‘You don’t understand.’
‘Matt, that must be the most well-worn statement any man can make when he’s made a mistake and been caught red-handed.’ She was managing to keep her voice level, but it came at a cost. Her heart was splintering into a thousand pieces. She looked away and shuffled towards the sofa because her legs felt wobbly.
‘Violet...’
His voice was soft right behind her but, when he placed his hand on her arm, she angrily shook it off without looking at him.
‘I don’t want this for myself, Matt. I don’t want you.’ She sank onto the sofa and didn’t look at him as he hovered in front of her, the very essence of a guilt-ridden male, she thought, raking his fingers through his hair, his fabulous eyes not quite able to meet hers... All that was missing was the stammer.
Anger, jealousy, searing hurt all fused inside her and she briefly closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. When she opened them, he was still there, towering over her, arms folded.
‘I’m telling you that you don’t understand.’
‘And I’m telling you that I do! I understand because I know you, because I’ve been down this road before, don’t forget! I’ve arranged the flowers and sent them on your behalf, except this time you were going to send the flowers yourself until you got wrapped up with your deal and forgot.’
‘I think I need something a little stronger to drink than water,’ he ground out, turning round and heading to the kitchen, to reappear within minutes with a glass of whisky that he downed in one ferocious gulp.
‘Please don’t try to talk your way out of this, Matt,’ she said when he pulled a chair towards her and sat down. ‘I deserve the truth and then... Well, we can take things from there, but first and foremost we’ll have to agree that this experiment has failed.’
‘Please, Violet...’
‘Please what? Please try to listen to whatever version of the truth you decide to come out with to placate me? Please accept a situation where I share you with other women? Absolutely not!’
‘Do you honestly think that I’m that sort of person?’ he demanded, and when she would have turned away he leant forward and tilted her face to his so that she couldn’t avoid his searching gaze.
‘I didn’t,’ she said truthfully. ‘But, then again, as you once pointed out, we’re not married, are we? Some people aren’t meant to settle down. They’re rolling stones. You’re one of those people, Matt, and if I was lulled into thinking otherwise then I’m wide awake now.’
‘I can explain...’
Violet looked at him stonily. She had always had her pride, and she had a lot of experience when it came to concealing her emotions from him. She had fancied him from a distance, but he would never have guessed in a million years as she made those phone calls to the flower shop and arranged theatre tickets and opera seats for the women who’d flitted in and out of his life.
She wanted to burst into tears, but there was no way she was going to do that. Every bone in her body hurt from the effort of keeping it together.
‘Please don’t bother.’
‘Okay, I admit that, yes, I ordered the flowers.’
‘I told you that I don’t want to hear!’ The last thing she needed was an agonised confession of infidelity. He would use his words carefully, but the message would remain the same and it was a message she didn’t want to hear. There was only so much reality any person could take in one go.
‘But then I chickened out from actually having them delivered.’
‘Because you couldn’t bear to say goodbye to whoever was on the receiving end?’ She clenched her hands into tights fists and stared at him with simmering hostility.
How could so much beauty be so lethal? But then, wasn’t nature full of poisonous creatures whose physical appearance could seduce and enchant?
‘Because I didn’t know how to say hello,’ Matt muttered under his breath. She had to strain to catch what he was saying. She was grudgingly riveted because, for the very first time, he was shorn of his usual self-assurance. A dark flush highlighted his cheekbones and he had lowered his eyes. Every muscle in his body shrieked tension.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m no good at this sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing? Behaving like a decent human being and telling the truth?’ An unfair and uncharitable remark. She knew that. He was a decent human being. He’d been decent from the start and it was all her fault if she’d hoped for more.
‘Violet...would you listen to me? Please? No interruption?’
Violet shrugged, but the plea in his voice held her still. He was so assertive, so dominant, that that ghost of a plea momentarily derailed her.
‘All of this...us...what happened... None of it... I never predicted any of it.’
‘That makes the two of us, Matt,’ Violet muttered, flicking resentful eyes at him.
‘You handed in your notice, Violet, and I didn’t think how much I really relied on you until you did that. I read that email and my blood ran cold. Why do you think I raced over to your house? There was no way I could have waited until the following morning.’
‘I don’t know what that has to do with anything.’
‘No interruption. Remember?’ He smiled crookedly at her and she felt her treacherous body melt a little. She sternly reminded herself that melting was not an option.
‘I’ve asked myself whether I would have gone to Melbourne if I hadn’t had those deals on the go, if I hadn’t had an excuse. The more I realised that I would have, the more I realised just how...dependent I had become on you over the years. It wasn’t a message I was happy to take on board, so I did the obvious thing and ignored it.’
Violet was listening intently. She didn’t know where this was going, but for the moment she had forgotten all about the flowers and was focused instead on whatever road he was leading her down.
He was so intent, his navy eyes so compelling. Part of her wanted to break away but she was held in place against her will. Dependent how? she wanted to ask, but that was a dangerous road to follow, so she focused on telling herself that she’d been a brilliant secretary who could handle him and of course he’d unwittingly become dependent on her. There was no point reading beyond that.
