Bride Of His Choice

Leigh felt a very definite punch to the heart. His smile seemed to link her to him, as though they were co-conspirators in complete tune with each other. Leigh instantly rejected the idea, but she still felt shaken by it. Richard Seymour was not the man she’d wanted him to be and she wasn’t about to be tricked into thinking differently.

He ran appreciative eyes over her as he headed down the steps. “You’re looking good, Leigh.”

“Thank you.” She dragged out the memory of the last time he’d commented on her appearance, instinctively defending herself against the flattering power of his compliment. “As opposed to looking anorexic, I presume.”

He’d accused her of it after one of Lawrence’s ritual Sunday lunches, which she’d been unable to eat, her stomach too screwed up to accept anything. Although she had been dieting, her non-consumption of that meal had nothing to do with losing weight.

Richard shrugged. “Believe it or not, I was worried about you at the time. You were far too thin.”

“And you put it so kindly. Anorexia might be a way of taking control of your body but it won’t give you control over anything else,” she quoted.

His eyes locked onto hers again as he reached her side at the foot of the steps. “I thought you needed a jolt,” he explained without apology.

He was giving her a jolt right now with his perverse interest in her, with the clarity of a memory that surely held no significance to him. She’d been seventeen, fighting what she then saw as an unfair weight problem, trying to look more like her model-slim sisters. Impossible task.

She’d been born with a different bone structure and no matter how thin she got, the natural curves of her body denied her a boyish figure. Away from the repressive influences of her family, she’d grown into the woman she was always going to be, voluptuously curved, but not grossly so for her height. She was taller than average, though even in high heels, she found herself half a head shorter than Richard Seymour, looking up to him, which she suddenly resented.

“Well, Richard,” she drawled, turning away to start down the path to the ornamental pond, “let me tell you I don’t need your approval for who or what I am. In fact, your opinion—good or bad—is irrelevant to me.” Which put him in his place in her world.

He laughed as he fell into step with her.

Leigh found herself clenching her hands at his amusement. She sliced him a totally unamused look, wishing he would take his disturbing presence elsewhere.

He grinned. “I have missed the black blaze of those incredibly expressive eyes.”

Missed? Had she really made such a strong impression on him all those years ago? Or was he attempting to flirt with her, now that she “looked good”?

She frowned over the questions as he walked on with her. The black suit she’d bought for the funeral was figure-hugging. She didn’t favour layers of shapeless clothes that made her look fat. Apparently Richard liked her current shape. As for her eyes, Leigh simply accepted them as part and parcel of her coloring—matching the blackness of her hair and toning with her olive skin. She had a slightly long nose and a wide, very full-lipped mouth, and she’d come to accept them, too. Since her face had filled out, the features she’d despaired over looked more right somehow, in keeping with the rest of her.

Certainly she no longer felt like the ugly duckling she’d always been in the Durant household, though she could never be counted as a blonde beauty like her older sisters. Ruefully she remembered her one desperate attempt to dye her hair blonde. Total disaster. Like everything else she had attempted in her teens in her hopeless need to fit some acceptable mould. She hadn’t known then she was a cuckoo in the nest and cuckoos couldn’t turn into anything else.

“I have no doubt you have no need of my approval, Leigh,” Richard picked up, apparently determined on teasing her out of her silence. As she glanced at him he added, “There wouldn’t be one red-blooded male who didn’t approve of you.”

Sex! Leigh wrenched her gaze from his and walked faster, inwardly fuming over this shallow view of her. She was more than just a lush body that a lot of men fancied. But then men like Richard Seymour probably didn’t want a woman with a mind or a heart. Taking sex as needed was probably his style.

In all the publicity and media speculation sparked by Lawrence Durant’s fatal heart attack, the newspapers had made much of the fact Richard Seymour was not married—one of the most eligible bachelors in Australia—and Leigh wondered if he was as much a womaniser as Lawrence Durant had been, behind the respectable facade of his marriage. With his looks, Richard certainly wouldn’t lack choice.

Was he now thinking the same of her? He was wrong, if he did. She hadn’t even cared to sample the chances that had come her way. Somehow an internal barrier went up the moment any man started getting too close to her. As for desiring them…she’d often wondered if desire was linked to trust and that was why she couldn’t feel it. Maybe one day she would meet someone she could really trust to love her as she wanted to be loved.

“Are you happy in the life you’ve made for yourself?”

