The Perfect Seduction, page 16
‘Your grandfather asked Olivia if she would put Ruth on the phone. I guess she was rather surprised, but she called Ruth over and—’
‘I could hardly believe it, but Ruth recognised Grandpa’s voice right away,’ Samantha interrupted excitedly again. ‘And then Ruth, Grandmother, started to cry and Grandpa he was practically in tears, too, and Olivia, she had to take the phone from Ruth, but then she had to put her on again because Grandpa wouldn’t speak to anyone else and then—’
‘Samantha...’ her father warned sternly before turning back to Bobbie and continuing, ‘Ultimately both Ruth and your grandfather realised that what they’d been told all those years ago, that what they’d believed about one another had been complete untruths. Your grandfather had never been married nor even close to it, never mind having a child.’
Their father looked grave and thoughtful.
‘Ruth wanted desperately to keep her baby but in those days...’ He shook his head. ‘She was told both by the hospital and by her mother’s family that she owed it to your mom to sever herself completely from her, and she wasn’t allowed to have any contact with her from just after she was born.
‘She told us over the phone how for months after your mother’s birth she would wake up in the night, distraught to discover that she was no longer pregnant, unable to work out why, until she remembered that she had already given birth and that her baby was gone.’
Bobbie could feel her eyes starting to fill with tears again as the starkness of her father’s revelations stirred her emotions, and Sam, too, she could see was close to tears herself.
‘What did Mom say when... when she knew... about Ruth, about her mother?’ Bobbie whispered.
Her father smiled gently at her.
‘Well, you can imagine she was pretty stunned to learn after all these years that far from not wanting her, her mother had, in fact, never stopped missing her or thinking about her. It probably was a bit much for her to take in at first. I left it to your grandfather to tell her, and well, there were some tears and then... Anyway, it was Ruth who took the initiative, phoning your mom to tell her herself just how she felt about her, and that must have broken the ice. After the first half-hour, the pair of them have hardly been off the phone for ten minutes at a time.’
‘I can hardly believe how much has happened,’ Bobbie told him, shaking her head.
‘Mmm...and where were you when it was happening?’ Samantha questioned her.
‘With Luke,’ Bobbie replied simply.
‘So Olivia said,’ Samantha returned, adding, ‘I’m dying to get to know her. She sounds great and, of course, I’m even keener to meet your Luke.’
‘He’s not...’ Just in time Bobbie stopped herself from announcing that Luke was not hers and said quietly instead, ‘He’s busy at the moment.’
Now that she was over the first shock of learning everything that had happened and despite her happiness for her mother, she was miserably aware that sooner rather than later she was going to have to tell her family just what the real situation was with Luke. Sooner because the last thing she wanted was the embarrassment of their falling on him en masse and greeting him as some kind of prospective, soon-to-be family member as they obviously seemed to think he was going to be.
‘What’s wrong?’
Bobbie and Samantha were sitting in their double room of the hotel suite the family had taken over at the airport hotel. Their parents were having dinner with Jon and Jenny whilst their grandfather had admitted that he was taking Ruth out to dinner—alone.
‘We’ve got a lot of catching up to do,’ Grant had informed them when Samantha had raised her eyebrows.
‘Sounds like Bobbie’s isn’t the only romance that’s likely to be going on around here,’ Samantha had said, adding wryly, ‘I’m beginning to feel a little out of place as the only one without a partner.’
Somehow or other Bobbie had managed to force herself to smile.
‘Roberta...’ Samantha warned.
‘It’s Luke,’ Bobbie admitted, unable to keep her feelings to herself any longer.
‘You’ve had a fight,’ Samantha pounced.
Bobbie shook her head. ‘It isn’t as simple as that,’ she told her sister, then went on to briefly outline what had happened.
