“I hope to God I’m reading you wrong,” she said tightly, “and that you’re not suggesting I could have done better than Stuart.”
“Not better. Younger.”
“Because a younger man could have given me what?” She huffed out a contemptuous breath. “For the life of me I cannot think of any man—younger, older, whatever—as kind and generous and concerned for others as Stuart Thorpe.”
“What about your other needs, Vanessa?”
His meaning was clear in the dark burning light in his eyes, in the way he closed down the distance between them, in the sexual energy that seemed to pulse in the air as his gaze trailed slowly over her face and lingered on her mouth.
She shook her head slowly. This part of her marriage she discussed with no one. Not Gloria, not Andy, not Emma or Lily or any of her girlfriends. She’d promised to keep the platonic nature of their relationship a secret, to protect Stuart’s pride as a man and to prevent the scuttlebutt of gossip.
“You’re young,” he persisted. “Didn’t you want a family?”
“No.”
It wasn’t a lie, despite her recent pangs of baby envy. She’d already brought up her brother, taking over his care when she was little more than a child herself. She’d used up all her nurturing spirit. She had no emotional energy left for babies of her own. None whatsoever.
“No,” she repeated, more adamantly. “I didn’t want a family and I didn’t need a lover. Your father gave me everything I wanted, everything I ever dreamed of wanting, and more. And he chose to leave his estate to me. Why can’t you accept those truths? Why can’t you go back to Australia and let me be?”
Seven
Go home to Australia and let her be?
No, Tristan couldn’t do that. He could never quit a task half-done.
He still needed to know everything about Vanessa, but before he even approached her in the parking lot after the polo match he’d accepted that his motivation had shifted focus.
That’s what drove him to ask why she’d chosen his father.
Frustration. Self-defense. Finding that full-bodied smile trained on him for the very first time, he’d felt a primal rush of possessiveness, a she-should-be-mine kick that transcended desire. He’d needed a reminder, damn fast, of why he couldn’t get in that car and drive her back to his hotel and claim her as his own.
Her fervent response had done the trick. It had also convinced him of one of two things: either Vanessa had genuinely cared for her husband or she was one bloody fine actress.
And if he was out-of-the-ballpark wrong about her relationship with his father, was he wrong about other things?
Questions and conflicting answers chased through his mind all night long. At dawn he plunged his restless body into the hotel pool and slugged out a hundred laps. Afterward he’d intended returning to his suite and to his regular, controllable Monday morning of work, where questions had answers, where decisions triggered action, where results ensued.
Where he never backed down from the tough issues … or from digging too deeply because of a woman’s heartfelt appeal. I’m asking that you respect the privacy of others. Think about it, please. Think about doing the right thing.
That plea still had his conscience tied in knots a week later.
Instead of working, he found himself driving out of town and into the sprawling midcountry estates, heading for White Birch Lane and a score of knotted intangibles. He needed facts. He needed truths.
Not only about Vanessa, but about the father he’d not spoken to since he left Eastwick as a twelve-year-old.
Focused on that result, he didn’t consider the early hour until he was driving up to the closed and silent mansion. It was too early for her to be gone for the day but not too early, he discovered, to find her in the garden.
The morning sun was less than an hour old, its light as pale as her hair. As diaphanous as the shell-pink sweep of nothing that shaped her body. The image was soft and ethereal, an artist’s rendition of Girl with Flowers, and Tristan stood transfixed by her beauty for a minute too long. Twenty yards of lawn and several bays of massed rose bushes away, he sensed her sudden stillness and the shock in her eyes when his presence registered.
The polite thing to do was acknowledge her, maybe with a teasing remark about wandering the grounds in her negligée, then retreat so she could dress in something more … substantial. The sensible thing was to turn on his heel and get the hell out of there without taking any more notice about what she was wearing or not wearing.
But he had noticed. His body ached with its impolite and not-sensible response to noticing.
The best he could do was keep a bed of rose bushes between them as he approached, an extra thorny-branched barrier to the one he was busy erecting in his mind.
She’s out of bounds. She loved your father. She was his wife for five years.
No matter what resulted from their legal wrangle, from the letter’s allegations, from his investigations, she could never be his.
The massed shrubs shielded much of her body from view, but it didn’t help. He could still see her face, her throat, the skin framed by lace at her shoulders and breasts. And he could see what had brought her out of doors so early.
One of her gloved hands held a bunch of long-stemmed blooms; the other wielded a pair of lethal-looking shears. The part of his body that had noticed the diaphanous nightdress and the shape of her body beneath took due note.
“I hope I didn’t startle you too much. Those things—” he inclined his head to indicate the shears “—look like they could do serious damage.”
“I heard you drive up, so no.”
“Yet you looked surprised.”
“I thought you were Gloria, arriving early.”
Her accompanying shrug caused her negligee’s deep neckline to dip, and Tristan’s hand itched to reach out and slide it back into place. With a silent curse he shoved both hands in his pockets, out of temptation’s way. “I’m not Gloria.”
“No,” she said, as soft as the morning. “You’re not.”
Their gazes meshed for what felt like a long time. He could feel the pulse of attraction between them, a silent energy that hummed in the summer’s morning. She felt it too—he could see it in her eyes and in the slight flush of her cheeks.
Hell. She felt it too.
He buried his hands deeper in his shorts. “I should have called first.”
“It’s fine, really.”
“Really?”
“You saved me a phone call.” A frown of concentration formed between her brows and turned her eyes serious. “I wanted to talk to you about what I said yesterday … or what I didn’t say.”
“About?”
“Your father. The will. I’m not backing down on anything I said, but on my way home yesterday and last night and this morning I was thinking—” She paused and although her eyes were clear, the dark smudges beneath flagged her lack of sleep. “I may have given the impression that Stuart didn’t want you to have anything. That is not true.”
“He left me a thousand bucks. To show he hadn’t forgotten me.”
“That was the lawyers’ doing and not what I meant. He would have made you a beneficiary, Tristan, if you’d come to see him when he asked.”
“Guess I must have missed that.”