by Penny Jordan
Sybilla’s mouth curled in disgust. She had made it as plain to him as she knew how that the only relationship she was interested in having with him was limited strictly to business, but he had refused to take the hint, and because of this she and Belinda had agreed that he would become Belinda’s client.
Socially it wasn’t always possible for her to avoid him, but she had begun to hope that he had at last taken the hint. The last thing she wanted to do was to have lunch with him, but Meg was saying quickly, ‘He’s thinking of expanding the company, and he wants us to provide him with extra part-time staff while he gets things off the ground. I know that when he made the appointment he told Belinda that this was the only day he had available as he was involved in negotiations with his bank for the rest of the week.’
It was the kind of business they just could not afford to turn down. She had, Sybilla acknowledged, no real option other than to take Belinda’s place over lunch.
The morning was already virtually gone, and as soon as she had gone through the post it was time for her to leave for her lunch appointment.
Belinda had arranged to meet Ray Lewis at a very popular and very expensive restaurant some miles outside the town. It was the kind of place that was favoured by the well-heeled business fraternity during the day, and the local ‘in’ crowd at night.
Privately Sybilla found the atmosphere rather oppressive and rich; she preferred both a less rarefied atmosphere and a plainer diet, but it was typical of the kind of place Ray Lewis would choose…the kind of place designed to impress.
She had changed into a smart navy suit and a fresh silk shirt. Outside it was still raining but this time she was prepared. Her navy pumps and tights wouldn’t show the rain-spots, and she was armed with her umbrella just in case she had difficulty in parking outside the restaurant.
‘I’ve no idea what time I’ll be back, although I’ll try to keep it as short as possible,’ she promised Meg.
The other girl laughed and suggested mischievously, ‘I could, if you like, telephone you at the restaurant.’
Sybilla groaned. ‘No…don’t you dare. It’s the kind of place where they bring the phone to the table. Horrendous.’
* * *
She was a few minutes later arriving at the restaurant than she had planned. The bar was full, but she could see Ray Lewis. He was standing with a group of people and had his back to her.
As she approached him he turned round and, on seeing her, exclaimed loudly, ‘Sybilla!’
And then, before she could stop him, he had taken her in his arms and was kissing her on the mouth.
As she froze with anger and rejection he whispered in her ear, ‘I knew that sooner or later you’d start to see things my way. You and I—’
‘Belinda isn’t available. It was too late to cancel and so I’m taking her place,’ Sybilla told him curtly. She couldn’t create a scene here in this crowded bar, however much she deplored Ray’s behaviour. Nor could she take the risk of publicly humiliating him, much as she would have liked to do so, for his wife’s sake if not for her own.
As she tried to manoeuvre herself away from him he held on to her, taking a very obvious delight in refusing to let her go.
She could feel both her temper and her embarrassment increasing, but refused to allow him to see it, instead saying coolly, ‘I suggest you let me go, Ray. We’re being watched, and I don’t think you’d want your wife…’
She didn’t have to continue. He was already releasing her and stepping back from her. He really was a most despicable man, she reflected, refusing to give in to the craven impulse to look quickly around the bar to see who might have witnessed his unpleasant behaviour. She could only hope that none of their other clients had seen it.
‘If I’d known I was going to have the pleasure of your company I’d have arranged to take you out to dinner. Somewhere very private and very discreet, if you take my meaning.’
Sybilla most certainly did. She made no attempt to hide her revulsion from him as she told him curtly, ‘This is a business lunch, Mr Lewis, nothing more.’
‘Hey, come on, what’s with the “Mr Lewis”? And as for all that crap about business…you and I both know that potentially we’ve got a lot more than business going for us. I like you, Sybilla. I like you one hell of a lot. You’re a very desirable woman. A very successful woman. Some men might find that threatening, but not me. In fact…’ He was reaching out towards her again, and instinctively she stepped backwards, tensing as she bumped into someone.
As she turned her head to apologise to them she heard Ray adding sickeningly, ‘I find it a turn on. I find you a turn on.’
And she knew that the person standing behind her had heard him as well.
Trying not to let either her embarrassment or her anger show, she forced a polite smile to her lips and turned round properly to apologise. And then her face froze as she saw that the man she had bumped into was Gareth Seymour.
Her apology died in her throat. The look he was giving her was contemptuously disdainful, the way he withdrew from any further physical contact with her bringing a hot wash of colour to sting her face.
This was the last person she would have wanted to witness Ray’s unwanted advances towards her. Twice in one day now she had been humiliated in front of Gareth; twice she had been made to feel a fool in front of him.
At her side, Ray was asking her what she wanted to drink. Automatically she told him mineral water, unable to drag her eyes away from Gareth’s face and the cold contempt so plainly portrayed there.
‘Oh, come on. You can have something more exciting than that,’ Ray was pressing her.
She shook her head. She rarely touched alcohol and never when she was involved both in business discussions and driving, but Ray was one of those men who seemed to think it clever to insist on overruling anyone who refused a drink, and she suspected that in the end she would be forced to give in and let him buy her a drink she didn’t want and had no intention of consuming.
