disappeared inside the pool house to dress.

  As last lines went, it was a good one, and Jared had been left staring after her, intrigued, amused, and aroused as hell.

  She’d stolen his heart that day, but it wasn’t until the end of the summer that he’d learned what an accomplished thief she truly was.

  Scrubbing his face with his hands, he leaned his head back against his chair and closed his eyes. But strangely enough, it wasn’t Tess’s image that troubled him. It was the little girl’s picture in the paper that haunted him. The missing child. For some reason, Jared couldn’t get her out of his head.

  “WHAT ABOUT THE BANK?” Tess’s mother asked at dinner that night. She looked tired tonight, Tess thought. Joelle Granger was still a young woman, not yet fifty, but Emily’s disappearance had aged her. The lines in her careworn face had deepened, and her light brown hair had seemed to gray overnight. Like Tess’s, her hazel eyes were rimmed with shadows.

  She, Tess, and Melanie Kent, Tess’s best friend, were seated around her dining-room table, but no one felt like eating, even though the chicken casserole was one of Joelle’s specialities.

  Tess stared at her plate. Wherever Emily was, had she been given food? Or was she hungry, her little stomach swollen and knotted in pain?

  Tess pictured her litt
le girl, weak from hunger, too sick even to cry out…

  Overcome by the images, she pushed away her plate. “I’m sorry, Mama, but I can’t eat a bite.”

  “Try to force something down, honey. You can’t keep doing this.”

  “Maybe in a little while.” The thought of food made Tess nauseated, so she tried to concentrate on something else. “I went to the bank this afternoon after I talked to Naomi Cross. There’s nothing they can do. I don’t have enough equity in my house to use as collateral, and there’s nothing in the business worth liquidating.” Tess’s cleaning service had been built primarily on her own blood, sweat and tears, commodities not necessarily valued by a loan institution. “Mr. Cobb was very nice, but as he pointed out, he isn’t running a charity organization.”

  Melanie gasped. Her lovely features contorted in anger. She’d always reminded Tess of a classical painting with her large, lost eyes and brooding mouth. “He didn’t say that!”

  “Not in so many words, but that was the implication.” Tess rubbed her forehead. “I understand their decision. I do. It’s business. They can’t afford to take on hard-luck cases, but my daughter’s life is at stake. You would think—” She broke off, shoving back her chair as she began stacking plates.

  “Leave the dishes,” her mother scolded. “I’ll take care of them later.”

  “No, Mama, let me do them. I need to keep busy.”

  When her mother started to get up, Melanie said quickly, “Keep your seat, Joelle. I’ll help Tess.” Grabbing the plates, she balanced them in her lap as she deftly guided her wheelchair toward the kitchen.

  “You girls don’t have to do that,” Joelle protested. “I’m perfectly capable of washing my own dishes.”

  “You’ve done more than your share of dishes,” Melanie insisted, referring to Joelle’s long tenure as the Spencers’ housekeeper. “You deserve a little pampering.”

  But even though both Joelle and Tess had installed ramps and made their homes as wheelchair accessible as possible after the accident, Joelle’s cramped kitchen was still hard for Melanie to navigate. She unloaded the dishes in the sink, then moved back to give Tess room to work.

  “I’m just in the way,” she muttered.

  Tess glanced over her shoulder as she started the dish water. “Stop that. You’re never in the way, and you know it. I don’t know what I would have done without you these last weeks.”

  Melanie bit her lip. “I just wish I could have done more. I wish I could have prevented this. Oh, Tess, when I think about the way she looked that afternoon—” She broke off, her blue eyes filling with tears. “If I’d just waited with her a little longer…”

  Melanie was the librarian at Fairhaven Academy, and she always stopped by every afternoon to see Emily before Tess picked her up from school. On that particular day, she’d been one of the last people to see Emily before she disappeared.

  Tess sighed. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. And besides, there were other teachers on the playground that day. They didn’t see anything, either.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But nothing. I meant what I said earlier. I don’t know how I would have gotten through this without you.”

  Melanie’s eyes softened. “We’ve always been there for each other, haven’t we?” Melanie’s rehabilitation after the accident six years ago had been a long and painful ordeal, but contrary to what she’d said, Tess hadn’t been there for her. Not for a long time. And for that, she’d never quite been able to forgive herself.

  She forced a smile. “We’ve been through a lot together, that’s for sure.”

  “Too much,” Melanie said with a grimace, tucking her silky blond hair behind one ear.

  Tess turned back to the sink, squirted soap into the hot water and began washing the dishes. As she worked, her mind drifted back in time, to the summer her and Melanie’s lives had been linked—and changed—forever…

  Friends since childhood, Tess had always been the more practical of the two, the more studious, the one who never got into trouble while the impetuous Melanie seemed to hover on the brink of one disaster after another.

  So it had come as a surprise to both of them when, in the summer after their junior year in college, Tess had been the one to fall in love, and with a man totally unsuited for her.

