Not only would he have spared her from his despicable behaviour, he would not now be in a position of wondering just how uncontrolled he had been emotionally in front of her.
‘Sit down,’ he ordered, trying to modulate the tenor of his voice. ‘We have to talk about what took place on Friday night.’
‘Must we? Wouldn’t it be better for us to both forget about it? We’re adults. These things happen…’ Her voice trailed off into anguished silence, which only made his expression harden as he contemplated the idiotic madness of his behaviour.
‘Would you feel more comfortable if we discussed this out of the office?’ he asked. ‘There’s a coffee bar ten minutes’ walk away from—’
‘No!’ Lucy edged towards the chair facing him, the one she used for more mundane reasons such as jotting notes down in her pad. ‘This is fine.’
‘Right.’ Nick sat back in the chair and broodingly surveyed the nervous fair-haired woman in front of him. Where to begin? ‘First of all I want to…apologise for what happened between us. My behaviour was inexcusable.’ He was visited by a split-second of instant recall, the memory of small breasts spilling from a bra, rosy-peaked nipples against pale, soft skin, and he drew in his breath sharply, dispelling the disturbing image. ‘My only excuse is that the situation was…somewhat extraordinary.’
‘I realise that,’ Lucy said, steeling herself not to wilt. She had seen the expression of disgust cross his face earlier on and it had been all she could do to remain where she was and not run sobbing from the room. He talked about his behaviour and made all the right noises of regret and apology but she could tell that he had found her behaviour as repellent as his own. Her behaviour, she thought with mortification, and her body.
‘I had just come from the most traumatic experience of my life…’ What the hell had they talked about? He remembered he’d spoken quite honestly with her—just what had he said? They must have talked about something. Had he made an even bigger fool of himself by discussing the private details of his married life? Had he, God forbid, broken down? Cried?
No. He rejected the thought completely. He wouldn’t have. He simply was not built that way.
‘Perhaps I spoke to you about that…?’ he prompted in an attempt to fill in the missing pieces.
‘No, of course not!’ Lucy’s denial was spontaneous. ‘I… Look, I understand. I understand why you felt that you had to get away. I told you so at the time. You were grief-stricken and you were dealing with it by…by losing yourself in drink.’
So he hadn’t confessed anything. Nick breathed an inward sigh of relief.
This was just the tip of the iceberg, however. He had to find out how exactly they had ended up making love.
‘Not very appropriate behaviour,’ he commented, allowing her to relax, knowing that the minute he broached the whole subject of sex she would revert to her stammering state of utter confusion. He looked down and idly picked up the fountain pen lying on his desk. Despite the advance of technology, he still used a fountain pen for writing letters and signing his name on documents. He twirled it slowly between his fingers now, making sure that he didn’t look at her. She seemed to go to pieces whenever he looked at her, something she had never done before. Then again, she had probably never been repelled by him before.
‘Have you ever drowned your sorrows, Lucy? Drunk too much for your own good? Behaved like a complete fool with no regard for the consequences?’
Of course, in retrospect, he would consider himself a fool to have made love with her, she thought with a burning sense of shame and hurt. This conversation would have been totally different if she had been beautiful and sophisticated. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have been taking place at all. ‘I did get drunk once when I was eighteen but I had such a bad hangover that I never did it again. And, no, I have never had to drown my sorrows in drink. But of course, as I said…’
‘What a blameless life you must lead,’ Nick mused, half to himself. Of course, it was written on her face, a fresh innocence that he had blasted his way into like a maniac. For the first time he wondered what her outside life was like. It had never occurred to him before, but then he had been so wrapped up in his own personal domestic nightmare that he had spent very little time actually noticing the people around them. He moved through them, did deals, went to meetings and functioned in a way that had been utterly detached from any curiosity.
Oddly, he found himself sidetracked by questions that had nothing to do with why he had called her into his office.
‘What do you do out of work?’ he asked suddenly and Lucy looked at him in surprise.
‘What do I do out of work? What do you mean?’
‘Do you go out much? Do you share a house with other people? Is that why you decided to come to the office on Friday? Because you couldn’t face your house-mates?’ She hadn’t been a virgin, he thought suddenly. He had another vivid image of her lying on him, her breasts swinging above his face as she moved, her slight body grinding against his hard, pulsing masculinity. His body stirred in response and he clenched his jaw at the intrusive thoughts.
‘No, no, I don’t share a house. In fact, I have my own flat. In a renovated Victorian house that’s been converted into ten flats. It’s not in the best part of London, but it does.’
‘And do you go out much?’
‘I have a normal social life,’ Lucy informed him, tilting her chin up defensively. It would have been a hell of a lot more normal if she hadn’t spent precious time hankering after the man facing her. She cringed at the thought that he might ever find out that little fact. She, at least, had not once uttered a word about how disastrously attracted she had always been by him. She had not allowed her short-sighted passion to guide her words. And he would never find out.
