Double Dealing Read online

  He nodded once, as if satisfied. “Excellent. Now please relax and enjoy the rest of your dinner. I have a lemon meringue pie for dessert of which I am particularly proud.”

  Samantha glanced up, smiling again as she sensed that the rough spot in their new association had just been safely traversed. “It’s a wonder some woman hasn’t chained you to her kitchen sink. A man who can cook like this is prime husband material.”

  “I was married once,” he said quietly, managing to make her feel awkward at having asked the implied question. “The cooking wasn’t enough to hold her, however.”

  “I see. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,” she whispered a little stiffly.

  “It’s quite all right,” he assured her “What about you? I see no ring.”

  “No. I came close once, but disaster was avoided at the last minute,” she told him lightly, having no desire to pursue the topic.

  “The marriage would have been a disaster?”

  “One of the many things I learned at my mother’s knee was that marriage was not one of life’s necessities. I think I’m ready for that pie now, Gabriel. And after dinner I would like to borrow your phone, if I may, to make reservations at a motel for this evening. How far is it to Santa Barbara?”

  “Several miles, but there’s no need to find someplace for the night, and you know it,” Gabriel told her bluntly as he carefully sliced the pie. “You can stay here.” He set her piece of pie down in front of her with a short decisive gesture as if he were throwing down a gauntlet.

  “It’s very kind of you to offer me a bed for the night,” she began politely, not certain how to take his mood.

  “I am not a kind man, Samantha. I am a practical man,” he added regretfully. “Quiet, practical, fond of detail, careful, prudent, and a lot of other dull qualities to be s-sure, but kindness isn’t among them. I am also not given to assaulting potential business partners. You’ll be safe enough here tonight.”

  Or as safe as I want to be, Samantha found herself thinking. What in hell had put that thought into her head? Too much speculation on what it would be like to have Gabriel Sinclair make love to her. Far too much.

  Chapter Three

  Stark was the first word that came to mind as Gabriel ushered Samantha into the guest bedroom. It was done in the same subdued tones as the rest of the house, the furnishings comfortable but minimal. No, not exactly stark, she reconsidered as he set her suitcase down beside the bed, but definitely not comfortably cluttered! She had the feeling that her host had never been exposed to the glories of clutter—of cozy chaos. Pity. It might have done him some good. Loosened him up a bit.

  “Why the sly smile, Samantha?” Gabriel interrupted her thoughts to ask.

  “Does it make you nervous?” she taunted lightly.

  “It would probably make any man nervous,” he told her seriously.

  “Well, don’t let it bother you. I was just thinking that you’re a very tidy housekeeper. Everything always in its place.”

  “Feel free to mess up this room if you like,” he retorted.

  “Thanks, I’ll think about it. It has great possibilities, you know. A little sand tracked across the carpet over there, perhaps.” She waved toward the door which opened onto a balcony. “Then I could take a few of the books out of the bookcase and fling them around at random, Or I could spill a cup of coffee on the dressing table…”

  “Please make yourself right at home, he invited gravely.

  She spun around, startled by the hint of humor in his tone. For an instant she stared at him thoughtfully. “Was that a joke, Gabriel? A sarcastic quip about the way you imagine I keep house?”

  “Everyone knows witches live amid a certain chaos.” He smiled.

  “Witch? You think of me as a witch?” She frowned.

  “An interesting combination, isn’t it? A witch and an angel?”

  “Except that it’s not a combination. Not yet. You haven’t agreed to work with me, remember?”

  “I remember.” He watched her prowl restlessly around the room. “The bathroom connects through that door.”

  “Thank you. Actually, it’s a lovely room, Gabriel. I’m sure I’ll be very comfortable,” Samantha said, suddenly aware of being rather tired. It had been a long, frustrating day. She turned away from studying the night-darkened view outside the floor-to-ceiling windows and faced him with a deliberately dismissing air. “Good night, Gabriel. In the morning perhaps we can go over those computer printouts I’ve got stashed in the car.”

