Ransacked Heart

by Jayne Bauling

  Disgust made his lip curl.

  ‘Probably not so pure, but at least I’ve stayed clear of triangles,’ he retorted flatly.

  ‘Lucky you!’ she mocked.

  ‘Luck hasn’t come into it,’ he contradicted her arrogantly. ‘Just good judgement.’

  Her laughter was taunting. ‘I didn’t see much evidence of it when you were dealing with me!’

  ‘No, I didn’t misjudge you, Maria. There was no chance of my doing so, the way you were flaunting your relationship with Jones—and you haven’t learned a thing since then,’ Luke added contemptuously. ‘You got together again in Sydney a few years ago, I’m told, and here you are a third time. I didn’t think you’d be that stupid, but I was curious enough to consent when Jones brought your name up with Giles Estwick when we started thinking about looking for a new programme manager six months ago.’

  ‘What a shock for you when I accepted the position,’ Maria snapped. ‘What are you going to do now? The contract I signed legally binds the station as much as it does me. I suppose you weren’t around and you realised too late what had happened.’

  He laughed. ‘But I wanted it to happen. I have plans for you, Miss Maria McFadden. Haven’t you realised yet?’

  She didn’t want to understand him, but heated recognition rippled through her as she stared at his mouth, as unwillingly fascinated by its sensual curve as she had been six years ago, when all her breathlessly adored heroes had suddenly become prosaic and petty with the advent of the man from Hong Kong.

  ‘What do you want?’ It wasn’t the question she had meant to ask.

  Instead of answering it, he gave her an ironically considering look. ‘You’ve got a lot more to say for yourself these days, haven’t you?’

  She flung him a savage little smile. ‘Does remembering how awed I was give you a thrill? Was it an affirmation of your power? I was nineteen—of course I was in awe of you. I’d never met anyone like you, and the fact that there was a rumour that you were newly in mourning for your father just added to the mystique, because I was young enough to find tragedy romantic.’

  For a time she had even innocently believed that Luke’s father’s recent death had been responsible for the anger she had sensed in him, until she gradually grew aware that it was something personal, directed at her, his dealings with most of the station’s personnel characterised by charm, his impatience with any inadequacies purely professional.

  ‘Hardly in mourning,’ Luke asserted distastefully, his features hard with something akin to rejection. ‘The man had died and I was getting on with my life.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve realised since that you weren’t like the rest of us ordinary human beings who are unfortunate enough to be troubled by feelings like grief and guilt.’ It was bitterly resentful, her hatred burning high as she remembered the months running into years that it had taken for her to convince herself that the guilt she had felt after her own father’s death was a self-destructive trap and just one more wrong done to her by Luke Scott. ‘But I was an innocent in those days. There you were, come to save our pathetic little radio station, and just about the first thing you did was scoop that concert in Harare, and at the height of the cultural boycott, because you’d emphasised our independent nature. We were actually presenting it in conjunction with that soft-drinks company, our three best DJs the compères.’

  ‘And you came along for the ride?’

  ‘Since Florian could hardly have taken his wife with him when she was so sick all the time.’

  ‘I understand that he’s still married to her?’

  A shadow crossed Maria’s face. ‘Yes.’

  Luke’s mouth curved derisively. ‘It didn’t bother you six years ago, so why should it now? Nicky Kai doesn’t mind.’

  She flung up her head, rage blazing in her eyes. ‘You seriously believe it, don’t you? That I was having an affair with Florian? And that I want to get together with him again now?’

  ‘Not forgetting your reunion in Sydney.’ He shrugged expressively. ‘Why not, if the two of you are so good together? You were congratulating yourselves on the fact earlier, I know.’

  It took her a moment or two to realise what he was referring to and remember Florian’s words out on the balcony.

  ‘Eavesdropping!’ she accused him caustically.

  There was something cruel about his smile now. ‘Don’t worry—any more intimate reminiscences escaped me, as I discovered a strong disinclination to hear the sordid details of your relationship.’

