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‘Bastard!’ he muttered. Stephen—whose fastidious nature frowned on public cursing, who had retained his self-control even when Duncan had goaded him to his face!
‘Do you know who she is?’ she asked curiously.
‘Yes, I know who she is,’ Stephen echoed with a contemptuous snap, picking up his fork again and viciously skewering a piece of apple. ‘Duncan was almost engaged to her once, but she decided to marry someone else. It didn’t stop the two of them having a flaming affair, though, and by the look of it they’re still going hot and strong…all lies to the contrary!’
His acrid bitterness gave Kalera a sinking feeling as she remembered the cryptic exchange of insults about ladies and tramps. She pursued the answer that she no longer wanted to hear. ‘But who is she?’
Stephen’s eyes were faintly sullen as they met her wary gaze. ‘I think you’ve guessed already, haven’t you? That, my dear, is Terri, my cheating ex-wife…and Duncan is the man that she was sleeping with for most of our marriage!’
CHAPTER FIVE
THE next morning Kalera went to work with a headache that no aspirin could cure.
Needless to say they hadn’t lingered over liqueurs and on the uncomfortable journey home Kalera had learned more than she wanted to know about the extended death-throes of Stephen’s seven-year marriage. She had listened to his bitter tale with a sinking heart, hearing the death-knell to any hopes she might have had of casually confessing her one-night stand with Duncan. Stephen would be incapable of viewing it objectively. Any other man he could have dismissed as no threat, but not Duncan. He would take Duncan as a personal insult, a twist of the knife that had already severed a large chunk of his masculine pride. How could he be expected to live comfortably with the knowledge that his hated rival had slept with both his wives?
In the darkness of the car Kalera’s responses had been stilted, but fortunately Stephen had been too wrapped up in his own festering anger to notice her discomfiture.
He had admitted that relations with his wife had been rocky for some time leading up to the final, violent row, but he had hoped that his burgeoning suspicions about her mood swings, growing physical coldness and evasive behaviour would prove unfounded. To ease his mind he had hired a private detective and when he’d found out that his trust had been misplaced his bitterness had been intensified by the fact that, even when confronted with the detective’s evidence of her persistent unfaithfulness, Terri had defiantly refused to explain or express any remorse over her actions. To his fury she had blamed himfor wrecking the marriage with his mistrust, and had vowed that she was not going to allow him to also wreck her relationship with Duncan.
Stephen had said that he could have understood, if not forgiven, Terri’s falling in love with someone else, but the cruel fact was that her affair with Duncan had been going on not just for weeks or for months, but for years—dating back to the time that they were in business together…
Although he’d railed fiercely against Terri for her treachery, Kalera had noticed that it was Duncan who was targeted with the worst of the blame.
‘He hates my guts because I exposed him for what he is—a moral bankrupt. There’s a dark, twisted side of him, the flip side to his brilliance, that’s totally without conscience. He never wanted to marry Terri himself—he just couldn’t stand the fact that I took her away from him and pulled the plug on our partnership, so he had to corrupt her, seduce her into playing his sick games, knowing that sooner or later I’d find out. Do you know what he did when I finally confronted him with the truth? He laughed!’ Stephen spat out the word with choked loathing. ‘He thought he’d won—that he’d proved his superiority over me yet again.
‘But he was laughing on the other side of his face when I told him that I wasn’t going to play the complacent husband.’ The flash of a passing streetlight illuminated a smile of grim remembered satisfaction. ‘That’s what the two of them had counted on, you see—that I’d rather preserve the fiction of a happy family than hold myself up to public ridicule and contempt as the gullible poor sod who’d been cuckolded by his former best friend. They misjudged me then—as they do now. Why should I be upset that he flaunts Terri as his mistress? She’s probably no more faithful to him than he is to her—they deserve each other as far as I’m concerned!’
But he was upset, if not by the sight of his ex-wife with Duncan, then certainly by the necessity of raking over the painful memories for Kalera’s sake. There was a white-hot edge to his anger which made her uneasy, but perhaps it was the continuing friction with Terri over the custody of young Michael that was constantly reigniting his burning sense of injustice.
