by Susan Napier
He kicked himself away from the door and walked swiftly towards her, hand outstretched. Without looking down, she was aware that he limped. She was also aware of the savage pride in the single, glittering eye which effortlessly dominated her attention. It seemed to flame with a strange inner light, until the almond-brown iris was shot with blazing spears of gold as he came to a stop in front of her, closer than was comfortable or courteous, towering over her by at least six inches as he insolently invaded her personal space.
She accepted his proffered hand with a wariness that proved wise when the strength of his grip turned out to be even greater than she had anticipated. His hand wrapped almost completely around hers, trapping it as he extended the moment of contact beyond politeness into the realm of pure intimidation.
The calluses on his palm as he eased the pressure created a friction against her softer skin which felt disturbingly familiar. It was like the faint warning buzz she had experienced when touching a faulty electrical socket. Indeed, the very air around him seemed to crackle and carry a whiff of burning. It was as if there was a huge energy source humming inside him, barely restrained by flesh and blood.
He released her slightly maimed fingers, the gold flecks in his eye blowing with a strange satisfaction as she stayed stubbornly where she was, lifting her firm chin, refusing to be daunted by his superior size and strength, or by the unsettling reciprocal hum in her own bones.
Surprisingly, he was first to disengage from the silent duel, turning away to sling himself down in the chair at the desk, stretching his long legs out in front of him. He didn’t offer her a seat, just leaned back and regarded her in a way that seemed indefinably possessive. Vivian’s blood tingled in her cheeks and she adjusted her spectacles again.
His thin mouth curved cruelly. ‘Shall we proceed to the business in hand, then, Miss Mitchell? I take it you followed all the instructions in the fax?’
She thought of the tense drive down, the nerve-racking hours alone in the motel, the wallowing boat…and his helicopter. She set her teeth and nodded.
‘Truly a Marvel—an obedient woman,’ he punned goadingly, and Vivian’s flush deepened with the effort of controlling her temper. ‘And, knowing that your company’s successful purchase of my land depends on your pandering to my every annoying little whim, of course you followed those instructions to the letter, did you not, Miss Mitchell?’
This time she wasn’t going to chicken out. She squared her shoulders. ‘No. That is, not exactly—’
‘Not exactly? You do surprise me, Miss Marvel-lous.’
Nerves slipped their leash. ‘Will you stop calling me that?’
‘Perhaps I should call you Miss Marmalade instead. That would be a more descriptive nickname—your hair being the colour it is… That wouldn’t offend you, would it? After all, what’s in a name? “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”…’
His frivolity was definitely a trap, the quotation from Romeo and Juliet containing a baited message that Vivian could not afford to acknowledge without betraying her tiny but infinitely precious advantage.
‘As a matter of fact, there’s an awful lot in a name,’ she said, ignoring the lure. ‘Mine, for example, is Vivian Mitchell—’
Instead of leaping to his feet in justifiable outrage, he rocked his chair on to its back legs with his booted heels, his expression one of veiled malice as he interrupted her confession. ‘Vivian. Mmm, yes, you’re right,’ he mused, in that low, gratingly attractive voice. ‘Vivian… It does have a certain aptness to your colouring, a kind of phonetic and visual rhythm to it…razor-sharp edges springing up around singing vowels. I do have your permission to call you Vivian, don’t I, Miss Mitchell?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she bit off, his feigned innocence making her feel like a mouse between the paws of a lion. ‘But you requested that Janna Mitchell bring you the documents and co-sign the settlement. Unfortunately my sister couldn’t come, so I brought them instead. Otherwise, everything is exactly as you asked…’
‘She couldn’t come?’ he asked mildly. ‘Why not?’
Having expected a savage explosion of that banked energy, Vivian was once more disconcerted by his apparent serenity.
She moistened her lower lip nervously, unconsciously emphasising its fullness. ‘She has flu.’
