LIGHT AFTER DARK

          Black as the darkest night hair against a crisp linen pillow, brown skin against a blindingly white sheet, and tiger’s eyes burning with deliberate cruelty and triumph into hers.

          In horrified rejection of the imagery that had sprung into her mind, Lara Anderson shuddered violently, dimly aware that she was still in the grip of severe shock.

          Abruptly, she was dredged from her turmoil by the insistent shrill of the telephone in the hall. Reluctantly she answered the summons, carefully shutting the lounge door behind her so that her father was not disturbed.

“Lara...?”

          She froze, her stunningly beautiful face white as snow between the silken wings of her blonde hair. Her breath caught in her throat in a strangled gasp. The receiver dropped from her nerveless fingers and swung towards the floor.

          That voice, that truly unforgettable voice... deep, dark, and rich as golden honey. He said her name as no one else had ever said it, nor before him, nor after. She hadn’t heard him speak in three long years and yet recognition was instantaneous and terrifying.

          Her throat closing over, she bent down to retrieve the phone.

“I’m so sorry to have startled you,” Christophe Moreau purred, lying between his even white teeth.

          Her own teeth clenched. Lara wanted to reach down the telephone line and slap him silly. And feeling that way again... Feeling that strange surge of raw violent hatred which he alone invoked, scared her rigid. Her mouth went dry.

“What do you want, Christophe?”

“I’m in a very generous mood, chérie,” he imparted with a husky edge to his slow drawl. “I’m prepared to offer you a meeting…”

          Her fingers clenched like talons around the receiver.

“A meeting... Why?”

“Can it be that you haven’t seen your father yet?” he murmured.

          Lara went white.

“I’ve seen him,” she whispered, not troubling to add that Kenneth Miller was still in the room next door.

“As you know, embezzlement is a very serious offense.”

“My father had gambling debts,” Lara protested in a feverish undertone. “He panicked... He didn’t mean to take the money from the firm! He was borrowing it…”

“Euphemistically speaking,” Christophe inserted with more than an edge of mockery.

“The firm used to belong to him,” she reminded Christophe with helpless bitterness.

“But it doesn’t now, chérie,” Christophe traded softly. “Now it belongs to me.”

          Lara’s teeth gritted. Three years ago, burdened by the demands of a wife with expensive tastes, aging machinery, and falling profits, her father, Kenneth Miller, had allowed Christophe Moreau to buy the family firm.

          Duly reinstalled as chief executive, her father had seemed content and, with new equipment and unparalleled export opportunities through the parent conglomerate, ‘Miller Engineering’ had absolutely thrived.

          Guilt stabbed like a knife into Lara. If it hadn’t been for her, Christophe Moreau would never have come into their lives. If it hadn’t been for her, the firm would still have belonged to her father. If it had not been for her, Kenneth Miller would not now be facing criminal charges for embezzlement.

          Nausea stirred in her stomach, churned up by a current of raw loathing so powerful, she could taste it in her mouth.

“Dad intended to repay the money... if it hadn’t had been for the audit, you wouldn’t even have found out!” Lara said in desperation.

“Why do you think I spring occasional surprise audits on my companies?” Christophe enquired gently. “Employees like your father get greedy and sometimes they get caught as he has.”

          Lara trembled, her heartbeat thundering deafeningly in her eardrums. His deliberate cruelty appalled her.

“My father wasn’t greedy... He was desperate!”

“I’m willing to meet you tonight. I’m staying at the Northern Star. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you which suite I’ll be occupying. Eight,” he specified. “I will wait one minute past the hour, no more. If you’re not there, there’ll be no second chance, chérie.”

          Aghast at the site he had specified and absolutely enraged by his instinctive sadism, Lara gasped.

“Don’t waste your time! I’ll see you in hell before I set foot inside that hotel again!”

“You must’ve been quite a sight limping out on one shoe that afternoon,” Christophe mused provocatively. “The chambermaid found the other one under the bed. I still have it. Cinderella’s slipper…”

“How dare you?” she seethed down the phone in outrage.

“And as I recall it, you damned near left something far more intimate behind,” he breathed reflectively.

          Blushing profusely, Lara slammed down the receiver before she could be further reminded of her own appalling, inexcusable weakness that day.

“The hell with him and his invitation!”

          The very last thing Lara wanted to think about right now was that day at the Northern Star, three years ago.

          ‘No more!’ she wanted to scream. ‘No more!’

          But of course, she wouldn’t. Lara didn’t scream. Lara hated to lose control. She had grown up sobbing silently behind closed doors, covering her ears from the sound of her mother screaming at her poor father. And she had sworn then that she would be different and that her own fiery temper would be subdued by every means within her power.

