A Lesson In Seduction

by Susan Napier

  ‘That’s what she’s going to tell Don, anyway, and since they both hold that lying is a sin he’ll believe it.’ He wiped a hand across his face. ‘Problem solved for everyone...as long as it’s not going to blow up later in his face...’

  Rosalind said nothing. What could she say? She couldn’t guarantee that the truth wouldn’t eventually leak out; she could only remove herself from the situation to ensure that it didn’t come from her. Unless she could persuade Peggy to make a clean breast of it, so that they could all begin again with a clean slate...

  ‘I hate it that she has to suffer like this,’ he went on savagely. ‘She’s always seemed so strong...and to see her lying there so...so...’

  His voice thickened to a halt as they stopped before a plain swing-door with a square panel of reinforced glass, and he placed his palm against it, blocking out her view of the bed within.

  ‘Luke—’ She was shocked to see the glitter of tears in his eyes, the way the skin was stretched taut across his cheekbones and jaw. God, he was hurting, and part of his pain was because of her. By coming here like this was she making things worse for Luke and his family just for the sake of her own selfish needs? ‘Luke, I—’

  ‘I know...I know...you want to go in alone,’ he said, misunderstanding her inarticulate plea. He released her elbow reluctantly. ‘For God’s sake, Roz, whatever this is about, please try not to hurt her any more than she already has been. She’s going to need every ounce of hope and courage to tackle her recovery.’

  There was a hot stinging in her own eyes at the irony of his plea. He didn’t know what he was asking. To have any sort of future with Luke she might have to force Peggy’s hand. And if she did she might very well lose him anyway. ‘Of course I won’t!’

  She turned to go in and felt him touch her shoulder.

  ‘And Roz?’

  ‘What?’ She looked back, her chin brushing the back of his hand. Unable to resist, she tilted her head and rubbed her cheek yearningly against it, until he turned his hand over and ran his fingers down the line of her jaw to tap them on her chin.

  ‘I love you,’ he said huskily.

  ‘What?’ She was hallucinating from lack of sleep. Having a waking dream...

  ‘Never mind. Later. Go on...’ He flattened his hand between her shoulderblades and pushed, so that she stumbled forward, instinctively reaching out and bumping open the door. ‘I’ll be waiting for you...’

  A long, slow, painfully intense half-hour later he was true to his word, getting up from a hard wooden chair in the small, sterile waiting room at the end of the hallway as she trudged across the wavering floor towards him.

  ‘Well?’

  She closed her dry, gritty eyes, unwilling to face the dream that had become a tangled nightmare of lies.

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Go? Go where?’ His voice sounded as if it was coming from the end of a long tunnel.

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘To Auckland... my apartment... I have an audition to study for...’ Damn it, she was going to take that Shakespearian role! she thought, trying to summon her enthusiasm. Peter was gone...no more stalker to distract her stage persona, to paralyse her vocal cords with nameless fears. Her career had taken the place of children in her life; now she would stretch it over the gaping hole left by Luke. She would be the fiercest, most bloodthirstily ambitious, most utterly wretched Lady Macbeth in the history of the Scottish play!

  There was a long silence and she opened her eyes, to be confronted with the intense black conflagration in his.

  ‘What happened in there?’

  She tried to smile, failed and settled for a shrug. ‘Nothing. We talked. It’s over—I don’t have to feel any more horrible guilt or responsibility on Peggy’s behalf...she said she’d been having chest twinges for some time but had put them down to indigestion. As for the rest...well...’ She found a wall at her shoulder and leaned gratefully against it. Why did her legs seem not to work? ‘It was just as she told you...’

  Peggy’s struggle with language had reminded her uneasily of those terrible minutes in the hotel room and Rosalind had been no more proof against the agitated pleading of her eyes and the working of her distorted face than she had been on the last occasion.

