Grant looked anything but daunted by her tone of voice. If anything, there was amusement in his eyes, and that only infuriated her further.
She stalked off towards the lounge and sat down on one of the chairs, her lips pursed as he strolled into the room without any apparent haste.
‘What’s going on?’ she burst out furiously. ‘How could you let Mr Ishikomo and his wife think that we...that we...’ Her words ended in spluttered incoherence.
‘You’re in quite a state,’ he said lazily, standing up. ‘Would you care for a drink? It might soothe your nerves.’
He walked across to the bar and poured himself a glass of brandy, taking his time, standing by the bar and looking at her over the rim of his glass as he took a mouthful of the liquid.
‘I am not in a state!’ Roberta said in a high voice. ‘And I do not want a drink. What I want is an explanation. Why didn’t you tell Mr Ishikomo that he was on the wrong track? Why didn’t you tell him that there’s nothing between us?’
‘There is, though, isn’t there?’ Grant returned silkily. ‘Some very good sex, for one thing.’
‘We’ve been through that,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve told you that it was a mistake. In fact,’ she lied, ‘I’d completely forgotten about it.’
Grant looked at her disbelievingly, and Roberta felt the blood rush to her head. The arrogance of the man, the conceit! He must be damned certain of his sexual charisma to stand there and tell her that he had made any kind of lasting impression on her. The fact that he had made her even angrier.
‘This is all beside the point!’ she shouted. ‘You still haven’t answered my question!’
He prowled around the room for a moment and Roberta followed him with her eyes, angry at his behaviour and at the fact that even now, at the very height of her rage, his body was still sending out messages that her own found it impossible to ignore.
He had shed his dinner-jacket in the hall, and his crisp white shirt moulded the broad width of his shoulders, reminding her with sickening clarity of that hard, bronzed torso that had sent her senses swimming.
She tore her gaze away from him and reminded him coldly that she was still waiting for his answer.
Finally he sat down on the chair opposite hers, stretching out his long legs on the coffee-table in front of him.
‘It was convenient,’ he said succinctly, and she stared at him in complete bewilderment.
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Mr Ishikomo, as I said, is unused to our western customs— ‘
‘Your western customs,’ she corrected, knowing exactly to what he was referring.
He shrugged as if the distinction didn’t really matter, and swallowed some more of his drink. ‘Whatever. The fact is that he incorrectly assumed that we were slightly more involved than we are.’
‘Slightly more involved? Isn’t that a bit of an understatement?’
‘So it is,’ Grant agreed. ‘I must be picking that up from you.’
‘You could have put him straight,’ Roberta informed him, more in control of herself now and determined not to give in to another explosive burst of anger. ‘You could have told him the truth.’
‘That we made love?’
‘No!’ she snapped. ‘All I’m saying is that you didn’t have to encourage him in his bizarre ideas about us.’
‘I told you, it was convenient. There are still a few more signatures needed on that deal.’
‘I see,’ Roberta said tightly. ‘You didn’t want him to renege on it because he found your behaviour offensive to his principles.’
‘Something like that.’
‘That’s despicable. And what about Emily? How are you going to explain all this to her?’
Grant stared at her blankly, as though he didn’t foresee any problems there at all. ‘She’ll understand,’ he said at last. ‘She’s a big girl now.’
Roberta sighed impatiently. ‘I don’t appreciate being used,’ she said with considerable restraint. ‘What you did was unnecessary. I’m sure Mr Ishikomo would have signed whatever he needed to sign without your committing me to some stupid, phoney relationship. Besides, what about your marriage plans to Vanessa?’ she threw in as an afterthought. ‘I thought you were slotting her in the role of surrogate mother for Emily?’
‘That was hypothetical,’ Grant said, averting his eyes. ‘She wouldn’t fit the bill at all, as a matter of fact.’ A dull red flush darkened his cheeks, and Roberta stared at him with dawning comprehension.
