by Penny Jordan
A waiter was hovering, waiting to take their order, but bossily Lorraine shook her head, telling Megan and Saskia firmly, ‘There won’t be time for us to eat now. Saskia will have to get home and get ready. What time is Mark likely to go to the wine bar Megan?’ she asked her cousin.
‘About eight-thirty, I should think,’ Megan answered.
‘Right, then you need to get there for nine, Saskia,’ Lorraine informed her, ‘So I’ll pick you up at half-eight.’
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER Saskia was just coming downstairs when she heard the front doorbell. Her grandmother was away, spending several weeks with her sister in Bath. A little nervously Saskia smoothed down the skirt of her black suit and went to open the door.
Only Lorraine was standing outside. They had agreed that it would be silly to take the risk of Megan being seen and recognised. Now, as Lorraine studied her, Saskia could see the older woman beginning to frown.
‘You’ll have to wear something else,’ she told Saskia sharply. ‘You look far too businesslike and unapproachable in that suit. Mark’s got to think you’re approachable—remember. And I really think you ought to wear a different lipstick...red, perhaps, and more eye make-up. Look, if you don’t believe me then read this.’ Lorraine thrust an open magazine beneath Saskia’s nose.
Reluctantly Saskia skimmed through the article, a small frown pleating her forehead as she read of the lengths the agency was prepared to have its girls go to in order to test the faithfulness of its clients’ men.
‘I can’t do any of this,’ she told Lorraine firmly. ‘And as for my suit...’
Stepping into the hall and closing the front door behind her, Lorraine stood squarely in front of Saskia and told her vehemently, ‘You have to—for Megan’s sake. Can’t you see what’s happening to her, the danger she’s in? She’s totally besotted with this man; she’s barely known him four months and already she’s talking about handing over the whole of her inheritance to him...marrying him...having children with him. Do you know how much her great-aunt left her?’ she added grimly.
Silently Saskia shook her head. She knew how surprised and shocked Megan had been when she had learned that she was the sole beneficiary under her great-aunt’s will, but tactfully she had not asked her friend just how much money was involved.
Lorraine, it seemed, had not had similar qualms.
‘Megan inherited nearly three million pounds,’ she told Saskia, nodding her head in grim pleasure as she saw Saskia’s expression.
‘Now do you see how important it is that we do everything we can to protect her? I’ve tried to warn her umpteen times that her precious Mark might not be all he tries to make out he is, but she just won’t listen. Now, thank goodness, she’s caught him out and he’s showing his true colours. For her sake, Saskia, you just do everything you can to prove how unworthy he is. Just imagine what it would do to her if he not only broke her heart but stole all her money as well. She’d be left with nothing.’
Saskia could imagine it all too well. Her grandmother had only a small pension to live on and Saskia, mindful of the sacrifices her grandmother had made when she was growing up, to make sure she did not go without the treats enjoyed by her peers, contributed as much as she could financially to their small household.
The thought of losing her financial independence and the sense of security that earning money of her own gave her was one that was both abhorrent and frightening to her, and Lorraine’s revelations suddenly gave her not just the impetus but a real desire to do everything she could to protect her friend.
Megan, dear sweet trusting Megan, who still worked as a nurse despite her inheritance, deserved to find a man, a partner, who was truly worthy of her. And if this Mark wasn’t... Well, perhaps then it would be for the best if her friend found out sooner rather than later.
‘Perhaps if you took off the jacket of your suit,’ Lorraine was saying now. ‘You must have some kind of sexy summer top you could wear...or even just...’
She stopped as she saw Saskia’s expression.
‘Summer top, yes,’ Saskia agreed. ‘Sexy...no!’
As she saw the look on Lorraine’s face Saskia suppressed a small sigh. It was pointless trying to explain to a woman like Lorraine that when nature had given one the kind of assets it had given Saskia, one learned very young that they could be something of a double-edged sword. To put it more bluntly, men—in Saskia’s experience—did not need the double overload of seeing her body clad in ‘sexy’ clothes to encourage them to look twice at her. And in most cases to want to do much more than merely look!
