Paradise Found (2 page)

Dear heaven, how could she view the restraint of a kind and loving fiancé and compare it unfavorably with this animal
behavior?
And that, she thought, was an insult to the animal kingdom. It had been unforgivable of Matt, especially as she knew that he hadn't acted on irresistible impulse. He had done it deliberately; he had probably plotted the scene in his mind in the jeweller's shop when he bought the pendant. It was his way of punishing her for presuming to marry his nephew.

She had taken a hard fall for Matt, but on his side it had been strictly for laughs, not to be taken seriously. She had amused him for several months and had been dropped with a suddenness that had left her feeling emotionally bruised. Anyway, it had all ended five years ago. She had seen the dangers of encouraging anything serious between her and Tony, but she had thought she was being melodramatic. Despite the lack of family unity—Matt had made no move to introduce her into the circle and rarely spoke of his relatives—she had accepted the fact that she couldn't marry Tony and not expect not to have to rub shoulders with Matt on the odd social occasion. She had anticipated that there might be a slight embarrassment, but nothing of any consequence.

‘That was hateful of you, Matt Hunter. How could you do it?'

‘It was easy . . . very easy. Like me to show you again?'

‘No, just get out.'

‘I'm
not apologizing.'

‘I would have been surprised if you had. Such conduct would be much too gentlemanly.'

‘I wouldn't be contemptuous of anyone's conduct, if I were you. What I did wasn't so outrageous. I took you in my arms and I kissed you. The sparks that ensued were a mutual effort. I'm not apologizing because it would be a lie to say I'm sorry. When you opened the door to me, wearing not a smudge of makeup and very little else, it came over me how delectable you looked.' His gaze ran the length of her brief toweling robe, sending tingles through the flesh the towel concealed from him. His subsequent inspection of her face encountered cheeks that were slightly pinker than normal and eyes that couldn't quite meet his. An awareness of the thoughts going on behind her tight expression brought a trace of laughter to his tone, ‘Kissing you was good. I'm not ashamed to say that I enjoyed it. If you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that you did, too.'

She considered denying it, but to what purpose? ‘Yes, I enjoyed it,' she admitted. ‘You always did pack a powerful amount of sex appeal.'

‘Sometimes too much for you to handle?'

Her nonchalant shrug was at variance with the quickening of her pulse at the turn the conversation had taken. He had never pushed
her,
never transcended the limits set by her somewhat strict upbringing, but she had known that he wanted more than she was prepared to give and that he was doubtless getting it elsewhere. She had sometimes wondered if that wasn't partly why he had lost interest in her and called it a day. She hadn't wanted it to end, but she couldn't have been other than the way she was, and it wasn't fair to expect him to change his outlook. Vital and vigorous in everything he tackled, presumably with a sex drive to match, he went out and grabbed life instead of waiting for it to come to him; it was natural for him to embrace every aspect of it to the full. She had still been in her teens, while he had left his twenties, and the gap had been too wide to bridge. And, yes, he had been a lot too much for her to handle.

Just as if his thoughts were running a course parallel to hers, his lids dropped lower over his black smoldering pupils. ‘I bet I wouldn't be too much for you now.'

‘Too bad you'll never know. You've left it too late to find out.'

The atmosphere was electric, had been since he came in, and the moment she opened her mouth it occurred to her that she was going about stopping things the wrong way. She knew that Matt would take her statement as a challenge.

The vibrant look he sent her stopped her breath. ‘Don't cheat by marrying Tony.'

‘I
won't cheat on Tony. What just happened was a one-time shot. I'm prepared now. I'm not likely to mistake it for anything other than what it is: a base physical response, which I'm human enough to have found pleasure in. I'll see that it doesn't happen again. So don't worry on Tony's behalf. I'll play fair.'

‘Oddly enough, I was thinking of you, not Tony. He's not strong enough for you, Zoe. He's not his own master, so he can never be yours. He's a boy, and always will be. You need a man.'

‘I don't want a man to be my master. I want to be his equal.'

