‘You’re married?’ Jackie concluded.
He shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
‘But considering it?’ she added.
He made a balancing motion with his right hand, as if marriage might or might not be on the agenda.
‘Who is she, then?’ asked Mel.
The same question was burning its way through Tory’s brain. Not once had he hinted there was someone else in the background, someone he was serious about.
He glanced towards her once more and, catching the daggers look she was sending, answered circumspectly, ‘I can’t really say at the moment.’
Tory understood. He meant he didn’t dare say. It made her even angrier. Did he imagine she had so little dignity she’d fight over him?
Jackie and the others remained intrigued. ‘Is she married?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ he replied.
‘Someone famous?’
‘A model?’
‘On TV?’
The suggestions came thick and fast and he scotched them with a brief laugh. ‘No, nothing like that. She’s just a very private person who wouldn’t appreciate me telling the world about her. Especially when I haven’t worked up courage yet to tell her how I feel.’
This news was greeted with a collective sigh as the rest obviously viewed him as that increasingly rare type of man—a romantic.
Tory was left biting her tongue in preference to making a scene by denouncing him as the faithless cheat she now knew he was.
When someone asked him, ‘What’s she like, then?’ Tory couldn’t sit through any more. Scraping back her chair, she muttered to Mel about being tired and, before she could hear anything about Lucas’s other girl, she walked away.
She took refuge in her dormitory and was lying on her bunk, trying and failing to concentrate on a novel, when Mel appeared.
‘You okay?’ Mel asked.
‘Fine,’ she answered shortly.
‘I just wondered—’ Mel hesitated before taking the plunge ‘—you seemed a little upset when Luc was talking about his girl.’
‘Upset?’ echoed Tory as if she’d never felt such an emotion in her life. ‘Why should I be upset?’
‘No reason,’ Mel pacified, ‘except that after last night—’
‘Nothing happened last night!’ denied Tory, as much to herself as Mel. ‘You may have seen me coming out of his room—’
‘No may about it.’
‘But it was not what you think.’
‘No?’ Mel raised a sceptical brow.
‘No!’ denied Tory in resounding tones.
‘So you won’t mind hearing about his other girl, then?’ Mel challenged.
Tory wondered why Mel was determined to twist the knife.
‘I couldn’t care less,’ she claimed.
It wasn’t true, of course. Half of her wanted to hear, the other half wanted to scream.
Mel continued determinedly, ‘Apparently she’s a bit younger than him. Quiet but strong-willed and fairly bright. Sporty. Not very glamorous. More your girl-next-door type. Lovely, though, with a really good complexion and large, soulful eyes.’
The description didn’t strike any chords with Tory but why should it? He was hardly going to go out of his way to introduce one girlfriend to another.
Not that she was a girlfriend. From recollection he’d never even asked her out—asking her to sleep with him wasn’t the same.
‘Sound like anyone you know?’ added Mel at her silence.
‘Why should it?’ Tory echoed aloud. ‘I mean… I’ve just met the man.’
Mel looked at her in wide-eyed disbelief.
Tory suddenly wondered if she and Luc had been sussed.
But, no, Mel just went on to shake her head and mutter, ‘A case of self-induced blindness, if you want my opinion.’
Tory gave her a quizzical look, as Mel grabbed a towel and wash bag to beat the rush to the shower room.
Later, when she should have been asleep, Tory dwelled over the attributes of Lucas’s lady love, as relayed via Mel, and became increasingly convinced that he’d been making it all up as he’d gone along. She remembered the half-smile he’d been wearing when he’d begun his ‘true confessions’. She knew that smile, had seen it before. It was the smile that said life was a joke.
And that, she suspected, was what he’d been playing on the others—spinning out a yarn about a fictitious girlfriend to keep them at a distance.
Or could it be the opposite? Tory recalled the women’s faces at his tale of romantic love, their wistful expressions at this rare breed of man who was not only handsome and sexy, but true and faithful in character. Was Lucas astute enough to realise just how desirable that made him seem? Even as he’d claimed to be unavailable, had he been casting a net to see if he could land another gullible idiot like herself?
