by Susan Napier
It wasn't until they were seated, waiting for the wine steward to return with pre-dinner drinks, that Max looked at her fully again, with an odd intensity.
'I don't think we said hello, did we?' She was the focus of a magnetically attractive smile. 'Hello, Sarah.'
'Hello. . .' She was annoyed at the breathlessness of her reply.
'Still stumbling over my name? Do you realise that the only time you use it easily is when you're in my arms.' He paused, musingly. 'I suppose I shouldn't object if you choose to make my name an endearment.'
She avoided his teasing eyes. This was another man again, a relaxed, almost whimsical one without that careful control that had seemed such an intrinsic part of his personality. Consequently, he looked younger, less jaded, more dangerously attractive than ever.
'Black suits you,' he continued, appraising her further. 'A pity there wasn't something black for Images' He leaned back slightly to allow the wine steward to place their drinks on the table. 'Although what we have is quite sufficient—more than sufficient. It's shaping so well that the feature may be syndicated to other Wilde publications.'
Sarah wasn't sure she liked that idea and her doubt must have shown for he said, with mild exasperation:
'Don't tell me you haven't considered the possibility, it was always on the cards. You're not going to turn coy now, it won't wash, in view of—'
'In view of what?' she asked, when he stopped and took a pull at his Martini.
'The fact that you've enjoyed yourself on this assignment,' he continued smoothly after the tiniest of hesitations. 'Barring minor . . . er . . . differences of opinion, that is. What do you think of the proofs?'
Sarah shrugged. 'They're excellent.' But he didn't need her to tell him that.
He made a derisive sound. 'No self-congratulations? Don't you possess any vanity at all?'
'As much as anyone, I suppose.'
'No, you don't.' The hazel eyes gave her a curiously baffled look. 'You frequently walk past a mirror without even a glance . . . even when you're wearing my father's best efforts. You never touch your hair, or make any of the subconscious gestures a woman makes to check her appearance. I can't believe that you're so genuinely unaware of the effect you're creating.
'What effect is that?'
'It's not necessarily a strength you know,' he said, ignoring her question. 'A small dose of vanity or envy would round off some of those edges that other people bark their shins upon.'
'Is that what you prescribe. A teaspoon of the seven deadly sins?' said Sarah lightly.
'Perhaps not all seven . . . but I think I've made myself clear on that subject before.'
'Crystal. You have a winning way with an insult,' Sarah told him, a trifle tartly.
'Learned at my mother's knee.'
Sarah's over-sensitised ears detected a hint of underlying bitterness in the smooth reply. Was he speaking the literal truth? Was this another tiny splinter of vulnerability threatening to work its way under her skin? She resisted it, remembering how skilled he was at manipulating people.
'You're lucky,' she replied. 'The only things I learned at my mother's knee were already thousands of years old. I decided not to embark on a course of continuing education, whereas you . . .'
'Now, now,' he admonished, with a gleam of appreciation, 'no fighting tonight. Shall we declare a truce?'
Sarah took a cautious taste of her sherry. She had better be careful, she didn't have much of a head for alcohol.
'Sometimes I can't help it,' she confessed.
'I know what you mean,' he murmured. Thick, dark lashes lay briefly against his skin as he looked down, idly stirring his Martini with the olive on a toothpick. Then the lashes swept back revealing the large dark pupils ringed by a halo of hazel. 'Why do you never wear any jewellery?'
'I... I don't own much.'
'Except your wedding ring.'
Sarah looked down at her left hand. That's an heirloom. It belonged to Simon's grandmother.' 'No engagement ring?'
She was past resenting his inquisitiveness. Besides, by answering some of his questions yesterday she had given him tacit approval to ask more. 'We didn't have a formal engagement. And anyway, Simon didn't believe in over-adornment, or in acquiring possessions for the sake of it.'
'Except you.'
Sarah's fingers curled into her palms at the quiet irony. 'That's not quite fair,' she protested, equally quietly. 'There was more between Simon and me than. . . perhaps I shouldn't have said what I did yesterday.'
