Wealthy Australian, Secret Son Read online

  “Lovely!” Diane threw in another brilliant hostessy smile.

  They remained silent until they saw Diane moving gracefully up the staircase on her very high heels.

  Charlotte felt rather sorry for Diane. She didn’t blame her for falling for Rohan. He was magnetic enough to draw any woman. She had caught Sam Bailey in particular having little snickers at Diane’s expense. Diane wasn’t liked, it seemed. But she was efficient. And very vulnerable where her boss was concerned.

  “Now, there’s a woman who would like to own you,” she said wryly.

  “Good thing she hasn’t told me,” was Rohan’s brisk reply. “Will we walk back to the Lodge, or won’t your evening sandals take it?” He glanced down at her beautifully shod narrow feet. “We can go through the garden. Or I can drive you.”

  “The drive might be safer.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” His tone was derisive. “Nobody said anything about sex,” he taunted.

  “But you’re planning on having it soon?” She rounded on him, lustrous green eyes sparking a challenge.

  “Well, we always were compatible in that area,” he said, taking her arm. “So—a walk, or the Range Rover?’

  “The garden,” she said. “It’s quickest and the easiest.”

  His brilliant gaze moved searchingly over her, as though he could uncover her every thought, her every secret. “I can’t promise I’ll make a point of sticking to the paths.”

  She put a hand to her throat, as though her heart had suddenly leapt there. Punishment she deserved. The day of reckoning wasn’t far off. And then there was Rohan’s mother, Mary Rose, deprived of her only grandchild.

  Mea culpa!

  A lovely soothing breeze lapped at her hair and her skin, at the fluid long skirt of her evening gown. It wrapped her body and caressed her ankles. The familiar scents of a thousand roses and creamy honeysuckle hung in the air. Above them the stars glittered and danced in a sky of midnight blue velvet. This wasn’t wise. But then she had never been able to command wisdom. An aching throb was building up fast in her body.

  “Shouldn’t you have brought a torch?” she asked, afraid she was revealing too much of her inner agitation. “For you? For me?” He gave an edgy laugh. “We know every inch of this place. Don’t twist away from me.”

  “Ah, Rohan!” She gave vent to a deep tremulous sigh that managed to be incredibly seductive. For all their time apart, she was still in thrall to him. Once married to Martyn, she had tried very hard to exorcise Rohan’s powerful image. Only it had haunted her every day of her life. And then, as her adored little son had grown older, Rohan’s features and mannerisms had begun to emerge! The fear she had felt when that occurred! The outright panic. God help her—she had married the wrong man! Martyn wasn’t the father of her child.

  How horrendously rash she had been. She hadn’t allowed herself enough time. Only back then she hadn’t known what else to do. So young. Pregnant. And she couldn’t think Martyn, her friend from childhood, wicked for having physically overcome her. She’d known before they had started out to a rock concert that evening how badly Martyn wanted her. For years he had wanted to be more than just her friend. Only there had always been Rohan. Rohan—who couldn’t offer the financial security and the lifestyle he could.

  So Martyn had watched and waited for his moment.

  When she’d realised she was pregnant how she had longed for a wise, loving mother to turn to—a mother full of unconditional love, full of advice as to which course she should take. Her father hadn’t been ready for any more shocks. Her escape routes had all been cut off. There had seemed no other course than to pay for her mistake.

  Rohan’s hand on her tightened, startling her out of her melancholy. “You know it’s cruel in its way,” he began conversationally. “One can kill trust, respect, write off the crime of betrayal, but one can never kill sexual attraction. I want you very badly—which you damn well know. But then, ours was a very passionate relationship, wasn’t it, Charlotte? While it lasted, that is.”

  Even as he spoke, he could feel the hot blood coursing through his veins. How could he punish Charlotte? Countless times he had longed to be in a position to do so. He had even bought Riverbend, putting in an outrageous offer almost as soon as it came on the market. Revenge on the Marsdons? Revenge on Charlotte who had betrayed him with Martyn, of all people? The only massive impediment was that he wanted her no matter what she did. Charlotte had taken possession of the deepest part of his being.

