Ruthless Tycoon, Innocent Wife

She was aware of his eyes boring into the small of her back as she and Crystal walked towards her little car, which was parked some way from his. It was only when they were inside and she had started the engine that she found herself breathing again.

‘You all right, sweetheart?’ Crystal asked quietly as Marianne swung the car round too fast and screeched past the two men without responding to Tom’s raised hand.

‘I’m fine.’ Fine. The word mocked her. Would she ever be fine again for the length of time that man was in her life?

CHAPTER THREE

RAFE STEED watched the car drive away without responding to Tom’s chatter at the side of him. In truth he didn’t hear the other man, his mind and senses still tied up with the young woman who was the product of the marriage between his father’s old love and his rival.

He had, quite unjustly, he admitted to himself, pictured a different kind of female from the one Marianne presented when his father had first told him about this love for Diane Carr. The fact that everyone had told him the daughter was the spitting image of her mother, both physically and in temperament, had prepared him for a cold, calculating, beautiful woman with her eye to the main chance. The sort of woman who didn’t mind trampling over anyone who got in her way. He hadn’t been too sure of Marianne’s sincerity at the funeral—it was difficult to gauge the depth of someone at such an occasion, when emotions were naturally running high—but today she had surprised him.

‘…hearing from your solicitor in the next day or two?’

Too late, Rafe realised Tom was waiting for an answer to a question he hadn’t heard. ‘Sorry?’ He forced a smile. ‘I was miles away, Tom.’

‘I said I’ll get things moving at my end straight away and I’ll assume I’ll be hearing from your solicitor soon.’

‘Of course.’ He nodded, wanting only to get away. ‘Look, I’ve an appointment…’

‘You go, Rafe.’ Tom held out his hand and Rafe shook it. ‘We’ll talk soon.’

Rafe watched Tom drive out of the car park, raising his hand in farewell, but once the dust from the other man’s car had settled he made no attempt to turn on the ignition of his hire car. He frowned and folded his arms, leaning back in the leather seat and shutting his eyes for a moment or two. He had been racing around like a headless chicken for the last week but it wasn’t tiredness that was claiming his mind. He was used to living life in the fast lane; in fact, he thrived on it. He couldn’t quite place what the feeling was that had him at sixes and sevens but it was all tied up with a certain woman with hair the colour of ripe corn and eyes like black velvet.

Damn it. He sat up straight, his eyes snapping open and his mouth hardening. What was the matter with him? He was too old and cynical to be taken in by a pretty face.

He watched as a young family came back to their aged saloon, the parents slightly harrassed as they ushered their three young children into the back of the car, settling the youngest one into a baby seat and making sure the seat belts were securely fastened round the other two. Those three children had no more than a fifty-fifty chance of their parents staying together long enough for the oldest to reach his teens, and maybe fifty-fifty was on the generous side. Monogamy, marriage, the promise till death us do part was a joke. As he knew only too well. But, having learnt the lesson, he wouldn’t forget it. One venture down the aisle and a divorce which had been public and messy had ensured that.

Shifting irritably in his seat, he started the engine. Funny, but the kick in the teeth his failed marriage had given him hadn’t seemed so bad as the recent revelations about his parents. He supposed that in a small part of his mind he had held them up as the perfect couple—proof that love could endure all things and remain constant to the end. Would he have preferred to remain in ignorance about Diane Carr and his father’s feelings for another woman?

Damn right, he would. He drove out of the car park onto the Cornish lane beyond, the narrow road and high hedgerows limiting the speed of the sleek sports car. Ignorance really could be bliss after all.

Of course, thinking about it, he’d forced the issue with his father, by objecting to his move to England. It had been a mixture of desperation and exasperation which had prompted his father to tell him about his roots and his hankering for his homeland, along with the story of why he had left Cornwall and travelled halfway round the world in search of peace of mind.

And his father had found that with his mother—he knew that—but peace of mind wasn’t enough. Rafe scowled to himself as he drove. However his father tried to explain it away by saying he wanted to end his days in the place where he had been born, close to his ancestors, it had been the memory of his first love which had driven him to come back. He knew it, whatever his father said to the contrary. Look how he’d been when he had first mentioned the girl being turned out of her home because of vast debts. Instead of his father taking hidden satisfaction in the turn around in his old rival’s finances, he had been horrified for Diane’s daughter.