  “Yes.” But he didn’t move, and Samantha had the feeling he was thinking about something other than the printouts. It didn’t take any great intuitive powers to read the trace of masculine hunger which came and went very quickly in the depths of those hazel eyes.

  Samantha found herself wondering how long it had been since he’d invited another woman to stay the night. Some instinct told her that there probably weren’t vast numbers of females coming and going in this man’s life. Not because he had an angelic, disinterested view of sex but because of his innate caution.

  Gabriel Sinclair would be as careful in his selection of a woman to share his bed as he was in everything else he did. That thought left her intrigued. She had been one of those women he’d selected, and he had made the decision within hours of knowing her. Samantha pondered just what that signified. Rashness of any kind, as he, himself, had pointed out, wasn’t one of his normal character traits!

  On the other hand, there was no denying the heavy maleness of him. It was a dense, tempered aura that emanated from the man, making itself felt whenever he came too near. But Samantha had the feeling that he wasn’t aware of the solid, unyielding power he projected. Or perhaps it only affected her?

  Perhaps he wasn’t used to the idea of what he could do to a woman’s sense of awareness because other women were not affected by the aura of implacable maleness, the waves she felt coming at her across the bedroom.

  Were other women immune? Or was she more attuned to this man for some reason?

  That last thought was far too disturbing. It was time to drop the curtain on bedroom drama before it developed into something much more complicated.

  “Good night, Gabriel,” she said again, this time very firmly. He nodded once instead of replying, swung around on his heel, and walked out of the room, the sense of him lingering long after he had gone. Slowly Samantha crossed the room and shut the door. After a second’s pause she flipped the lock, too. A part of her insisted the man could be trusted not to force himself on her. If she hadn’t truly believed that, she wouldn’t have accepted his invitation to stay the night.

  But a more objective side of her nature reminded her that she knew as much about Gabriel Sinclair as just about anyone else in the world, and that wasn’t really much when you thought about it. She might have been a bit hasty in making her decision to stay the night.

  Well, as Vera Maitland was fond of saying, to live life to the fullest one must take risks. She could almost hear her mother quoting the words. Samantha went to stand before the window facing the darkened ocean. The problem, of course, was that her mother’s notion of a worthwhile risk often differed considerably from that of her daughter.

  Vera Maitland was too gloriously self-contained to risk herself emotionally the way Samantha had once done so disastrously with Drew Buchanan. For Vera risk was something undertaken for the sake of a great cause, and when it came to that sort of thing, few people were braver than Samantha’s mother.

  She remembered the fearless way Vera had joined ranks of others one dark year to go against the dogs and fire hoses in Alabama. Samantha remembered the incident clearly because Vera had taken her along on the theory that one was never too young to get involved in the things that mattered. It was the dogs Samantha recalled most vividly. She had always loved dogs before that frightening trip to Alabama; always thought of them as friendly, affectionate creatures, responsive to love and kindness. Since that fateful year Samantha had been wary of dogs and g
enerally gave them all, large or small, a wide berth.

  During the march Samantha had been terrified; more than once she had considered letting go of her mother’s hand and running. But finally her fear of disappointing Vera by showing herself a cowardly daughter had been Ear greater than her fear of the snarling dogs. Even at that early age living up to Vera’s standards was important.

  But nothing frightened Vera except, perhaps, the knowledge that she had raised a daughter who was not cast entirely in her own image. Samantha closed her eyes against the memory of her mother’s shocked expression the day she had learned that Samantha was planning to marry Drew Buchanan.

  “My God, you can’t possibly be serious!”

  Samantha met her mother’s eyes across Vera’s kitchen table and bravely nodded her head. “I’m very serious, Mother. He loves me and I love him.”

  Vera’s finely drawn features were still austerely beautiful even in middle age. Her deep brown hair, which Samantha had inherited, had begun to streak quite dramatically with gray in the past few years in a manner hairdressers envied. That day she had worn it combed straight back, caught with an exotic clip at the nape of her neck.

