Lord Palfry was a wily old fox and an astute financier. When there was a brief pause in the conversation, he turned to her and said, ‘Now, my dear, I hope you’re doing your duty and filing away everything I’m saying.’
Abigail gave him a startled look.
‘I know the way this young lad works,’ he said with a hearty chuckle. ‘I trained him.’
‘A long time ago,’ Ross agreed smoothly, with amusement in his voice. ‘Lord Palfry lectured occasionally at the university where I studied. He became something of a mentor for me.’
‘Tried to get him to come and work at one of my companies, but he refused.’ His eyes were bright and shrewd. ‘Just as well, in a way. Sharks are difficult to control.’ He turned to her. ‘How do you manage it?’
‘I didn’t think I did,’ Abigail replied, smiling and he chuckled again.
‘That’s what my secretary would say, but dammit, I’d be lost if she ever upped and moved on.’ He gave a bellow of laughter and gave them a brief nod before edging away.
‘Nice man,’ Abigail murmured, looking at his departing back, and Ross drained the remainder of his drink and stared at her with one hand in his pocket.
‘Don’t be deceived by that easy banter. That old dog is as ruthless as they come and I can’t see him being kept in line by his secretary, whatever he says.’
‘No,’ she agreed easily.
‘Very few people in this life are indispensable.’
‘Of course,’ she agreed again, and he frowned at her.
‘The problem with women is that they think they sometimes are,’ he whispered softly into her ear, and she stiffened.
‘Are you referring to me?’
‘I am referring to the female species in general.’
‘How kind of you to share that thought with me,’ she said, and he gave a low laugh.
‘Fiona tells me that she happened to mention casually to you that we were serious about one another and you implied that any relationship she and I had could not compare to the relationship you and I have because no one could possibly know me as well as you do.’
Abigail looked at him in stunned surprise but his expression was veiled.
‘I never said any such thing,’ she muttered.
‘Oh, good.’ His lips twisted into a smile. ‘Because I’m not Lord Palfry and no one controls me.’
‘I never said that I did.’
‘Not to me at any rate.’
‘Nor to your girlfriend.’ She could see what Fiona was trying to do: she was trying to drive a wedge between Ross and herself. For some reason she felt threatened by their working relationship and she was reacting by attacking first and thinking later.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she said in a honeyed voice, ‘I happen to think that you two are very well suited.’
‘Oh, do you?’
‘Yes, I do.’ You’re both as manipulative as each other, she added to herself, accepting another glass of champagne from the waitress walking past with a full tray precariously balanced on one palm.
‘That must be irksome for you,’ he said casually, and she looked straight into his black, assessing eyes.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Because you’re attracted to me. Aren’t you?’ He trailed his finger along her spine and her body went rigid with tension. She fought desperately to control the expression on her face.
‘I have more sense than to be attracted to you.’
‘What has sense got to do with it?’ There was an odd look flickering in the depth of his eyes, but he smiled.
‘Everything,’ she informed him calmly. He had stuck his hand back into his pocket, but her spine still tingled from his touch.
Everyone was beginning to file towards the dining-room. Over one hundred people, all in their sober city suits, faces blending easily into one another, a dark mass with only the odd bright flash of colour from a woman’s dress.
They moved to join the crowd, and although her feet were behaving, carrying her along, her head felt hot and feverish.
She realised with some horror that Ross Anderson knew precisely what effect he had on her, and his little speech earlier on had been to warn her not to let her attraction get the better of her sense of judgement. He must, she thought bitterly, be the most arrogant man on the face of the earth.
She glanced around her and froze. All these people. The chances of spotting Ellis Fitzmerton amid the throng were a million to one. The chances of him spotting her were equally low, but he had. He was staring at her. He had a drink in one hand, and she watched with mounting dismay as he parted a way through the crowd towards her.
It was not really surprising that he was there and she wished desperately that the possibility had crossed her mind earlier, in which case she would have used any excuse in the book to back out.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to Ross, because the last thing she wanted was for them to meet, and before he could say anything she began walking towards Ellis.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said, holding out his arms, which she ignored, ‘fancy seeing you here, of all places.’
He looked as though he had already consumed a fair amount of alcohol. His eyes had a certain glazed look about them.
‘How nice to see you, Ellis,’ she lied politely, hoping that Ross had moved on into the dining-room. ‘How are you?’
‘Good, as always.’ The blue eyes lingered over her. ‘Hoped you might have returned to the office, paid us all a visit.’
‘I’ve been very busy,’ she said, keeping out of reach of his hands. She looked at him critically and wondered what on earth had possessed her to ever be attracted to him. He was good-looking enough, but there was no depth to him. He looked glossy and shiny, like a pretty piece of costume jewellery.
‘I’m sure, I’m sure,’ he laughed knowingly, and her fists curled into balls.
‘And how is Catherine?’
‘Pregnant. Married a year ago.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘You’re looking good, Abigail,’ he leered, gulping down some of his drink. ‘Very good. Edible.’