‘I was convenient in more than one way, wasn’t I?’ she asked. ‘You wanted an excuse for getting Vanessa off your back, and what better than to inform her that you and I were involved in a relationship?’
He didn’t deny it, and she could have thrown something at him.
‘Well, I’m not in the market for exploitation!’ She stood up, shaking with anger, but before she could leave the room he had crossed the space between them, his dark eyebrows meeting in a frown.
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, and when she turned away he forced her back to look at him, holding her chin in between his fingers so that she had no option but to meet his eyes.
‘I didn’t think that you would react so violently. I have to admit that I acted without thinking.’ It was as much of an apology as she was ever likely to get out of him, but it wasn’t enough.
That’s the problem with you, she thought, you just don’t think. He had made love to her at the cabin, initially because she brought back to him memories of the woman he had loved, and then to satisfy his passing curiosity. He would quite happily have a two-week relationship with her, if only to meet what he considered the challenge of making her abandon her high-sounding principles.
He didn’t care about her. She was a world apart from his life, as foreign to him as if she lived on another planet instead of in another country.
It didn’t cross his mind that he had the power to hurt her. It was the first time she had admitted as much without sugar-coating it in a jumble of reasons why that couldn’t possibly happen. The raw truth of it was, she now realised, that, in spite of everything, she had allowed herself to be put in a situation from which she could emerge a catastrophic loser.
She felt the tears of self-pity stinging her eyelids and she blinked rapidly. This was so different, wasn’t it? Nothing like Brian. Because she hadn’t loved Brian, had she? Infatuation for a while, yes. But never love. She knew now, because this was love. This irrational, intense feeling she had for Grant Adams was love. She was hopelessly, stupidly in love with him.
‘I thought you would see it as a harmless and temporary bit of subterfuge.’
‘I hate you, Grant Adams.’
A frown of displeasure crossed his handsome face.
‘You’re self-centred and arrogant, and you have no idea how to treat people!’ There was a lot more she could say on the subject, but the words refused to come out. They remained locked inside her head.
‘You’re over-reacting,’ he muttered.
‘I am not over-reacting. I don’t suppose anyone has ever told you this before, but you don’t think twice about taking advantage of women, do you? You go through life using people to suit your own ends. You men are all the bloody same!’
He was wearing an unreadable expression when he looked at her. ‘That’s a bit of a generalisation, isn’t it?’ he murmured softly, his green eyes piercing into hers intently, and she burst out in a rush,
‘Is it? Is it really? Not from what I can see! You wanted to know about Brian. Well, I’ll tell you, he used me.’ There was self-disgust and bitterness in her voice. ‘He made wild promises of love; he would have promised the moon if it had been within his grasp, but of course it was all a ploy. He wanted something from me all right, but it wasn’t love and friendship.’
‘Carry on,’ Grant said urgently.
‘So that you can have a good laugh at my expense?’ Roberta jeered, her jaw aching from the effort of withholding her tears.
‘That’s one sin I’m not guilty of,’ he said roughly, forcing her to look at him when all she wanted to do was to look away.
Now that she had started, she had a burning, compulsive desire to get it all off her chest. Confession cleansed, and there was no one she had spoken to before about Brian. When her friends in London had asked, she had assumed a smiling, rueful demeanour and shrugged her shoulders philosophically.
‘He... My mother had recently died, you see. We were very close, just the opposite of you and Emily.’ She took a deep breath and ventured a smile. ‘I was a bit of an emotional wreck at the time, and he came along. Compliments, flowers and good wine. The sort of stuff that bowls girls over, but I had always thought that I would never be caught by that trap. But I was. He was good-looking, and I guess he picked me up when I was down and I clung to him, totally blind to what was really going on. Pathetic, isn’t it?’
Grant didn’t answer, and she wondered what he was thinking. If he was laughing at her, then he certainly didn’t show it.
