by Sarah Morgan
Ellie’s mobile rang and she gasped. ‘That’s Ben. I need to get going. We’ll see you there, Meg. You look fab. Dino is going to be blown away. I wish I could stay to see his face.’ She sprinted out of the room, leaving Meg on her own with all her insecurities echoing in her head.
Staring at her reflection, she sighed. She didn’t look like herself. She didn’t feel like herself. Turning sideways, she kept her eyes on the mirror. All right, maybe she didn’t look awful. Just weird. Different.
The dress was nice.
Actually, she looked better than she’d thought she would.
Remembering Ellie’s comment that Dino would be blown away, Meg picked up the gold clutch bag that Ellie had persuaded her to buy along with the shoes. He wasn’t going to be blown away. She didn’t expect that. She didn’t have the sort of looks that would turn heads. But she looked OK. Decent. Hopefully he wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen with her.
He’d asked her, she reminded herself firmly. He’d worked with her long enough to know what she was like. He’d kissed her when she’d been dressed in her windproof jacket. She had to look better than she did when she was being blown to bits by a gale.
Meg opened the door of the staffroom and was about to go in search of Dino when she saw him standing in the corridor. He was deep in conversation with a woman wearing a short scarlet dress. It was covered in sequins that sparkled and glinted under the lights.
Short? Meg’s stomach plummeted. Was she supposed to have worn something short? Why had no one told her? The invitation had just said ‘Black Tie’ and she’d interpreted that as meaning that everyone would wear a long dress. Ellie hadn’t said anything about the dress being unsuitable. But perhaps Ellie didn’t know. As a mother of two young children, she didn’t get out much either, did she?
Meg’s mouth dried and her heart started to pound.
She looked completely wrong.
Then Meg recognised the woman—Melissa. Staring at her sexy dress, which clung to her body and ended at mid-thigh, Meg wondered why on earth Dino hadn’t just invited her to the ball. In all probability he was wishing he had. He certainly seemed to be enjoying the conversation, his laughter echoing down the corridor.
Meg looked down at herself and felt her face burn with embarrassment. It was all too easy to imagine what his reaction would be when he saw her. The comparisons he was going to make. She was going to be a laughing stock. Everyone at the ball was going to be staring at her and feeling sorry for her. She has no sense of style. No idea how to dress.
Her palms damp with sweat, Meg closed the door to the staffroom, yanked off the gold shoes and quickly pushed her feet into her trainers.
No way. No way was she putting herself through this. She’d rather fling herself over the edge of a gully, naked. Dino was blocking the only exit, which meant…
Hesitating for only a fraction of a second, she grabbed her coat and opened the window. The freezing night air poured into the staffroom but Meg didn’t care. The cold was the last of her worries. Praying that no one would notice her, she hauled the dress up to her waist, slid nimbly out of the window and moments later she was sprinting through the darkness, the silk dress winding itself around her legs as she fled through the thick snow that covered the grass and on towards the car park. Her feet were soaked in an instant. Twice she tripped and landed on her hands and knees in the snow.
‘Stupid, stupid dress.’ Her palms stung with pain and she struggled to her feet for the second time and yanked the offending dress up around her waist. Her breath came in great tearing pants and every minute she expected to hear Dino’s voice coming from the open window, or footsteps pounding after her. Except that Dino probably wouldn’t have bothered following her. He’d probably just think he’d had a lucky escape.
The flash of guilt she felt at having left him standing there with no explanation was eclipsed by the knowledge that she’d done him a favour.
It was only when she realised that she couldn’t actually see her car that Meg discovered she was crying. She was so cross with herself. Why, oh, why, had she allowed herself to be talked into going to a ball?
Ellie was wrong. It wasn’t fun at all—it was a nightmare. In order for it to be fun, you had to be part of that female club who giggled over the contents of their make-up cases and drooled over dresses, and she did neither of those things. And it was perfectly obvious that Dino was never going to be interested in someone like her. He would have been embarrassed to be seen with her.
