A Secret Vengeance

Ms Gilbert was just a charity case, Luke reassured himself, some poor little old lady who didn’t have the wherewithal to help herself. To think anything else was untenable.

But the more Luke tried to picture Ms Jessica Gilbert as some poor little old lady, the less he was convinced. His father wouldn’t have been worried about his mother jumping to the wrong conclusions if the woman was elderly. He would only have worried about jealousy if the woman was young. And attractive.

“Is there something wrong, Luke?”

“Would you mind very much if I took a rain check on lunch, plus the ring-buying expedition?” he said on the spur of the moment. “There’s something I simply must do which can’t wait.”

“What, for heaven’s sake?” She wasn’t angry, just puzzled.

“I need to drive up to Lake Macquarie.”

Isabel blinked her surprise. “Lake Macquarie! But why?”

Why, indeed?

“There’s a property up there, an old fishing cabin where Dad used to take me when I was a boy. I haven’t been there for years. I just found out that he didn’t sell it like I thought he had. I know it sounds crazy but I have this compulsion to see it again.”

“And you have to go see it this very day, this very afternoon?”

“Yes.”

He expected her to ask more questions but she just smiled a wry smile. “You’re a lot more sentimental than you think you are, Luke Freeman. Look, why don’t you drive up there and stay the weekend? Have a rest. It’ll do you the world of good. These last two weeks must have been dreadful for you.”

Yes, he could stay the night at least, if he wanted to. He knew where his father had always hidden the key and he doubted that would have changed.

“You wouldn’t mind?” he said.

Isabel shrugged. “Why should I mind? In just over two weeks’ time, I’ll have you for the rest of my life. I think I can spare you for a couple of days’ R and R. But, Luke, I don’t want to put off buying the rings. They might need to be resized. Would you trust me to choose them without you?”

Luke couldn’t think of any other female he’d ever known who was so blessedly lacking in being a drama queen about things. “You are one incredible woman, do you know that? Here. Take this credit card and put the rings on that. And put lunch on it too.”

“If you insist,” she said, smiling saucily as she whipped the card out of his fingers.

“I insist,” he said, and smiled warmly back at her.

Another thing about Isabel that Luke appreciated was the fact she didn’t pretend she didn’t like money. She did. Even before the tragedy, which had turned him into a multimillionaire overnight, Isabel had openly appreciated the fact that he was earning a high six-figure salary, owned a town house in Turramurra, drove a recent-model BMW, and could afford to take her to Dream Island on their honeymoon.

Now, of course, he could afford a whole lot more.

“I’ll call you later,” he promised.

“You’d better.”

“And you’re right. I might stay up there for a day or two.” Depending on what he found once he got there, of course.

“I’ve already told you to.”

“I’ll miss you,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek.

“You call that a kiss?”

He laughed, then kissed her on the mouth. Her tongue touched his and Luke momentarily regretted not making love with Isabel the night before. But, at the time, he hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t wanted sex in any way, shape or form since the funerals.

“Mmm.” His lips lifted and he smiled wryly down at her. “I might come back tonight after all.”

“Waste of time, handsome. I’m taking Rachel out to dinner and the theatre tonight, remember? I can’t put it off. I’ve already arranged everything.”

“I wouldn’t want you to put it off,” he told her. Rachel was an old school friend of Isabel’s from her boarding school days. She’d once been a top secretary at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but she hadn’t worked for some years. Nowadays, she spent twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, looking after her foster mother who had Alzheimer’s.

Luke could well imagine how much Rachel looked forward to the one night a month off Isabel organised for her. He’d met her once briefly, and had thought how tired and old she’d looked. Yet she was only a year older than Isabel.

“It’ll keep, won’t it?” Isabel added.

“Sure.” Luke shrugged, the need already fading. They’d never gone through one of those lust-driven stages where they’d just had to have each other, regardless of where they were, or what was going on around them. They’d become friends before they’d become lovers. Some engaged couples Luke knew couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even in public. He and Isabel were never like that.