‘I think balance is a better quality to aim for in a relationship. It's impossible for a man and a woman to be equal in all spheres. In some things the woman should be superior, in others the man. With the right man, you'd balance well,'

‘You?' she scoffed. ‘Don't pretend any interest in me. You haven't wanted to come near me in the last five years.'

‘There were reasons,' he said, reflectively stroking his fingers down a hairline scar that crossed his right eye and ran down to his cheek, so faint as to be barely visible. It hadn't been there when she'd known him.

‘You must have been aware of my engagement to Tony. Why wait until now to try to foul things up between us?'

‘I knew Tony was getting married—to a
humdinger,
according to him. Odd that he never mentioned your name. I didn't know that until I turned up at the house and Nerissa divulged it. Otherwise I would have been round sooner to save you from yourself.'

‘What a dog in the manger attitude. You don't want me, at least—'

‘Before you added that rider I was on the point of correcting you. I could want you very much. But I'm touching on that base physical thing again—the word “base” being your choice and not mine—which you seem to abhor. I think that when two people make the right kind of chemistry they should appreciate it, not turn their noses up at it.'

‘I don't want a purely physical involvement with you, or with any man, for that matter. You wanted more than a light flirtation, and I wasn't interested in a heavy but brief affair. And nothing has altered on that score. I want something solid and lasting, marriage and children, not only a shared bed but a shared life, and that's what I'm going to have with Tony. Nothing, but nothing, is going to come before my marriage. I'm taking this so seriously that I've even given up my receptionist's job at the hotel because of the evening hours involved. When Tony comes home from work, I'm going to be there.'

She hadn't meant to work up to such an impassioned speech, but she was trembling with the forces that had built up in her. She
had
found deep pleasure in being held and kissed by him, but there was more to life than that.

‘Do you love Tony?'

For the life of her she couldn't give a straightforward, honest yes, because Matt's return had confused everything for her. So she parried that one by saying, ‘Would I be marrying him tomorrow if I didn't?'

The slant of his mouth was doubting, but he merely said, ‘And how about Tony? Does he love you?'

‘He says he does, and he's never given me cause to disbelieve him.'

His gaze locked with hers for a heart-stopping moment; then his expression went curiously blank. ‘In that case, there's nothing more to be said.' With that he turned on his heel and left.

But Zoe wasn't convinced that he had meant it. She locked the door after him, then wandered back into her bedroom, needing to look at her wedding dress . . . She touched it for reassurance but got none. It was a beautiful dress. Since she didn't have a mother of her own, Tony's mother, Matt's sister Nerissa, had gone with her to help with the choice. Yet she had needed no help. It had been the first one she tried on once she decided to go all out and get a gown, and it was perfect for her in every way. Done in pure ivory, it was classically simple, and while it showed her figure off to its
best
advantage, it was also demurely right for the occasion.

For a long time she had had the feeling that everything was going too well for her and had been suspicious of it. She experienced no earth tremors when she was with Tony, but she felt a deep and warm affection for him, and when he had asked her to marry him, it had seemed right to say yes.

She could never be sure why she had agreed to go out with him when he first asked her for a date. She had known that he was Matt's nephew, and even if she hadn't had positive knowledge of that fact, there would still have been a certain poignancy in their similar looks. Both were tall, with wide shoulders and deeply muscled chests. Matt had the narrower waist and hips, but he exercised more and didn't indulge to excess in food and drink. If Tony didn't pay more attention to his diet and moderate his drinking, or if some caring woman didn't take him in hand, he would have a paunch by the time he was Matt's age. Zoe firmly believed that when she was his wife her loving influence would take care of that. Tony's hair wasn't as fiercely virile or as dark as Matt's, and his eyes weren't black but more of a dark, spaniel brown, but they were enough alike for it to be self-inflicted pain for Zoe to be with him and look at him.

She had never quite got over Matt, so the question was often in her mind, did she go out
with
his paler reflection as a next-best substitute, or as punishment for taking too long to recover from her hopeless infatuation? Whatever the reason, very gradually, over the months, Tony's own beguiling personality had infringed itself upon her awareness, and she had begun to accept him, faults and all, for himself, had grown to like him and be very fond of him.

