Theo inclined his head, hearing her out but unmoved by her heated response, and then he shrugged in an exquisitely dismissive gesture.
‘That being the case, then you clearly have no idea how to survive in a world that is full of predatory males…’
‘Predatory males?’ Heather’s thoughts stopped on those two simple words and she stared at him, dumbfounded. ‘Predatory males? The world isn’t full of predatory males, Theo. Not everyone is built along your lines!’
‘I am very far from being a predator,’ he pointed out with insufferable calm. ‘Predators are driven by a need to find and catch their prey. Actually, I have never felt any such need. In fact, I would say that I am more the prey than the predator…’
Heather gasped in disbelief at this wild distortion of fact. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’re as innocent as the driven snow?’
‘Incorrect analogy. I’m saying no such thing. Merely that women chase me more often than not.’
He was probably right too. But that didn’t stop him from being an all-time predator of the highest order. Sensing yet another argument she would be in danger of losing, Heather contented herself by fulminating at his high-handed smugness.
‘Which brings me to the boyfriend…’
She opened her mouth to refute the label, and closed it as quickly as she had opened it. Scott, actually, had been the sweetest of dates, in so far as they had talked until the early hours of the morning over coffee at her flat. She had listened to him pour his heart out about his ex-girlfriend, on whom he was obviously still hung up, and they had parted company promising to keep in touch.
‘Scott isn’t a predator.’ The unlikely thought of that brought a smile to her lips, and seeing it filled Theo with an uncustomary surge of belligerence which he put down to his unsurprising frustration at her naïveté.
‘How would you know? The way you were dressed at that nightclub was a green light to any unattached male. I’m telling you this for your own good, Heather.’
‘You came here to preach to me? Because you don’t think that I’m sensible enough or adult enough to take care of myself?’ She stood up, hand outstretched for his cup. ‘I think it’s time you left, Theo. You should never have come in the first place! What gives you the right to come into my flat and start treating me like a kid?’
‘Calm down. You’re beginning to sound hysterical.’
Heather laughed hysterically and snatched the coffee from his hands, spilling some on his trousers in the process. Her only regret was that the stuff had gone tepid, although he automatically flinched back and sprang to his feet to brush himself down.
‘And I won’t be offering to launder them for you!’ she shrieked. ‘You deserved that!’
Theo, although he didn’t show it, was taken aback by this display of temper. The calm, obliging, sunny-tempered girl…where had she gone?
‘For what? For being decent enough to show concern about protecting you?’
Through the red mist of her anger Heather resisted yelling at him that the only person she needed protecting from was him—and only because she had been idiotic enough to fall in love with him.
Thinking it managed to bring a few seconds of calm to her shattered thoughts, and she took some deep breaths. When in a crisis, breathe deeply and don’t panic. One rule for all situations.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ she managed to say frozenly. ‘I do apologise for spilling the coffee on you, but I won’t be paying the laundry bill.’
‘To hell with the damned trousers!’ Theo exploded. He paced the room, finally leaning against the wall and folding his arms. ‘I don’t care if I have to throw them out! You shriek at me like a fisherwoman when I am the one who should be aggrieved. You have thrown my good intentions back in my face!’
Heather took a few more deep breaths. So this was what love did to a person. Turned her from an even-tempered, cheerful sort into a screaming banshee. Her days of mute adoration seemed a lifetime ago—as did tranquillity and peace of mind.
‘I can take care of myself.’ She folded her arms protectively over her breasts and felt a heady, disturbing rush of awareness as his eyes stripped her of her modest gesture.
‘Tip: watch what you wear, and make sure you don’t flaunt yourself the way you were doing with me a few moments ago…’
‘I’ll remember that. Thank you.’
Her sudden compliance got on his nerves and he stared at her narrowly. Maybe—and it wasn’t a nice thought—he was trying to lock the gate after the horse had bolted. He suddenly had a driving, obliterating need to find out whether she had slept with her date or not, and there was no way he could reasonably put that down to anything caring, concerned or paternalistic.
He walked slowly towards where she was now cringing back into her chair, as if willing the inanimate object to swallow her up, and he leant over her, bracing himself with his hands on either side of her.
Every nerve in her body jumped in wild, searing alarm, and she was aware of her breath coming and going in short, painful bursts.
She kept repeating the mantra about taking deep breaths, but with his face only inches away from hers the exercise was singularly failing to work.
‘And did you remember that when you were with your date? Or did you innocently imagine that he was talking to you and not your breasts?’
‘Don’t you dare insult me like that, Theo.’ Her voice lacked conviction, however. She was sickeningly mesmerised by the dark, burning depths of those magnificent eyes.
It was an insult, but Theo brazenly outstared her. ‘Are you telling me that he didn’t manage to get his paws on you?’
‘I’m telling you that it’s none of your business. Actually, Scott is a really nice guy. He respects me—which is more than I can say for you!’
Theo made a sneering sound under his breath and Heather glared at him coldly.
