The Final Seduction. Sharon Kendrick

lover, your mentor, your stallion—’

      ‘Please don’t call him that!’

      ‘Why not? Does the truth offend you?’ He looked around the empty beach with exaggerated scrutiny. ‘I expect he’s somewhere warm and comfortable, is he, polishing the leather of his hand-made shoes?’

      ‘Why, you…you…Philistine!’ Her eyes swivelled to his feet. He wore a scruffy old pair of canvas deck-shoes, without socks. Without socks! Marco would have sooner gone to prison than gone out in footwear like that! He would have said that those were shoes for a tramp. And yet somehow Drew managed to look nothing like a tramp. He looked, Shelley realised with a lurch of horror, he looked incredibly sexy…

      ‘You look like you should be standing on a street corner begging for small change!’ She glared at him.

      His body tensed, as though he was fighting some dark, internal demon, and then he shook his head slightly. ‘I guess we’ve traded all the insults we need to. Why don’t you tell me how long you’re here for, Shelley? Just passing through? Or have you come to put your mother’s old house on the market?’

      She didn’t stop to think, but then maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe she had known all along just what her answer to this would be. ‘Why would I be passing through? Milmouth doesn’t take you anywhere. No, I’ve come home, Drew,’ she told him, observing his frozen reaction more with pain than with pleasure. ‘Home to stay.’

      The screech of a gull could be heard over the whining wind and the relentless smack of the waves hitting the beach.

      ‘You’re staying?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘For how long?’

      ‘I haven’t decided—and if I had I wouldn’t be telling you! My plans are flexible.’

      He considered this. ‘And where exactly will you be staying, Shelley?’

      ‘At my mother’s house, of course. Where else?’ She glared at him again. ‘Sorry. Have I said something funny?’

      He shook his head, still laughing. ‘Ironic more than funny.’

      ‘That’s a little too subtle for me, Drew. Care to let me in on the joke?’

      He shrugged, and Shelley’s eyes were irresistibly drawn to the hard, strong body moving beneath the thick knit. ‘Just that I can’t imagine your rich lover gearing up for a night of passion in your mother’s old house. Apart from the limitations imposed by the room sizes—the walls are paper-thin!’

      ‘That’s not only coarse, it’s also inaccurate. Marco has never been a snob!’

      ‘No? Well, then it must be you who has the image problem, mustn’t it, Shelley? Because you never brought him back to Milmouth, did you? Not once!’ he accused. ‘Not even—’ and he drew a deep breath ‘—to your mother’s funeral!’

      Should she tell him that it hadn’t seemed right to do so? That her mother had hated Marco nearly as much as she had adored Drew? It would have seemed disrespectful to her mother’s memory to bring along the man she had never stopped blaming for the disintegration of her dreams.

      For in Veronica Turner’s mind Shelley and Drew would still have been engaged if Marco had not happened along. For a long time Shelley would have agreed with her, but now she recognised that Marco had probably done her a big favour.

      Shelley herself had been sick with grief and regret. In fact she had barely been able to function. But apparently that was the normal reaction to sudden death. It had seemed the easier option to handle things on her own. To avoid situations which might create ugly scenes…

      ‘Oh, what’s the point in trying to explain?’ she questioned tiredly. ‘You’ll only believe what you want to believe. And I know how much you hate me, Drew.’

      ‘Hate you?’ He looked at first surprised and then very slightly perplexed, as if she were being hysterical. ‘Hating you would imply that you have some significance in my life, Shelley. And you don’t. None at all. Not any more. Duke!’ The dog came loping over. ‘Come on, time to go.’

      And he strode off without a word, or even a glance of farewell. Just like that.

      She watched him walking away from her across the pebbles and a great tidal wave of sadness rocked her, overwhelming her with its force. Because she had lost everything that once existed between her and Drew, and that was the brutal reality.

      The water on the western side of the shore was a deeper shade of blue than the washed-out sky and in his navy sweater and faded jeans Drew seemed to blur and blend into the landscape itself. Shelley watched him and felt a sudden wrench as she remembered the way he had been able to make her laugh.

      Remembered the way he had always looked at her—as though someone had just given him a wonderful present. Compare that, she thought, as she swallowed back the memories, with the icy disapproval she had seen on his face just now.

      They had been friends, she realised—really good friends. And she had thrown it all away. With one irrevocable gesture she had sacrificed that friendship and everything that went with it.

      She had made her choices willingly—no one had held a gun to her head. But the reality of what those choices had done to her life invaded Shelley’s memory like a dark, stormy cloud.

       CHAPTER THREE

      SHELLEY had known Drew Glover for as long as she remembered, and she must have known him before that as well.

      They had grown up next door to each other in the small, boxy houses which were clustered on the poorer side of Milmouth—a million light years away from the imposing Edwardian villas which overlooked the sea on the western side of the village. She was almost eight years younger than him, and the same age as his youngest sister, Jennie.

      Shelley had been brought to Milmouth as a baby, an unsettled, grizzly child whose nature had been forged by uncertainty and insecurity. According to her mother, Drew would bend and pick up the toys she hurled out of her pram and solemnly hand them back to her. But then he had two younger sisters of his own.

      ‘He was such a sweet-natured boy,’ Veronica Turner had told her daughter with a beaming smile, the day Shelley and Drew decided to get married. ‘And he still is.’

      Shelley remembered his curiosity. His protectiveness. He had been the first person who had ever stood up for her—when he overheard one of the other children taunting her.

      ‘So why haven’t you got a father, Shelley Turner?’

      She had been about seven at the time, an age when she’d desperately wanted to be like everyone else. And Milmouth was so small and provincial. Everyone else had two parents.

      Her face had started working and her mouth had wobbled and she didn’t know what she would have answered when Drew had appeared from out of nowhere—tall and tough and teenaged—and had announced scornfully, ‘Of course she’s got a father! Everyone’s got a father—hers just doesn’t live with her, that’s all.’

      ‘Where does he live, then?’ one of the others had been bold enough to ask.

      Even now Shelley remembered looking into Drew’s eyes—so deep and blue and encouraging—and knowing that she should never be ashamed of the truth. If only she had remembered that…‘He lives in America,’ she’d told the child steadily. ‘He’s a dentist.’

      These two impressive facts had kept the other children quiet for a while, but Shelley had remained an outsider. Veronica Turner had taught her daughter to keep her head down and not make waves. Not to invite people back to the house unless she was really certain that she liked them, and, more importantly, that they liked her. It was better to be considered cold than to risk rejection.

      But then, Shelley’s mother had known all about rejection. It was a force