‘I know this is supposed to be a business lunch, but there’s no law that says we can’t combine business with pleasure, and you know already how much I’d like to give you pleasure,’ Ray was saying suggestively and far too loudly. Certainly loudly enough for Gareth to have heard him, to judge from the look of distaste that crossed his face.
As she started to turn away from him he said curtly to her, ‘The owner of the shaving-foam, presumably. I can’t say I’m impressed by your choice of…friends these days, Sybilla.’
It was outrageous, unforgivable, and totally and completely uncalled for that he should make such a comment to her. They hadn’t seen one another for ten years; they were virtually strangers to one another, and he had no right, absolutely no right at all to pass criticism on her regarding matters about which he was completely uninformed and completely wrong!
She was halfway to opening her mouth to tell him so when she realised what she was doing. Quarrelling with Gareth, and in public too, was the last thing she needed. Far better to treat his unfounded and ill-judged condemnation of her with the contempt he seemed to think she deserved.
Even so, as she turned away from him she couldn’t resist saying under her breath, ‘Fortunate for me, then, isn’t it, that your opinion of me…or my friends doesn’t rate very highly in my personal scale of life’s vital statistics?’ And then, as she caught sight of the woman she had seen with him earlier in the day coming towards them, she added for good measure, ‘As it happens, I wasn’t too impressed with your friend either. Scarlet nail-polish at nine o’clock in the morning is rather overdoing things a little, isn’t it?’
With that she turned back to Ray and said quickly, ‘I’m rather hungry and short of time. Do you mind if we go straight into the restaurant?’
Before he could object she started to walk towards the restaurant, praying that Ray would follow her.
Of all the people to have run into. And why, oh, why had she allowed herself to be baited into that extraordinary and totally out-of-charac
ter bitchiness about his woman friend? It had been completely unnecessary…completely over the top. The smart thing, the sensible thing to do would have been to quietly ignore his gibe and just walk away from him. Instead of which she had had not just to go running headlong into trouble, but to actually verbally invite it. Even in the white heat of her resentment and anger she had been able to see that Gareth hadn’t been too pleased by her attack on his woman friend, and who in his shoes could blame him?
She remembered how overawed and diminished she had felt by the girls he used to bring home, how young and vulnerable she had felt in comparison, and wondered a little grimly if it had been those old memories, memories she ought to have rooted out and destroyed long, long ago, which had been responsible for today’s outburst.
Whatever the cause, it was pointless regretting it now. All she could do was to hope that she and Gareth did not come into contact with one another again.
With a bit of luck they shouldn’t do so. He, after all, couldn’t be staying around for very long. He would doubtless arrange for Thomas’s business to be put up for sale or perhaps even closed down, and he would then return to America, and she doubted that anyone in the town would ever see him again. Over the last few years it had been only his love for his grandfather that had brought him back, and now that Thomas was dead…
Despite the fact that Gareth had refused to join the family business, had wanted to make his own way in life, he and Thomas had always remained close. Always after his visits Thomas was full of what he had done…what he had achieved. Sybilla had nerved herself to listen to Thomas singing his praises because she knew how much he meant to the older man.
After Gareth’s parents had been killed in an accident Thomas had brought him up, and there was a very, very strong bond between them.
Once, naïvely, she had asked Thomas if he had not been upset by Gareth’s decision to branch out on his own, but wisely Thomas had told her that Gareth must have the right to define and shape his own life, and that to try and keep him within the confines of their small town when he wanted to be elsewhere would be to destroy the bonds between them and would eventually destroy their relationship completely.
She hadn’t understood that then, at seventeen, but she did now. She had already heard from those who had been there how grim-faced Gareth had been at the funeral, and how obvious it had been to the onlookers that he was deeply upset by the loss of his grandfather, even though he had kept his emotions under control.
Now she wondered what role his companion played in his life. Over the years Thomas had never talked to her about the women Gareth knew. She knew that Thomas had wanted him to marry…wanted him to have children, but as yet it seemed that he had not found the women with whom he wanted to settle down. Unless…
Gareth’s emotions and future were nothing to do with her, she told herself grimly as the waiter pulled out her chair for her. In fact she had no business thinking about Gareth at all…or admitting him into her mind. By rights she ought to be concentrating on Ray and the new business they hoped to get from him.
That was, after all, why she was here, and the sooner she made that clear to Ray as well as to herself, the better.
* * *
Lunch was every bit as difficult as she had envisaged. Several times Ray tried to trick her into accepting a dinner-date with him, but on every occasion she side-stepped the issue, until in the end he was starting to become truculent and angry with her.
Knowing that she was going to have to confront him, Sybilla told him firmly, ‘You’re a married man, Ray, and even if I were attracted to you that fact alone would mean that as far as I’m concerned there could not be any kind of relationship between us.’
‘The old-fashioned sort, are you? Well, marriage isn’t what it used to be, Sybilla. In fact, my marriage—well, let’s just say—’
‘Let’s just not say anything,’ Sybilla interrupted him firmly. ‘We’re here to discuss business, Ray, and nothing more. And now I really do have to leave. I’ve got another appointment this afternoon,’ she fibbed, ‘and I need to get back to the office first.’