The apparently artless question snapped Leigh out of her private reverie. Danger signals flared in her mind. Give anything away to a man like Richard Seymour and somehow he’d use it against her. She’d had too much experience of that process in the Durant household to be offering any information about herself.

Keeping her expressive eyes fixed on the path ahead she answered, “Reasonably,” in an even tone, then turned the question back on him. “What about you? Are you happy with what you’ve made of yourself?”

He laughed again, though there was more irony than amusement in the sound this time. “You know, no-one’s ever asked me that question.”

Of course. Brilliant success didn’t exactly invite any such doubt. “Perhaps you should ask it of yourself?” she drily remarked.

“Perhaps I should,” he agreed even more drily. “Though I can’t say it’s ever been on my list of priorities. I’ve always thought happiness an elusive thing, not easily captured and even more difficult to hold.”

Unlike wealth and power.

“Then why ask me about it?”

“Oh, I guess I was really asking if you’ve found a relationship you find satisfying.”

He dropped the question so casually, the impact came in slow motion. Leigh’s first reaction was it was none of his business. Then his previous comment about the approval of “red-blooded men” started to rattle her. Did he fancy a quick fling with her while she was in Sydney? Was this why he’d followed her out here…to ascertain availability and charm his way into her bed? Did he see her as old enough for him now?

The idea was outrageous, yet oddly tantalising. Leigh was tempted to play him along, just to see if it was true. “No, I haven’t. At least, not as satisfying as I would wish,” she answered honestly, then slid him an assessing look as she added, “But I didn’t come home for you, Richard.”

It was a mistake to look at him. He instantly locked onto it with a piercing intensity that pinned her eyes to his. “Am I not one of the ghosts you wish to lay to rest?”

“Why would you think so?” she retaliated, disturbed by the wild quickening of her pulse.

“Because you hated me so much.”

He was raising the ghosts, deliberately and too evocatively for Leigh’s comfort. “Wouldn’t you, in my place?” she snapped.

“Yes. But there was nothing I could do to change your place, Leigh. You had to do it yourself. Which you did. Yet I wonder if all those negative feelings towards me—the bitter resentment and the black contempt—still linger on?”

He was getting to her, digging around in her head and heart, and she didn’t want him to. Realising she’d paused to counter this attack on her feelings, Leigh got her legs moving again, chiding herself for falling into the trap of letting him focus the conversation on her. She tried to switch it back on him.

“I can’t imagine it matters to you.”

“It does. Very much.”

“Why?” she demanded, inwardly refusing to believe him. She would not—not—allow herself to be vulnerable to what Richard Seymour thought or felt about her. She’d been down that painful track, wanting him to shine for her, but he hadn’t.

“I wasn’t your enemy,” he answered simply. “Your hatred was blind, Leigh. As much as I could be, I was your friend.”

Hardly a friend, she thought with a violence that startled her. Let it go, she berated herself furiously. Just let it go and set him aside, right out of your life.

“I don’t view you as an enemy, Richard,” she said as dispassionately as she could. “I don’t think I did then, either. Not personally. If you hadn’t been the favoured protégé, someone else would have won that place, and been used in the same way to show off my father’s dissatisfaction with me.”

“I didn’t enjoy my place in that particular game, Leigh.”

She couldn’t stop herself from seething over how he had conducted himself, even though he might not have enjoyed it. “You didn’t walk away from it,” she tersely remarked.

“As you say, it wouldn’t have changed anything,” he answered easily. “Lawrence would have found someone else. Someone who might have joined in the game with him, making it worse for you.”

In all fairness, she couldn’t accuse Richard of aiding or abetting the cruel baiting that had gone on during the mandatory-attendance Sunday luncheons in the Durant mansion. She remembered him diverting the conversation into other topics, taking the focus off her, but she’d hated him for that, too, feeling he pitied her.

She’d wanted him—willed him—to stand up and fight for her, though Lawrence would never have tolerated that from him. With an older, wiser head on her shoulders, she could see that now, but at the time…

She took a deep breath, trying to clear herself of the burning turmoil Richard Seymour could still stir. Applying cold hard reason, it was possible to agree with his point of view. He may well have meant to be a friend to her, as much as he could, within the parameters of retaining his position.

“Well, thank you for thinking of my feelings,” she said, trying to be fair and wanting this highly unwelcome contretemps finished with. “As it happens, I don’t hate you any more, and you’re not a ghost I need to lay to rest.”