  Jared Spencer was older, for one thing. More sophisticated. More worldly. Tess sometimes wondered how she had ever let him get under her skin the way he had. He wasn’t her type at all. She’d always held nothing but contempt for the southern aristocracy with their customs and attitudes and machinations.

  But in spite of her disdain and no small amount of resistance, Jared had finally gotten to her. He’d pursued her arduously and won her over, and sometimes still, in looking back, Tess wondered why he’d been so persistent. Was it a simple case of the forbidden fruit? Had she, the housekeeper’s daughter, been an irresistible temptation to rebel against a lifetime of expectations?

  Melanie, perhaps not to be outdone, or perhaps because the Spencer charisma had enthralled her, too, had promptly gotten involved with Jared’s younger brother, Royce, although she’d kept the relationship a secret. Tess hadn’t suspected a thing until she’d opened the door one night, and Melanie had collapsed, hysterical, into her arms.

  It wasn’t until Tess had finally gotten Melanie to calm down that she noticed the marks on her friend’s arms, the telltale discoloration where someone had grabbed her roughly.

  Tess stared at the bruises in shock. “Melanie, who did this to you?”

  Melanie didn’t want to tell her at first, but then finally she whispered, “Royce.”

  Tess gasped. “Royce Spencer? But you don’t even know him!”

  Melanie glanced away, unable to meet her friend’s gaze. “We’ve been seeing each other.”

  “Melanie! He’s married!” Tess blurted in horror. In fact, he was practically a newlywed. His sudden marriage had created quite a clamor within the family, Joelle said, coming as it had after his announcement that he would not pursue an MBA at Harvard, as his brother had done before him, but would instead go directly to work for the Spencer Hotels Corporation.

  “I didn’t know he was married,” Melanie defended. “Not at first. And then when I found out, I was already in love with him. I tried to break it off. I swear I did. I know now what a mistake it was. Tess—” She clutched Tess’s arm. “You should have seen the look in his eyes tonight when he grabbed me. I thought he was going to kill me. He was completely out of control.”

  Tess could hardly comprehend what her friend was telling her. Melanie, involved with a married man? Royce Spencer, capable not only of infidelity, but violence?

  In truth, Tess had never cared much for Royce Spencer. He’d always been on the wild side, and just a little too sure that he could get whatever, and whomever, he wanted. He and Tess had had an altercation once at the lake house when he’d made a pass at her. Tess hadn’t told her mother about it because she’d handled things herself. She’d slapped Royce’s face, he’d laughed and apologized, and for a while, he’d pursued her even harder. But then he’d finally given up, and that had been the end of it.

  But this!

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I gave him an ultimatum,” Melanie said almost defiantly. “I told him if he didn’t leave his wife, I’d tell her about us.”

  “Oh, Mel.”

  “You hate me,” Melanie whispered. “I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I don’t hate you.” What Tess felt at the moment was shock. Disbelief. And, yes, more than a little disappointed. Dating a married man—that just wasn’t done in her book.

  “But you’ve lost respect for me,” Melanie said. “I don’t blame you. I don’t respect myself much at the moment.”

  “We’ll sort all that out later,” Tess murmured, her mind still reeling. “What we have to do now is make sure you’re okay. Do you need to see a doctor?”

  “He just grabbed me. H
e didn’t…hit me.”

  “But he threatened you,” Tess said. “Maybe we should go to the police.”

  “No!” Melanie’s eyes widened in terror. “Don’t you see? No one can know about this. Royce said if I told anyone, he’d kill me. And I believe him. You don’t know how dangerous he is—”

  “She’s right,” Tess’s mother said from her bedroom doorway.

  Both girls spun to face her. Wrapping a white chenille robe tightly around her, Joelle crossed the room to examine the bruises on Melanie’s arms. When she finally looked up, her eyes were grave, almost frightened. “No one can find out about this, Tess.”

  “But he threatened her! We can’t let him get away with that!”

  Joelle’s expression was resolved, worried. “You think the police would believe you? It would be Melanie’s word against Royce’s, and even if she did manage to convince the authorities she was telling the truth, the family would buy Royce’s way out of it. I’ve watched them get him out of one scrape after another for years, always making excuses for his behavior, always covering up for him. I’ve been afraid for a long time what that boy might be capable of.”

  Tess stared at her, stunned. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “I didn’t think I had to,” Joelle said wearily. “I hardly ever let you go over to the lake house. I thought all I had to do was keep you away from him. From all of them. And it wasn’t hard, because you never seemed to like any of the Spencers anyway.”

  “But Jared’s different,” Tess protested. “He would never hurt anyone.”

  Joelle gave her an uneasy glance. “He may not be like Royce, but he is still a Spencer. It’s time you realize what that means, Tess. The Spencers will protect their own, no matter who they have to step on in the process. I want you to stay away from him. Do you hear me?”

  “She’s right,” Melanie whispered. “You have to stay away from the Spencers before something like this happens to you.”

  But what none of them had known at that moment, not even Tess, was that she was already irrevocably tied to the Spencers….