Catherine Spencer - Mistress on his Terms

“You raise an interesting question nonetheless,” he said, slamming closed the trunk and ushering her into the passenger seat with more haste than gallantry before sliding his rangy frame behind the steering wheel. “Why, after all this time, do you want to see Hugo?”

“He’s my father. What better reason is there?”

“But why now? If you’re telling the truth, he’s been your father all your life.”

“I didn’t know that until recently.”

“Precisely my point, Ms. Talbot. You’ve managed without him for the better part of twenty-six years. You’re well past the point where you need a guardian. There’s no emotional tie between you. So what’s the real reason you’re suddenly sniffing around?”

He made her sound like an ill-bred bloodhound. “It’s highly personal and not something I choose to share with a total stranger.”

“There are no secrets between Hugo and me.”

“Apparently there are,” she said smugly. “Judging by your reaction to my sudden appearance, he never confided to you that he had a daughter waiting in the wings.”

“Maybe,” Sebastian replied, giving back as good as he got, “because he never missed you. The daughter he does know and love more than compensated for your absence.”

“I have a…sister?” The concept struck a strangely unsettling, though not unpleasant note. She had been an only child who’d always wanted to be part of a big family, but there hadn’t even been cousins she could be close to. No aunts or uncles, and no grandparents. Just her mother and the man she’d known as her father. “We don’t need anyone else,” he’d often said. “The three of us have each other.”

Three, that was, until the September day ten months before, when a police officer showed up at her door and told her her parents were among the fatalities of a multivehicle accident on a foggy highway in North Carolina.

“Half sister,” Sebastian Caine said. “Natalie is Hugo’s child by his second marriage to my mother.”

“So what does that make you and me?” she asked, aiming to introduce a more cordial tone to the conversation. “Half stepbrother and sister?”

He cut her off in a voice as cold and sharp as the blade of an ax. “It makes us nothing.”

“Well, praise heaven!” she replied, stung.

“Indeed.”

They’d cleared the airport by then and joined the stream of traffic headed through the pouring rain for downtown Toronto. He was probably a very skilled driver, but the memory of her parents as they’d looked when she’d gone to make a positive identification remained too fresh in her mind, and the way Sebastian Caine zipped around slower vehicles left her bracing herself for disaster.

“Keep pumping an imaginary brake like that, and you’ll wind up putting your foot through the floor,” he observed, zooming up behind another car with what struck her as cavalier disregard for safety.

“I don’t fancy ending up in someone else’s trunk, that’s all.”

He sort of smiled. At least, she supposed that was what the movement of his lips amounted to. “Do I make you nervous, Ms. Talbot?”

She closed her eyes as he changed lanes and zipped past a moving truck. “Yes.”

“Then you’re wiser than I expected.”

Her eyes flew open again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t trust you or your motives. It means I’ll be watching every move you make while you’re here. Put a foot wrong, and I’ll be all over you.”

“How exciting. Be still my heart!”

“I’m serious.”

“I can see that you are. What puzzles me is why I’m such a threat to your peace of mind. I assure you I don’t plan to run off with the family silver or murder people in their beds. I have questions that only Hugo Preston can answer, that’s all.”

“You didn’t have to come halfway across the country for that. The telephone was invented a long time ago.”

“I’m curious to meet my father face-to-face.”

“I just bet you are!” he sneered.

She shrugged. “So sue me.”

“Give me reason to, and I will.”

She stared at him, unable to fathom his hostility, but his expression gave nothing away and she wasn’t about to beg for an explanation. “I’m afraid you’re in for a terrible disappointment,” she said instead. “I have no hidden agenda in coming here.”

His mouth tightened.

“There’s nothing unnatural in a person wanting to meet her biological parent.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror, stepped on the accelerator and raced past a stretch limo. Prickles of sweat broke out along her spine as he took an off-ramp at alarming speed.

Thrusting both palms flat against the dashboard, she asked, “How many auto accidents have you had?”

The question was ill-advised, to say the least. He speared her with a chilly sideways glare, which glimmered with evil amusement. “None. But there’s a first time for everything.”

“Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer you postpone the premiere performance until I’m not your passenger.”

“Your preferences don’t rank high on my list of priorities, Ms. Talbot. In fact, it’s safe to say they don’t register at all. As for your perceived sense of danger, let me assure you I don’t intend risking either life or limb on your account.”

They’d turned onto a street lined with elegant town houses by then. Braking to a stop next to a van, he shifted into reverse and began backing into a parking space so tight, it invited disaster. She opened her mouth to tell him so, then snapped it closed again as, without a moment’s hesitation or a single false move, he angled the car into place and brought it to rest parallel to the curb.