‘I saw you on that stage, Violet, and something else I never realised hit me like a sledgehammer.’
‘What was that?’
‘I wanted you. I was attracted to you. Something about you...went beyond physical attraction, and I never registered that because, for me, there had never been anything beyond physical attraction. Physical attraction was something I could understand. Sex was good, but sex was all there was, and as far as I was concerned it was all there ever would be with any woman. A relationship involved feelings I knew I would never have and I was never going to be in the business of pretending otherwise. I grew up in a house where there was never any demonstration of affection between my parents and I guess what you see becomes learned behaviour. I accepted that without really analysing it. But then you left me.’
‘Matt, I hardly left you.’
‘You left me,’ he said gruffly. ‘That’s what it felt like. I should have known that what I felt weren’t the usual feelings of a boss who has lost his brilliant PA—and I certainly should have realised that what I felt was something way deeper the very minute we climbed into bed. Nothing had felt so right, Violet. Everything was magnified. Exquisitely intense. I never wanted it to stop. That should have set the alarm bells ringing, but I’d never heard those bells before, and I had no idea what they signified.’
‘Please, Matt, don’t say things you don’t mean.’
‘I wouldn’t. When I left Melbourne, I thought life would go back to normal, but it didn’t. On the surface, everything was as it should be, but below the surface...a crack had opened, and it grew bigger by the day. There was no way I was
conditioned to put two and two together but, when you showed up at my office all those weeks later, I was over the moon.’
‘You were?’
‘You’d come back. And then you told me that you were pregnant and I was shocked at how readily I accepted the situation. I’d never planned on having a family, yet there I was, and I wasn’t complaining half as much as I should have been.’
‘Matt...’ Violet whispered helplessly.
‘I wanted to marry you. I couldn’t stand the thought of not having you and our baby in my life on a permanent basis. But you weren’t having it and, while I understood where you were coming from, I still couldn’t stand it.’
‘You stopped asking very quickly,’ she pointed out, unwillingly drawn into a conversation that was dangerously seductive.
‘I didn’t want to scare you off, but then you relented, told me that you were willing to meet me halfway.’
‘I hated the thought of you finding someone else,’ Violet admitted, breaking all her self-imposed rules about revealing as little as possible. ‘I hated thinking that I would see you with another woman hanging on your arm whenever you came round to see our child. I hated the thought that you would probably end up marrying one of those women. Like I’ve said, a single guy pushing a pram is an irresistible temptation. I also knew, whether I wanted to admit it to myself or not, that two parents were always going to be better together than apart when it came to a child’s best interests. You were prepared to be unselfish. Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Violet...’ His voice roughened and he looked away, his body language awkward but intensely appealing in its sincerity. ‘The flowers...’
‘The flowers.’
‘For you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The flowers were for you. It took me a while, because I was so bloody slow on the uptake, but I finally slotted all the pieces of the jigsaw together and saw what had been staring me in the face from that very first moment we slept together. I love you, Violet. You, your smile, your quick wit, the way you have of standing your ground and not giving an inch. I love the way you stand up to me. I love the way you make me feel.’
‘You love me?’
‘I didn’t recognise the symptoms.’ He smiled a hesitant smile and reached forward to link her fingers loosely with his. ‘Even though I knew I had a virus.’
‘Are you really being honest with me?’
‘I would never lie about something like this. I always thought that my heart was firmly locked away, but you managed to get hold of the key...and I think it happened long before we slept together. You have the whole package, Violet, and I was an idiot not to see that sooner.’
Violet’s heart was soaring and there was a drumbeat in her ears. ‘I love you too, Matt.’ It felt a dangerous crossing of lines to utter those words, because she’d spent so long making sure they never left her lips. She almost expected him to pull back, despite everything he had just said, but he didn’t. He smiled. She tentatively held her hand against his face and he caught it in his and kissed her palm.
‘I was so attracted to you before I left for Melbourne, but I knew that it would never come to anything because we were just so different. The last sort of guy I wanted was someone who played the field, and there was no way you could ever be attracted to me, anyway. I’d seen way too much of the women you went for to ever think that you could go for someone like me.
‘Then you came to Melbourne and you were there for me when my father was rushed into hospital. Sleeping with you...felt so incredibly good, but I just looked at it as stolen happiness. It wasn’t going to last, but I would hold on to it for as long as I could. When I found out that I was pregnant, I was so confused. I knew I had to tell you, but the thought of seeing you again...scared me. I’m not sure when I realised that I loved you. Maybe I always knew, just as I knew that love was the last thing you would ever want from me.’
She paused. ‘Why didn’t you send the flowers?’
‘I chickened out. I suspected you had feelings for me, but I couldn’t be sure. I loved you, but what was that about? How had that happened? I placed the order for forty-eight red roses and then I panicked. Had second thoughts. I told myself that I’d get back to it, make my mind up, take the bull by the horns, but I needed a couple of days to think it through. It never occurred to me that the woman at the flower shop would get in touch with you, but she did, and here we are.