Janna was also sick with guilt and remorse, and the combination had made her pathetically easy to deceive. As far as her sister or anyone else knew, Vivian’s prime motive for taking her place on this trip was her desperate desire to get away from everyone for a while.
‘Convenient.’
She winced at the flick of the whip. Not so serene, after all.
‘Not for her. Janna hates being ill.’ Her younger sister was ambitious. As a newly qualified lawyer, working in Marvel-Mitchell Realties’ legal department, she had a rosy future ahead of her, one that Vivian intended to protect.
‘Messes up those gorgeous ice-blonde looks, I suppose,’ he said, casting a sardonic look at her wild ginger mane.
Vivian froze.
‘You knew,’ she whispered, feeling momentarily faint. Thank God the masquerade had only been intended to get her inside the door.
‘The moment I saw you.’
‘But you’ve never met Janna—or anyone from Marvel-Mitchell,’ she said hollowly. ‘Until now you’ve always insisted on dealing through an intermediary—’
‘So you decided to be honest, in spite of the fact I might be none the wiser for the deception. I’m impressed. Or was I supposed to be?’ he added cynically. ‘Are you always so honest, I wonder?’
‘I try to be.’ Her tartness reproved his cynicism.
‘A neat piece of sophistry. You try but you don’t necessarily always succeed, mmm?’ His voice hardened. ‘You can’t have been so naïve as to think I wouldn’t investigate the people I do business with? I’m not a fool.’
‘I never thought you were.’ But she had seriously underestimated his thoroughness.
‘I’m sure that Marvel, too, conducted its own investigations into my integrity…?’
It was a question rather than a comment, and Vivian answered it as such.
‘Other than maintaining a current credit check, Peter felt there was no need, since we’ve been buying and selling properties on your behalf for several years without any problems,’ she replied curtly. ‘In spite of never having met you, Peter considers you a trusted ally. So your personal integrity was naturally taken for granted, Mr Rose.’ Her green eyes were wide and innocent as she made the final, pointed statement.
‘Call me Nick, Vivian.’ His reaction was equal bland innocence. ‘Of course, one man’s integrity is another man’s poison. I don’t do business with cheats and liars.’
‘Very wise,’ she agreed distractedly, unnerved by his mention of poison. Was that supposed to be significant?
‘Are you patronising me, Miss Mitchell?’ he asked silkily, planting his feet back on the floor and leaning his torso threateningly towards her.
She was jolted out of her unsettling ruminations. ‘I prefer to think of it as pandering to your every annoying little whim,’ she said sweetly.
There was another small, dangerous silence. He seemed to specialise in them.
He rose, unfolding himself to his full height with sinister slowness.
‘Brave, aren’t you?’ he murmured.
The thin, menacing smile and the burning gold splinters in his eye told her it was not a compliment. ‘So… Instead of the lawyer I requested, Marvel-Mitchell Realties sends me a mere receptionist. A suspicious man might take that as an insult…’
‘But then, from your investigations you must know I’m not just a receptionist,’ Vivian defended herself. ‘I’m also Peter Marvel’s secretary-PA, and for the last eighteen months a full financial partner in the firm. I’m fully authorised to sign cheques and contracts on behalf of Marvel-Mitchell Realties.’
Not that she ever had. Up until now she had been quite happy to be
Peter’s sleeping partner—well, lightly dozing at any rate. She enjoyed her work and hadn’t looked on the investment of her unexpected inheritance in Peter’s firm as an excuse to throw her weight around the office, but rather as an investment in their shared future…
Brooding on that sadly faded dream, she didn’t notice him moving until a large hand was suddenly in front of her face. For an awful moment she thought his repressed hostility had finally erupted, but instead of the impact of his palm against her cheek, she felt him pull off her spectacles so that his image immediately dissolved into an indistinct blur.
‘Oh, please…’ She snatched vaguely, but he was too quick for her.
‘Salt build-up from all that sea-spray on the boat trip,’ he said blandly, retreating out of her reach. She squinted to see him produce a white square from his pocket and carefully rub the lenses with it. ‘They need a good clean.’