'Why not? Who was it who said that one owes respect to the living; to the dead one owes only the truth?'
'Voltaire,' replied Sarah automatically, having Come across the quotation in her extensive reading after Simon's death, when she was trying to come to grips with her feelings about grief and guilt and the resulting emotional mess.
The man across from her smiled. He was too clever by half. Sarah gave him her haughty look.
'You should wear jewellery—gold perhaps, something warm and yellow, or rich and red, like rubies,' he said, to punish her, his eyes drifting over her bare ears and throat, to the beat of the pulse above her collarbone. 'But perhaps you're right,' he continued provocatively, 'bareness makes its own statement. . . and it's often a more interesting one!' His eyes dropped lower and glinted with satisfaction as she hastily brought her arms up on to the table in front of her, resting her chin on her hands, shielding the warm swell of her breasts from his gaze.
Sarah felt herself flush with a mixture of embarrassment and annoyance. Damn him for a disturbing devil! She had worn the dress braless before and not felt self-conscious, yet he made her feel a brazen hussy. In fact she had tried a strapless bra under the dress this afternoon, but the lace had been bulkily obvious under the thin silk and she had stuffed it back into her drawer, feeling a coward for having tried it on at all.
'Calm down, Sarah,' he said mockingly. 'I'm not going to leap on you in the middle of the restaurant. Credit me with a little finesse.'
'Oh, I credit you with more than a little,' she managed sarcastically, 'and it's not exactly a calming thought.'
'I'm glad you find it exciting,' he said, wilfully misunderstanding her and then disconcerted her by changing the subject. 'I meant what I said about your working overseas. Why don't you consider it? London perhaps? Wilde's has several publishing concerns there. I could make some enquiries if you like.'
'I already work for Wilde's,' she said, not sure whether he was serious or whether it was just part of his line.
'You're being obtuse,' was all he said.
'Still intent on playing the fairy godmother?' she taunted, deciding to take him lightly, fearing to do anything else.
His mouth turned down at the corners. 'I admit that at the time you accused me of being condescending my attitude may have been rather patronising, but I've since been cured of that. I suspect that Cinderella possesses more than enough of her own brand of magic.'
And with that enigmatic utterance he turned his attention to the listings in the leather folder beside his plate, and suggested that she choose from the menu for them both.
'Tom told me that cooking is one of your hobbies.' Sarah had a momentary frisson at that, remembering the other things she had told Tom during their numerous conversations. 'Well, wine is one of mine, so let's collaborate.' And, drily: 'Your surprise is most unflattering. I know I open car doors for women but that doesn't mean I'm the complete chauvinist pig. Have I ever given you reason to think that I was?'
In truth, he hadn't. He was quite prepared to meet a woman on her own intellectual level, whatever it was, and certainly showed no signs of treating them as second-class citizens. And, Sarah realised with a flash of wisdom, he was confident enough of his own masculinity not to have to reinforce it by acting the macho male.
Together they decided on champagne to accompany the first course of smoked roe pâté and vichyssoise soup and with the main course of chateaubriand a distingui
shed French red. Both agreed that dessert would be superfluous.
As the conversation flowed easily back and forth, Sarah relaxed enough to enjoy herself. She was seeing yet another facet of this most complex of men, a fascinating one. Max was cultured, witty without effort, mining a rich vein of humour which abhored posturing and pretentiousness. They discussed books and music, people and current events, exploring mutual ground and areas of irreconcilable difference alike, sometimes earnestly, sometimes humorously. Yet Sarah was ever aware of the undercurrents to the conversation and whenever she seemed in danger of forgetting the fact that they were man and woman, Max would re-introduce that note of seductive intimacy to which she was increasingly vulnerable.
'I'm glad Teresa gave you a fringe,' he said suddenly, in the middle of a discussion about New Zealand wines. 'It means you can't hide your hair away any more, even when you scrape it back as you have done tonight. Is that piece of not-so-subtle body language directed at me?'