She could tell he wasn’t pleased but there was no way she was going to be blackmailed into a relationship with him she did not want. No way at all.
She was still feeling raw and uncomfortable when she neared the office, her discomfort over lunch lying under her skin like an irritating piece of grit, but not so much because of Ray Lewis. No, the cause of her discomfort lay more deeply buried within her psyche than that. It was because of her run-in with Gareth that she felt so at odds with herself, so angry with herself for allowing Gareth to provoke her into that unseemly, almost juvenile, retaliation. To provoke her. She frowned as she worried at the words. Why on earth should Gareth have wanted to provoke her? Surely, like her, the last thing he could want was any kind of communication between them whatsoever?
He had made it plain enough to his grandfather ten years ago how little he’d relished her childish adoration of him.
Had he provoked her or was she looking for excuses for her own behaviour? Was she…? But no. His comment to her had been a definite and deliberate provocation. Stripping the whole affair of all of its emotional camouflage and looking at it calmly and logically, she could see absolutely no reason for Gareth to have made the comment he had unless he had wanted to provoke her. But why? So that he could give vent to his contempt of her. But why should that be necessary?
Unless perhaps he had wanted to underline to her how much he despised her. Was he afraid that she might still harbour that idiotic teenage crush? Her face burned with indignation at the thought. That had been ten years ago. She had changed since then. She was a woman now.
A woman. Was she? She was an adult certainly, but a woman… She tried not to remember the number of times she had backed off from members of his sex, from all the men who had wanted her…desired her…all the men whose sexual advances she had rejected in a flurry of protests and fear.
Fear not of them as men, but of allowing them to get too close to her in case ultimately they hurt her emotionally. As Gareth had hurt her.
But it was ridiculous to remain fixated on something…someone who had played such a relatively small part in her life. Other girls had similar crushes and went on to form other, more mature relationships; why hadn’t she?
Was it something to do with the trauma of overhearing him telling his grandfather that he was aware of her feelings and most certainly did not feel flattered by them? Was it because she was too sensitive…too afraid of loving another man who would not want that love? But that hadn’t been love she had felt for Gareth. She had been a child. She had been fifteen…and an immature fifteen at that, but not too immature to understand what the sensations she’d experienced whenever she’d thought about Gareth meant. She shook her head, trying to clear her mind of so many disturbing thoughts, thoughts she had successfully managed to push to the back of her mind in recent years, telling herself that she was simply one of those women more interested in remaining independent and establishing a career than in men.
By the time she walked into the office her head was aching. Meg exclaimed sympathetically over her pale face and strained eyes, offering her an aspirin.
She shook her head, telling her wryly, ‘I’m allergic to them. They always make me most vilely sick. No, I’ll be OK. It’s just a tension headache, that’s all.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Meg told her. ‘There’s a bug going round that starts off with a headache and then develops as full-blown flu. Half the town seems to be going down with it.’
‘Don’t tempt fate,’ Sybilla pleaded. ‘The last thing we need right now is a flu epidemic.’
There had been several calls while she’d been out, and as she attended to these she started signing the letters Meg had prepared in her absence. At four o’clock she had a girl to interview, a possible new addition to their pool of temps, who had trained as a computer-operator prior to the birth of her first baby, but who now wanted
to get back to work. They were always on the look-out for reliable staff, and if Ray did ask them to provide him with extra temps while he was expanding his business they would need to take on at least three new girls. Of course, after her lunch-date with him he might decide to place his business elsewhere. If he did, then he did, she decided grimly, half inclined to wish that he would, even though she knew from a business point of view his was a very valuable contract.
At ten to four Belinda rang to confirm that she would be back at the office in the morning.
‘How did the lunch with Ray Lewis go?’ she asked.
‘Not very well,’ Sybilla admitted.
‘Mm. I’m sorry I had to land you with that one, but I know how good you are at being tactful and diplomatic.’
Tactful and diplomatic. Well she certainly hadn’t exhibited those virtues today, Sybilla reflected a couple of hours later as she prepared to leave the office.
The girl she had interviewed had been very promising, and had left agreeing to think over their terms and come back to them.
Now all she had to do was spend the evening going over the paperwork she was taking home with her, and with a bit of luck the next day she would be able to enjoy the day off she had forgone today.
Her garden was crying out for some attention and she had promised herself that this year she would redecorate her spare room. She had also promised her parents she would visit them and spend more than her normal brief weekend with them, and even Belinda had warned her that if she didn’t allow herself a proper holiday this year she would be in danger of becoming a workaholic.
Her head was still aching when she got home and the back of her throat felt sore as well.
She told herself that it was all that talking over lunch that was responsible for her sore throat, sternly refusing to admit the possibility that she was succumbing to the virulent strain of flu Meg had told her was sweeping the town.
She couldn’t afford to be ill, she told herself grimly half an hour later as she sipped a mug of coffee. And she didn’t intend to be, either.