Scandals And Secrets

She was not to his taste, however, either physically or personality-wise. Celeste was as hard as her body. He liked his women soft, in all respects. And he preferred brunettes, especially one particular brunette with big innocent brown eyes, the most luscious body and the sweetest of smiles.

Damn, but he couldn’t wait for the delectable Mrs Nathan Whitmore to fall into his hands. They said everything came to those who waited but he was getting sick and tired of waiting for Gemma to wake up to the sort of man that husband of hers was. Maybe he would have to think of some way he could give the situation a little push...

Meanwhile, he was about to relieve his boredom by giving his darling sister a different kind of push. Hell, but he was going to enjoy relaying the news he’d found out last night.

When Celeste saw Damian’s mouth pull back into a wickedly smug smile, a prickle of alarm shivered down her damp spine.

‘You’d like for me to have come crawling, wouldn’t you?’ he said silkily, linking his hands behind his head and crossing his ankles with an air of arrogant insolence. ‘You like having men suck up to you. It makes you feel all-powerful. That’s one of the reasons why you only screw around with younger men. Because they grovel better, and they’re easier to control.’

Celeste’s mouth dropped open for a second before it snapped shut. Underneath his nasty delivery and understandably inaccurate assumptions, Damian was right about her enjoying power over the male of the species. That was one of her rewards for staying alive, for picking herself up from the edge of insanity and suicide, and choosing to survive. It felt good to have men jumping to obey her every whim and want, having them bow and scrape. The days of her ever having to be afraid of a man, or in having them control any aspect of her life, were long over.

Or so she had believed. Till recently.

‘What a delicate turn of phrase you have, Damian,’ she said drily, needing a few moments to regain her composure after such a disturbing train of thought.

He laughed. ‘Since when did you take offence at calling a spade a spade? You don’t give a damn what people think of you, Celeste. You never have.’

Celeste frowned at this dig at the way she’d lived her life over the past decade or so, especially her uncaring attitude to scandal and gossip. It was true that she’d deliberately fuelled her reputation as a man-eater, publicly parading a long line of toy-boy companions for the gossip-mongers and tabloids to report.

What the general public did not know—or even her own brother—was that not once, during that time, had she actually been to bed with any of those young studs. Oh, yes, she’d flirted openly with them, especially when the cameras had been close. She’d allowed them to take her to highly publicised premieres, charity balls, the races and any other function where her photo was likely to be taken and printed, complete with partner.

Most of her supposed lovers had been independently wealthy playboy types from society families around Sydney. Some, however, had been employees—her personal assistant and chauffeurs were always young, male and handsome—whom she outwardly treated much more intimately than their position warranted. Amazing how quickly rumour escalated such relationships into tempestuous affairs.

Celeste suspected the men themselves lied about their conquests of the infamous female head of Campbell Jewels. Perhaps their male egos prompted them to feed the gossip about her reputedly voracious sexuality, each one in turn thinking they were the only one not to succeed in getting her into bed.

Celeste had never been bothered by any of this before. She had revelled in it all, finding some kind of weird vengeance in the knowledge that there was one particular person whom her scandalous reputation might hopefully hurt. She used to like to picture his face when he read or heard the latest gossip about her. She would imagine him hating her, yet still wanting her at the same time.

Thinking about his ongoing unrequited desire evoked an inner satisfaction that soothed the savage beast lurking within her heart.

Or it had. Till she’d taken herself off to the Whitmore Opals ball a few weeks back and come face to face with that unrequited desire, only to find out that her own desire for Byron Whitmore was still there, just as unrequited as his, and just as strong as ever.

Celeste had been utterly thrown. She’d been so sure she would never feel any desire for any man ever again, let alone the man who’d been the instigation of all her pain and anguish. Suddenly, that night, her much vaunted control over her life had been in danger of slipping away.

Any imminent disintegration had been temporarily staved off, however, by the most unlikely circumstances: an attempted robbery.

The prize for the thieves was to have been the Heart of Fire, a magnificent uncut black opal, the auction of which had been advertised as the highlight of the ball.

When she’d first heard news of the auction on the grapevine, she’d tried dismissing the thought that this could be the same opal which had played such an unfortunate part in her life over twenty years before, but once she saw it for herself on display in the Regency store windows all sorts of tortuous thoughts and futile hopes had forced her to walk back into the lion’s den and confront the past as she had never confronted it before. In the flesh.

The results had been horrendous. Not only was she shattered by the realisation that she still wanted Byron in a sexual sense, she had also stupidly forked out two million dollars for an opal she couldn’t even bear to look at. She hadn’t even been to elicit any real information about the circumstances of the Heart of Fire’s reappearance, Byron having answered her query with some slick lie about it turning up in some old dead miner’s things at Lightning Ridge and being returned to him. As if anyone would just hand over a two-million-dollar opal!

