‘You should have thought of that before you came barging in here with your abuse and your insults.’
‘You’re coming with me tomorrow!’
‘And you expect me to jump to your command?’ she said over her shoulder. ‘After the way you’ve just treated me?’
‘I expect you to fulfil your obligations.’ He turned her round and looked into her eyes hotly. ‘And don’t kid yourself about my influence. A word from me, and Carol would drop you’ like a hot potato.’
‘Threats?’ she asked drily, and-smiled with a mouth like a bruised rose-petal. ‘You’re excelling yourself tonight, Mr. Oliver.’
‘I’m not threatening you.’
‘Yes, you are.’ She looked up at him. ‘I could almost feel sorry for you, if you weren’t such a tyrant. You get so angry when things don’t go exactly as you want them to. It must be very frustrating for a man like you to come across people who won’t do precisely as you say, mustn’t it?’
‘I only expect them to do as I say when I pay their wages,’ he said quietly. ‘And I’ll be the one to decide whether you go back to London, not you. You’re too damned fond of a cop-out by half.’
‘A cop-out?’ she repeated haughtily.
‘It’s obvious why you prefer agency work,’ he said contemptuously. ‘So you’ve got an out, whenever you need one. Which must be pretty often. Your stock response to any problem is to announce that you’re going home. Is that what you used to do as a little girl? Snatch up your toys and announce that you weren’t playing any more?’
‘We didn’t have too many toys—in the gutter,’ she said cuttingly.
He smiled without warmth. ‘How long would you last in a regular job, Leila?’
‘In your employment, about a week,’ she retorted smartly. ‘How long did your last personal assistant stick it out?’
‘Five years,’ he said in a hard voice.
‘Before she left to join a convent, I imagine.’
‘What do you mean, a convent?’
‘Because she must have been a saint. Now, will you please get out of my bathroom and leave me in peace?’
Blaize stared at her bleakly for a moment. ‘How can someone who looks like you be so disruptive?’ he asked quietly. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me and my family, Leila, but I don’t like it.’
He turned and walked out. She heard her door slam, and sank against the wall tiredly.
What in heaven’s name had happened with Tracey? Had the girl pulled some kind of performance out of her repertoire, specifically to stir up trouble between Leila and her father? Leila knew she had the acting skills to do it. Yet somehow she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Tracey was capable of such treachery after the warm friendship they’d experienced today and this evening.
Not unless Tracey had fooled her with truly malicious expertise.
What, then? Had Katherine egged her on to something she wouldn’t normally have thought of? Katherine had obviously told Blaize a highly embroidered version of her own quarrel with Leila, and would probably do anything to hit back.
It hardly mattered, anyway.
Wearily, Leila got into her nightie and sank between the sheets. She shouldn’t have let him bulldoze her into staying on here. She should have told him that wild horses wouldn’t have kept her here.
Hell! The way he’d treated her, she had every right in the world to walk out. She would just need to tell Carol about the way he’d barged into her bathroom, and Carol would understand everything.
Why had she let him intimidate her? Blaize was terrifying when he was angry like that. Those eyes of his …When he had stared at her naked body, she’d had a moment of real fear. She’d almost thought he would drag her to the bed, throw her down, and—She rolled on to her stomach, shutting out the image.
She was angry with herself now-angry for having given way to her passion, and shown him so much naked emotion. She should have had more control. That made twice she’d slapped his face in two days.
He had stripped her tonight, seen her naked in more senses than one. She felt bruised, both internally and externally. That crack about coming from the gutter―how could he be so cruel, so brutal? Didn’t he know how much she really cared about him? He’d degraded himself, as well as her, when he’d said that.
Their shared experience ought to have drawn them together. Instead, it seemed to have pushed them apart, brought them to even more fiercely opposed confrontations.
Nothing seemed to explain why he was so antagonistic towards her.
Why? What kept going wrong between them? What factor poisoned their relationship? She’d never known anyone like Blaize. He affected her more than she knew how to deal with. Even when he hurt her, when his words cut deep into the most vulnerable parts of her mind, she could not stop caring for him, could not stop her heart from yearning for him, like a silly, romantic girl’s.
Was she falling in love with him?
Could she really be falling in love with a man who, even if she had let him possess her body when he’d wanted to, would not dream of being serious about her?
‘Falling in love.’ What a stupid phrase. As though love were a hole in the ground, something you tripped into by accident, and then struggled to get out of. Or was that really an accurate simile, after all?
In some situations, love was a hole. It was a trap into which a woman could stumble, half-unwitting, and find herself enmeshed in the toils of a passion she had no way of controlling.
How long had she been here at Cap Sa Sal? She added the days up, and found to her faint surprise that she had already been here over three weeks. Not very much time to grow so hooked on a man. Not very much time left in which to unhook herself.
