Even though she didn’t understand this heart-to-heart, or what message it was supposed to convey, it brought a gigantic, equally inexplicable lump to her throat.
‘Women!’ He spat out the word in vengeance. ‘They’re not worth bothering about. What’s so special about Zoe? All women are brilliant actresses. They don’t care about a man, except in terms of what he can do for them, whether it’s giving them a good time or promoting their careers. Women are born with the intuitive knowledge of how to get the most, and give the smallest possible return. Isn’t that so, Catherine?’
Even if everything he’d said was still a mystery to her, she could now identify the lump in her throat. It was compassion for his jaundiced opinion of her sex.
‘I feel sorry for you, Paul. It must be horrible to have such a warped mind.’
‘And who warped it? Have you asked yourself that?’
Her pity proved to be the final straw, the one that forced him to step forward and take her by the arms. She stiffened in dread of the shaking she expected to receive. But instead she found herself being propelled smoothly forward and kissed violently. She hadn’t been lying when she said she felt sorry for him. He had been driven to this by his own bitterness; because she felt sympathy for him she didn’t repulse him, even found it in her heart to rejoice that she was helping him to get it out of his system. Being kissed in anger was a totally new experience for her. Not only her mouth suffered the outrage; it was as though her emotions were being peeled raw by the savagery of his passion. She clung to him, supine beneath the malevolent force of his desire, throwing her neck back to give her mouth up to his kiss.
She should have known it wouldn’t stop there, at the baring of her emotions. She was divested of her clothes in such a way that she hardly noticed what was happening. Here was no impatient boy out for his own gratification with no thought for her. She was in the hands of an expert who knew the value of a pause, a caress, a man experienced enough to draw her from quiescence and make her aware of her own needs before attempting to satisfy his own.
His fingers grazed down the strained column of her throat, and down again to the rounded temptation of her bared breast. She reveled in the sensuous, sensual feeling, the mindless ecstasy of the abrasive backward and forward movement that was both unbearable torment and impossible delight. She knew she should do something to stop him—now, before it was too late—but she couldn’t summon up the willpower to speak out against the things he was doing. To have him desist now would be torment beyond imagining.
His mouth lifted from hers, but only to find a more vulnerable target to plunder. It teased down her throat, following the exact course his fingers had taken, and parted to enclose the rosy tip of her breast, sending shock-waves of pure unadulterated joy tingling through her system that were incomparable to anything she had ever known before. Another first, because it was the first time a man’s lips had ever become acquainted with such an intimate part of her body. She had thought kissing was only for mouths. The exhilarating surprise to a body that was unprepared for such delights was too traumatic to take and she began to shiver uncontrollably. Yet even though she pushed him away, it wasn’t in her mind to reject him. She was overwhelmingly certain that he knew this, knew she needed a second or so to get herself together, and she couldn’t believe it when he made no attempt to take her back into his arms.
Her eyes flew up to his for explanation.
‘I’ve got to live with myself afterward,’ he grunted. With typical male brusqueness and lack of feeling, he added, ‘I should have waited until morning. This is no time to talk.’
‘Why are you so contradictory?’ she demanded furiously. ‘You came in here saying you wanted to talk; now you say it’s no time to talk. It’s about time you decided on something and kept to it. You never wanted me here in the first place. It was in your eyes when you met me at the airport, yet you hired me and you sent my air ticket to me. I didn’t invite you into my room just now. You pushed your way in. And it might also pay you to remember that I didn’t undress myself. You did that. You wanted to make love to me. Are you telling me now that you don’t?’
‘Cool it, will you?’
‘Cool it!’ she exploded. ‘How dare you? I’ve made a discovery.’ He’d accused her often enough of having a provocative tongue; she might as well give it some exercise. ‘I thought this was something that only applied to women. But you’ve shown me there’s such a thing as a male tease.’
