‘Why?’
‘Because…because it makes me sound cheap.’
‘I would lose the moral high-ground, if I were you, considering you’ve just told me that you used me as a panacea for being in the dumps!’
‘I’m sorry if you felt insulted. I never meant to hurt you.’
‘Hurt me? Since when do you think you’re capable of doing that?’
Luc flushed darkly then pushed himself away from the bed to stride over to the window. Even though his good sense was telling him that it was time to go, he was unnerved to find that walking out didn’t seem to be that easy.
‘And I wasn’t using you as a panacea. I’m not that kind of person. Anyway, I don’t understand why it would bother you what my reasons were. It’s not as though you have lots of morals when it comes to sleeping with women.’
Outraged, Luc looked at her with eyes like black ice. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’
Agatha sat up with the duvet still covering her completely and pulled her knees up under it to her chest. She wrapped her arms around her knees and stared at her fingers in mute silence.
‘Well? Are you going to explain that remark?’
She started, realising he was now back by the bed, his posture indicative of a man demanding answers. Except she didn’t want to answer him. In fact, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to speak. She just wanted to dwell on the awful truth that he saw her as a one-night stand, and thankful she was not a one-night stand that would have any lasting repercussions in the form of a pregnancy.
‘I get to order all those flowers you send to women you no longer have use for,’ she threw at him, suddenly mutinous. ‘You don’t seem to have a problem with women being handy for you.’
‘There’s an understanding that exists with every woman I have ever slept with.’
‘Okay, okay.’ The peacemaker in her surfaced.
‘I don’t encourage longevity,’ he rasped harshly. ‘That is something that’s understood from the starting post.’
Agatha stared at him in stubborn silence and then couldn’t stop herself from bursting out, ‘I don’t understand how you can do that!’
‘Not every woman launches into a relationship thinking of marriage and playing happy families,’ he said through gritted teeth. His lack of control over proceedings infuriated him.
‘No,’ she agreed in a tight voice, although she wanted to tell him that he was wrong. There couldn’t be a single woman who was overjoyed at the prospect of a pointless fling. Or a one-night stand. Which brought her right back to her own situation and the fact that she had become the one thing she had always thought she wouldn’t.
‘You are the most frustrating woman I have ever met in my entire life.’ Luc swore under his breath.
‘You’re not accustomed to women having opinions.’ She had forgotten about wanting him to leave. The air between them crackled with tension. Every nerve in her body was alive and it was a powerful feeling that sabotaged every scrap of common sense.
‘Of course I am. That’s the biggest load of rubbish I’ve ever heard! I meet women in positions of power on a daily basis. We no longer live in the Dark Ages, Agatha. Women have opinions and speak their minds.’
‘But not the ones you date!’ she flung back, her shimmering turquoise eyes wide and clear as she looked at him.
Was it his imagination or could he see traces of pity there? Was she feeling sorry for him? Shouldn’t he be the one in that position?
‘I don’t understand it,’ she whispered, forgetting her own misery for a second. ‘You’ve got everything. I mean, you’re successful, you’re eligible…I know there was all that business with your dad’s company, and I know it must have been horribly upsetting for you, knowing that everyone in the town was talking about you, but you came out of it and showed them all. You’ve done what you wanted to do, you’ve made pots of money, and Danielle’s back in the family home—so how is it that you’ve never wanted to take the next step and settle down? I know your mum worries about you.’
The sound of her crashing through his personal barriers left him momentarily speechless. Of course, she didn’t have a clue that she had done anything wrong. The woman was from another planet. In the space of an hour, she had not only dipped her dainty toe in water no one else had dared tread before, she had dived in headfirst and splashed around!
Rage tried to push through incredulity but failed.
‘The ball and chain doesn’t quite have enough appeal for me at the moment.’ He gathered his self-control with tremendous difficulty. ‘So you might as well send that message back to the home front.’
He didn’t lose his temper. He never lost his temper. Women never had that effect on him. Occasionally they might irritate, but that was about as far as it ever got. ‘And I think this is an appropriate time for me to leave. You’re right; mistake made, time to move on.’ He began getting dressed.
‘I know this probably isn’t the right time to bring this up…’ Her voice behind him was hesitant. ‘But I won’t be coming in to work tomorrow. In view of everything that’s happened, I’ll definitely be resigning. I can post the letter to you, if you want.’
Fear at the thought of not seeing him again tore into her with teeth like razors, but where lay her choice? The possibilities lurking in the aftermath filled her head like a swarm of angry bees. The possibility that her beautiful experience would be his regrettable one, that her role in his life would be reduced to a shaming one-night stand, that she would be forced to retreat to the sidelines and watch as he continued with his life of work and revolving women, that he would not be able to look at her without pity and contempt. Each seemed worse than the one before, and doubly worse when she thought about carrying on in her job, viewing it all firsthand and on a daily basis.
‘We’ve covered the resignation issue,’ Luc informed her flatly.
