The Boss's Proposal

by Cathy Williams

  ‘No!’ she cried. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Don’t what?’ His eyes raked mercilessly over her.

  ‘Don’t shut me out. Please! Please?’

  ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t. Isn’t that what you’ve done to me?’

  That expression of vulnerability brought a wave of tenderness over her that made her legs tremble. She hadn’t thought that she was shutting him out. She’d been protecting herself in the only way she knew how, protecting herself against the possibility of ever being hurt again.

  ‘Won’t you let me in?’ she asked quietly, reaching out and placing her hand flat on his chest.

  She felt his body tense but she kept her hand there, needing the warmth of his skin through his shirt; then he turned away and rasped, ‘Shut the door behind you.’

  He stalked across to the small couch in the corner of the room and, her heart beating wildly, Vicky closed the door and walked across to his bed, and perched on the edge, crossing her feet at the ankles and loosely entwining her fingers on her lap.

  She could hear the steady background hum of the air-conditioning system, which somehow only managed to intensify the silence between them.

  He wiped his hands across his eyes and then looked at her, waiting for her to speak. She’d entered his territory and now it was going to be up to her to speak her mind, never mind the degree of receptiveness in the audience.

  ‘I didn’t mean to shut you out,’ she began hesitantly. ‘I didn’t think I had, anyway. I mean, I came over here at your suggestion and you can’t say that I’ve tried to monopolise Chloe’s attention. In fact, I’ve hardly seen her at all these past few days!’ Her automatic position of self-defence cranked into gear, but when she looked at him she discovered that it wasn’t working with him.

  ‘We’re not talking about Chloe.’

  ‘No,’ Vicky murmured inaudibly. She drew a deep breath. ‘I suppose…I suppose you’re right. I went through a bad time with Shaun and I’ve let it influence my life. When I saw you…you brought everything back. I…it was like being hit by a roller coaster at full speed…I felt like my past was catching up with me again…and I was scared. Terrified, in fact,’ she amended truthfully, reliving what she’d felt when she’d first set eyes on that familiar, yet not familiar face. ‘I thought you were going to be just like Shaun. It didn’t take long for me to realise…’ Her voice wittered away into silence as she sensed dangerous ground ahead. Her fingers plucked at her skirt.

  ‘What? For you to realise what?’ There was a watchfulness about him that hadn’t been there a few minutes previously and that was almost as alarming as his bitterness.

  ‘For me to realise…that you weren’t anything like Shaun. Your brother was cruel, sadistic and addicted to getting his own way.’ She couldn’t sit still any longer and she stood up and walked jerkily towards the window and looked out, not seeing anything.

  ‘And what was I?’ he asked with mild curiosity. She could feel him staring at her and her stomach responded by going into knots.

  ‘Nothing like your brother,’ was as far as she would go on that one, and for the moment he seemed to accept her staccato answer. ‘I should have left as soon as I could. I had planned to, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But I…enjoyed the job. I’d spent months doing menial work to pay the bills and, even though I knew it was dangerous working for you in case you ever found out the truth about me, it was tempting to carry on doing it for a little bit longer, enjoying the challenge of a job where I had to actually think. Never mind the money, which was very useful. I was finally in a position where I could afford to spend a bit on Chloe and on the house. I was putting money aside. I told myself that soon I’d leave…and then…’

  ‘Your past jumped up to bite you on the hand when you were least expecting it. Another shock to your system, no doubt.’ His voice was laced with jeering cynicism and for a brief second her eyes flashed angrily at him. He was deliberately making this hard for her, but what could she do about that?

  ‘Yes,’ she answered meekly, and he shot her a darkly challenging look before glancing away.

  ‘So tell me why you’ve come,’ he said, mildly curious now, not giving an inch. ‘To prove right the old adage that confession is good for the soul? Nothing further to add to the litany of past regrets?’

  ‘To tell you that I’ve been a fool,’ she said with a shuddering sigh, and this time there was something different when he looked at her, although his voice was casual when he spoke.

  ‘Oh, yes? And why would that be?’

  ‘Because…’ Her voice faltered now that she had hit the thin ice patch and risked falling in. What would he do if she confessed that she was in love with him? Would he laugh? Look embarrassed? Launch into an immediate retraction of his offer of marriage with the threat of real emotion entering into the equation, messing up his tidy little convenient proposition? None of these possible scenarios did anything for her self-confidence.

