by Marsh, Susan
‘Well, there’s no need to look so stern, Thomas. I’m only reporting what Malcolm has dreamed up in his fevered brain. And because he believes it, he’s looking for ways to hurt us by holding up the divorce.’ She added, her voice as soft, distinct, and every bit as steely as Tom Russell’s, ‘And until my divorce goes through, darling, there will be no merger. And you and I will both lose a lot of money.’
‘Then you must advise him of the truth very quickly, Livvie.’ The icy chill permeated the store-room door with bluetooth penetration.
‘He’s not likely to believe what I tell him, is he? Look, the answer’s simple enough. All you need to do is to show him you have another woman.’
Tom Russell gave an incredulous laugh. ‘What other woman?’
‘Now, now, Tom.’ Sly amusement stole into the low voice. ‘Don’t try to tell me you can’t come up with a woman—like that.’
Tom Russell surveyed her grimly. ‘I think you’ve been reading your own tabloids, Olivia. Forget it.’
‘For goodness’ sake, can’t you follow in your old dad’s footsteps for a week or two and find some nubile little actress to flash around the town? It’s only for a few weeks.’
‘I’m not my old dad,’ Tom Russell said, his voice ominously soft.
There was a small, tense silence, then Olivia West snapped, ‘Think about it.’ She crossed into Cate’s view, stepping up to Tom and boldly placing her hands on his shoulders. In her chic black dress, her curvaceous figure looked formidably seductive. ‘We both have a lot to lose, don’t we, darling? How much do you want your merger?’
With implacable calm Tom Russell detached her and pushed her away. ‘Not enough to deceive some woman. For God’s sake, I’m a businessman, not some tabloid Don Juan.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Olivia exploded hoarsely, swinging away from him. ‘Hire a woman. You only need to let Malcolm see you with her a couple of times. Once I get my divorce, you’ll have your merger. And I’m not deceiving Malcolm. For your information it was he who—’ Her voice grew strident with emotion. ‘Look, in a few minutes time this church will be packed with people, and a good number of them will be actresses who work for your television network. Some of them, I’m willing to bet, have already been employed in more ways than one by your old dad. Pick one of them. Offer her money.’
Cate nearly gasped out loud at the audacity of the woman. How would Tom Russell take such a crack about his father? She strained to hear, but the abrupt click of a door closing suggested that Olivia had delivered her parting shot, and stalked off.
Cate sagged with relief. Thank heavens. Now Tom would follow, and she could creep from her hiding place and hightail it back to Mike.
There was the sound of a chair scraping, and the room fell quiet. She moved to the opening in the door to check that the coast was clear, and came up short. To her intense annoyance Tom Russell was still there at the table, frowning over some papers.
Damn the man. She fretted with impatience. People would have started to arrive by now and she’d be missing her chances. She exhaled a frustrated breath, then took a harder look at him. In his unconsciousness of being under scrutiny, the lines in the tanned skin around his eyes and mouth suddenly seemed more deeply etched, as though from tiredness or strain. She felt a stir of sympathy. Perhaps even a Tom Russell could spend sleepless nights grieving. The loss of a parent was no small thing, as she could testify.
She sighed, and, bracing for a wait, closed her eyes and leaned back against the sink.
A shrill jangling broke out at her feet and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
It was her mobile phone.
She stood paralysed for helpless seconds while the ghastly tune went on. Then adrenaline rushed to her rescue and she was overcome by a false, fatalistic calm. She plunged her nerveless hand into her bag, brought the phone up and held it to her ear.
‘All right, Mike,’ she said. Her soft voice crashed into the charged silence. ‘I won’t be long.’
She did the only thing possible. She put the phone away, and, her limbs stiff with embarrassment, jerked the door open and walked out of the ladies’ room, straight into the big, iron-hard frame of Tom Russell.
CHAPTER TWO
TOM’S first impression was of softness. Soft breasts pressed against his chest, soft, firm thighs, a delicious feminine fragrance rising from a tender white neck.