Which perhaps explained why his father had taken Luke aside at his engagement party and had questioned him on whether he was completely happy with Isabel in bed. Luke had been taken aback at the time by his father’s grilling over their sex life, but he had assured him that everything was fine in the bedroom department.

Thinking of this instance, however, suddenly made Luke wonder if his father had been totally happy with his sex life. To all intents and purposes, Luke’s parents had seemed happy with each other. They were openly affectionate with each other. Always holding hands and hugging. But who knew what happened behind closed doors?

Luke imagined that a man dissatisfied with his sex life might be tempted to stray…

“I think you’d better get going, Luke,” Isabel said drily. “You’ve drifted off somewhere again.”

“Sorry.”

“You were thinking of your father, weren’t you?” Luke stared at her.

“You don’t have to look at me like that. I know what he meant to you. And I know how much you’ll miss him. Much more than your mother. Oh, I know you loved your mother too. How could you not? She was the nicest, sweetest lady. But your father was more to you than a parent. He was your best friend. And your hero. So go and talk to him for a while up at that old place on Lake Macquarie. He’ll be there, I’m sure. And he’ll listen to you, as he always did.”

Luke now wished he’d told Isabel the complete truth about Pretty Point. He hadn’t realised she had such sensitivity. She always seemed so pragmatic about things.

But it was too late now. She’d wonder why he hadn’t been honest with her right from the start. And their relationship might suffer.

But it was a valuable lesson learned. He vowed to always tell his fiancée the truth in future, no matter what.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN the idea to go to Pretty Point for the weekend first popped into Celia’s head, she’d immediately rejected it. But the more she’d thought about it, the more she’d realised that Lionel’s love nest was the perfect getaway.

And, brother, did she need to get away.

The last two weeks had left her totally and utterly drained. She’d spent every evening and all the previous weekend over at Aunt Helen’s, either sitting with her almost catatonic mother, or arguing with her aunt over what should be done about her.

Celia wanted her mother to see a psychiatrist, and to get onto some medication for depression, but her sister disagreed.

“Jessica isn’t crazy,” Helen had stated firmly last night. “Just broken-hearted. All she needs is time, and some tender loving care and she’ll come good. You’ll be the one needing medication shortly if you keep worrying about her the way you are. Now, I don’t want to see hide nor hair of you this weekend, Celia. Go out with your friends. Or better still, go away somewhere. Anywhere.”

Celia lent back in the deck chair with a sigh and thought anywhere had never looked so good. What was it about a water view that relaxed nerves and soothed even the weariest soul?

She had to give to Lionel. He’d built his love nest on one superb spot.

He’d also had great taste in wine.

Celia took another sip of the excellent Chablis she’d found chilling in the fridge door and thought how lucky it was that her last appointment had cancelled that afternoon. She always tried to finish up early on a Friday but it was a real stroke of luck to finish at lunch-time. By two o’clock, she’d been packed and on her way to Pretty Point, with only a small detour necessary for some groceries.

And now here she was, mid-afternoon, with a lovely glass of wine in her hands, a million-dollar view to enjoy, and two days of blissful peace and solitude to look forward.

Celia kept on sipping the wine and gradually, the tension melted out of her knotted neck and shoulder muscles till she was leaning back, feeling deliciously mellow. Alcohol, she decided, was proving much more relaxing than all the head rotating exercises she’d been trying on herself every night this week. And infinitely more relaxing than Joanne’s solution.

“What you need, honey,” Celia’s fellow physio at the clinic had said yesterday, “is to get laid.”

Pig’s ear, she did.

Sex never relaxed Celia. Her only feelings afterwards were disappointment, disillusionment and dismay.

But that was just her, she’d finally accepted. Sex was widely accepted as a very pleasurable activity, as well as being touted as mother nature’s sleeping pill. She was the abnormal one.

