by Jessica Hart
Now she couldn’t help wondering if he might change his mind if he saw her away from the office. This might be her opportunity to show him that she wasn’t just a muddle-headed secretary. She would be glamorous, sophisticated, a woman of the world. The prospect sent a thrill of anticipation prickling down her spine. Skye sternly repressed the feeling, reminding herself of her decision not to get involved with any more inaccessible men, but still, it would be nice to show him that she wasn’t quite as stupid as he thought.
One lunch-hour, she sneaked out and, feeling rather guilty at spending so much money on a simple desire to impress someone she had already decided she wasn’t going to bother trying to impress, she spent almost all her monthly salary on a classic little black dress. Skye had never owned anything so plain, so simple or so stunning before. The dress was unrelieved black, relying on its cut and its fabric to make its effect. It had short sleeves and an off-the-shoulder V-neck that threw her fine skin into relief and emphasised the pure line of her clavicle.
Skye even impressed herself when she looked into the mirror on Saturday evening. There was no doubt about it, she did look different.
‘I thought you’d given up on Charles?’ Vanessa eyed Skye suspiciously as she peacocked in front of the long mirror in the hall.
‘I have.’
‘Then why are going to so much effort for tonight?’
Skye made a great show of adjusting the black dress over her shoulders and kept her eyes firmly fixed on the mirror. Why was she going to so much effort? ‘I just thought it would make a change,’ she said, airily enough, and changed the subject quickly. ‘Can you lend me some earrings, Van? I think the parrots would spoil the effect.’
Eventually they decided on a pair of huge, heavy gold knots that caught the light and looked suitably dramatic with her shining hair piled on top of her head. A few wayward curls kept escaping down her neck, but Vanessa said firmly that it didn’t matter. ‘It makes you look softer—less drop-dead sophisticated.’
‘Do I really look sophisticated?’ Skye regarded her reflection in delight.
‘I never thought I’d say it, but yes, you do.’ Vanessa studied her friend as if she’d never seen her before. ‘You’ve always been much too pretty for your own good, but I’ve never known you look beautiful before. Are you sure you’re not still trying to impress Charles?’
‘Absolutely sure.’ Skye wasn’t quite ready to admit, even to herself, that it was Lorimer she was trying to impress but as she smoothed down her dress nervously on Fleming’s doorstep she couldn’t help wondering if he would think she was beautiful too. She tried to compose her face into a glamorous, world-weary expression to go with the dress, but it was hard trying to look mysterious when you were being greeted by people who had known you since you were in nappies.
Fleming swept her into a hug that left her pink and laughing, and by the time Marjorie had emerged to give her an affectionate kiss there was little left of her decorous image. ‘My goodness, you do look pretty,’ said Marjorie, ushering Skye into the sitting-room. ‘Now, come in and meet…’
Skye hardly heard what she said. She had stopped dead on the threshold as she found herself staring across the room at Lorimer. He was standing by the fireplace, holding a glass of whisky in one hand, and as Skye came in he looked up. She had been expecting to see him, of course, but she was unprepared for how much the severity of the dinner-jacket and tie suited him without detracting in the slightest from the aura of toughness that was so much part of him. He looked solid and decisive and devastatingly attractive, and Skye felt the breath leak out of her.
Across the room, her eyes met his, and for a moment as they looked at each other it was as if he had been caught off guard and his expression flared with something that looked almost like shock, and something else too, something deeper and far more disturbing. His eyes shuttered almost immediately, but it left Skye feeling jarred and oddly shaken.
‘You remember Charles, of course.’ Marjorie was at her elbow and Skye pulled herself together with an effort. Charles was looking handsome but somehow diminished standing next to Lorimer and Skye, aware of Lorimer’s eyes on her, greeted him warmly with a kiss on both cheeks. Over his shoulder, she could see Lorimer’s expression tighten.
‘No need to introduce you to Lorimer, I know,’ Marjorie chattered on, ‘but you won’t know Moira… Moira Lindsay.’