His scowl deepening, Rafe changed gear with enough venom for the car to growl a protest. Well, one thing was for sure, once he’d got his father settled into the Haywards’ place and the alterations to Seacrest were underway, he’d limit his visits to England to the bare minimum. His father had chosen the path he wanted the rest of his life to take and that was fine. Just fine. He didn’t need his father any more than his father apparently needed him.

He reached a crossroads and waited for a pair of cyclists to pass in front of him, refusing to acknowledge the little voice in the back of his mind that was telling him he was acting like a spoilt brat. Once the cyclists had vanished in a jumble of long brown legs and brightly coloured shorts and trainers he continued to sit, the hot sunshine bouncing off the bonnet of the car and the haze of summer drifting through the open car window.

What was it about Marianne Carr that sent bolts of desire sizzling through his body every time he laid eyes on the woman? He didn’t like it, he didn’t want it and yet that day at the funeral—totally inappropriately, he admitted wryly—he’d been as hard as a rock from the moment he had first seen her. It was the last thing he had expected and it had knocked him for six.

A brightly coloured butterfly drifted in through one window and out through another as he continued to stare grimly ahead.

He was thirty-five years old, for crying out loud, and nothing if not a man of the world. He couldn’t remember the last occasion a woman had affected him so primitively but it had been a long time ago, probably in his teens. There had been a cute little redhead in his last year of high school and she’d had every guy weak at the knees and uncomfortable in a certain part of their anatomy for an hour after she’d looked their way. Candy Price, that had been her name, and she had been built like one of the old Hollywood film stars, with curves in all the right places and eyes that promised paradise. Not that he’d found out whether that was true or not. Wealthy as his parents had been, she’d reserved her favours for Chuck Martin, the local millionaire’s son, who had spots and braces but who drove a sports car and flashed the dollars around like money had gone out of fashion.

A toot behind him reminded him he wasn’t the only car on the road and he pulled into the lane ahead, gathering speed as he drove.

But Candy Price wasn’t at all like Marianne Carr. One was brazen voluptuousness and the other a cool-as-cucumber English miss who had a way of looking at you that indicated she thought you’d just crawled out from under a stone. Mind, she’d lost a little of that coolness today. His hand touched his cheek and he smiled darkly. He hadn’t seen that slap coming but she sure packed a punch for such a slender young thing.

It had been his fault. He nodded to the thought. He could have put things more sensitively but somehow she had got under his skin.

No, be honest, he checked himself in the next breath. It had been the fact that he couldn’t control the way his body reacted to her that had got under his skin, which wasn’t the same thing. And, damn it, he didn’t get it. He liked his women to be built on the lines of Candy Price rather than fragile and slender; women who were game for a lusty good time with no strings attached and who would remain friends once the affair was over. He was always honest, he always explained he wasn’t the marrying kind—once bitten, twice shy—and that he would run a mile from commitment and everything that went with it. He’d found the world was full of beautiful, unattache

d women who saw life the same way he did. He had no complaints.

A bird suddenly flew from one side of the hedgerow to the other, narrowly missing the windscreen, and it was enough to jolt him into the realisation that the speedometer had crept up past seventy, which was far too fast for a Cornish country lane. Reducing his speed quickly, he told himself to concentrate. Ruthlessly wiping his mind clear, he continued to drive at a moderate speed, even humming quietly to himself after a while.

By the time he arrived at the little hotel where he was staying he felt calmer. It wasn’t until he was in the shower later that evening that he realised he had come to some sort of a decision on the drive home that afternoon. He would give Victoria Blackthorn a ring, ask her out. She had made it plain she wanted to see him again when he had driven her home that day after the funeral and he had the feeling she would be on his wavelength completely. She was a very attractive young woman, feminine but independent and career-motivated. Just what he wanted, in fact. You knew where you stood with someone like Victoria, who had embraced equality between the sexes and had no compunction about letting a man know she liked him.