The Mistress's Child (2 page)

churning over with anxiety, as if he somehow knew her secret and was just biding his time before he confronted her with it. Distract him, she thought. 'Why on earth should my job prospects interest you?'

'Call it curiosity,' he told her softly. 'Ex-lovers always interest me.'

Lisi repressed a shudder. She didn't feel like his ex-lover—she felt like a woman who had shared his bed under false pretences before he had disappeared dramatically from her life. But she didn't want to analyse that—not now and not with him here. Instead she took his question at face value.

'I love my job,' she said staunchly. 'It's convenient and it's local—and there's no reason why I should travel miles to find something which is already on my doorstep, is there?'

'I guess not.' But he couldn't help wondering why she had settled for such steady small-town life when she was still so young and beautiful. His eyes were drawn irresistibly to the lush lines of her mouth, knowing that he would never be satisfied until he got her out of his system one last time.

For good.

He gave a conventional smile as he forced himself to make conventional conversation. 'And of course Langley is a very pretty little village.'

Lisi was growing uncomfortable. She wished he would go. Just his proximity was making the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up like soldiers and she could feel the prickle of heat to her breasts. She remembered the lightning feel of his mouth as it caressed all the secret places of her body and thought how sad it was that no other man had ever supplanted him in her memory.

She cleared her throat. The last thing she wanted was to antagonise him and to arouse his suspicions, but she could

not tolerate much more of him sitting across the desk from her while she remembered his love-making, the unmistakable glint in his eyes telling her that he was remembering, too.

'You still haven't told me how I can help you,' she asked quietly.

Philip narrowed his eyes. He didn't know what he had expected from her today. More anger, he guessed. Yes. Much more. And more indignation, too. Lisi looking down her beautiful nose at him for daring to reappear without warning and after so long. Particularly after the last words he had ever said to her.

Yet there was an unexpected wariness and a watchfulness about her rather than the out-and-out anger he might have expected, and he wondered what was the cause of it. Something was not as it should be.

He ran a long, reflective finger along the faint shadow which darkened his jaw. 'You mean am I here today on business? Or pleasure?'

She gave a thin smile. 'I hope it's the former! Because I don't think that the atmosphere between us could be described as pleasure—not by any stretch of the imagination.'

Oh, but how wrong she was! You didn't have to like a woman to want her. He knew that. Liking could die, but lust seemed to have a much longer shelf-life. 'Then maybe we should try and put that to rights.'

'By placing as much distance as possible between us, you mean?'

'Not exactly.' He leaned back in the chair and narrowed his eyes in provocative assessment. 'Why don't I take you for a drink after work instead?'

His audacity left her reeling, and yet there had been weeks and months when she had prayed for such a proposition, when she'd tried to tell herself that what had happened between them had all been one big misunderstanding

and that there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for his behaviour.

But those hopes had soon dwindled—along with the growing realisation that Philip Caprice had changed her life irrevocably. And how, she reminded herself. He had brought with him trouble and upheaval, and if she wasn't very, very careful—-he could do the same all over again. And this time she had much more to lose.

'A drink? I don't think so. Not a very good idea,' she told him in a trembling voice and then paused for effect— to try and hurt him as much as he had once hurt her. 'I can't imagine that your wife would like it very much. Or has she grown used to your infidelities by now?'

He stilled as if she had struck him, though he had been expecting this accusation from the moment he'd walked in. He was surprised that she had taken so long to get around to it. 'My wife wouldn't know,' he said tonelessly.

'Oh, so it all became too much for her, did it?' Lisi sucked in a breath which threatened to choke her. 'Did she divorce you when she found out about me, Philip? Or were there others? There must have been, I guess—I'm not flattering myself that I was something special.'

He felt the pain of remorse. 'There was no divorce.' His eyes were very green—colder than ice and as unforgiving as flint. 'She—' He seemed to get ready to spit the next words out. 'She—died.'

