Element Of Risk

He didn’t try to spare her feelings. ‘Not that I know of. Why should she?’

Why, indeed? Because Natalie had known of her pregnancy, it didn’t mean that her cousin had even considered the possibility of her being the girls’ mother. Perdita hadn’t told her she was expecting twins. ‘In that case, I can just be their mother’s distant cousin. At least they don’t look like either of us.’

‘Not too obviously, anyway. Just remember the document you signed this afternoon,’ he said with harsh insistence.

She didn’t need to be reminded. ‘Oh, I do,’ she said tonelessly.

‘When are you going?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ she returned, ‘but don’t worry, I’ll keep in contact.’

She knew it sounded like a threat and she was pleased until she saw the expression on his face. Stark and potent, he looked at her with such a formidable impression of force and power that she was almost cowed.

For the first time she realised that her childhood impressions of Luke had not necessarily been correct. She had been infatuated with this man, made love with him, borne his children, and although he had cruelly driven her away she had understood his reaction— indeed, she had felt much the same as he had. But she had always thought of him as a gentleman.

Now, beneath the aristocratic bones and the polished veneer she recognised the authentic, chilling tang of the barbarian. Luke was fighting for his children, and if she met him head-on it would be a bloody, vicious, no-holds-barred battle.

He would use whatever means he needed to keep his daughters safe. If he thought she presented any danger to them at all, she’d find herself banished again. It seemed ridiculous to believe such a thing could happen in New Zealand, but she had no doubt that he’d find some way.

She said quietly, ‘I want only what’s best for the girls, Luke. I always have. If I hadn’t, I’d have kept them, and they’d have grown up as I did, without stability. I knew I was too young. I learn from my experiences; I wasn’t having my children go through that sort of childhood.’ Looking away from him down the passage of the years, she said half to herself, ‘Do you know that my father went back to his old life? Apparently, after a probationary period no one—least of all he and his wife—was in the least worried that he had seduced and abandoned my mother after making her pregnant. He kept his position, whereas my mother was subjected to the most appalling pressure to have me adopted, and when she wouldn’t, was literally thrown out on to the street.’

Luke said relentlessly, ‘Your mother was spoiled and headstrong and completely selfish. Think about it, Perdita. What sort of mother was she to you? The only reason she kept you was to make everyone suffer, you especially.’

He was cruelly perceptive, but what he didn’t know was that her mother had truly loved Perdita’s father; his defection had killed something in her. There had never been another man for Katherine Gladstone. Ill-equipped to earn her living, she had struggled for years, and because there hadn’t been the support systems there were now for solo mothers she had been forced to leave her daughter with childminders while she worked at a succession of low-paying jobs. It didn’t exactly make for good bonding.

Although not physically cruel, she had never made any attempt to love or understand the child she saw as the source of all her problems. Perdita had grown up knowing that her father had left her mother because she had been conceived, that she was to blame for her mother’s unhappiness and their poverty.

Those bitter memories had led Perdita to give up her twins.

‘She suffered too,’ she said now. ‘Not that it matters— it’s all over and done with.’ She hesitated, until some dark compulsion made her ask, ‘When you got my letter did you believe it?’

His eyes were hooded. ‘That you were their mother? Yes, after I’d made enquiries.’

‘And that they were yours?’ For some reason she had to know.

A muscle flicked in his jaw. ‘Yes.’ He paused, then went on dispassionately, ‘You’d been a virgin. They were born eight and half months after that night. I knew they had to be mine.’

What had he felt when he realised that the children he’d adopted were his own daughters? One look at the stark, impassive features revealed that she’d never know.

Besides, she wasn’t sure she believed his version of events. More than five years ago, well before she had started seriously searching, someone had tried to make sure that no one would ever be able to discover the twins’ identity. If it wasn’t Luke, who had it been, and for what reason?

She was never likely to know that, either, and now was not the time to pursue it. So she nodded as though the subject wasn’t very interesting and said, ‘I’ve done what I wanted to. I’ve seen the twins and satisfied myself that they’re happy.’ Casting a fleeting look at his implacable face, she touched her tongue to suddenly dry lips and said more forcefully than she’d intended, ‘I want to keep in touch.’

‘You are not to write—’

She said levelly, ‘I want to keep in touch, Luke.’ Resentment at his high-handedness broke through the guard she’d set on her emotions. Without volition, her hand stole up to touch the locket at her throat. ‘I think you owe me that, don’t you? You’ve enjoyed them all their lives while I’ve spent untold hours wondering how they are, whether they’ve been loved as I’d have loved them, worrying that they might be mistreated, unhappy.’

He said harshly, ‘You make it sound as though Natalie and I stole them. You gave them up.’

Her smile was the celebrated bittersweet one that had made her face hauntingly famous. ‘It worked out very well for you, didn’t it? I assume that it was Natalie who couldn’t have children, but you got your own.’

