The Final Seduction

‘Key!’ He held his hand out like a surgeon and Shelley found herself obediently handing it over, and he unlocked the house.

He held the door open for her, and she had to pass with breathtaking closeness to him. She found that she couldn’t look him in the face. The house screamed out its silence, and its emptiness made Shelley gulpingly aware that they were all alone…

She dared to raise her eyes at last, to discover that he wasn’t watching her at all, but was already poking around in the hall cupboard to find the meter and was punching out numbers on his mobile phone.

She listened with fascination, disbelief and finally incredulity as Drew managed to get himself put through to people further and further up the system—first at the Water Board and then at the Electricity Board. And when he’d finished he slid the phone back into his jeans and grinned.

‘Sorted! They’ll be here by the end of the afternoon.’

Shelley was aware of a great, gaping hole of insecurity which made her pathetically ungrateful for his help. So that instead of thanking him she found herself sniping, ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t you?’

He shrugged, half modestly. ‘Well, you don’t have to be clever to beat the system, Shelley—just have persistence and confidence with a little gift of the gab thrown in for good measure.’

‘And you’ve certainly got those three in abundance, haven’t you?’ she snapped, trailing into the sitting room, her heart beating even faster when she heard his footsteps behind her. ‘You’d have to be amazingly confident to go to the trouble of telling your staff to pretend that you didn’t own the Westward! And you must have told Jennie to join in with all the subterfuge, too—’

‘She didn’t want to,’ he confessed. ‘But I made her promise.’

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘And what prompted all this intrigue, I wonder, Drew? Not modesty, surely?’

He leaned negligently against a piano which had not been played for years. ‘Not modesty, no. Just a desire to see whether you’d changed.’

‘Whilst maintaining the pretence that you hadn’t?’

‘To be honest, I rather enjoyed being patronised by you, Shelley—it made a refreshing change. Women can be so obvious once they know you have money.’

Now why did it feel as though he was twisting the knife when he said something like that? Something told her that she was walking straight into a trap, but the wine had made her reckless. ‘How obvious?’ she asked. ‘A throwing-their-knickers-at-you sort of obvious?’

She saw the fractional darkening of his eyes, the crooked grin which made him look like a roguish kind of pirate, and again felt the dull ache of regret.

‘Mmm,’ he purred. ‘Unfortunately that hasn’t happened yet.’ He lifted his eyebrows in a kind of mocking question. ‘Of course, I live in hope, Shelley.’

His murmured words tugged at her with stealthy sorcery, and desire unfurled inside her like a bud in spring. She folded her arms across her chest, which didn’t really help at all. It was supposed to be a gesture of self-protection and defiance, but all it succeeded in doing was making her painfully aware of the tingling fullness of her breasts.

She thought about Marco’s gallery in Milan—the must-see place of the fashionable city. So what interested little question would she ask a man in whom she had no emotional interest? She would curve her lips into a polite half-smile. She did so. ‘And how did you manage to acquire the Westward in the first place, Drew? Did your Premium Bonds come up, or something?’

‘There’s that superior little voice again,’ he mocked. ‘How it does a man good to eat a little humble pie now and again—particularly when it comes from such a delectable source!’

‘No, seriously. I’m interested.’

‘Oh, well, if you’re interested…’ His mouth curved into a lazy smile. ‘Who told you, by the way?’

‘Told me what?’ she enquired innocently.

‘So you’ve learnt to play the tease?’ He gave a half-smile of rueful acknowledgement. ‘That I owned the Westward?’

Shelley kept her promise to the blonde. ‘Oh, come off it—how long did you honestly think you could keep something like that a secret for? I was bound to find out sooner rather than later!’

‘Which neatly answers the question, while not answering the question at all,’ he mused. ‘Very loyal of you, Shelley. Funny, that; I didn’t think that loyalty was a quality you rated very highly.’

‘I asked you a question which you were in the process of answering,’ she pointed out testily. ‘If you could just put your character assassination of me on hold!’