At His Convenience Bundle by Penny Jordan, Maggie Cox, Kim Lawrence

said harshly, ‘If you must know it was caused by a woman just like you!’
    He could see the shock in her face, but he ignored it.
    â€˜She may not have fired the bullet that caused it, but she was still responsible.’
    A dark, frightening anger filled his expression, banishing the intimacy they had shared. Bitterly Luke contemplated what he had done. How could he not have controlled himself? Stopped himself? How could she have made him feel like that? How could she have made him want like that, when she was everything he did not want in a woman? Anger and self-disgust left a sour taste in his mouth.
    â€˜Luke?’ Suzy whispered hesitantly.
    Why wasn’t he saying anything to her? Why was he turning away from her instead of holding her as she longed for him to do?
    He had to make it plain to her that what had just happened between them hadn’t left him vulnerable or open to any kind of persuasion, Luke told himself. He could still feel the soft warmth of her lips against his scar. Anger burned through him. A gunshot wound was nothing compared with what he could see inside his head. He saw the smouldering rubble of what had once been a home, the body of the pretty young woman who had lived in it lying on the ground like that of a broken doll, murdered, and all because some damn female journalist had ignored his explicit instructions so that she could get her human interest story…
    â€˜Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the fact that we’ve had sex changes anything,’ he told Suzy brutally. ‘It doesn’t! After all, we both know that sex is the currency you favour. On this occasion it didn’t work!’
    A cold feeling of sickness was crawling through her. Shock, anguish, despair—she could feel them all.
    Luke was making it humiliatingly plain that he had simply used her for sex. How could she have been so stupid as to allow herself to think—To think what? That because for her sexual intimacy was inextricably linked to emotional intimacy Luke would think the same thing? That because she could not stop herself from feeling the way she did about him he shared those feelings? Was she totally crazy? Hadn’t he just made it brutally plain to her that he did not?
    Silently Suzy turned away from him, whilst pain raked her with burning claws.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    â€˜I’ M BORED !’
    Charlie’s petulant comment was a welcome interruption to Suzy’s agonised inner examination of what had happened with Luke last night.
    She and the children had breakfasted alone, Lucy informing her with a world-weary sigh that, ‘Daddy and Luke are talking business and we aren’t allowed to interrupt them.’
    Was it business that had been responsible for Luke’s absence from both the bed they had shared last night and the suite when she had woken up this morning? Suzy didn’t really care! She was glad he seemed to have forgotten his threat to stay with her day and night, and was just relieved that she hadn’t had to go through the embarrassment and humiliation of seeing him.
    In fact she wished passionately that she might never have to see him again! How could he have used her so cold-bloodedly—and more importantly, how could she have let him?
    â€˜It’s a beautiful day,’ she responded to Charlie’s statement of his boredom. ‘Why don’t you go for a swim?’
    She had seen the swimming pool from her vantage point on the hillside above the villa, and had admired the elegance of its tranquil setting.
    â€˜We can’t go swimming,’ Charlie told her crossly.
    Suzy frowned, wondering if perhaps their father had put a ban on them swimming without adult supervision. But before she could say anything Lucy told her unhappily, ‘We can’t swim because Mummy sent us with the wrong clothes. She forgot about packing our swimming things.’
    Forgot? Suzy felt a sharp stab of anger against the