Abigail cringed back, and he said petulantly, ‘No need to act like that. Not as though we don’t know one another.’ His face cleared, became calculating. ‘There was no need to leave because of her, you know,’ he said, drinking some more but keeping his eyes fixed on her face. ‘We could have carried on what we had.’
‘We had nothing.’
‘Now, now, it grieves me to hear you say that.’ His hand snapped out and his fingers circled her wrist.
‘Let me go,’ she muttered, tugging.
‘I will, but only if you give me a little kiss first.’ He smiled coaxingly and she looked at his flushed face with disgust.
‘If you don’t watch it, Ellis,’ she hissed, ‘I’ll give you a little something else first, and you won’t like it.’
He opened his mouth to say something, and a voice said from behind her, ‘Let her go. Now.’
They both looked at Ross who was smiling, but it was a dangerous smile, and Ellis’s hand dropped to his side.
‘Don’t believe I know you,’ he said and Ross ignored him.
‘Come along, Abigail,’ Ross said, steering her away, and she didn’t know whether she should feel relieved because she had been rescued from an unpleasant situation, or cross because she was a big girl now in no need of being rescued anyway.
Ellis weaved a path behind them.
‘Can’t believe the amount of people here,’ he was saying. ‘Surprising really that we managed to see each other.’ He had moved alongside them and shot her a look from around Ross.
‘Must be Fate,’ he said as a joke, and she didn’t answer.
‘Where’s your party?’ Ross asked curtly and Ellis blinked at him.
‘Over there,’ he pointed vaguely, and Ross said in a hard voice,
‘Then why don’t you remove yourself to them?’
Ellis glared, then said sulkily to no one in particula
r, ‘Oh, fair enough.’ He looked at Abigail who by this time was feeling thoroughly embarrassed. ‘Off with the old and on with the new, eh, Abby? Don’t blame you.’ He winked at her and she smiled in frozen humiliation.
He wheeled off in the opposite direction and Ross didn’t say a word to her. He released her hand, and they walked to their table in silence.
It was only when they were alone in the taxi and heading to drop her off at her flat, that he said without looking at her, ‘Interesting affair, don’t you think?’
‘The food was good,’ she answered non-committally.
‘Who was he?’ Ross shifted to look at her and she stared back at the shadowed, hard face.
‘I used to work for him,’ she said. You can never escape your past, she thought. It always catches up with you and at the least expected times.
‘Really.’
She could feel his eyes assessing her in the darkness of the taxi, she could hear the wheels of his brain churning over, reaching conclusions.
‘Is he the reason you left?’ he asked casually. ‘At the interview, you told me that you had reached the end of your career prospects at the company you worked for.’
‘I had,’ Abigail muttered, stubbornly refusing to be led by the nose into a conversation she preferred to avoid. She had spent months keeping herself to herself, maintaining her private life, making sure that Ross Anderson never ventured too close and now more than ever it was important that she keep him at bay.
‘Or maybe you were indulging in an affair that turned sour,’ he murmured, and her eyes flashed angrily at him.
‘I have no idea what gave you that impression,’ she snapped, ‘but you’re way off target! I left Jacobson and Brown because I was bored and restless. I wanted a change. I needed to work for a bigger organisation!’
‘It would make a perverse sort of sense,’ he mused thoughtfully. ‘You had an unfortunate love-affair with someone unsuitable, hence your rapid engagement on the rebound.’
Abigail felt a wave of humiliating anger wash over her, and she raised her hand to slap him, an impulsive gesture fired by emotion and a need to retaliate.
She hardly saw his hand snap out. She was only aware of it when his fingers bit into her wrist. He yanked her hand down, pulling her forward towards him.
‘Too close to the truth for comfort, Abby?’ he whispered.
‘You have no right to speculate on my personal life.’
‘Why does it matter so much to you?’
‘Because…’
‘Because you’re accustomed to being secretive? Hiding yourself away from prying eyes? Taking refuge in that shell of yours the minute you think someone is getting too close?’
‘No!’ She hated him for doing this to her, for making her heart beat faster, for making her feel this awful, compelling attraction when she, of all people, should know better. Ellis had been right about one thing. Seeing him like that, out of the blue, had been the hand of Fate, showing her the living proof of her own past mistake, pointing out that mistakes were there to be learnt from.
‘You’ve got to face your shortcomings,’ her mother had always told her, ‘you’re not beautiful, so don’t expect things to fall into you lap. Work hard and you might get somewhere but don’t expect people to trip over themselves offering you things on a silver platter.’
‘How close has this boyfriend of yours got to you? Do you keep him at a distance as well?’ he pressed, and she didn’t answer. If she didn’t say anything, then she reasoned there was a limit to how far he could needle her. He would have to give up in the face of silence.
‘No comment?’ he asked, with a short laugh.
‘That’s right.’
‘Why? Because it’s none of my business?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re so damned uptight.’
She ground her teeth together and he laughed, raking his fingers through his thick, dark hair.
‘You’ll get high blood-pressure, bottling everything up inside you like that. You ought to take a look at your face!’