  They walked through a tunnel hung with lovely wisteria towards the summer house, designed as a small Grecian-style temple portico. It glowed whitely ahead. The four classical columns that supported the stone structure were garlanded with a beautiful old-fashioned rose that put out great romantic clusters of cream and palest yellow fragrant blooms, with dark green glossy leaves. Her mother had used to call it the Bourbon rose.

  She had a feeling of being inwardly lit up with desire—languorous on the one hand, on the other highly alert. The radiance she felt was so intense it surely must be showing in the luminescence of her skin. She stumbled just a little in her high-heeled sandals. He gripped her arm.

  “Oh, Lord!” came from Rohan under his breath. “You were the world to me.” He hauled her very tightly into his arms. “I lived for you. For our future together.”

  She was desperate to make amends. “Rohan, I thought—”

  He cut her off. “I don’t want to hear. Remember how we used to come to this place? In secret? This was our shrine, remember? The place of our spiritual and sexual exploration.”

  “Rohan, I loved you with all my heart.”

  “Yet you betrayed me.”

  “I told you. I deserved punishment.” She was trembling so badly she needed his tall, lean body to balance her. So much she’d had to endure over the past years. She wanted to cry her heart out. Swear that what she would confess would be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  His grip was fierce and unrelenting. “Well, I have you now,” he breathed, taking a silky massed handful of her hair and tilting her face up to him. “Come on, Charlotte. Kiss me like you used to.”

  It was a taunt, a torment. Never an invitation. As in everything he took the initiative. “You’re never going to go away, Charlotte.”

  “No.” She was breathless.

  “Say it.”

  “I’m never going to go away. I’ll never leave you.”

  “As if I haven’t heard that before.” His voice was unbearably cynical. “Only this time we have our son.”

  Oh, Rohan, hold me. Hold me.

  It was an old, old prayer for when she was in a hopeless, helpless situation.

  He let go of her long hair, his hands moving to cup her face, his fingers pressing into the fine bones of her skull.

  His kiss fell intently on her mouth. Only she confounded him by opening it fully, like a flower to the rain, admitting his seeking tongue to the moist interior. There was no end to sensation, the rush of desire, the rediscovery of rapture. No end to the richness, the incredible lushness of sensual pleasure. She reached up naked arms to lock them around his neck. Their darting tongues met in an age-old love dance. She could feel his hands on her, trembling. This had to be a dream from which she never wanted to wake. The first time since the last time she had come blazingly alive. More extraordinarily, the bitterness she knew she had caused, the torture of years of thinking himself betrayed, were nowhere. Not in his mouth. Not in his hands. Profound passion came for them at an annihilating rush.

  His hand sought and found her breast, forefinger and thumb stimulating the already tightly budded nipple.

  She moaned in mindless rapture, throwing back her head as he kissed her throat.

  Oh, the depths of passion! Not even suffering could blunt them.

  She could feel herself dissolving. He her captor; she his. She yearned for him…yearned for him… This was her once-in-a-lifetime great love. Desire beat like a drum. It gained power
. Surrender would come swiftly behind it. Soon all sense of place would vanish with their clothes. Passion demanded flesh on flesh.

  Somehow she found the strength to put a restraining hand over the caressing hand that was palming the globe of her breast. Another second of this and she would be lost to the world.

  He must have felt the same way, because he stopped the arousing movement of his hand, letting his hot cheek fall against hers, encountering the wetness of her tears. He savoured them, licking them off with his tongue. They had both been moving with tremendous momentum towards the point of no return.

  “All right,” he acknowledged, trying to subsume his own near-ungovernable arousal. “I want you for the night. Not just minutes out of time.”

  “Rohan, I can’t—”

  He cut her off. “You’ll have to come to me,” he said, his voice picking up strength and determination. “Not here. Not Riverbend. I realise the difficulties. But Sydney. Next weekend I’ve been invited to a big charity function. You’ll come as my partner. I’ll leave it to you to explain it to your father and Christopher.”