  ‘Then why raise the subject now?’ Maria countered. ‘You can’t have any real scruples about our supposed affair or we wouldn’t be working for you, so I can only assume that you’re making this personal attack for the sheer hell of it, because you once got a kick out of disapproving of me—despising me—and you’re trying to recapture the thrill of it all.’

  The grey eyes glittered. ‘You and Florian Jones are employed because you’re both good at what you do——’

  ‘Thank you,’ she inserted tartly. ‘As it happens, that’s what Flo was referring to when you overheard us, Mr Scott—our professional relationship. So if you don’t mind, let’s keep this conversation equally professional, please.’

  ‘When what’s between us is so personal?’

  The tone was silkily challenging, and Maria’s heart jumped in startled recognition before instinctive denial asserted itself.

  ‘There’s nothing personal between us.’

  ‘You owe me, Maria,’ Luke added intently.

  ‘I owe you nothing!’ she retorted tempestuously. ‘If anything, the reverse is true. You owe me, Mr Scott, except that nothing can ever compensate for what you stole from me six years ago.’

  ‘I didn’t steal anything from you, and what you lost, you had no right to in the first place.’ He was remorse-less, but his voice had dropped to a silken taunt as he went on, ‘But tell me what you think it is I owe you, Maria. I’m interested to hear.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing I want.’ Maria was scornful.

  His smile was blistering. ‘You want.’

  ‘Other than this job,’ she added challengingly, some perverse part of her almost wishing he would attempt to deprive her of it so that she would have something real, present and immediate to fight him for.

  ‘Which you have. This time I’m not letting you off so lightly—which is what I was actually doing when I had you dismissed from that other one,’ he stated outrageously.

  ‘Hardly!’

  ‘I could have destroyed you six years ago,’ he continued.

  ‘And didn’t you just do your best?’ Bitterness rose. ‘My job—’

  ‘I’m not talking about your dismissal or even the fact that it parted you from Jones, and I think you know it.’ The claim was confident. ‘I’m talking about the way things were between us. As I say, I could have destroyed you, or so I thought at the time, but you’ve turned out to be a lot tougher than I had imagined…not vulnerable or confused at all. This time I don’t have to restrain myself; I don’t have to be merciful. I know what you are and that you can cope.’

  ‘With what? Being destroyed by you?’ she quipped wildly.

  ‘Weren’t you listening? I’ve realised that you neither required nor merited consideration. Nor do you now, and this time you won’t get it.’ Luke paused deliber-ately, his eyes holding hers. ‘You’re not stupid and you’re not innocent, Maria. You knew what it was all about six years ago—what was happening.’

  It was as if she was bound by silken cords, soft yet irresistibly strong. Maria couldn’t move her head or even lower her eyes, and time had slipped. She was nineteen and choked by the immensity of her reaction to this man, unable to breathe or stir, and panicked by the conviction that Luke was seeing into her secret self, invading, bent on vandalising and stealing. Every time he looked her way, that frightening compulsion went sweeping through her, the urge to let him look, let him absorb her until nothing was left and she no longer existed as a separate, individual
entity. She was a confident, outgoing girl who usually interacted quite happily with people of either sex and any age, but she was reduced to silence in Luke Scott’s presence, so deeply did he disturb her.

  A trick of time. She was twenty-five, her hormones under control, her identity secure and her spirit her own, safe from thieves. She showed Luke her smile.

  ‘Weren’t you listening to me earlier? Yes, I know what was happening. You were a romantic figure, come to restore our fortunes. The awe I felt was probably the first phase of hero-worship—the sort of thing some people call a crush. Oh, it was uncomfortable.’ She gestured mockingly. ‘And confusing, since I never reached the stage of identifying my affliction. Maybe I do owe you something after all. If you hadn’t made me hate you, it might have gone on for months.’

  ‘Ah, hatred.’ Luke was smoothly reflective. ‘Much more comfortable.’

  ‘And it lasts.’ Maria looked straight at him with hard eyes. ‘I still hate you, Mr Scott.’

