His chauffeur was parked a few metres up, but before he started walking her towards the car Heather looked at him and gave a watery smile.
‘I’ll be fine to make my way back from here,’ she said, enunciating every word very carefully. She stuck her hands firmly into the deep pockets of her coat and clenched her fists.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Where do you live?’
‘Honestly. I’m fine. You’ve done too much already.’ She was aware that there was just the smallest hint of her words being slurred. When he placed his hand on her elbow she knew that she would capitulate.
‘You’ve gone very quiet…’
‘I feel a bit wobbly…tired…’ As soon as she was in the car she rested her head back and closed her eyes. She was dimly aware of giving Theo her address, and the next time she opened her eyes it was to find that they had arrived at the house which she shared with four other girls, all of whom were out. For the first time she realised that she must be the only person under the age of twenty-five, single and in London, who wasn’t out doing something on a Friday night. Except she had done something!
He walked her to the door, took her bag from her when she couldn’t locate her keys and managed to find them. This after pulling out everything bar the kitchen sink from her voluminous sack. When he stepped inside the house Heather didn’t protest. Yes, he had done his duty, and he was keen to be off, but, no, she didn’t want him to leave. Not just yet. Not when she wouldn’t be seeing him again.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ Heather asked awkwardly.
‘How many of you share this place?’
‘Four.’ She hiccupped, and covered her mouth with her hand.
‘I think you probably need the coffee more than I do. Go and sit down and I’ll make you some.’
Well, Theo reasoned, his evening had gone wildly wrong starting from the moment he’d heard that crash outside his office, so why not wrap it up doing something he rarely did? Waiting on a woman who was the worse for wear and had probably collapsed into a snoring heap on her sofa?
Theo wasn’t a brutish male chauvinist. However, he had been spoilt by the attention lavished on him by members of the opposite sex. His looks, his charisma and his vast wealth had always been a powerful magnetic pull for women who heeded his slightest whim. He had never particularly had to put himself out. In fact, he couldn’t recall the last time he had taken care of a woman in the manner in which he was now taking care of the one who had fallen asleep beside him in the car when he had been in the middle of a sentence.
He made his way to the back of the house, observing the chaos in which four people apparently lived with no pressing desire to tidy up behind themselves. The kitchen sported the detritus of breakfast eaten on the run and not cleared away. Jumpers were slung in odd places and shoes were randomly scattered. On the window ledge a row of cards suggested a birthday had come and gone.
Coffee made, he reached the sitting room to find that Heather had fallen asleep. She had stripped off her jumper and was sprawled on the sofa with one arm raised, half covering her face and dipping over the arm of the chair.
She had kicked off her shoes, revealing thick grey socks.
Theo stood for a few seconds, drawing in a sharp breath, because the shapeless figure wasn’t quite as shapeless as he had imagined. Her breasts were big, succulently generous, but there was proportion to her body and the sliver of skin he glimpsed where the tee shirt rose up was surprisingly firm.
He rubbed his eyes to dispel the uneasy sensation of staring at her, and the even more uneasy suspicion that he would have liked to move closer so that he could appreciate those curves a bit more.
Without waking her up, he deposited the coffee on the table by the sofa and, after a few seconds’ hesitation, pulled out his pen and hunted around for some paper. He wasn’t going to wake her, but walking away without saying goodbye somehow felt wrong. So he jotted down a couple of lines, wishing her luck in getting a new job, then he left, resisting the terrible urge to look back over his shoulder at her softly breathing body.
Once outside, he laughed at the insanity that had possessed him for a few fleeting seconds. He had looked at her and had been turned on! He almost called Claudia, knowing that some sweet talk would have her running back into his arms, but instead he switched off his mobile phone and forced his highly disciplined brain to concentrate on the work he had had to defer to the following morning.
Heather, surfacing the next day to the sounds of one of her room-mates clattering about in the kitchen, had a few seconds of blissful oblivion during which she imagined the sounds to be Theo, making her that cup of coffee.
The cup of coffee lying cold on the table by her. Next to a note which she now read. It said nothing at all. A few polite words scribbled down before he left the house, doubtless relieved that there was no need for him to continue the charade of entertaining her.
Heather sat up and buried her head in her hands. He hadn’t woken her up! She had fallen asleep and lost her opportunity to spend a few more minutes in his company.
The sun seemed to have gone out of her life. It was only when, after a week, one of her friends in the house mentioned it that Heather gave herself a stiff lecture. Moping around over a man she had known for roughly three hours was insane.
‘Am I insane?’ she asked her reflection. ‘No. Because you know,’ she added, wagging her finger censoriously at herself, ‘only a complete loony would lose sleep over a man like Theo!’
She pulled herself together and accepted the job at Tom’s pub. It was, as she had predicted, hard work but sociable, and was suited to her temperament. The hours might have been longer, and her exhaustion levels might have been higher, but she was at least eating regularly, and she took Fridays off. Theo’s remark about being young and enjoying life had stuck in her head.
