Ransacked Heart

by Jayne Bauling

  Not that there was any real danger of his ever mattering to her. How could he? She hated him.

  The dark grey eyes that glanced her way just before they moved across the chaotic intersection seemed to mirror that hatred, and she recoiled slightly.

  ‘Is it that you can’t think of anything plausible, or simply that you refuse to make excuses for what you are?’ he wondered insultingly. ‘I could almost admire you for it if it’s the latter.’

  ‘Almost, but not quite,’ she jeered in a brittle voice. ‘Because I’m still what you believe I am, still chasing Florian Jones around the world! Only, again, why does that make me worse than Nicky? As you’ve conceded, Florian’s marriage is no longer a fact except on paper, and Nicky isn’t his wife.’

  ‘It doesn’t make you worse, it just makes you weak,’ he told her insolently. ‘I’ve never been able to respect people who go back. Going back, starting over, is always either the easy option or a negative step in itself, retrogressive. It’s weakness…But then Florian Jones is your one great weakness, I suppose, since it’s obvious that you haven’t learnt a thing in the years since you first got involved with him. Or is it that your other relationships keep proving unsatisfactory, driving you back to him?’

  ‘My hundreds of other relationships, don’t you mean, Mr Scott?’ Maria prompted caustically.

  In fact, only one serious relationship lay behind her, with a Wellington actor who read news bulletins in order to eat, and it had died owing to lack of feeling, disappointing them both at the time, but Maria had philosophically absorbed the lesson at the heart of the sad experience. She believed in love, but she had been too impatient, her eagerness to experience it persuading her to believe that what she had felt went deeper than liking and a mild physical attraction. In future, she would not go looking for love, or trying to manu-facture it out of other lesser emotions, but she still believed it would find her one day.

  ‘Hundreds?’ Luke was drily sceptical. ‘How have you found time to make such a success of your career? How many really?’

  ‘One,’ Maria admitted shortly, despising herself for confiding even that much. ‘It didn’t work out.’

  ‘Why not? No, don’t tell me. He didn’t measure up to Jones, the affair lacked the romance of having to follow a man around the world—perhaps even the bitter-sweet romance of uncertainty.’

  ‘There’s nothing romantic about my relationship with Florian,’ Maria asserted abruptly.

  ‘Wasn’t it a romantic gesture, accepting this job?’ Luke was slowing the car as they arrived at the restaurant, one of the most famous in Taipei, Maria knew, and an immaculately uniformed parking attendant was approaching. ‘And wasn’t he being romantic when he suggested that we consider you for this job? Which of you is responsible for the long periods of separation, or are they merely dictated by your careers?’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve made up your mind as to the answer to that, along with everything else, Mr Scott,’ she responded levelly, disconcerted by a need to conceal an unexpected surge of bitter frustration.

  ‘No, I’ve only made a guess,’ he returned coolly.

  ‘As your guesses instantly become convictions…’ she shrugged, not bothering to complete it, and neither of them spoke again until a commissionaire had ushered them into the foyer of the building housing the restaurant and they were inside a lift.

  ‘Just one more thing before we become part of a crowd, Maria,’ said Luke as the door slid shut and they began to move smoothly upwards.

  ‘What?’

  The abrupt challenge was distracted because she was struggling to contend with an unexpectedly physical reaction to finding herself alone with him in such a confined space. It had happened before, when they had descended from her apartment, but then the presence of another person had diluted the effect to an extent where she was able to ignore it.

  Now she wished fervently for an old-fashioned attendant to match the commissionaire downstairs and the man who had driven Luke’s car away to park it.

  She felt panicky, as if something precious deep within her was menaced by his closeness, and once again as shockingly unsure of herself as she had always been in his presence six years ago.

  ‘I want you to stop calling me Mr Scott,’ he advised her blandly. ‘My name is Luke.’

  Maria dragged a breath into her lungs and managed a tight smile.