‘What the hell are you insinuating? That I deliberately set out to—?’

‘Impregnate me, is that the term you’re looking for?’ Reining in her temper, she said more moderately, ‘No, I know you didn’t. I’m sorry, I’m behaving stupidly, but can’t you see my point of view? Is it so strange that I want to keep in touch? You may not think I’m a very worthwhile character, but I swear to you that I would not willingly hurt them for anything in the world.’

‘When you look at me like that I’d believe anything you say,’ he said in a controlled voice that almost hid the hard-edged anger beneath the austere facade, ‘and I have to remind myself that you’ve made a very good living these past years producing whatever looks you were asked for.’

Humiliation washed through her. Turning her head sharply so that he couldn’t see what his brutal words had done to her, she fought it back. She wasn’t ashamed of being a model. He was muddying the waters, diverting her attention from the point under discussion. She set her jaw. Excellent tactics, but they were going to fail because she had no intention of losing her children again. She didn’t want to interfere in their lives—no, that was a lie.

Of course she wanted to be there for them, to see them all the time, but she accepted that it was impossible. When she had surrendered them for adoption she had given up her rights to mother them.

However, she hadn’t given up her natural instincts, and she wanted to learn to understand her daughters, to be able to fathom the lights and shades of their personalities, to be someone to them. Losing Natalie must have wrenched them from happiness to insecurity, and Perdita wouldn’t do anything to add to that. But she was going to be a part of their lives in some way.

She looked him square in the face and said collectedly, ‘I mean it, Luke. Unless they ask me I won’t tell them who II am, but sooner or later they’ll want to know, and it would be easier for them if their birth mother is not a total stranger.’

‘All right,’ he said slowly. ‘Give me your address.’

She could feel his reluctance, taste it on her tongue, and she knew how much effort it had cost him to say that. It was a major victory, but she was careful not to let him see her relief.

‘I don’t have one. I’ll contact you when I get settled.’

They had been standing like antagonists, facing each other, ©yes locked, searching for weaknesses, the air bristling with tension. Now Perdita felt awkward, the tension somehow metamorphosed into unease and embarrassment.

Her eyes slid away from the pale, cold intensity of his. ‘Well,’ she said awkwardly, ‘thanks for coming to see whether I was all right. As you can see, I am.’

‘You’d better wash the tearstains from your face,’ he said curtly.

She put a hand to her cheek, felt the faint encrustations and pulled a face. ‘Ugh.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said caustically, ‘you could probably roll in mud and still come up looking like Helen of Troy and Eve mingled in one glorious woman. Tearstains merely add another dimension to that maddening smile. It’s a wonder the advertising agency who dreamed up the Adventurous Woman project didn’t think of them— they certainly thought of everything else.’

She said calmly, ‘If they’d believed tears would sell more cosmetics they’d have done it. However, I was supposed to be an adventurous woman, not a wimp.’

‘Why did you give modelling up? There isn’t a flaw in that perfect face—I imagine you could have gone on for another five years yet. Ten, with filters.’

Perdita had spent years hearing her face and body discussed in the most clinical of terms, and would have said that she had no false vanity, no emotion but gratitude for the quirk of heredity that had given her looks and a body that matched the ideal for this decade. But something about the way Luke spoke sent a tiny whisper of foreboding through her.

He sounded every bit as blase as her agent, as the photographers who’d called forth hundreds of incarnations of her. His gaze as it measured her high cheekbones and satiny, full mouth was cool and dispassionate. Yet she detected an oblique anger, all the more intense for being so tightly leashed.

Many men had looked at her with desire. She was accustomed to it, knew how to deal with it. There was nothing in Luke’s demeanour to indicate anything but a rigidly disciplined self-possession, but the air sparkled and quivered between them, and deep in her body a flicker of white-hot response flamed treacherously into life.

It had to be because she’d never had a chance to get over her crush on him. Most adolescents fell in and out of love until slowly they built up a pattern of understanding, so that when real love arrived they recognised the differences. Pitchforked into an early maturity before she’d been ready to say goodbye to childhood, it was no wonder she was still in thrall to a purely physical response.

Caution steadied her voice, made her voice offhand as she shrugged. ‘I’m not greedy. I’ve earned enough to make me secure for the rest of my life, and apart from interesting things like the Adventurous Woman promotion, modelling was just sheer hard work after a couple of years. I didn’t enjoy being treated like a commodity.’

Now why had she told him that? Her lashes covered a momentarily uncertain gaze. Normally she wouldn’t have said that to anyone but a trusted friend. She didn’t trust Luke Dennison. She couldn’t afford to. In many ways he was the enemy, and, like all the most dangerous ones, he had the ability to infiltrate her defences. Which meant she was going to have to stop unbuttoning her lip whenever he asked a simple question.

‘Even though you conspired with a whole industry to do exactly that? So we aren’t going to see that lovely face in any more magazines?’