Hassle in his private life was not something he tolerated. Yes, he went out with arm candy, and sure he could understand why his mother might find that a little alarming, but arm candy didn’t stress him out. This stressed him out. Of course she wanted to scarper. She had leapt into bed with him, and she needn’t have told him that it probably would have amounted to the biggest mistake of her life as far as she was concerned. She wasn’t a one-night stand kind of girl. Referring to her in that manner had been a low blow, he admitted to himself, but he wasn’t going to apologise.
Nor was he going to give her the easy way out and allow her to walk away without due procedure.
‘Yes, well, that was before we…’
‘Rules are rules. You have to give notice. What happened in this bedroom has nothing to do with work. I don’t play by those rules.’
‘But—’
‘I also doubt the Employment Tribunal would take a lenient view if I sacked employees at the drop of a hat. Instant dismissal is only relevant in certain circumstances. Yours doesn’t fall into that category.’
‘But it’s going to be awkward.’ She could feel herself perspiring under the duvet, and the treacherous pull of her body towards him as though she was being tugged by an invisible line, yanked in a direction she wanted to run from.
‘Is it? I thought what happened was just a simple mistake that we were going to put behind us.’
‘Yes,’ Agatha confirmed hurriedly. ‘Yes, of course.’ Already he had moved on and was tackling the situation like the experienced man of the world that he was. While she clutched a quilt, got knots in her tummy thinking about her ‘one-night stand’ label and tried to downplay the horror of still being in his company—thinking about him while he carried on with life as though nothing had happened, following her instructions, which would be easy for him, but hellish for her. Who knew? In two weeks’ time, she might even be out buying some high-wattage trinket for another of his women.
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘No problem.’
‘And,’ he continued coolly, ‘don’t get it into your head that I’m goin
g to have to answer for you leaving my company. I won’t. When you leave, you’ll explain to your mother that you left because you couldn’t hack it. You’ll be back to square one, jobless in Yorkshire, which isn’t my problem. I won’t take the blame for that situation.’
‘No. Of course not,’ Agatha said faintly. Her mother would be bitterly disappointed. There were no jobs to be had locally. For Agatha not even to have stuck it out for a year would seem like ingratitude, to someone who had elevated Luc to the status of a saint following the way he had taken care of his mother. He had uttered nothing to the press but to promise that the finance director would be buried for what he had done, and he had silenced wagging tongues with the sheer force of his personality. He had made sure to be a presence in the village and had let it be known, by virtue of the odd throwaway remark, that he would be merciless towards anyone who failed to support his mother.
There had been no need to adopt that approach; Danielle had always been a popular member of the community, contributing to the church fairs, helping out at fundraisers and opening the house and grounds once a year so that everyone could enjoy a summer party at their expense.
Both Agatha and her mother had been deeply impressed by the commanding way he had taken care of the situation.
Agatha now thought that she could probably find another word to describe his approach. Maybe ‘high-handed’. Maybe ‘arrogant’. But Edith would never believe that. She would be left with the impression that her daughter had packed in a golden opportunity because she couldn’t be bothered to try hard enough.
‘I could always keep looking for another job in London,’ she whispered.
‘Doing what? You’ve hardly proved yourself working for me, and what would you expect me to do about your reference?’
‘My reference? ‘
‘Well, what have you proved to me? That you have no self-motivation, no enthusiasm to try for the career ladder, open boredom with everything to do with office work.’ Luc scarcely recognised his intractability. Shouldn’t he be the one shedding the problem as fast as he could? Confusion at his own inexplicable reactions conspired to fill him with burning rage at himself.
‘In other words, you’d make sure that I was unemployable in London just because we fell into bed for all the wrong reasons, and because I’m not one of those women who think it’s okay to carry on falling into bed just for a bit of fun.’
‘Do you really think that I’m petty enough to resort to those kinds of tactics because you’ve decided to play the distraught, outraged maiden? ‘ Luc’s lip curled and her eyes fluttered away from his.
If you can’t take the heat, she thought, then get out of the kitchen. A man like Luc, a predator who ruthlessly took what he wanted out of life, wasn’t going to tiptoe around her, making room for her insecurities and doubts. Lord only knew how many women he had slept with, and he had no scruples when those women outstayed their welcome.
How could she have thought that she could dump her sheltered upbringing, her morals and principles and sleep with him when she had had first-hand experience of how he treated women? How could she have been stupid enough to imagine that dreams could turn into ongoing reality?
She had built a lot of idealised fairy-tale castles in her head and she had no one else to blame because they had been exposed for what they were.
He strolled towards her and every slow step threatened her already shattered peace of mind.
‘You need to start asking yourself a few questions,’ he said, his voice deadly soft. ‘You might waffle on until the day you die about climbing into bed with me because you were suffering some terrible bout of temporary insanity, but when you looked at me I was seeing a very different story. You wanted me. So why don’t you be honest with yourself and cut to the chase? We didn’t have sex because you weren’t thinking straight. We had sex because you wanted it.’ He felt driven to hear her admit it.
Agatha stared at him in mute silence. She could feel anger roiling just below his cold exterior and she wondered if he thought that she was playing games with him.