‘You must have something,’ Lorraine urged, refusing to be defeated. ‘A cardigan. You must have a cardigan—you could wear it sort of unbuttoned...’
‘A cardigan? Yes, I have a cardigan,’ Saskia agreed. She had bought it halfway through their cold spring when they had been on an economy drive at work and the heating had been turned off. But as for wearing it unbuttoned...!
‘And red lipstick,’ Lorraine was insisting, ‘and more eye make-up. You’ll have to let him know that you find him attractive...’ She paused as Saskia lifted her eyebrows. ‘It’s for Megan’s sake.’
In the end it was almost nine o’clock before they left the house, due to Lorraine’s insistence that Saskia had to reapply her make-up with a far heavier hand than she would normally have used.
Uncomfortably Saskia refused to look at her reflection in the hall mirror. All that lipstick! It felt sticky, gooey, and as Lorraine drove her towards Hilford she had to force herself to resist the temptation to wipe it off. As for the unbuttoned cardigan she was wearing beneath her suit jacket—well, the moment she was inside the wine bar and out of Lorraine’s sight she was going to refasten every single one of the top three buttons Lorraine had demanded she leave undone. True, they did nothing more than merely hint at a cleavage, but even that was far more of a provocation than Saskia would normally have allowed.
‘We’re here,’ Lorraine announced as she pulled up outside the wine bar. ‘I’ll pick you up at eleven—that should give you plenty of time. Remember,’ Lorraine hissed determinedly as Saskia got out of the car, ‘We’re doing this for Megan.’
We? But before Saskia could say anything Lorraine was driving off.
A man walking in the opposite direction paused on the pavement to give her an admiring glance. Automatically Saskia distanced herself from him and turned away, mentally squaring her shoulders as she headed for the entrance to the wine bar.
Lorraine had given her a long list of instructions, most of which had made Saskia cringe inwardly, and already her courage was beginning to desert her. There was no way she could go in there and pout and flirt in the enticing way that Lorraine had informed her she had to do. But if she didn’t, poor Megan could end up having her heart broken and her inheritance cheated away from her.
Taking a deep breath, Saskia pulled open the wine bar door.
CHAPTER TWO
ANDREAS saw Saskia the moment she walked in. He was seated at the bar, which was now being besieged by a crowd of young men who had come in just ahead of her. He could have stayed in and eaten in the office block’s penthouse apartment—or even driven to the closest of their new acquisitions—but he had already endured two lengthy phone calls he would rather not have had this evening: one from his grandfather and another from Athena. So he had decided to go somewhere where neither of them could get in touch with him, having deliberately ‘forgotten’ to bring his mobile with him.
He hadn’t been in a particularly good mood when he had arrived at the wine bar. Such places were not to his taste.
He liked good food served in comfortable surroundings where one could talk and think with ease, and there was also enough Greek in him for him to prefer somewhere more family centred and less of an obvious trawling ground for members of the opposite sex.
/> Thinking of the opposite sex made his mouth harden. Athena was becoming more and more brazen in her attempts to convince him that they should be together. He had been fifteen the first time he had been exposed to Athena’s sexual aggression, and she had been twenty-two and about to be married.
He frowned as he watched Saskia. She was standing just inside the doorway, studying the room as though she was looking for someone. She turned her head and the light fell on her smoothly glossed lips.
Andreas sucked in his breath as he fought to control his unwanted reaction to her. What the hell was he doing? She was so damned obvious with that almost but not quite scarlet lipstick that he ought to be laughing, not... Not what? he asked himself caustically. Not wanting...lusting...