‘My darling, darling Violet. We love one another and I have never been happier in my entire life. So, please, will you marry me? Not because we’re having a baby, but because we want to share the rest of our lives together.’
‘How could I possibly say no to that?’
She smiled at him, then leant forward and pulled him towards her, and the feel of his mouth on hers sent her heart into a crazy tailspin. Oh, how used to that feeling she was—but, oh, how wonderful that this time the feeling was mutual.
They were married less than a month later, plenty of time to have got her father over. Every single employee attended, along with friends from every walk of life, including many of her father’s friends, most of whom she remembered well. It was a rowdy and memorable affair. Her father was in his element and, at the end of a brilliant evening, he and some of his former band members formed an impromptu group to play for the newlyweds.
Matt’s parents, as stiff-lipped as she had expected, unbent a little by the end of the evening. This time, when his mother politely repeated her invitation to lunch, Violet nodded and conceded that it might not be quite as bad as she had reckoned the first time the invitation had been extended.
Who knew? Maybe a baby would change the dynamics.
They should have had a honeymoon of her choosing, Matt had said, but with his usual overprotective gene in full flow, he had put his foot down at any destination that involved a plane. She was far too pregnant to travel, he had determined, even if the duration of the flight was ten seconds.
So they had a romantic week in deepest Cornwall, where the weather pretty much did what they wanted it to. They had lovely walks and a roaring fire in the evening.
And then, in the blink of an eye, Matilda was there. Eight pounds six ounces of curly black hair, navy-blue eyes, a rosebud mouth and little chubby hands punching the air.
Now, six months later, Violet could smile at the memory of just how panicked Matt had been when she had gone into labour.
Her cool, collected and self-assured husband had been at his most flustered.
‘Just remember to breathe,’ she had told him, amused and indulgent in between contractions, ‘and you’ll be okay.’
She heard the sound of the front door opening, but this time it wasn’t the door to his apartment, but the door to the house on Richmond Hill where they now lived. They had finally opted for somewhere close enough for Matt to return home in the evenings in time to see Matilda before she went to bed. Original plans to move farther out had been put on the back burner.
He strode in and was as mesmerising as he always was, walking towards her with that slow smile that still made her toes curl and her skin prickle with love and desire.
‘An early Friday,’ he drawled, kissing her on the mouth and then kissing her again before pulling back. ‘As instructed by my darling wife.’ He glanced past her from hallway to open-plan kitchen. ‘And I see the table is set for...’ He frowned. ‘For five people?’
‘I thought I’d surprise you,’ Violet said, pulling him towards the kitchen. Matilda was sound asleep in her cot and she could sense that he was itching to go in and have a look at his sleeping daughter. ‘My dad’s coming over for dinner...and your parents.’
‘My parents?’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not, indeed?’ he murmured. ‘What time are they over?’
‘We have a couple of hours. They won’t be here until seven forty-five.’
> ‘In that case...’ He leant down to brush his mouth against her neck and, at the same time, he curved a possessive hand underneath the short-sleeved jumper to find the swell of her naked breasts, because she was braless. On cue, he hardened, and even more so when he pushed up the jumper to tease her nipple between his fingers. ‘We have plenty of time for me to look in on Matilda and then have ourselves a little bit of fun...wouldn’t you agree?’
Violet smiled. Yes, she would agree. She tiptoed to curl her hands around his neck and pulled him to her so that she could kiss him, a long, lingering kiss, full of love, desire and adoration.
She most certainly would agree.
Coming next month
BEAUTY AND HER ONE-NIGHT BABY
Dani Collins
Scarlett dropped her phone with a clatter.
She had been trying to call Kiara. Now she was taking in the livid claw marks across Javiero’s face, each pocked on either side with the pinpricks of recently removed stitches. His dark brown hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, perhaps gelled back from the widow’s peak at some point this morning, but it was mussed and held a jagged part. He wore a black eye patch like a pirate, its narrow band cutting a thin stripe across his temple and into his hair.
Maybe that’s why his features looked as though they had been set askew? His mouth was…not right. His upper lip was uneven and the claw marks drew lines through his unkempt stubble all the way down into his neck.
That was dangerously close to his jugular! Dear God, he had nearly been killed.
She grasped at the edge of the sink, trying to stay on her feet while she grew so light-headed at the thought of him dying that she feared she would faint.
The ravages of his attack weren’t what made him look so forbidding and grim, though, she computed through her haze of panic and anguish. No. The contemptuous glare in his one eye was for her. For this.
He flicked another outraged glance at her middle.
“I thought we were meeting in the boardroom.” His voice sounded gravelly. Damaged as well? Or was that simply his true feelings toward her now? Deadly and completely devoid of any of the sensual admiration she’d sometimes heard in his tone.
His Secretary's Nine-Month Notice (Mills & Boon Modern) Page 16
