Firsthand knowledge sounds good to me!”
“I would seize the night if I were you, Miranda,” Celine said archly.
Everyone laughed.
Except Bobby, who remained silent. Miranda didn’t look at him, but she was extremely conscious of his presence and his lack of response. This performance by Nathan was for his benefit. She hoped it was having the right effect, whatever that was supposed to be.
Marry!
Nathan couldn’t mean it. Why go so far? What had Bobby said to him?
“Then we’ll say goodnight to you. Enjoy yourselves.” Nathan rolled on, saluting them with one hand and digging the fingers of the other into her hip to prompt her into appropriate speech.
“Have a great time, all of you!” she rushed out. “And thank you for your good advice. It’s a bit hard to catch one’s breath around Nathan.”
It left them laughing.
They didn’t know how true it was.
All the way out to his Land Cruiser, Miranda was in a ferment over his words and actions. His arm remained lodged around her waist, and she could feel his determination to prevent any backward sliding from his stated plan. It wasn’t desire for her company driving him. He had taken control and was relentlessly pushing through what he considered had to be done.
He opened the front passenger door and half-lifted her into the high seat. Her bag was stowed on the bench seat behind her. There was no time wasted in putting himself behind the steering wheel and getting the Land Cruiser into motion. His face was grim as they sped away from the resort homestead, and Miranda had to take a very deep breath to combat the throat-strangling tension he emitted.
“What did Bobby Hewson say to you?”
Jaw-clenching silence.
Her heart cramped at this evidence of damage done, but she could not let the issue rest any longer. “This is later, Nathan. I’m entitled to know.”
“He was surprised you had been hired for such a position of trust without a thorough investigation into your background,” he answered, his voice grating out the words.
Miranda clenched her hands at the implication she could not be trusted. “In all my working life, I have never once been considered unreliable. Your mother saw my references,” she shot at him.
“He proceeded to tell me your mother was little better than a whore, a kept mistress who’d serviced several married men, one of whom had fathered you. She’d also been an alcoholic who eventually drank herself to death.”
The stark facts of her mother’s life sounded ghastly, stripped as they were of any mitigating circumstances or sympathetic understanding. Miranda felt sick, remembering how Bobby had wanted to know more about her life and had been sweetly comforting when she had confided the truth. But she had never, never used such brutal terms in speaking of her mother, and she had wept over the sadness of it all…the initial deceit of a married lover who had left her alone and pregnant, the inability to cope and the desperate drowning of that inability in alcohol.
She closed her eyes, savagely berating herself for having revealed such deeply personal matters to a man who had no compunction in using them against her. Pillow-talk. Intimacy she had believed was precious to both of them. Now this malicious betrayal of it.
“Did he tell you I was bent the same way?” she asked dully.
“He said you knew how to work the sexual angles to your advantage, that he himself had been pleasured by you in years gone by, and he wouldn’t put it past you to fleece any male guest who fancied you.”
Humiliation burned her soul. “It’s not true,” she whispered. “I’ve never…sold myself. He’s saying these things because he thought he could buy me and I wouldn’t go along with it.”
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me, Miranda. I don’t enjoy repeating this muck-raking. It was all I could do, not to smash his face in.”
Relief poured some soothing balm on her wounds. At least Nathan believed she was being slandered. In fact, the sheer savagery in his voice spurred the courage to open her eyes and really look at him. His face was taut with barely suppressed anger. His knuckles gleamed almost white where he was gripping the steering wheel.
“You had to be taken out of there,” he said with biting conviction. “He would have used you to create a nasty situation. He was setting up for it. Without you as a flesh-and-blood focus, he loses his teeth. In moving you onto my ground, there’s no way he can get at you.”
Miranda sighed, understanding his tactics and grateful for being spared Bobby’s treacherous company, but suspecting frustration would only drive the slandering further. “It won’t stop him telling lies about me, Nathan. In fact, your suggestion of marriage will prob-ably fuel his claim of my playing the sexual angles for profit.”
“No. It reinforces how serious my threat was to him.”
“Threat?” The idea startled her. Then she remembered the hard, ruthless cast of his face when he had answered Bobby at the dinner table. “What did you threaten him with?” she asked, unable to think of anything that would hurt a Hewson.
“I told him if I heard so much as another word breathed against you, I would set about wrecking his marriage and the Hewson-Parmentier merger with every bit of armament at my disposal.”
Shock pummelled her. “But how could you do it?”
“Through his wife.”
“You would hurt her?”
“Against him I would use anything.” He slanted her a hard, cynical look. “Don’t be wasting your sympathy on the sultry Celine…a new bride, fancying a lustful dalliance with me. Hardly an expression of true love for her husband.”
It was all very well to criticise the morality of others, but if Nathan had been encouraging Celine, was he any better? Feeling very much at odds with this tactic, Miranda recalled his reaction to her own supposed position of mistress to a married man. “You told me adultery wasn’t your scene,” she tersely reminded him.
“It’s not,” he replied without hesitation, shooting her a sardonic look as he added, “but neither of them know that. I’m bluffing, Miranda, and a bluff only succeeds if it is credible.”
“Do you think it’s credible…talking about marrying me?”
“There wasn’t a person around that table who didn’t believe me,” he said with arrogant confidence.
A bluff…Miranda closed her eyes again, a dull weariness settling through her. Right now it was all too much…Bobby’s mean and malevolent assault on her reputation, Nathan’s moves to counter it. Though, of course, he did have to counter it—Tommy, as well—or the slurs on her character could very well taint the good name of the resort, most especially with the wealthy guests who invariably passed on good or bad word of mouth to their friends.
“You’d better warn Tommy that you talked about marrying me,” she said tiredly. “The guests might bring it up with him.”
“I’ve told him. He’ll play along.”
“They might chat with others on the resort, too. The guides…Sam…”
“A pleasant piece of gossip doesn’t matter. And I made it clear it was me pursuing you, Miranda, not the other way around,” he added drily.
“And eventually I’m to decide not to marry you.”
He expelled a long breath. “As I’ve said before, most women wouldn’t choose my kind of life.”
“Is that what happened with Susan?”
The words slipped out, probably because she was too stressed to monitor