  ‘Because…what?’

  ‘I’ve thought about what you offered…’ she began again, veering away from one patch of thin ice towards another. ‘You know…your proposal…’

  ‘What makes you think that that still stands?’ he asked indifferently, though his eyes were still narrowed and watchful on her.

  ‘I’m sorry…I thought…’

  ‘But let’s just say, hypothetically, that I was still prepared to enter into an arrangement with you.’

  ‘Well, talking hypothetically,’ Vicky volunteered nervously, ‘I’ve realised that I would be prepared to go through with such an arrangement. I’ve looked at the way you are with Chloe…unless it was all one big act…’

  ‘I don’t pretend things I don’t feel,’ he responded grimly, and she wanted to scream at him, Well, what do you feel about me? Aside from the occasional burst of lust? Anything at all?

  ‘In that case, I think it might be a good idea. I know it’s not an ideal situation…’ She smiled wistfully, imagining what the ideal situation would be. ‘But it could work…’

  ‘And I’ve been thinking as well.’ His voice was serious, and she knew what he was going to say even before the words were out. It was like having a bucket of freezing water poured over her. ‘I can’t marry you, Vicky.’

  ‘No. Well. Fair enough.’ A great well of despair washed over her. ‘I…that’s fine… It was stupid of me to have resurrected that old proposal anyway. When we get back to London we can work something out…I know Chloe would be heartbroken if she didn’t see you again…’ Her feet, which were desperate to get her to the door, seemed to have been nailed to the floorboards. Amazing. She almost groaned with the frustration of it.

  ‘Don’t you want to know why I’ve changed my mind?’

  ‘No…really…it’s enough that you have…’ She heard the misery in her voice and cringed.

  ‘I’ve been doing some thinking of my own,’ he said quietly, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. He swept his fingers through his hair, but continued to stare at the ground until she eventually sidled a bit closer to him—because, if she didn’t, she wasn’t sure she would be able to catch a word he was saying. Not that he’d begun to say anything at all.

  She felt a little braver now that he wasn’t staring at her and reducing her thought processes to pulp. ‘There’s no need to explain anything to me. I mean it.’

  ‘There is.’ He favoured her with a brief glance, then he resumed his peculiar inspection of the carpet, as though he was looking for something he had misplaced there. His vocabulary, from the looks of it, she thought, which appeared to have deserted him completely.

  The seconds dragged into one minute, two minutes, five minutes, until she said edgily, ‘Well, explain away, then.’

  Her remark was greeted with another quick look, too quick for her to read the expression in his grey eyes.

  ‘If you’ve been watching my interaction with your daughter, then I’ve been watching yours, looking at th
e way you two reach out automatically for one another, the way Chloe looks across to you every so often for support…and you were right. Marriage and family is about more than arrangements and practicalities. It’s more than a business proposition, two people adding up the pros and cons for living under the same roof, sharing the same house and then trying to work out whether it’ll be worth the effort.’

  His words jabbed into her like the blades of a knife, and every jab was accompanied by a sharp twist.

  ‘I’ve always been sceptical about love; I’ve seen too many friends start out with hope and end up with ashes, and your relationship with Shaun was just another example of why emotion never gets anyone anywhere. Or so I thought. The fact is, emotion is all we have, and without that marriage is a sham, a hell on earth. It takes more than a lack of argument to make a good marriage, just like virtue isn’t necessarily a lack of obvious vice.’ He sighed deeply and raised his eyes to hers. ‘Hence my change of mind.’

  Vicky’s head felt as though it was stuffed with cotton wool. The inside of her mouth wasn’t faring much better either.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that you don’t love me?’ she said in a high, flippant voice, to defuse the situation which was threatening to overwhelm her. Remind me, she thought, never to ask someone for honesty. Much better to avoid it at all costs.

  Instead of finding answering relief in his eyes, he didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’m not saying anything of the sort.’

  His words dropped into the silence like bombshells. First of all she thought that she’d perhaps heard incorrectly, then it occurred to her that she’d misinterpreted what he had said. Hadn’t there been a double negative in there somewhere? Lastly, she figured that perhaps it was just an elaborate counter-bluff, maybe containing a pun, although his face was unsmiling. A wash of unaccustomed colour stained his cheeks, but he was still holding her gaze, waiting for her to say something.