For the first time, Skye registered the presence of a girl standing beside Lorimer. She had a coolly serene presence that didn’t make her immediately noticeable, but when she looked closer Skye saw that she had fresh clear skin and beautiful red hair, and her heart sank. Moira had the sort of radiance and composure that came from truly healthy living. Sky thought guiltily of the self-indulgent evenings she spent with Vanessa, drinking gin and eating chocolate and crisps and ice-cream. Why couldn’t she be the sort of girl that would far rather spend her weekends running around some sports field than lying in front of the television?
Skye wasn’t surprised that Lorimer was so enthusiastic about Moira. She was obviously intelligent, attractive, fit and, worst of all, she was nice. Fully prepared to dislike her on sight, Skye found that she simply couldn’t. Moira was friendly without being in the least bit patronising.
‘I’m delighted to meet you at last,’ she said to Skye. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Skye and glanced involuntarily at Lorimer who was watching her sardonically.
Moira laughed. ‘Don’t worry, if you’ve got any dreadful secrets, Lorimer isn’t telling. He certainly didn’t tell me how glamorous you were!’
Skye warmed to her even more, but before she could reply Lorimer interposed, ‘She doesn’t usually look like this. There’s nothing glamorous about the parrots and bananas she’s usually decked out in. I hardly recognised when you walked in looking so plain, but as soon as I saw those over-the-top earrings I realised it was you after all.’
‘They’re not over the top!’ said Skye, offended. So much for impressing Lorimer with her new-found sophistication! His acid comments made her feel awkward and silly, like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes. Her blue eyes were hostile as she touched the earrings defensively.
‘They’re enormous,’ he contradicted her. ‘They must be agony.’
‘Rubbish,’ lied Skye. The clips were pinching and dragging on her lobes with the weight of the knots, but she wasn’t going to admit that to Lorimer.
He was patently unconvinced by her denial anyway. He glanced meaningfully at Charles. ‘The lengths some girls will go to get their man,’ he said so that only Skye could hear.
Skye’s chin came up. If Lorimer wanted to think she was still interested in Charles, so much the better. Anything was better than him even suspecting that the effort had been not for Charles’s benefit but for his. She turned deliberately away and began flirting very obviously with Charles.
She felt miserable and confused. Bitterly, she realised how badly she had wanted Lorimer to think of her differently, but all he did was stand there watching her laughing up at Charles with that hateful, contemptuous expression on his face and no doubt comparing her to Moira whose quiet composure might have been expressly designed to serve as an example of everything Skye was not. Next to her, Skye felt impossibly frivolous and out of place.
There was a tight feeling in her throat as if she wanted to burst into tears. Skye took desperate slugs of her wine and rattled off funny stories that kept Moira and her godparents amused but which only made Lorimer look even dourer. At first, Charles took her rather obvious attempts to flirt as his due, but as she got louder he began to look pained, obviously torn between his fear of offending his boss and his distrust of the frenetic edge in Skye’s vivacity.
By the time they sat down to eat, Skye felt quite exhausted and decided to try being aloof and sophisticated again. She thought she was doing quite well, confusing everyone with her abrupt change of image, until one of Vanessa’s earrings lost its precariou
s hold on her earlobes and fell with a loud splash into her soup, chinking against the fine china and splattering soup all over Charles who was sitting next to her. He looked vexed and dabbed irritably at his tie with his napkin while Skye bit her lip and stared down at the chunk of gold swimming in her soup in acute embarrassment. Why did these things always happen to her? Moira’s earrings would never dare fall off.
There was an awkward silence, broken only by Charles’s mutterings about his tie. Skye wanted to die. Fortunately, Marjorie intervened, glossing over the embarrassing moment with a comment to Moira and Skye risked a glance up. Lorimer was sitting opposite her, and he was making no attempt to help her out of her embarrassment by joining in the others’ conversation and pretending nothing had happened. Instead he was watching her with a sort of resigned, reluctant amusement in his dark blue eyes. He shook his head at her, mouth twitching as an answering look of rueful laughter crept into Skye’s expression and she fished the earring out of the soup with a fork.
