The Mistress's Child

He gave a conventional smile as he forced himself to make conventional conversation. ‘And of course Langley is a very pretty little village.’

Lisi was growing uncomfortable. She wished he would go. Just his proximity was making the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up like soldiers and she could feel the prickle of heat to her breasts. She remembered the lightning feel of his mouth as it caressed all the secret places of her body and thought how sad it was that no other man had ever supplanted him in her memory.

She cleared her throat. The last thing she wanted was to antagonise him and to arouse his suspicions, but she could not tolerate much more of him sitting across the desk from her while she remembered his love-making, the unmistakable glint in his eyes telling her that he was remembering, too.

‘You still haven’t told me how I can help you,’ she asked quietly.

Philip narrowed his eyes. He didn’t know what he had expected from her today. More anger, he guessed. Yes. Much more. And more indignation, too. Lisi looking down her beautiful nose at him for daring to reappear without warning and after so long. Particularly after the last words he had ever said to her.

Yet there was an unexpected wariness and a watchfulness about her rather than the out-and-out anger he might have expected, and he wondered what was the cause of it. Something was not as it should be.

He ran a long, reflective finger along the faint shadow which darkened his jaw. ‘You mean am I here today on business? Or pleasure?’

She gave a thin smile. ‘I hope it’s the former! Because I don’t think that the atmosphere between us could be described as pleasure—not by any stretch of the imagination.’

Oh, but how wrong she was! You didn’t have to like a woman to want her. He knew that. Liking could die, but lust seemed to have a much longer shelf-life. ‘Then maybe we should try and put that to rights.’

‘By placing as much distance as possible between us, you mean?’

‘Not exactly.’ He leaned back in the chair and narrowed his eyes in provocative assessment. ‘Why don’t I take you for a drink after work instead?’

His audacity left her reeling, and yet there had been weeks and months when she had prayed for such a proposition,when she’d tried to tell herself that what had happened between them had all been one big misunderstanding and that there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for his behaviour.

But those hopes had soon dwindled—along with the growing realisation that Philip Caprice had changed her life irrevocably. And how, she reminded herself. He had brought with him trouble and upheaval, and if she wasn’t very, very careful—he could do the same all over again. And this time she had much more to lose.

‘A drink? I don’t think so. Not a very good idea,’ she told him in a trembling voice and then paused for effect—to try and hurt him as much as he had once hurt her. ‘I can’t imagine that your wife would like it very much. Or has she grown used to your infidelities by now?’

He stilled as if she had struck him, though he had been expecting this accusation from the moment he’d walked in. He was surprised that she had taken so long to get around to it. ‘My wife wouldn’t know,’ he said tonelessly.

‘Oh, so it all became too much for her, did it?’ Lisi sucked in a breath which threatened to choke her. ‘Did she divorce you when she found out about me, Philip? Or were there others? There must have been, I guess—I’m not flattering myself that I was something special.’

He felt the pain of remorse. ‘There was no divorce.’ His eyes were very green—colder than ice and as unforgiving as flint. ‘She—’ He seemed to get ready to spit the next words out. ‘She—died.’

Lisi registered the bizarre and unbelievable statement and flinched as she saw the brief bleakness which had flared up in his eyes.

Died? His wife had died? But how? And why? And when? Not that she could ask him. Not now. And just what could she say in a situation like this? Offer condolences for a woman she had unwittingly deceived? She swallowed down her awkwardness. ‘I’m sorry—’

He shook his head. ‘No, you’re not. Don’t pretend. You didn’t know her.’

‘Of course I didn’t know her! I didn’t even know of her, did I, Philip? Because if I had…if I had—’ She chewed frantically on her lip.

‘What?’ he interjected softly. ‘Are you trying to say that you wouldn’t have gone to bed with me if you’d known she existed?’

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘Are you so sure, Lisi?’

She bent her head to gaze unseeingly at all the property details she had been typing up. Of course she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything other than the fact that Philip Caprice had exercised some strange power over her—the power to transform her into the kind of wild, sensual creatureshe hardly recognised, and certainly didn’t like.

‘Just go away,’ she said, her voice very low. ‘Please, Philip. There’s nothing left to say, and, even if there was, we can’t have this conversation here.’

‘I know we can’t.’ He leaned forward and the movement caused his trousers to ride and flatten over the strong, powerfulshafts of his thighs and he heard her draw in a tiny breath. ‘So let’s have that drink later and catch up on old times. Aren’t you interested to compare how the world has been treating us?’

Something in his words didn’t ring true and again she felt a frisson of apprehension. Why would Philip suddenly reappear and want to catch up on old times?

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh, come on, Lisi—what have you got to lose?’

Her freedom? Her sanity? Her heart? She shook her head. ‘I’m busy after work,’ she said, despising herself for being tempted all the same.

But there was something in her body language which told a conflicting story, something which put his senses on full alert—and, besides, he wasn’t going away from here until he got what he had come for. ‘How about tomorrow night then?’

‘I’m busy.’

‘You mean you have a date?’

Lisi stared at a face which held the arrogant expression of a man who was not used to being turned down, and came to a decision. She had thought that playing it polite might do the trick, that he might just take the hint and go away again. But she had been wrong. And the longer he stayed here…

Politeness abandoned now, she rose to her feet. ‘I don’t know how you have the cheek to ask that! My personal life is really none of your business, Philip.’

The fire in her eyes heated his blood, and there was answering fire from his as he echoed her movement and stood up to tower over her, thinking how small and how fragile she looked against his robust height.

‘Like I said,’ he murmured, ‘I’m just curious about ex-lovers.’

Her heart was pounding with rage and fury and with something else, too—something far more threatening—something too closely linked with the overwhelming desire she had once felt for him. ‘I don’t think that the extent of our little liaison really warrants such a flattering description as ‘‘ex-lover’’, do you?’

He wasn’t doing much thinking at all. Not now. He was entranced by the rise and fall of her heavy breasts beneath the thin white shirt and he felt an explosion of need and lust which made him grow exquisitely hard, and he thanked God that the heavy overcoat he wore concealed that fact.

‘If the term offends, then what would you rather I called you, Lisi?’ he asked steadily.

‘I’d rather you didn’t call me anything! In fact, I’d rather you turned straight around and went out the way you came in! What is the point of you being here? Do you honestly think you can just waltz back in here after all this time, and pick up where we left off?’

‘Is that what you’d like, then?’ he asked softly. ‘To pick up where we left off?’

Yes! More than anything else in the world!

No! The very last thing she wanted!

Lisi stared distractedly at the hard, angular planes of his face and—not for the first time—wished that she had more than one beautiful yet unsatisfactory night to remember this man by. And then reminded herself that she had a whole lot more besides.

Imagine the repercussions if he were to find out!

She gave a humourless laugh. ‘I outgrew my masochistic phase a long time ago!’ She looked down deliberately at her watch. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I really do have work to do!’

He remembered her as uncomplicated and easygoing, but now he heard the sound of unmistakable frost in her voice and he found himself overwhelmed by the urge to kiss the warmth back into it. And it was so long since he had felt the potency of pure desire that he found himself captive to his body’s authority. Compelled to act by hunger and heat instead of reason—but then, that was nothing new, not with her.

A pulse began to beat at his temple. ‘You don’t look too busy to me.’