One Night: Red-Hot Secrets: A Secret Disgrace / Secrets of a Powerful Man / Wicked Secrets. PENNY JORDAN

sheets—white and very, very expensive—were of the finest quality possible, even if back then she had not known enough about such things to recognise that fact, and it was surely safer to focus on that fact and use it to block out those awful unwanted images that were threatening to crash through the barriers she had erected against them.

      On one side of the bed were double doors that led to a modern marble-and-glass bathroom with a free-standing bath, and on the other a pair of double doors that led to a dressing room.

      She didn’t want to be here. It wasn’t good for her. Not now, when she was feeling so vulnerable, so aware of the past and its consequences not so much for her or for Caesar but for their son. It was there in that room, in that bed, that he had been conceived. There in that bed that she had somehow convinced herself that Caesar wanted and loved her, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary; there that she had willingly allowed herself to be swept away by needs, desires and emotions she had been pitifully incapable of understanding, never mind resisting.

      Out of the corner of her eye she saw Caesar remove the dinner jacket into which he had changed for their evening meal, throwing it carelessly onto one of the off-white leather sofas. As he did so, the fabric of his dress shirt pulled tautly cross his shoulders. Traitorously, shockingly, dangerously, her stomach muscles clenched and her heart rolled over.