'I always wear it up,' Sarah said, put off her stride.
'Not always, surely,' he murmured.
'I sometimes wear it loose at home.'
'In bed?'
'Yes, I mean, no,' stammered Sarah. It was amazing how evocative a couple of words in those chocolate-flavoured tones could be. It raised all sorts of images between them. 'I usually plait it at night, otherwise it gets very tangled.'
'I imagine it would, but it would be a pleasure to untangle,' he said softly over the narrow rim of his champagne glass. 'Does confining it so strictly during the day enhance the nightly private pleasure of letting it loose?'
Sarah's mouth went dry. 'You make it sound almost wicked,' she said faintly.
'It is wicked, a wicked waste.' He finished his creamy, chilled leek and potato soup and rested his chin on linked fingers, as he often did when thinking. Sarah concentrated on her pâté, her face a serene mask while her heart skipped erratically, waiting . . . waiting ...
Yet again he indulged in a verbal retreat, leaving her poised on the edge of frustration. When was he going to put into words what was in both their minds, so that she could get her little rehearsed refusal over and done with? This time he was talking about Sir Richard, describing his working habits with a mixture of respect and unfilial sarcasm.
'He sounds rather formidable,' Sarah commented. 'I should be in a constant state of terror if I had to work for him.'
He looked amused. 'People call me formidable, but you're not scared of me . . . quite the reverse.'
'Perhaps they mean formidable? said Sarah, giving the word its French pronunciation.
'Is that a compliment?' he pounced.
'From me? Never!' Sarah hid her smile in her second glass of champagne. The heady brew was so fine and light and dry that it almost crackled in her mouth. She felt she could drink it all night and not be affected.
'Never say never, Sarah, that's tempting fate. I'll get a good word from you yet.'
'I think you have a surfeit of those already.'
'Not from you. But I can wait.'
'Somehow I get the impression that you're not very good at that.'
'I'm learning,' he said, with wry self-mockery. 'You like getting your own way almost as much as I do. You'd have made a good schoolmarm ... or mother. Were you and your husband planning children?'
Sarah shook her head abruptly.
'Don't you want to have children?' He sounded vaguely shocked.
'Your chauvinism is showing,' she told him with a trace of the schoolmarm. 'But yes, I do; some time.'
'Then it was your husband who didn't.'
Recognising the relentless look on his face Sarah gave in gracefully. It no longer had the power to hurt her, anyway. 'Simon was the child in our marriage,' she said candidly. 'Or rather, his talent was.'
'My God, it seems to me that you got precious little out of that marriage,' he said, with what she thought was unnecessary harshness.
'I got myself. I grew up. I learned about art, and beauty and truth, and about love,' she smiled wistfully.
'And where have you put all this education to use?' he asked brutally. 'How many men have you been out with, like this, since Simon died?'
'A few.' To relieve the intensity of their conversation
Sarah made a bright joke about some of her matchmaking editor's pushier candidates, but it fell flat and Max muttered something under his breath. 'What did you say?'
‘I said—clumsy idiots.'
'My clumsiness as much as anything,' Sarah admitted. 'I went out with them for all the wrong reasons. At that stage I wasn't ready to make any kind of concession to any man.'
'But now you're ready to experiment a little,' he said, deceptively casual.
Her reply was too quick, too emphatic. 'No. No. Not at all.'
'Liar,' he challenged and she stilled, like an animal cornered. Max's steady eyes were almost straw-coloured in the lamplight—the colour of the champagne in her glass. Champagne eyes and champagne, they both beckoned her to recklessness.