Because that was what she was. She could pretend to be experienced, even convince herself that she knew the score, but leave her alone with Lucas for a minute and she was as easy to take in as a schoolgirl.
She had to face it. A few tender looks from him, a passionate kiss or two, and her heart was racing as if it were true love, when it really was just sex. She only realised afterwards, but by then it was too late.
Best thing was to keep away from him altogether and she managed it at breakfast the next morning which was then followed by a briefing on the day’s main event, a ten-mile-round hike and treasure hunt for real. But he was waiting his moment, catching her as she went down to collect some supplies from the kitchen.
‘Look, Tory—’ he brought her to a halt ‘—about the other night…’
Tory didn’t want to listen. ‘Someone’s coming,’ she hissed at him, simply to get free.
They heard footfalls, making her lie the truth, but he didn’t react as she’d hoped. Instead he pulled her inside the nearest room, an empty office.
Tory wrested her arm away, complaining, ‘You’re going to blow my cover.’
‘I don’t care,’ he dismissed. ‘Sorting out things between us is more important.’
‘Well, I care,’ she retorted angrily, ‘and I’m the one about to go on a ten-mile hike with these people. If anything happens, I want to be able to trust them.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean—if anything happens?’
Tory wasn’t exactly sure. She just had a bad feeling about this particular exercise.
‘Nothing,’ she discounted at length. ‘Look, I have to go. The minibus will be waiting to take us to the start point.’
She reached for the door handle and he put a hand on her arm once more. ‘Meet me when you get back, then?’
‘There won’t be time,’ she pointed out. ‘After the debriefing, we have to drive back to London.’
‘I could take you,’ he offered.
Tory shook her head. ‘I have to go on the minibus to get feedback.’
She was still taking this project seriously even if he clearly wasn’t.
‘Okay,’ he conceded, ‘so I’ll follow you down and meet you off the bus.’
He was obviously determined and Tory was tired of arguing. She settled for saying, ‘Won’t she mind?’
‘She?’
‘The girl you were telling Mel and the others about.’
His blank look changed to a surprised, then amused one. ‘Oh, that girl.’
For a man caught out, he showed no signs of guilt.
‘Unless of course you made her up,’ Tory suggested tartly.
He raised a quizzical brow. ‘Why should I have done that?’
‘Who knows?’ She no longer did.
‘Well, no, she’s real enough,’ he confessed, grinning slightly, ‘but there’s no reason to be jealous—’
‘Jealous?’ Tory cut across him, pride surfacing. ‘Me? You think I’m jealous?’
‘I didn’t actually say that.’ He raised his hands in a pacifying gesture.
But Tory didn’t wish to be pacified. Much safer to be angry, disdainful.
>
‘Why should I be jealous?’ she challenged and, before he might actually answer, ran on rashly, ‘I have Alex, remember?’
The words were out before she realised quite what she was saying.
Mr Laid-back suddenly turned into Mr Uptight, grating, ‘Alex?’
‘Yes.’ It was too late to backtrack even if she wanted to.
His eyes narrowed to slits. ‘So, tell me, do you happen to know where Alex is this weekend?’
Tory frowned at the question. She did know the answer. Alex was in Edinburgh, trying to patch things up with his wife. But why had Lucas asked such a thing?
Unless he knew, too.
‘Do you?’ she countered.
She watched his face, the changing expressions, and guessed he did. She waited for him to throw it in her face—that her live-in lover was with someone else.
He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, shaking his head.
Tory understood. On the brink of exposing Alex, he had decided against it. But why?
Perhaps it suited him—that she maintain some kind of relationship with Alex. It would justify him playing the field in turn.
‘Forget it.’ He finally opened the door, allowing her to leave.
Tory escaped but with a heavy heart. Why had she mentioned Alex? It made all her other earlier denials seem so many lies.
