A Ruthless Passion

Just keep your cool, Cat told herself, swallowing to relieve the stress that had built up beneath her breastbone.

‘Can I get you something to drink?’ Nick asked.

‘No, thank you.’ Not even though her mouth and throat felt as dry as the Gobi Desert.

‘I’m thirsty, so excuse me,’ he said abruptly, and disappeared through a door.

Tensely she looked around the room. If Nick had chosen the furniture he’d made a good job. It suited him, the proportions matching both the big room and his height and presence, but the black leather chairs and sofas, the exquisite Persian rug and the stark abstracts on the wall, intimidated her.

This, she thought distractedly, was how children must feel—helpless, ineffectual in a huge adult world.

Well, small she might be, but ineffectual she was not. Squaring her shoulders, she marched across to the bookshelves, oddly cheered when she noted some well-thumbed favourites of her own.

She was glancing through one when Nick returned with a tray. Setting it down on the table, he said, ‘I made some for you too. Sit down and pour, and for heaven’s sake stop looking at me with the whites of your eyes showing. I’m not going to leap on you.’

With a distrustful glance, Cat put the book down and lowered herself onto a cold, smooth leather chair. At least the coffee gave her restless hands something to do. She poured his as he liked it, black and strong and fierce, and added a lot of milk to her own.

Nick had seated himself opposite, long legs stretched out. Accepting his cup, he asked, ‘Why did you go back to your maiden name?’

Startled, she kept her gaze on the milky surface of her coffee. ‘I wanted to.’

It was the wrong answer, but with Nick there were no right ones.

‘You still wear his ring on occasion.’ Smile hardening into contempt, his gold eyes flicked over the telltale lack of white skin on her bare finger. ‘No doubt only when it’s expedient to remind me that the man you married gave me a future.’

Shamed heat burned her cheeks; she’d used the ring as a talisman because it gave her the illusion of safety. ‘Then you should understand how I feel about Juana. Glen gave you a future; I want to do it for her.’

‘That’s very clever, Cat,’ he said softly. After a taut silence he went on, ‘I checked with the clinic. What whim persuaded you to take responsibility for the child?’

Filled with a strange reluctance, she muttered, ‘She only had an aunt—her mother’s sister Rosita, just fourteen. Her father had been killed by the insurgents and I don’t know what happened to the rest of her family. Rosita couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say.’

‘That hasn’t answered my question.’ When she didn’t go on he probed uncompromisingly, ‘What made the baby your responsibility?’

‘Rosita had no money and no way of earning any. They were refugees. I couldn’t just let the baby die when I knew she could be saved.’

He frowned. ‘How did you find out about her?’

‘I was there when she was born. I held her while the doctor tried to save her mother.’ She gave him a swift glance from beneath her lashes, but his face was stern and unreadable. ‘And she was special because she was born on the day my mother died. It seemed—significant, somehow. Symbolic.’

She waited for a sneer, for anger, but none came.

He was watching her through half-closed eyes, his mouth an unreadable line. ‘Do you want to adopt her?’

She shook her head. ‘Sister Bernadette convinced me she’ll do better in her own culture with an aunt who loves her. Juana is all that Rosita has left—the only thing she has to live for.’ Cat lifted her cup and drank some of the hot liquid, then set the cup down and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I want to make sure she has all the surgery she needs—the doctors in Brisbane said there’ll be at least a couple more operations, and she might need a dental plate too.’

‘How long will all this take?’

‘At least five years.’

‘A long-term commitment,’ he said coolly. ‘And after that?’

‘At the very least I’m going to make sure Rosita gets onto her feet somehow, so she can continue to care for Juana. Life for a girl with no family, no one to protect her, is difficult in Romit.’

‘So you’re planning the future of two girls?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

Silence hummed between them, heavy with unspoken thoughts. Nick said quietly, ‘In his will Glen made it impossible for me, as the trustee, to advance you any more than your yearly allowance.’

Cat bit back a protest; she’d been so shocked after Glen’s death that she hadn’t taken in much of what the solicitor had explained to her. Glen had always seen her as the naïve adolescent he’d swept off her feet, so his refusal to trust her didn’t surprise her as much as it dismayed her.

Nick said deliberately, ‘You could always ask me to help you.’

Why did suspicion darken her mind with ugly speed? ‘I have asked you. You’ve just refused.’

‘I can’t ignore Glen’s instructions. However, he trusted me to look after you.’ He looked down at the letter and her passport. ‘I could make you a personal loan. Or a gift.’

For a moment hope clutched her, but one glance at his hard, hunter’s face killed it. She said with icy, desperate precision, ‘For a price, no doubt. What do you want in return?’

‘Perhaps I don’t want anything,’ he said, his eyes gleaming with a predatory light.

She gave a cynical little laugh. ‘I doubt that very much. That’s not how things work.’

Unblinking, he surveyed her. ‘What are you prepared to give?’

More than anything she wanted to lick her dry lips, drink some more coffee to ease the passage of words through her arid throat. ‘I only give to the people I love,’ she said.

‘By your own admission, you’ve broken that rule twice. Three times if we accept that you didn’t love Glen when you married him.’

Colour burned her skin but she met his cold, golden gaze unwaveringly. ‘But I did love him.’ Because she’d been a starry-eyed innocent, dazzled and overwhelmed by Glen’s sophistication.

‘Setting aside your marriage to Glen, the other incidents were certainly errors of taste.’ His voice was level, almost amused, but each word flicked her on the raw. ‘After all, it’s not done to make passionate love to—’

‘We didn’t make passionate love—we kissed; that’s all,’ she interrupted, hot-faced and shamed. ‘And there were two of us—’

‘Oh, there were indeed two,’ he returned roughly. ‘You and me, kissing as though we wanted to make love right there and then, the day before you married Glen, and the day we buried him.’

Coffee splashed over the edge of the cup onto her hand; Cat dragged in a shuddering breath.

‘Have you scalded yourself?’ Nick demanded, leaping to his feet to crouch by her chair. ‘Let me see.’

He removed the coffee cup from her grip and set it down on the table. In spite of the sunny room ice froze Cat down to her bones.

‘Just as well you drink it with a lot of milk,’ he said, and lifted her stinging hand to his mouth as though he couldn’t stop himself.

Cat’s throat constricted. Dazed, she stared at him with dilating eyes, watching his lashes fall as his beautiful mouth touched the fragile skin of her wrist. Her fingers curled at the warmth of his mouth and sensation poured through her—hot, languid, remorseless as a river breaching its banks.

Shudders racked her body when she tried to pull away, but her strength had gone. She knew what he saw when he looked at her face—drowsy eyes and seeking, sensuous mouth—and she expected his slow, bitter smile. Hunger banished everything but a stark, stripped need; his angular features were stamped with it, the amber eyes smouldering, and his mouth—oh, God, his mouth…