by Grace Green
‘Get back?’ Stephanie stared at him confusedly.
‘I have to fly out to the East Coast early tomorrow. I’m afraid I’ll be gone for two or three weeks.’
‘Tony.’ Stephanie felt faint. ‘What I have to say can’t wait for two or—’
‘Of course it can!’ Over her protests, he took her key, opened the door, put the key into her purse and guided her inside. ‘We’ll have a long talk when I get b—’
‘Tony, please listen to me. This can’t w—’
He cupped her head, and trapped her mouth in a deep-delving kiss that almost smothered her.
‘Now you get off to bed,’ he said firmly. ‘And get well. I’m depending on you to fill McAllister in on all our plans. Any problems, you can reach me through my office.’
And as she struggled to catch her breath, he left, and her pleas for him to wait echoed, unanswered, in the foyer.
Frustration intensified the poleaxing pain in her head as she sagged against the foyer wall.
She’d blown it.
She was still engaged.
And would now have to remain so till Tony got back. A woman could hardly disengage herself from a man without his being the first to know. It wouldn’t be fair.
She sighed. So...she’d have to play out a charade. But only for a couple of weeks; she could handle that.
Especially knowing her decision to call off the wedding was the right one. After intensive soul-searching, she’d realized Tony could never repair the damage his ruthless ultimatum had done to their relationship. She was no longer in love with him...if what she’d felt for him had been love in the first place, and she was beginning to doubt that.
Still, she felt a pang of guilt. He was going to lose face when his friends and colleagues found out he’d been jilted. She felt badly about that; really badly. But there was nothing she could do about it.
He was going to be very upset, too, when he came back, if his housing project wasn’t under way.
Now that was a matter she could do something about.
She pushed herself from the foyer wall and started wearily toward the elevator. It wouldn’t kill her, she acknowledged with a feeling of bleak resignation, to meet with McAllister a couple of times, and pass on Tony’s plans.
Surely it was the least she could do.
Under the circumstances.
She was working in the store window the next day, dismantling the Happy New Year To I And All sign that had been blinking there since the Merry Xmas To U And Yours had come down, when she had the feeling someone was watching her.
When she’d come in to work earlier, the first thing she’d done was to ascertain where the M.A.G. offices were. According to the gilt lettering on the windows, the firm took up the entire second floor of the building directly across the four-lane street.
Now, as she turned, she found her eyes caught by a movement in one of those windows. And despite the glint of sun on glass, she saw the outline of a tall figure. A man. But even as she recognized him, he moved away.
McAllister.
Her stomach did a backward flip. Swiftly she finished dismantling her sign and then hopped back down onto the floor of the store, where her assistant was unpacking Valentine’s Day trappings from a huge box.
Joyce Pym was almost six feet tall, with cropped brown hair, an affable nature and boundless energy. She had been an employee at the Warmest Fuzzies for over a year, and she and Stephanie had developed a friendly working relationship.
‘Joyce,’ Stephanie said in a deliberately offhand manner, ‘that building across the street...’
‘Which one?’ With a glossy red heart in her hand, Joyce paused and looked up questioningly from her task.
‘The...architects’ building.’
‘Oh, the M.A.G. What about it?’
‘Is their parking area around the back?’
‘No, underground. My friend Marjorie Sutton works there. She has a parking spot in the basement.’
‘I didn’t know you had a friend working there.’
Joyce grinned. ‘Sure, and she talks about little else! She works for the senior man—apparently he’s God’s gift to women. The McAllister, she calls him and Lord a’mighty, you’d never think her fifty-five and happily married, the way she goes on and on about him.’
Stephanie turned her back and started packing away the New Year lights. ‘McAllister,’ she said carelessly, ‘I believe he’s the architect Tony has hired. Damian McAllister.’
‘That’s him.’ Joyce sighed. ‘He lost his wife five winters ago, poor man. They’d only been married a few months, and to make matters worse, the poor mite was pregnant. According to Joyce, The McAllister went off the deep end and has never surfaced since. Ashley, I believe her name was. Ashley Cabot. Her family had pots of money. But there you are.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Money doesn’t always guarantee happiness, does it!’
He called her the next day, just before noon.
‘McAllister,’ he said when she answered the phone. ‘When can we meet?’
Never, she wanted to say. But didn’t. ‘My schedule is probably more flexible than yours. You set a time.’
‘How about now?’
‘Now?’
‘You just told me to set a time—’
‘No need to snap my head off. Just a sec.’ She put the phone down, and walked to the back room where her assistant was unpacking a delivery of velvet swans. ‘Joyce, can you keep an eye on the counter? I have to go out for a while.’
‘Sure.’
When she picked up the receiver again, she could hear what sounded like fingertips irritably tapping a desktop. ‘Mr. McAllister—’
‘Damian.’
She gritted her teeth. ‘Now is fine. Where shall I—’
‘I’ll pick you up outside your store in five minutes.’
He hung up.
Stephanie tried to control a surge of temper.
Joyce wandered through. ‘So,’ she said, ‘where are you off to, this nice sunny day? Playing hooky?’