‘He thought what?’ Samantha yelped in furious anger when Bobbie got to the part where Luke had accused her of wanting to blackmail Ruth. ‘My word, but that’s so untrue it’s almost funny,’ she declared hotly. ‘When I think of all the hard times we had as kids persuading Dad and Mom, yes and Grandpa, too, that we weren’t going to be turned into a couple of freaks surrounded by bodyguards and so overprotected that we wouldn’t know what it was like to live in the real world. When I think of the problems that our family’s having serious money has caused for us... Did you tell him that far from wanting to blackmail anyone, the pair of us, but you more especially, have spent your grown-up years afraid to let yourself trust any man too much just in case he turns out to be more interested in getting his hands on your money rather than your body? Boy, is he going to have some crawling to do when he finds out the truth,’ Samantha asserted in evident satisfaction.
Bobbie permitted herself a sad smile.
‘No, Sam,’ she said, ‘it isn’t going to be like that. Luke... well... apart from the fact that he doesn’t... that he... He might want me, but he doesn’t love me,’ she owned painfully. ‘And he’s the kind of man...well, I just know that his pride will make it impossible for him to admit how badly he’s misjudged us...me and my pride. I can’t face him again, Sam, not after all that’s happened, not now that he knows how I feel about him. I just wish...’ She paused. ‘If only everyone wasn’t so convinced that we’re already a couple, then I could just disappear back home and lick my wounds in private... try to forget him.’ She frowned suddenly and then announced, ‘Sam, I want you to do something for me.’
‘No,’ Samantha told her firmly.
‘I haven’t told you what it is yet,’ Bobbie complained.
‘I don’t care. I can tell just by looking at you...just by listening to you, that I’m not going to like it,’ Samantha insisted.
‘It isn’t anything very hard,’ Bobbie coaxed her. ‘Nothing that I wouldn’t do for you....’
Samantha was watching her suspiciously.
Bobbie took a deep breath. ‘I want you to pretend to be me,’ she told her twin.
Samantha stared at her.
‘What...? But the family—’
‘No, not to them,’ Bobbie corrected her impatiently, ‘to Luke. I want you to go and see him and tell him that you hate him and that you never want to see him again.’
Samantha whistled softly and then said, ‘Wow!’
‘You can be as horrible as you like,’ Bobbie encouraged her. ‘In fact, the more horrible the better. I want you to make him feel that any idea he had that I might ever have wanted him or felt anything for him, was the wrong idea. In fact, I want you to make him thoroughly dislike me so much so that...that in future he isn’t even going to want to speak to me, never mind anything else.’
‘You’ve got it that bad, huh?’ her sister enquired with loving sympathy.
‘It’s the only way I can stop myself from weakening and...and hoping...perhaps even making a complete fool of myself by...’ Bobbie closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I love him so much,’ she whispered huskily, ‘that I’m afraid of what I might do if I have to be around him for too long. This way... I’m going to tell everyone that we’ve had a fight and that...that I’ve decided to go home.’
‘They won’t like that. They’re planning to stay here a month and maybe more,’ Samantha warned her sister.
‘They’ll accept it, especially if...well, Mom will understand if she knows I’m hurting and she’ll talk to Dad and Grandpa. And then when I’m gone...’
‘You want me to go see this Luke and pretend to be you,’ Samantha finished for her.
‘You will do it, won’t you?’ Bobbie appealed to her sister.
‘What else are twin sisters for?’ Samantha responded gruffly.
Bobbie flung herself into her arms and they hugged one another tightly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SAMANTHA had teased her unmercifully when Bobbie had explained to her what she planned to do with the bathroom of the small house she had bought herself, not with any family money, but with her own earnings.
‘You want to what?’ she had asked, laughing. ‘Oh boy, is that some give-away,’ she had teased her sister when Bobbie had reluctantly admitted that the mirrors that had just been delivered were not to go on the front of her wardrobes but were, in fact, to be fitted around her bathroom with one special antique one to hang over the large Victorian footed pedestal bath she had found in a reclamation yard.