  The clip, Samantha knew, had been given to her mother by one of her economics students. He was the son of an important political figure from an underdeveloped country in Asia. Vera had seen a golden opportunity to inculcate him with her socioeconomic theories for developing nations and had lavished a considerable amount of attention on him. The young man had sent the clip as a token of his appreciation. Samantha knew better than to speculate on whether her mother had had an affair with the young man. Vera was neither promiscuous nor a prude, but she had made it a rule never to become physically involved with her male students. Vera never broke her own rules. Society’s on occasion, but never her own.

  “Love? Samantha, how many times have I told you that the emotion is a myth—a trap. A dangerous illusion for a woman. A fairy tale that Madison Avenue employs to sell everything from mouthwash to linoleum. It blinds her to reality, puts her in the grip of a man’s will, and she is used! Enjoy an affair with Buchanan if he attracts you, but don’t make the mistake of thinking he seriously returns your affection. He isn’t capable of it. Haven’t you learned anything at all working with him? He’s the original user—using up people and money and anything else he can get his hands on to get what he wants. He’s a full-blooded robber baron who would have done very nicely a hundred years ago when there were no legal brakes at all on such men. Even today he’s doing very well manipulating everything and everyone around him quite ruthlessly!”

  “If you thought so poorly of him, why did you encourage me to go to work for him when Dad suggested it?” Samantha flung back, already knowing the answer.

  “Because I thought, as you’ve decided to follow a business career instead of an academic one, that you might as well go into a position where you could exercise some good influence, however small, over a man like Buchanan. I don’t live in an ivory tower, Sam; I’m well aware that sometimes the most important battles are the insidious ones fought from within the enemy walls.”

  “I’m not working for Drew as some kind of spy!” Samantha protested fiercely.

  “But you’ve already proven you have the power to sway or at least alter the effects of some of Buchanan’s decisions. Look at the way you mitigated the effects of his last land grab in Miami. Those people in that apartment complex would have been dumped into the street if you hadn’t been in a position to assist them. You used Buchanan’s resources to find those unfortunate people new housing. That was a brilliant play, Sam!”

  Though her mother’s praise was rare, Samantha was only temporarily put off her train of thought by the compliment. “Drew let me use his company’s resources, Mother,” she argued back. “If he hadn’t cooperated, I wouldn’t have been able to alter a thing! He’s not what you think he is; he’s simply an up-and-coming businessman. We have a tremendous amount in common…”

  Vera shook her head sadly. “No, you don’t, honey. You’re worlds apart from Drew Buchanan. And I’ll bet he knows it, even if you don’t. Believe me, if he’s actually talked of marriage…”

  “Talked of it! We’re engaged!”

  “Then there can be only one reason,” Vera shot back coldly. “He believes you can be useful to him as a wife, and we both know there’s only one way, don’t we, Sam?”

  “Mother!”

  “He knows you’re Victor Thorndyke’s daughter. Buchanan is only marrying you for the money he expects you to inherit, Samantha. Use your common sense! If there’s one thing I’ve tried to teach you, it’s how to think logically. Kindly do so now!”

  “I want to marry him,” Samantha repeated doggedly.

  “And then what? Quit your job to become the perfect corporate wife? Oh, Sam, you know that would never work. I haven’t brought you up to be a good little corporate wife. To dole out your time between luncheons and teas and appointments at the beauty salon. You’ve been taught to make your own way in the world. To change it for the better if you could. And once outside the corporation arena your influence would be significantly lessened, anyway.”

  From out of nowhere came the courage to ask her mother the one question Samantha had never dared to say aloud. “Did you ever, even for a little while, imagine yourself in love with Victor Thorndyke?”

  Vera sat back abruptly in her chair, staring at her daughter. Then she seemed to gather herself for the answer. She had always prided herself as a mother on the fact that every one of Samantha’s childhood questions had always been answered fully and frankly, regardless of the subject matter. Every question was an opportunity to teach and guide. Vera never lost an opportunity.

