she thought faintly. How had she gotten that impression? Maybe feature by feature there was nothing about him that grabbed attention. The dark brown hair was a little too long to conform to current style, a little too short to be sexily shaggy. The even features were bluntly masculine, but not memorable. He was tall, but not more than an inch or two over six feet, and although his shoulders were broad enough to strain the seams of the white shirt, they didn’t have the obsessive muscularity of a bodybuilder.
And none of that was important, because emanating from him like an almost physical force was an aura of pure maleness.
An insane vision of tangled sheets, sweat-sheened skin, intertwined limbs fogged her mind for a second, and for that second it was so real that she could almost feel his hands spread wide on her hips, feel him thrusting into her. It wasn’t her fault, she thought disjointedly. Any woman would sense what she was sensing. Line Max Ross up with three other men, men with movie-star good looks, men who knew and used all the tricks to make a female heart turn over, and without even exerting himself he would be the one that a woman would pick out, maybe without even knowing why she’d done so.
She felt a spreading heat radiate through her, and let herself sway infinitesimally toward him.
Trillions and jillions, Mommy. And forever and ever…
Julia jerked back, sanity flooding through her. The man in front of her had taken her child away from her. The man in front of her had destroyed her whole life. How could she have seen him, even for a moment, as anything but her enemy?
The heat she’d thought she’d felt was anger, she told herself unsteadily. Rage. She just hadn’t recognized it, because for too long now that emotion had been forbidden her.
“Forget it, Ross.” Her tone was ice. “Maybe if I thought you really could help me get my daughter back I might go for your deal, but you can’t and we both know it. So I guess it’s just you and your fantasies again tonight.”
She took a step away from him, expecting him to react in some way and not knowing what she would do if he did. She didn’t want to get into it with him, she thought in sudden weariness. She didn’t have the energy to indulge in any more skirmishes with the man, especially since there was absolutely nothing to be gained from them. What she really wanted to do was to find some anonymous place to lay her head for the night, blot out the last few hours from her mind and wait for sleep to claim her. Maybe she would dream of Willa, she thought without much hope. Tomorrow she would have to start planning how she was going to spend the rest of her life, but maybe just for tonight she could linger in the past a while longer.
“It wasn’t a quid pro quo.” Behind her he spoke, his voice harsh in the silence. “But okay, there’s been a fantasy or two, Julia. I don’t know why, but I can’t deny it. If that makes me a bastard, then go ahead and pin the label on me. Just don’t insinuate that I’d put conditions on helping you. No matter what you think of me, I’m going to do my damnedest to bring your daughter home to you.”
She paused at the doorway of the kitchen. “The woman I used to be might have believed you, Max,” she said tonelessly. “I used to be able to fool myself about nearly everything. But you told me yourself how it would be for Willa if I managed to find her. I won’t do that to her.”
A few minutes ago she’d told herself she didn’t know why she’d come back here with him, she thought. But like so much in her life, that had been a lie too. She’d come here hoping he would save her, hoping she could dump all her problems in his lap and let him solve them for her.
Like Sylvia used to. The comparison brought the usual conflicting mixture of love and regret that thinking of her mother unfailingly stirred in her. You always told yourself you’d never grow up to be like her, but in the end you turned out exactly the same. Admit it—some part of you really did think he could wipe out the past for you.
But life, no matter what the impulsive and beautiful Sylvia Weston had believed right up until the end, wasn’t a fairy tale. There were no knights in shining armor, there were no magic solutions, there weren’t any guaranteed happy endings. And sometimes the only choice left was the hardest one of all.
Whether or not Max managed to pull off the impossible and clear her name wasn’t the point. Willa didn’t need her. Barbara was a born mother—the kind of mother that Willa should have had from the start.
Babs always wanted children. You forfeited your right to Willa before she was even born, and you know it.
The truth was so ugly. No wonder it had taken her this long to gather up the courage to face it. Now all she had to do was to speak it out loud, so that never again would she be tempted into thinking it had been any other way than how it had really been.
She turned. He’d come up behind her and was standing only a foot or so away, as if he knew she had one last thing to say. Her eyes met his.
“I married him for the money, you know,” she said unevenly. “He married me for my looks. I knew I was a trophy wife, and I didn’t see anything wrong with the bargain we’d struck. It wasn’t until the maternity nurse put Willa into my arms for the very first time that I realized what I’d done.”
Her gaze went past him to the kitchen window. Frilled Priscilla curtains were held back on each side of it, and beyond the fussy eyelet lace the night outside seemed empty and black. She closed her eyes for a second, and opened them again to find him still watching her.
“It was a bad marriage.” Her teeth caught at her bottom lip, and she shook her head. “No—it was a hellish marriage. There’d never been any love there, on Kenneth’s part or mine, and a month or so after the wedding I realized that I didn’t even like him. He was the coldest, most ruthless person I’d ever known.”
She smiled bleakly at the silent man in front of her. “But like you said, I’d been born with a charge card in my hand. I’d been raised to believe that marrying for love was unthinkably naive, and as long as I made myself available to him when he needed me—whether it was to accompany him to some social function, to host a dinner party or to provide him with an heir to take over the Tennant empire one day—Kenneth paid for anything I wanted without question.”
“You were his wife, for God’s sake.” Max broke his silence as if he couldn’t help himself. His jaw tightened. “Maybe you married for all the wrong reasons, but you wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. I put a price on myself, and Kenneth met that price.” Her voice didn’t waver. “But when Willa was born, I took one look at her and fell completely and totally in love—and I knew I’d already done the most terrible thing to her I could do. I’d had no business making a child with a man I didn’t love, Max. I’d had no right to bring a life into the world to fulfill my end of a bargain. And to Kenneth, all that was important was that she was the wrong sex. He wanted a boy to carry on in his footsteps, not a daughter.”
“That was his problem, not yours.” Max’s voice was edged. He took a step closer to her. “Why didn’t you leave?”
“Because I wouldn’t have been allowed to take Willa with me,” she said, looking away. “Kenneth saw both of us as possessions, and even if he couldn’t stop me from walking out of the marriage he would have made sure I never saw her again. I’d wanted a rich man. I got one. He had enough money to buy anything, even sole custody of his daughter. I think if I’d given him the son he’d wanted he might have made some kind of deal, but after Willa was born I vowed to myself I wouldn’t bring another child into that marriage.”
Her smile was crooked. “You know what’s funny, Max? Once or twice I really did daydream about how life would be if he wasn’t there anymore. I never actually considered murder, but when I saw his plane explode I couldn’t find it in my heart to mourn for him. I felt more grief over the deaths of Buddy Simpson and Ian Carstairs than I did over my own husband’s.”
“The Tenn-Chem pilot and Kenneth’s personal secretary.” He nodded. “Yeah, they left families too. And then there was Van Hale.”
“I