The Price of Seduction

by Nina Blake

  Unfortunately, there was an inkling of truth somewhere in Trevor’s allegations. Conrad did have a passion for Aboriginal art and although he’d told her he was speaking to officials about the theft, he hadn’t elaborated, hadn’t explained why they were questioning him about it.

  In fact, he’d been quite mysterious about it.

  She didn’t want to believe Trevor but she couldn’t leave a serious accusation like that lingering and decided to ask Conrad about it when they were alone. That was, if the opportunity arose.

  Bree and Olivia gathered their papers and stepped towards the boardroom door but Conrad reached across for the door handle.

  His eyes slid down Bree’s figure and she felt him undressing her with his eyes. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know what she looked like beneath her clothes. He had, after all, explored her body in some detail.

  Her breasts tingled, her nipples pressing against her bra. She didn’t want him to make her feel this way, not when she needed her wits about her.

  “Olivia, please let my driver take you back to the office,” Conrad said. “The receptionist will see to it.”

  “Certainly,” Olivia replied. A knowing smile spread across her lips as she left the room.

  He pressed the door closed behind him, his eyes fixed on Bree. She wished he’d say something but, seemingly content to drink her in with his eyes, he didn’t appear anxious.

  Bree jumped in. She couldn’t stand it any longer. If he was thinking of the right words to tell her their fling was over, she wanted to get it done with.

  “I presume you got rid of Olivia so you could talk to me,” she said. “Look, it’s okay. I understand that the weekend is over and we’re back to a working relationship now.”

  “You can’t tell me that’s what you want.”

  Bree’s stomach fluttered. “Isn’t that the way these things work?”

  “It’s not the way this is going to work. You’re always so blunt with me. You tell it like it is. I’m going to return the favour and be equally frank with you.” Bree was expecting him to cut her off but that’s not what his eyes were telling her. “You’re coming to lunch with me. That’s why I got rid of Olivia.”

  Bree was hungrier than she wanted to admit.

  In more ways than one.

  * * *

  Not wishing to waste any time, Conrad chose a small Italian place tucked away in a basement around the corner from his office.

  As Bree sat across the table from him, he wondered how he could have been so wrong about her. She’d given him what he’d asked for. One weekend together at Il Bosco.

  But that wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

  He’d had lots of women but he’d never had a sexual relationship as powerful as this one. That had been the single most intense sexual experience of his life, no question about it.

  It made him smile. She was so petite. She seemed to be so proper. And most of the time she was a highly efficient public relations executive. That just went to show how much was hidden behind her professional exterior.

  Who would look at the two of them sitting at lunch and believe she could be the one to overpower him?

  She’d stood up to him too, as no one else had in the past. She’d spurned him the first night at Il Bosco, perhaps rightly so, standing by her principles and refusing to budge. She hadn’t let him buy her off with promises of the Il Bosco contract or even with the jewels she had so quietly returned to him.

  Bree hadn’t let him take her but when she was ready she’d given herself freely with her mind and her body. That was a much greater gift than simply falling into bed with him because he was rich.

  He wasn’t thinking about marriage but he wanted to see her, know her better, go out with her. He wanted her at his side and in his bed.

  He wanted her. Full stop.

  She looked so much less corporate now she’d taken off her charcoal business jacket. The three-quarter sleeve emerald green top was stunning against her pale skin and much to his delight the plunging neckline revealed her ample cleavage.

  Worn with a pair of well cut, purple, low-waisted pants she looked smart enough for business or for lunch but he preferred her without the jacket. It was too much like a uniform and he liked to see the real Bree. He preferred to see the lush figure under the jacket.

  She had no idea how alluring she looked just twirling her fork into her spaghetti carbonara, her eyes lowered, her face fixed in concentration.

  “I was surprised you wanted to have lunch with me today.” She looked up at him. “You know, when you’ve been so busy this week and all.”

  “I knew it’d be a hectic week, what with tying up the loose ends for the purchase of Il Bosco,” he said.

  She held his gaze. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t expect we’d be having lunch together or seeing much of each other at all now we’re back in Sydney.”

  “But you knew I’d still see you.”

  “Yes, at meetings and through work. Only professionally. That was the arrangement, wasn’t it? Or had I misunderstood?”

  She was certainly frank. She wasn’t going to let this slide or allow them to continue their affair until she knew exactly where she stood.

  Then, it wasn’t an affair, no matter how it had begun. He might not be able to define their relationship with clarity and precision but he knew what it wasn’t.

  “I didn’t want to lead you on,” he explained. “At the time I didn’t want you to think this was more than it was, but things have changed. Now there really is more.”

  “How much more? One weekend wasn’t enough. Will two weekends do? Another couple of weeks after that perhaps?”

  “This isn’t a business proposition or a fixed term lease. If it were, I can assure you I’d have a contract written up outlining all the details. This is different. You’re a woman and I’m a man and I think we should just see where this takes us.”

