The Mistress's Child

He didn’t answer immediately. He wasn’t sure how much of his past he wanted to share with her. What if anything he wanted to share with her, other than the very obvious. And his years as emissary to a Middle Eastern prince could not be explained in a couple of sentences in the middle of a field on a blisteringly cold winter’s afternoon. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you about it some time,’ he said softly.

So he wasn’t going to fill in any gaps. He would remain as unknowable as he ever had been. She looked at him in exasperation. ‘Why are you really here, Philip? What brought you back to Langley after so long?’

An unanswerable question. How could he possibly define what his intentions had been, when nothing was ever as easy as you thought it was going to be? Something had compelled him to return and lay a increasingly troublesome ghost to rest, and yet the reality was proving far more complex than that.

He had been dreaming of her lately. Images which had come out of nowhere to invade his troubled nights. Not pin-point, sharply accurate and erotic dreams of a body which had captivated him and kept him prisoner all this time. No, the dreams had been more about the elusive memory of some far-distant sweetness he had experienced in her arms.

Part of him had wondered if seeing her again would make the hunger left by the dream disappear without trace—like the pricking of a bubble with a pin—but it had not happened like that.

The other suspicion he had nurtured—that her beauty and charm would be as freshly intact as before—had sprung into blinding and glorious Technicolor instead. His desire for her burned just as strongly as before—maybe even more so—because nobody since Lisi had managed to tempt him away from his guilt and into their bed.

Not that there hadn’t been offers, of course, or invitations—some subtle, some not. There had been many—particularly when he had been working for the prince—and some of those only a fool would have turned down. Was that what he was, then—a fool?

Or was it that one night with her had simply not been enough? Like a starving man only being offered a morsel when the table was tempting him with a banquet?

He looked into her eyes—their bright, clear aquamarine shaded a deeper blue by the half-light of approaching dusk. Her face was still pale—pale as the first faint crescent of the moon which was beginning its nightly rise into the heavens. Her lips looked darker, too. Mulberry-coloured—berry-sweet and succulent and juicy—what wouldn’t he give to possess those lips again?

‘Maybe I wanted to see you again,’ he murmured.

It sounded too much like the kind of declaration which a woman dreamed a man would make to her, but there was no corresponding gentling of his tone when he said it. The deep-timbred voice gave as little away as the green, shuttered eyes did.

‘Why?’ She forced herself to say it. ‘To sleep with me again?’

Philip’s mouth hardened. He wasn’t going to lie. ‘I think you know the answer to that.’

She let out a cold, painful breath as the last of her hopes crumbled. It was as she had suspected. The warm, giving Philip whose bed she had shared—that man did not exist. It had all been an act. He was merely a seductive but illusionaryfigure who had let his defences down enough to have sex with her, and then had retreated to his real world—a world which had excluded her because he’d had a wife.

Not just cruel, but arrogant, too!

‘And you think…’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Do you really think that I’ve been sitting around, just waiting for you to come back and make such a—’ she almost choked on the word ‘—charming declaration as that one?’

‘But I’m not telling you any lies, am I, Lisi?’

She shook her head violently, and some of the thick, dark hair escaped from the velvet ribbon which had held it captive. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Lies aren’t your thing, are they? You lie by omission rather than fact! Like you omitted to tell me that you were married when you seduced me!’

‘Seduced you?’ He gave a short laugh and his breath clouded the air like smoke. ‘You make it sound as though we were both starring in some kind of Victorian melodrama! There was no wicked master seducing some sweet little innocent who knew no better, was there, Lisi? Quite the contrary, in fact. You were the one who stripped naked in my bed. You knew exactly what you wanted and what you were doing. So please don’t play the innocent. That night you kept me delightfully and memorably entertained—something which is simply not compatible with someone who isn’t…’ he narrowed his eyes into hard, condemnatory slits ‘…experienced.’

Lisi swallowed. He was insulting her, she knew that—and yet it was like no insult she had ever heard. The disparaging tone which had deepened his voice did not have her itching to slap the palm of her hand against that smooth, golden cheek the way it should have done.

Instead, it seemed to have set off a chain reaction which began with the quickened pace of her heart and ended with the honey-slick throb of a longing so pure and so overwhelming that she could have sunk down into the thick, wet clods of earth and held her arms open to him.

But she had played the fool with Philip Caprice once before, and once was too often.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘You know, you really ought to make your mind up how you feel about me. On the one hand you seem to despise me for my so-called experience—while on the other you seem unable to forget what happened.’

‘Can you?’ he demanded as he felt the heavy pull of need deep in his groin. ‘Can you forget it, Lisi?’