In another three weeks, her spell here would end, and then she would be heading back to London.
Leaving the pain and the confusion behind her.
Leaving Blaize Oliver, and his children. Leaving a world that she’d never been meant to-step into, had only been meant to keep on the fringes of. Like a child peering into a shop window at Christmas time.
The gutter. Such an ugly, brutal way of putting it.
Telling her so finally that her interference was not wanted. Telling her exactly where her place was.
Her pillow was damp. She’d hardly been aware of her own tears, but they had been flowing nevertheless ―flowing for herself, for Blaize, for the two children who had found such a tender place in her heart …
Emotional exhaustion brought sleep, unexpectedly, pulling the shutters down over her mind …
CHAPTER SEVEN
BREAKFAST the next morning was a strained affair.
Katherine had left the night before, to go back to her own villa, but her presence was still very much in the air.
Blaize, wearing a beautiful charcoal silk suit, ate in silence, intently reading the business newspapers over his coffee. He hardly seemed to notice Leila’s presence which was crueller than any rudeness could have been: Tracey sat next to him, pale and silent. She looked very much as though she hadn’t slept last night. She kept her suspiciously red eyes on her plate. Leila’s heart went out to her. She longed to go across and hug her, and ask her what had made her cry so bitterly last night. But she knew better than to meet her eyes. Blaize had forbidden her to have any more contact with his children, and if that was what he wanted, then so be it. She had learned her lesson at last.
Jason, who was leaving for England later that evening did not come down for breakfast―whether he’d overslept, or was diplomatically keeping out of the way, Leila could not guess.
Only Terry, out of bed for the first time, as a special treat, seemed at all cheerful, and unaware of the heavy atmosphere. Wrapped in his dressing-gown, he sat next to Lucy, who wore a distinctly uncomfortable expression, as though she, too, had received the brunt of Blaize’s displeasure last night.
It didn’t help that Terry prattled happily to Leila right through breakfast, making no secret of his affection for her.
Hard as it was to answer him in monosyllables, Leila tried her best, but with the exuberance of a nine-year old who was feeling much better, he seemed not to notice her efforts to snub him. .
It was Tracey, in the end, who got out of her chair and leant over him. ‘Come on,’ she ordered in a motherly tone, ‘you’ve been out of bed long enough. Let Lucy take you up now.’
Reluctantly, Terry allowed himself to be conducted back to his room, demanding to know why he couldn't kiss Leila.
Blaize glanced at his watch.
‘We’ve got half an hour,’ he said briefly, looking across at Leila. ‘Rick will be waiting at the helicopter at nine. In the meantime I want you to look over this.’ He passed her a sheaf of notes, some of the passages ringed with a thick red pencil. ‘Just read the marked bits. It s part of a general report on the clothing industry i~ norther.n Spain. It’ll help you have some idea what’s go109 on this morning.’
‘Yes, Mr Oliver,’ she said, pulling the notes towards her.
‘You’re ostensibly taking notes this morning,’ he said in an impersonal voice as they drove out to the chopper, half an hour later. ‘I want a formal record of this meeting. They want me to see a presentation about their product with a view to getting serious negotiations started then I get back to London, and, if things go well, we’ll probably need a signed statement expressing our preliminary intentions. But I want you to keep your eyes and ears open in all senses. The people we’re dealing with are clever businessmen.They’re Catalans, which means they’re shrewd and hard-headed, and I don’t want to miss any nuances.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Leila said, nodding.
‘Everything will be in English this morning, so you needn’t worry about that. You’ve grasped the main points from the notes I gave you?’
‘I think so.’
Leila had never flown in a helicopter before. The black machine, with its smoked-perspex canopy, was standing in a field half a mile from the house. As Blaize pulled up in the car, the rotors were already turning. Leila hunched instinctively as the buffeting wind swept across her. She felt Blaize’s hand take her arm, leading her under the whirling thunder of the blades, helping her up the steps into the cockpit. Rick was waiting inside, wearing a pair of headphones, which he passed to Blaize. It was Blaize who took the controls. While he made the pre-flight checks, Rick helped Leila strap herself into her seat, and gave her a set of ear-defenders to put on.
She hugged her briefcase, which contained the slim portable Olivetti typewriter, among other things, and tried to restore some order to her tumbled blonde hair with one hand. Thank heaven she’d had the sense to get those long tresses cut before she’d come out to Spain, or she’d have been in one hell of a mess by now. She was wearing a simple grey suit with a silk blouse—every inch the proficient English secretary, cold and distantly forbidding. Well, she needed some kind of shield for her torn emotions, didn’t she?
Leila’s stomach lurched as the helicopter surged upwards and banked over the field, and then they were soaring over the countryside in the direction of Gerona.
