The Morning After

‘Ask Susi

e if you don’t believe me,’ she prompted when deriding scepticism that anyone could love a promiscuous bitch like her turned his attractive mouth ugly. ‘Ask her why all her other attempts to make Todd dismiss me from his life have failed. And ask yourself why a beautiful, desirable woman like Susie cannot win her man on her terms without having to bring you in to do it for her.

‘Ask her—’ she gently thrust her strongest point home ‘—if she’s ever asked Todd why he refuses to give me up, and if she’s honest, Mr DeSanquez, she’ll tell you that she has asked him, and Todd had told her, quite clearly, that he loves me and will always love me until the day he dies—no matter what I do.’

Silence. She had him wondering, and Annie had to stifle the urge to smile in triumph. The way his sleek black brows were pulling downwards over the bridge of his long, thin nose told her that she had forced him to consider what she’d said.

‘You could keep me here for six months—a year! but when I eventually went back Todd would be waiting for me with open arms. Is Susie prepared to live with that?’ she challenged. ‘Knowing that, no matter how deeply she manages to inveigle Todd into her clutches, I will always be there like the shadowed wings of a hawk in their lives, waiting to swoop down and steal him right away from her?’

This felt good—really good! Annie thought with relish as he spun restlessly away. He poured another drink, swallowed it down in one go then turned, forcing her to smooth the pleased glow out of her eyes as he glanced sharply back at her.

‘You really are the shrewd, calculating bitch my family label you, are you not?’ he said grimly.

‘I am what I am.’ She shrugged, throwing his own words of earlier right back at him.

‘And what made you what you are, I wonder?’ he mused angrily.

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ she said. ‘There’s a final ingredient in all of this which should clear that up.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘You see, I love Todd in exactly the same way that he loves me. Only, we are not allowed to show it because of Todd’s mother. You do know who Todd’s mother is, don’t you?’ she questioned tauntingly.

‘She is Lady Sarah Hanson,’ she provided the answer whether he knew it or not. ‘A woman with pure blue aristocratic blood running through her veins. She would die rather than see her son align himself with a woman with my reputation.’ Her soft mouth twisted on that little truism.

‘Lady Sarah also suffers from a chronic heart condition,’ she went on. Most of this was the absolute truth—most of it. ‘Todd is strong—tough—but draws the line at killing his own mother.’ She gave a helpless shrug. ‘Your Susie doesn’t stand a chance against a love like ours, Mr DeSanquez,’ she concluded, ‘and you would be doing her a bigger service by telling her that, rather than trying to blackmail me.’

At that she got up, mentally crossing her fingers that she’d managed to swing it. He was certainly not as confident as he had been, nor—oddly—as contemptuous of her as he studied her thoughtfully.

‘No.’ He shook his dark head and her heart sank. ‘You are wrong. I have seen the way he looks at my cousin, and no matter what you believe about his feelings for you Hanson gazes at her like a man angrily frustrated in love. Whatever hold you may have on him, and I do not deny it is there,’ he conceded, ‘I think it is time—perhaps more than time—that both you and Hanson learned to forget each other.

‘I saw the way you were with him the other night, watched the seductive way you utterly bewitched him, seducing him with your promising smiles and the sensual brush of your exquisite body.’ Contemptuously his gaze raked over her. ‘Susie has a chance with him with you out of the way,’ he concluded. ‘She stands none while you are around.’

‘So what is your plan?’ she scoffed at him deridingly, her mind tumbling over itself in an effort to find the hidden key that would stop all of this. ‘To keep me here tonight and tomorrow night and the next and the next in the hopes that it will blacken me in his eyes? Didn’t you hear a word I said?’ she sighed. ‘Todd doesn’t care what I do or who I do it with! He will forgive me for you and he will forgive me for breaking my contract with Cliché!’

‘Then you have a rather big problem on your hands, Miss Lacey,’ he countered grimly. ‘Because if you do not find a way of convincing him that you care nothing for him any more then I withdraw my support for his magazine. So now what do you suggest that we do?’

Catch twenty-two. Annie felt her heart sink in her breast.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I SEE I have managed to silence that quick little tongue of yours,’ he taunted when the silence stretched out between them. ‘But I would appreciate a suggestion as to how we overcome the stalemate we seem to have created.’

‘I don’t have one,’ Annie admitted dully, eyes lowered so that he wouldn’t see the frustration glittering there.

‘I see,’ he said silkily. ‘Then it seems to be up to me to find it for you. That is, of course,’ he then prompted, ‘if you are prepared to do anything to save Hanson from ruin?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, with a numbness that encompassed her whole being.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he drawled aggravatingly, coming to lean over her, bracing his hands on the arms of her chair. ‘Was that a yes? I did not quite catch the word.’

‘Yes—it was a yes!’ she flared, her fingers clenching into tight fists of frustration on her lap. ‘I’ll do anything to save Todd from ruin!’ Then, on a sudden flood of tears that blurred her beautiful eyes, she choked, ‘Anything, damn you—anything!’

It was odd, but the tears seemed to throw him. His eyes widened, shocked surprise showing on his lean face before he suddenly jerked away from her as if those tears held poison in them and he was afraid of dying if they so much as touched his skin.

But anyone who knew Annie well would also have known that when tears flowed from her eyes so did her temper burn up to counteract them, and she jumped from her seat, those same tears glistening with a wretched, bitter anger.

‘So what do you want me to do?’ she demanded shrilly. ‘Strip naked in public in the hopes I’ll make him despise me? Or simply cut my own throat and put a quick end to all poor Susie’s problems? Or maybe,’ she went on while he just seemed to stand there struck by her sudden explosion, ‘you would like me to strip naked in public and cut my own throat? That should do it!’ she concluded thickly. ‘Put a neat if messy end to the whole bloody lot!’

‘Swearing doesn’t help,’ he said, as if that one expletive was the only part of what she’d thrown at him that had actually meant anything at all.

‘Hah!’ she choked, her temper almost shooting right out of the top of her head, then disappearing suddenly when she began to see the black humour of the situation. Here she was, offering to top herself for that cat Susie’s sake! She couldn’t believe that she could be sunk so low!