  “Your father and I were physically very attracted to each other, Sam,” she began honestly. “But how could it have ever developed into anything more than that? He was diametrically opposite to me in all his political, social, and economic beliefs. For God’s sake! The man had even supported McCarthy during those Communist witch-hunts of the fifties, although I’m pleased to say he eventually saw the error of his ways on that issue.” Vera hesitated, glancing unseeingly out her window into the kitchen garden. “Frankly, that is Victor’s one saving grace. He’s a hard man, but he is capable of seeing the error of his ways. His problem was that he had been born into wealth and had always been taught that privileges and power were only his due. Why would he ever entertain the notion of undermining a system that had so lavishly nurtured generations of Thorndykes? By the time I met him, naturally it was too late to expect he would ever change. You have to shock Victor to get him to view his world from the outside if you want him to change his mind about anything.”

  “And that’s why you seduced him? Because it was the one way you thought you might get through to him?” Samantha waited tensely. Her mother had explained years ago that she’d had the affair with Victor Thorndyke while she was trying to convince him not to build the chemical plant he had been planning near a river. She had been successful. Thorndyke had never built the plant. Samantha’s conception was the other result of Vera’s campaign.

  “It’s true that none of my logical arguments had worked.” Vera half-smiled reminiscently. “And I knew he was attracted to me. But I also knew he was married with two children and under most circumstances I would not have had an affair with another woman’s husband. But I was thirty at the time, Sam,” she went on gently. “I wanted to sample the uniquely female experience of bearing a child and mothering it. Victor had a great many qualities I admired. He was intelligent, healthy, and physically attractive. It wasn’t his fault he had become a product of a system I found morally reprehensible. I decided he would make a good biological father for you, and since I would be making no claim on him later, either financial or emotional, I also decided I would not be a disturbing influence on his family.”

  “But were you in love with him?” Samantha persisted desperately.

  Vera’s lashes lowered as she gazed down at
her coffee cup. Then she drew a deep breath. “Perhaps, for a while, I made the mistake of thinking that what I felt was… love,” she finally admitted very slowly.

  Samantha stretched out a hand across the table, closing it warmly over her mother’s. “Oh, Mom, please don’t act as if you’ve just confessed to some horrendous criminal act. I’m glad you felt that way.”

  Vera looked up, her expression raw. “Because it gives you an excuse to make the same mistake now?”

  “No! Because I like the idea that I was conceived in love and passion, not just cold-blooded mating!”

  In spite of herself, Vera’s mouth curved faintly. “There was passion, Sam. More than I’ve ever known with anyone else.” Then she shook her head once, very determinedly. “Which is probably what led me into thinking for a while that what I was experiencing was love. I don’t want you making the same error!”

  “If you had it to do over again, would you?” Samantha whispered, searching her mother’s features.

  “I have never regretted the affair,” the older woman said vibrantly. “You are an intelligent, healthy, and independent young woman. I have always been very proud of my daughter.”

  Just don’t screw up now and ruin everything I’ve tried to do. Samantha finished wryly in her head. “I love him, Mother.”

  Vera knew her daughter’s streak of independence well. Hadn’t she deliberately fostered it all during her childhood? It was unfortunate that it was temporarily sending her off in a misguided direction, but there wasn’t much point in further argument, and Vera knew it.

  Eventually Samantha had departed for Miami never dreaming just how desperate her mother was to prove her point about Drew Buchanan. So desperate, in fact, that for the first and only time in her life Vera had turned to a man for help. And the man she turned to was Victor Thorndyke.

  After that, events had moved quickly and catastrophically. With a knowledge and complete understanding of Drew Buchanan which stemmed from the fact that Victor, himself, had used many of the younger man’s business methods, Samantha’s father had moved coldly and calculatingly to bring a swift ending to the engagement. It had taken only one phone call from Vera to send Thorndyke on his way to Florida determined to protect his daughter in the only way he knew.