Lisi registered the bizarre and unbelievable statement and flinched as she saw the brief bleakness which had flared up in his eyes.

Died? His wife had died? But how? And why? And when? Not that she could ask him. Not now. And just what could she say in a situation like this? Offer condolences for a woman she had unwittingly deceived? She swallowed down her awkwardness. 'I'm sorry—'

He shook his head. 'No, you're not. Don't pretend. You didn't know her.'

'Of course I didn't know her! I didn't even know of her, did I, Philip? Because if I had...if I had—' She chewed frantically on her lip.

'What?' he interjected softly. 'Are you trying to say that you wouldn't have gone to bed with me if you'd known she existed?'

'No,' she whispered. 'Of course I wouldn't.'

'Are you so sure, Lisi?'

She bent her head to gaze unseeingly at all the property details she had been typing up. Of course she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure of anything other than the fact that Philip Caprice had exercised some strange power over her—the power to transform her into the kind of wild, sensual creature she hardly recognised, and certainly didn't like.

'Just go away,' she said, her voice very low. 'Please, Philip. There's nothing left to say, and, even if there was, we can't have this conversation here.'

'I know we can't.' He leaned forward and the movement caused his trousers to ride and flatten over the strong, powerful shafts of his thighs and he heard her draw in a tiny breath. 'So let's have that drink later and catch up on old times. Aren't you interested to compare how the world has been treating us?'

Something in his words didn't ring true and again she felt a frisson of apprehension. Why would Philip suddenly reappear and want to catch up on old times!

I don't think so.'

'Oh, come on, Lisi—what have you got to lose?'

Her freedom? Her sanity? Her heart? She shook her head. 'I'm busy after work,' she said, despising herself for being tempted all the same.

But there was something in her body language which told a conflicting story, something which put his senses on

full alert—and, besides, he wasn't going away from here until he got what he had come for. 'How about tomorrow night then?'

'I'm busy.'

'You mean you have a date?'

Lisi stared at a face which held the arrogant expression of a man who was not used to being turned down, and came to a decision. She had thought that playing it polite might do the trick, that he might just take the hint and go away again. But she had been wrong. And the longer he stayed here...

Politeness abandoned now, she rose to her feet. 'I don't know how you have the cheek to ask that! My personal life is really none of your business, Philip.'

The fire in her eyes heated his blood, and there was answering fire from his as he echoed her movement and stood up to tower over her, thinking how small and how fragile she looked against his robust height.

'Like I said,' he murmured, 'I'm just curious about ex-lovers.'

Her heart was pounding with rage and fury and with something else, too—something far more threatening— something too closely linked with the overwhelming desire she had once felt for him. 'I don't think that the extent of our little liaison really warrants such a flattering description as "ex-lover", do you?'

He wasn't doing much thinking at all. Not now. He was entranced by the rise and fall of her heavy breasts beneath the thin white shirt and he felt an explosion of need and lust which made him grow exquisitely hard, and he thanked God that the heavy overcoat he wore concealed that fact.

'If the term offends, then what would you rather I called you, Lisi?' he asked steadily.

'I'd rather you didn't call me anything! In fact, I'd rather you turned straight around and went out the way you came

in! What is the point of you being here? Do you honestly think you can just waltz back in here after all this time, and pick up where we left off?'

'Is that what you'd like, then?' he asked softly. 'To pick up where we left off?'

Yes! More than anything else in the world!

No! The very last thing she wanted!

Lisi stared distractedly at the hard, angular planes of his face and—not for the first time—wished that she had more than one beautiful yet unsatisfactory night to remember this man by. And then reminded herself that she had a whole lot more besides.

Imagine the repercussions if he were to find out!

She gave a humourless laugh. I outgrew my masochistic phase a long time ago!' She looked down deliberately at her watch. 'And now, if you'll excuse me, I really do have work to do!'

