by Daphne Clair
Samantha pressed the button on her key ring to unlock the car as they approached. Jase stepped forward to open the driver’s door for her.
“Nothing.” She regretted the comment. “He was a good father. He did a lot for me.” He’d always been happy to give her anything she expressed a desire for. As for those things that were inexpressible, that she’d not been able to articulate, no one could be expected to read minds, or irrational emotions. Certainly not a remorselessly practical man like Colin Magnussen.
She slipped into her seat, still thinking of her father and their complex, difficult relationship.
He had loved her, even though she’d been a disappointment to him, and perhaps he’d loved his wife more than she’d ever known. Certainly he’d never saddled Samantha with a stepmother. If there had been other women in his life, she’d never seen any sign of them when she was home for weekends and holidays from the exclusive boarding school he’d sent her to a few months after losing his wife.
After Samantha left home at twenty-one, removing herself from his overpowering shadow, and crossed the Tasman to Australia, she’d fully expected he would marry again. He wasn’t too old to find another trophy wife—nor to father the son he really wanted.
But he hadn’t. He’d simply become even more obsessively devoted to his business. And then he’d died.
Not wanting to think about that, she shook her head, and as Jase joined her in the car he asked, “Something wrong?”
Only my life.
Where had that come from? Her life was satisfactory in every way. She said, “Just thinking. Do you want to see another site?” As she spoke, rain spattered on the windscreen, quickly turning to a steady downpour.
“That’s enough for today,” Jase said, looking out at the rain. “This looks like it’s going on for a while, and I’ve a few ideas to work with now.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m hungry. What are you doing about lunch? Can we talk about this—” he lifted his electronic notebook “—while we eat?”
She took him to a restaurant close to the Magnussen Building, where she often entertained business visitors and was well-known to the staff, and they were seated promptly at her favourite table. The background music was not too loud, so they could talk without having to raise their voices. After they’d ordered, Samantha went to the ladies’ room and repaired her makeup.
Over her mixed seafood dish and Jase’s ham on a kumara mash, they discussed his preliminary findings. For a time she almost forgot the latent bone of contention between them.
His smile, his quick brain and ability to think outside the square, the timbre of his voice, the subtle male scent that reached her when he leaned forward with his mini-computer to demonstrate on the small screen what he was talking about—all combined to keep her captivated. They sparked ideas off each other in a way she found unexpectedly stimulating.
Finally Jase put away his notes and they ordered coffee.
Stirring sugar into his cup, he said, “When I’ve seen all I need to understand your processes, I’ll work on costings for you.”
“Bryn said some of what you installed for him might work for us.”
She felt his sharp glance, but he only nodded, saying in a neutral voice, “No point re-inventing the wheel. If it’s out there anywhere in the world I’ll find it. If not, I’ll design what you need and get it built.”
“At a price?” she murmured, and sipped at her coffee.
He shrugged. “You don’t get me cheap.” He leaned back a little, a hint of devilment entering his eyes. “But I’ve had no complaints so far.” He looked all male and devastatingly sexy. Her reaction was predictable, and irksome, but she hid it, putting her coffee cup carefully back in its saucer.
He probably couldn’t help himself. He had an innate response to…well, to any half-decent-looking female, she assumed. Some men were like that.
There were film stars, singers, sportsmen, who had the same power to draw women effortlessly into their orbit. Partly as a result of fame and good looks, but there was something else, some indefinable quality that gave them an edge over other men.
Whatever it was, Jase Moore had it in spades.
He said, studying her with a slightly barbed meditative look, “Did you ask Bryn onto your board just to spite me?”
Samantha raised her brows, coolly derisive. “I asked him because he was the obvious candidate.” Her hand curled about her cup.
“So you did what’s best for your business.” His voice was dry.
“And I trust him…as a good friend.”
His eyes searched her face, the expression in them seemingly made up of part anger, part suspicion and possibly—making her instantly defensive—part concern. “A friend. And you’re okay with that?”
“Of course,” she answered curtly.
He was still regarding her with that disconcertingly perceptive stare. Finally he said in a flat tone, “Then you were never really in love with him.”
“I never said I was,” she answered, her voice very even and only slightly acerbic. “That was your…fantasy.”
“Uh-huh.” Disbelief coloured his voice, lurked in his eyes. He still didn’t buy her disclaimer. “Speaking of fantasies…”
He stopped there and looked down, closing his hand about the coffee cup. Samantha said, “What?”
Jase raised his head. “You don’t want to know.”
But the renewed gleam in his eyes, the wry smile on his mouth, gave her a clue. For a moment their eyes held, and a peculiar feeling invaded her midriff.
The man had no right to indulge in fantasies about her.
She reminded herself, picking up her cup and sipping at it, that while he might have a physical reaction to her appearance, it didn’t mean he liked her as a person. She put down the cup and returned a carefully dispassionate gaze, her tone intentionally mocking. “That lurid?”
He laughed. “Not lurid at all,” he said. “Surprisingly…innocent. I saw a little girl, pale and pretty and not quite sure of herself. Lonely, maybe. Wistful. Longing for…something. Something she was afraid she’d never have, but was more important to her than anything.”
