Simon was standing very still. He had put his arms round her, apparently instinctively, but the part of her which accepted that he could never love her observed that he was careful to keep his hands from touching her bare shoulders—probably as a result of years of experience in trying not to excite the ardour of scores of importunate lovelorn women, she reflected bleakly.
‘I know you do, but you must realise that I cannot accept your love, sweetheart.’ He rejected her as if it was a set speech, often used, which it probably was.
‘And yet you thought you wanted me before,’ she reminded him ironically.
‘I know. As I say, I’m fully aware that I’ve messed you around.’ His tone was harder now, and almost indifferent. ‘But, as we agreed, there was too much in the way.’
Fee broke away from him then, her colour high as she realised how fully she had revealed herself, actually inviting—forcing—his explicit rejection, so superfluous when she already knew he no longer wanted her and could never love her. He had sounded so bored. Why not? How many other women had he had to discourage once he found he no longer wanted them?
‘I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed you, but you must be used to it,’ she offered sardonically, an aching dignity in the way she lifted her chin and met his eyes. ‘I’m just like Maynah Norman and all the others, aren’t I?’
‘No. No, you are not.’
Simon spoke with a tightness that suggested controlled anger and, noticing his strained expression, Fee felt guilty.
‘I suppose you think I’ve got no pride,’ she guessed savagely to cover it.
‘No, I just think you’re incapable of pretence,’ he responded colourlessly.
Anger added itself to her distress as she began to realise what a fool she had just made of herself, telling him she loved him, although it seemed that he had already known that—and again, why not? He was so used to being loved by multitudes of women, and, while he might welcome it from some, not even he could possibly want all the women who loved him.
‘I must compliment you on how well you do this, even managing to sound kind!’ She flung it at him mockingly. ‘But then, you must have lots of practice in turning us down—’
She broke off as the phone beside her rang, reaching for it automatically, too devastated emotionally to remember the rule about not answering calls when she was in this house.
‘Wait, Fee, let me. Don’t—’ Simon halted as she
gave the number.
Once again the slight delay told her it was an international call, but she was still disorientated, only tensing and her eyes flying helplessly to Simon’s face as she heard Vance Sheldon begin, ‘So you’re there for once, are you? Now listen to me; after the exhibition you made of me and yourself in Perth, you owe it to me—’
That was all she heard as Simon put out a hand, breaking the connection with a stab of his finger, then taking the receiver from her and putting it down next to the phone.
‘Why did you answer?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘It was Sheldon, wasn’t it? Still trying to bully you into returning?’
‘Yes. I wasn’t thinking…’ Fee shook her head unhappily.
His exasperation fading, Simon stared at her for a moment before pulling her into his arms.
‘Poor baby,’ he murmured roughly against her hair.
Baby now. Fee absorbed it anguishedly but stayed where she was. Hearing Vance Sheldon’s voice hadn’t upset her nearly as much this time, mainly because she had too much personal and immediate distress to contend with, the reality of Simon and his rejection of her making everything else seem slightly unreal in comparison, and definitely unimportant. Mr Sheldon now seemed slightly ridiculous, and mere harassment could never hurt again, now that she knew what real hurt was.
But if this was the only way she could be in Simon’s arms, probably for the last time ever, then she was content to let him believe that she was distraught over the call.
Fee clung to him, shaking with yearning, her heart bursting with love. She could feel Simon’s fingers moving soothingly in her curls as she dropped her head to his shoulder, then spreading out to cradle the back of her skull, pressing her even closer. His other hand was at her back, moving slowly up beneath the loose fall of her satiny hair and coming to rest between her shoulders, fingers rubbing gently at the smooth bare skin, back and forth and up and down.
She was melting, and yet shattering too at the same time somehow, simply dissolving with love and breaking apart with the knowledge that he no longer wanted her. Unmoving save for those magical hands, he stood so still, a man doing his duty as common humanity demanded, offering comfort but unstirred by desire, let alone love—
And she loved him so much! A tiny moan of agony and despair escaped her and she raised her head anxiously, looking into his face and searching it urgently, but, while Simon’s eyes were open, they looked like a blind man’s, unseeing though they stared into hers. Hope and desperation died. She couldn’t make him love her, so what use was it to beg, to plead, to demand, as she had been about to do despite everything she already knew, including the fact that hope was futile? He had heard it all before, from so many like her, and why should his reaction be any different this time? She was just one of the crowd.
‘God, it makes me sick, the way history has to repeat itself.’ Simon sounded savagely disgusted as he released her abruptly. ‘I’ve never really believed in the concept of inescapable destiny, but it seems I was wrong. Damn you, Fee.’
It was one of anger’s betrayals, the truth spoken unthinkingly. Despite his earlier denial, Simon did see her as being just like Maynah and all the other women who had loved him—and undoubtedly despised her for it.
‘Am I supposed to apologise?’ she flared furiously, her own anger arising out of humiliation.
Simon was white with rage, his eyes stormy, and she saw him literally bite back whatever he had been about to say. After a few tense seconds, he succeeded in looking merely irritable, his lips curving derisively.