The scheduled meeting turned out, in fact, to be two meetings. The first took place at the factory, an impressively modern fashion-house in the industrial sector of the city, equipped with all the latest computer-guided machinery; and, after a brief coffee-break, they all moved to a smart hotel in the charming Old Town, near the great cathedral, where the clothing people had rented a conference suite.
Apart from secretaries, the Spanish party consisted of four people in all—three men and a woman—working in highly professional shifts to present their proposals to Blaize Oliver. The basic premise was that he should use an existing chain of shops which he owned in the southern counties of the UK to market a new range of sports and leisure-wear called La Motta, a rapidly growing concern that was jointly owned by the four young people; but the ramifications were endless, and the Spanish case was both complex and prolonged.
Leila was acutely aware of Blaize’s isolation as he faced these four highly geared young businesspeople.
How he must miss his personal assistant! Her own presence here at his side was no kind of substitute for a real advisor, someone who had enough of a grasp of the ins and outs of his businesses to be able to take a real part in the discussion.
Not that Blaize seemed to be finding it in any way hard to cope. He simply sat, watchful and brooding-eyed, listening to the presentation, and asking a quiet question from time to time.
There was a mountain of paperwork, dealing with past and projected profits, which Blaize and she were given some time to study.
More interestingly, they also had a videotape prepared. A television set was wheeled into the conference room where they’d been talking, and Blaize and Leila watched a very slick exposition of the merchandise that was on offer.
The film covered the factory in Gerona which manufactured the clothes, and which they had just visited, explaining some of the more advanced processes in greater detail. It then moved to a fashion show where tall and elegant models were showing off the latest designs, and ended with detailed shots of retail outlets in northern Spain and France. Enthusiastic customers were shown buying as many of the tracksuits, nylon jackets and casual clothes as the beaming sales assistants could handle. It was as professional a piece of publicity as she’d seen.
There were several samples of the actual clothing on hand, too, including some designs due to be released later in the autumn. Blaize passed them over to Leila for inspection without comment. She examined the stuff carefully, checking the stitching and cutting, trying to assess the overall design in terms of what an English public would buy.
‘Here, you keep this, and this,’ one of the Spanish businessmen beamed, heaping jackets and tracksuits into Leila’s lap. ‘Everyone in England will be wearing this stuff in six months’ time, and you’ll be ahead of the trend. You can tell everyone you were the first to wear La Motta clothes!’
Blaize checked his watch at last. ‘I’m ready for my lunch,’ he said, rising. Four pairs of anxious eyes were fixed on his face, but he was giving nothing away. ‘My secretary and I will go and find some place to eat for an hour or two. We’ll get back to you in the afternoon. Shall we meet back here at, say, four-thirty?’
He and Leila left the hotel, and walked through the narrow, medieval streets towards the river. It was a charming old city, its mazes of winding streets occasionally opening out unexpectedly on to grandiose flights of stone steps, or leading in and out of little squares, dominated by churches which seemed over-huge for their locations.
The shops along the way were resplendent with precious antiques, or elegant clothes, adding to the atmosphere of walking through some remote and glamorous past.
The place he took her to was called Jordi’s, a very smart restaurant which overlooked the river.
A starchy-looking head waiter dissolved into an obliging jelly in the face of Blaize’s commanding presence and fluent Spanish, and ushered them upstairs, to the more exclusive part of the restaurant.
The table they got was superb, secluded from the other diners, and right next to a huge window that opened out on a panorama of the river and the picturesque old multistoried houses along its bank.
Leila sat opposite Blaize. It was the first private moment they’d had since last night’s flaming row, and she felt uncomfortable enough to bury her face in the menu, rather than meet his eyes.
‘Better stick to something you know,’ he advised. ‘Catalan food can be a little strange on English palates.’
‘I’m not as insular as all that,’ she replied evenly. ‘I do occasionally deviate from sausages and mash.’
His eyes glittered. ‘You take everything I say as an insult, don’t you?’
‘No, Mr. Oliver, I just feel like something different,’she answered politely. ‘What’s estojado de conejo?’
‘Meat stew,’ he replied succinctly.
‘Is it good?’
‘I think it’s delicious. B
ut then, I’m evidently not as cosmopolitan in my tastes as you are.’
She resisted the impulse to make some retort. ‘Then I’ll have that, please. With a salad to start with.’
‘I want a steak with pepper. Let’s have a drink first. I need one, after this morning.’
‘Oh … gin and tonic,’ she decided, in answer to his enquiring eyebrow.
‘A Bloody Mary for me.’ He delivered the order to the hovering waiter, and leaned back, surveying her with those deep green eyes. ‘What did you think of our friends this morning?’
‘Very businesslike. Very enterprising.’
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