Samantha felt her mouth dry, and her cheeks grow cold.
Her tongue slipped over her lips, but the moisture only lasted a second. Drawing a deep breath, she tried to steady the whirling in her head. He’d been right when he said she didn’t want to hear this. How could he know more about her than she did herself? In the Middle Ages he’d have been burned at the stake. “That’s…” Her voice cracked and she tried again. “That’s quite an imagination you have.”
A strange expression flitted across his face. He picked up his cup and drained it.
Samantha swallowed, trying to ensure her voice had returned to normal. “I’m ready to go.”
He nodded, not commenting on her still almost full cup. Then he studied her for a second. “Are you okay?”
She raised her brows. “Of course.”
When she took out her credit card he protested, but gave in when she said he was a guest of Magnussen’s and that of course it would go on the company account.
Outside, the downpour had abated a little, but the lowering clouds had turned black and the light was dim, ozone sharpening the air.
Standing under the canopy outside the restaurant, Samantha turned to Jase. “Are you coming back to the office?”
He shook his head. “I’d like to get to my computer while this morning’s still clear in my mind. Thanks for lunch. And the site tour.” He paused, his eyes searching her face. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
“I only have a few steps to go.” Deliberately misunderstanding him.
He nodded, a twist of his mouth acknowledging that. “I’ll be in touch.” Unexpectedly he bent his head and brushed his lips across her cheek before turning towards where he’d parked his car.
Ten minutes later, sitting at her desk staring into space, she could still feel the touch of his mouth.
Her secretary en
tered, and stopped before she reached the desk. “Are you all right?” she asked. Just as Jase had.
Samantha snapped herself out of a confused reverie. “Yes. What is it, Judy?”
For the rest of the day she firmly kept Jase and his unsettling remarks at the very back of her mind.
When she reached home that night after working late, she was tired but restless. Following a quick meal of tinned soup and a couple of pieces of toast, she poured herself a glass of wine and switched on the TV but found nothing she wanted to watch. Then she flicked through the daily paper before flinging it aside and picking up a book that also failed to hold her attention.
She put it down on the elegant metal-and-misted-glass coffee table, smoothed the cushion she’d been resting against, deciding she needed softer ones, and began aimlessly wandering about the spacious apartment.
She’d bought it after selling the last house her father had built for his family, less than a year before her mother’s death. It had seemed full of life when her mother was alive—she was always hostessing parties or business dinners, celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, having guests to stay. Following her death it had seemed empty, too large for Samantha and her father, and it was certainly far too big for Samantha alone, even if she’d kept their housekeeper on.
Here she had a cleaner who came three times a week and left everything spick and span. There was nothing for her to do.
Maybe she should get a cat. Or a dog. Only the regulations in her building didn’t allow either. Some of the residents kept birds, but she’d always had a feeling of angry empathy with caged birds, even knowing that those bred to it wouldn’t survive in the outside world.
Her thoughts kept circling around Jase and the extraordinary so-called fantasy he’d regaled her with.
She shivered. No one knew how she’d felt as a little girl. He’d been guessing.
Every only child must have felt lonely at times. And didn’t all children long for something—a puppy, a bicycle, a special doll, a baby brother…or their parents’ attention?
Jase hadn’t said anything specific and unique to her.
Had he deliberately played with her mind, like a phoney stage clairvoyant speaking in generalisations and knowing gullible members of the audience would refer it to themselves and unwittingly give clues to further the illusion? A stirring of anger grew into a cold rage. Stupid of her to have fallen for that cheap trick. And what had he thought to gain from it?
At least, she hoped, she hadn’t allowed him to see how much it had affected her. She wasn’t a child any more, but a grown woman who had learned how to hide her feelings, to appear impregnable, in absolute control of herself and her surroundings. Of her emotions. Proving to her father that when it came her turn to run the firm he’d worked so hard and long to build, that he’d poured his whole life into, she wouldn’t let him down. That his little girl, as he’d used to call her, was as tough and strong and indomitable as himself.
A second glass of wine, breaking her usual limit when home alone, didn’t help her inner turmoil, only made her inexplicably want to cry. Of course she didn’t give in to the maudlin impulse. She hadn’t cried since her mother’s death and she wasn’t going to start now.
Working with Jase wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared, though she was always conscious of tension between them, the undercurrent of sexuality that was never totally absent. Determinedly businesslike, she was pleasant but impersonal, and he seemed willing to go along with that, though occasionally she caught a slightly acerbic gleam in his eye, an unsettling curl to his mouth when he looked at her, his eyes resting on her for a fraction longer than necessary.
They visited another Magnussen’s site, a private home for a wealthy Chinese family who had particular requests for curves and pillars that signified good fortune. Samantha actually had a secret preference for building homes where people would live, families grow up, though she wouldn’t admit to Jase that she didn’t always love the concrete-steel-and-glass structures that formed a large part of her firm’s business.
