Back in Fortune's Bed

by Bronwyn Jameson

  With a sigh she leaned back against the counter, as if she needed its support. “I don’t know if you remember much of what I told you about my family, my father in particular.”

  “He was a big-shot director. Broadway plays. A couple of movies.”

  She nodded. “David started out as a financier, a backer for some of my father’s plays. They struck up a business friendship—for want of a better word—and produced a couple of shows in partnership. David was the one who coerced Father into the movie business, which turned out to be a colossal blunder. To cut a long story short, my father got into financial trouble through his involvement in a couple of big-budget flops and David bailed him out.”

  Max had pretended to relax against the kitchen island but now he had a new tension in his gut. “Go on.”

  “It turned out that David put a price on repaying that substantial debt. He hated being a peripheral player in show business society. He wanted to be at the center of the in-crowd and that wasn’t happening quickly enough for him. He saw this as a golden opportunity to jump-start his social status.”

  “By marrying you.”

  Surprisingly she didn’t confirm the obvious. There was more, and Max could tell by the wounded shadows in her eyes that he was going to hate the more. Already he was wishing he had laid out the stepson, since it was too late to do the same to his father.

  “He didn’t want to marry me. He wanted to marry the Fielding name,” she divulged in the same even tone with which she’d started. Almost as if she was reciting her lines. Practiced, poised, emotionless. “His first choice was my sister Rose.”

  “The actress?”

  Although hardly a star, he’d noticed the Rose Fielding name. He noticed because of Diana and the family resemblance.

  “Yes.” Her smile held a bleak edge. “David saw her potential for stardom as an extra bonus.”

  “What happened?”

  “All those phone messages from home, those last weeks I was in Australia? I thought it was another of my family melodramas but Rose really did need my help. You see, she’d had an affair with a big-name star. A married big-name star. David found out and he was using this knowledge, and Rose’s guilty conscience, to pressure her into marriage.”

  “He was blackmailing her?” The tension that had been building inside Max exploded. “Why the hell didn’t she go to the police?”

  “With what? He wasn’t exactly sending her written demands. I don’t even know if he had any hard evidence of her affair, but that doesn’t matter. He could have ruined her career with a few careless whispers in the right ears. Oh, and he threatened to tell Father, which was almost as bad!”

  “Perhaps she should have thought of that before she got it on with her married co-star,” he said curtly.

  “Perhaps, but that’s the thing with Rose. She doesn’t think, she just does. And when she couldn’t reach me, she took a cocktail of drugs and alcohol and went to bed.”

  No longer quiet and detached, her voice broke on those last three despairing words. Her eyes bore the sheen of unshed tears and something inside Max cracked wide open. Something he’d been denying ever since she’d rocketed back into his life.

  Swearing softly, he straightened and started toward her but she warned him off with raised hands and a quick shake of her head. “Don’t. Just…don’t. Let me finish this.”

  Hell, but he didn’t want to hear the rest. He knew how this ended—with him arriving at a garden in the Hamptons too late to make a difference. He could guess the in-between. “That’s why you had to go home in such a rush?”

  She nodded.

  “And your sister recovered?”

  “Yes.”

  The raw note in her voice—from that cursed restraint that held her stiff and brittle and alone—cut him to the quick. He had to fist his hands around the edge of the benchtop to stop himself reaching for her. When he spoke his voice sounded almost as harsh as he felt. “So what happened? You volunteered to step into the breach?”

  “I went to see David, to talk to him. The circumstances sounded so over the top, even for my family. I thought maybe there’d been a misunderstanding. I’d always gotten along okay with David, you see, because he seemed so calm and together. I thought I could talk to him.” Still battling for control of her emotions, she huffed out a shaky breath. “That’s when he decided that I’d make an even better wife than Rose.”

  “You agreed to marry this bastard?”

  “What else could I do? He had my family’s finances in a death grip. My youngest sisters were still in school and he held the mortgage on both our homes. That wouldn’t have mattered quite so much if the house in the Hamptons hadn’t been my mother’s pride and joy.”

  “Your father wasn’t a nobody. He could have found other backing, other finance.”

  “He was living on past glory, on his name alone. That’s why his shows had been flopping, that’s why he got into trouble in the first place and grabbed David’s bailout offer without thinking of the consequences.”

  “So you sold yourself to your father’s fine upstanding business partner,” he said roughly, “instead of calling me or Eliza or anyone else who could help.”

  “Who could help how?”

  “By taking your father by the shirtfront and forcing him to take responsibility for his own mess. You were only twenty, for hell’s sake!”

  “And Rose was only eighteen and hospitalized,” she countered. “Believe me, if I’d known David’s true character beforehand I might not have agreed so readily. But I was young and I was gullible and I thought things would blow over with Rose, and once the financial mess was sorted I’d be able to divorce him. He promised me that out, whenever I wanted, but that was a lie. He was smart enough to keep control of my family’s finances and to keep control of me.”