He held them up to the light and inspected them before breathing on the glass and polishing some more. ‘Pretty strong lenses. You must be extremely short-sighted.’
‘I am,’ she admitted truculently. She could have pointed out with brutal honesty that he had a few glaring imperfections of his own, but she was too soft-hearted for her own good—everyone said so. Even Peter who was supposed to be madly in love with her, had always been exasperated by her ability to empathise with the opposing point of view in an argument.
‘You must be rather helpless without them.’
Was that a hint of gloating in his voice? She squinted harder. ‘Not helpless, just short-sighted,’ she said flatly.
Unexpectedly he laughed. It was a disturbingly rich sound, unflavoured by bitterness. ‘How long have you worn them?’
‘Since I was thirteen.’
And never had she been more grateful, for once there were spectacles firmly perched on her nose she found the boys less inclined to stare endlessly at her ever-burgeoning breasts. From a potential sex-pot she had become an egghead, and even though her marks had been barely average she had managed to cling to the image until the other girls in her class had also started acquiring ogle-worthy figures.
‘May I have them back, please?’ she asked the blurry male outline, holding out her hand.
There was a pause. All he had to do was clench those strong fingers and the fragile frames would be crushed, leaving her more vulnerable than ever.
‘Of course.’
Instead of handing them to her, he replaced them himself, taking his time as he set them straight across the bridge of her nose, his face jumping back into disturbingly sharp focus, a close-up study in concentration as he tucked the ear-pieces carefully into place, his rough finger-pads sliding around on the ultra-sensitive skin behind her ears for long enough to make her shiver.
‘Th-thank you,’ she said reluctantly, edging back.
He followed her, his fingers still cradling the sides of her skull. ‘You have very speaking eyes.’ God, she hoped not! She blinked to clear her gaze of all expression and shuddered again at the intensity of his inspection. What was he searching for?
‘Are you cold?’
‘No.’ To her dismay it came out as a breathy squeak.
His hands dropped to her taut shoulders, then lightly drifted down the outsides of her arms to her tense fists.
‘You must be, after being out in that draughty old boat,’ he contradicted. ‘Your hands are as cold as ice and you’re trembling. You need some food inside you to warm you up.’
She cleared her throat. ‘I assure you, I’m perfectly warm,’ she said, pulling her hands away. ‘And I’m not hungry.’
‘Your stomach still feeling the effects of the trip?’ he murmured with annoying perception, his dark brown eyebrows lifted, the one above the eye-patch made raggedly uneven by the indent of the scar. ‘It’s a mistake to think the ride back will be easier on an empty stomach. You’ll feel much better with something inside you.’
Like you? The wayward thought popped into her head and Vivian went scarlet.
He stilled, looking curiously at her bright face and the horrified green eyes that danced away from his in guilty confusion. What in the world was the matter with her?
His eyebrows settled back down and his eyelid drooped disguising his expression as he took her silence as assent. ‘Good, then you’ll join me for lunch…’
‘Thank you, but the boat leaves again in—’ Vivian looked at her watch ‘—twenty minutes, and I still have to get back down to the wharf—’
‘The captain won’t leave until he’s checked with me first.’ He effortlessly cut the ground from under her feet.
‘I’m really not hungry—’
‘And if I said that I hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday and was far too ravenous to concentrate on anything but feeding my appetite?’
Your appetite for what? thought Vivian as she silently weighed up her options…which proved to be extremely limited.
‘I’d say bon appétit,’ she sighed. Maybe he’d be easier to handle on a full stomach.
‘On the principle that it’s better I take bites out of food than out of you?’ he guessed wolfishly, coming a little too close to her earlier, forbidden meanderings.
‘Something like that,’ she said primly.
‘While I arrange something suitably light for you and filling for me, why don’t you get those papers out so I can look them over?’