‘I had been left some money by Mum. Not a massive amount, but enough to keep me going for quite a while if I invested it properly.’ Her voice was calm now, not hysterical at all. ‘He knew that from the very start. It was no secret. Who knows, maybe he was genuinely attracted to me to begin with, before he decided that I was better suited as a meal-ticket than a prospective wife.’
Grant knew what was coming. She could see it on his face.
‘Need I carry on?’ she asked him unsteadily. ‘He persuaded me out of my money and I stupidly let him. So, you see, I’m not just a prim school-ma’am type, I’m a foolish prim school-ma’am type.’
Grant clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘My description of you was out of line. And untrue, anyway.’
She couldn’t bear his sympathy. Sympathy always rubbed shoulders with pity, and pity was something she could do without.
She fidgeted to escape his grip and his fingers tightened on her arms.
‘I’m not like him,’ he said tightly. ‘Look at me! Do you see me as being cast in the same mould?’
Roberta looked at him, and her heart gave a little uncomfortable leap. There was a depth and intelligence to him, a sense of humour, that had all been absent from Brian, but there was no way that she was going to admit as much. There was no way that she was going to let him know how vulnerable she was to him.
He was incapable of love, just like Brian had been. The unbidden thought surged through her and she felt a quiver of panic.
Wasn’t that the crux of it? She wanted his love, however fiercely she had tried to deny it to herself. Not safety, control over her life. She could do without those. What she needed was his love, and that was the one thing he could never give her, or anyone else. He was locked in his past and she, for one, did not possess the key to release him.
She jerked out of his grip and took a shaky step backwards.
‘I’m going up to bed now,’ she muttered, more sharply than she had intended.
‘Stay down here. Talk to me,’ he said harshly, and she shook her head.
‘What else is there to talk about? I just don’t like being used. If I over-reacted, as you put it, then I’m sorry, but I don’t approve of men who exploit women and, as you can see, I speak from experience.’
She turned away abruptly and walked towards the door, half expecting him to try and stop her, but he didn’t. He remained where he was, and as soon as she was out of the room Roberta ran all the way up to her bedroom and locked the door.
All sorts of thoughts were running through her head, all sorts of agonising questions, and she didn’t want to address any of them. It was all pointless, anyway.
Time would answer them; time would cure this painful, confused ache in her heart.
CHAPTER NINE
IN THAT pleasant limbo halfway between asleep and awake Roberta lay in bed, knowing vaguely that there was a reason why she did not want to get up.
As soon as she opened her eyes, it all came rushing back like a dreadful nightmare. Mr Ishikomo, his assumptions, Grant’s arrogant exploitation of the situation because it suited him. Oh, God. Emily. She closed her eyes and wondered if she could somehow contrive to spend the remainder of her stay in Toronto in bed, preferably with laryngitis, because the consequences of what had happened the night before were too awful to think about.
Emily did not give her the option. She had hardly sat down in the lounge to begin reading the newspaper when she rushed in, a tornado of excitement, brimming over with all the expected questions, and Roberta smiled weakly, waiting until Emily had finished, then she said hopefully, ‘I have the most dreadful headache.’
Emily frowned petulantly. ‘How can you have a headache? All of this is so exciting! I never suspected a thing,’ she carried on admiringly. ‘Some dark horse, you are.’
Roberta eyed her warily, wondering whether she could try and explain everything, but one look at her excited face squashed all her good intentions.
Besides, why should she do the explaining? Grant would have to do that. He had got them both into this mess and, as far as she was concerned, he could damned well get them out of it.
But that didn’t help. As she and Emily browsed in Kensington Market, she found that she couldn’t distance herself from what had happened. She couldn’t just shove it to the back of her mind, ignore Emily’s questions, and philosophically wait for Grant to extricate them from the catastrophe.
She smiled, dodged, evaded and ended up back at the house later on with the screaming headache that she had feebly complained about earlier in the morning.
It’s not my problem, she kept telling herself. I’m only a visitor here, I’ll be off and out of all this soon. But she found it impossible to look at Emily and pretend that it would all be forgotten as soon as she left Toronto.