He reached behind her seat, leaning close enough that she got a pleasant whiff of his aftershave, and hauled out a briefcase. “Wait here,” he ordered, climbing out of the car. “I won’t be long.”

Lily watched as he loped across the street and up the steps to a door three houses down. Before he had the chance to ring the bell, a woman appeared. She was very pleased to see him, if the smile and hug she bestowed were anything to go by, and she was also very pregnant. He slung an arm around her shoulders and the two of them disappeared inside the house.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty. The clouds, which had been dense enough to start with, grew even darker. Not long after, a light came on at an upstairs window of the house into which Sebastian Caine had disappeared.

“Oh, fine thing!” Lily muttered resentfully. “I’m left cooling my heels in here while he has an assignation with his mistress. No wonder he told Hugo not to hold dinner!”

She twisted around and craned her neck, searching the narrow area behind the two front seats in the hope of finding something to wile away the time—a newspaper or magazine, even a map of the area. But the only item of interest was Sebastian’s passport lying open and facedown on the floor.

She prided herself on being an essentially decent person, the kind who returned her library books on time, held open doors for the elderly, and told little white lies only when absolutely necessary. She definitely did not consider herself to be the sort who snooped through other people’s medicine cabinets or read their mail. But that darned passport drew her like a magnet and before the full import of what she was doing could properly register, she found herself picking it up and sneaking a look inside.

In line with those of most other people she knew, her own passport picture made her look as if she belonged on North America’s Ten Most Wanted list, but Sebastian Andrew Caine might have commissioned a portrait photographer to produce his. His face stared back at her in all its direct-gazed, firm-jawed glory.

He’d been blessed with impeccable cheekbones, thick black hair, eyelashes to draw the envy of every woman alive and a disarming cleft in his chin. On top of that, as she knew from firsthand observation, he stood well over six feet and probably sent his tailor into raptures over his trim, perfectly proportioned physique.

Too bad he’d been at the end of the receiving line when God dispensed charm!

Though now a Canadian citizen, he’d been born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on April 23, thirty-four years ago. He traveled often and mostly to exotic places like Turkey, Russia, The Far East, Morocco and Greece.

She thumbed through the pages. His most recent port of call had been Cairo; his most far-flung Rarotonga. He’d visited Rio de Janeiro twice in the last three years and the southern Baja four times. What with jaunts all over the world and house calls to his current ladylove, it was a wonder he found time to work!

Annoyed at being kept waiting, Lily slapped the passport closed and turned to glare across the street at the house he’d entered, only to find her view blocked by Sebastian Caine’s tall figure. Completely unmindful of the rain pelting down, he stood beside her window, glaring right back at her.

At the realization that she’d been caught blatantly prying into something that was absolutely none of her business, her whole body blushed, starting at her toes and spreading in waves until the blood suffused her face and left it burning. Even her throat and eyeballs felt parched. She could neither swallow nor blink. She simply sat in paralyzed horror and prayed he was a mirage created by the rain weaving patterns down the glass.

At best, it was an unlikely alternative and one he soon disabused her of by striding around the back of the car and wrenching open the driver’s door.

Of course, there was no justifying what she’d been caught doing. Still, she felt compelled to try. “It was lying on the floor,” she blustered, the minute he climbed into the car.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His raised eyebrows told her plainly enough what he thought of that as an excuse.

“So I picked it up. A passport’s not something to be left lying around, you know.”

He leaned back in his seat and continued his frigid, unblinking regard.

Self-preservation told her she was merely digging herself in deeper with every word and that her best bet was to keep quiet. But his silence, charged with unspoken accusation as it was, unnerved her. “I mean, it could just as easily have fallen out on the road without your noticing, and I’m sure you know what a hassle it is trying to get a replacement…. Particularly if you needed to travel overseas in a hurry… Not to mention the ramifications of some underworld figure getting hold of it and putting it to criminal use…and…well…”

“Are you quite done?” he asked, when she finally ran out of steam.

She looked down, realized she was still clutching the passport and hurriedly dropped it into his lap. “Yes.”

“Thank God!”

He tossed the passport over his shoulder, and eased the car out of its parking spot. The rush hour was in full swing by then, which made it a bit easier for her to tolerate his aloof silence since she had no wish to distract him from the job of negotiating the heavy traffic. But when the city limits lay far behind them and the only sound to break the twilight hush was the frenzied swipe of the windshield wipers, she decided they’d both sulked long enough.

“I’m afraid,” she said, slewing a glance at him, “that we got off to a rocky start and I’d like to apologize for my part in that.”

His shrug of acknowledgment could hardly be construed as encouraging.

Still, she persevered. “I really don’t make a habit of going through other people’s private possessions, you know. But you were gone longer than you led me to expect and I was just looking for something to read.”