‘The McAllister and I are going to have a meeting to discuss house plans,’ she said lightly. ‘He’s going to pick me up out front in a few minutes.’
She went through to the back to pay a visit to the washroom, and get her jacket. When she returned, she found Joyce waiting for her, her face pink with excitement.
‘He’s out there! And oh, Lordy...what a dream-boat!’
‘Now you know why your friend keeps raving about him,’ Stephanie said lightly. ‘I guess you both have a weakness for dark brooding types!’ She scooped up her bag and made for the door. Through the plate glass, she could see an older model silver-and-navy Mercedes idling by the curb. McAllister was sitting with his arms over the steering wheel, staring ahead, his expression distant.
‘Bye, Joyce. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back. If not by five-thirty, just lock up and go home.’
As she walked to the car, he got out, rounded the hood and opened the passenger door.
He was wearing a flannel shirt, narrow-fitting blue jeans and a beautiful tweed jacket with a steel blue fleck that picked up the color of his eyes. His expression, when he dipped a glance her way, was a shade cool.
As she moved past him to slide into her seat, the musky scent of his body and hair launched a silent attack on her senses. She cleared her throat. ‘Where are we going?’
He made her wait till he had got in beside her and set the vehicle in motion before he answered.
‘I’m taking you out to have a look at the site.’
‘Oh.’
‘Your fiancé said you haven’t seen it yet.’
‘No.’
‘I should have thought—’
He broke off, and Stephanie turned to look at him. His jaw was shadowed; she guessed the skin would feel slightly rough to the touch. A nerve quivered somewhere deep inside her, as faint as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing. The sensation was as unsettling as it was pleasurable; she clenched her stomach muscles in an effort to put a stop to
it. ‘Thought... what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No... what?’
He threw her a sideways glance. ‘If I were building a house for the woman I was going to marry—’ his hands tightened on the wheel ‘—I’d want to take her to see the lot myself—at least the very first time, rather than have an architect fill in.’
‘If you feel this is not your responsibility,’ Stephanie said stiffly, ‘then please drive me back to the store.’
‘You misunderstand. Even if you had already checked it out with Gould, I’d still want to spend some time there with you. I need to show you where I intend to place the house, and so on. My point was—’
‘Point taken.’ Stephanie pushed her legs out in front of her, and stared moodily at the toes of her leather boots. ‘Tony’s been too busy to drive me out. His workload—’
‘You don’t need to make any excuses for your fiancé. I’m well aware of how Tony Gould operates.’
Now there was a statement that could be taken several ways, yet the tone in which it was spoken was noncritical. Why then did she feel as if he was implying something sinister? She sensed an underlying hostility, not only to Tony, but to her, too. Bad enough meeting him under false pretences, as she felt she was, but being with him was going to be totally unpalatable unless his attitude changed.
‘There’s something I’d like to clear up,’ she said. ‘The other night, you called me a liar. I admit I told you, in Vermont, that there was no man in my life. I just want to explain why I said—’
He jerked his head around and his expression froze her explanation before she could get it out.
‘When your fiancé introduced us—’ his tone was curt ‘—you made it clear you wanted me to forget we’d ever met before—’
‘Yes, but that was because—’
‘I don’t give a damn what your reasons were! You say I need to know? Like hell I do! It was your choice, not mine, to keep our little interlude secret. I had nothing to hide. So let me tell you...I’ve put it right out of my mind. Just don’t ever refer to it again. It never happened. Understand?’
Oh, she understood all right! Damian McAllister was cold and hard and overbearing; he had not one ounce of sensitivity in his whole body!
But even as she glared at his jutting profile, she couldn’t help but see the lines etched around his eyes and bracketing his mouth, couldn’t help remembering what Joyce had told her just a short time before: Not only had McAllister lost his wife, but he’d lost his unborn baby, too.
She had, of course, noticed those lines around his eyes and mouth before, but because she’d known little of his history, it hadn’t occurred to her that they might have been etched there by pain, or by suffering.
Compassion swelled inside her and she felt the faintest smarting of tears. The man was not cold, or hard.
He was just a man with a broken heart.
CHAPTER SIX
THE building lot Tony had purchased was on a wide, maple-lined street. Several new houses were already occupied, and Stephanie thought each one was more palatial than the next.
A bitter wind was blowing, and as they got out of the car, she shivered. Zipping up her anorak, she dug her hands into her pockets.
‘Well,’ McAllister said abruptly, ‘what do you think?’
‘It’s a beautiful spot. Look at those old trees at the back—they must be nice and shady in summer.’
They crossed the sidewalk and started across the lot, their feet making crunching sounds in the crisp-topped snow.
‘The back of the house faces south, and will have the sun all day,’ McAllister said.
‘Then the kitchen should be at the rear, shouldn’t it? With patio doors leading to the garden. And it’ll have to be a huge modern kitchen, because Tony plans to do a lot of entertaining.’ She heard the stiltedness of her voice and it made her want to grit her teeth. How she hated this charade she was playing. And how she hated the awkwardness between herself and McAllister. She couldn’t tell him she was no longer going to marry Tony but there was something she could do that might relax the unpleasant tension between them. She stopped walking.