Her mother had obviously been very partial to sex. With Lionel, anyway.

More than partial. She’d been possessed by it.

Celia wondered what it would be like to experience the sort of uncontrollable passion that turned an otherwise intelligent, independent woman into some kind of mindless sex slave. Had the pleasure of the moments spent with Lionel compensated for her mother’s pain afterwards? Had a weekend of sex and excitement with him been worth weeks of subsequent depression?

Celia had to assume her mother thought it had. Otherwise, why keep on doing it?

Maybe if she was ever swept up in a grande passion—or even a petite passion—Celia might understand her mother’s masochistic behaviour. As it was, from an objective, outsider’s point of view, such an all-consuming passion seemed nothing better than a slow-acting poison. One of those corrosive substances that ate away at one’s insides till there was nothing left but a dying shell.

Her mother had been well on the way to being reduced to such a shell long before Lionel had died. Hopefully, his death had come just in time and Aunt Helen was right: with a bit of tender loving care Celia’s mother might not end up having a complete nervous breakdown, nor going stark raving mad.

On the other hand…

Celia scowled at herself. She really didn’t want to think about her mother’s ill-fated relationship with Lionel Freeman this weekend.

Difficult not to, however, considering where she was. The place still reeked of the illicit lovers. Celia might have cleared all the rooms of her mother’s things, but Jessica’s highly individual decorating touch remained, as did loads of Lionel’s personal possessions. Clothes. Stacks of CDs. Shelves full of books. And bottles and bottles of wine.

Celia sighed. It had been a mistake to come here. She’d been right to reject the idea when it had first occurred to her. What on earth had she been thinking of?

But she was stuck here for now. She’d had too much to drink on an empty stomach to drive anywhere at the moment. Maybe later on this evening, she would go home.

And maybe not.

The bitter truth was she’d end up thinking of her mother at the moment, no matter where she was. Might as well stay here, Celia decided wearily.

Might as well have another glass of wine, too.

Luke was lost. Hopelessly lost. He’d thought he knew the way. But it had been nearly twenty years since he’d been to Pretty Point and, even then, he’d only been a child passenger, not the adult driver.

The relatively new freeway showed no turn-offs to Pretty Point, nor to any other place names he recognised. He realised after sailing past the turn-off to Morisset and Cooranbong that he probably should have taken it. He’d been driving north way too long. Nearly two hours from Sydney. He took the next turn-off to Toronto, drove into the town and bought a local map at a newsagent’s.

After studying it for a while, he made his way back onto the expressway, took the correct turn-off, and fifteen minutes later began to finally see some familiarity in the roads.

Even so, the area had changed dramatically.

Bush had been cleared and housing estates had popped up all over the place, even on Pretty Point. It was certainly no longer a backwater. As he drove down the now tarred road which led to the far end of the Point—and his father’s property—Luke began to appreciate how much ten acres of waterfront land was worth here in the present climate.

Ms Jessica Gilbert, whoever she was, had done very well for herself out of his father’s generosity.

Luke’s tension grew as he drew closer, his eyes narrowing as he glimpsed a building through the trees, a triangular-shaped house with a sloping green roof. He slowed, then braked, then scratched his head. Had his memory played him false? The area looked right, but the house was all wrong.

He drove on slowly, looking for a sign that this was the right place. And there it was, on the big white gum tree with the gnarled branches. His childish message, carved into the trunk all those years ago. LF was here.

Luke’s stomach contracted. The place was right. But the house was definitely wrong. He stared at it again.

It looked almost new, built on exactly the same spot where the old cabin had stood.

If his father had built a new weekender up here, then why hadn’t he ever mentioned it to him?

Don’t jump to conclusions, he warned himself. All will be explained once you meet its occupier in the flesh.