  ‘Then call me Luke, as there’s a certain intimacy to hatred. It’s a very personal thing,’ he taunted. ‘And there you were, insisting that there’s nothing personal between us.’

  ‘You must have hated me too!’ she flared, caught, and angry enough to show her resentment, past and present. ‘All right, your claim that I was superfluous is probably valid, so why wasn’t I made redundant in the usual way? Let go, as the euphemism has it? There’d have been no comebacks for the station. I didn’t belong to a union, I didn’t know anything about my rights then, and I know now that I didn’t have any in that particular case…But you actively made my dismissal a punishment.’

  ‘You must have thought you merited punishment, for the idea to have occurred to you at all.’

  ‘The way I was dismissed ensured that it occurred to me,’ Maria asserted tightly. ‘Except that I had no idea what I was being punished for.’

  ‘Because you felt no guilt about what you were doing?’ Luke probed inimically.

  ‘My supposed affair with Florian?’ Maria just man-aged to keep her voice low. ‘Even if you hadn’t been way out there, you had no right to make something from my personal life the grounds for dismissal.’

  ‘The method of your dismissal,’ he corrected her. ‘You were due to lose that job anyway.’

  ‘You admit it, then? That it was personal?’

  ‘We’ve just been agreeing that what’s between us is personal, haven’t we?’

  ‘Only in the most negative sense, and only then, not now.’ Maria was defiant.

  Luke laughed with genuine amusement, but something hard and unyielding still lay behind the surface gleam in his eyes.

  ‘More than ever now. As I say, you owe me something, and if you’re determined to go on pretending you don’t know that, I’ll be delighted to tell you what it is some time soon, but not right now. We’re attracting too much attention. In fact——’his upper lip curled

  fastidiously as he paused thoughtfully ‘—in fact, if we didn’t have our professional connection to serve as camouflage, I don’t think I’d care to be seen with you. It’s just a pity we don’t live in the era when a man could set his mistress up somewhere and know she’d be there waiting for him whenever he felt the urge to see her, but was never, ever seen with her in public.’

  Immobile, barely breathing, Maria didn’t speak for several seconds. Then she said tightly, ‘I’m not your mistress.’

  ‘No, but you’re going to be.’

  This time her silence was longer. She had known, hadn’t she? Oh, yes, she had recognised the sexual awareness that was the dark other side of Luke’s hostility—and had tried to ignore it, but it was impossible to go on pretending it didn’t exist now that the preliminary skirmishing was over and he was referring to it openly.

  Apprehension was a physical pang, the ensuing denial a wash of red-hot feeling. Never!

  The thought was frantic as she dragged a desperate breath into her lungs. She hated Luke Scott, so——

  Just say no.

  Maria suppressed rising panic that was fatally laced with hysteria. Where had that stupid slogan come from, the facile answer of those who thought there were easy solutions to all the world’s problems? Nothing was that simple.

  The way he was looking at her——

  ‘When I’m so cheap and nasty?’ she jeered, a soft acknowledgement of the contempt with which he was regarding her.

  ‘Cheap,’ he granted her ruthlessly, and smiled as she glanced in the direction of Florian, who was now dancing energetically with the exotically lovely Nicky Kai. ‘No, Jones won’t be rescuing you, even supposing Nicky is into sharing. He can name his price and I’ll pay it because he’s a brilliant jock, but that’s it and he knows it.’

  In a happier moment, Maria might have laughed at the idea of Florian troubling to rescue anyone from anything.

  ‘I don’t need rescuing.’ She lifted her chin. ‘No one has mistresses any more.’

  ‘I know, but what other word is there? We’d both balk at “lover”. People just get married or live together,’ Luke went on relentlessly. ‘But those don’t apply to us as they imply a sharing that’s total, and there’s only one area of my life that I can bring myself to share with you.’

  The insult enraged her.

  ‘Unfortunately there isn’t a single square inch of my life I want to share with you,’ she told him levelly, the mad, febrile fluttering of her heart a private weakness.

  ‘This time I’m not considering you,’ Luke returned callously, and produced a brilliant smile. ‘Come, let me introduce you to people. Who haven’t you met yet?’

