A Haunting Obsession

Once again, Bonnie was taken aback. What on earth was going on here?

But then suddenly he smiled, and she was quite blown away. Not only by the change in his face—from churlish to charming in one second flat—but by the involuntary leap in her heart.

‘In that case you must call me Jordan,’ he returned smoothly. ‘Yes, I think first names are definitely called for, since I have a feeling we’re going to be spending quite some time together. I’m a very difficult man to please, you see, Bonnie. You’re going to have to earn every cent of your commission with me.’

‘I... I’ll do my best,’ she said, having to battle hard not to show how rattled she was feeling. Mr Vine-Hall’s about-face had been astonishing enough, but that was nothing to her own response to it.

She hoped against hope that it was just shock, and not a sexual thing. After Keith, Bonnie had feared good-looking men for a long time, but her experience with Neil—and a couple of others—had begun to reassure her that she was not blindly susceptible to a handsome face.

Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe they’d just been the wrong type of handsome face.

Her panic was instantaneous, fear making her stomach tighten and her heart thud. She found herself staring at that smiling mouth and wondering if its kiss would send her swirling into a sensuous mist, if the stroke of his tongue would ignite her blood, enslaving her senses, making her want whatever he wanted, making her weak as water in his arms.

Heat began to gather in her face, a heat that was as telling as it was embarrassing.

Wrenching her eyes away, she leant forward to fumble the key into the ignition. Totally flustered now, her reversing was disgracefully ragged, her forward acceleration down the driveway not much better, the car shuddering to a rough halt on the other side of the open gates. Bonnie’s hand shook as it reached for the door-handle.

‘I’ll lock the gates,’ her passenger offered abruptly.

Mortified, she sat stiffly behind the wheel while he moved to accomplish what she probably would have fouled up as well. ‘Competent’, she had claimed to be. A groan escaped her lips at the incompetence she had just displayed.

She watched in the rear-view mirror as he easily pulled the heavy gates shut and snapped the padlock in place. His actions were smooth and uncluttered, performed lithely with the agility of a young athlete. And yet, Bonnie judged, he must be at least thirty-five.

As he turned back to walk towards the car, she tore her gaze away, not wanting to be caught in the act of looking at him again. She could just imagine what he was already thinking.

Self-disgust had her getting a grip on her rampant emotions with a steely resolve. There would be no calling him by his first name. He would remain Mr Vine-Hall no matter how many hours they had to spend together. On top of that, if she found out that her reaction to his smile a moment ago was sexual, she would turn him over to Gary faster than one could say Jack Robinson.

Because there was one thing Bonnie was sure of. She wasn’t ready yet to become involved with another man. The wounds of her relationship with Keith were too recent, too raw. And while logic told her all men were not like Keith, she couldn’t envisage trusting any man again with her body, or her life, for a long, long time. Which meant keeping any unwanted hormonal activity firmly under control!

‘Thank you,’ she said crisply once the instigator of her internal lecture was resettled, keeping her eyes staunchly on the road ahead. ‘One thing I forgot to ask you, Mr Vine-Hall,’ she continued as she eased the car into gear and moved slowly down the bumpy road. ‘Does this weekender have to be in Blackrock Beach? We do have several very nice properties listed at some of the other local beaches.’

‘I was thinking of only Blackrock Beach when I rang,’ he replied thoughtfully, ‘but I can see it’s changed a lot. I was picturing the sleepy little seaside spot I used to holiday in as a boy, but it’s hardly that any more.’

‘No, it’s boomed since the expressway was put in from Sydney up to the Central Coast. Hardly a block in view of the beach which hasn’t been built on.’

‘Yes, so I noticed. So no... I won’t hold you exclusively to Blackrock Beach. Show me whatever you think might suit. I do like my peace and quiet at the weekend. And a reasonable amount of privacy.’

Bonnie had reached the end of the dirt road by now, and was feeling decidedly better with this businesslike conversation. If she didn’t have to look into his undeniably handsome face too much, and he didn’t smile at her too often, she should be able to get through this afternoon without any more awkward moments.

‘Oh, and Bonnie...’ His pregnant pause forced her to look over at him.

‘Yes?’

‘You agreed to call me Jordan, remember?’

And he smiled at her again.

CHAPTER FOUR

GODDAMN it, she was blushing again!

A guilty confusion wiped the smile off Jordan’s face. If there was one thing he knew about women of easy virtue it was that they didn’t blush when you started coming on to them. Neither did they keep breaking eye contact or become totally flustered.