  ‘Oh, but people might think there’s something personal between us if I do that,’ she mocked faintly.

  The arresting copper-toned features tautened. ‘I’ve said I over-emphasised the need for discretion. Try it, and don’t tell me you’d rather die.’

  ‘I think I might,’ she retorted.

  ‘Say it!’ He was insistent, and she stiffened resentfully.

  ‘Why? Because you know how much I’ll hate it?’

  ‘Will you?’

  Suddenly the tone was velvety. He was half turned towards her, and Maria saw him lift a hand and watched it move towards her, coming to rest against her bare midriff, warm fingers shaping themselves lightly to its gentle curve.

  The odd fleeting stasis that gripped her was complete. Breathing and blood were stopped; her mind emptied, muscles went paralysed and even her heart skipped, missing a beat.

  Then it was over, replaced by its opposite, restored life an explosion of rioting sensation. Her flesh was vibrantly alert, too sensitive, her heart thudding like a runner’s, wild hot panic flooding her reactivated mind. A single beat of awareness deep, deep in her woman-hood made every muscle clench in frantic denial.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said tautly through stiff, barely moving lips.

  ‘Then call me by my name.’

  His fingers stirred lazily against her skin, and she clamped her teeth together over a gasp.

  ‘This is harassment!’

  ‘It would be if you didn’t owe me,’ Luke conceded indifferently, no trace of compunction there to soften his mercilessly intent expression.

  ‘Luke, damn it!’

  Her mind made the sacrifice for the sake of screaming flesh and she conceded defeat with a blistering fury, rage a fever in her eyes, darkening their colour to sherry.

  ‘Keep practising,’ Luke quipped amusedly, and with-drew his hand as the lift glided to a halt.

  Maria didn’t need to look at his face or see the confident way he carried himself as he stepped out of the lift with her. His subtle satisfaction seemed to permeate the space around them. She could literally feel it, absorbed by her pores and entering her bloodstream, an alien message of warning, invader already and threatening ownership, but the acrid flavour on which she was choking was that of her own resentment.

  ‘Have you gone speechless on me again?’ he murmured tauntingly as Cavell Fielding came forward from the restaurant’s extravagantly decorative entrance opposite them, a slight widening of her sapphire eyes the only surprise she evinced at seeing them together. ‘The silent nymph you were six years ago fascinated me, but the woman with so much to say for herself is infinitely more stimulating.’

  ‘I’II think of something.’ Maria’s voice was milky-soft.

  Only what? The intensity of her response to him a minute ago filled her with self-loathing, but she was afraid too, because suddenly it seemed as if hatred was no longer enough to counter the threat he presented, and yet it was the only answer she possessed.

  Quite deliberately, she summoned the memory of the anguish of six years ago, the job she loved summarily barred to her and her Communications course sacrificed; and she dwelt especially on the dilemma that had torn at her then, the agonising conflict between her obstinate determination to pursue an uninterrupted career in radio at a time when there were no positions to be had in Johannesburg but possibilities in Durban, and a heart-wrenching reluctance to leave her parents alone when advanced emphysema was shortening her father’s life so cruelly.

  The hatred was enough, answer to the strange, stifling power that Luke Scott had over her, but now a new suspicion preyed o
n the edges of her consciousness of it, the shadowy suggestion of a conviction that the hatred had its genesis in something darker and more complex than the realities she was calling to mind.

  Six years ago! Luke’s words and their possible implication slammed belatedly into her brain as she was being introduced to the entertainment editor of a local newspaper, but natural incredulity dismissed them as more talk, just words carelessly plucked from an inadequate language. Maria didn’t believe that the child she had been then could have fascinated him. If it were true, he would have done something about it. That was the sort of man he was.

  Yes, there was something sexual between the two of them now, but any interest he had felt six years ago would have been connected solely with the phenomenon of the awe he had inspired, so overwhelmingly intense that it had reduced her to awkward, agonised silence every time he was around.