Pride, she supposed. She hadn’t wanted him to think her jealous. Forget that she was—achingly, gnawingly, spectacularly—at the idea of him with some other girl.
She felt like a schoolgirl again, in love for the first time. Only she never had been. Not with Charlie or anybody else. She finally understood that. Because love wasn’t the warm, pleasant feeling she’d imagined it was.
She caught the drift of her thoughts and brought herself up sharply. She had to stop this. What she felt for Lucas wasn’t love either. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let it be. It was desire, pure and simple, or maybe more accurately lust, less pure but just as simple.
So why didn’t she let it burn itself out? Good question. Why didn’t she just give way to sexual longing and climb into bed with Lucas the very next opportunity and stay there until the fire was out?
She knew the answer. She was scared, that was why. But she resisted analysing her fear.
She didn’t get a chance, anyway, as she collected the supplies and headed for the bus to find her team already boarded and waiting.
Her team? Well, not quite hers. Or even a team. Five of them. Should have been six but it seemed Jessica Parnell, the senior editor from Vitalis, had woken up that morning and decided life was too short to scramble over hillsides to hold on to a job she had loathed for at least the last two years. Having had this revealing thunderbolt, she had shared it in no uncertain terms with Tom Mackintosh before calling a minicab to take her to the nearest railway station.
Mel shared it second-hand as they were driven to their drop-off point.
Amanda almost purred with satisfaction. Her dismissal of, ‘Bloody prima donna,’ however, was too much for Carl, their advertising sales director.
Normally an anything-for-a-quiet-life type, he actually commented aloud, ‘Takes one to know one.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ demanded Amanda with an imperious look.
For once Carl wasn’t quelled. ‘You heard.’
She’d heard but evidently she didn’t believe it. Amanda really wasn’t used to opposition. It left her fuming with silent indignation.
To Tory, it was probably the most interesting aspect of the weekend. At the office Amanda ruled Toi with an iron fist in an iron glove and had expected to do so at the centre, too. But gradually, as various tasks challenged people’s perceptions of themselves—or possibly fatigue and irritability set in—fewer and fewer of Toi’s staff were prepared to dance to Amanda’s discordant tune. Tory was almost sorry she couldn’t return to the office to see if this defiance would continue.
Amanda now complained loudly to Lucy, the somewhat sheepish make-up editor from Vitalis, going as far as suggesting that some people were in for a rude awakening on Monday morning, while Carl started to sing loudly and Mel grinned, seemingly enjoying the internecine strife.
So, no, they were not a team, which increased Tory’s niggling worry as they were dumped in the middle of nowhere with basic supplies, a compass, one map and a series of clues as to what landmarks they had to capture with the digital camera they were issued.
They had practised map-reading, of course, and each team had a so-called expert. Carl was theirs and did seem to know what he was doing, although from their first step in what was hopefully the right direction Amanda tried to undermine him.
Despite this, they managed to follow the right track, finding the ‘bridge over troubled water’, a tiny footbridge over a fast hill stream, ‘Stonehenge’ or a mini version of stone slabs and columns, and ‘the last resting place’ which turned out to be a couple of wooden crosses in what had been the back garden of an old shepherd’s hut on a hill. The names Rover and Robbie could faintly be seen, etched out of the wood. Dogs, they assumed.
They rested there for lunch: beans and sausage cooked over a Primus stove. Amanda, needless to say, slated such food but she still ate her share.
They were well over halfway and beginning to feel good about themselves when the rain started. At first it wasn’t heavy and they walked on, quickening their pace slightly, but then it began to come straight down, almost in sheets. On open moorland, with nowhere to shelter, they pressed on. No bitching or complaining now. Breath was saved to battle the elements.
Even Amanda kept going, but she was clearly suffering, with chafing boots and tired legs, and when they were walking along the edge of a slight incline she tripped and rolled. She didn’t have far to fall. Tory scrambled down after her in seconds. But Amanda’s groans sounded genuine enough and she shrieked as Tory touched her leg, trying to find the source of her injuries.