Retribution beat down upon her head for goading him when she saw the intensity of his reaction. She thought he was going to blow a fuse as he lashed back in retaliation. ‘All right—you’ve asked for this. It’s that old devil double standard raising its chauvinistic head again. I like the women I make love to to at least make a pretense of clinging to their ideals. Putting it on a commercial basis cheapens it. It’s one thing for a man to show his appreciation for a woman’s favors, but the price tag should be discreetly tucked out of sight, not flaunted in advance.’
She didn’t understand this any more than she’d understood the other strange things he’d said, but she recognized an insult when it was thrown at her. ‘Get out. Get out before I—’ Looking ’round wildly for something to hit him with, her eyes fastened on the book he’d returned. The fact that he’d written it gave the act of hurling it at him a flavor of poetic justice.
He caught it, of course. She hadn’t expected him to be a sitting duck. Neither had she expected what followed.
‘Thanks,’ he said, an insufferable smirk coming to his face. ‘I haven’t read this one, although I’ve read most of the other stuff he’s churned out. Don’t suppose I’ll get much sleep after this, so I might as well see how old Lucian makes out in his latest offering.’
‘You haven’t read—? He? Who are you talking about?’
‘Lucian Chance. Writes, of course, under the pseudonym Lucky Chance. He was at the party where we first met. Tall, owlish, self-effacing type. Doesn’t have a great deal to say for himself. You wouldn’t think that words were his stock in trade.’
CHAPTER NINE
She let him go without asking any more questions or offering an explanation as to why she collapsed, thunder-struck, upon the bed. For one thing, she didn’t have a voice at her disposal; she was barely capable of registering a grunt of disbelief as he strode out the door leading to the balcony to return to his own room. Secondly, her thoughts were in too much of a bewildered spin for her to have known what to ask.
Paul wasn’t Lucky Chance. Lucky Chance, real name Lucian Chance, was the tall, pale-faced man wearing brown spectacles whom she’d seen at the party, the one who’d looked so nice, modest and naturally retiring that she had dismissed him as too ordinary to be a writer. She had looked ’round for someone extraordinary and had latched on to the wrong man. How could she have made such a ghastly mistake?
Who was Paul? Paul Hebden, that’s who he was. She didn’t have to search far to discover what he did for a living. To her painful cost, she knew. It all clicked together. Every word, every action, all the puzzling, mystifying things, suddenly gained crystal clarity. Paul’s reference to the gossip circulating about Zoe, Jeremy—and Paul himself, because Paul was the film director who’d been cuckolded . . . His need to save face and his obsessive desire to show her off like some prize trophy . . . The bored arrogance and ill-concealed contempt toward Poppy and that other clinging female at Lois’s party, as well as toward any other—and there would have been many—foolish girl who made it clear that her body was available to him in exchange for a leg up the ladder of success in the film industry . . . All explained.
She remembered how, earlier that day, she and Deirdre had speculated on the absence of the film director and his live-in girl friend. But they hadn’t been absent at all. They’d been there all the time. Paul was the director, which made her—she swallowed in alarm—his live-in girl friend.
She could kick herself for not digging deeper. At Lois’s party she had known that Paul was ma
king a pass at her, but she had still persisted in offering her services to him. Good, old-fashioned, respectable secretarial services. But he’d assumed something else, as of course he would have, since he wasn’t a writer and had no use for an efficient typist. He had thought she was engaged in a profession that dated much farther back, one that was on the go before the typewriter had been invented, as far back as biblical times, the oldest profession in the world. He thought . . . painful as this was to her she had to take it to its bitter conclusion . . . that he had bought the right to share her bed. He thought he had hired her as his mistress.
Even as her cheeks flamed, she could understand Paul’s part in this, why he’d brought her. A tag-along female would nip further speculation in the bud. If he had a new woman in his bed, no one was going to think he was still pining for the one who’d jumped out of it, and he could direct his ex and her new lover through all the steamy love scenes without everyone’s thinking he was going through every kind of torment.