‘No woman comes on to a man the way you did because she’s a little upset and needs a bit of company.’
‘I didn’t come on to you.’
Luc gave a shout of mirthless laughter. ‘You might make a big song and dance about the way I treat women, Agatha, but at the very least I don’t have a problem with honesty. If all you wanted was a pat on the back and a shoulder to cry on, you would have run screaming the second you knew I was going to kiss you. You didn’t. In fact, I seem to recall…’
‘No!’
Luc looked at her for a long while, then he offered an indifferent shrug. ‘Don’t you like thinking that you might have physical needs like any other woman?’ His expression was veiled but there was nothing veiled about what he was doing to her, forcing her to confront her sexuality, throwing all her moans and whimpers of encouragement back in her face.
How tedious he must have found it, when he would be used to women who knew what they were doing in bed.
‘I know I have physical needs,’ Agatha whispered. At least, she did now, and the power and urgency of them terrified her.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ Luc’s voice was laced with thick sarcasm.
‘And it’s wonderful!’ she said with a bright, defensive smile. ‘And you’re right, it’s silly to hide behind excuses. I made love to you because I wanted to.’
Luc had lost count of the number of women who had been eager to tell him how much they wanted him. When Agatha had said it, in the heat of the moment, with the roar of passion in her ears, he had liked it. It had turned him on. He liked this even more, hearing her say it again but in the cool aftermath of sex.
There was just something so incredibly sexy about her tousled innocence and the knowledge that she had lost her virginity to him. He could hardly believe how much he wanted to savour the thought of that. It was like she had managed to dig deep inside him and pull out a primal instinct he was hardly aware of possessing.
Let her confront her own mixed-up responses, he thought. He might just wait for her to say what he knew she would—that there had never been any question of her throwing herself at him because he had just happened to be there, right time, right place.
He wasn’t given to waiting for women. But, yes, he might make an exception in this case, because when he thought of those big, rosy nipples and the voluptuous, silky-smooth curves of her body, his body went into overdrive.
‘See?’ he drawled lazily, watching her through shuttered eyes. ‘How hard was that? Ten out of ten for facing up to reality.’
Agatha fought a tide of burning resentment.
‘If I can feel this way with you,’ she told him fiercely, ‘then how much more wonderful will it be when I make love to a man who means something to me? So you’ve won. I’m not sorry we made love and I’m not ashamed either. I know my virginity would have been a turn-off for you. Men like you want experienced women who don’t go into meltdown after they’ve made love. But there’s a man out there for me, and I feel so much more confident now that I’ll find him.’
CHAPTER FIVE
AGATHA had not been foolish enough to put any faith in the remainder of the evening to somehow miraculously put things into perspective and to fill her with a bracing optimism to face the next day, back at work after the shattering events of Sunday.
However, she was dismayed to find that no amount of stern lecturing of herself or level-headed reasoning could take away the sickening knot in her stomach as she stood in front of the gleaming lift doors, waiting for it to carry her up to her cubby hole.
She had given an awful lot of house room to the idea of hibernating in her room until her notice was up, but then that would have allowed the one-off episode with Luc to dictate her behaviour, and she didn’t want that. She had spent way too long with a bunch of silly, girlhood fantasies for company and, now that those fantasies had become a very unlikely reality, she wasn’t about to let them
take over the role of running her emotional life.
She also wasn’t going to dress like a refugee from a charity shop. She had reluctantly admitted to herself that one very good thing seemed to have come of her recklessness with Luc: she no longer felt self-conscious of her body. She had seen genuine, hot appreciation in his eyes when he had looked at her, and for the first time in her life her curves had not been a source of embarrassment. She had wantonly revelled in the attention they had provoked, and miraculously the feeling had stayed with her.
So instead of her grey, woollen skirt and blouse, and the all-encompassing cardigan which was as unflattering as it was comfortable, she pulled out the few items of clothing she possessed that were relatively fitted and suitable for work: a slim-fitting black skirt and a plain but figure-hugging cream, long-sleeved jumper. The paisley-patterned scarf, given to her by her mother as a ‘you’re starting work in a proper job in an office’ gift, was pulled out of hibernation from a box at the bottom of her wardrobe and added vibrant colour to the outfit.
As she walked to her little office, she knew that she was getting quite a bit of attention. In fact, with a spontaneity she didn’t know she possessed, she actually grinned and turned around to blow her colleague Adrian an air kiss when he wolf whistled as she passed his desk.
More than anything, she wished that she was working in the central hub of the office, where the buzz of telephones and light-hearted banter between phone calls and computer work might have distracted her from her thoughts.
Her own desk, tucked away along the corridor, could be seen as either a haven of solitude or a miserable and isolated cage. She wondered whether Personnel had stuck her out of the way because, with her limited experience, she would have been a disadvantage to all the bright young things with their degrees and top-notch computer skills. At the time, she had been told that, because she would be working more or less directly with Luc, she might occasionally be passed something of a reasonably confidential nature and so a private space would be more acceptable. Belatedly she realised that indeed she did handle some confidential stuff, if you could call dealing with his girlfriends confidential.
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