And even when the bathroom had finally been finished, Samantha had still shaken her head. ‘Well, I guess it does look kinda...interesting,’ she had conceded, eyeing the antique filigree candle sconces that decorated the walls and the complementary bronze candle holders that stood on every available surface. ‘But are you sure it’s a good idea...bathing by candlelight? Won’t that make it hard for you to see the dirt?’ she had teased and then gone on about the tub. ‘Why, I guess two people could quite easily fit in it,’ she had mocked innocently whilst Bobbie had given her a murderous look.
So far, though, it had only been put to a solitary and far more mundane use than she had had in mind when she had given in to her romantic and highly sensual yearning for a special place where she and her lover, her beloved, could hide themselves away to indulge themselves in the kind of lovemaking that had always been her secret fantasy.
‘Identical, huh, that’s all they know,’ Samantha had scoffed when she had finally teased out of her twin the erotic fantasy behind her plans for her bathroom. ‘Personally, my choice would be for...’ She had paused and then an unfamiliarly dreamy and half-embarrassed look had crossed her face as she admitted, ‘My favourite sen-sual fantasy would be to make love in some hidden woodland glen with the sound of water somewhere nearby, a stream or preferably a river. It would be springtime—’
‘And the squirrels would pelt you with twigs and leaves for invading their privacy, and as for the brown bears...’ Bobbie had rolled her eyes expressively and both of them had ended laughing ruefully.
‘At least we share a common thing about water, though, I suppose,’ Samantha had concluded slyly when they had finally stopped giggling.
‘Perhaps...’
But it seemed that she was definitely destined to occupy her own private fantasy retreat on her own, Bobbie acknowledged as she walked tiredly upstairs, heading in the direction of her bathroom.
She had arrived home three days earlier and since then she had been working flat out, dealing with her accumulated backlog of mail, doing some basic shopping, cleaning the house and, in short, doing anything and everything that would keep her mind off Haslewich and Luke.
By now, of course, Sam was bound to have seen him and put their plan into action. He would know then just how wrong he had been about her, about them, and being the kind of man he was, she knew that his wretched sense of justice and fair play would not allow him to rest until he made whatever he considered to be due recompense to her for having misjudged her. She knew, too, oh how she knew, that she simply could not bear to endure his remote kindness and remorse, his pity when he knew, when they both knew, just how much more she truly wanted from him.
No, kind and gentle though he might be, it would carry the same degree of intense pain as the merest breath against badly burned or other sensitive skin.
Whilst she could withstand his anger and contempt, his savage condemnation of her by whipping up an answering form of protective anger, she had no defences against this compassion, which was why she had asked Sam to change places with her, to be her and to tell him when he made his apology that it was a little too late, that there were no amends he could make or that she wanted him to make; that it had been amusing for a while to play teasingly with the notion of allowing the sexual chemistry between them to have its head, but now she was bored, ready to move on to fresher pastures.
Oh yes, she could see it now, she acknowledged wearily as she shrugged off her clothes and padded naked from her bedroom to the bathroom, dimming the lights and slowly, as though it was a ritual, starting to light the candles she had set here and there around the bath and on the small occasional tables with the antique lace cloths. Sam would shake her head and stand her ground, she would smile ferally at Luke and laugh negligently as she dismissed her own emotions and him, and when she had finished there would be, could be, no turning back because Sam would carry out the role with relish and inspiration. She would know just how to walk the fine line that barely separated a woman being free-spirited from one who was vulgar, a woman who was hedonistically sensual from one who was brazenly too sexual.
The candles had a delicate floral fragrance that warmed the senses and Bobbie breathed it in appreciatively. She was not going to cry, she told herself firmly as she ran herself a bath. There was after all, no need.
It was sad, of course, that Luke did not love her, but one day... She bit down hard on her bottom lip as she fought the pain that sliced through her. A small handful of crystals added to the bath-water turned it a soft shade of blue. In the candlelight, the antique mirrors gave her back her own reflection; her skin looked peachy gold, sun-warmed and ripened, her hair a honey-soft swath that fell silkily below her shoulders, her breasts warm, round globes with deep golden rose nipples, the soft tangle of curls between her legs the same warm honey colour as the hair on her head.