In a moment she was lost, her own honesty defeating her, at last giving in to the strength of the attraction he held for her. She had tried to avoid it, been careful to nurture dislike, explaining away the tension that she felt in his presence as antagonism. But it wasn't. It was more complex than that, and more simple. It was sexual tension, and she felt it enveloping her now, prickling across her body like a rash. She lowered her lids, flustered, and lifted them again. He was still watching her, with a virile certainty that was intoxicating; he was way ahead of her, on all counts. He knew she wanted him, he wanted her—the desire in his eyes no longer veiled, but burning a steady flame. Sarah didn't want to fight him, or herself, any more. There was a sense of inevitability about it, as though every encounter, since their first meeting, had been leading up to this. Deep within her the battle had been fought and lost some time before; only her timidity, her fear of the unknown depths of her own passion, had prevented her from admitting it.
The searing moment of mutual recognition was interrupted by the waiter, who took their silence as a cue to offer a few pleasantries, cleared the table and re-laid for the main course. The red wine was delivered, opened, tasted and poured, and the chateaubriand, a tender, succulent fillet of beef, crusty brown on the outside and meltingly pink at the centre, arrived on a silver salver surrounded by an array of crisp-tender vegetables.
Max calmly began to eat while Sarah wondered where her appetite had gone, and tried to ignore the pangs of a more urgent hunger.
'Eat. It's good,' she was told, and Max smiled approvingly as she obediently picked at her food.
'What a good child you are when you're not arguing.'
'I'm not a child.'
'You are in some things,' he said, supremely confident. 'You don't know very much about men. About the way they think and act, about how they feel in relationship to you. Don't you know that coolness and disinterest is a challenge to any man's masculinity?'
'Is that all I am to you, a challenge?'
His smile glittered at the note of chagrin. 'Mere challenge I can resist; mystery is something else. The question is, what am I to you?'
That was a question Sarah didn't even want to consider.
'A challenge, perhaps,' she murmured, trying for archness and achieving mockery.
His eyes narrowed. 'Perhaps you do know. Perhaps this nervous apprehension is just a pose.'
She didn't pretend to misunderstand. 'I loved Simon. I never looked at another man while he was alive, and afterwards I never wanted to.' Then she felt embarrassed at the blatancy of her statement, but Max simply nodded and began to draw an intricate pattern with his fork on the white linen table-cloth. A lock of straight black hair fell forward over his brow and he was frowning slightly with concentration. Sarah longed to lean over and make contact, sooth out those furrows, make him look at her again with that warm, sensuous gaze.
'What about friends? People you knew before and during your marriage . . . othe
r artists?'
‘I more or less lost touch with them all,' she said meekly. 'Quite a few of Simon's so-called friends were just hitching a ride on his reputation. After he had gone we had no common interest any more.'
The pattern became even more intricate. 'All of them. You have no contacts in the art world now?'
'Acquaintances. Except—' she paused, fascinated by the convoluted wanderings of the fork, and the fork paused also.
'Except?'
'I have one friend, a painter ... I owe him a lot.' 'You have a close relationship?' 'Not the kind you're implying.'
'No romance?' He seemed to tire of his game, throwing down the implement and stretching his shoulders back against his chair. He sounded vaguely triumphant, Sarah thought, annoyed. It was a bit late now, asking whether she was involved elsewhere, when he had already made his dishonourable intentions clear.
'No romance,' she repeated neutrally.
'What about before Simon came on the scene?'
'Do you want the story of my life?' she asked, exasperated, and sighed when he nodded. 'No, there was no one before Simon.'
'Just establishing precedence,' he mocked. 'So there's only been one man in your life, and he put you to sleep. It's about time you were woken up.'
'Have we swopped fairy-tales now?' Oddly enough she did feel as if she had woken from a long sleep—dazed and heavy, and filled with languid longings. She used her cutlery slowly, deliberately, aware of the eyes on her mouth as she ate, making of it a sensuous act. The rich white béarnaise sauce was redolent of tarragon and chives, which she would forever after associate with this meal.... this man. She sipped her wine, and the ruby liquid left her mouth warm and red.
'I think we're going to create a tale all of our own,' he replied. He seemed on the verge of saying more, but restrained himself. At times this evening he had seemed almost hesitant, as if pondering the consequences of what he was doing, and at others he had given her potent reminders that he was not a man to give up easily, if at all, once his mind was made up.