By the time Emily retired upstairs for her bath, Roberta felt as though she had been subjected to an ordeal about as gruelling as the Chinese water torture.
She sat down on one of the sofas in the lounge and closed her eyes, wishing that she could fall asleep and wake up to discover that it had all been a bad dream.
In fact, she was very nearly falling asleep through sheer mental exhaustion when she heard the doorbell, and she wearily got to her feet, in no particular haste to find out who was at the door.
She had a sneaking suspicion that whoever it was would be bringing bad news. Wasn’t that just typical of life? It was never content to throw just one obstacle in front of you; it always threw a series of them, until the light at the end of the tunnel became so obscure that you just wanted to give up halfway through and admit defeat.
She opened the door, and sighed when she saw who was there. Vanessa. Long, blonde, wrapped in a huge beige cashmere coat, and wearing an expression that was distinctly unpleasant.
Roberta padded back to the lounge, with Vanessa following in her wake, and sat down, waiting to see what line of questioning was about to come, because one thing was for certain: the other woman had not visited to offer her congratulations and enjoy a jovial cup of tea.
Roberta tucked her legs under her, waiting for Vanessa to speak, and thought, When you get back from work, Grant Adams, I’m going to kill you.
‘So you won.’ The blonde came to the point without procrastinating. She had removed her coat, and she sat gracefully on the chair, her legs crossed. The high, childlike voice was acid, and Roberta said evasively,
‘I didn’t think it had been a battle.’ So Grant had told her, she thought.
Vanessa looked at her expressionlessly. ‘I would never have thought that you would be the one he would decide to settle down with. He had his choice of women. Why you?’
Roberta felt her hackles rise and she thought, Wonderful, what a line in compliments! But she had no intention of becoming embroiled in a fruitless argument over a fictitious situation. She smiled politely and looked blank, as though she couldn’t quite follow what Vanessa was getting at, and didn’t much care anyway.
‘I know I should be a graceful loser,’ Vanessa said, twirling her fingers in her lap and looking rather piteous, ‘but I fought hard for him.’
‘Maybe you fought a bit too hard,’ Roberta said sympathetically, and the other woman nodded.
‘Maybe I did. Maybe if I had held out a bit more, played hard to get a bit longer, he wouldn’t have lost interest.’
Maybe, Roberta wanted to tell her, you should look at it along the lines of having had a narrow escape, but she bit back the words. Vanessa’s disappointment was another by-product of Grant’s arrogance, and he could get himself out of it as well.
‘I don’t think I could have coped with Emily, anyway,’ Vanessa was saying. ‘She’s terribly difficult and we rub each other up the wrong way.’ She paused, and Roberta knew that she was considering her position of jilted lover, working out how she could get out of it with some semblance of pride. ‘The fact is, it would probably never have worked between Grant and me. I would have been fighting a battle with that child all the time.’
‘Very tiring,’ Roberta murmured vaguely.
Vanessa nodded vehemently and began to look slightly less piteous. ‘Very. Come to think of it, if he hadn’t called the whole thing off, I probably would have. I mean, he’s sexy as hell and rich with it, but that’s not all there is to life, is it?’
‘Definitely not,’ Roberta agreed.
‘I can see you understand what I’m saying,’ Vanessa informed her, confident now. ‘Well, you can tell Grant Adams from me that I’m well shot of him! Good riddance.’ She stood up and Roberta followed suit, following her to the front door.
‘I’ll tell him,’ she promised, and she would, too, along with lots of other things which would be of a slightly more unpleasant nature.
Vanessa slipped on her coat and said warmly, ‘I’m glad we had this little chat. I must admit that I was feeling a little angry when I first showed up here, but I’m not now. And I’ll tell you something else,’ she added, glancing up the stairs to make sure that Emily was nowhere around. ‘It might seem a bed of roses to you now, but watch out. Whatever he’s told you, he’s incapable of love.’
Too Scared to Love Page 13