Not, even after six weeks, that any of those fun-packed Friday evenings with her friends could compare to that one night that had sprung from nothing and disappeared before she could hold onto it.
And his image kept slipping into her head. She couldn’t seem to help it. One minute she would be laughing at something and the next minute there he was, released from the restraints she kept trying to put on him. She went to bed with him at night and woke up to him the following morning, and she just couldn’t help it. It was involuntary. The man haunted her.
Of course it would end. Time had a wonderful way of healing, and she cheerfully resigned herself to due process. She was so resigned, in fact, that when, two months after she had last laid eyes on him, she picked up her telephone to hear his voice on the other end, she almost didn’t recognise it.
Then she sat down, flapping her arm madly so that Beth would turn the television down, which she did, making sure she remained where she was to overhear the conversation. Heather could feel her heart start racing. He had managed to get her name from the firm of cleaners she had worked for, apparently. Heather assumed his influence must have unlocked her personnel file, since its contents were confidential. Not that she cared. She just wanted him to tell her why he had called.
‘I have a proposition to put to you,’ he finally said, when pleasantries had been exhausted.
‘Really?’ She tried to keep the stomach-turning curiosity out of her voice.
‘My housekeeper has gone. Her sister in Scotland has fallen ill and needs looking after. The job has become vacant and I thought of you.’ He briefly explained what it entailed. It could even, he informed her, be a live-in post. His apartment had a separate wing and he was rarely there anyway. He preferred to spend as many of his free weekends as he could in the country. He told her how much she would be earning and the figure made her gasp. It was far and away more than she was currently earning with both her jobs combined. She would be able to save and, if she decided to live in, would be able to afford her course within months, instead of the tortuous years she had anticipated.
Not that financial considerations played much of a part in her decision.
; ‘I accept,’ she told him promptly, making him smile at the other end of the line. ‘Just tell me when you want me to start…’
CHAPTER THREE
‘SO,’ BETH said sternly, ‘what happens next?’
Eighteen months on and they were sitting in the usual place they met, an all-day French wine bar and restaurant which never seemed particularly bothered about serving cappuccinos to people who had zero intention of eating but would still manage to occupy valuable seats for hours at a stretch.
Heather bit her lower lip nervously, because she knew exactly what was coming. She managed to buy herself a few seconds of thinking time by taking a sip of her coffee, but the question was still there when she met her friend’s concerned, probing brown eyes.
‘What do you mean?’ she dodged unsuccessfully.
To start with Beth had been overjoyed at her friend’s sudden run of good luck. To be asked to do something as undemanding as looking after a house that would be very clean most of the time anyway, considering its owner wasn’t often there, at a salary that was way over the going rate, sure beat the hell out of working in Tom’s rowdy pub till all hours of the morning. Giving up the assistant teaching job would be a wrench, but, heck, she would be able to complete her course and then get started on the career ladder.
As far as Beth was concerned, a woman was defined by her career. She herself had wanted to be a lawyer from the age of five, if she was to be believed, and had got on with turning her dream into reality without ever deviating from her route.
Heather deeply admired her friend’s ambitious streak. So much so that she had tried very hard in the beginning not to let on that her real reason for accepting Theo’s generous offer was her own inarticulated need to be near him. But, not being secretive by nature, she had soon lapsed into easy confidences, and ever since had had to endure her friend’s occasionally withering remarks about being used.
‘I mean,’ Beth said, leaning forward with the concerned frown of one friend trying to impart to another friend what should have been self-evident, ‘now that your course has finished, are you going to move out and get a job with that publishing company? The one you sent your application off to? You did send that application off, didn’t you?’
Heather wilted in the face of this direct line of questioning and mumbled something about needing to add a few finishing touches to it. In truth, the envelope had been lying in her bag for a fortnight while she fought off the sickening prospect of leaving behind a situation that was going nowhere but happened to be working very nicely for her.
While she continued to fan the flames of her infatuation, Theo was as far removed from being interested in her sexually as he ever had been. Theirs was an evolving situation. She had evolved into emotional dependency and he had evolved into having the perfect housekeeper. Indeed, her housekeeping duties were now virtually non-existent. She did some light cleaning, mostly in her own wing, some even lighter cooking to accommodate him when he happened to be in for supper, but mostly she had become a curious mixture of out-of-hours secretary and general do-it-all.
He talked to her about work issues, no longer reminding her that everything he told her was always in the strictest confidence. She’d used to laugh at his frowning secrecy, gently informing him that she personally didn’t know a single person who would have been remotely interested in offshore deals involving companies they had never heard of. He would watch her as she pottered around his kitchen, chatting about her friends and what they got up to.
He found her relaxing and amusing and, more importantly, undemanding. Unlike the women he continued to wine and dine, she showed none of the clinginess that some of them displayed, and she had never nurtured ambitions beyond her reach. In his eyes, they had the perfect relationship. He paid her handsomely, and had increased her already generous salary every three months in direct proportion to the level of duties she took on. In return she helped him in ways far beyond what he would have expected his own secretary at work to do.