Celeste had been in a most uncharacteristic mental turmoil that night when the balaclavaed robbers made their unexpected appearance. When one grabbed her as hostage, she’d been momentarily at a loss, obeying his commands and weakly going with him like a lamb to the slaughter, till some brutal manhandling had snapped her out of her submissive fog, revitalising her bitter determination never to surrender any of her self to any man in any way ever again, either emotionally or physically.

Out of the blue, she’d struck back, using the self-defence skills she’d learnt many years before, felling her assailants with two quick kicks. With hindsight, she almost felt gratitude to those brutes for bringing back horrific memories which in turn had renewed her fighting spirit.

Suddenly, she’d felt strong again, strong enough to defy this unwanted weakness of still wanting Byron Whitmore in a sexual sense. When fate placed her in his insidious presence once again a few days after the ball, she had delighted in deliberately courting his disgust in an appalling display of over-the-top flirtation with her chauffeur.

Unfortunately, her outrageous behaviour had back-fired on her in a couple of ways. Firstly, the chauffeur had been inspired to take liberties later that evening and she’d had to fire him. But the second and more disastrous outcome was that this time Byron’s obvious contempt had unaccountably distressed, instead of soothed her.

Celeste had eventually pulled herself together to the point where Byron ceased to fill her thoughts on a daily basis. But she certainly wasn’t looking forward to confronting him again next Monday at the trial of the ringleader of the robbers, where they were both witnesses.

‘Is this your version of the silent treatment?’ Damian drawled in a derisive tone. ‘If so, I find it incredibly boring.’

‘Say what it is you have to say, Damian,’ she answered sharply. ‘I’m not in the mood for any of your sick little games.’

‘Moi? Play sick games? Never!’ His laughter grated on her already stretched nerves.

‘Damian,’ she rebuked. ‘Get on with it!’

His hands dropped back to his sides and he sat up, a petulant expression on his too handsome face. ‘You always spoil my fun.’

‘Your idea of fun is not my idea of fun.’

‘Really? I always thought it was. I like a bit of young stuff myself.’

Celeste’s chin came up and she eyed her brother with distaste. ‘I’m going over to the house. I have other things I’d rather do than stand here freezing to death.’

‘What?’

‘What do you mean, what?’

‘I mean what else have you got to do? After all, you haven’t found a new young stud to fill your leisure hours yet, have you? You know, Celeste, you never did tell me why you fired Gerry. I mean, I do realise it’s rather clichéd—and a tad tacky—for the rich lady employer to have her chauffeur perform extra services but he did seem well equipped for the job.’

Celeste was appalled at the fierce heat that raced up her neck and into her cheeks. Blushing had never been her style but her newly sensitised self was suddenly finding the picture she had painted of herself over the years not only embarrassing but almost obscene. When hadn’t she seen what she was doing? Where had her pride disappeared to? Clearly, her hatred of Byron and men in general had warped her so much that she didn’t care what anyone thought of her.

But suddenly, she did. Dear God, she did...

‘Well, well, well,’ Damian drawled. ‘Whatever did Gerry do? I would have thought he was a very straight young fellow. Did he try something a little more...adventurous? Is that it?’

‘Don’t be disgusting, Damian,’ she snapped. ‘I simply decided I didn’t need a chauffeur any longer.’

‘I see. So you have another gorgeous young hunk to tease Byron Whitmore with, do you?’

Celeste gasped before she could stop herself.

‘You thought I didn’t know?’ Damian’s smile was pure malice as he stood up and walked towards her. ‘Silly Celeste. Didn’t you know Irene always told me everything? I know all about your encounters with our dear sister’s husband. Whoops, half-sister. Though he wasn’t her husband the first time, was he? Merely her boyfriend.’

‘He was not,’ Celeste choked out, her head whirling with Damian’s disclosure. ‘Irene and Byron were not going out when I first met him. I was on work experience at Whitmore’s. She didn’t start going out with Byron till after I went back to boarding-school. I didn’t try to take Byron away from Irene. She took him away from me!’

‘And what of later, Celeste?’ Damian said in a low, smarmy voice. ‘He was her husband then, wasn’t he?’

Celeste closed her eyes and shuddered.

‘Yet you made love to him, didn’t you?’ Damian taunted softly. ‘You had to have him, no matter what...’

Celeste’s eyes opened, huge and haunted. ‘Yes,’ she confessed brokenly. ‘Yes...’

‘You callous bitch,’ he said with so much venom that Celeste was stunned.