She certainly had the knack of landing herself in the most bizarre situations; this one topped the lot. She could see how it had come about. She had gone to the party for the specific purpose of meeting Lois’s author friend, with a preconceived notion of what the writer of racy, action-packed detective novels would look like. Never again would she be stupid enough, impulsive enough, to prejudge anything or anybody. It was, she realized, gravely winding a strand of hair ’round her finger and giving it a hard tug, as if seeking solace in self-punishment, to Paul’s credit that he hadn’t wanted her to be brazen enough to carry it through. That’s why he’d given her time to back out, had seemed to be pressing that option on her, and why he’d been so disapproving when he met her at the airport—and why he thought he had an absolute right to be on familiar terms with her. She glowed all over with shame as she recalled the mockery and contempt in his eyes all the times when she had drawn back from his touch and how he had accused her of welching on a deal. A deal she had so unwittingly and innocently made. And her embarrassment increased a hundredfold when she remembered her most recent humiliation. She hadn’t drawn back just now, but he had. Even he had balked at having sex with a whore.
But I’m not! A protesting tear slid down her cheek to be impatiently scrubbed away. You’re not a child, either, she scolded herself. Two more truths flashed into her mind. She wasn’t a welcher. And she wasn’t going to get one wink of sleep until she’d seen Paul and made that point clear to him.
She reached for her robe, but her hand was curiously hesitant. It was old and tatty, one of the few items of clothing she hadn’t purchased especially for this trip. It seemed to represent youth and innocence, and she felt that in view of everything it would be hypocritical to put it on. Furthermore, she didn’t want to present an appearance that might play on his sympathy. She selected, instead, a caftan from her wardrobe and pulled it over her head. It was another of the things Ally had persuaded her to buy, saying it would be marvelous for casual evening wear, or to double glamorously as a robe. At the time Catherine had been unable to envision an occasion when she might want to wear it. It was very beautiful and exotic in parchment-colored silk, with a trail of vivid flowers in glowing orange and gold shades sweeping down from her breasts to the floor-length hem. Yes, this would serve her purpose better. Her purpose? No . . . no, not that. She just wanted to explain to Paul that she wasn’t what he thought she was.
Cleopatra had laid out her hairbrush set. She picked up the ivory-backed brush and restored order to her hair, which hung past her shoulder blades. Its weight and lustrous dark copper sheen were well suited to its simple style, but Catherine wondered whether the time had come to try a more sophisticated hair-do. Not at this moment, though; she was in too much of a hurry. She had to get it over quickly before her courage failed her. After hurriedly examining her face to ensure that it wasn’t tear-stained, and ignoring the acute misery in her enormous sapphire-blue eyes, she left her room to run along the balcony to his door.
He answered her tap instantly, almost as if he had been waiting for her to come, then bade her enter, his face solemn and guarded.
‘I have to talk to you,’ she said, not realizing that they were the same words he’d used earlier when he had come to her room under pretext of returning her book, until he queried, ‘Talk?’ with the same eloquent lift of his brows that she had employed.
‘I didn’t really expect you to make it easy for me,’ she said. In a hushed voice that exactly matched her lowered chin, she added, ‘I’ve come to tell you that I’m not a welcher.’
‘You’ve come to pay up?’
That wasn’t it at all. She’d come to explain. But something in his face goaded her to say, ‘If you insist, yes.’
‘I can’t hear you. Speak up,’ he commanded.
Her heart was fluttering against her ribs and she knew she sounded breathless, but this time she managed a louder voice. ‘I said yes.’
‘You’re quite sure about that?’ The fixed penetration of his gaze caused her to color. It wasn’t the only giveaway thing she did, but the other wasn’t made clear to her until he disentangled her fingers from her hair. ‘I think we’d better sit down, in a reasonable adult manner, and figure this out.’
She didn’t realize what he meant by ‘reasonable adult manner’ until he sat down on the edge of the bed, legs apart in typical male fashion, and gave her a perch on one of them.