He felt the woman gasp and try to recoil, but his hands swiftly gripped her upper arms. She trembled in his grasp, her white satin flesh alive with a sensual vibrance that instantly communicated itself to him.
His gaze clashed with large sea-green eyes, sparkling up into his in alarmed calculation. Her rosy mouth was full, ripe and passionate. Some crazed part of his brain actually considered the possibility of sinking his teeth into her plump lower lip.
Common sense told him this was no mere blonde. Ridiculous words like ‘spy’ and ‘industrial espionage’ jostled in his brain. Her parted lips made a tiny, anxious tremor and he felt a grim, cynical triumph.
Well might she be anxious. Stirred against his will, he demanded harshly, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing in here?’
Cate’s brain blurred into sensory overload. Steel-grey eyes, glittering with suspicion, scoured her face. She had a dizzy awareness of the faint, clean scents of soap and sandalwood, of fine, expensive fabrics brushing her skin. But underneath those outer trappings of masculine sophistication her feminine sensors picked up the heady, high-voltage buzz of pure essence of man.
For whole seconds her lungs forgot to work, until she forced some action. ‘I was just—I was—’ She took a deep breath and said in a more assertive voice, though it might have skipped into a slightly higher register, ‘Would you let me go, please?’
He tightened his grip for an instant, as if to demonstrate how completely he had her in his power, then abruptly released her. While she made an emphatic point of rubbing her arms, he whipped a wafer-thin phone from inside the jacket of his superbly tailored charcoal suit.
‘Explain yourself while I call Security,’ he commanded, flicking it open. He perused the dial, no mercy in the set of his chiselled mouth and jaw. She grappled with a million excuses, but one clash with the icy blaze of his grey eyes through their black lashes told her all of them would fail.
The vision of herself being escorted from the cathedral between beefy security men, in the glare of a thousand cameras, was unthinkable. How would she explain to Harry? She’d be the laughing stock of the newsroom.
She lifted her chin, and prepared to surrender the truth.
‘I was—visiting the Ladies,’ she said with an attempt at airiness, though she could feel a slight flush colour her cheeks. Privately, it was mortifying. Of all the people in the world to have to explain to …
His eyes made a slow, thorough, entirely masculine survey of her down to her ankles, then back, lingering an insolent moment on her mouth. ‘Do you seriously expect me to believe that?’
She stared at him in incredulity. ‘Well …’ A saving surge of anger brought the words flying to her tongue. ‘Why shouldn’t you believe it? People are innocent until proven guilty in this country, you know.’ She drew herself up to her full five-six. ‘And now I have to go. There are things I need to do.’ She made a brusque attempt to sweep past him, but his lean bronzed hand shot out and closed once more around her arm.
‘Not so fast.’ He moved very close to her, and again she felt that swamping effect on her senses. ‘Don’t try to play the innocent, Goldilocks. You’ve been lurking in there like a common thief, spying on a private conversation. Either explain yourself properly, or you will find yourself in court pretty bloody quick.’
There was something so insulting about being called a name in that deep, cultured voice. Allowances needed to be made, she supposed, for a man coping with the loss of his father, but did he have to be so offensive? Certainly, neither her shoes nor her suit were brand new, but they were far from common.
‘I wasn’t listening to your conversation.’ In a determined effort she twisted from his grasp and retreated a strategic step. ‘I had important things on my mind.’
He snarled a contemptuous expletive not at all appropriate for a church, and added, ‘Don’t make the mistake of assuming you’re dealing with a fool, darling.’
The air fairly crackled with masculine aggression. Who knew what he might do? For all she knew, he might have minders who rubbed people out, like the mob.
To get herself off the hook, she warmed to her innocence theme, ignoring his sceptical gaze raking her from head to toe as if she were some despicable form of alien low-life. Amazing how, in the living, breathing flesh, that stern, tightly compressed mouth could still be so sensuous and expressive.
‘I hardly heard a thing,’ she continued, earnest in her effort to allay his fears. ‘You can’t hear much at all in that room when the door’s closed.’