A strong surge of self-disgust lashed him. He had recognised her, of course. It was the girl from this afternoon, the one the receptionist had congratulated on her early departure from work. Then she had been wearing a minimum of make-up. Now... He eyed her lipsticked mouth and kohl-enhanced eyes grimly. She was wearing a suit with a short skirt...a very short skirt, he observed as she moved and he caught sight of the length of her sheer black tights-clad legs. A very, very short skirt!
As the turned-over waistband of her once respectably knee-length skirt made its presence felt, Saskia grimaced. Once she had found Mark she fully intended to make her way to the cloakroom and return her skirt to its normal length. It had been Lorraine, of course, who had insisted on shortening it.
‘I can’t go out like that,’ Saskia had yelped.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Lorraine had derided her. ‘That’s nothing. Haven’t you seen pictures from the sixties?’
‘That was then,’ Saskia had informed her firmly without letting her finish, but Lorraine had refused to give in and in the end Saskia had shrugged her shoulders and comforted herself with the knowledge that once Lorraine was out of sight she could do what she liked with her skirt. The cardigan too was making her feel uncomfortable, and unwittingly she started to toy with the first of its unfastened buttons.
As he watched her Andreas’s eyes narrowed. God, but she was obvious, drawing attention to her breasts like that... And what breasts! Andreas discovered that he was starting to grind his teeth and, more importantly, that he was totally unable to take his eyes off Saskia...
Sensing that she was being watched, Saskia turned round and then froze as her searching gaze clashed head-on with Andreas’s hard-eyed stare.
For a breath of time Saskia was totally dazed, such was the effect of Andreas’s raw masculinity on her. Her heart was pounding, her mouth dry, her body... Helplessly transfixed, she fought desperately against what she was feeling—against what she was not allowed to feel. For this was Megan’s Mark—it had to be. She could not really be experiencing what her emotions were telling her she was experiencing, she denied in panic. Not a woman like her, and not for this man, Megan’s man!
No other man in the place came anywhere near matching the description Megan had given her as closely as this one did. Mentally she ticked off Megan’s euphoric description of him—one Saskia had previously put down to the near ravings of a woman besottedly in love. Gorgeous, fantastically good-looking, sexy... Oh, and he would be wearing a blue shirt, Megan had told her, to match his eyes.
Well, Saskia couldn’t make out the colour of his eyes across the dimly lit distance that separated them, but she could certainly see that Megan had been right on every other count and her heart sank. So this was Megan’s Mark. No wonder she was worrying so anxiously that he might be being unfaithful to her... A man who looked like this one did would have women pursuing him in droves.
Funny, but Megan hadn’t mentioned the most important thing of all about him, which wasn’t just that he was so spectacularly and sexually male but that he emanated a profound and intense air of authority that bordered almost on arrogance; it had struck Saskia the moment she had looked at him. That and the look of discreet male inspection quickly followed by a reactive resultant look of contemptuous disapproval.
That look... How dare he look at her like that? Suddenly all the doubts she had been harbouring about what she had agreed to do were vanquished.
Lorraine was right to be suspicious of such a man’s motives, especially where a naive, gentle, unworldly girl like Megan was concerned. Saskia didn’t trust him one little bit. Megan needed a man who would appreciate her gentleness and treat her correspondingly. This man was powerful, daunting, awesome—and looking at him was, as Saskia was beginning to discover, something of a physical compulsion. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. But that was just because she disliked him so much, she assured herself quickly, because she was so intensely aware of how very right Lorraine had been to want to test his loyalty to Megan.
Determinedly quelling the butterflies fluttering in her stomach, Saskia took a deep breath, mentally reminding herself of what she had read in the article Lorraine had thrust under her nose. Then she had been horrified, repulsed by the lengths the girls hired by the agency were prepared to go to in order to entice and entrap their quarry into self-betrayal. It had even crossed her mind that no mere man could possibly find the strength to resist the kind of deliberate temptation those girls offered—everything from the most intense type of verbal flattery right up to outright offers of sex itself, although thankfully offers had been all they were.