  She tried to focus on rearranging the bodice of her beautiful silk gown. The flesh of her breast still tingled from his touch. At the very portal of surrender she had pulled back, though she knew her sex-starved body would have no peaceful rest that night.

  “It would upset Dad quite a bit,” she managed after a while.

  “Do you think that bothers me?” His answer was full of disdain. “Your fine, upstanding parents gave my mother and me hell. The only person I’m concerned about is Christopher. I’m only guessing, but I think he’ll take it rather well. You’re a beautiful young woman, Charlotte. You can’t go the rest of your life alone. Or were you planning on living with Daddy for ever?”

  “I don’t deserve that, Rohan,” she shot back. “It’s been very difficult. Martyn’s death. Dad so sad and lonely. He needed me, Rohan. I couldn’t refuse him. I went on to finish my Arts degree externally. I didn’t give up. I know I could get myself a halfway decent job in the city, but here in the Valley it would be difficult. No teaching jobs, for instance. All taken. Then there’s the fact Chrissie loves the Valley. He loves Dad. I’d hate to uproot him, and I’d have the difficult job of finding a suitable minder for holidays and after-school hours. Not easy!”

  “No.” He saw the difficulties. “But you don’t have to worry now. That’s all been taken care of. Our son needs his father.”

  “I can’t let you browbeat me, Rohan.” Out of the blue Martyn and his treatment of her popped sickeningly into her mind.

  But Rohan was no Martyn.

  “Browbeat you?” He looked down at her, aghast. “As if I would or could. You want me as much as I want you. That was always the way. Who do you think you’re kidding, Charlotte?”

  She could feel the tears coming on again. “I’ve had no self, Rohan! Do you understand? No self.”

  He was shaken by the very real agony in her voice. “Did you think you could learn to love Martyn?” He was trying desperately to understand. “I loathed him!” She thrust away. This was dangerous. She had to get home.

  “Loathed him?” Rohan was stunned. “What did he do to make you loathe him? Martyn was mad about you. You loathed him? Come on, now. I need to know why.”

  She tossed back her long mane that tumbled in gleaming disarray over her shoulders, struggling hard to come up with an answer that might stave off a confrontation. “You know Martyn wasn’t the strongest of characters. His mother pampered him all his life. Rendered him useless. I don’t want to talk about Martyn. He’s dead, and in some way I am to blame.”

  He stood stock still, wishing she were under a spotlight so he could look deep into her eyes. “You couldn’t possibly have been frightened of Martyn?” He was forced to consider what he had never considered before. Martyn had adored Charlotte. He would never have hurt her. Would he? “I know he could be a bit of a bully, but you could always handle him. Remember how he bullied that little Thomas kid? I threatened to knock the living daylights out of him if he didn’t lay off the kid. First and last time I ever threatened anyone. When you married Martyn you put yourself in the Prescotts’ power. And Martyn’s father was always a decent man.”

  “The past is past, Rohan,” she said, low-voiced. “Neither of us can change it.”

  “So you won’t talk?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about any more,” she insisted. “If I could undo the past I would.”

  Rohan groaned like a man desperate for peace of mind. “I’m not following this at all. If you seriously believed Martyn was Christopher’s father—and that’s your story—you were having sex with both of us.”

  “I was so alone.” Unprotected. Isolated. “You took that computer job in Western Australia. It couldn’t have been further away. I know they offered you a lot of money, but that meant you were gone for the entire summer vacation. I was without you for the best part of four months. I can’t talk about this any more, Rohan. I betrayed you. I betrayed myself. I made a terrible mess of my life. But I’m begging for a ceasefire. You’ve told me what you want. I understand. I want to make it up to you for your suffering.”

  Rohan raised a staying hand. “Oh, be damned to that, Charlotte!” he said, very sombrely. “Thing is, you can’t. I understand your wanting the continuation of your privileged lifestyle. Pregnancy would have made you very vulnerable. You were so young. But I can’t forgive you for depriving me of my son, depriving my innocent, hard-working mother of her grandson. You do well to cry. Now, I’d better get you home. Daddy will be waiting up for his golden girl.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  JUST as she feared, her father made strenuous objections to her spending the following weekend in Sydney.

