Tiger's Eye

by Madeleine Ker

‘Please.’ Leila disengaged her fingers from his. ‘You don’t have to justify anything you do. It’s hardly my business.’

  He ignored her interpolation. ‘As for my making a habit of seducing my employees, that’s nonsense. I never do It.’

  ‘You did it with the last two temps who worked for you,’ she cut in coldly. ‘Don’t they count? Or do you have to be on the permanent payroll to escape the Blaize Oliver seduction routine?’

  ‘Who gave you that little bit of poison?’ he asked sharply. ‘Ah. Don’t bother to tell me. My dear little daughter Tracey.’

  ‘Yes. Your own daughter.’ Her nerves were quivering at the confrontation. Are you going to tell me that she’s a liar, as well as hard and self-sufficient?’

  ‘No, I’m not going to tell you that. But I will tell you that Tracey understands far too little about the world for her intellect.’

  ‘I have the same problem myself,’ Leila said ironically. ‘I’m tired, Mr. Oliver. I’m not paid to be a child-minder, but I don’t mind helping out with a sick little boy. When it comes to pandering to the little boy’s father, however, my services end!’

  His eyes held hers for a few seconds, anger glittering in them. It was as though the shuddering passion they’d shared such a short time before had never happened at all.

  He shrugged dismissively. ‘Go on, then,’ he said drily. ‘Take your carefully measured little personality to bed. I’m not stopping you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she told him with elaborate politeness, and went through the silent house, up the stairs to her room. She was shaky and weak. Being with him was more gruelling than running a marathon. One moment they shared the fiery intimacy of lovers, and the next they were snarling at each other like cat and dog …

  She had to pass Terry’s room on her way. She hesitated, then turned back to open his door silently. By the soft night-light she could see that the boy was sleeping peacefully. The camomile had done him good. She slipped into the darkened room to pull the covers up around his neck, and bent to kiss his forehead lightly.

  A tiny noise behind her made her straighten quickly and turn round. There was a shadowy figure curled up in the armchair in a corner of the room. It was Tracey.

  Leila could see her bare toes poking out from beneath the quilt she’d wrapped round herself. She’d obviously decided to watch over her little brother tonight.

  For a moment she thought the girl was asleep, but then she saw the flicker of light on her eyes. Did she know that Leila and her father had been alone downstairs together? Had she heard the quarrel, spied on those flaring moments of passion?

  But Tracey made no acknowledgement of her presence, and Leila slipped out, closing the door behind herself.

  It was nearly one o’clock in the morning.

  She showered in her room, washing the stickiness from her skin, then slid between the cool sheets of her bed.

  She was thinking with an ache of the effect Blaize had on her.

  He was so strong, so damnably attractive, that there was no way she could be indifferent to him. He was able to move her so deeply! He had a kind of pagan magic in him, a magic that made her his slave each time he touched her.

  Her stomach was still painful with nerves and emotion.

  Why was it that every meeting with him left her shaking and disturbed, unable to be at peace with herself for the unhappiness and confusion inside?

  Because you’re stupid, she told herself angrily. You let him get under your skin. You give way to his seduction.

  You make it easy for him to upset you, by telling him every secret you’ve got! You give him power over you, and what does he give you in return? Nothing. Just the same ruthless proposition he makes to every pretty woman who takes his fancy. It’s just sex. It’s just chemistry.

  You know how potent hormones are, they can make you crazy, or make you feel on top of the world.

  Every woman knows that.

  She opened her eyes in the darkness, and stared at the square of dim light that was her window, deliberately turning her thoughts away from Blaize to that earlier, hateful memory.

  It had been years since she’d thought of Mr. Martin.

  Why did Blaize find it so easy to put his finger on all the wounds in her psyche?

  He’d been middle-aged and heavily built, the regional manager of a transport firm where she’d got her first job. The office had been arranged so that she and Mr. Martin were cut off from the rest of the business, and it had been simplicity itself for a man like that to take advantage of the shy, naive girl she’d been then.

  He’d known that she’d grown up in care, and had no family to back her up.

  Her first job. She’d been so frightened of losing it, so frightened of letting down all the people who were looking to her to make a success of her life. She hadn’t had the faintest idea how to defend herself from exploitation.

  It had started with the odd pinch, with sly allusions that she hadn’t understood at first. Then he’d begun boasting to her of his sexual exploits with other women.

  Telling her blue jokes.

  When he’d started realising that she was too nervous of him to complain to his superiors, and too inexperienced to know how to stop him otherwise, the long, nightmare slide had begun. For a long summer and autumn he’d made her life a misery, touching her every time he got the chance, trying to force kisses on her, pressing his body up against her when he passed her desk, which was twenty times a day.

  The jokes had got cruder, the approaches more brutal.

  Her life had reached a low point that she’d never known in all the years of loneliness. She’d fought him, all alone, until he’d made what he really wanted quite plain.