‘Rubbish. I heard your voice very, very distinctly.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Look, I was here first, remember? I didn’t know you were coming in for your romantic rendezvous, did I? I’m not a mind-reader. I came in to find the Ladies, and you chose to use this room, too. Maybe I should have let you know I was there, but I thought you and your—girlfriend would be less embarrassed if I just said nothing and tiptoed away.’
He took a moment to digest this, and his gaze became less hostile, though more guarded, as if he’d seen the force of her argument but didn’t want to show it. It occurred to her that underneath his big, powerful, macho-male-in-command act, he actually seemed quite worried. She wondered if the merger had a lot more riding on it than he’d been willing to show Olivia West.
His eyes flickered over her. ‘What’s your name?’
Her heart sank. Lying was tempting, especially considering her summation of Marcus Russell as a vampire whose fangs had been battened to the national throat, but she thought of the guard in the porch and discarded it. ‘It’s Cate,’ she muttered. She forced herself to meet his eyes. ‘Summerfield.’
‘Summerfield.’ His brow creased, as if with the effort of recollection, and he slipped the phone back into his pocket.
That little action reminded her of something that had been nagging at her. He hadn’t made the call to Security. No minders had been summoned. Why?
The answer came to her in a dazzling flash. Because it would be a risk. Of course!
He was afraid that if he did, she would blab his secret to the world.
For a fabulous, golden moment she tasted the heady nectar of power. How the tables were turned. Goldilocks held Tom Russell in the palm of her little hand. Just wait—wait until he found out where she worked.
He’d relaxed a little, and now he started strolling about, pausing at times to fire questions and grill her with his hard gaze, although she couldn’t help noticing now how often his eyes lighted on her legs, or drifted to her hair.
Her own blood sparked up in response. She reminded herself that he was a rich, spoiled parasite devising criminal new ways to soak up the country’s wealth, but even at his iciest, his tall, dark sexiness impacted on her with undeniable power.
‘So who are you?’ he shot at her in his deep voice. ‘Are you an actress? A friend of one of my stepsisters? What do you do? More to the point, why are you here?’
She fluttered her lashes. ‘Oh, that.’ She allowed the moment to lengthen, the better to savour it.
Though a cowardly part of her cringed in terror at the risk she was about to take, another part fairly tingled with anticipation. She could feel his wolfish grey eyes follow her every move, and somehow the knowledge incited in her a dangerous desire to tease him.
With pleasurable deliberation, she pulled the ribbon from her hair, shook out the pale mass until it frothed in a blonde cascade down her back, then smoothed it all down with her hands.
Against every fibre of his will, Tom’s concentration wavered as the line of her profile and tender white neck impinged on his vision. His brain, locked down and blinkered against temptresses since the solemn vows of his wedding, flooded with images of shapely mermaids and bare ripe breasts. The thought came to him that she should be sunning herself on some rock. Naked, and smelling of the sea.
Conscious of his riveted attention, Cate swathed her hair back into her nape, casting him a glance as she retied the ribbon. ‘You invited me.’ She made a graceful, self-correcting gesture. ‘That is to say—my employer was invited to send a representative.’
‘Your employer …’ His thick black brows edged together and he flicked a frowning look over her. Then she saw the grim comprehension dawn in his eyes. He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘Bloody hell. I should have realised. You’ve got paparazzi written all over you.’ Underneath the derision, she detected something very close to dismay in his voice.
In one heart-stopping stride he was across the room to where she stood. ‘Here, give me that.’ He snatched the bag from her shoulder, and her alarmed internal organs all dropped back into their niches. ‘Which rag do you write for?’ he growled, making a ruthless search of the compartments. He found her phone and coolly slid it into his jacket pocket, then his lip curled in triumph as he pounced on her cassette recorder.
‘No, I don’t work for you,’ she rejoined, watching with some pleasure as his lean, smooth fingers rewound the tape and played it back without finding a whisper of illegal conversation. ‘I’m not guilty of churning out any of that cheap Russell trash, thank you. I write for a quality paper. The Clarion.’
