Robyn Donald - Element Of Risk

Her relief startled her, lowering her guard enough for her to blurt, ‘Didn’t you even wonder?’

His mouth twisted. ‘I didn’t know you were pregnant. Your mother certainly wasn’t telling anyone.’

Perdita opened her mouth to tell him that Natalie had known, she had visited her in the nursing home, but he forestalled her ruthlessly. ‘Not that it matters. Even if you can prove that you are their birth mother, Perdita, you have no legal claim to the children.’

‘I know that. I accept it. Is it so difficult to believe that I simply want to see them, to reassure myself that they’re happy?’

He said forcefully, ‘I don’t think you’d be a good influence.’

Perdita’s head lifted sharply, the bell of heavy hair falling across her neck in a silken swathe. For a moment she was speechless, scanning his face to see whether he could possibly be joking. He wasn’t. He meant every word he said. Evenly, almost lightly, she asked, ‘Why is that?’

‘The life you’ve led these past ten years.’ He waited for her answer, and when she didn’t speak said with cold-blooded austerity, ‘My daughters are only ten, Perdita. You’ve spent those ten years in the fast lane, living with a variety of lovers, leading an infinitely more sophisticated life than anything New Zealand can offer. I’d be at fault as a father if I allowed you the chance to impose your demi-mondaine manners and morals on them.’

Her face a mask of scorn, she got to her feet and confronted him fearlessly. ‘What a smug, sanctimonious prig you are, Luke. I don’t understand how Natalie could love you. Listen to me, and don’t forget it, because I’m not going to say it again. I intend to see my children. If necessary I’ll stay in Manley until they come back from wherever you’ve hidden them, and then sneak around to see them. I gave you the chance of doing it properly, but I will see them, whether you want me to or not.’

Ignoring his sharply indrawn breath, she turned towards the door, but before she had reached it he was barring the way, his face set in lines of contempt and anger, aquamarine eyes blazing with frigid fire.

‘Let me past,’ she said between her teeth.

‘Not until I’ve had my say,’ he returned dangerously. ‘Listen to me, Perdita, and for once think of someone other than yourself. Those girls have just come through a traumatic time. They don’t need any more pain. I swear, if you hurt them, confuse them or upset them, I’ll make you suffer so much that you’ll wish to God you’d never been born.’

She had to tilt her head back to look up into his face. Sheer fury turned her eyes to smoky pools, her voice to a molten purr. ‘Then you’d better come with them when I see them,’ she said softly, ‘so that you can monitor my behaviour. Because I am going to see them.’

He swore. Perdita had learned to ignore swearing, but she flinched at the naked hatred in his voice. ‘You little bitch,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought I was rid of you—why the hell did you have to come back?’

An emotion Perdita thought had died forever struggled in painful rebirth deep in some walled-off portion of her heart.

‘You must have known I would, as soon as I found out where the girls were.’

‘I didn’t know you were their mother until I got your letter three days ago.’ His eyes were opaque and hard and lethal. ‘We were told their mother had gone overseas and wouldn’t be coming back.’

‘Whoever told you that was wrong. I’m like Nemesis,’ she said silkily. ‘I never give up. Now, get out of my way.’

He stepped back as though the mere touch of her would contaminate him. ‘I’ll serve you with a non-molestation order,’ he threatened.

‘I’ll go to the media,’ she countered sweetly. ‘It would make good headlines, wouldn’t it? Especially if the British tabloids got hold of it. I’m quite famous, you know—they’d enjoy a good juicy scandal like that.’

He seemed to grow a further six inches. The implacable resistance she sensed in him was converted into a cold, concentrated fury. ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said in an almost soundless voice.

She couldn’t allow herself to be intimidated so completely. ‘Are you prepared to bet on that?’ she asked. ‘After all, anyone with my morals and manners has to be untrustworthy by definition.’

His hands slid around her throat. Fear slithered on evil cats’ feet through Perdita’s body, throbbed in the pulse beneath his fingers, chilled the anger in her veins to elemental ice. She saw pitiless determination in the gaze that fixed on to her mouth, smelt the faint, unmistakable scent of male, aroused and relentless.

Once before Luke Dennison had slipped the leash of his control to reveal the primal male to her. Now she saw it again, and as had happened that last time, an elemental terror turned her bones to liquid.

‘I’ve already warned you,’ he said quietly, a thumb coming to rest over the busy betrayer in her throat. ‘You’ve pushed as far as you’re going to, Perdita. Any more, and you’d better be ready for retaliation.’

Common sense told her that there was nothing he could do to her. This was New Zealand, after all.

Instinct knew otherwise.

Yet she didn’t flinch, even though she felt the colour drain from her skin. ‘Stop trying to frighten me,’ she said, green eyes as cold as his, and every bit as determined. ‘None of this drama is necessary, Luke. If you let me meet the children I’ll go on my way, and you won’t need to be bothered by me any more.’

‘I don’t want you anywhere near them,’ he said, levering her chin upwards to an unnatural angle that stretched her throat towards the frail boundary between discomfort and pain.

His immediate, total rejection scored across her heart like the cruellest of whips. She lowered her lashes so that all she could see of his face was the angular line of his jaw, as obdurate as his character, tough and uncompromising. She should have expected this; she, of all people, knew how hard he could be.

‘You can’t stop me,’ she said, hating the tremor in her voice, trying to summon courage from some deep inner reserve. ‘Be sensible, Luke. You can’t keep them imprisoned forever, and there’s no way you can run me out of town this time.’

‘Go on,’ he said when she fell silent.

‘That’s all. I’m going to see them.’

‘Damn you,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been haunted by you for bloody years—you must have known that coming back here would put us all in an intolerable situation!’

Then he kissed her.

The fierce possession of his mouth summoned a fire that marked her soul. Searing through the debris and accretions of the past eleven years, it stripped every bit of studied worldliness from her to cast her back into the adolescent turmoil of her first crush, the year she had turned seventeen.

Natalie had given her a watch and a new wardrobe to mark her status as an adult, and, dressed in the clothes his wife had bought for her, Perdita had fallen in love with Luke, helpless in the grip of a blind, unrequited passion.

That same passion, so newly reawakened, thrummed through her now with an intensity she didn’t even try to resist. She melted, her mouth softening, yielding, opening to his like a flower to the sun. Drumbeats pulsed through her in a rhythm of desire. Shivering, she was suffused with heat.

Luke ground his mouth on to hers, but almost immediately the quality of the kiss changed, transformed into seduction pure and simple, as nakedly sexual as the embrace that clamped her hips against his, as the utterly masculine promise that fitted so snugly between the notch in her legs.

Perdita drowned in sensation, sanity and reason wrecked by a flood of carnality.