  “You’ve always been in Costello’s power!” he ranted. “You’d think the boy was some powerful sorcerer. He’s always had your heart and your mind.”

  How true! She and Rohan had connected from early childhood on some profoundly crucial wavelength. “He’s not a boy any longer, Dad,” she pointed out. “He’s very much a man. I’m twenty-six, remember? I want a life.”

  “Not with Costello.” Vivian Marsdon violently shook his head. “Never with Costello. The idea is monstrous! What would it do to your mother?”

  Charlotte’s caught her father’s eyes. “Do you mean the mother who so cherishes me and my little son?” she asked with considerable pain. “Mum took herself out of our lives. Why should I now worry what she thinks?”

  “Because you always did and you always will. We both care. I still love Barbara. And you still love your mother, no matter how badly she let us down.”

  “What about Christopher, Dad?” Charlotte asked heatedly. “You’ll always love him? No matter what?”

  Vivian Marsdon frowningly picked up on her words. “No matter what? What are we talking about, here? Have you formed some new understanding with Costello?”

  “There’s so much you don’t know, Dad. At the heart of it is the sad fact you never wanted to know. If Rohan could get me at the snap of a finger, why do you suppose I married Martyn?”

  Vivian Marsdon’s thick sandy blond eyebrows drew together in a ferocious frown. “Because he loved you. God, Charlie, he was madly in love with you. You were all things to him. I scarcely need mention he was in a position to offer you far more than Costello ever could. Security counts with a woman.”

  “You mean what he could offer at the time? It wasn’t Martyn’s money anyway. The truth is, Dad, Martyn and I lived off his father. They wanted it that way. I wasn’t allowed a job outside organising social events. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do.”

  Vivian Marsdon stumbled back into his vast armchair. “I don’t believe this.”

  “That’s because you’ve spent your life hiding your head in the sand. It’s safer down there.”

  “It’s what I believed, Charlie, but I see now I was wrong. I was fearful for your mother’s sanity. I couldn’t bring myself to take a
stand against her. God, I loved her. She was my wife. We were happy in the old days. Before our darling Mattie died.”

  “I know, Dad.” Charlotte bowed her head. Nothing good had come out of Mattie’s tragic death. But for years of her childhood up until that point it had been a magic time. And most of that magic had been due to Rohan Costello. “But you don’t have to be alone, Charlie. You’re a very beautiful, highly intelligent young woman. You’re my daughter. A Marsdon. That name still carries a lot of clout. I could name a dozen young men in the Valley desperate to pound their way to your door.”

  She laughed. “Not a few of them you didn’t frighten off, Dad. Good thing I wasn’t interested in any of them.”

  “Why would you be?” he snorted. “Ordinary. Ordinary young men. Costello isn’t, whatever else he is. He’s bought Riverbend on your account!” He said it as though he had hit on an invisible truth.

  “Rohan bought Riverbend because he’s a very astute businessman. It’s prime real estate, Dad. The most beautiful estate in a beautiful prosperous valley. Rohan has big plans.”

  “And they surely include you,” Vivian Marsdon said with a sinking heart.

  “That upsets you so dreadfully, Dad?”

  He looked across at her mournfully. “I couldn’t bear to lose you and Chrissie, Charlotte. I have no one else.”

  “But you won’t be losing either of us, Dad,” she said, with a burst of love and sympathy. “As long as that’s what you want, I would never deprive my boy of his grandfather. He loves you.”

  “He does. God has blessed me. And I love my grandson with all my heart. He’s a wonderful little boy. He’s going to make his mark in the world. And I didn’t think much of Costello’s trying to buy the boy’s affection by taking him and young Peter for that helicopter ride.”

  “Oh, come on now, Dad. They were absolutely thrilled. Chris had all the kids madly envious when he told them about it at school. Chris went with Rohan very willingly.”

  Vivian Marsdon sighed. “I ask you—how did it happen? You’d think Christopher had known him all his life,” he added with amazement. “Of course a helicopter ride is a sure way to get to a seven-year-old’s heart.”