Society Wives: Love or Money: The Bought-and-Paid-for Wife

His small smile caused a large clamor in her system. “Can’t say I haven’t felt some coolness.”

“Which hasn’t dulled the curiosity.”

“No.”

Vanessa cast a glance over the crowd and found a degree of that curiousity trained on them. Many of the locals—her friends included—would be conjecturing over her chumminess with the enemy. A frown pulled at her brow so she considered the changed dynamic between them. She couldn’t work out what had changed. The heat, the awareness, the attraction, she’d felt before, but today there was another element she couldn’t pin down.

They weren’t exactly comfortable and relaxed together but the tension had altered.

It reminded her of the one time she’d sat on a horse. The riding lessons were a birthday present from Stuart, but when the instructor hoisted her into the saddle she hadn’t enjoyed the sensation one little bit. She’d hated losing touch with earth, of not knowing if the exhilaration would last or bring her crashing onto her backside.

She cast a cautious sideways glance at Tristan and caught him watching her. A weird sense of yearning fluttered to life in her chest, and her frown deepened as she quickly looked away. Oh yes, Ms. Pragmatist nodded. You are so going to land on your backside.

“Worried about what they’re thinking?” he asked.

“Well, I am fraternizing with the enemy.”

“I’m not the enemy, Vanessa.” He eyes on hers were darkly serious. “Your real enemy is the person who wrote that letter.”

Vanessa lost Tristan to Delia during the halftime divot-stomp and didn’t see him again—no, that wasn’t true, she couldn’t help seeing him, but she didn’t talk to him again—until she was walking toward her car at the end of the day. This time her wow-where-did-you-spring -from reaction wasn’t contrived. One second she was picking her way carefully across a soggy patch of ground, trying not to identify the heavy weight pressing down on her chest as going-home-alone gloom, the next he was there at her side.

The weight lifted leaving her feeling ridiculously pleased … until she felt his gaze fix on her smile for an unnervingly long moment. Then she thought, must stop grinning like a loon. Must think of something to say that doesn’t sound like I’m ridiculously, pleased.

“Did you enjoy the second half?” she asked, getting the smile under control. “I lost you during the break.”

“I didn’t know they really did that.”

“Walk the divots? It’s a time-honored tradition and the perfect chance to mix. Don’t they do that at your Aussie football games?”

“Our mixer tradition is aimed at the kids. They all flock onto the ground for a kick at halftime.”

Picturing the mayhem of hundreds of kids let lose on a football field, Vanessa allowed herself a half smile. “Slightly wilder and noisier than a divot-stomp, I imagine.”

“Slightly.”

“You looked as if you were enjoying yourself.” Straight away she wished she’d kept that observation to herself. She also wished that the sight of Delia hanging off his arm, laughing, reaching up to brush something—or nothing—from his collar wasn’t stuck in her visual memory. She had no hold on him and no right to the sharp stab of possessiveness.

“I enjoyed today,” he said noncommittally.

“You seemed to fit right in.”

He cut her a sideways look, as though trying to work out if she was having him on. Then something shifted in his expression, his gaze grew keen with perception. “And you, Vanessa. You fit in as if you were born to this life.”

The warm glow of enjoyment brought on by his seeking her out and fanned by their banter, faded and died. But she might as well confirm what he’d probably already gleaned from Gloria or who knows where else. “My parents both worked for people like these, in the city. I spent some time observing the life.”

“And you dreamed of living it?”

She shrugged. “What girl doesn’t dream? It’s the Cinderella fantasy.”

They stopped beside her car, the last left in this row of the parking field, and she was searching her purse for her keys when he asked, “Why my father?”

Vanessa looked up sharply, not quite sure she’d heard him correctly. If she had, then she didn’t understand the question. Intense blue eyes collided with hers for a heart-jolting moment before he looked away.

Before he waved a hand at the field still littered with Bentleys and Porsches and Mercedes. “You wanted this life, you could have had it with any man you wanted. Why my father?”

For a second she stared back at him, stunned by the question and then by its subtext. She’d set out to trap a rich man because of a childhood Cinderella fantasy. Then she kicked herself hard for her stupidity.

She’d known he held that opinion right from the first time she spoke to him, so why should the question shock her now?

“I hope to God I’m reading you wrong,” she said tightly, “and that you’re not suggesting I could have done better than Stuart.”

“Not better. Younger.”

“Because a younger man could have given me what?” She huffed out a contemptuous breath. “For the life of me I cannot think of any man—younger, older, whatever—as kind and generous and concerned for others as Stuart Thorpe.”

“What about your other needs, Vanessa?”

His meaning was clear in the dark burning light in his eyes, in the way he closed down the distance between them, in the sexual energy that seemed to pulse in the air as his gaze trailed slowly over her face and lingered on her mouth.

She shook her head slowly. This part of her marriage she discussed with no one. Not Gloria, not Andy, not Emma or Lily or any of her girlfriends. She’d promised to keep the platonic nature of their relationship a secret, to protect Stuart’s pride as a man and to prevent the scuttlebutt of gossip.

“You’re young,” he persisted. “Didn’t you want a family?”

“No.”

It wasn’t a lie, despite her recent pangs of baby envy. She’d already brought up her brother, taking over his care when she was little more than a child herself. She’d used up all her nurturing spirit. She had no emotional energy left for babies of her own. None whatsoever.

“No,” she repeated, more adamantly. “I didn’t want a family and I didn’t need a lover. Your father gave me everything I wanted, everything I ever dreamed of wanting, and more. And he chose to leave his estate to me. Why can’t you accept those truths? Why can’t you go back to Australia and let me be?”

Seven

Go home to Australia and let her be?

No, Tristan couldn’t do that. He could never quit a task half-done.

He still needed to know everything about Vanessa, but before he even approached her in the parking lot after the polo match he’d accepted that his motivation had shifted focus.

That’s what drove him to ask why she’d chosen his father.

Frustration. Self-defense. Finding that full-bodied smile trained on him for the very first time, he’d felt a primal rush of possessiveness, a she-should-be-mine kick that transcended desire. He’d needed a reminder, damn fast, of why he couldn’t get in that car and drive her back to his hotel and claim her as his own.

Her fervent response had done the trick. It had also convinced him of one of two things: either Vanessa had genuinely cared for her husband or she was one bloody fine actress.

And if he was out-of-the-ballpark wrong about her relationship with his father, was he wrong about other things?

Questions and conflicting answers chased through his mind all night long. At dawn he plunged his restless body into the hotel pool and slugged out a hundred laps. Afterward he’d intended returning to his suite and to his regular, controllable Monday morning of work, where questions had answers, where decisions triggered action, where results ensued.

Where he never backed down from the tough issues … or from digging too deeply because of a woman’s heartfelt appeal. I’m asking that you respect the privacy of others. Think about it, please. Think about doing the right thing.