The truth of the matter quickly sank in. That bastard back at the real-estate office had lied about her. She wasn’t a tramp at all. She was a respectable married woman who was too damned sexy-looking for her own good.

It certainly put a different interpretation on her reactions to him. Any hope that she’d been giving him the eye was obliterated. Clearly, her staring was because he must have seemed horribly rude. Hell, he had been horribly rude, right from the start!

She wasn’t to know he’d been fighting urges which till today had been totally alien to his personality. Good lord, he hadn’t surrendered to any form of uncontrollable passion since he was an adolescent! On top of that, the last female on earth he would consider trying to seduce would be a married woman, albeit a supposedly amoral one. He’d seen the pain adultery caused.

Yet that was exactly what he wanted to do. Seduce her.

He’d staunchly resisted temptation at first, only to give in finally, deliberately misinterpreting her offer that he call her by her first name, thinking he only had to turn on a bit of charm to make her realise he was willing to go along with whatever was on offer.

Shame was hard on the heels of guilt. Jordan knew he was no saint—what man was?—but his behaviour today had been appalling. So the woman was exquisite, with a voice like cool silk and a body men might kill for. So what? That was no excuse.

Damn it all, he’d defended men in court who had done just that, committed crimes of passion over a beautiful woman. He’d always thought what fools they were. There were plenty of other beautiful women in the world. Why ruin their lives over just one? Why not simply walk away and climb into another bed? What made them so vulnerable to that one particular woman that they could think of nothing and no one else?

Such obsessions were the result of a sick mind, he used to believe. Or a weak character. Suddenly, he was gaining a different perspective on sexual obsession. And he didn’t like it one bit.

Jordan wanted no part of such a weakness, no part at all!

His inner torment was getting out of hand when his usual ruthless logic came to his rescue. This obsession—for want of a better word—was due to nothing more than an acute case of male frustration. He’d been working incredibly long hours over the past few weeks. Why, he hadn’t even had a spare hour to write, let alone make love.

Erica, of course, had been very understanding, which was only to be expected. Her lack of any real physical passion was something Jordan actually found reassuring. Hell, the last sort of woman he wanted for a wife would be one who actually needed sex. How would he be able to trust her when this sort of thing happened after they were married?

He could still remember that awful Saturday afternoon when he’d come home injured from soccer practice, only to stumble across his mother ‘entertaining’ a man who wasn’t his father on the sofa. He’d been just fifteen and up till then had thought his mother little short of a saint.

He’d stood there, white-faced and shaken, while she’d scrambled into some clothes and shuffled the man out of the back door. When she’d returned to face her son, she’d launched into a muddled explanation, all the while floods of tears running down her flushed cheeks.

Jordan had listened to her pleas for understanding with a chilled heart. She’d claimed she still loved his father but that he was hardly ever home, his ambition to become a judge taking up all his spare time. She’d sobbed that she needed company, needed to be loved.

Needed to be screwed, more like it, he’d decided, having seen the man she’d chosen for her lover. He’d been very good-looking and very common, with tattoos over his arms. Not the type to know much about love, only sex.

She’d begged him not to tell his father, and he hadn’t. But someone else must have, for he’d overheard his parents having a bitter row that night.

Nothing was ever the same after that. His parents hadn’t divorced, but an air of cold remoteness had descended on their relationship which never thawed. Adultery had destroyed his parents’ marriage, plus his own respect for his mother. It was the ultimate betrayal, in his opinion, and Jordan wanted no part of it!

He decided then and there to ask Erica to marry him this very night. Make the commitment official, after which he would sweep her off to bed. That should set his equilibrium to right!

‘By all means call me Mr Vine-Hall, if you’re more comfortable with that,’ Jordan resumed, his tone crisp. ‘I wouldn’t like you to think I was trying to come on to a married woman.’

Bonnie swallowed. Had she been thinking that? Admittedly, she’d been flustered by his suddenly being nice to her, but she hadn’t really stopped to find a reason for it. Her brain seemed to have been scrambled by his smile along with her body.

She steeled herself and looked over at him. He was no longer smiling, but when their eyes met an electric charge seemed to sizzle across the space between them, making her stomach tighten and her breasts prickle alarmingly, Intuition told her that he would come on to her if she weren’t a married woman.

Tell him you’re not married, whispered an insidious little voice. Tell him you’re a widow.

She clenched her jaw underneath the force of the temptation, shuddering inside as she remembered where her carnal weaknesses had led her last time—to hell and back. No way could she risk such treatment again. No way. Let him continue to think she was married. It was the only wise course of action.