Meanwhile, Luke clung to the hope that the new place had originally been built as an investment property—possibly when he’d been living in England. Maybe his father had intended to sell it, but then had generously allowed this Ms Gilbert to live there, once he’d heard her hard-luck story.

Luke directed his car down the gravel driveway which wound a gentle path through the tall trees and up towards the back porch of the A-framed dwelling.

A sporty white hatchback was parked next to the steps.

Not a car that an elderly spinster would drive.

Luke tried not to keep jumping to a not-very-nice conclusion, but it was increasingly hard.

He climbed out from behind the wheel and rather reluctantly mounted the long back porch, all the while frowning down at the pine decking, then up at the pine logs which made up the entire back wall of the house.

One of his father’s favourite woods had been pine.

Luke knew then that his father had not just had this place built, he’d designed it himself. Had designed and had built it without telling him. Without telling his wife as well, Luke warranted.

Clenching a fist, he rapped on the door. There was no doorbell, of course. His father had hated doorbells. He’d hated phones as well. He’d hated anything that made irritating interrupting noises.

Luke knocked again. Louder this time.

Twenty more seconds ticked by. Twenty more silent tension-twisting seconds.

Why didn’t the woman answer? Was she deaf?

Suddenly, Luke hoped she was just that. Deaf. Elderly people were often deaf.

The door was reefed open and she stood before him.

In the flesh.

She wasn’t old. Nor deaf.

She was young. And beautiful. With full lips, slanting green eyes and glorious red-gold hair.

It was up. But not like Isabel wore hers up, all neat and smooth and confined. This hair defied order, rebellious curls easily escaping their loose prison to kiss the skin on her slender neck and rest lightly against her smooth, pale-skinned face.

“Ms Gilbert?” he demanded to know, his voice curt, his stomach churning. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe she was a friend. A welfare officer. A community nurse, even.

And maybe he was the next winner of the Nobel prize for architecture. If there was one.

“Yes,” she admitted, and Luke finally knew the answers to every question he’d been asking himself since he’d first heard her name.

CHAPTER THREE

CELIA stared up at the dark haired and very handsome man standing in the doorway, her memory trying to place him. His face was familiar, and so were his eyes. Almost black, they were. Long lashed and very deeply set.

She was frowning into their inky depths when recognition struck.

“Dear heaven,” she said, her hand tightening on the door knob. “You must be Luke. Lionel’s son.” She kept on staring at him. Impossible not to. It was like seeing Lionel, twenty years ago.

“Right in one, Ms Gilbert.”

The fact that he knew her name took a moment or two to register. As did his simmering anger.

Clearly, Luke Freeman hadn’t come to claim or inspect an inheritance. Somehow, he’d found out about his father’s extramarital affair with her mother, and had come charging up here, far from happy.

But what did he want? To hear first hand all of the sordid details? To confront his father’s mistress personally? To tear strips off her for corrupting his precious parent?

Over my dead body, Celia vowed. Her mother had suffered enough at the hands of one Freeman man. She wasn’t about to let the son finish off what the father had started.

She crossed her arms and gathered herself to do battle. “I don’t how you found out,” she said through gritted teeth, “but I presume you know everything.”

“About your affair with my father, you mean?” he returned in a voice that would have cut diamonds. “Oh, yes, I know. Now. But I suspected the truth as soon as you opened the door. To give my father credit, he had taste. You are one beautiful woman, Ms Jessica Gilbert.”

Celia was too shocked to be even mildly flattered by this back-handed compliment. My goodness! He thought she was his father’s mistress!

She opened her mouth to tear strips off him, but then slowly closed it again, her mind racing to put this puzzle together. If he thought she was his father’s bit on the side, then he actually knew very little. Just a name. Not the woman in question’s age. Nor anything else about her. He certainly had no idea Ms Jessica Gilbert was a forty-two-year-old single mother with a twenty-six-year-old daughter. He definitely had no idea how long the affair had been going on.

Celia could say anything she liked and Lionel’s son would probably believe it.