  Her shoulders relaxed and she looked almost relieved. “After last weekend I wasn’t exactly sure where I stood, or where we stood.”

  “I’ve got a very busy few days ahead of me but there’s the weekend. Are you free on the weekend?”

  “Saturday or Sunday?”

  “Both.” He enjoyed the smile that washed over her face with his answer. “And Friday night as well. Let’s have another weekend away but this time it’ll be at my apartment. I don’t have room service but there’s always the next best thing – home deliveries.”

  They continued eating and talking until he asked the question which had been bothering him for a few days.

  “What did Trevor Daniels say to you just before we left Il Bosco?”

  She stiffened, her face expressionless. “I can’t recall.”

  “I went to check on the helicopter and when I looked across he was saying something to you, looking very smug.”

  Bree looked down at her now empty plate, then back up at Conrad. “He always looks smug.”

  “He had a reason for it. What was he saying?”

  “Is that why you asked me to lunch? So you could find out what Trevor has been saying behind your back?”

  “No, I asked you to lunch because I wanted to, because I could. I’d have seen you sooner but it simply hasn’t been possible over the last few days.”

  She took in a deep breath. “Trevor said he thought you had something to do with the stolen rock art, that you had a vested interest in it, that you knew more than you were letting on. He didn’t accuse you of theft outright but that was the general gist of it.”

  Anger welled up inside Conrad. First, Daniels had crassly alluded to his previous relationship with Bree, speaking of her as though she were used goods he no longer needed. Now he was trying to turn her against him.

  “And you believed him?”

  She looked him in the eye. “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  From anyone else he would have found the question insulting but Bree wasn’t anyone else. She didn’t agree with everything he said and i
ndulge his every whim as so many others around him did. She said what she thought and now she was voicing her concerns.

  “Of course not,” Conrad said. “Don’t tell me you believed him.”

  She shook her head. “No, but I wanted to hear it from you. Trevor has a way of finding your soft spot and going in for the kill. He can be ruthless.”

  “I still find it hard to believe you went out with him for two years. I’ve made a point of never doing business with him and until recently I’ve avoided having anything to do with him at all. He’s completely untrustworthy. A low-life piece of scum.”

  A little furrow formed in her brow. “He’s a horrible person. I have first hand experience with that. But if you haven’t had much to do with him in the past, how do you know he’s scum?”

  She’d got to the crux of the matter swiftly. Still, Conrad wasn’t ready to answer her question and give her the truth.

  He knew all too well the depths to which Daniels could sink, as he had demonstrated in the past. Their first encounter, if you could call it that, may have been three years ago but Conrad hadn’t left it behind. Daniels had pretended to be helpful, pretended his actions were altruistic but he wasn’t helping a friend in need. All the time he’d been scheming to ruin a young woman.

  There had been others involved too. Other people.

  Yes, an unborn child was most certainly a person as far as Conrad was concerned.

  Since that first extremely personal incident with Daniels, Conrad had kept an eye on him from a distance and watched the way he did business.

  But Bree already believed Daniels was untrustworthy and lacked integrity. He didn’t need to convince her of that and there was no point reliving the part of his life he’d most like to forget.

  “I’ve seen enough of Trevor Daniels to know what kind of man he is,” he said. “He doesn’t break the law but he bends it, looks for ways around it. He lacks morals and professional integrity so of course he’s going to behave the same way in his private life. So tell me, Bree, what did he do to hurt you so much?”

  Angst in her eyes, she paused as if deliberating what to say. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start at the end.”

  “Alright. Trevor decided it was time to get married. I think it was partly to do with turning thirty and partly because my sister got married last year and I was always talking about it.”

  “And you didn’t want to marry him?”

  “No, it was the other way round.”

  “If he didn’t want to get married, why did he get engaged to that Shannon woman? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “He wanted to get married,” she said.

  Conrad nodded for her to continue.

  “Just not to me.”

  That must’ve hurt. He could see the pain in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Bree,” he said.

  “Trevor was biding his time. I was just…a diversion. He said I had a good job and a good body but that was all. I wasn’t from the right kind of family and I didn’t mix in the right circles. My dad was a plumber and I went to the local government school, not some posh Sydney north shore private school. I didn’t have the breeding, the connections. I didn’t know the right people.”

  “So he said all that to you. How do you feel about him now?”

  “My ego’s taken quite a battering and that has made me stronger. I’m glad we broke up. He never loved me. The way he spoke to me when we broke up, I’m not sure he even liked me very much. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what kind of person he was until it was too late.”

  “You’re better off without him. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I never truly loved him although I thought I did at the time. I believed in commitment. I stayed with him because I thought it was the right thing to do. I was using my head instead of my heart.”

  Conrad looked down at his hands. Bree had been honest with him and told him about her past but he hadn’t been completely honest with her about his own. He hadn’t lied to her but he’d omitted the one relationship from which he was still scarred.