  The restaurant that had been chosen to introduce both the radio station’s new programme manager and image to the media was splendidly stylish, opening on to a lantern-illuminated balcony all the way down one side, décor and menu strictly Chinese.

  Maria thought the evening went well and could only hope those to whom this launch meant so much were equally pleased with the way she acquitted herself. At her side, introducing her to people, encouraging her to elaborate on some of her ideas for the future, Luke was urbane, expressing only suave approval, and no one could have guessed at the personal contempt he felt for her, not a hint of it—or anything else personal either—allowed to show through his sophisticated public manner.

  She herself had not yet fully recovered from the trauma of those moments in the lift, but it probably didn’t matter. Who was there here who knew her well enough to discern and identify any flaws in her own polished public persona? Certainly—she hoped—not Luke himself, and while her acquaintance with Florian Jones went back to their high-school days in South Africa, she knew he was impervious to anything that did not affect him directly.

  ‘You do this very well,’ Luke commented smoothly later.

  ‘I’d rather be doing it on my own,’ Maria responded waspishly, taking advantage of the fact that no one was near enough to overhear them for the moment.

  ‘Sorry,’ he drawled with blatant insincerity.

  ‘Why don’t you go and talk to Cavell?’ The suggestion was tartly offered.

  ‘She’s working,’ Luke returned dismissively, and it was true, she realised, following his glance and seeing Cavell in conversation with a television reporter.

  ‘So am I,’ she reminded him pointedly.

  ‘We all are.’ There was something savage in his smile.

  The look Maria gave him was inimical. That was what he hoped people would think, she knew, and so far only she was aware that he was here, relentlessly at her side, for personal reasons.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘WHOSE idea was it that you should live here?’ Luke asked as he and Maria stepped out of another lift, this one mercifully crowded, on their return to her apartment.

  ‘Oh, obviously it has to be something Florian and I arranged between us, doesn’t it?’ Maria retorted sar-castically. ‘Naturally, being the sort of people we are, we felt no compunction about making use of Nicky, letting her sweet-talk the letting agent…Why haven’t you warned her about me, by the way?’

  Her mind was preoccupied with a moment just several seconds in the future. Luke had brought her home as he had intended. It had been impossible to thwart him under the glare of media attention back at the restaurant, and she was still trying to decide how to deal with the situation if he wanted to come in with her when they reached her apartment—and she knew he would want to. That was what this was all about.

  ‘Oh, I’m not worrying about Nicky,’ Luke dismissed the challenge amusedly. ‘She’s tough, she knows how to look after herself and her interests. In fact, the two of you have a lot in common. You’ve both followed international careers, acquiring a cosmopolitan patina, you’ve both been involved with the same man…Have you compared notes yet? And I suspect that you’re as resilient in your own way as she is, so things could get interesting when she does realise that you’re out to steal her man.’

  ‘I am not out to steal her man!’ Maria snapped automatically.

  Her steps had slowed, as if in sympathy with her mind’s reluctance to confront the looming moment.

  Dear God, was this anticipation or apprehension, and why should she feel either? She had turned other men—men she didn’t hate—away at her door before now without going through all this prior angst, meeting the moment with the tact or firmness it required when it came, but not before.

  ‘You’re planning to share him?’ Luke probed derisively. ‘The way you did with his wife? Were you equally friendly with her?’

  ‘Rachel was one of my best friends from school.’ It was almost a relief to be being attacked on this particular issue, because there were other far more personal ones to be dreaded. ‘I actually introduced her to Florian.’

  He threw her a sardonic glance. To your eternal regret?’

  ‘Yes!’ Maria said vehemently, her thoughts flying briefly to Rachel, for whom marriage was a trap in a way it could never be for Florian.

  ‘Why, when her existence never stopped you?’ he mocked.

  ‘My affair with Florian, since that’s what you choose to believe, has nothing to do with you—past or present—but why isn’t it stopping you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Ah, one rule for yourself, another for everyone else?’ Luke was still taunting, but naked hostility blazed in his eyes momentarily.