          Lara would be strong without passion. And if she stayed away from the passion, she wouldn’t be hurt. The worst thing of all now had to be looking back, seeing how she had broken her own rules and how she had suffered accordingly.

          Struggling to escape those frightening echoes from the past, Lara returned to her father. Grey with strain, Kenneth glanced up and began talking again, not even acknowledging that she had been out of the room, so cocooned in his own problems that he might as well have been on another planet.

“I had to hand over all my keys... Even my car keys… I wasn’t allowed to enter my own office again,” he relived painfully. “Then I was escorted out of the building by two security guards... It was a nightmare!”

          Those must’ve been Christophe’s instructions. Hadn’t her father deserved just a little bit more consideration? Couldn’t he have been allowed to retain even a tiny sliver of dignity?

“Dad...”

          Her voice suspended by choking tears, Lara darted across the room to offer comfort but her father pulled away from her.

“I would’ve treated a thief the same way…”

          The admission was stark.

“You’re not a thief, Dad!”

          But Kenneth didn’t reply to his daughter. Every which way Lara looked, she felt responsible. She should’ve been there for her father, should’ve seen that he was in trouble.

          A week after Christophe had bought ‘Miller Engineering’, Lara’s mother had walked out and asked for the divorce. The amount of cash from the sale had proved too severe a temptation for Linda Miller.

           Bad as the marriage had been, Kenneth had been utterly devastated. Her father had adored her mother. He had been terrifyingly loyal and forgiving through her every extra-marital affair. He would’ve done anything to keep her... For Linda, he had crawled, begged, pleaded.

          The only person relieved by Linda’s departure had been her daughter. But she should’ve seen the immense void that had opened up in her father’s life. She had watched him turn into a workaholic, living and breathing business and profit because that was all he had left.

          Why hadn’t it occurred to her that, as the firm thrived and made all the money her greedy mother could ever have wanted, her father must have bitterly resented the fact that the firm was no longer his and that those healthy profits had come too late to sustain his shaky marriage? But gambling...?

“It was somewhere to go, something to do,” Kenneth proffered while she stared back at him horrified. “And then I started losing and I thought I couldn’t go on losing forever...”

          The silence went on and on and then abruptly and without any warning, Kenneth rose heavily from his seat and moved with the shambling pace of a much older man towards the front door.

“Where are you going, Dad?” Lara demanded, her blue eyes almost purple with the strength of her distress.

“Home, baby girl... I need to be on my own... Please understand that, Lara.”

          In despair, she hurried down the path after him.

“Dad, we can cope better with this together! Please stay,” Lara pleaded.

“I’m sorry. Not now, baby,” he breathed tightly, unable to look at her.

          Cope with the shame, the publicity, the court case? With the loss of his home, his job, his self-respect? Would he be able to cope? It was a tall order, she registered dully, especially for a man of his age.

          But what alternative was there? You coped, you survived. If Lara had learned anything in recent years, it was that truth. Yet struggle as she did, she could no longer keep her mind fully focused on her father’s problems. The past was surging back to her, the past she had buried three years ago...

          The day she had met Christophe Moreau she had been in London, shopping for her trousseau in the company of a friend. It had been less than two months before her wedding to Randall Anderson.

          Lara hadn’t been wearing her engagement ring. One of the stones had worked loose and it had been in the jeweler for repair. She had been standing chatting to Liza at a busy intersection, waiting on the lights to change so they could cross.

          Somebody behind her in the crowd had pushed her and she had fallen into the road, practically beneath the wheels of Christophe’s chauffeur-driven limousine. She didn’t remember falling. She had knocked herself out.

          What she did remember was coming dizzily back to consciousness before the ambulance arrived and focusing on the most extraordinary golden eyes above hers. Astonishing pools of brilliant gold… So, naturally, Lara had stared. She had never seen eyes that shade before.

“Stay still... don’t speak.”

          Christophe had been shooting autocratic instructions in every direction, including hers. Lara didn’t appreciate his arrogant behavior.

“I’m fine…”

“Keep quiet,” she had been told.

“It’s only my head and I want to get up...”

          She had begun trying to move. A brown hand like a giant weight had anticipated such daring.

“Look, mister... I want to get up… Right now!” Lara had said again, embarrassed eyes flickering over the gathering crowd of witnesses.

“You’re not getting up... You could have injured your spine.”

          Her temper had begun to spark. ‘Who the hell is this guy thinking he is?’ she thought.

“My spine is perfectly fine... I’m perfectly fine…”

“We will have a doctor tell us that.”

          Christophe had continued to stare down at her with the most phenomenal intensity and then he had run a forefinger almost caressingly along her delicate jawbone.

“I will never forgive myself for hurting something so incredibly beautiful...”