She reached her car and pressed her key, some of her panic receding as she heard the reassuring bleep and the clunk as the doors unlocked. Later, she knew, she’d feel guilty. But for now she was just relieved to have made it as far as her car.
Pulling the dress up to her knees so that it didn’t get tangled in the pedals, Meg turned on the engine, reversed out of her parking space and accelerated forward.
All right, so Dino seemed to find her attractive, but that was just up on the mountain, when they were working together. Here, doing everyday normal things, she didn’t fit and it was no use pretending that she did. She wasn’t any of the things he was looking for.
Tears blurred her vision and she brushed them away, struggling to keep her car on the road in the hideous weather conditions.
She contemplated driving to her mother’s house, but then decided that would trigger a whole load of questions she didn’t want to answer, so instead she took the road that ran along the side of the lake and to her cottage. Her mother wasn’t bringing Jamie back until the morning so she had until then to get herself back under control.
Five minutes later she was in the bathroom, scrubbing off the make-up Ellie had so carefully applied, the green dress lying in an abandoned heap on the floor.
She’d just pulled on a cosy bathrobe when she heard the hammering at the door.
Meg froze. Oh, no, no, no. She should have hidden the car. She should have turned off all the lights. She should have— ‘Meg! Maledezione.’ Anger thickened his accent. ‘Open this door right now!’
She didn’t move. Had he come here just to shout at her? Probably. She deserved it, didn’t she? She’d left him standing there. He was a senior consultant and people were expecting him to attend the ball. Because of her, he wasn’t going. Because of her, everyone would be talking.
Braced for him to hammer on the door again, she almost died of shock when she heard the sound of a key in the door. Before she could move, he was at the top of the stairs.
Meg took one look at the thunderous expression on his face and flattened herself against the door of the bedroom. ‘Where did you get a key to my house?’
Dressed in a black dinner jacket that shrieked of expensive Italian tailoring, he looked sensational. And furious.
Guilt ripped through her. ‘Go ahead, yell at me. I know I deserve it. I know I behaved like a coward and I’m prepared to take what’s coming to me. Just do it. Get it over with and then you can leave. You’re all dressed up and it probably isn’t too late for you to find a woman you’d like to take.’
‘You are the woman I wanted to take! But you climbed out of a window and ran across two flower beds.’ He ran his hand over the back of his neck, his handsome face a mask of incredulity and disbelief. ‘What is going on? What is the matter with you?’
Her heart was hammering against her ribcage. ‘Where did you get a key to my house?’
‘Your mother. It was the first place I looked for you.’
‘Then you wasted your time because I’m not going.’
‘I didn’t look for you in order to force you to come,’ he gritted. ‘I looked for you because I was worried.’
Thinking about the lecture she was now facing from her mother, Meg made a sound that was halfway between a sob and a laugh. ‘She had no right to give you the key to my house. She had no right to interfere.’
‘She’s trying to stop you sabotaging every relationship.’ Dino loosened his bow tie with impatient fingers. ‘Why are you sabotagi
ng it, Meg? Explain. Is this to do with Jamie’s father? Or is it that you don’t like my company?’ When she didn’t answer he took a deep breath and tried again. ‘There are banks and safety deposit boxes that are easier to break into than you. Do yourself a favour and drop the self-protection for a few minutes. I’m trying to understand you.’ He undid the first few buttons of his shirt and she wondered if he were doing it on purpose to make things harder for her. Was he trying to remind her about their chemistry?
‘You know I like your company,’ she croaked. ‘It isn’t that.’
‘Then what is going on?’
She’d hurt his feelings. She was a bad person. ‘I don’t blame you for being angry but I honestly don’t know why you would be this angry because it can’t possibly matter to you that much.’
‘I’m not angry,’ he breathed, ‘at least, not with you. If you want to know the truth, I’m furious with myself for not taking notice when you said you didn’t want to go to the ball. Instead of pushing you, I should have asked you why.’
Her heart skittered and jumped. ‘You’re not angry with me?’
‘Exasperated, yes. Puzzled, definitely. Angry? No. How could I be angry? You must be extremely traumatised to be prepared to launch yourself out of the window into a snowdrift to escape me. Am I that scary?’