  But they had come to the door of her apartment and the moment was here and now, impossible to delay.

  She shot him an eloquent little smile and said decisively, ‘Goodnight.’

  Humour gleamed in the dark grey eyes as he understood her. ‘Not yet, Maria.’

  ‘Right now, Luke,’ she retorted smartly, determined not to reveal her apprehension.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Entertaining the proprietor wasn’t part of the job description,’ she offered, her tone creamy as she nerved herself to continue the debate if necessary.

  ‘Even if it’s the job I want to discuss with you?’

  ‘It’s not, though, is it?’ Of that, at least, she was confident.

  Luke laughed. ‘No, as always, this is personal.’

  ‘Then goodnight again,’ she responded evenly as she inserted her key in the lock.

  ‘Why?’ he enquired idly once more.

  Maria drew a breath and smiled resolutely. ‘Because even if my personal feelings were a whole lot warmer than hatred, I hardly know you.’

  ‘There’s nothing cold about your particular brand of hatred,’ he contradicted her. ‘It’s a passion.’

  ‘Then it’s the only sort of passion you’ll ever get from me!’

  It was too confrontational, she realised as soon as she had said it, seeing something spark in his eyes, the instinctive, age-old masculine response to the sort of rejection men would always interpret as a challenge.

  Then he disconcerted her by laughing again, but the sound was laced with a derision she found intolerable.

  ‘Does the occasion really merit the heavy dramatics? What do you imagine I’m planning to do? Seduce you tonight? As you say, we hardly know each other.’ He paused, allowing her to assimilate it before adding, ‘Having waited six years, I can probably wait a little longer. It’s almost a habit.’

  The outrageous claim squashed incipient embarrassment, and in her distraction Maria allowed him to push her gently aside and take command of her key, turning it swiftly. They were inside her apartment, Luke already closing the door again, before she found her voice.

  ‘Six years? I don’t believe you! You haven’t been waiting six years, Luke.’ The disbelieving protest was almost indignant. ‘You couldn’t have!’

  ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ All humour had vanished as he turned to face her, dropping her key on to the stand beside the door, his f
eatures stamped with hostility. ‘And yet it’s true. That’s what you owe me, Maria. Six years—six years in which I’ve never quite succeeded in getting you out of my mind.’

  ‘It’s not true!’

  Panicked, she didn’t want it to be true, because if it was, it increased the threat he constituted a thousandfold.

  ‘Why are you so incredulous? You must be used to the way men react to you. There can’t be a man alive who sees you and doesn’t want to take you to bed, who doesn’t wonder what you’re like, although some might be able to resist the temptation to try and find out once they realise what you are. I thought I could.’ Luke’s lips twisted. ‘Is that why you’re so sceptical, Maria? Because I didn’t act, didn’t come looking for you again? I’d have despised myself. I despised myself anyway, haunted by things as superficial as a way of moving, a combination of colour and shape, an asymmetrical smile, the chance attributes of someone who holds herself so cheap she’ll squander herself on a man as truly valueless as Florian Jones, and ignore both his marriage and his other affairs. No, I wasn’t going to come after someone like you.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here now?’ Maria flared, the insults having begun to register humiliatingly, boring hotly into her.

  Luke wore an expression of distaste, like a mask, so hard was its set.

  ‘Bending with the wind that brought you to me,’ he quipped, the humour harsh and followed by a shrug. ‘When Estwick passed on the fact that Jones had mentioned you as a possible candidate for this job and your previous experience confirmed that you were amply qualified to do it, I thought—what the hell! Chance, fate or whatever you want to call it was offering me the opportunity to finally get you out of my system. It would be worth it, if it put an end to such irritations as the inconvenient way I’d suddenly find myself visualising you when I was with other women…So here we are, and that’s what I’m doing here.’

  ‘Except that your…is it exorcism you’re talking about? It requires my co-operation, doesn’t it?’