The Disobedient Wife

‘Yes.’ His chest expanded beneath the pristine white shirt, and for a moment she almost imagined his sigh to be one of audible regret because, of course, he knew that that was the last thing in the world she would ever have done. ‘But it’s something else, isn’t it, Kendal? It’s the buzz you get out of that stubborn need to be independent—the climb to the top regardless.’

‘It isn’t regardless!’ A toss of her bright head revealed the long, slender line of her throat, the pulse beating angrily in its secret hollow. ‘And what’s wrong with my having ambitions anyway?’ Again she could feel the age-old arguments surfacing, refusing to be quelled. ‘You do.’ ‘That’s different.’

‘Why? Because I was a wife and mother?’

‘As far as I’m concerned you still are!’ His tone was angry, his temper near boiling.

‘And I suppose that means I should be in your kitchen? In your bed?’

‘And what’s wrong with that? At least half the time anyway!’

‘Ha ha!’ It was all she could do not to fling at him that she had been there—always. Had been his for the taking, her heart, mind and soul too crazily in love with him even without the devastating ecstasies he had branded upon her body. Always his, until Lauren had intruded…

For a moment she felt his eyes, like twin lasers, burning through the thin veneer of her composure. A tendril of hair had come loose from her carefully arranged French pleat, and she fastened the recalcitrant red strand behind her ear with surprisingly shaky fingers, sensing those shrewd eyes following her every movement, those proud nostrils distend as though seeking the familiar scent of her perfume.

The briefest smile caused his mouth to curve with devastating sensuality, and Kendal’s nerves seemed to stretch taut as she recalled how often that look had preceded nights of endless ecstasy in his arms.

‘You turn up here, looking like some model off a catwalk, in the colour I always told you suited you best, reeking to high heaven of Givenchy. What was all this intended to do, darling?’ The smile was gone now. ‘Soften me up? Remind me of what I’ve been missing all these months and get me to agree to your ludicrous, and, if I might say so, characteristically selfish request?’

So he wouldn’t allow Matthew to go.

Kendal’s spirits sank although her head came up in a bright flame of defiance as she breathed through glossed lips. ‘Did anybody ever have the power to soften you, Jarrad?’

He sank his hands into his pockets, which brought her gaze reluctantly to his hard abdomen and the taut fitness of his thighs beneath the expensive cut of dark suit trousers.

‘You should know,’ he rasped, and for a moment something murky and tumultuous clouded the usual vital glitter in his eyes. ‘Although “soft” is probably far from how I would describe my responses to you.’

Kendal’s heart struck up a crazy rhythm, and colour showed on the pale sheen of her cheeks.

‘You would say something like that, wouldn’t you?’ she accused him breathlessly, jumping up to put a safer distance between herself and that potent, powerful masculinity.

‘Why not?’ His mockery was harsh, relentless. ‘It was about the only thing that was any good between us.’

‘No, you’re wrong!’ She wanted to forget it, to deny, if only to herself, that she had ever derived pleasure from this man’s lovemaking, that he had taken her, sobbing, mindless, through the very gates of paradise. ‘There was only Matthew!’

‘Ah yes, Matthew…’ He straightened and moved away from the desk, his height topping hers by half a head. The lean athleticism of his body and that compelling presence that had never failed to take her breath away succeeded now, so that for a moment her defences were stripped and impetuously she blurted out, ‘You’ve got to let me go.’

‘Why?’

There was danger in his cool study, and a flash of panic showed beneath the unusual green of her eyes.

‘I’m not stopping you,’ he said, turning away.

‘You know what I mean.’ She could hear herself starting to beg. ‘I mean Matthew. You’ve got to let me take him—’

‘No!’ The sheer violence of his refusal made her visibly flinch as he swung back to face her. ‘I haven’t got to do anything,’ he reminded her with cruel, intimidating softness.

‘So I lose the chance of this contract? Just because you’re being so petty-minded?’

She watched him go back to his desk and sit down, as though he were merely discussing a matter of the day’s filing.