‘Not you. I wasn’t escaping you. I was escaping the evening.’
He looked at her and shook his head. ‘Are you going to explain any of this to me?’
Meg dragged her gaze away from the bronzed skin at the base of his throat. He deserved an explanation, didn’t he? That was the least she could do after leaving him standing. She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm as she spoke of the past she’d tried so hard to forget. ‘The night Hayden told me he was involved with another woman…’ It was an effort to force the words through the barriers she’d erected. ‘…we were supposed to be going to a ball. I’d just told him I was pregnant and he thought it was important that I know right away we didn’t have a future. That he didn’t want to keep up our relationship. He said that I was wrong for him. That he didn’t want to be with someone like me.’ Her voice thickened and she cleared her throat, desperately choking back tears. ‘Someone who was more at home in the mountains than a nightclub. He said I just wasn’t glamorous enough for him.’
‘Hayden is Jamie’s father?’
Meg’s voice hardened. ‘Well, that sort of depends on your definition of father. Given that he’s never actually seen Jamie, I wouldn’t exactly say he ever really earned himself the title of father.’
‘Right. So we’ve ascertained he’s emotionally impaired, intellectually challenged and monumentally selfish. Did anyone ever diagnose his visual problem?’
‘Visual problem?’ She stared at him in confusion
‘You’re beautiful, Meg.’ Dino stood strong and firm in front of her, not budging an inch. ‘Really beautiful. If he couldn’t see that, he obviously had a visual problem. Myopia? Cataracts?’
‘He just had a thing for well-groomed women. And who can blame him?’ She lifted her head and looked at him, forcing herself to meet his eyes as she revealed the most humiliating part of it all. ‘Do you know the thing that hurt most? The night he told me I wasn’t glamorous enough, I’d really made an effort. He’d wanted to go to this stupid ball and I’d decided that I ought to support him, so I spent ages on my hair and face and I thought I looked good. Until he said that. And just to make sure I knew how far short of the competition I was, he’d brought my replacement in the car with him.’ Meg’s knees shook slightly as she remembered the horror of that moment. ‘She was sitting outside the whole time he broke up with me. He took her to the ball instead. I haven’t been to one since. I decided to stop trying to be something I wasn’t.’
‘Meg—’
‘I’m sorry I messed up tonight. I’m sorry I embarrassed you,’ she croaked. ‘When it comes to social stuff, I’m a coward. And that is why this is never going to work between us and why you should just turn right around and walk back out of that door. Because if we carry on with this relationship, I’ll just do it to you again. And then you’ll hate me.’
‘When we carry on with this relationship, I’ll make sure you don’t do it to me again and I’m certainly not going to hate you.’
His words terrified her. ‘You need a woman who isn’t afraid to dress up and stand by your side. The truth is, we’re colleagues. You’re a fantastic doctor and you’ve got a killer smile and you just happen to kiss like a sex god, but none of that is going to make this work.’
‘Colleagues? A few days ago we almost had sex in the snow. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t normally behave like that with a “colleague”.’
‘That was a one-off, probably triggered by the intense adrenaline rush of the avalanche threat.’
‘If it was a “one off”, how do you explain the kiss in your kitchen? We have a relationship, Meg.’ He closed his hands over her shoulders, his grip firm and possessive. ‘No matter how determined you are to fight it. Answer me one more question—despite the way you felt, you obviously did intend to come to the ball tonight. Why did you change your mind?’
‘Because I got it wrong again.’
‘What did you get wrong?’ Dino frowned. ‘You mean the way you dressed?’ His eyes narrowed and he turned his head to look through the open door into the bathroom. Muttering under his breath in Italian, he strode into the room she’d just vacated and picked up the dress from the floor. ‘You were wearing this tonight? This was the dress you chose for the ball?’
Knowing exactly what he was thinking, Meg felt her face turn scarlet. ‘Yes. Sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t know what?’