He remembered her as uncomplicated and easygoing, but now he heard the sound of unmistakable frost in her voice and he found himself overwhelmed by the urge to kiss the warmth back into it. And it was so long since he had felt the potency of pure desire that he found himself captive to his body's authority. Compelled to act by hunger and heat instead of reason—but then, that was nothing new, not with her.

A pulse began to beat at his temple. 'You don't look too busy to me.'

Like an onlooker in a play, Lisi stared with disbelief as she saw that he was moving around to her side of the desk, with a look on his face which told its own story.

'Philip?' she questioned hoarsely as he bent towards her.

'Answer me one thing and one thing only,' he demanded.

His voice was one of such stark command that Lisi heard herself framing the word, 'What?'

'Is there a man in your life?' he murmured. 'A husband or a fiance or some long-time lover?'

This truth was easy to tell, but then perhaps that was because she was compelled to by the irresistible gleam of his eyes. She shook her head. 'No. No one.'

He looked down at her for one brief, hard moment and knew a moment of sheer, wild exultancy before he pulled her into his arms with a shudder as he felt the soft warmth of a woman in his arms again.

The blood roared in her ears. She wanted to push him away and yet she was powerless to move, so tantalising was his touch. Suddenly she knew just how a butterfly must feel shortly before it was impaled against a piece of card. Except that a butterfly would receive nothing but pain— while Philip could give her untold pleasure.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' she breathed as she felt the delicious pressure of his fingers against her skin through the shirt she wore.

'You know what I'm doing.' Doing what he had been wanting to do ever since he had walked back in here again today. Doing what had haunted him for far too long now.

'You need kissing, Lisi,' he ground out and pulled her even closer. 'You know you do. You want me to. You always did. Didn't you?'

His arrogance took away what little of her breath was left, because just the sensation of feeling herself in the warm circle of his arms again was enough to make her feel as weak as a kitten.

'Get out of here! We're standing in the middle of my bloody office—' she spluttered, but her protest was cut short by the ringing of the doorbell and Marian Reece, her boss and the owner of Homefinders, walked in, her smile of welcome instantly replaced by one of slightly irritated bemusement as she took in the scene in front of her.

'Hello, Lisi,' she said steadily, looking from one to the other. I'm sorry—am I interrupting something?' Hearing the unmistakable reproof in her boss's voice, Lisi sprang out of Philip's arms as if she had been scalded, thinking how close he had been to kissing her. Would she have let him? Surely not. But if she had... ?

Her heart was crashing against her ribcage, but she struggled to retain her breath and to appear the kind of unflappable employee she usually was. 'H-hello, Marian. This is Philip Caprice. We were, um, we were just—'

'Just renewing our acquaintance,' interjected Philip smoothly and held his hand out to Marian, while smiling the kind of smile which few women would have the strength to resist.

And Marian Reece was not among them.

Lisi had known the forty-five-year-old since she had bought out the estate agency two years ago. She liked Marian, even though the older woman led a life which was streets apart from her own.

But then Marian was a successful businesswoman while Lisi was a struggling single mother.

'Lisi and I are old...friends,' said Philip deliberately. 'We go way back.'

'Indeed?' said Marian rather tightly. 'Well, call me a little old-fashioned—but mightn't this kind of fond greeting be better reserved for out of office hours?'

Fond? Inside, Lisi almost choked on the word. 'Yes, of course. And Philip was just leaving, weren't you, Philip?'

'Unfortunately, yes—I have some business to see to.' He glittered her a look which renewed the racing in her heart. ;   'But I'll be back tomorrow.'

Lisi thought it sounded more like a threat than a promise. 'Back?' she questioned weakly. 'Tomorrow?'

'Of course. You haven't forgotten that you're going to sell me a house, have you, Lisi?'

Lisi blinked at him in confusion. Had she had missed something along the way? 'A house?' He had mentioned nothing about a house!

'That's why I'm here,' he said gently. 'I'm looking for a weekend cottage—or something on those lines.'

Was she being offered a lifeline? In the old days he had done deals for rich contemporaries of his from university— they had valued his taste and his discretion.