Dipping a corner of her napkin into a glass of water, she wiped the earring clean and defiantly clipped it back on to her ear before meeting Lorimer’s gaze once more, her eyes glinting with humour and challenge in the candlelight. For a long moment the others were forgotten as they looked at each across the table, before Lorimer, who had obviously been trying not to, gave in and grinned. Unable to help herself, Skye smiled back.
Then the moment was broken as Fleming recalled Lorimer’s attention and Marjorie asked Skye if she wanted to finish her soup. Skye felt strangely lightheaded. Lorimer’s smile had lit a slow-burning fuse inside her; she could feel its warmth spreading through her, trickling along her veins and tingling down to her fingertips. Somehow she carried on a conversation with Marjorie, but Lorimer kept catching insistently at her attention and she was very aware of his fingers curling round his wine glass, and the way he turned his head to smile at Moira. Every time he did that, Skye hurt inside. They were so obviously close to each other.
He didn’t smile at her again. Slowly, the tingling warmth receded and Skye’s smile grew increasingly brittle but she was determined to prove to Lorimer that while he might choose to ignore her others at least appreciated her company. She positively scintillated, dominating the conversation and sending Charles flirtatious glances under her lashes while a muscle began to beat insistently in Lorimer’s rigid jaw.
Her bare shoulders gleamed softly as she leant forward eagerly, her face vivid even in the candlelight which threw haunting shadows into the hollows of collarbone and cleavage, and caught the glint of gold at her ears and in the shining hair piled on top of her head. It was slowly falling out of its neat arrangement, but since there was little point in pretending to be mysterious after your earring had dropped in the soup Skye pulled the combs free without thinking and shook her head so that her curls tumbled down in a pale, glinting mass. Still talking, she tossed her hair away from her face but, looking up, caught such a blaze of expression in Lorimer’s eyes that she faltered. He turned away as soon as he saw her looking at him, and after only a moment’s hesitation she struggled on with her story, but she was unnerved by her own reactions. Lorimer had no right to ignore her completely and then throw her into complete confusion with just a look!
She concentrated harder on Charles when they moved back into the sitting-room for coffee, but all the time she was aware of Lorimer who was looking more and more boot-faced. She didn’t know why he was looking so cross; he was the one ignoring her, after all. What was she expected to do? Sit around and wait for him to smile at her again? Defiantly, she held out her glass to be refilled.
Skye had reached the buoyant stage and was inclined to protest when Lorimer stood up quite suddenly and announced that he would take her home.
‘I can get a taxi!’
‘I’m going in your direction anyway,’ he said, his temper obviously on a short rein.
‘What about Moira? And Charles?’
‘If you’d been listening to someone other than yourself, you’d have heard us just discussing that, as Moira and Charles both live near by, he has kindly offered to walk her home. That leaves me in a car and you in no state to wander around on your own.’
Skye could see Fleming smothering a smile and she looked up at Lorimer indignantly and somewhat owl-ishly. ‘I’m perfectly all right!’
‘Don’t argue, Skye.’ Still protesting, she found herself being frog-marched down the steps and out to Lorimer’s car, having been barely allowed enough time to kiss Fleming and Marjorie goodbye. Skye did notice that both of them wore very knowing smiles as they waved her off, but she was too taken up with Lorimer to wonder why.
‘I would have been quite happy in a taxi,’ she said sulkily as he got into the driver’s seat.
Lorimer ignored her. ‘Do up your seatbelt,’ he ordered, starting the engine and glancing in the rear-view mirror before he pulled out. The orange glow of the street-lamp threw the decisive lines of his face into sharp relief so that he seemed to be blocked into angles of darkness and subdued light.
Skye obeyed him, still grumbling. ‘You may have wanted to leave, but I was enjoying myself,’ she said as she adjusted the seatbelt over her bare shoulder.
‘You were the only one who was. I thought it was only fair to everyone else to stop you making an exhibition of yourself.’ Lorimer’s expression was sardonic as he glanced at her. She had unclipped her earrings with a sigh of relief and was massaging her sore earlobes. The mass of pale gold hair shimmered in the passing headlights.