Looking them over was a long way from signing, but Vivian hastened to do as he instructed while he was gone. He had shut the door behind him, and opened it so quietly on his return that she wasn’t aware of him until he loomed over her at the desk. The first she knew of him was the hot, predatory breath on the back of her neck.
‘You move very quietly—’ she began, in breathless protest at his consistent ability to surprise her.
‘For a cripple?’ he finished with biting swiftness.
‘That wasn’t what I was going to say!’ she protested, sensing that sympathy was the last thing he would ever want from her.
‘You were going to use a more diplomatic term, perhaps?’ he sneered. ‘Disabled? Physically challenged?’
She was suddenly blindly furious with him. How dared he think that she would be so callous, let alone so stupid, as to taunt him, no matter what the provocation!
‘You move quietly for such a big man is what I was going to say before you rudely interrupted,’ she snapped. ‘And an over-sensitive one, too, I might add. I didn’t leap down your throat when you drew attention to the fact I was blind as a bat, did I? And I have two supposedly undamaged legs and yet I never seem to be able to coordinate them properly. I dreamed of being a ballerina when I was a girl…’ She trailed off wistfully, suddenly remembering who it was she was confiding in.
‘A ballerina?’ He looked at her incredulously, his sceptical eye running over her five-feet-ten frame and the generous curves that rumpled the professional smoothness of her suit.
‘It was just a childish thing,’ she said dismissively, inexplicably hurt by his barely concealed amusement.
He tilted his head. ‘So you dreamed of becoming a perfect secretary instead?’
‘I wasn’t qualified for much else,’ she said coldly. Academically she had been a dud, but she was responsible and willing and got on well with people, her final-year form-teacher had kindly pointed out to her concerned parents, and weren’t those things far more important in attaining happiness in the wider world than the mere possession of a brilliant brain?
Of course some people—like Janna and their younger brother, Luke, who was a musical prodigy; and her mother and father, an artist and a mathematician respectively—managed to have it all…good looks included. Not that her family ever consciously made her feel inadequate. Quite the reverse—they sometimes went overboard in their efforts to convince her that she belonged, that she was the much-loved special one of the family. The Chosen One—because she had been adopted as a toddler, and had proved the unexpected catalyst for the rapid arrival of a natural daughter and t
hen a son.
‘No other thwarted ambitions?’
‘No.’ She didn’t doubt he would laugh like a drain if she told him that her greatest desire was to be a wife and mother. It was her one outstanding talent: loving people—even when they made it very difficult for her. Sometimes almost impossible.
She looked down at the documents on the desk, concentrating on squaring them off neatly, aware of a nasty blurring of her eyesight that had nothing to do with foggy glasses.
The papers were suddenly snatched out of her fingers. ‘This is what you want me to sign?’
‘Mmm?’ Distracted by her thoughts, she took no notice of the faint emphasis. ‘Oh, yes.’ She pulled herself together, certain that her ugly suspicions were correct and that he was now going to announce dramatically that he had no intention of doing so.
Four months ago, when Nicholas Rose had signed a conditional agreement to sell his Auckland property, his lawyer had cited tax reasons for his client wishing to retain legal title until the end of April. Peter had been happy with the extended settlement date, for it had given him time to chase up the other parcels of land that had been part of the lucrative contract Marvel-Mitchell had entered into with a commercial property development company. Nicholas’s property had been the most critical, being a corner lot at the front of the planned shopping mall development, providing the only street access to the larger site. With that in his pocket, Peter had felt free to bid up on one or two other lots, whose owners had demanded much more than current market price.
Then Nicholas Rose had suddenly cancelled his appointment to sign the settlement in Auckland, citing a clause in the conditional agreement that gave the vendor the right to choose the time and place, and Janna had got sick, and Vivian had tried to be helpful and discovered two appalling truths: one, that Nicholas Rose was potentially an implacable enemy, and two, that her cosy dream of love and babies with Peter was shattered beyond redemption.