  Her words, uttered with such matter-of-fact acceptance while her eyes glimmered with those cursed tears, knocked the stuffing right out of Max’s fury. “You should have called. You should have come to me.”

  “I tried to call but you weren’t available. I left a note.”

  “A couple of cavalier lines saying you had to go home,” he said on a strangled note. “Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t you keep calling? If I’d known how serious this was, I’d have been on the first plane to New York.” Instead of weeks later, when he’d stopped feeling cornered by the concept of commitment, when he’d realized that he wanted her in his life whatever it took.

  “I didn’t know the full story when I left Australia. All I knew was that Rose had attempted suicide. I dashed off a note because all I could think about was getting home as quickly as possible. And I did call again, several times, after I found out what was going on.”

  Calls he hadn’t returned because he’d still been working his way out of that corner; still pride-sore over her abrupt departure and the offhand scribble of her goodbye note.

  “When I found out you’d taken Eva Majeur as your date to a family wedding, I got the message.”

  What the…?

  Shaking his head, Max laughed shortly and without humor. “That was about as much a date as you taking Jeffrey to Case’s wedding. Eva was…convenient.”

  “And available,” she snapped back. “She’d made that very clear.”

  “Don’t tell me you gave up because you thought I’d moved on to another woman.”

  But that’s exactly what she had thought. He could see it in her eyes. And he’d fed the idea that morning in Sky’s stables, when he’d told her she was dispensable. When he’d insinuated that she had been quickly replaced.

  “Does it even matter?” She dropped her shoulders and hands in a hopeless gesture. “It all happened so long ago. It doesn’t serve any purpose raking over what you could have done if you’d known or if Eva hadn’t been convenient or if I’d persisted. I didn’t and it’s history now.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” she said, and her game attem
pt at a smile hit him in every place left open and raw by her story, by the hopelessness of frustration and regret. “I wanted to tell you the whole story,” she continued, “so you know that I didn’t jump from your bed into David’s. I didn’t choose to marry him for the sake of a wedding ring or because you’d passed on that option. I wanted you to know that.”

  She ended on a quiet note of finality and the ensuing silence felt heavy with weighted regrets. Max wanted to say he was sorry but he knew the apology would sound trite. As she’d pointed out a week ago, it would take a lot more than I’m sorry to make up for all the misunderstandings, for the pride that had stopped him calling her for too damn long, for his ugly ham-fisted accusations that day in the stables. For the insult of gifts aimed at seducing her back into his bed.

  He wanted to say…hell, he didn’t know what words to offer, he didn’t know if anything would make a difference.

  With a muffled oath he closed down the space between them and hauled her into his arms. Oh, she tried to resist but he shushed her protests and eased her head against his chest. It was all he could think to do, to offer her his support, to let her know she was no longer alone.

  “It’s been a rough night,” he murmured, acknowledging not only the recent emotional drama but the earlier episode with her unexpected visitor. “Just let me hold you. Please.”

  It took about a second to recognize how right she felt in his embrace, even with her body still taut and unyielding. He stroked the length of her rigid spine until she finally started to relax. Satisfaction settled rich and sweet and belly-deep, and for a long time he just held her and stroked her back and her hair and hummed beneath his breath to the country ballad playing on her stereo.

  Earlier she’d asked his preference and he’d pulled whatever CD’s he recognized from her collection. They’d been playing on rotation ever since, mostly unnoticed in the background. Now the combination of the right music and the right woman in his arms eased the deep ache in his chest a notch. The past could not be undone; he couldn’t fix what had happened then, no matter how badly he wished it otherwise.

  “There’s one more thing I have to ask.” Tension strummed the edges of his mood but he soothed it by coiling a tress of her cool, silky hair around his fingers. “Did he ever hurt you?”

  She eased back a fraction.

  “Your husband…was he abusive?”

  “He wasn’t violent,” she said softly, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

  It was something, he supposed, a very small solace when he sensed she’d been wounded in many other ways.

  “Can we move on now?” she asked. “I’ve had enough of the past for one night.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  She rested her cheek against his chest and her hands, finally, stretched from their loose hold on his waist to caress his back. He wasn’t sure of her exact words, muffled against his shirt, but he thought she said,

  “That’s what I want.”

  For a long time that was enough. Diana in his arms. The scent of her hair warm and familiar.

  “You still use the same shampoo.” He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, touched a finger to the tiny pearl stud in her ear. “Are these the same earrings?”

  She nodded, a delicious stroke of friction over his heart. “You remember.”

  “I remember.”

  For one whole weekend she’d worn little more than those earrings. He’d felt them beneath his tongue, a cool hard contrast to the warm responsive skin that he’d loved so well, so thoroughly, so often.

  The memory surged through his blood and made a mockery of his murmured request to just hold her. He supposed the only surprise here was that their own special brand of electricity had taken half a CD to spark to life. Where Diana was concerned, a couple of bars of the opening track and her body swaying against his should have flicked the switch to full power.

  And her body was swaying against his, he suddenly noticed, although so infinitesimally she may not even have realized she was responding to the melody playing around them. He smiled and looped his arms around her back. “I was going to take you dancing tonight.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “The Badlands Bar.”