A man like this one, though, must be used to women—attractive women—throwing themselves at him. ‘He dated so many girls before he met me,’ Megan had said innocently.
Saskia would just bet that he had. Megan was a honey, and Saskia loved her with a fierce loyalty, but even she had to admit that her friend did not possess the kind of glamorous instant eye appeal she suspected a man like this one would look for. But perhaps that was what he loved about her—the fact that she was so shy and homely. If he loved her... Well, that was up to Saskia to prove...or disprove...wasn’t it?
With the light of battle shining in her eyes, Saskia made her way towards him.
Andreas watched her progress with a mixture of curiosity and disappointment. She was heading for him. He knew that, but the cool hauteur with which she not only ignored the interested looks she was collecting from other men as she did so but almost seemed not to notice them, was every bit as contrived as the unfastened buttons of the top she was wearing. It had to be! Andreas knew the type. He should do. After all, Athena...
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Saskia apologised as she reached Andreas’s side and ‘accidentally’ stumbled against him. Straightening up, she stood next to him at the bar, giving him a winsomely apologetic smile as she moved so close to him that he could smell her scent... Not her perfume, which was light and floral, unexpectedly, but her scent—the soft, honey-sweet headily sensual and erotic scent that was her. And like a fool he was actually breathing it in, getting almost drunk on it...letting his senses react to it...to her...
Lorraine had coached her on her best approach and Saskia had memorised it, grimacing with loathing and distaste as she did so.
Andreas forced himself to step back from her and put some distance between them, but the bar was crowded and it was impossible for him to move away altogether, so instead he asked her coldly, ‘I’m sorry...do I know you?’
His voice and demeanour were, he knew, cutting enough to make it plain that he knew what she was up to. Although why on earth a woman who looked like this one needed to trawl bars looking for men to pick up he had no idea. Or rather he did, but he preferred not to examine it too closely. There were women, as he already knew to his cost, who would do anything for money...anything...with anyone...
But Saskia was facing him now, her lipstick-glossed mouth parting in a smile he could see was forced as she purred, ‘Er, no, actually, you don’t...but I’m hoping that soon you will.’
Saskia was relieved that the bar was so dimly lit. She could feel the heat of her burni
ng face. She had never in her most private thoughts even contemplated coming on to a man like this, never mind envisaged that she might actually do so. Quickly she hurried on to the next part of her prepared speech, parting her lips in what she hoped was a temptingly provocative smile whilst carefully running her tongue-tip over them.
Yuck! But all that lipstick felt repulsive.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me if I’d like a drink?’ she invited coyly, batting her eyelashes in what she hoped was an appropriately enticing manner. ‘I love the colour of your shirt,’ she added huskily as she leaned closer. ‘It matches your eyes...’
‘If you think that you must be colour blind; my eyes are grey,’ Andreas told her tersely. She was beginning to make him feel very angry. Her obviousness was nothing short of contemptible. But nothing like as contemptible as his own ridiculous reaction to her. What was he? A boy of eighteen? He was supposed to be a man...a mature, sophisticated, experienced, worldly man of thirty-odd—and yet here he was, reacting, responding, to the pathetically tired and jaded sexual tricks she was playing on him as eagerly as though... As though what? As though there was nothing he wanted to do right now more than take her to bed, to feel the hot urgency of her body beneath his, to hear her cry out his name through lips swollen with the mutual passion of their shared kisses whilst he...
‘Look,’ he told her sharply, cutting off the supply of lifeblood to his unwanted fantasies by the simple act of refusing to allow himself to think about them, ‘you’re making a big mistake.’
‘Oh, no,’ Saskia protested anxiously as he started to turn away from her. By rights she should simply accept what he was saying and go back to Megan and tell her that her beloved Mark was everything he was supposed to be. But an instinct she couldn’t analyse was telling her that despite all the evidence to the contrary he was tempted. Any man could be tempted, she tried to tell herself fairly, but something inside her refused to allow her to listen.