She thought of her mother and knew what she had to do.

Celia sighed, uncrossed her arms and stepped back out of the doorway. “I suppose you’d better come in,” she said with a wave of her hand, all the while wondering what approach she should take for the part of Lionel’s secret mistress.

His son was no fool, so best stick to the truth as much as possible so that she didn’t slip up. She would simply bring the affair forward twenty years and put herself in her mother’s place.

It would be difficult to pretend she’d loved the ruthless Lionel, let alone made love with him.

But she’d manage.

Somehow.

Luke tried to get a grip on his anger as he accepted her reluctant invitation and stepped into his father’s secret love nest.

He failed wretchedly. But who, exactly, was he angry with? His father, for not living up to his hero status? Or this creature, this incredibly sensual creature of the captivating and cat-like green eyes?

Luke strode across the large open-plan living room, his eyes taking in at a glance the simple yet elegant beauty of the place. The extensive use of wood had his father’s hand stamped all over it, though not everything was made of pine inside, only the kitchen and the walls. The polished wooden floors were boxwood and the high panelled ceiling looked like various types of cedar. The dining room table was made in a rich walnut, the finely carved chairs fashioned in the same wood, with dark green velvet cushions. The huge sofa facing the sandstone fireplace was also covered in the same dark green velvet.

As Luke walked past it, he couldn’t help thinking about what might have transpired on that sofa between his father and his mistress. And on the plush-pile cream rug stretched out on the floor in front of the fireplace. He could see her red-gold hair now, spread out and glowing in the fire light. He could almost feel the warmth of the flames on her pale skin, and practically taste the siren sweetness of her lips, drawing her married lover down, down into the hell-fires where lust ruled and faithfulness was totally forgotten.

Luke wrenched out one of the dining chairs and plonked himself down sideways in it, one elbow on the table, his other on the back of the chair. No way was he going to sit on the sofa. Nor make himself too comfortable. This was going to be a very brief visit.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked politely after shutting the door. “Tea? Coffee? A glass of wine?”

“No, thanks.” No politeness in his voice. It was rough and gruff.

“I think, perhaps,” she murmured in her sweet siren’s voice, “I could do with one.”

He watched her walk over to the galley-style kitchen, his gaze sweeping down her body then up again.

She was mistress material all right, with curves in all the right places. And she dressed for the part. Long, floaty wraparound skirt in a deep burgundy colour. A black knitted cardigan top with a deep scooped neckline and easy-to-undo buttons. No bra. Bare feet.

Luke estimated it would take a man less than twenty seconds to strip her naked, if she made no objections.

The image of his father sweeping through that door and immediately doing just that brought a flood of fierce feelings within Luke. More anger. A degree of disgust. And a perturbing amount of jealousy!

She poured herself a glass of white wine from a bottle in the fridge and came round to slide up on one of three pine stools which faced the kitchen counter. But she didn’t face the kitchen counter. She faced him, her green eyes thoughtful.

“What do you want, then?” she said as she crossed her legs and lifted the glass to her lips.

When her skirt fell slightly apart to show more than a tantalising glimpse of shapely leg, Luke struggled to banish the X-rated images that zoomed into his mind.

“I just want to talk to you,” he replied, pleased that his tone was a bit more businesslike and less angry.

Her delicate eyebrows arched cynically, and Luke wondered if his father had told her he only wanted to talk to her when they’d first met.

The image of his father as a ruthless womaniser didn’t sit any better with Luke than the image of him as a seduced fool.

He’d thought he’d known all the answers when she’d opened the door, but that wasn’t true. The physical reality of Ms Jessica Gilbert now raised a hundred more tantalising questions. But one stood out amongst all the others?

“Did you love him?” he asked abruptly, and watched her reactions.

Her lovely eyes rounded, her nostrils flaring in and out as she sucked in sharply. “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” she bit out.

