Vanessa was disturbed by his relentless intensity. ‘It happened years ago. It really has nothing to do with you—’
‘It does if you’re going to faint with fear every time you approach a climax in my arms.’
‘Benedict!’ She folded her arms protectively across her breasts as they surged back to aching life. Tiny cramps of treacherous pleasure ripped through her body, causing an immediate panic. ‘I can’t let it happen again,’ she said desperately. ‘I can’t afford to get involved with you—’
‘Why? I’m free, I won’t cost you anything.’
His attempted lightness caught her on the raw, lancing another festering boil. ‘That’s what he said, and in the end it cost me everything I had!’
‘What are you talking about?’
It was time he knew. Perhaps then this awful agony of indecision and apprehension would be over. He would reject her finally and completely before it was too late. He would fire her and she could crawl away with her pride in tatters but her fragile heart still intact.
‘I’m talking about why I left England when I did,’ she said in a hard voice that matched the shellac shine in her eyes.
‘I had to. You see it wasn’t just Julian I slept with. Oh, no. I had sex with his father, too, even though he was fat and ugly and old enough to be my grandfather. I didn’t care because I knew he was rich.’ The words began to pour from her in a brittle avalanche, gathering an icy momentum of their own. ‘I had it all perfectly planned, you see. I insinuated myself into Egon’s household and then I seduced him in the marital bed and persuaded him to kick his wife out into the street. I made sure he alienated the rest of his family and then I convinced him to write a new will that disinherited them all and left his entire fortune to me. Then he conveniently died of a heart-attack, probably because I injected an air bubble into his veins one night when we were having sex. Only the autopsy never proved it, so I got away scot-free.’
‘What in the hell are you talking about?’
Behind the mask of his bewildered shock she knew what was happening. His fastidious mind was already beginning to recoil from the muck-racking lies. Mud sticks. That was what the St Clairs had relied on when they had started their sordid rumour campaign—Julian included. He had robbed her almost simultaneously of her virginity and her virtue. By the time the furore had died down she had been a social and professional pariah, clean only in the eyes of her father and Judge Seaton, who had been a personal friend of Egon St Clair and knew the greed and viciousness of which Belinda St Clair and her offspring were capable. The judge had been as shocked and angry as Vanessa that Egon had chosen to make her an unwitting accomplice to his posthumous revenge on his estranged wife by naming her as his heir, thereby setting her up as the sole target of her furious malice. He had suggested that she sue the St C
lairs for slander and the papers for libel, but Vanessa had just wanted to put the whole horrible nightmare behind her. She couldn’t face more prying publicity; the snickers and the pointing and the leering curiosity had sickened and sapped her spirit almost to the point of breaking.
‘Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t prosper from all my sordid crimes,’ she flung at Benedict in wretched defiance, hating him for sitting there so silent, so still, unquestioning, accepting. ‘The fortune turned out to be wildly inflated and I had to sign away my claim to avoid financial litigation. I’m surprised you don’t recall the juicy details; it made the tabloids all over the world. It was a story with everything—kinky sex, blackmail, fraud and murder. You should ask to see my scrapbook some time! Nothing ever came to court, of course, but that’s only because I was too clever for the cops—the police couldn’t dig up enough solid evidence to bring charges. But this is probably no surpirse to you, right?’ she goaded, at the end of her tether. ‘You always thought there was something suspicious about me and the judge. Maybe you were right. A woman with my back-ground—’
She broke off. His head was bent, his shoulders were shaking. He was erupting with rage, with outrage; he was going to slice her heart out of her chest with a few brutal words and sling her into an exile far worse than the oblivion she had already endured. But then he threw his head back and she saw that he was laughing—laughing...
For a moment she thought she was going to vomit with the pain. She leapt to her feet, black dots dancing nauseatingly in front of her stinging eyes. ‘Oh, so you think it’s funny, do you?’ she choked. ‘My life being ruined is just a big joke to you—’
She whirled to run but he was up, catching her by the elbow, still laughing. ‘No, Vanessa! Listen—’
‘Listen? You—’ She tried to hit him and he twisted her arm behind her back.
‘I wasn’t laughing—’
The blatant untruth made her twist violently. ‘Let me go, you filthy liar—’
‘Vanessa.’ He shook her panting form roughly. ‘You can’t fling things like that at me in a temper and expect me to take them seriously. Besides, if that farrago of ridiculous nonsense bears any relation to reality I’ll eat my hat. Of course I laughed. To anyone who knows you at all the idea of you being an evil, gold-digging vamp is totally risible. What you know about seduction can be written on the head of a pin! You have no idea what turns a man on. Now, why don’t you just calm down and tell me about your deep, dark, dreaded past properly, instead of waving it in front of my face like a red rag to a bull? You got exactly the reaction you damned well deserved...’
And so had he, thought Vanessa savagely a few fraught moments later, looking in her rear-view mirror to see the masculine figure standing in a cloud of sandy dust as she accelerated recklessly away from the beach. Was he shaking his fist at her? He was certainly furious, his last frustrated yell ringing in her ears.
‘You can’t run away from your emotions forever, Vanessa. I won’t let you use Whitefield as your private bolt-hole to avoid life’s nasty human complications—’
At least she had got the final word in. As she’d slammed the car door, almost catching his fingers in the process, she had yelled back, ‘Why not? You are! I never believed you decided to come down to Whitefield out of the blue just for an innocent holiday. You said you needed to get away and Auckland was too accessible. You’re running away from something, too, so don’t preach your self-serving sermons at me!’
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS a miracle that Vanessa didn’t kill herself on the drive back to Whitefield. She could hardly see the road for tears and she was shaking so badly that the gears ground fiercely with every change.
She wasn’t a masochist, she told herself fiercely. She wasn’t going to set herself up for another lesson in the miseries of unrequited love. Back there on the beach she had realised, to her horror, that she was even more vulnerable to her emotions now than she had been five years ago. Julian’s charm had been largely superficial, his character incapable of a great depth of emotion, and at some instinctual level she must have realised that, for, although his rejection and betrayal had been wretchedly painful at the time, she had survived it by despising him and forgiving herself for her immaturity.
Benedict—clever, cultured, cloaked in layers of intriguing emotional complexity—was impossible to despise. Such a serious man would never love easily—or feign love where it didn’t exist—and he was cruelly honest about his intentions. He was looking for a lover, not a lifelong companion. He was rejecting her love before it was even offered.
Well, this time she was going to be the one doing the rejecting, Vanessa told herself as she spun the car recklessly into the gates at Whitefield. A volatile cocktail of temptation and challenge had temporarily deranged the molecules of her brain, that was all. Her feelings towards Benedict were pure chemistry—and she was a stout opponent of chemical dependencies.
She wasn’t in love with him. She refused to be. She would stick to her original plan and fall in love with Richard and he would be kind and tender and never terrify her with feelings she couldn’t control, or force himself into every crack and corner of her consciousness until she felt her life wasn’t her own any more!
Suddenly Vanessa slammed on the brakes, fish-tailing the car on the gravel as she almost rear-ended the snazzy yellow left-hand-drive Corvette parked crookedly with its boot open on the forecourt.