She never minded running through e-mails with him, or typing up letters that had to be done late at night after he had left the office. Nor did she balk at buying expensive jewellery for girlfriends, or even ordering the customary bunch of red roses he would have delivered when a relationship was nearing the end of its natural life span.
On a couple of occasions, when he had been out of the country and way too busy to shop, she had even purchased gifts for his mother, which she’d had couriered over to Greece. She could be relied upon to choose just the right thing. He should know. He had seen the reactions of the recipients.
There was nothing Beth could tell her that Heather didn’t already know. This time, though, it was different. She had finished her illustration course and had come top of her class. She no longer needed to save madly. In fact Theo’s generous salary, and the fact that she paid no rent—at his insistence—meant that she had managed to foot the bill for the course, buy all her coursework material, even take herself off on various excursions to exhibitions of interest, and still have money in the bank. Not enough to put down for buying her own place, but more than enough to rent somewhere on her own.
Every word Beth was telling her now made sense. Confronted by too much of the truth to be palatable, Heather took refuge in vague answers.
‘I actually know of an apartment…’ Beth casually announced, glancing at her watch because her lunch hour had extended well beyond its time limit. ‘It’s in my block. It’s not as big as mine, just the one bedroom, but you’ll love it, and you wouldn’t have someone knocking on your door in the late hours of the night, expecting you to fling on a dressing gown and follow him so that you can transcribe some letter that he could easily get his secretary to do the next day…’
But I never mind doing that, Heather wanted to say. She knew better, though. So she nodded distantly and tried to look enthusiastic. ‘I could have a look…’ she compromised.
Beth took that for a definite yes and stood up and reached for her briefcase. ‘Good. Let me know when you’re free and I’ll sort out an appointment for you. But I’m telling you now that you won’t be able to sit around and think about things, because it’ll be snapped up in no time at all.’ As if aware of the preaching tone of her voice, she grinned sheepishly and gave Heather a friendly hug. ‘I care about you,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘And I hate to think of you languishing in that man’s house, desperately waiting for him to notice you while you busy yourself doing his dirty errands.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Of course you do!’ Beth cut short the protest briskly. Heather, she had decided long ago, had an amazing knack for justifying Theo’s bad behaviour and her responses to it. She had met him a few times in the past and knew, realistically, that hell would freeze over before he looked at Heather in any way aside from that of one lucky employer who had a doting employee at his beck and call. He liked his women tall, thin and vacant. Heather resoundingly didn’t fit into any of those categories, and as far as Beth was concerned she let herself down by feeding the illusion that one day he might see her with different eyes.
‘I’m off now, darling. You take care—and phone me. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Heather agreed readily, not quite dismissing the option of moving out, but not giving it much importance either.
Fate had brought her together with Theo, in a manner of speaking, and fate wasn’t quite ready to take her away.
But the application in her handbag, the possibility of a flat and Beth’s stern little talk did have her thinking as she made her way back to Theo’s place.
On the way back she stopped off and bought a few things from the delicatessen at the corner—things she knew he would like. He would be away for the weekend, but tonight he would be in. She would make him some spaghetti Bolognese, to which he was very partial.
As she approached the apartment block she tried not to think of his weekend activities. He was seeing yet another of his impossibly beautiful
brunettes. This one was called Venetia, and she suited the name. She was almost as tall as he was in heels, only wore designer clothes, and on the one occasion she had met Heather had treated her with the slightly disdainful superiority of someone very beautiful in the presence of a troll.
That Heather was jealous was something she would never have revealed to Theo.
But, on top of everything else, it filtered into her system now like poison.
It was no longer enough to content herself with the silly delusion that enjoying him was enough. Yes, she found him endlessly fascinating, with his endearing arrogance, his sharp wit and his moments of real thoughtfulness. But was it really enough?
She had completed her course two weeks ago, and in its wake the grinding clang of time was left marching on, reminding her, in the sudden void, that she had a life to be getting on with—and not a life that revolved around one man who really didn’t pay her a scrap of attention even though she knew, in some inexplicable way, that she was virtually indispensable to him.
Or are you? a nasty little voice in her head said, making her pause in her tracks. You’d like to think you are, but don’t we all believe the things we want to believe and discard the rest?
It was with a heavy heart that Heather walked up to his apartment. She had started that as a form of exercise over the past few weeks—as a way of counteracting her love of chocolate and all things sweet and therefore calorie laden.
Theo lived on the top floor of a high-specification block of penthouse apartments in the very heart of Knightsbridge. Typically, his was by far the largest, encompassing the entire upper floor of the building. It was as big as any conventional house, although laid out in a contemporary fashion, and he had not stinted in its decoration. In fact, he had told her, as she’d traipsed her way through in awestruck silence on her very first day, he had simply employed the top designer in London to come in and have his way with it. His only constraints had involved colour—as little of it as possible—and no plants which would require looking after.
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