Tainted Desire: When Love Deceived

Lucy Sable fell for Jonah Duvall the first time she saw him. He was her stepbrother by then, her mother Eloise Hill having married into the Duvall family and brought Lucy along. Jonah held that Eloise was the woman who had broken up his parents' marriage and taken his home apart, and he carried that against the daughter as well as the mother. He decided to court Lucy, let her fall the rest of the way, and use it to get at Eloise. It ran that way for a while. Lucy came across the truth of it by accident, and she left the city without telling him where she was going. Only once she was gone did Jonah work out that somewhere along the line he had stopped pretending, and it drove him close to out of his mind.