  She laughed, a sultry puff of sound that warmed through his shirt to the overheated skin beneath.

  “We could still go if you want.” But he tucked her closer into his body and swayed in time to the soaring final chorus. “Although this is rather nice.”

  Nice lasted to the end of the song before she went still. One of her hands clenched in his shirt for the beat of silence before the next track started and for that single second he felt the shift of her hips and the subtle pressure of her belly against his erection.

  There was nothing subtle about his male reaction.

  The primal hum of desire thickened in his blood and with a low groan he slid his hands lower to cup her backside, to press her closer. She lifted her head and he saw a note of hesitancy in her eyes, a shadow of vulnerability that wakened a possessive tenderness stronger than he’d ever felt before.

  This was his woman and he wasn’t letting go.

  Slowly he eased his grip and gentled his touch, lifting his hands in a long, slow caress from hips to waist to shoulders. Then he brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek, stroked his thumb over her bottom lip. And when he bent his head to kiss her, when he tasted the familiar warmth of her lips, he tempered the surge of male need and moved his mouth over hers with restrained patience.

  It was a kiss of comfort, an extension of the I-just-want-to-hold-you hug, and when he sensed the same hesitancy in her response as he’d read in her expression a moment before, he felt a powerful urge to plunder, to take the decision from her hands, to sway her with the force of their chemistry.

  Yet he knew that wasn’t the way. Not after what he’d learned about the coercion that had led to her marriage.

  Their next kiss would be at her inception, their next embrace at her command, and when she became his lover again, it would be her choice. Her seduction.

  Reluctantly he broke away from the kiss and watched as she blinked his mouth and then his face into focus. One of her hands had strayed to his neck and her fingertips trailed like butterfly wings against the ends of his hair as she retreated. She would touch him again, he promised himself, in that same provocative way.

  Except the next time they would both be naked.

  Because he couldn’t let her go completely, he cupped her upper arms in his hands and waited for her gaze to fasten on his.

  “So, the dance is over.” Underneath the flushed skin of her throat, her pulse beat with those same butterfly wings. “What now?”

  “That’s up to you,” he told her. “I’m staying here tonight, in case your intruder returns. Whether I sleep in your bed or the guestroom is your call.”

  “No pressure, huh?”

  “I’ve never pressured you into sleeping with me, Diana.”

  “There are different kinds of pressure.”

  Max’s gaze narrowed as he figured out her meaning.

  “I’m not apologizing for the fact you turn me on. Just because a gun’s loaded doesn’t mean a man is going to use it.”

  “Are you saying you’re going to walk away, without trying anything?”

  “I’ll walk right to your guestroom if that’s what you choose.”

  He’d surprised her but it gave him little satisfaction because the suspicion was back in her eyes. Right when he had no agenda, right when he was doing the noble and gentlemanly thing. That mistrust chafed at his patience. So did the stretch of hesitation without an answer.

  “Either you want to sleep with me,” he said, “or you don’t. It’s as simple as that. This isn’t a trick question, there’s no hidden agenda. I thought you might appreciate making the decision without me pushing you.”

  She stared up at him a moment, still wary-eyed, and then she laughed. She straight-out, fair dinkum laughed. Then she sh
ook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’m sure force is hardwired into your genes. You are chronically unable to not push.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that you still have your hands on me, reminding me how much better those hands feel on my bare skin. It means you gave me exactly three seconds to make up my mind before you implied I was taking too long over a simple question and pushed me—yes, you did push me, Max!—for an answer.” She paused to draw breath. “Except it isn’t as simple as yes or no for me. I know it should be, but it isn’t.”

  “So your answer is no?”

  “If you need it right this second, then I guess it is.”

  He nodded curtly. “Then you’d better point me in the direction of your guestroom.”

  Diana hated watching him walk away.

  As soon as he’d left her, alone and chilled by his rapid departure, she kicked herself for handling the situation so badly. It had been a knee-jerk reaction, the laughter, her sardonic tone, even if her words were the simple and honest truth.

  Max always had an agenda, a purpose, a goal which he pursued with a relentless aim of success. The fact that he had backed off, that he hadn’t pushed his advantage when she’d been at her most vulnerable, was something she should have thanked him for, not insulted him over. He’d loaned her his strength when she’d been close to falling apart, he’d distracted her shattered emotions by joking over dancing at the local honky-tonk, he’d kissed her with disciplined tenderness. He’d stayed the night to protect her.

  And he’d handed her exactly what she needed: the opportunity to go to him on her own terms, strong in the knowledge that she’d made the choice without any persuasion.

  All through the night she debated taking the short walk to the adjoining bedroom, to apologize, to explain. But there was only one reason to go to him and she knew this was not the right time. Still raw from the scare of Gregg’s intrusion, still hollow from all she’d spilled in her painful revelations about her marriage, she was too susceptible and needy. Too open to the suggestion that this could be more than a night of sex with the ex.