“I think it is, Ms Gilbert. My father visited his solicitor the day before he died,” he went on. “His intention was to gift this place over to you. But he was killed before he could see to the transfer. He revealed that he’d been letting you live here rent-free for the past few years, but that he wanted you to have security for life.”

“I see…”

Her green eyes glittered with contempt. But for whom? Luke puzzled.

“You think I was sleeping with your father for what I could get out of him,” she stated coldly.

“It did cross my mind,” he admitted.

“I’m sure it did. I presume you won’t be signing this place over to me, then, will you?” she added drily.

“That depends,” he said, and watched a speculative interest replace the contempt in her eyes.

“On what?” she asked carefully.

The moment she asked that question in that fashion, Luke at least knew one of the answers he’d been looking for. She hadn’t been in love with his father. She had been in it for the material gain all along.

It made brutal sense. Why else would a girl as young as this be having an affair with a man as old as his father?

Luke wondered how much she’d already gleaned from him in cash during their liaison. Not to mention presents, the sort of presents rich older men gave their beautiful young mistresses. Clothes. Jewelry. Perfume. Lingerie.

She’d look incredibly sexy in black lace…

“On what does it depend?” she demanded to know and, immediately, another X-rated image raised its ugly head, rattling Luke with the power this female had to both arouse and tempt him without seemingly doing a thing.

Luke stared at her and tried to imagine what she would say if he offered her this place in exchange for one weekend being his mistress, giving him everything she’d given his father. And more.

Oh, yes, he’d want more. He was only thirty-two years old, a man in his sexual prime, a man who hadn’t made love to his fiancée in…

Guilt consumed him as his train of thought ended with Isabel: the woman he was going to marry in a fortnight’s time, the woman he’d vowed always to be truthful with in future.

What was happening to him here?

Not that he’d actually done anything. A man could not be hung for his thoughts, especially when in the presence of the temptation sitting before him. Did she have any idea how sexy she looked, swinging her prettily painted toes in front of him, that slit in her skirt falling further and further apart till he could practically see the entire side of her left leg? And all the while she was sipping her wine and watching him over the rim of the glass like a hunter quietly watching its prey.

Luke began to understand why his father had fallen victim to her wiles. She was the devil in disguise.

At the back of his mind, Luke knew he should get the hell out of there. But his curiosity far overrode his common sense.

“It depends on your telling me all about your affair with my father,” he said brusquely.

Her left leg slipped off her right knee, bringing her skirt back to a more modest arrangement. When she put her glass back down, Luke saw that her hand was shaking slightly. “All? What do you mean by…all?”

Luke liked seeing her agitated. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because he didn’t really want her to be a cold-blooded money-grubbing bitch. Luke was afraid that if she was, he might find himself in deep trouble here. For if she’d sleep with a man old enough to be her father, strictly for material gain, then what would she be capable of with him?

Never in Luke’s life had he felt the pulling power of his dark side this much. Sure, during his years at uni, he’d sometimes acted foolishly in the sexual sense. Even recklessly. He’d been a bit of a lad over in London too, perhaps because he’d been away from his father’s supposedly good influence for the first time.

But ever since he’d come back to Australia two years ago, he hadn’t wanted wild sexual thrills any more. He’d wanted a more safe, secure and settled life. He’d wanted what his father had had.

Luke stared at his father’s sexy young mistress and realised ruefully his dark side still wanted what his father had had. The nice little woman at home, and this, waiting for him at weekends.

His heart raced just thinking about it.

But they were still only just thoughts, he told himself firmly. He couldn’t, he just couldn’t act on them, no matter how tempting. He would hate himself for ever if he did.

But he still wanted to know everything about his father’s affair, to try to make sense of it all.

“Exactly that,” he bit out. “I want to know how and when you met my father? Who made the first move and why? How often you met and where? I want to know if he truly loved you, or just wanted you for sex. Tell me the whole rotten truth, Ms Gilbert, and this place is yours.”