‘I go to the movies with friends, go to the theatre now and again, have meals out…’
‘With men?’ he asked smoothly, picking up on her list of hobbies and tacking on what purported to be a natural follow-on question.
‘Sometimes.’
‘And do you have a lover?’ It was an outrageously interfering question, he thought to himself, but curiosity had got the better of him. Sex with her had been good. Better than good. Or so it seemed to him in hazy retrospect. But her demure appearance belied any such suggestion.
Yes, you, once in reality but a thousand times in my head. ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business,’ Lucy said, half-shocked by the directness of her statement.
‘You are quite right,’ Nick said soothingly. ‘I am perfectly sure that if you had you would never have…’ The silence, fraught with the unspoken, stretched between them.
‘No,’ Lucy blurted out.
‘Which brings me to something that I have been turning over and over in my mind all weekend.’
She knew exactly what he was going to say. He was going to ask her why she had ever allowed herself to have sex with him and she frantically sought in her head for the answer that would be furthest away from the humiliating truth, which was that she had simply been unable to resist, that all her pent-up yearning had broken down her usual powers of reason and common sense and left her mindlessly drifting in a sea of sensuality. He had touched her and she had been lost, totally and shamelessly lost.
‘What’s that?’ she asked faintly.
‘Why?’
For a few desperate seconds, Lucy pretended to be bewildered by his question.
‘Why…what?’ she asked finally, buying time.
‘Why did you? You were working peacefully here, albeit at an extraordinarily peculiar time, and I lurched in… I confess I am surprised that you did not flee the building in terror.’
‘I…I’m not the fleeing-buildings type of girl,’ she answered in a high-pitched voice. ‘Besides, I knew who you were and I could see that you had been drinking. I only thought to make sure that you didn’t pass out, to be honest.’ All the truth so far.
‘And…?’ He couldn’t find the words to phrase the ques
tion but it was vitally important that he knew the truth, that he had not coerced her into a situation against her will. He could not seriously believe that he was capable of any such thing, but the demon drink could work in a thousand ways, and he was not accustomed to consuming large amounts of it.
‘Look,’ he said impatiently, ‘I need to find out whether I…took advantage of you in any way…’
‘Took advantage?’
‘And stop repeating every phrase I utter. You know precisely what I mean. Did I force you to do something against your will?’ His body went still as he waited for her to reply. If his memory served him right…but he couldn’t rely on his memory.
‘No,’ Lucy told him quietly.
‘Then did I somehow use my position to influence you in any way?’ His razor-sharp memory was failing him just when he needed it most. ‘Did I hint that you might…I don’t know…lose your job if…?’
‘No. Don’t you think I have a mind of my own?’ she flared, insulted by the insinuation that she would either do something against her will or else yield to something simply for the sake of a job.
‘Of course I do,’ Nick grated harshly. ‘I am merely trying to establish what precisely happened.’
‘What for?’ Lucy blurted out, her face reddening. She could feel tears pricking the backs of her eyelids and swallowed them down. ‘What’s the point in performing a post-mortem on what happened? I was perfectly prepared to…to pretend…’
‘That nothing had happened? Be an ostrich that sticks its head in the sand? I needed to talk to you about this because you happen to be my secretary and if either of us felt that we no longer had a tenable working situation then I would be obliged to transfer you to another position within the company.’
Just like that, Lucy thought bitterly. If he thought that he had done something dishonourable, then he would have given her the push. Their act of making love, the memory of which could still turn her bones to water, whatever she felt about herself for doing what she had done, was less than nothing to him. He might call her an ostrich, but she wasn’t. Far from it. She could feel the impact of reality crashing into her like an avalanche.
‘I’m perfectly happy to resign if you don’t think you can work with me,’ she said coolly.
‘That is not what I’m saying…’
‘No? It sounds that way to me.’
‘And you can say, with your hand on your heart, that you can behave as though none of this had ever happened?’
‘Yes.’ She managed to find sufficient resources of control to utter the lie with a perfectly bland expression. ‘As you said, it happened and, yes, it never should have, but it did.’
‘Perhaps because you wanted it to?’ Nick asked slyly, and his suggestion was so close to the truth that for a split-second she could feel her body freeze, then a sudden, flaring heat thawed it out and galvanised her into action.
‘If you really want to know,’ she said coldly, ‘I did it because I felt sorry for you.’
Nick had thrown out his taunt like an arrow in the dark, never thinking that he might hit the target. Obscurely, the idea that she might have wanted him, have actively wanted to sleep with him, had had the astounding effect of turning him on. Her reply now stopped him in his tracks.
She had felt sorry for him. Of course. It made perfect sense. He had shown up unexpectedly, in a pathetic state, and she had been overwhelmed by pity. The thought cut through every ounce of pride he had and his expression hardened.
‘I was overcome and I acted stupidly. I just got carried away with…with pity—pity and compassion for the pain I knew you must be feeling.’