  Peggy was deathly afraid of losing her family and, trapped by her disability, more vulnerable than ever to her deeply rooted feelings of shame. She had found Peter’s body, after calling in at his flat on the way to the hotel, and, as Rosalind had surmised, had fled in shock and panic. But she was under the impression that she had managed to redeem her wickedness by blurting everything out in the confused moments before she’d finally lost consciousness.

  Rosalind had tactfully glossed over the facts, hoping that the poor woman need never know of the true circumstances surrounding the discovery of her son’s body. Her grief over his death was muted by a shamed sense of relief and, true to the spirit which had characterised her behaviour all along, Peggy was desperate to have the past swept safely back under the carpet where it belonged.

  Rosalind hated it but she had been too exhausted to remember her rehearsed arguments, even if she could have brought herself to unleash them on the fragile bundle of humanity on the bed. She had the feeling that in years to come Peggy would continue to struggle with her conscience and ultimately pay the price of suppressing her unresolved grief.

  ‘And where does that leave us?’ Luke broke harshly into her anguished thoughts by placing a hand on the wall beside her head and dipping his face to force her to look at him.

  ‘Us?’ She was still an actress, wasn’t she? Maybe that was all she would ever be as far as Luke was concerned... but at least she could be the best.

  Rosalind summoned all her remaining courage and gave a tinkling laugh. ‘Oh, Luke, don’t be so intense. There is no us...that was just holiday fever...spiced up with intrigue and all our suspicions about each other. It’s a shame that it had to end in the way it did, but maybe it was for the best, because we’re back in the real world now and I really don’t think we have much in common—’

  She yelped as he shot out his other hand to slam it against the wall. ‘Oh, no, you don’t!’ he hammered out. ‘I didn’t chase you halfway across the world to be fobbed off with your flighty-actress routine! I told you before you walked in there that I love you. That meant something to you—I could see it; stop trying to deny it, damn it—I love you!’

  ‘Maybe you think you do,’ she said desperately, aware of the sick woman hovering like a spectre between them.

  Maybe in time, as she got stronger and better able to cope, Peggy would relent, but what if she didn’t? Rosalind imagined loving Luke, sharing his life, coming into contact with Peggy and Don, always walking on a knife-edge, aware that one careless word might sow the seeds of destruction in his adoptive parents’ marriage. She would stifle. In love, as in everything else, Rosalind was an all-or-nothing person. She would love freely and completely or not at all.

  ‘But you’re a realist, Luke; you know that isn’t always enough,’ she continued. ‘We...we want such different things from life—’

  ‘Yes—I want you and you want me,’ he said bluntly. ‘Different, and yet the same. We complement each other, Rosalind, we know that we fit together...like the two halves of a whole.’ His hands bunched into fists on the shiny white wall as he looked down into the carved stillness of her coldly classic features. ‘If you want this to be our final reckoning, so be it. Look at me and tell me you feel nothing for me. Convince me. Look into my eyes, damn you, and tell me that you don’t love me and never could.’

  She lifted tragic green eyes, rage breaking through the marble-like stillness of her façade. ‘I don’t love you, Luke, and I never could,’ she snarled, hating him for forcing her to be brutal.

  He drew a breath, and his hands fell heavily to her shoulders. His eyebrows slanted and his mouth quirked.

  ‘And people pay to see you do this?’ He cocked his head. ‘Oh, Roz
, I hope nobody ever asks me for my opinion of you as an actress.’

  His response was so unexpected that she began to slide down the wall. How could he not believe her? She thought she deserved an Academy award for her performance. ‘I don’t love you!’ she repeated feverishly. ‘I really don’t!’

  He caught her by the waist, preventing her from falling off the crazy tilt of the world. ‘We’ve done things round the wrong way, haven’t we, Roz... had the honeymoon before the wedding?’

  She held her hands up in a warding-off gesture, only to have them captured and kissed. ‘Luke, for God’s sake, it wouldn’t work—’

  ‘Why not?’

  A million reasons...most of them to do with other people, she thought.