‘There, isn’t that better? Cozier, wouldn’t you say?’ he inquired, his hand stealing under her hair.
‘Yes,’ she said, falling back on that faint little voice again, striving to dispel her painful awareness of his thumb sensually stroking the nape of her neck.
‘So you want to begin fulfilling your duties, do you?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
‘I didn’t catch that. What did you say?’
‘I said yes.’
‘Right—into bed with you. Well?’ he snapped when she didn’t jump into action. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘N-nothing,’ she said miserably, and dutifully attempted to slide off his knee.
His hand dropped with the swiftness of a bullet from her neck to trap its intended target, her waist, preventing her from moving. His free hand tilted her chin and made it impossible for her not to look directly at him.
‘You haven’t got the monopoly on deep thinking, you know. My thoughts have been working overtime since I left you.’
‘Oh?’ The realization that he had been teasing her forced an even deeper color into her cheeks, then drained it out again.
‘How many times has a man undressed you before tonight?’
‘I wasn’t counting.’
‘You wouldn’t have been old enough to count, that’s why. And the man who did the chore would have been your father.’
‘Aren’t you the bright boy!’ she said, resorting to flippancy.
‘No, I’ve been extremely dull. I should have wised up much sooner than I did. All the signs were there even before that ridiculous scene in your room just now. I want you to know that what I did to you isn’t generally considered outrageous.’
‘I wasn’t outraged.’
‘You were petrified. When I . . . well . . . I know it was a shock to you, but it was a shock to me when you seemed all set to shoot through the ceiling as though you’d been scalded. You were trembling so much I thought you were going to pass out on me. I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether it was another of your tricks to fend me off, or if it was for real. The suspicion had gone through my mind that you just might possibly be a virgin in the accepted sense, that you’d never consummated a relationship with a man. But I never for a moment dreamed that it was all virgin territory. I’m not embarrassing you, am I, by speaking this frankly?’
‘Oh no! It’s . . . er . . . fascinating. Do go on.’
‘Poor little kitten. You can hardly bear to look at me. Why didn’t you stop me? I don’t mean the talking about it, but the doing. All you had to say was that
no man had got that far with you before, and we both would have been spared that fiasco.’
She swallowed, feeling bitterly hurt. She hadn’t been able to help the upheaval of her emotions when his lips had touched her breast. True, the effect of it had almost rocketed her into orbit, but she had looked upon it as a blissful awakening. How could he bring it down to such a debasing level by calling it a fiasco?
‘I apologize for what I put you through. I would never have subjected you to my . . . unseemly behavior . . . if I’d known.’
Unseemly behavior! It was getting worse. Turning a lovely moment into something tainted and shabby.
‘I should have recognized that you weren’t being provocative,’ he continued remorselessly. ‘I should have known that that innocent look was genuine. Do you remember when you told me you were called Cat for short and I said something about it being a sinfully inaccurate description, and that I had a much more appropriate pet name in mind? I didn’t realize how right I was. You are a kitten-face . . . a tiny misunderstood kitten who doesn’t possess enough sense to come in out of the rain.’ He laughed harshly. ‘We’ve been at cross-purposes from the beginning. Your answers were totally different from the ones I usually get when I chat a girl up. I accused you of talking in riddles and presumed it must be a new kind of party talk.’
‘I thought you were telling me you didn’t want to talk business,’ said Catherine.
‘I don’t know about talking about it; I know that I meant it. But I think not the same kind of business you meant. You’d better tell me what it’s all about. Begin with Allycats. Tell me just what Allycats is, and we’ll go from there.’
‘A typewriting agency. At the interview—’
‘What interview?’ he cut in.
‘When I came to your hotel room.’
‘That was an interview? As far as I knew it was a date. I thought I was taking you out to dinner. If only I’d tested you out as you asked me to . . . or, should I say, tried to test you out, because somehow I don’t think I’d have got very far. Either way, it would have saved us both a lot of aggravation.’
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