‘I was not making an exhibition of myself!’ she said crossly. The defiant exhilaration that had kept her sparkling all evening was rapidly evaporating with only Lorimer as a very unresponsive audience. ‘You know your trouble? You’re so priggish and repressed, you don’t know how to enjoy yourself!’
‘What was there to enjoy in the spectacle of you making a fool of yourself over Charles Ferrars?’ he retorted. ‘He certainly wasn’t enjoying it either. I almost found it in myself to be sorry for him. God knows how Moira could think that you were fun! I thought you were appalling, and so did Ferrars.’
‘How do you know what he thought?’ said Skye rudely. ‘You hardly said a word to him all evening.’
‘You were talking so much, nobody got a word in to anyone! And anyway, I didn’t have to talk to him to know that he was hating every minute of it. You might as well give up on him, Skye. You’re much too loud and obvious to fit in with his smooth, careful image.’
‘When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it!’ Skye shoved the earrings in her clutch-bag and snapped it shut angrily, turning her head deliberately away and preserving a silence that she hoped was dignified but which was more probably sullen. The car was juddering over the cobbles, each street-light surrounded by a fuzzy orange halo through the drifting mist. At least Skye told herself it was the mist blurring them rather than the tears that glistened unshed in her eyes.
Lorimer pulled the car up across the road from the flat. Skye stared up at the building. All the windows were dark, curtains closed against the cold night. She hoped the lights in the stairwell were working. They operated on a timer that had a nasty habit of stranding her halfway up to the fourth floor so that she had to grope for the next switch, and Skye had her own reasons for dreading the sudden plunge into pitch-darkness.
Unaware of the apprehensive look on her face, she was surprised when Lorimer offered abruptly, almost reluctantly, to see her safely inside. ‘Would you?’ she said gratefully, forgetting her sulks in her relief at not having to face that first blackness alone.
Without answering, he switched off the engine and walked with her across the road. Skye opened the heavy door and groped along the wall for the light switch. The stairwell sprung into dim light and she let out a sigh of relief.
‘The light’s working, thank goodness.’ She glanced at Lorimer, feeling as always vaguely ashamed of her fear. ‘It’s stupid, I know, but when the lights go off it’s pitch-black in here and I hate the thought o
f being alone in the dark.’
Lorimer’s expression was unreadable. ‘I don’t suppose you were planning to be alone, were you?’ He took a step towards her and for some reason Skye found herself retreating until she came up against the wall.
‘Wh-what do you mean?’ she stammered, her nerves jangling at his nearness. In the dim hall light, the impact of his hard presence was overwhelming and everything about him seemed to stand out in almost shocking detail: the grooves in his cheeks, the creases at the edge of his eyes, the way his hair grew, the cool, exciting line of his mouth.
‘Come on, Skye.’ he said with dangerous softness. ‘You thought you’d be bringing Charles home with you tonight, but he wouldn’t play, would he? It must be very disappointing for you, especially since you went to so much effort for him.’
Very deliberately, he reached out and brushed his finger along the line of her clavicle, a glancing, feather-light touch that scorched Skye’s skin and set her senses thrumming. His body was blocking out the light, and her eyes gleamed through the shadows. She couldn’t breathe; each shallow gasp took an enormous effort and when Lorimer traced a thoughtful line down to the shadowy hollow of her cleavage she thought her heart would stop altogether.
She wanted to jerk herself away from the wall, to push his hand away and march up the stairs with her head held high, but his eyes held her immobile as treacherous, insidious desire coiled itself round her will. Lorimer was barely touching her, but she knew he could feel her skin quivering in response.
‘You looked beautiful tonight,’ he said and his voice was deep and grudging. ‘It would be a shame to waste all that effort, don’t you think?’ Both his hands were sliding tantalisingly over her bare shoulders, his fingers warm and very strong against her satiny skin, drifting inevitably up her throat to slide beneath the soft, tangled hair. ‘Don’t you think so?’ he asked again, very softly.