‘Not you, Fee,’ he murmured drily, before becoming decisive. ‘Where’s Charles? Find him and tell him I want to see him—and try to keep that stepsister of yours away if you possibly can.’
‘I’m supposed to give their guests drinks and entertain them on the patio if they arrive,’ Fee remembered. ‘I thought it was some of them when you rang the doorbell.’
‘I’ll stand in for you while you find Charles,’ he offered impatiently, clearly still working off some excess anger or frustration. ‘Go on, Fee.’
He was probably sick of the mere sight of her, just one more among all the legions of languishing women in whom he had lost interest, Fee reflected savagely, but she moved to do as she was bid, needing to get away from him now, embarrassment beginning to set in.
Since she had never done such a thing before, Charles looked startled when she knocked on the door of his and Babs’s bedroom, once too briefly and rarely shared by Jim and Angela.
‘She’s in the bathroom,’ he told her.
‘Not her—you,’ Fee corrected his misapprehension. ‘Simon is downstairs. He wants to see you.’
‘Oh? Was it he who answered that phone call, by the way? He was too quick for Babs or me to get to the phone in here, but I presume it wasn’t for us anyway?’
‘I answered it by mistake. It was Mr Sheldon.’
Charles was galvanised into action, swearing indignantly and bounding out of the room.
‘Charlie? What’s wrong?’ Babs’s muffled voice came from the bathroom.
‘Nothing serious, Babs,’ Fee called, and slipped away before more difficult questions were asked.
She sat in her own old bedroom for a while, trying to assemble the composure she would need to get her through the evening, only going downstairs again after she had heard Babs do so in response to the sound of people arriving below.
She heard Charles speaking in the lounge, but Babs and most of the guests must be out on the patio, she thought, hesitating in the hallway.
‘No, that’s my prerogative, Charles,’ Simon cut in with typical arrogance.
She couldn’t face him again, not so soon after he had rejected her and killed the last of the hope she hadn’t even known she held, hope to which she had had no right, Fee thought frantically, turning away and heading for the kitchen instead.
She was opening a bottle of mineral water when Simon found her.
‘Charles may get the number here changed, but, if he doesn’t, just remember never to answer the phone when you’re visiting. That way you won’t have to worry about Sheldon,’ he told her abruptly. ‘I just wanted to remind you before I left.’
‘Yes.’ Once Fee would have been furious with him for interfering, and with both men for discussing the matter without consulting her, but now she couldn’t even look at him, let alone summon any anger. ‘Thank you.’
‘Charles invited me to stay for dinner but I didn’t think you’d appreciate it, and neither would Babs, judging by the frozen greeting she gave me,’ he went on ironically, then sighed when she made no response. ‘All right, Fee, I’ll tell Miss Sung-Li you’re to be transferred to Services on Monday if that’s really what you want. As for the other thing, it would never have worked…you and me. I’d only have made you very unhappy.’
‘I know you would,’ she acknowledged acidly.
‘Yes, that’s why you want this transfer, isn’t it? Because you can’t obey your own rules any longer. So perhaps it’s for the best after all,’ he conceded harshly.
Then he had gone and Fee buried her face in her hands, wondering how she was ever going to survive the anguish
that was tearing her apart.
* * *
Fee’s new boss was a reserved but easygoing man with little to say for himself and a merciful and total absence of curiosity about her as a person, but he seemed to find her work satisfactory, thanking her with grave courtesy for everything she did.
Now that she was no longer Simon’s personal assistant, her fellow-employees clearly felt no obligation to cease abruptly any Simon-related gossip and speculation whenever she appeared, and she heard two junior secretaries talking avidly about him as they walked just ahead of her through the building’s underground parking area at the end of Wednesday.
‘No, I have it on good authority that it’s not a business trip,’ one was asserting confidently. ‘So it must be a holiday—somewhere exotic, I bet. Maybe it’s to get over whatever’s been bugging him lately! I wonder who he’s taken with him?’
‘I haven’t heard of anyone new since he ditched Loren Kincaid, have you? But he’ll pick someone up, that’s for sure.’
Fee ached, but she couldn’t feel angry. Simon had earned his reputation.
But tormenting visions of him on some glamorous beach, always with a woman, haunted her nights, and the days were as bad. One man had absented himself, and teeming Hong Kong felt empty and dead.
Babs was still almost oppressively anxious about her emotional well-being, and in her present state of mind Fee found it easier to give in to her insistence that she needed company, rather than enduring constant phone calls, so she was with her and Charles the following Sunday morning, lounging beside their swimming-pool and reading a serious newspaper article about the refugee problem when Babs squeaked and looked up from her more sensational section of the paper.
‘I do not believe this! Simon Rhodes has been charged with assault! In Australia!’ Her voice swooped upwards. ‘It says…Oh, yes, he simply hit the guy once. “Rhodes Properties in Hong Kong…incident took place…business premises of famous financier Vance Sheldon”…Vance Sheldon, Fee!’
Charles snatched the paper away from his wife.