Kalera’s own devastating experience of loss enabled her to understand why Stephen had kept his personal connection with Duncan secret. The greater the pain, the deeper one tried to bury it. What an awful irony it must have seemed when the one woman who had interested him since his divorce turned out to be working for his nemesis. No wonder he had seemed so appealingly vulnerable and cautious on those first few dates. He must have hesitated to commit himself to further involvement until he was sure that her relationship with Duncan was purely businesslike, the power of his attraction ultimately proving stronger than his fear of history repeating itself.
‘I’m sorry. I should have told you all this before,’ he said remorsefully as they kissed goodnight on her threshold. The leafy jasmine vine which grew over the porch trellis whispered above their heads, spilling its delicate fragrance into the warm night breeze. ‘It wasn’t very fair of me to keep you in the dark and still expect you to make an informed choice. I suppose you feel this puts you in an even more impossible position at work…?’
Kalera’s first impulse was to agree, but her innate stubbornness made her baulk at the hint of manipulation. Stephen was a strong man with very firm opinions and she sometimes got the impression he would like to do the thinking for both of them.
‘Awkward, perhaps, but not impossible,’ she replied, feeling a throb of stress at her temples when his lips tightened. ‘Maybe this is a good way of showing that we’re not going to let the past taint our future. It’s only for a few weeks. I’m not afraid of Duncan and you needn’t be either. He has no power over our feelings for each other—’
‘I’m not afraid, it’s just—’ He frowned down at her in the feeble glow of the jasmine-smothered porch light. ‘I don’t trust him…’
She almost smiled at the growled understatement. ?
??But you do trust me?’
His hesitation was barely noticeable. ‘Of course I do.’
Her impulse to smile vanished. ‘I’m not Terri,’ she told him quietly. ‘I would never, ever be unfaithful to my husband.’
‘I know.’ He knew he had hurt her and tried to gloss over his error. ‘So…is this some kind of test of my faith?’ he asked wryly.
She had instantly denied it, but this morning as she drove to the hotel where the breakfast meeting was being held she couldn’t help wondering whether there wasn’t a tiny element of truth in his joking remark. She could never marry where there was a lack of mutual trust. She pushed the fleeting doubt away. Nothing that she had learned in the last few hours challenged her fundamental understanding of Stephen as a sensitive, caring man who held steadfast to his ideals. It was her perspective of Duncan which had suddenly acquired a new and puzzling slant.
Stephen had made it sound almost as if Duncan had cold-bloodedly set out to seduce Terri from sheer masculine competitiveness but, while he thrived on challenge, Duncan was the least cold-blooded man that Kalera had ever met. The true source of his genius lay in the fierce passion with which he ignited his ideas in the minds of others. No goal was ever pursued halfheartedly, but always with reckless amounts of unbridled enthusiasm…whether it was creating a new piece of software or making love to a woman.
Kalera shivered as she pulled into the hotel car park, her nerves spiking at the vivid mental image of Duncan, his moon-burnished torso arched into a shuddering bow, his fists digging into the mattress, head flung back, sweat glistening on his straining throat, his mouth open on a hoarse cry of violent ecstasy as he spilled himself into her hand. Heat prickled over her breasts as she remembered how quickly his body had veered out of his control, his intellect completely submerged in a rapturous celebration of the senses.
She braked just before she hit the car-park wall, only her seat belt saving her from slamming her head against the steering wheel, and turned the ignition off with trembling fingers. No, a cold-blooded vendetta wasn’t Duncan’s style but she would well believe he might take any number of risks in the grip of hot-blooded passion!
To do what he had done he must have been deeply in love—it was the only motive that jelled with his character. Whether he had been in love with Terri before her marriage to Stephen, or not realised the overwhelming force of his emotions until later, the only thing that could have precipitated him into such a tortured affair would have been the discovery that his feelings were reciprocated. Add an innocent child to the volatile equation and the situation would have been even more fraught. Living a double life seemed so alien to Duncan’s extroverted nature that it must have been Terri who had insisted on secrecy. Perhaps she had felt unable to choose between hurting her family and giving up the man she loved, until in the end the choice was made for her…