  ‘It just wouldn’t. I have a career that takes me all over the place and I like to move around—have plenty of excitement going on in my life. You wouldn’t like it... you’re too conventional...you need to be settled... have a fixed home, family...children...’ A light went on in her overloaded brain. ‘You’d make a wonderful father; you should have a big, loving family of kids to make up for all you missed in being an only child. I can’t even give you one child’s love...’

  She went on to tell him that he hadn’t thought it through; she listed all the reasons why he would come to resent her childlessness and announced that she never intended to get married anyway because she didn’t see the point if there were no children to protect.

  ‘Fine. We’ll just live together for the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Luke!’

  He cupped her face tenderly. ‘Look, Rosalind, I know what you’re doing and it’s very kind of you, but you can’t protect me from my own emotions. Let me bear the responsibility for a change. I have thought this through. For the last twenty-four hours I’ve thought of nothing else. I know damned well that you and my aunt are linked in some way that she doesn’t want you to reveal, probably by something that happened in her past, something she’s bitterly ashamed of—and, for someone of her generation and religious upbringing, it’s probably to do with sex.

  ‘Now, I know that you can’t possibly be her daughter but maybe you’re her connection to someone else—No!’ He pinned her mouth shut with his thumb. ‘Let me finish. I’m not going to ask you about it again—I won’t ever ask you. I don’t have to. It’s between you and Peggy, not you and me.

  ‘Can’t you see that telling you I loved you before you walked into that room was an expression of faith? I will never lose faith in you, Roz. I believe in you. You’re a passionate idealist, a true and honest friend, never venal or self-serving at the expense of others, and because I have that certainty in my heart I can accept everything else on trust...

  ‘I love you for all your qualities...for your joy and your stubbornness, your fiery dramatics and your deep humanity—yes... even for your sterility.’

  There were tears again in the dark eyes, tears and something else that vanquished her doubts and fatigue—a deep, passionately held commitment to what he was saying.

  ‘The pain that you carry from your past is the part of the compassion you bring to the present. I’d love to heal that pain for you but I know I can’t; I can only do as you do for those you love: be there when the hurt is too much to bear alone. There might not be children from our love but—oh, Roz, there’ll still be love...so much love...’

  He leaned his forehead against hers and whispered prayerfully, ‘I need you to be there for me too, Roz. Through good and bad, in sickness and in health. That’s what this is all about. Trust. If you love me, then believe in me. Keep your secrets, and believe that nothing will make me betray our love. Please...’

  Rosalind’s arms went around him, tight and hard. It had taken magnificent courage for him to say all that, to open himself up so completely before she had uttered a single word of love, and she could feel the shock of it shivering through his entire body.

  Trust. Betrayal. Rosalind knew which of the two words she associated with Luke. He was intelligent, resourceful, sensitive and strong and deeply thoughtful...of course she trusted his judgement and the depth of his compassionate understanding. He would never betray those he loved, any more than Rosalind would. In that sense they were two of a kind. There would be difficulties ahead but Rosalind knew that there was no secret that she couldn’t share with him, no problem or sorrow they couldn’t discuss. For now, she was content to hug the revelation to herself, but she knew that one day soon she would talk to him about Peggy and Peter, and in doing so she would create not a gulf but another bridge of understanding...

  ‘The most important scene in my life and it’s being played out in an empty hospital waiting room,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘I somehow expected a revolving set and maybe a full orchestra and chorus. You’re a cheap guy with a proposal, Luke James!’

  His head lifted. ‘Is that an “I believe”?’ he asked rawly, a dark splendour dawning in his eyes at her flippant reply.

  She began laughing through her tears. Her dear, darling, cautious Luke wanted the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed.

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s an I believe. I love you, Luke James. Now and for always, I believe...’

  ISBN : 978-1-4592-6879-1

  A LESSON IN SEDUCTION

  First North American Publication 1997.

  Copyright © 1996 by Susan Napier.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure intention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A

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