‘My God, he actually went and did it. I thought it was just talk…Last time Sheldon phoned, Simon and I discussed what to do about it, how to stop him. He said he’d like to get his hands on the swine and I agreed; I offered to do it but I’m sorry to have to confess that I wasn’t exactly serious…but Simon said it was his right or some such thing. Obviously he was serious.’ Charles looked at Fee with sudden respect. ‘Hell, Fee!’
Fee was silent, waiting her turn and reading the story for herself, but she learnt no more than Babs had already announced. Simon had gone to Australia and thrown a punch at Vance Sheldon.
‘I can’t get over it!’ Charles was inclined to find it funny. ‘Simon, stirring himself on someone else’s behalf. That’s a first!’
Fee couldn’t say a word. She just sat there, thinking and thinking about what Simon had done, her mind testing what intuition was telling her about the reason for his action.
After a while Charles went indoors, but Babs remained sitting on the edge of her sun-lounger, initially as silent as Fee.
Eventually, though, she stirred and prompted, ‘Fee?’
Fee looked up and Babs caught her breath as she saw her expression.
‘He does care about me,’ Fee said in a soft, shaky voice.
‘Oh, darling, you mustn’t read too much into it,’ Babs cautioned her urgently. ‘You’ve said yourself that he’s lost interest in you. You heard what Charles said—that the two of them discussed it together; you’re like some child we all love, and they wanted to protect you from that monster…Simon acted for us all.’
Fee shook her head. ‘When I really was a child, Simon would never have done anything like this for me, and he doesn’t do things like that for anyone, anyway. He simply doesn’t care enough usually. That’s what Charles meant a few minutes ago. Oh, Babs!’
‘Fee, you can’t know!’ Babs sounded almost frantic. ‘It was probably an impulse, it doesn’t mean anything, and you’re going to get your heart broken all over again if you start getting your hopes up like this.’
‘I can know, because it’s so untypical of Simon generally, so utterly pointless and…and ridiculously
quixotic. I’m not—’ Fee broke off, but her eyes were
still soft and shining. ‘I’m not saying he has suddenly fallen in love with me or anything dramatic like that, but he does care about me, and I think he might even still want me. There’ve been other little things, a way of considering me personally. I didn’t think it meant anything, but now I don’t know, because it was also untypical of him. When he comes back, if he wants me, then I’m going to…I don’t know…be what he wants me to be. I’ll ask him—’
‘Oh, Fee, I’m so afraid for you,’ Babs confessed feelingly as Fee broke off emotionally.
‘So am I,’ Fee admitted shakily. ‘But I have to find out.’
‘And nothing I can say will stop you, will it?’ Babs accepted.
‘No,’ Fee confirmed.
CHAPTER TEN
A TINY paragraph in one of the evening newspapers the following week announced that the charge against Simon Rhodes had been dropped. No explanation was given.
But Simon hadn’t returned to Hong Kong. Fee knew that because everyone was talking about him at work but no one had seen him. Sunday’s story was responsible for endless speculation, the consensus of opinion being that such behaviour was uncharacteristic of Simon; someone remembered that Vance Sheldon had featured in an even more sensational story not long ago, the details were recalled, and Fee found herself the subject of much curious gossip. As always, she shrank sensitively from the attention of strangers, but at the same time there was a new, tender warmth around her heart. Simon had done it for her, and she couldn’t help being moved and a little proud.
She knew now that he cared about her in some unusual and sensitive way. What she didn’t know was if he had meant his rejection because he had genuinely lost interest in her after discovering how inexperienced she was, or whether all his recent moody irritability had been because he still secretly wanted her but had decided that
he couldn’t have her for some reason.
Fee wasn’t confident enough to make any easy assumptions, but she wondered constantly, and even if he sincerely didn’t want her his caring was special and she would always treasure it.
She was anxious for his return, needing the mystery solved, her confidence waning when there was no news of him, and she was eventually driven to risk exciting further speculation by ringing through to his office and asking when he was due back, but her replacement said she hadn’t heard from him.
It was Saturday morning when she finally learned of his return from a morning newspaper, one of the sober ones, so it merely stated that Simon had declined to comment on what it called the fracas in Sydney on his return to Hong Kong the previous evening.
Suddenly Fee was more frightened than she had ever been in her life, and by the time she drove up to the gates of Simon’s house on the Peak she was pale with nerves, her hands clammy on the steering-wheel. But she had to know.
At the entrance, she encountered a problem. Since she wasn’t expected, Mr Deng claimed to have no authority to admit her.
‘At least tell Mr Rhodes I’m here and see what he says,’ Fee beseeched him urgently, embarrassed by his cynical expression and wondering how many times he had turned other uninvited women away from these same gates in the past, but too desperate to be deterred. ‘He might want to see me.’
Apparently he did, because after using the intercom system Mr Deng allowed the gates to glide open and she drove in.
The main door to the house opened as she got out of the car unsteadily, discovering that her legs were suddenly shaking so badly that she could barely stand.
The shirt Simon wore with his jeans hadn’t been tucked in or buttoned, and Fee looked up at him as he came to stand at the top of the stairs, her attempted smile a shaky failure.
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