Frowning, he stopped, too.
‘What’s up?’ His tone was terse.
She took in a deep breath and spoke in a rush, so he wouldn’t have time to stop her. ‘I broke my engagement to Tony just before I left for Vermont at Christmas. I didn’t lie to you. I was fancy free when I stayed at your place.’
The wind had brought a glisten to his eyes, had flipped his hair back from his brow. He stared at her, the moments ticking away silently between them as he assimilated what she’d said. She counted up to fifteen before he responded.
‘Then—’ his voice had a husky edge ‘—I apologize for calling you a liar.’
‘Apology accepted.’
He stared at her some more, and she was just about to ask what he was thinking, when he said, ‘I’m curious about something.’
‘What?’
‘You’re different from the kind of woman we’re all used to seeing on Tony Gould’s arm—’
‘And what kind would that be?’
‘Rich, sophisticated, brittle.’ He grinned. ‘Snobbish.’
‘Is there a compliment hidden in there somewhere?’
His eyes smiled at that. ‘And though rarely a week goes by that his name doesn’t appear on the society pages, I don’t recall ever seeing your name there...before your engagement, that is. You obviously didn’t move in the same circles, so where the hell did your paths cross?’
‘Tony owns the block across the street from your office. About a year ago, he was thinking of selling, and he brought a prospective buyer into my store to have a look around. That’s how we met.’
‘And it was love at first sight?’
‘For Tony, apparently.’
‘And for you?’
She shrugged. ‘For me, it took a little longer.’
‘And you’re getting married in September?’
September had been Tony’s choice, not hers, but she had given in...to please him. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Your nephew mentioned it.’
‘Jason?’
‘We talked a bit, after I dropped you off.’
‘He’s my godson.’
‘And he thinks the world of you.’
‘The feeling’s mutual.’
‘But he doesn’t care for your husband-to-be.’
‘Jason told you that?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘Am I right in thinking you don’t like Tony very much?’ she asked bluntly.
‘Surely all that’s important is that the woman he’s going to marry likes him’ was the unruffled reply.
‘Yes.’ She firmed her lips to contain the ironic smile that threatened to twist them. ‘That is all that’s important.’
‘Yet...you and he fought.’
‘As Shakespeare said, “The course of true love...”’
“‘...never did run smooth.” Still, it couldn’t have been more than a tiny ripple that ruffled the smoothness in your case.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘You made up so easily.’
‘How do you know we made up easily?’
‘When I looked into your parents’ living room before I left Rockfield, I saw Gould had already taken possession.’
‘Oh.’ That threw her...but not for long. ‘I thought it was a big enough ripple at the time.’
‘Over... what?’
She frowned, stared at him and felt like telling him to mind his own business...and would have been fully justified in doing so. But to her own surprise, she didn’t.
‘Tony and I had a difference of opinion about where we were going to spend Christmas. We’d promised my family we’d spend the holidays at Rockfield with them, but at Tony’s party, the Whitneys invited us to go to Aspen...and Tony accepted. I was upset that he’d broken his promise—so I gave him back his ring.’
‘But
he turned up at Rockfield after all, because...’
‘Because when he was packing for the ski trip, he realized that where he wanted to be was with me.’
McAllister didn’t respond for a couple of minutes, and then, in a tone that bewildered her by its harshness, he said, ‘So... what did Gould tell the Whitneys?’
‘The truth, of course...that he’d already made other plans, and he’d have to turn down their invitation. He said they understood.’
‘Your fiancé is quite something, isn’t he!’
There was no mistaking the sarcasm in his voice. It grated on Stephanie, despite her own changed feelings for Tony, and she said tautly, ‘Don’t you think you’re being hypocritical, taking this job, if you don’t like Tony?’
‘Business is business. And this is business, isn’t it?’
She flinched inside, his caustic tone a hurtful attack that put an end to the cease-fire she’d hoped was on the horizon.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘business is exactly what it is.’
Her body crackled with hostility as she resumed walking. ‘So let’s get on with it!’
He drove her back to the store an hour later, and as he watched her stalk regally over the sidewalk and open her door, he cursed under his breath.
How could he have done that? How could he have taken his disgust with Tony Gould out on her? But it had made him see red, when she’d told him Gould had followed her to Rockfield because he couldn’t bear to spend Christmas without her. Bull! The man knew damned well that the Whitneys’ place in Aspen had burned to the ground two days before Christmas. Paula Whitney herself had told McAllister that. When she’d called the M.A.G. to ask him if he’d design their new lodge, she’d happened to mention that Gould had actually gotten as far as the airport boarding lounge, on his way to Colorado, before she managed to track him down with the news that the skiing holiday was canceled.
What did a woman like Stephanie Redford see in that jerk! It was beyond him. But it wasn’t his place to set her right; if she couldn’t see it for herself, she’d just have to suffer the consequences. But he’d almost blurted out the truth. Dammit, why hadn’t he? Because she would have hated him, that was why. Didn’t people always hate the messenger who brought bad news?