She looked...she looked like a woman who was ready to make love, Bobbie admitted achingly, gently tracing the soft swell of one breast until her fingers started to tremble so much that she had to stop.
Fighting back the tears, she stepped into the bath and then lay back in it, positioning her head on the strategically placed bath pillow and closing her eyes.
The tape she had switched on as she walked into the bathroom was playing Vivaldi, haunting and evocative. One tear escaped from beneath her closed eyelids and then another as her mouth started to quiver.
Cocooned in her private sanctuary, absorbed in her deep sense of loss and pain, she didn’t hear the front porch door being unlocked. She didn’t even hear the determined swift feet on her stairs as their owner followed the sound of the music.
It was not Bobbie’s practice to bolt her bathroom door. Why should she? She lived alone after all. She still had her eyes closed when it was pushed open and it was only the audible swiftness of her visitor’s quickly indrawn breath that alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone.
Galvanised into action she opened her eyes; at the same time she stood up, starting to reach for a towel, and then froze, shock and disbelief warring for prominence as she stared into Luke’s eyes.
‘Luke! What are you doing here? How did you...?’
‘What the hell do you think I’m doing here?’ he muttered thickly and then before she could stop him he was lifting her out of the bath, ignoring both her cries of protest and the damage her soaking wet body had to be doing to his suit, ignoring everything but the need to satisfy the famished need of his mouth to be in the closest possible physical contact with hers.
This wasn’t kissing, Bobbie thought incoherently, it was...it was hunger, starvation, wholehearted possession. She could feel herself reacting to his nearness, her whole body starting to tremble, to ache...to burn, with such a searing need that she could no more have denied it than she could have stopped breathing.
She wasn’t sure which one of them undressed Luke; she only knew that the sight, the scent, the feel of his naked body, his skin, his flesh against her own, sent such a fierce surge of sensation through her that she was almost too self-consciously embarrassed to meet his eyes.
But far from being shocked, or even worse, contemptuous, of her body’s very obvious open, aching need for him, Luke tightened his hold on her and told her hoarsely, ‘It’s all right...it’s all right. I feel exactly the same. God, but I want you...I want you so damn much that...’
He had started to kiss her again, not just on her mouth this time, but on her throat, her breasts and then her belly. He dragged his mouth against her skin, causing her to shudder violently and moan his name as she pressed herself eagerly against him.
They made love then and there on her bathroom floor, Luke’s possessive and open need to fill her with the fiercely powerful stroke of his body matching her own equally strong desire to have him there. Obeying instincts she had never before experienced, Bobbie wrapped her legs tightly around him, holding him securely within her body, keeping him there as she cried out her famished need to him, urging him to possess her totally and completely, so intimately and deeply, that her body would carry the memory of him within it for ever.
Their desire for one another was uncontrollable, a wild, untameable primitive force, their lovemaking quickly reaching its natural climax, and as she felt the hot spurt of Luke’s seed deep inside her body, Bobbie knew with some dreamy, illogical female instinct that she would conceive, had conceived his child, and that knowledge made her eyes fill with tears of joy, the most exquisite sensation of complete fulfilment engulfing her.
Wonderingly she reached out and touched Luke’s face, her eyes darkening as she held his head. He gently kissed the palm of her hand. ‘We need to talk,’ he told her quietly.
But Bobbie shook her head and closed her eyes defensively, whispering, ‘No.’
She was afraid to hear what he might be going to say...or discover why he was even here; she was afraid, too, that now that their hungry desire for one another had been slaked, he would...
‘Yes,’ Luke insisted, overriding her thoughts, overriding her denial, and asked her quietly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’
‘I didn’t think you’d believe me,’ Bobbie answered huskily.