  “You asked me once about the women in my life,” he said. “I told you about Sophie. It was no secret that I went out with her for two years but there was another relationship which affected me much more than that.”

  “What happened?”

  “Until three years ago I was playing the part of a playboy. It wasn’t the real me and I don’t know why I did it other than that it was expected of me. It was fun and it was easy for me, very easy. Until Rebecca Vivian came into my life three years ago.”

  “You haven’t mentioned her before.”

  “I dated her briefly but I’d be lying if I said she was special or that she meant more to me than anyone else I’d had before that. There were certain… ” His voice trailed off. “There were complications. We were probably only together a couple of months when she told me she was pregnant. It was a shock, I admit. Before that, she said she was on the pill and I believed her.” He paused. “I’ve never told anyone about this before and I mean no one.”

  Bree pressed her eyes closed for a moment. She must be thinking of their first time together and how they’d completely disregarded birth control.

  “I knew I couldn’t marry her even though that was what she wanted,” he said. “I wasn’t willing to live a lie. One thing I’ve always known for sure is that if I ever get married, it’ll be forever and it’ll be for love. It won’t be because it’s expected of me.”

  “You didn’t love her?”

  “No, but I was already starting to love that child. I was going to be a father and take care of that baby and I would have provided for Rebecca too.”

  “You were going to be a father?”

  Suddenly, it all came back to him – the shock of finding out he was going to be a father, the way none of it had worked out, the anger and resentment, the bitter end.

  And the loss.

  Conrad looked down at the table. “She lost the baby.”

  “She miscarried?”

  He nodded, unable to face the truth. Then his mind came back to the present, to the woman sitting opposite him, the woman he never dreamed he’d meet.

  He couldn’t tell her the full story. It was too painful.

  “So you can see,” he said, “how surprised I was at myself when we forgot about contraception that first time. I know what can happen and where it can lead and I still completely lost control.”

  A faint blush rose in Bree’s cheeks. “I was surprised at myself too.”

  “If you were to fall pregnant, I’d want to know right away. Because I’ve been through this before.”

  Bree nodded. He reached across the table for her hand and stroked her fine skin. He held one of her hands in both of his.

  It was a long time until he let her go.

  * * *

  For Bree, lunch had been short and now it was over. She was back at the office trying to finish off a proposal while juggling phone calls and emails.

  They hadn’t even had time for dessert, her favourite part of the meal. Aside from their meeting which was completely focussed on work, she’d had one hour of Conrad’s time over lunch and didn’t expect to get more than a five minute phone call until the weekend.

  She’d been shocked and confused when she found the ultrasound picture in Conrad’s wallet. She’d tried to work out why he had an ultrasound, a foetal X-ray, in his wallet instead of a photograph of a child. Now she knew.

  There was no child. That ultrasound picture was all he had.

  It was sad, so very sad. It happened to other couples but that hardly provided much solace if you were the one who’d lost a baby.

  Even it were unplanned and came as a shock, pregnancy was something to be celebrated. It meant there was a child to be loved and nurtured and taken care of.

  Was that how she’d feel if she were pregnant? It was easy to say how wonderful pregnancy was when thinking about someone else but it felt completely
different when she thought about herself in that position.

  She had a fulfilling career and a nice apartment of her own. She lived well and had a bit of money put aside but that didn’t mean she was ready to take on a child. Not on her own as a single woman. That’s not how she ever thought it would happen. It wasn’t a possibility she wanted to face.

  It had only been a few days and it was too soon to know if she were pregnant. There was no point sending herself into a flurry about it until she knew the truth.

  She could still see Conrad’s pain. He was a strong, powerful man, highly experienced with women and enormously successful in the corporate world. He had everything you could ask for. But that did nothing to ease his sorrow, even after three years.

  Her phone rang, only this time she didn’t recognise the number that flashed on the small screen. It was a Melbourne number.

  “Hello Bree, this is John Patterson calling from PCR,” the man said. “I called last week and left a message.”

  He was the head of Professional Communications and Relations, one of Melbourne’s leading PR firms.

  Bree remembered receiving a voice mail message on her mobile but she’d been so busy she’d completely forgotten about it. Also, as she had no idea why a rival firm from a different city was contacting her, it hadn’t registered as an important call.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been very busy. I meant to call back.”

  “I’ll get straight to the point. I’ll be in Sydney next week on Tuesday and I’d like to invite you to lunch to discuss a business proposition.”

  “What kind of proposition?”

  “A couple of my senior staff are pregnant and I’m on the look-out for potential replacements.”

  Bree was shocked. Her initial reaction was to refuse, to turn him down because she already had a job. His firm was based in Melbourne and she wasn’t planning on moving back to her home town. She also wasn’t planning on switching jobs so quickly when she’d only been with Kelly Communications for a couple of months. That sort of thing was always hard to explain to future employers.