  ‘I’ll get you the sack if you don’t do it. And I’ll make sure you never get another job in this town.’

  He’d actually written out her dismissal notice, and had gloatingly shown it to her.

  She’d realised then that she faced a crossroads. If she gave in to him, her life would go one way. If she didn’t, it would go another. She’d had to make a decision.

  She’d known that, if she let him sack her, she’d find it almost impossible to get another job in Nottingham.

  So she’d walked out of the firm that afternoon, and had never gone back.

  ‘But why, Leila?’ the social worker had asked angrily. ‘Don’t you know how hard it is to get a good job like that in these times?’

  ‘I’ll get another,’ she’d answered flatly.

  It had taken months―months in which she’d had time to reflect, to realise that she’d been a fool to give in to Mr. Martin’s very first smutty joke.

  That she must never give in again, not if she wanted to keep her own self-respect.

  And after the winter, her next job. She’d come across Mr. Martins there, too, but this time they’d been a lot less purposeful, and she’d been a lot less innocent and she’d known how to stop them, right at the stage of the first blue joke, the first ‘accidental’ brush against her breasts.

  That was one of the reasons she’d eventually gone to Carol Clarewell, once she had the necessary skills and experience―to avoid ever having to face Mr. Martin or his like again. And she’d never had that kind of trouble again, not in the three years she’d been with Carol.

  In fact, she had stayed so wary of men that she was still a virgin. Blaize had, unwittingly, put his finger on the point.

  Oh, there had been men, plenty of them, who had wanted her. But she had never wanted any of them badly enough to go beyond a certain point.

  At twenty-four, it had started to worry her. Was Blaize right? Would she end up a cold and hopeless spinster one day?

  Her virginity was a precious thing to her, though. Not something she would bestow on any man, just for the sake of losing it. She wanted to give it to a man she loved, someone who would mean everything to her.

  Would he understand that? Would he guess that a large part of her coldness and desire to put him off was fear―the fear of a wom
an who had never known a man’s love?

  She had been deliberately cruel in comparing Mr. Martin to Blaize Oliver. She’d wanted to hurt him to stop him from doing what he was doing to her.

  Yet wasn’t Blaize, in his way, just as bad? There was an obvious difference, of course, in that Blaize didn’t need to put any pressure on his victims. That awesome sex appeal did the job for him. No doubt he was right, by his lights. Most women were only too eager to fall into bed with him. And no doubt there were very few of them naive enough to imagine that there was some kind of permanent commitment on his part.

  But the principle was the same. He was a man to whom women were a commodity, to be used and exploited as it suited him.

  ‘I don’t want a wife, Leila. I don’t want one, and I don’t need one. 1can do without that kind of restriction in my life.’

  The memory of his touch passed like fire across her skin.

  Why was it, she wondered as she slipped into sleep, that the most beautiful men were always the most ruthless?

  The next weekend was feverishly hectic. On Friday night, a party of eight friends of Blaize’s arrived from London to stay at the villa. The ensuing party lasted until the early hours. On Saturday morning, six more arrived, making fourteen in all.

  And Leila knew that on Saturday night another party was scheduled. ‘Nothing elaborate,’ Blaize had said airily. ‘Sixty or seventy guests, no more.’

  The big house seemed to be creaking at the seams.

  Extra staff had been drafted in from the nearby village to help out, creating even more of a crowd. Leila felt desperately sorry for little Terry. His rash was at last starting to fade, but he was still a sick little boy, and his rest was disturbed by the music, the noise, and the continual procession of friends coming to see how he was.

  Luckily, the weather was beautiful, which kept most people out of doors. Blaize had a bar and a stereo system moved out to the pool; so that the racket was more or less inaudible from the house. The guests who weren’t down at the beach, or being flown round the coast by Rick Watermeyer, or simply sitting talking to Blaize, all congregated at the beautiful, pillar-lined pool to splash, sunbathe and party. Sun-umbrellas had been set up. A barbecue seemed to be on the go all day long, and the atmosphere was one of continuous carnival.

  Most seemed to be young people, in the twenty-to-thirty age-bracket. Some appeared to have only a passing acquaintance with Blaize Oliver―he was the sort of man, she gathered, who was generous with his hospitality and his invitations-and were simply intent on having fun.

  There was no shortage of pretty girls, blissfully trying out new swimsuits in the Spanish sun, and bright young men chatting knowledgeably about ‘the market’, or the best place to buy a used Porsche.

  The older ones, the ones who came to see Terry in his bed, were obviously much better friends. She heard the name Vanessa mentioned in conversation, and gathered that these were people Blaize had known a long time, since before his divorce.

  Leila herself, though, had little chance to assess Blaize’s guests, or mingle with them; Saturday was also proving to be the day when Blaize’s business empire reported in to the big boss.