Eventually she gave him a name tag and carte blanche to visit any of the company’s operations after clearing it with the site managers. When he’d collected the information he wanted, he didn’t contact her until he had finished a preliminary report.
Together they pored over diagrams, pricings and plans spread over drafting tables in her office. He’d e-mailed them to her computer, but this way she found it easier to comprehend them. Rigidly she suppressed her inevitable interior response to his smile, the accidental brush of her arm against his sleeve, the brief waft of his personal scent when he reached across to point something out to her.
At times a comment of his or a question of hers led them into other areas than the immediate task at hand.
She made a passing remark one day about wishing they could go back in time and visit famous buildings that had succumbed to disaster or decay over the centuries. And Jase said quite casually, “Mmm-hmm. Some of the world’s best physicists believe that time travel will be achieved some time in the present century.”
“Seriously?” Samantha queried. She straightened from the chart in front of them to stare at him.
“Seriously,” he confirmed. “It seems that scientifically it’s not impossible.”
It had to do with black holes in space and other concepts she’d never really understood, but the way Jase explained the basics led her to exclaim, “You should have been a teacher.”
“You think? My teachers would turn in those early graves they claimed I was driving them to.”
“But you must have been bright!”
“If I was, it didn’t show. I think I spent more time in detention than in class.”
She regarded him thoughtfully. “I suppose you were a rebel.”
Shrugging, he said, “A pain in the posterior. Barely scraped through my final exams. My parents despaired.” Momentarily he looked regretful. “I try to make it up to them. Eventually I got a degree in computer science and physics.”
“Didn’t anybody recognise your potential?”
“A late bloomer,” he said, then admitted, “I did get pretty good marks in maths at school. And science was okay, but I was banned from the lab after…well, a couple of unilateral experiments that were…um, less than successful.”
Samantha tried to look disapproving, but couldn’t help a laugh escaping.
His eyes lit with curiosity, he said, “I’ve never seen you do that before.”
“Do what?” She stepped back from him, automatically checking for some gesture she’d made.
“Laugh so naturally. And don’t do that!” he added, scowling.
She blinked. “Don’t laugh?”
“No.” He looked exasperated. “Don’t close up every time I say something halfway personal.”
Samantha stiffened. Then realised it was exactly what she’d done. Her face felt much as it did when her beautician applied a herbal mask that hardened over her entire face and would crack if she changed her expression.
Jase said, “You should laugh that way more often. It makes you look human.”
Somehow that wounded her. “I am human!”
“Yeah,” he said with a kind of scathing weariness. “And working hard at hiding it.”
Her laugh this time was meant to be a scornful negation, but came out a shade too high and definitely not natural. “That’s a weird thing to say. As if you thought I was one of your computer-generated holographs or something.”
“Uh-uh, not mine.” Something new came into his eyes—something uncomfortably piercing, and he shook his head. “There are times, though, when I feel like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner.”
In the film, Ford’s lead character fell in love with a convincingly “human” robot, Samantha recalled. She’d seen it twice and had fought tears at the scene where Ford proved to the girl that her so-called memories of her family, her childhood, were false and she herself was a “replicant.” Not a real person at all.
>
Making her voice crisp and damning, Samantha said, “You spend too much time with computers. Your imagination is running away with you.”
“Maybe.” But after a long, head-on-one-side, glinting look that engendered a defensiveness in her, he turned his attention back to the cost projection in front of them, apparently dismissing the unsettling exchange.
“I’ll take it to the board,” she promised some time later, “but we don’t have unlimited cash to spend on expensive toys for boys.”
Jase raised his dark brows.
“I know—I’m being sexist,” she conceded. “But I’ve noticed how men’s eyes light up at the idea of a new piece of machinery. Sometimes the cost is way out of proportion to the darn thing’s usefulness. The more complicated it is, the more often it seems to break down. And once a sale’s made, too many firms don’t want to know.”
“With me,” he said, “you’ll get an ironclad guarantee. Once I’m committed, I don’t walk away.”
Predictably, the board was impressed, and with only two diehards against, voted a budget for the proposal that Jase presented to them in person during their meeting.
After the others left, Jase said, “I’ll send you a contract, Samantha, and you can have your lawyers go over it.”
“Yes. Thank you.” Her glance went to the photograph of Magnussen’s founder that hung above the conference table, looking indomitable and maybe disapproving. Unconsciously she chewed at her lower lip.
“You have a problem?” Jase asked.
“My father might not have agreed with this.”
“Your father’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes.” She couldn’t help a faint smile. No timeworn platitudes for Jase Moore. Not “passed on” or “gone.” Simply dead.
“Did you always do what he wanted?”
“No, but he wasn’t easy to challenge. He could never admit he might be wrong.” And he’d been especially annoyed when his own daughter disagreed with him.
“What about your mother?”
Her mother had seemed to live to please her father. A former photographic model with a unique ability to shine in company, she’d been an asset in her husband’s social and business life. Occasionally, with a winning smile and a light word or two, she’d poured delicately perfumed oil on waters he had ruffled, but always deferred to his opinions and his needs. The perfect mate for an autocratic man.