‘No one has ever pitied me in my life before,’ Nick said harshly. He linked his fingers together and pressed his thumbs into the palms of his hands. Pity. The word conjured up images of vulnerability and weakness that he found revolting. At least when applied to him.
‘Perhaps because you’ve never been in a position to incite such an emotion,’ Lucy told him, warming to her subject now that she had found herself unexpectedly saved from having the truth forced out of her. ‘You were in a black hole and…’
‘And, out of the goodness of your heart, you thought you might shine a little ray of light.’
‘No,’ she denied, ‘not out of the goodness of my heart. It just seemed natural at the time. But I can see that it was wrong, all wrong, and for that I apologise.’
He wondered savagely whether she had enjoyed dispensing her cure or whether she had simply been swept away by the emotion of the moment.
Well, he could hardly ask her to resign now. That would have been tantamount to declaring that he was too weak to deal with what had taken place.
‘Yes, it was wrong,’ he said, forcing some semblance of calm assurance into his voice, ‘and I want you to know that under normal circumstances there is no way in the world that I would ever dream of sleeping with you.’ It was an aggressively phrased remark, taut with implications, and he knew that he was hitting below the belt. In truth, he had had no idea that this meeting would progress along these lines. He’d thought that he would subtly find out what he needed to know, namely that he had not forced himself upon her, and then he would close the book and lay that particular chapter to rest.
He had not reckoned on being drawn into this type of discussion. He had pressed for the truth, though, not satisfied with the obviously genuine reassurances she had given him, and he had discovered that the truth was not to his liking.
Now, obscurely, he was not prepared to lay the matter to rest. He stood up and began prowling restlessly around the room, looking at her from various angles while she kept her head perfectly still and staring straight towards the window behind his desk.
‘Of course,’ he said lazily, pausing to inspect the rows of books that he kept on the shelves on one side of the office; he ran his fingers delicately along the hardbound spines, then turned to face her, ‘I hope you do not misinterpret this in any way. I merely want you to know that there will be no repetition of what took place, of that you may be sure.’
Lucy wondered how many more ways there could be for him to dress up the obvious behind lots of protective packaging. He was telling her that he did not find her attractive. She had been a warm body at a time when he had needed it and, fool that she was, she had succumbed because her heart had won the battle with her head. But that was it. In a sober state, she was as sexless as the two framed prints he had hanging on his wall.
‘Oh, good,’ she said flatly, her face still averted so that he was unable to see the expression in her eyes. And her eyes were very expressive. He was surprised that he had not noticed that before. Huge brown eyes framed with long, dark brown eyelashes that somehow seemed at odds with the blondeness of her hair and the paleness of her skin.
He shook his head irritably and walked back to his chair, but instead of sitting down he stood behind it, leaning casually against the high back, his forearms hanging loosely over the front.
Oh, good? Was that all she had to say on the subject?
‘You’re not my type,’ he informed her, lowering his eyes and missing the hurt wince that had Lucy drawing her breath in on a hiss.
He might think that spelling it out would somehow make her more comfortable, put her mind at rest that she had nothing to fear from him should they find themselves working late together in an empty building, as they often had in the past.
He was wrong. Every word he uttered was another nail in her heart.
She looked at him, at his dauntingly beautiful face. She knew every groove of that face as though it were her own. Had committed it to memory, even though she had tried hard not to.
No, she wouldn’t be his type. She was as physically ordinary as he was impressively, compellingly handsome. He would always be drawn to women like his wife. Stunningly beautiful women with big hair and breasts.
She fancied she saw something ruefully patronising in his expression.
‘And I feel I ought to make this clear if we
are to resume our working relationship,’ he continued slowly, frowning, as if uncertain as to how he should say what he had to say.
What more? she wondered numbly.
For a few seconds, Nick didn’t go on. He simply looked at her assessingly, as if weighing up in his mind whether he should proceed or not, then he sighed.
‘Perhaps this is something best left unsaid.’
Lucy drew her lips together in a stubborn line. ‘If you feel you have something further to add then I really do wish that you would tell me. I’ve been very…happy working here and, as you say, we have to clear the air if we can continue our working relationship…’ She could be as coolly controlled as he could, she thought to herself. The fact was that she loved what she did, whether Nick was her boss or not. She enjoyed the work and she doubted she would ever have been able to find a job that paid as well anywhere else in London.
‘All right.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders with typically Mediterranean expressiveness and swung his chair around, turning it to face her once he was sitting. ‘If you insist…’
‘I insist.’
‘You are young and I would not want you to harbour any notions that our few hours together might be the start of an agenda. Nor would I wish you to think that you are now somehow privileged in any way whatsoever. You are an excellent secretary and I personally feel that it is imperative that we maintain the boundaries between us.’
‘In other words, you’re cautioning me not to rip my clothes off and fling myself at you,’ Lucy said slowly, appalled at his line of thinking.
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