Vaughan Slater, nine years younger than her mother back then. Only twenty-four to her thirtythree. But old enough to take advantage of a woman alone. Old enough to seduce her, sleep with her, make her fall in love with him, then tell her it was ‘only sex’ to her face and just walk away.
Vaughan Slater... the single and sole reason for her mother’s breakdown all those years ago.
CHAPTER TWO
CAROLYN glanced at her watch as she drove into Wollongong. Nearly ten-forty. Her appointment with Vaughan wasn’t till eleven, with the interior decorator following at eleven-thirty. Much as she wasn’t looking forward to meeting Vaughan again, she didn’t want to be late.
She hadn’t actually spoken to the man himself when she’d rung his office earlier in the week, his secretary making both appointments for her for this Saturday morning. So he had no idea of her true identity. The secretary had started calling her Miss Thornton straight away and Carolyn hadn’t corrected her mistake. At the time, she wasn’t sure why she’d kept her real name a secret, but she suspected one never gave an enemy any advantage in advance.
For he was an enemy, she accepted, a bitter taste coming into her mouth. An enemy to her mother’s future happiness. Carolyn knew that, when Julian presented his new bride with a designer-built and fully furnished home, Isabel was sure to want to meet and thank the people responsible.
Carolyn grimaced as she tried to picture how her mother would react to meeting Vaughan again, to having the man she’d loved so obsessively come back into her life. She wouldn’t be able to cope. Of that Carolyn was sure.
I can’t let them meet again, she vowed fiercely. I won’t!
The street that housed Vaughan’s office appeared on the right with Carolyn negotiating the turn across the on-coming traffic with great care. The last thing she wanted was to prang Julian’s beautiful blue BMW. Actually, she’d have driven her old bomb of a Datsun if she’d thought it would make the trip. As it was, she sighed with relief once she slid the car safely into a parking spot and turned off the engine.
Her watch showed ten forty-four by the time she alighted and locked the car then set out to find number sixteen. But as she walked swiftly along, the imminence of her encounter with Vaughan began sending a thousand nervous flutterings into her stomach, and her earlier steely resolve threatened to desert her.
Carolyn ground to a halt and scooped in several steadying breaths. Truly, she just had to get a grip on herself or risk making a hash of this meeting. A cool head was required. Vaughan was a successful and professional man now, who wasn’t going to like being put on the spot, or having old skeletons dragged out of the closet. He certainly wasn’t going to appreciate being told he had to avoid meeting a client’s wife, even if it meant lying to that client. For that was the only way Carolyn could think of to tackle the situation, by virtually throwing herself on his mercy. If the devil had any, that was!
At least she had a few weapons to fall back on to persuade Vaughan into compliance. No doubt Julian hadn’t paid him the full balance of his fat architectural fee for designing the house as yet. The Vaughan Slater she knew and despised would not do anything to make waves and lose out on that, Carolyn thought with bitter cynicism.
Money meant a great deal to him. Hadn’t she subsequently found out, when she’d checked the bankbooks after her mother’s breakdown, that he had not paid one cent in board for the last few months he’d stayed in their home? One didn’t have to have too much of an imagination to work out what happened. Once he’d secured his landlady’s love through pretending a return of affection with some very convincing words and lovemaking, he’d simply not paid any more.
Thinking about this little snippet of damning evidence made Carolyn even more determined not to take any nonsense from this man. He’d do what she asked or reap the rewards of his folly. Julian loved Isabel to distraction. He was also a very wealthy and influential businessman around Sydney and the south coast, being the owner and managing director of a large construction company that built shopping centres. Carolyn didn’t think he’d take too kindly to finding out the unabridged and disgusting truth of the way his womanising architect had once treated his wife.
Carolyn’s blue eyes darkened with fury and her teeth clenched down hard in her jaw.
Amazing, she thought. She’d had no idea she possessed such a capacity for hatred and revenge. People always described her as being mild-tempered. She certainly didn’t feel mild-tempered whenever she thought of a certain individual.
Steeling herself again, she walked more confidently along the pavement, looking for the dreaded address.
It wasn’t far, a modern three-storeyed steel and glass building with huge bluish windows facing the ocean, the kind of glass that one could look out of but couldn’t see into from outside.
Carolyn took one last steadying breath and pushed through the revolving glass doors into a grey marbled air-conditioned lobby. There was no reception desk, only a huge noticeboard on the wall which told her her quarry resided on the top floor. So did the interior decorator—Madeline Powers. Suites Three and Four respectively. A flight of stairs and two lifts serviced these upper floors.
Carolyn chose the stairs. She still had a few minutes to kill.
Would he recognise her straight away? she wondered as she made her way slowly up the carpeted staircase.
It was possible, her basic features not having changed much over the years. She still wore her straight hair in a single plait most of the time, though nowadays she wound it round the top of her head in a coronet. She also never wore make-up during the day, her natural peaches and cream complexion and thickly lashed blue eyes holding up quite well au naturel.
He wouldn’t have changed much, she fancied. Men didn’t from their mid-twenties to early thirties. Unless, of course, they put on weight or went bald, which she doubted he had from Julian’s description.
Carolyn still had a rather vivid mental picture of Vaughan at twenty-four, despite the intervening years. A strong angular face with straight brown brows and deeply set brown eyes; thick, wavy chestnut hair that always seemed to need a cut; a sensual-looking mouth that rarely smiled; and a body that had brought her girlfriends running from miles around, especially when he mowed the lawn with his shirt off.
Carolyn cringed as she recalled some of the comments her classmates had made about his various physical attributes. Maybe she’d been a bit of a prude back then, for she certainly hadn’t shared her friends’ preoccupation with sex. Admittedly, she’d been a young fourteen at the time, but even now she wasn’t impressed by the type of man who flaunted his sexual equipment in overtight clothes, any more than she liked girls who went round half-naked!
Maybe I’m still a prude, came the agitated thought. Twenty-four-year-old virgins aren’t exactly thick on the ground these days.
Carolyn became uncomfortably aware that her forehead had broken out in a fine layer of sweat. Extracting a tissue from her bag, she dabbed herself dry, conceding that perhaps she was dressed a little too warmly for a hot February day, Julian’s warning over her dress having induced her to wear a grey suit that the girls at work labelled the most effective in her ‘anti Maurice Jenkins’ armoury.
Carolyn smiled ruefully at the accuracy of this description, since the suit was rather shapeless with a blazer-style jacket and a pleated skirt. It certainly hadn’t caught the eye of the aforementioned Dr Jenkins, an obstetrician at the private hospital where Carolyn worked, who had steadily seduced every attractive nurse in the place and was currently directing his attention towards the administration staff.
Maurice Jenkins might be a handsome and successful man, but no male was welcome in her life on a ‘just sex’ basis; never had been and never would be. Which perhaps was why she hadn’t had a steady boyfriend as yet. All men seemed to want from a girl these days was sex. Carolyn resented being...
Good grief, where was her mind taking her? This was