Passionate Retribution

'She was pregnant with me,' Luke supplied, his lips forming into a cynical smile. 'Hackneyed but accurate. There's no need to get all coy—I can recall several occasions when you flung that fact at me in moments of pique.'

Emily took a deep breath, a swift, horrified denial springing to her lips. 'I…' Mortified, she realised his accusation was unpalatably true. She had been a little brat at times.

'My mother supported us both until I was ten. I won't bore you with the details of a life which by your standards would have seemed impoverished,' he drawled. 'She found out at that point that she had a disease which was likely to leave me an orphan prematurely.'

Emily found herself straining to listen to his unemotional narrative. Her eyes grew dark at the dilemma which had faced this unknown woman, and part of her wondered whether she who had never had to face such harsh realities could have coped even up to that point, bringing up a child alone. She felt a surge of inadequacy when faced with such self-sacrifice.

'So she swallowed her pride and decided to turn to her family. The old lady was long dead and lacking any direct heir—at least one she would recognise. She had left the lot to your father, her nephew, with the proviso that he would take responsibility for her grandchild in the event of my mother's demise. Charlie pointed out that my mother had not at that point died.' He raised his eyes to her horror-struck face, and his expression was inflexibly hard, as though his features were hewn out of marble rather than flesh and blood. It was at that moment she realised the depth of his hatred, his rage.

The realisation was a profound experience. Luke's contempt, his casual derision, all took on a new dimension. Had she been stupid not to look below the surface before? The question swirled together with a multitude of others in the chaotic morass of speculation that shook her to the foundations…challenged all the parameters of her life.

'I won't go into the details of just how much she suffered,' he said, his voice aloof, only his eyes alive with an active fury that added momentum to the warning bells of disquiet in her head. 'She was a tough woman, but I watched her grow weaker, frailer. I was impotent to help. Shall we just say I made a vow a long time ago to administer a suitable punishment?'

'You were a child,' she protested huskily.

'Childhood is a modern concept. Children are capable of great passion just as some adults are capable of insipid apathy.' He looked at her, contempt twisting his expression.

She couldn't doubt that his comment was intended to be personal, but she was too preoccupied by his revelations to react to the fact. 'Are you using me?' Crazy ideas that her present situation had been contrived for his own malignant purpose refused to retreat, even though logic told her the suspicion was misplaced. If the tender scene in the conservatory had been a shock to her, there couldn't have been any way for Luke to have predicted it. No, he had just taken the heaven-sent opportunity it presented to him to inflict as much pain on the Stapelys as possible, and she had been almost co-operative from his point of view… stupid from her own.

Luke's eyes were blatantly mocking. 'I thought we'd already agreed that this was a mutually beneficial arrangement. You knew you were a contrivance, so why the wide-eyed horror now?' he drawled.

'I have agreed to nothing; I've been coerced. Besides, that was before…' she began falteringly. What he'd said was true, but then it hadn't had the same significance. She hadn't been prepared for the depth, the shocking intensity, of his revulsion. His attitude had always seemed to spring from a certain perverse desire to challenge her parents' blinkered, smug outlook on life, but this dark hatred that had taken seed all those years ago was quite different. It had been there all along beneath the urbane exterior, a core of lethal ire, a passion that craved justice. She wasn't at all sure any more, looking at a face stripped bare of all languid cynicism, just how far he was prepared to go in his crusade. She shivered, suddenly aware of the cold in the room that seemed to seep from the stone walls. The isolation was like an emptiness in the pit of her stomach.

'Before you caught a glimpse of the real world?'

'None of this seems very real to me,' she said, her voice filled with the weariness that made her droop quite literally with lassitude. 'I didn't ask to be spirited away here; in fact, I specifically told you I wouldn't come. You haven't listened to a word I've said from the outset. What is it with you? The gospel according to Saint Luke?' She shook her head. 'Why can't you let the past die?'

'Like my mother?'

'You said before that my father killed your mother. But she took her own life, Luke.' She felt no urge, especially at the moment to defend her father, but the injustice of that accusation still bothered her.