The Threat of Love

'Apparently not,' Gil thought aloud, staring back at her, and another car shot past them, blaring angrily as Gil's car drifted across the road while his attention was on Caro. Gil swore and turned his eyes back on the road ahead. 'I wonder why your father didn't say anything?'

Caro knew why. Her father was well aware of that old affair and why it had ended. He had played a considerable part in ending it. He had suspected Damian from the start, and when there had been talk of an engagement he had put a private detective on his tail to check up on him, and had discovered the other woman in Damian's life.

Damian had been having an affair with one of his typists for months. They had met in hotel bedrooms on evenings when he told Caro he was working late; they had gone away together for the weekend and he'd told Caro he had to visit a client abroad and couldn't take her. Caro hadn't at first believed a word of the report her father had grimly showed her. She had pushed it away, shaking her head, white and trembling, but there had been too much irrefutable evidence. Photographs, testimony by hotel staff, photocopies of hotel registers. They had always signed in as a married couple, under a false name, of course. Caro still remembered the way she had felt staring at the girl's face—she'd been nineteen, blonde, very pretty. One look and Caro had known Damian was a liar and a cheat. He had planned to marry her for her money, but he had had no intention of being faithful to her. That was so humiliating that for months afterwards she had wanted to die. It was bad enough that he hadn't ever loved her, that he had wanted to marry her only for her father's money, but it was far more wounding to know that even if he had married her he would have betrayed her with other women all the time; their marriage would have been a complete lie.

'Doesn't your father approve of Shaw?' asked Oil. 'I suppose he wanted you to marry someone with more money. Did he interfere? Order you to stop seeing him? Is that what happened?'

'No, it isn't!' she snapped, her loyalty to her father forcing her to answer. 'You don't know my father. He isn't some old-fashioned domestic tyrant. He doesn't judge people by how much money they have, and he has never once ordered me to stop seeing anyone.' 'Amy seemed to think otherwise,' said Gil drily. 'How much did she tell you, for heaven's sake?' Caro muttered, dark red and furious.

'Something about a private detective...'

'I'll kill her, I'll really kill her!' She hesitated, breathing thickly, then reluctantly said, 'OK, Dad did pay a private detective to follow Damian, but only because he had suspicions about him and wanted to check him out, and he was proved right. He found out that... Well, anyway, it was all true. I didn't just take Dad's word for it. I faced Damian with the photos and other evidence, and Damian didn't deny any of it. He couldn't.'

Gil slowed and pulled up under a tree whose drooping branches hung low over the road. 'Another woman?' he asked curtly, and she nodded without looking at him.

'Oh, he tried to tell me that it hadn't meant anything,' she said with cynicism in her voice. 'He claimed that he'd been "seduced" by this other girl, he put all the blame on her. If you'd seen her picture!' Her mouth writhed and her eyes glittered angrily. 'She was a pretty kid of about nineteen, younger than me! She was probably as innocent as a newborn lamb until she met him. But Damian painted her as some sort of femme fatale—it was all her fault. He said he'd loved me all the time, the other thing had been a passing madness, and he would end the affair at once, if I would forgive him.'

'But you didn't,' said Gil, his eyes intent on her angry face.

'I did not. Would you have done?'

He shook his head, mouth twisting. 'It sounds to me as if you were well out of that relationship!'

Having started to talk about it, Caro couldn't seem to stop. She said bitterly, 'I listened to him lying and wriggling and blaming the other girl, and I started to hate him. He's a very convincing lawyer, because he's as cunning as a wagonload of monkeys, and I'm sure he does a great job for you, but I wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him.'

'He still seems to arouse a powerful reaction in you, though,' Gil drawled, watching her closely. 'They say hatred is the flip side of love. Are you sure you're over him?'

She laughed harshly. 'Absolutely certain! And I don't even hate him now, I just despise him.'

'Well, let's just see, shall we?' His voice had an odd intonation and she was so puzzled by that that she looked up at him just as he bent towards her, which made it easier for him. His mouth was on hers before she had any idea what he meant to do; the feel of it was hard and warm, deeply intimate, possessive; and a tidal wave of emotion hit her, her lips parted under his, and her head swam. She felt everything cloud inside her mind, she was dizzy and blind with passion, and her hands instinctively reached for his shoulders, clinging to him in case she actually fell.

When Gil finally lifted his head again, she looked dazedly at him, feeling a deep sense of loss, aching for him to kiss her again. Gil studied her through half-closed lids, his dark eyes gleaming like hidden water. What was he thinking about? She knew so little about him, how his mind worked; he was a mystery to her, even though she had been seeing him every day, lately, for hours at a time.

When he did speak she was puzzled by the question. 'How old were you when you met Shaw?' he asked in that deep, velvety voice of his, and she was so surprised that she automatically answered.

'Twenty-one.' It seemed a lifetime ago; how young and stupid she had been! She felt quite sorry for her half-forgotten self.

'And how many men have there been since?' She hesitated, looking away, breathless, and Gil gave a short laugh. 'From the way you react to me whenever I touch you, I'd guess there have been very few—if there have been any! Shaw left you in a deep-freeze and you've been existing in it ever since, haven't you? I remember how you flew into a temper when I suggested that you'd never been to bed with anyone. Did you sleep with Shaw?' He stared fixedly at her, watching the involuntary flicker of her lids, the deepening heat in her face. 'No, I don't think you had got that far. You were very young and he planned to marry you, not just seduce you. You were business; he had the other girl for his playtime.'

Caro flinched at the bluntness of that. It was the truth, of course, but her ego still stung at the reminder. Gil noted her expression, his dark eyes narrowed.

'That bothers you?' he said coldly. 'If you're still jealous over him, it means you haven't stopped caring about the man.'

'I am not jealous! And I certainly don't care anything about him, I just told you... I despise him.'

'So it won't bother you to see him again?'

'What?' She stiffened, her face tight and cold, staring back at him, and Gil watched her with that probing fixity as he said,

'Well, it is on the cards, isn't it?'

'What are you talking about?'

'For a woman with a first-rate brain, you can be very stupid!' Gil snapped. 'Think about it! You've been too busy working on the accounts at Westbrooks to sit in on any of the meetings your father has been having with my grandmother's people, but sooner or later you're likely to be called in to discuss the report you've submitted, and then you're going to come face

to face with Damian Shaw. How are you going to feel then?'

'I won't feel anything,' she lied, and Gil laughed shortly.