‘That we were supposed to wear short dresses,’ she blurted out. ‘That’s why I don’t go to these things, Dino. I avoid them for exactly that reason. Hayden was completely right that I don’t have a clue! I never know what to wear, or what bag to carry, or w-what height of heel I’m supposed to pick—I don’t know anything.’ Her voice rose. ‘I’m rubbish at that sort of thing. Completely, totally useless. Always have been. When other girls were playing with Barbie dolls, I was learning to fit crampons to my boots. You heard Mike. He told me I had bigger balls than a man! He told me that Sue was delicate, whereas I’m not. No one worries about me ploughing through snow because I’m as strong as a horse.’
‘I wouldn’t want to be with a woman like Sue,’ Dino gritted. ‘She would drive me mad and I would very probably want to kill her within two minutes, which isn’t a good basis for a long-term partnership.’
‘Stop being nice to me. It’s making me feel even more guilty.’ Meg rubbed the palm of her hand over her face and noticed black on her fingers. ‘You see? This is why I don’t wear make-up—now I have mascara everywhere and I probably look like a panda.’
He grabbed a towel from the bathroom and gently wiped her face. ‘You don’t look like a panda.’ His gentleness was the final straw and the last of her control crumbled.
‘I’m sorry I left you standing there. I never should have said I’d go with you. I’m a truly horrible person and I feel really bad. I wish you’d just shout and rant.’ She gave a hiccough. ‘And now I’d be really grateful if you’d go away and leave me alone. I need to hide under the duvet.’
But he didn’t let her go. Instead, he folded her into his arms and hugged her tightly. ‘You saw me talking to Melissa, didn’t you? She caught me just as I was about to come and get you. You saw Melissa and that’s when you turned and ran.’
Crushed against hard male muscle, Meg felt her limbs melt. ‘You should have taken her.’ He smelt so good. He felt so good.
‘I didn’t want to take her. And your dress was perfect, tesoro.’ His voice was husky. ‘I just wish I’d seen you wearing it. You should have walked out of that room with your head held high and I would have been proud to have you as my date.’
‘Not when you saw how I stacked up against everyone else. Everyone would h
ave been staring at me. And feeling sorry for you.’
‘If they stared it would have been because you are beautiful, not because you were dressed inappropriately. And if they felt anything for me, it would have been envy. You shouldn’t be insecure about the way you look.’
‘I’m not insecure. I like the way I look.’ Meg sniffed and pulled away, noticing black smudges on his shirt. ‘It’s just that the way I look doesn’t suit all that social stuff. I like wearing walking boots and tramping through the mountains, I just don’t like wearing dresses and putting on make-up. I haven’t got the right sort of face or body for that.’
‘You have a beautiful face and a woman’s body,’ Dino drawled, ‘and even though I think you look seriously cute in your walking gear, it would be a novelty to see your legs once in a while.’
‘Why? Honestly, why are you bothering?’ Her throat was clogged with tears. ‘All right—yes, I saw Melissa this evening. I thought she looked gorgeous. She looked sexy and feminine—everything I’m not. I’m wolf-girl, Dino, and putting a dress on me doesn’t change that. Even if I’d worn Melissa’s dress, I still wouldn’t have looked as good as she did. I’m just not a girly girl. I’m the person who can manoeuvre a car out of a snowdrift, but I can’t apply mascara. You heard what Jamie said—I’m just not that feminine.’
‘Really?’ His eyes glittering dark, he slid the robe off her shoulders and Meg gasped and made an abortive grab for it.
‘What are you doing?’
‘You told me you’re not that feminine. I prefer to make my own decisions about these things.’ He trailed a leisurely hand over the curve of her hip. ‘Sorry, but I’m going to have to disagree with you.’
Meg made another grab for her robe. ‘Dino, please…’ Scarlet with embarrassment, she tried to cover herself but he dropped it on the floor behind him.
‘You think I care what dress you’re wearing? You think that’s why I want you? So how do you explain the fact that I wanted to strip you naked when you were wrapped up in layers of thermal insulation on the mountain?’ The heat of his mouth was a breath away from hers and she could feel hard muscle through the thin fabric of his shirt. ‘You think I’m interested in the way you wear your hair?’