He gave a snort of cynical laughter. ‘Quality? The Clarion?’ He put the recorder back in her purse and took out her pass. ‘What’s your excuse for not wearing this? I’d sack you for that alone if you worked for me.’
‘It spoiled the line of my jacket.’
‘What?’ His lip curled with such incredulous contempt that she was spurred to anger herself. A man like him would never know the challenges a woman faced fitting in with the society crowd.
He thrust the bag back at her. ‘Let me impress on you, Miss Summerfield,’ he said, enunciating each syllable with punishing precision, ‘anything you did happen to hear is completely off the record. Don’t even think of trying to use it.’ He towered over her in such an intimidating stance that it took all her nerve to hold his gaze. ‘Though you did say, didn’t you,’ he added, his eyes narrowing, ‘you didn’t hear anything?’ He scoured her face. ‘How true is that?’
Maybe it was the excess of testosterone in the air, but somehow her feminine spirit seemed creatively inspired.
‘Nearly true,’ she assured him, hoisting her bag to her shoulder. She gazed at him with smiling innocence. ‘Unless you count that bit about the merger. But don’t you worry. I don’t know much at all about share prices and the Stock Exchange.’
It was like kerosene to the bonfire. He hissed in a long searing breath, and stood stock still. Then he began to advance on her, his grey eyes glinting through the screen of his black lashes. ‘What else?’ he murmured, his deep, rich voice smooth with menace. ‘What else did you hear?’
Her heart revved up to an insane degree, but there was a crazy exhilaration in taunting him that drove her on. She gave a breezy little shrug and neatly eluded his grasp, sashaying over to the table to take a look at his notes.
‘Nothing else,’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘Oh, except the part about Ms West’s divorce. Something about deceiving the courts so she can rip off her husband in the division of property, et cetera. It was all really too complicated for me to take in.’ She shuffled through the pages and slanted him a mocking glance. ‘And then there was that bit about how you have to hire a woman.’ She gave an amused laugh.
He stared at her for seconds, his eyes narrowed in calculation, then strolled across and tweaked the pages from her grasp. In a visible change of tack, he perched casually on the edge of the table, quite close to where she stood.
Too close for comfort.
‘Now, how does a fema
le body,’ he drawled, cool amusement in his deep, dark voice as he made a slow, appreciative appraisal of her from head to toe, ‘so clearly designed for an angel, come to house such a teasing little devil?’
In spite of herself her blood heat rose. She told herself she was impervious to flattery. Her body wasn’t like an angel’s, unless it was a fallen angel that had consumed one chocolate too many. She made an effort to keep her voice under control. ‘I’m—just doing my job.’
‘Now, now, Cate.’ His mouth edged up in a smile. It gleamed in his grey gaze and lit his harsh, sardonic face with such warmth, it was impossible to believe she’d not seen at once how handsome he was. ‘You know you can’t write a word of it. Think of your code of ethics. Wasn’t it the Clarion who invented it?’
He was all suave reason and charm. She knew he was turning on the seduction, but it worked. All the air was sucked from her lungs and her heart started an erratic thumping.
‘The code, yes,’ she agreed, breathless. ‘We do, we do— adhere to it. Religiously. Although if something’s in the national interest—I’m sure Harry would think that a merger between Russell’s and the West Corporation—’
‘Won’t happen if you publish it.’ He still smiled, but the warmth vanished. ‘Olivia will pull out. Then I’ll sue you for a billion and take your Clarion to the cleaners.’
The cold menace in the words helped her to pull herself together. She fished in her bag for a notebook. ‘That sounds like a threat, Mr Russell.’ She challenged him with her eyes. ‘Hang on, I’ll just write it down.’
Danger flashed in his grey irises like a lightning strike. ‘Take care, sweetheart. This is not the day to be playing games with someone who can ruin you.’ He gestured at her accusingly. ‘Consider your position. Here you are, caught red-handed, listening in on a conversation in which some highly sensitive information is being discussed. You’ve deliberately concealed your press pass—’