‘I don’t call it being petty-minded—wanting to keep my son where I can be directly involved with his upbringing.’ He took the top off his pen, the gold fountain pen he always used, the one that she had given him for his thirty-second birthday two years ago. ‘You can go without him.’

Kendal caught her breath. ‘You know I won’t do that,’ she said, moving back over to the desk.

‘I know.’

Unbelievably he had resumed writing, that dark head bent in concentration. Scribbling some trifling note to his secretary, probably! she thought, frustration overcoming her so that before she could control herself she was grabbing the note from under that long, tanned hand.

‘You bastard!’ The crumpled paper hit his cheek before dropping onto the thick carpet beside his chair.

‘Yes!’ She gasped as with lightning reflexes he caught her wrist, twisting her arm, forcing her over the desk towards him. ‘But then we already know that, don’t we? Which is probably the reason you married me!’

She laughed in spite of the turbulent sensations that were gushing through her from the contact of those hard, tenacious fingers, a contact that was designed merely to humiliate—to crush.

‘Oh, sure! Spitefulness and brutality appeals to me!’ she breathed, her green eyes dancing. ‘Aren’t you getting confused with the reason I left?’

She tried to wrest her hand from his, the struggle only succeeding in loosening the clasp in her hair, bringing a sea of red waves tumbling down across her shoulder.

‘Now, that’s how I like you.’ He grunted in cold approval. ‘Ruffled and undignified and stripped of all those falsely cultivated airs! And perhaps you’d mind telling me again just why you walked out on me, Kendal? And don’t try to convince yourself I was anything other than tender with you. Except, of course, when you wanted me to be otherwise…’

It took all her strength, but she managed to free herself as everything that was feminine in her throbbed with the recollection of just how tender this man knew how to be.

‘Wasn’t incarceration and infidelity enough? You wanted a dutiful little wife at home while you carried on your secret little liaison with Lauren Westgate! Only it wasn’t secret, was it, Jarrad? Ralph found out—which was the real reason he had to go! Why you fired him! You and Lauren!’

The big swivel chair squeaked beneath Jarrad’s weight as he leaned back, draping one white-sleeved arm over the padded leather.

‘My relationship with Lauren had nothing to do with why your brother-in-law had to leave the company,’ he said with a grim cast to his mouth.

‘Like hell!’ she spat back, her eyes dark and wounded. It had been like twisting a knife in an already open wound when he had had her sister’s accountant husband struck off his payroll. Quiet, gentle Ralph, who had reluctantly given in to her demands to tell her what he knew, had confirmed what she had already suspected was happening between Jarrad and his lovely sales director. That raw wound had split wide open, producing scars that had never healed, when she had been left to witness the turmoil into which Jarrad’s action had plunged her own’s sister’s marriage, causing Chrissie to lose the baby she had been expecting. Then there had been the financial problems. Ralph’s loss of self-esteem. The final break-up…

‘You wanted brains and breeding and you got it, didn’t you? Brains in the office and a dumb, unsuspecting redhead to breed with at home!’

‘And Kendal Mitchell’s made up her mind about that, and nothing I say could ever convince her otherwise, could it?’ Jarrad said roughly.

Try me! Give me some proof that there was never anything between you and Lauren! Foolishly, even now, her heart cried out to him, although he hadn’t tried to offer any proof of it then. Nor had he done so when he had hounded her for those first six months after she’d left, demanding that she return home, and only for his son’s sake, though he hadn’t said that in so many words. But of course she knew it was only because of Matthew.

‘You’re right! Nothing can—or ever will!’ she flung at him, and turned on her heel, wanting to get out of there before the tears of frustration and regret she could feel burning behind her eyes threatened to degrade her in front of him.

‘Kendal!’

She froze on the spot, his imperious tone forcing her to glance back over her shoulder.

‘I meant what I said. You take that job in the States and you go on your own.’

‘And if I don’t?’ she challenged.

‘Then I’ll sue for custody.’