For Tony's sake, Zoe went out of her way to like Tony's mother. Nerissa Talbot hadn't been widowed all that long, and it was natural for a newly bereaved woman to cling to her only son. Zoe made allowances for both of them, guessing that Nerissa had always been overprotective and appreciating that this could account for the streak of weakness in Tony. Nerissa had taken the wind out of Zoe's sails by admitting as much herself while taking pains to point out that she would do her utmost not to be an interfering mother-in-law, and grandmother when the time came, and that it was her dearest wish that she would find a friend in her daughter-in-law. That was fine by Zoe. Kind of comforting. There had still been the stumbling block of Matt, but she'd managed to still any tiny voice of disquiet in that quarter.

It was strange the way Tony never spoke of Matt. After all, Matt was his boss as well as his uncle. On the rare occasion when Matt's name did filter into the conversation, there was a
bitterness
in Tony's tone that was unattractive. At the risk of being disloyal to her fiancé, she wondered whether Tony's antagonism wasn't based on jealousy.

Matt hadn't inherited a family concern as so many do. He had started with a modest job with a firm of haulers, learning the ropes before graduating to his own haulage business. From small beginnings it had grown into a name to be reckoned with. Although the trading name was just ‘Hunter's' now, in the days when Zoe had known Matt it had been ‘Hunter & Talbot.' Had the Talbot been a relative of Tony's on his father's side? Was that why Matt had made Tony his heir? And what had happened to the partnership?

The ringing of the telephone broke off her conjectures. When she answered it, Zoe was slightly dismayed to hear Nerissa's voice. At the best of times Tony's mother could hardly be described as a soothing influence. ‘Just checking that the bride-to-be is okay.'

‘I'm fine, thank you, Mrs. Talbot. It was thoughtful of you to ring.'

‘I'm not so old that I can't remember the night before my wedding. I was in a terrible state. You wouldn't believe it.' Oh, yes, Zoe would. Her future mother-in-law twisted her fingers and fidgeted and made a big panic production out of everything. ‘I'm pleased to hear you sounding so calm.'

If Nerissa thought that, either she wasn't
very
perceptive or Zoe was a better actress than she'd credited herself with being.

‘Has my brother been round to introduce himself?'

‘Yes, and to bring my wedding gift.'

‘Matt is very unorthodox. Anyone else would have waited until morning, but he was most insistent. He's a very forceful man; it's best to go along with him.'

‘Yes, I . . . er . . . can imagine.'

‘Weddings aren't his scene at all, and he has a very full work schedule. You should be flattered, Zoe dear, that he's squeezed the time in to be here for yours and Tony's wedding. Although why . . . ?'

Was Zoe supposed to say how flattered and thrilled and delighted she was that Matt proposed to attend the next day's ceremony? The words would have stuck in her throat. And what did she make of that puzzling,
Although why?

Nerissa ended the lengthy pause by asking, ‘Did you like the gift he brought you?'

That was easier. ‘It's beautiful. I couldn't help but like it.'

‘I'm delighted. Matt bought a gift for Tony, too. Cuff links. You can also expect the traditional check.'

‘Your brother is very generous.'

‘It's easy to be generous when you're loaded,' Nerissa said in a dry, waspish tone that held Zoe's tongue silent. ‘Are you glad
that
you listened to me and decided on the gown?'

Like every girl, Zoe had dreamed of a long wedding gown and a veil, but when the time had come she had wanted to relinquish it in favor of a two-piece suit and less bridallike hat. She had even got her outfit picked out. It would have been different if her parents had still been alive and she'd been getting married from the family home. But they weren't. Zoe had no really close relatives, just distant cousins and one elderly aunt who wasn't in the best of health and couldn't tackle the long journey, so she wouldn't be at the wedding. Another regret was that Tony's maternal grandmother wouldn't be able to come for the same reason. She lived even further afield—in France, the country her husband's work had taken her to in mid-life. She loved the warmth and the people, and on becoming a widow she had seen no reason to pull up stakes and decided to remain in Provence. Zoe had still to meet her.