  Not that she was missed in any way. Katherine Henessey, resplendent in a silk kaftan, was proving a charming and very competent hostess, marshalling and co-ordinating the entertainments with an adeptness that bore out Blaize’s tribute to her social skills.

  So Leila worked in the attic with the machines most of the time. Holiday or no holiday, the amount of information that was coming in over the phone, on the fax machine, or down the telex, was quite bewildering.

  Given that Blaize had several departments in London organising and filtering the data that kept coming in, there was still too much to handle. Her part of it was relatively simple. She wasn’t expected to know everything that was going on.

  But she was realising that it would take months to train a proper personal assistant-someone who could decide. what was urgent and what was not, what was relevant for Blaize’s attention, and what could be shelved.

  She herself had little idea.

  Reluctant as she was to bother her employer at a time like this, some of the material that was coming in seemed to require his urgent attention, and when a Manchester director phoned in for the third time in two hours, sounding slightly hysterical, Leila decided that Blaize would have to be summoned.

  He was out at the pool, someone told her. She hurried across the lawn to locate him among the happy crowd.

  ‘Hel-lo.’ A good-looking man in his early thirties blocked her path. ‘I don’t think we’ve met.’ He smiled, giving her an appreciative once-over. ‘My name’s Jason Tennant. What’s yours?’

  ‘I’m not a guest,’ she told him, trying to locate Blaize round his shoulder. ‘I’m only Mr. Oliver’s secretary—’

  ‘The delectable Leila?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said in surprise. ‘I’m Leila Thomas. How did you know?’

  He smiled, showing good white teeth beneath a ashlOg moustache. ‘Only is not the word, my dear. Blaize has been singing your praises to us. Have some champagne.'

  ‘Actually, I’m in rather a hurry—’

  But he had already put the cool glass in her hands.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ he said firmly. ‘And you’re much too pretty to be working indoors on a glorious day like this. You can take five minutes off to talk to me, surely.’

  She smiled, despite herself. ‘I must speak to Mr. Oliver right now. It’s quite urgent.’

  ‘Does Mr. Oliver look as though he is in the mood for urgent business?’ Jason Tennant asked meaningfully.

  She followed his glance. Blaize, wearing cool, crisp white, was talking lazily to a very nubile brunette in a yellow bikini at the opposite side of the pool. There was rather a lot of the brunette spilling out of the bikini.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Leila said drily. ‘His sister?’

  Jason grinned. ‘I see you’ve had a few insights into Blaize’s character.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Katherine Henessey was evidently busy somewhere else right now. If the bikini-clad brunette wasn’t careful, she was going to find little Tracey Oliver putting rat poison in her champagne.

  Jason Tennant clinked his glass against hers. ‘Don’t let that go flat. It’s Spanish, but it’s not bad at all.’

  Leila took a sip of the cool champagne. As he’d said, it was delicious. And the tall, smiling man with the moustache had an easy charm that suddenly made the prospect of going back to work less than inviting.

  ‘Are you really the model of efficiency that Blaize makes you out to be?’ Jason enquired, looking down at her from his height of over six feet. ‘If you won’t be offended by my saying so, girls with your sort of looks don’t usually bother cultivating anything so practical as an orderly mind.’

  ‘That sounds very much like sexism to me,’ she warned him, amused.

  ‘It’s fact. Why should they? Men don’t want brains in a pretty girl. Most men, that is. I’m a lawyer, and I appreciate intelligence-I see enough stupidity every morning to last me the rest of the day.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Are you coming to the party tonight?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It depends on what Mr. Oliver wants.’

  She took a last sip, sighed regretfully, and gave him back the glass. ‘That was lovely, but I’m afraid I really do have to do my duty.’

  ‘Blaize won’t thank you,’ Jason warned, taking the glass. ‘But I’ll keep this chilled for you. I hope I’ll see you tonight.’

  She smiled her thanks at him; he was the first person here who’d made any attempt to be really nice to her.

  Then she walked round the pool, side-stepping basking forms, and approached Blaize and his playmate.

  Blaize’s expression didn’t suggest that he was very pleased to have his conversation interrupted.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he grunted, looking at her from under dark brows. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The
re are one or two things I think you might want to attend to,’ she told him. ‘There have been some priority telexes from America and the Far East. And Mr. Lewis from Manchester has been on the line three times already, and he says it’s most urgent. I can’t keep putting him off.’

  Blaize gave her a grim look, and rose wearily. ‘I’ll be back,’ he promised the brunette in that special, husky purr that Leila knew so well.

  ‘I’m sure this won’t take ten minutes,’ Leila said as they walked back to the house. ‘I think it’s urgent, otherwise I wouldn’t have interrupted what was obviously such a fascinating conversation.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Understanding dawned. ‘Ah. You thought I was flirting with Sally.’