It seemed she’d smashed her knee against rock as she’d tumbled. How serious, it was hard to tell. No one wanted to peel off clothing in this downpour. But their first attempt to support Amanda to her feet and walk warned them it wasn’t a simple sprain.
It was Tory who said, ‘We’ll have to use the CB to call in.’
Carl was reluctant. ‘We’ll lose if we do that.’
Tory stared at him in disbelief. ‘For God’s sake, Carl. The game is over. She’s really hurt!’ she almost shouted the words at him.
He looked resentful but took out the CB handset from his bag. No amount of fiddling with bands and aerials, however, produced anything more than static. Either it was malfunctioning or the storm had broken up the signal.
Various suggestions followed and were rejected. They could sit and wait for rescue but Carl admitted he’d deviated from their suggested route, opting for a shorter but steeper path, and it could be hours until they were located. Hostile glares were sent in Carl’s direction but no one commented aloud. They still had to rely on him to get them back.
Another attempt was made to shoulder Amanda’s weight between Carl and Tory. With no alternative, Amanda gritted her teeth and tried to bear it, but the occasional sob still escaped from her. It was hard not to jar her leg and their progress was painfully slow.
Tory wasn’t sure they should even be moving Amanda and was relieved when they finally came upon potential shelter. ‘Over there in the rock.’
It was more an indentation than a cave, with barely space for two, but they carefully lowered Amanda to the ground while they took stock. It was decided that someone should stay with Amanda while the rest walked back to the centre.
Before anyone volunteered, Amanda spoke up. ‘Victoria…I’d like Victoria to stay.’
Tory was taken aback. She’d imagined Amanda would prefer just about anyone else.
She glanced down at Amanda and was awarded an almost pleading look.
‘Well?’ Carl prompted her for a decision.
‘Fine,’ conceded Tory with good grace and jok
ed weakly, ‘as long as we get the rest of the chocolate.’
‘You deserve it.’ Mel gave her a commiserating smile and dug out a foil space blanket and torch to hand over before the rest of the party moved on.
Tory tried to make Amanda more comfortable, propping her against a makeshift pillow of their rucksacks before draping the blanket over her. They were already very wet and the wind whipped some of the rain into their shelter, but Tory did her best to shield Amanda from it.
They didn’t talk much at first but Tory finally gave way to curiosity. ‘Why did you want me to stay? I mean, we haven’t exactly hit it off.’
Amanda pulled a face, conceding the point, then said by way of explanation, ‘That Mel character loathes me and, as for Lucy, she’s such a wimp.’
‘So I’m it by default,’ Tory concluded dryly.
‘Perhaps,’ admitted Amanda in a similar tone.
Well, it was honest. Tory had to give her that. She was also quite surprised by how well Amanda was behaving in the circumstances. She was clearly in pain yet now she had something real to complain about she was almost stoical.
‘How long do you think before we’re rescued?’ was all she asked.
‘Hard to say.’ Tory didn’t want to hold out any false promises.
‘They may struggle to find us,’ added Amanda.
That possibility had occurred to Tory but it seemed important to stay upbeat. ‘I think Carl pretty much knows our location on the map.’
Amanda nodded, then commented, ‘God, Jessica will be laughing her socks off when she hears about this.’
‘Jessica?’
‘Jessica Parnell—Vitalis’s senior editor. She was right. What the hell are we doing, playing girl scouts at our age?’
‘You’re not that old,’ Tory protested automatically.
Of course she should have known the older woman would come back with, ‘How old do you imagine I am?’
Thirty-eight was Tory’s guess so she took off five years and said, ‘Thirty-three.’
‘I wish,’ responded Amanda, obviously pleased. But not pleased enough to reveal her real age. Instead she said, ‘I’ve been in the business more than twenty years. It really is true about time, you know, it flies.’
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