  As they moved around the room, Luke introducing her to the people with whom she would be working, Maria struggled to put his threats out of her mind and minimise her own reaction to him, both six years ago and now. Whatever she had felt at nineteen, hatred was all that was left now, and hatred ought to impart strength. Luke Scott meant nothing to her; he couldn’t do anything to her if she refused to let him.

  But she remained disturbed, acutely aware of him at her side and only grateful that he despised her too much to allow himself to be seen touching her in public.

  Even the convention of a hand at her elbow would have been intolerable. That was how much she hated him.

  She glanced at him, almost hopefully, but the impact of his virility and arrogance remained undiminished, and her fingers curled into her palms, painted nails slicing the soft skin. He was quite simply devastating, a combination of grace and power, allied to the pride implicit in strong, superb facial bones over which dark coppery skin was stretched tautly. He was clean-shaven, although a faint darkness marked his jaw at this hour; inevitable with his colouring, she knew, her eyes moving upwards to his jet-black hair and then—a betrayal of herself—down to where the open neck of his shirt provided tantalising glimpses of subtly gleaming flesh shadowed by softly curling dark hair, all so emphatically masculine.

  It was a dangerous moment, fascination obliterating resentment, but when Luke suddenly turned his eyes her way again, the contempt Maria saw in them restored hatred.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘CAN we give you a lift?’

  Maria flung Luke Scott a hostile look as he and Cavell Fielding appeared just as she was taking her leave of Giles and Ursula Estwick, with Florian and Nicky on either side of her.

  ‘I’m going home with Florian and Nicky, thanks.’

  It was deliberately dismissive, but a scorching anger rose in response to the searingly contemptuous look he gave her.

  ‘We’ve managed to wangle her an apartment just a floor below Nicky and me,’ Florian volunteered cheerfully. ‘Well, it was Nicky’s influence really, I have to admit. It takes Taipei’s most famous daughter to buck our letting agent’s system of waiting lists like that.’

  ‘It sounds like a convenient arrangement,’ Luke commented urbanely, and Maria saw his lip curl sar-donically, as if everything he believed of her had just been confirmed.

  What did he think th
ey were going to do? Toss a coin to determine on which floor Florian spent the night?

  ‘Cosy,’ she offered flippantly with a defiantly challenging smile.

  ‘Obviously,’ he drawled.

  Maria met Cavell’s watchful sapphire eyes and a furious resentment gripped her, felt on Cavell’s behalf almost as much as her own, because Luke couldn’t have spoken to her as he had earlier, openly stating that he intended to make her his mistress, if he had had any real regard for Cavell, or women in general, for that matter.

  ‘See you tomorrow, then, Cavell,’ she confirmed an arrangement they had made during the course of the evening, ignoring Luke now but still acutely conscious of his attention as she thanked the Estwicks again and departed with Florian and Nicky.

  ‘Luke Scott doesn’t like you any better yet, Flo,’ Nicky commented amusedly when they were in a taxi.

  ‘I’m a woman’s man,’ Florian returned complacently as their driver eased his slow way out of one of the traffic jams that were a major problem in Taipei. ‘Other men can resent that.’

  Maria shook her head, her smile a little cynical.

  ‘You don’t think his dislike might be a little more personal than that?’ she wondered casually.

  ‘As gorgeous as she is, I don’t go for women like Cavell Fielding.’ Typically, Florian laughed, natural vanity making him misunderstand her. ‘Although I suppose he might suspect her of fancying me! I have to say this, though—whatever it is, he’s never let it become a big issue. He ignores me when he can and I co-operate by keeping out of his way, because I like the job. He’s never allowed his dislike, personal or otherwise, to influence his professional judgement in any way. He knows I’m the best jock he’s got here. But generally it’s been unnecessary for us to have much contact. As I told you earlier, he spends most of his time in Hong Kong, where his major interests are.’

  It was just a pity that Luke hadn’t decided to ignore her as well, Maria reflected wryly. The policy he applied to Florian would have suited her perfectly.