‘I know you think it’s a great game, but it’s not funny.’ She could feel tears pricking the back of her eyelids and she blinked rapidly.
‘You’ve had a repressed life.’
‘Stop trying to analyse me!’ And then she did the unthinkable. She burst into tears. She couldn’t seem to help herself.
Ross drew in a sharp breath and put his arms around her, cradling her against him, stroking her hair, and she burrowed against his shoulder. It felt good to have his arms around her.
‘Don’t cry, Abby,’ he murmured. He produced a handkerchief and she wiped her face.
‘I’m fine.’ Her voice sounded choked. ‘I’m all right. I don’t know what came over me just then.’ She tried to pull back from him, and he released her but only to tilt her tear-stained face upwards.
‘I apologise if I upset you,’ he said roughly, his voice awkward. She had never heard him apologise to anyone before and it was clear from the expression on his face that the instinct was alien to him.
‘You didn’t,’ she muttered, dabbing her eyes and wishing that the taxi driver would stop lingering over the route back and put his foot on the accelerator.
He looked down at her and then inclined his head to brush his lips against her cheek. It seemed almost accidental when his mouth found hers and began gently exploring it, tracing the outline of her lips with his tongue, tasting her with leisurely thoroughness. Instinct was telling her something, but she couldn’t quite hear it over the roar in her ears.
She reached up and linked her fingers behind his black head, and her breasts pushed against his chest. His hand curled into her hair and she gasped as his other hand moved to cup her breast, kneading it gently. The sensation was agonisingly exquisite.
The fever which had started in the pit of her stomach now spread outwards until she felt as if she were burning up all over. He unbuttoned her jacket and continued caressing her through the fine material of her aquamarine blouse. Her nipple was aching, and his finger found the hard nub and he began rubbing it, playing with it through the lacy bra, making comforting noises.
She squirmed against him, breathing thickly, and he unbuttoned her shirt and scooped his hand down inside the bra so that her breast nestled into the palm of his hand.
Was there ever an experience as erotic as this? His black eyes never left her face, even though his breathing was as uneven as hers and there was no longer anything at all soothing about his actions now. There was an urgent demand there, matching hers, making her head spin.
When the taxi pulled up outside her house, neither of them was aware of it until the driver coughed discreetly but firmly from the front seat. The practised cough of someone who had seen it all before, and Abigail jerked away from Ross and began buttoning her blouse, her jacket, her coat with unsteady fingers, not looking at him.
There was nothing to be said. She wished that she could blame something, but she couldn’t. The effects of the champagne had worn off long ago and face it, she told herself with scathing disgust, you didn’t exactly scream with outraged horror when he began comforting you.
‘Abigail…’ he muttered, impatiently reading her expression of mute hostility.
‘Don’t say a word. Just don’t.’
His lips thinned, but she was beyond caring. She snatched up her evening bag and pulled open the car door and the freezing air wafted in, another sharp dose of reality.
She turned to him and said distantly, ‘I’ll be in at the usual time tomorrow morning. I don’t expect I shall see you first thing; you’ve got two meetings lined up.’
He looked back at her, his eyes hooded, then he shrugged and drawled indolently, ‘In that case, I shall see you after lunch. I’m expecting two calls from Bob Reingate and the marketing director. Could you fix meetings for me with them the week after next?’
‘Yes.’ There was a silence, then he nodded briefly, dismissing her, and she slammed shut the taxi d
oor.
Pity, she thought, two hours later when she still couldn’t get to sleep and had been over what had happened between them in such detail that she was going crazy. I was a sobbing wreck and he took pity on me. First an object of curiosity, now an object of pity.
She would pretend that nothing had happened because what other option was there? But she couldn’t pretend to herself. She was violently, stupidly attracted to him and the only halfway good thing about the whole situation was that that attraction had been controllable.
Last night, she thought, as she prepared for work the following morning, was the culmination of a week of worry. He was there, a sympathetic shoulder, but now she realised that if she couldn’t control her responses to him, then she would have to leave.
She worked swiftly and silently through until three o’clock, skipping lunch, and feeling that now familiar lurch inside her when the office door was pushed open and Ross strode in, pausing to stand by her desk.
‘You’ve been busy,’ he said, looking at the stack of letters neatly piled on her desk, and she smiled.
‘They need your signature.’
‘In that case…’ He perched on her desk and took his fountain pen out of his pocket. She watched his dark, bent head as he flicked through the letters, signing them.
When he raised his eyes to hers, she was proud of herself for her outward appearance of calm.
He knew that she was attracted to him, but she was also going to make sure that he knew, just as clearly, that she was not about to have an affair with him.
‘Where’s your engagement ring?’ he asked abruptly, and she frowned.
‘Forgot it by the sink in the kitchen,’ she lied swiftly, acknowledging that the pretence of still being engaged was no bad thing.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I’m not asking you to.’
He shrugged and smiled drily.
‘You’re damned stubborn, Abigail Palmer,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Is it your way of telling me that last night never happened?’
She flushed but didn’t look away. ‘How did your meetings go?’
Beyond All Reason Page 7