Of course she couldn’t! But then, unlike Philip, she had a very tangible memory of that night.

Tim.

She thought of Marian’s words—wise, kindly experienced Marian who had urged her to tell him, who had emphasised how much a child needed a father. But what if this particular man had no desire to be a father? What if she told him and ruined both her and Tim’s lives unnecessarily? What if Philip had children of his own?

Was now the time to ask him? In a field on a cold December night where stars were now beginning to appear as faint blurry dots in the skies?

She steeled herself. ‘What happened to your wife, Philip?’

She took him off guard with her question, though perhaps that was because these days he had schooled himself not to remember Carla more than was absolutely necessary. The living had to let go—he knew that—just as he knew how hard it could be.

He used the same words as the press had done at the time. ‘She was involved in a pile-up on the motorway.’

She nodded, painfully aware of how much the bereaved resented other people’s silence on the subject. She remembered when her mother had died, and people had seemed to cross the road to avoid her. ‘Was it…was it instant?’

‘No.’ The word came out more harshly than he had intended, but he did not want to discuss Carla, not now. God forgive him, but he wanted to lose the pain of death in the sweet, soft folds of living flesh. ‘Can’t we go somewhere warmer, if we’re going to talk?’

She shook her head. Tim would be out of nursery soon enough and she had no desire to take Philip home and have him see her little house with all its childish paraphernalia, which might just alert his suspicions.

And where else to go to talk in Langley on one of the shortest days of the year—the pub would have shut by now. There was always the hotel, of course, she reminded herself, and a shiver of memory ran down her spine.

‘I don’t think there’s any point in talking. What is there left to say?’

He watched the movement of her lips as she spoke, saw the tiny moist tip of her tongue as it briefly eased its way between her perfect white teeth, and a wave of lust turned his mouth to dust. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he agreed softly. ‘How can we possibly talk when this crazy attraction is always going to be between us? You still want me, Lisi—it’s written all over your face,’ and he reached out and pulled her into his arms.

‘D-don’t,’ she protested, but it was a weak and meaningless entreaty and she might as well not have spoken for all the notice he took of it.

He cupped her face in the palm of his hand and turned it up so that she was looking at him, all eyes and lips and pale skin, and his voice grew soft, just as once it had before. ‘Why, you’re cold, Lisi,’ he murmured.

It was the concern which lulled her into staying in his arms—that and the masculine heat and the musky, virile scent of him. Helplessly, she stared up at him, knowing that he was about to kiss her, even before he began to lower his mouth towards hers.

The first warm touch of him was like clicking on a switch marked ‘Responsive’. ‘Philip,’ she moaned softly, without realising that she was doing so, nor that her arms had snaked up around his neck to capture him.

The way she said his name incited him, and he whispered hers back as if it were some kind of incantation. ‘Lisi.’ Her mouth was a honey-trap—warm and soft and immeasurably sweet. He felt the moistness of her tongue and the halting quality of her breath as it mingled with his. Even through the thickness of his greatcoat, he could feel the flowering of her breasts as they jutted against him and he felt consumed with the need to feel them naked once more, next to his body and tickling both hard and soft against his chest. ‘Oh, Lisi,’ he groaned.

All she could think of was that this was not just the man she had found more overwhelmingly attractive than any other man she had ever met—this man was also the biological father of her child, and in a way she was chained to him for ever.

Just for a minute she could pretend that they had been like any other couple who had created a child together. They could kiss in a field and she could lace her fingers luxuriously through the thick abundance of his hair, and feel the quickening of his body against hers and then…and then…

Then what?

The logical conclusion to what they were starting clamoured into her consciousness like a bucket of ice-cold water being torrented over her and Lisi pulled herself out of his arms, her eyes wide and darkened, her breath coming in short, laboured little gasps.

‘You thought it would be that simple, did you, Philip? One kiss and I would capitulate?’

The ache of her absence made his words cruel. He raised his eyebrows in laconic mockery. ‘You weren’t a million miles away from capitulation, were you?’

She drew her coat around her tightly and the reality of the winter afternoon made her aware that she was chilled almost to the bone. ‘I may have had a moment’s weakness,’ she hissed, ‘but I can assure you that I have, or had, absolutely no intention of letting you take me in some damp and desolate field as if I were just some girl you’d picked up at a party and thought you’d try your luck with!’

‘Luck?’ he said bleakly, stung by the irony of the word. Maybe it was time he told her. Maybe he owed her that much. For what kind of bastard could have walked out on a woman like Lisi with only the baldest of explanations—designed not just to hurt her but to expurgate his own guilt? ‘I really do think we need to have that talk, Lisi—but not now, and not here—’