A Treacherous Seduction. PENNY JORDAN

Dee Lawson, her landlady, of the financial and professional mess she was now in all three of them would immediately rush to her aid, full of understanding and sympathy for her plight. But Beth was sharply conscious of the fact that, out of the four of them, she was the only one who always seemed to get things wrong, who always seemed to make bad judgements, who always seemed to end up being duped…cheated…hurt. Who always seemed to be a loser…a victim…

      Beth shuddered with a mixture of anger and anguish. What was the matter with her? Why was she constantly involving herself with people who ultimately let her down? She might, as other people were constantly reminding her, be placid, and perhaps a little too on the accommodating side, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have any pride, that she didn’t need to be treated with respect.

      None of the other three would have got themselves in this situation, she was sure. Dee, for instance, would most certainly not have done. No, she couldn’t imagine anyone ever managing to dupe or cheat Dee, with her confident, businesslike manner, nor Kelly, with her vibrant, positive personality, nor even Anna, with her quiet gentleness.

      No, she was the vulnerable one, the fool, the idiot, who had ‘cheat me’ written all over her.

      It had to be her own fault. Look at the way she had fallen for Julian Cox’s lies; look how gullible she had been, believing that he loved her when all the time what he had really been interested in had been the money he had believed she would inherit.

      She had been stricken with shame when Julian had left her, claiming that he had never told her that he wanted to marry her, accusing her of running after him, pursuing him, of imagining that he had ever felt something for her.

      Beth’s face started to burn. Not because she still loved him—she most certainly didn’t, and she doubted deep in her heart that she ever had; she had simply allowed him to persuade her that she had, because she had been flattered by the assiduous attentions he had paid her, and by his constant declarations of love, his insistence that they were soul mates. Well, she had certainly learned her lesson there. Never, ever again would she trust a man who treated her like that, who claimed to have fallen crazily and instantly in love with her as Julian had done, and she had stuck to that private vow even when…

      Beth could feel her heart starting to thud heavily as she fought to suppress certain dangerous memories.

      At least she hadn’t made the same mistake twice. No, she agreed mentally with herself, she’d just gone on to make fresh ones.

      A failed romance and the public humiliation of other people knowing about it, painful though it had been, had at least only damaged her own life. What had happened now had the potential to humiliate not just her but Kelly as well.

      They had built up a very good reputation in the town since opening their crystal and china shop. Because they were a small outlet they concentrated on matching their customers’ needs and, where they could, innovatively anticipating them.

      Kelly had already told her enthusiastically that they had several very good customers, with celebrations of one sort or another coming up, to whom she had mentioned the fact that the purchase of some very special and individual stemware might be an excellent idea.

      One customer in particular had been talking excitedly to Beth only the previous week about purchasing three dozen of the crimson Czech champagne flutes.

      ‘It’s our silver wedding this year—two days before Christmas—the whole family will be coming to us and it would be wonderful to have the glasses for then. I’m having a large family dinner party and we could use them for the champagne cocktails I’m planning to do, and for the toasts…’

      ‘Oh, yes, they would be perfect,’ Beth had enthused, already in her mind’s eye seeing them on her customer’s antique dining table, the delicacy of the fragile glass and the richness of the colour emphasised by the candlelight.

      There was no way Candida Lewis-Benton would want to order what she, Beth, had just unpacked. No way at all.

      Valiantly Beth fought the temptation to burst into tears. She was a woman, not a girl, and, as she had thought she had proved when she was in Prague, she could be determined and self-reliant and, yes, proud too. She could earn her own self-respect, and never mind what certain other people thought of her—certain other not-to-be-thought-of, or thought about, arrogant, overbearing men who thought they knew her better than she knew herself. Who wanted to take over her life and her, who thought they could lie to her and get her to acquiesce to whatever they wanted for her by claiming that they loved her. And she had known, of course, just what it was he had wanted. Well, she had at least shown him just how easily she had seen through his duplicitous behaviour.

      ‘Beth, I know it’s probably too soon to tell you this, but I…I’ve fallen in love with you,’ he had told her that afternoon in the pouring rain on the Charles Bridge.

      ‘No, that’s not possible,’ she had replied hardily.

      ‘If that wasn’t love, then just exactly what was it?’ he had demanded on another occasion, and he had touched his fingertips to her lips, still swollen and soft from the passion they had just exchanged.

      She had answered boldly, ‘It was just lust—just sex, that’s all…’ And she had gone on to prove it to him.

      ‘Don’t be tempted into falling for the promises these street traders make to you,’ he had warned her more than once. ‘They’re simply pawns being used by organised crime to dupe tourists.’

      She knew quite well what he’d been after. What he’d been after was exactly what Julian had been after—her money. Only Alex Andrews had wanted her body thrown in as well.

      At least sexually Julian had done the decent thing, so to speak.

      ‘I don’t want us to be lovers…not yet…not until you’re wearing my ring,’ Julian had whispered passionately to her the night he had declared his love—a love he had not felt for her at all, as it later transpired.

      It seemed almost laughable now that she had ever agonised so much over his perfidy. Perhaps the acute sense of self-loathing she had experienced over his betrayal and accusations had had more to do with the humiliation he had made her suffer rather than a genuinely broken heart.

      Certainly, whenever she thought about him now, which was rarely, it was without any emotion whatsoever other than a distant sense of amazement that she could ever have considered him attractive. She had gone to Prague determined to prove to herself that she was not the emotional fool Julian had painted her as being, vowing that never again would she let herself be conned into believing that when a man told her he loved her he meant it.

      She had come back from Prague feeling extremely proud of herself, and equally proud of the new, hardheaded, hard-hearted Beth she had turned herself into. If men wanted to lie to her and betray her, then she would learn to play them at their own game. She was an adult woman, with all that that encompassed. Mistrusting men as emotional partners didn’t mean that she had to deny herself the pleasure of finding them sexually desirable. The days were gone when a woman had to deny the sexual side of her nature. The days had gone, too, when a woman had to convince herself that she loved a man and that, even more important, he loved and respected her before she could give herself to him physically.

      She had been living in the Dark Ages, Beth had told herself—living her life by an outdated set of rules and an even more outdated set of moral beliefs. An outdated and far too idealistic set of moral beliefs. Well, all that was over now. Now she had finally joined the real world, the world of harsh realities. Now she was a fully paid-up member of modern society, and if men, or rather a certain man, did not like the things she did or the things she said, then tough. The right to enjoy sex for sex’s sake was no longer a purely male province, and if Alex Andrews didn’t like that fact then it was just too bad.

      Had he really thought she was going to fall for those lies he had told her? All those ridiculous claims he had made about falling in love with her the moment he first saw her?

      Prague had been surprisingly full of people like him. British-and American-born