Sandra Marton - Mistresses - Bound with Gold / Bought with Emeralds

She stiffened. She couldn’t see his eyes, but the stillness of his face suggested a penetrating watchfulness. She moved up to press her stomach against the rail, using the excuse of leaning over to study the boats they were passing to show him a delicate, unrevealing profile.

Now was her chance to do the honourable thing. To forestall any future trouble for Ryan with a full and frank confession. She would have to trust to Joshua’s strong sense of justice, and the compassion she now knew he possessed, and hope that he would appreciate the honesty of her intentions…

‘He has a crush on you, you know.’

Her head whipped around, as he had known it would, the glossy hair flaring out from her skull in a blue-black spray.

‘Ryan? Don’t be ridiculous!’ spilled out of her lips.

‘The more attention you pay him, the more likely he is to presume that you mean something by it,’ he told her.

She lifted her chin. ‘I do: it means I like him.’

‘In spite of him being my son?’ he guessed, putting a finger on her dilemma.

‘He’s a very nice boy,’ she sniffed.

‘He wouldn’t thank you for calling him a boy. He’s a

young man, filled with a young man’s passions…’

And foolish ideals.

Regan bit her lip and he turned to join her at the rail, his shoulder brushing against her navy sleeve as he bent to lean on both elbows, looking down into their lightly churning wake. ‘Ryan loves complexity and finds any sort of mystery irresistible. You can’t blame him for being intrigued, you’re probably the most complex woman he’s ever encountered. Add big violet eyes and a sleek little body to the equation and you have a perfect recipe for infatuation. He may think his intellect will protect him from emotional harm, but he doesn’t realise that some emotions are not always answerable to reason…’

That was cutting too close to the bone. She looked at his bowed head, noting the way the breeze ruffled his hair, and the silky black growth on his muscled forearm. ‘I really think you’re overreacting—I’m just a novelty—’

‘He watches you when he thinks you aren’t looking…’

She tore her yearning gaze away from his averted head.

‘So? You have no idea what’s going on inside his brain.’

‘I know how males think. And I know Ryan better than most men know their sons.’

‘I just don’t think he thinks about me that way,’ she said feebly. ‘You make it sound as if I’m some kind of femme fatale… ’

He straightened up, removing his sunglasses, and she immediately wished he would put them back on. His eyes made her stomach lurch. Then she realised there was a physical reason for her reaction; they were moving out of the mouth of the canal into the light chop of the channel which extended from a half-melon of sandy beach—dotted with family groups taking advantage of the school holidays—to the open gulf.

‘And you make it sound as if you don’t believe you’re innately attractive to men. That unless you set out to entice a man he’ll simply ignore your femininity. Why, I wonder?’

Regan’s fingers automatically moved to twist her absent wedding ring. ‘I’m not here for psychoanalysis,’ she rasped.

‘You sound a little dry,’ he said gently. ‘Would you like something to lubricate your throat while we argue the point?’ He signalled to someone out of Regan’s sight-line, and she completely lost her train of thought when she saw who it was bringing forward the silver tray.

‘Champagne cocktail or tropical crush, Mam’selle Eve?’

She blushed furiously at the sight of his ugly face, pruned into a wrinkled smile. ‘Hello, Pierre,’ she said faintly, grabbing the nearest drink without caring what it contained.

‘Actually, her name is Regan,’ Joshua told his man, accepting a stemmed glass of straw-coloured liquid containing a hulled strawberry. ‘She prefers to reserve Evangeline for those occasions when she’s incognito.’

Regan jerked around to remonstrate, and fruit juice spilled out of her glass down the lapel of her jacket.

‘Ah, Mam’selle, let me sponge that out for you before it stains.’ The glass was taken out of her hand and her jacket removed and borne away into the air-conditioned depths of the vessel before she could do much more than stutter a protest.

‘I think you might be safer with the champagne,’ said Joshua, handing her one of the tall cocktails, his eyes flicking over the white singlet top she had worn under her navy suit.

‘How did you find out my middle name?’ she demanded.

Joshua toasted her with his glass. ‘I asked around.’

She knew what that meant for a man of his wealth and power.

‘You mean you had me investigated,’ she snapped.

‘Do you blame me?’

No, that was the problem. It was what she would have done were their circumstances reversed.

‘I hope you got your money’s worth,’ she gritted.

The prow of the boat eased higher in the water as a low grumble signalled a surge of power from the throttle, and as Regan listed on the wooden decking in a belated attempt to find her sea legs Joshua reached out to steady her, his fingers firm on her waist. The breeze became a tugging wind as the vessel cut through the water with smoothly accelerating speed and the airstream flowed around the sleekly aerodynamic body to flute invisibly above the turbulent wake.

‘Not yet.’ His steadying hand dropped away. ‘I’m only getting my reports in dribs and drabs. And it’s mostly raw facts, not feelings. Care to fill in the blanks?’

He waited, and when she said nothing he continued with surgical precision.

‘With such a fanatically religious mother and a passive alcoholic as a father you were bound to grow up sexually repressed and hungry for praise and affection—you must have been a sitting duck for a manipulative, smooth-talking bastard like Frances. He found out about your connection with Sir Frank and deliberately set out to recreate himself in the image of your ideal husband. But he never intended to be faithful to the image, did he?’

Regan sucked in a sharp breath. Laid out in his stark words the truth seemed even more ugly. ‘You have no right—’

‘I’ve been there myself,’ he said quietly. ‘I know how it feels to realise that your loyalty has been secured by a lie. You blame yourself for not seeing it from the beginning.’

‘I don’t want to talk about him.’

‘Fine. Then let’s talk about us.’

She set her untasted drink sharply down on the glass table which held the silver drinks tray. ‘There is no us! ’

He set his glass beside hers and shadowed her back to the rail. ‘Tell me, why did you come to the apartment that night?’

‘Why don’t you ask your informant?’ she said bitterly.

‘What happened that night was not part of his brief,’ he said with dangerous softness. ‘But that could change with one phone call…’

She blanched. ‘My flatmate’s cousin is Cleo—she was the one who was supposed to meet you that night, but she was sick. I took her place, but I didn’t tell anyone. No one knew—not even Derek.’

‘That explains how, but not why, ’ he said, his eyes narrowed intently on her face. ‘It’s so out of character with everything else I’ve found out about you.’

‘Maybe I was wild with grief,’ she said sardonically.

But he was implacable. ‘A kind of grief, perhaps. Was it anything to do with Cindy Carson visiting your flat? You never knew your husband had had a mistress, did you? Not until she confronted you.’

Regan thought that she would have preferred being interrogated about her attempt to fiddle the books to this painful emotional plunder!