  ‘Then what are you saying?’ she asked into the oppressive silence. More requests for honesty, she thought numbly, could only end in tears. Hers.

  ‘I’m telling you that I love you and I can’t put you through a marriage that’s one-sided. I thought,’ he carried on, now addressing his fingers, ‘that I could show you how much…how much I…well, you know what I’m saying here…’ His flush deepened and his voice was unsteady, as though every word was an effort. ‘I…but it hasn’t worked…and…’

  ‘So you’re saying that you love me?’ She could feel the wild stirrings of hope pushing through her woolly-headed brain, and as fast as she tried to shove it back it resprouted. Her heart was thundering inside her.

  ‘I’m saying that I love you, Victoria Lockhart.’ This time his voice was steady and his eyes never left her face.

  She smiled slowly and went to sit alongside him on the sofa. ‘Would you mind very much telling me that over and over again, because I’m finding it difficult to take in?’

  He carried on looking at her, and suddenly the humour was back in his eyes.

  ‘Now, why would I do that?’ he drawled, sitting back on the chair so that he could have an all-encompassing view of her. From the expression on his face, it was a view he liked.

  ‘Because I seem to have spent my life searching for you and I need you to tell me that my love for you is returned. You forget, I’m a woman whose self-esteem has taken some battering in her life…’ Her self-esteem had never felt better. When she thought of Shaun and the emotional mess she’d been, she had the unreal feeling that she was thinking of a different person altogether.

  ‘Well, there might be a bit of a price to pay…’

  ‘What kind of price?’ She looked at him with wide-eyed innocence, but there was a wicked smile on her face that matched his.

  He leaned forward, curled his hand around the nape of her neck and pulled her to him, then he proceeded to kiss her thoroughly, only stopping to say into her hungry mouth, ‘The marrying kind of price…’ His tongue dipped back into her mouth and she laughingly struggled her way out of the heady embrace.

  ‘There’s no need,’ she said, pink-faced but serious. Her hands pressed against his chest and she could feel the movement of his heart beating against his ribs. He reached to clasp both hands in her hair, on either side of her face, while the soft pads of his thumbs stroked her temples, her eyes, her cheekbones. Her small breasts ached for the same soft, seductive caress. ‘I know that your sense of duty and responsibility prompted you to propose originally, but…’

  ‘If only you knew,’ he murmured, now stroking the slender column of her neck, then travelling inexorably downwards to cup her jutting breasts.

  ‘If only I knew…what?’ Her words ended on a gasp as he unbuttoned her and scooped her breasts out of their lacy bondage, rubbing his thumbs erotically over the raised tips.

  ‘When I proposed to you,’ he said, stilling his fingers so that he could capture every ounce of her attention, ‘I meant it. I wanted to marry you. I was determined to claw my way to your love if I had to die in the process. And now, my darling…’ His fingers resumed their expert manipulation of her breasts, sending a convulsive shudder through her body. ‘I don’t intend to let you go. Ever.’ He dipped his head to trail the tip of his tongue delicately around her nipple, circling, touching, flicking, until her unsteady breathing became small moans of pleasure. ‘I want to marry you, just like I want Chloe to be a daughter to me, like she’s a daughter to you…’ He suckled on her breast, just long enough to make her slide a few centimetres down the sofa, long enough for his hand to gently curve around her thigh, massaging the willing flesh and edging upwards.

  ‘And then, who knows?’ He looked up at her and his grey eyes were dark with passion and tenderness. ‘More babies?’ He nuzzled her and she could feel him smiling into her breasts. ‘If you thought you’d found the archetypal tycoon, then, my darling, you were wrong, because the prospect of domesticity has never seemed so good…’

  ‘Are you telling me that I’ve tamed a tiger?’ She watched his dark head against her body and was thrillingly, sinfully happy.

  ‘Not,’ he said, shifting his body so that he could unzip his trousers, ‘completely. In one very important aspect, my love, you’ll never be able to tame me…’

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-8637-9

  THE BOSS’S PROPOSAL

  First North American Publication 2002.

  Copyright © 2001 by Cathy Williams.

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  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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