‘Scott would never talk to my breasts—which is a disgusting expression. I suppose you think that he’s wimp, but he isn’t. And he would never sneer at me either!’
Thinking back on it, Scott, in an ideal world, would have been the perfect partner. Her eyes misted over at the sheer unfairness of life, and as he watched her expression change some new emotion was added to the boiling pot in Theo’s head. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but he didn’t like it.
He was deeply regretting his generous urge to pay her a surprise visit. He should, he told himself fiercely, have let her loose on the London scene and then just waited until she came crawling back to him. Naturally she wouldn’t have found him, but she certainly would have learnt her lesson, and sometimes lessons had to be learnt the hard way.
She was still looking at him in that defensive, wary, but ultimately mulish way, and with a soft groan Theo dipped his head and covered her mouth with his. No gentle kiss, this. Urgency and something powerfully elemental pushed her back into the chair.
For a few breathtaking seconds, caught off guard, Heather gave in to the rapturous pleasure only his mouth could give her. She twisted under the pressure of his hot embrace, and as his hand brushed against her breast she felt her nipples harden in response, straining to be touched and caressed. Imagination filled in all the gaps with remorseless speed, reminding her of how exquisitely his hands would move over her body, and how completely his mouth would seductively follow the path, until her whole body was on the brink of orgasm, waiting only for his hard thrusts to bring her to a state of mindless climax.
But hot on the heels of surrender came reality, and she pushed him back with one sharp jolt.
Theo stood up immediately. His erection was like steel. Painful.
‘Were you trying to show me first hand what kind of man I should watch out for?’ Heather asked shakily. She felt assaulted—and horribly, horribly turned on. How could her body betray her like that? She couldn’t meet his eyes. Not when he might see things there that were shameful. Instead, she twined her fingers convulsively together and held her breath.
‘Maybe,’ Heather burst out tremulously, ‘I don’t want to be the one who’s second best! Maybe I want to be number one with someone—and why not? What’s so odd about that?’
For once she entertained the unusual sight of Theo lost for words. Then, without saying a word, he walked away. Out of the room and out of her life for the second time.
It was only when the door slammed shut behind him that Heather finally gave in to the jag of sobbing that had been threatening to come.
CHAPTER NINE
HEATHER was asleep when her telephone rang. It was a rude awakening from the dream she had been having. In her dream she had risen to glittering heights of success with a job that seemed to be unrelated to the one she was taking but which paid bucketloads of money. And there was Theo, present at a sparkling social event which she knew was for her—even though in the dream she was standing on the sidelines, watching. He was looking at her in a different way, in a way that signified respect, and she was basking in the glow of appreciation.
She ignored the phone, wanting the dream to go on and on for ever, but she could feel it disappearing like mist in the sun as the phone shrilled next to her on the bedside table.
‘It’s me,’ Theo said flatly, stating the obvious. Heather would have recognised his voice if he had been wearing a handkerchief over his mouth.
Disoriented, she sat up and looked at the illuminated hands of the clock on her dressing table. A little after eleven-thirty. He had only been gone for a matter of an hour and a half! Struggling with the shock of hearing his voice, it took her several minutes before she gathered herself together sufficiently to realise that he was saying something to her down the phone.
‘How did you get my telephone number?’
‘Have you heard a word I just said?’ Theo imagined her in a state of drowsiness, hair everywhere, cheeks pink. He looked across the room and grimaced, then turned away from the person who had made herself at home and was staring with great interest around her. ‘Look, the telephone number was scrawled next to the telephone on a jotting pad. I made a note of it—and just as well, as it turns out.’
‘Do you know what time it is?’
Theo stifled a groan. He had driven back from her flat in the minimum amount of time, only resisting the temptation of heading for the local pub because there had been no convenient parking on the street outside, and had arrived at his apartment in a foul mood which not even the challenges of his latest deal could alleviate. In what had become a disturbingly familiar pattern, he had stared at the columns of information blinking at him and had had to concentrate very hard to bring it all into meaningful focus.
Having lived his whole life at the control panel—a place of pleasing superiority from where he could orchestrate events and determine the ebb and flow of his life, both public and private—Theo had found it nigh on impossible to cope with the lack of control he had felt ever since Heather had walked out of his apartment.
He had spent a good while telling himself that it had been for the best, that Heather’s believing the fantasy of their fictitious relationship had been the inevitable start of the whole thing unravelling. The speed at which it had unravelled had taken him by surprise, but he had had no choice but to do what he’d had to do.
That done, he had assumed that his life would effortlessly continue the way it always had, although he had naturally suspected that she might cross his mind off and on.
When he had found himself thinking of her more than he had anticipated, he had told himself that it was because she had been more than his usual fling. After all, hadn’t she worked for him, shared his space, for well over a year?
He would, he’d reasoned to himself, have been inhuman to imagine that they could part company without the occasional lingering aftermath.
He had consoled himself with the thought that he was anything but inhuman.
Seeing her with another man had catapulted all reason out of the window. He had reacted with a fury that had left him shaken.
On the drive back from her flat earlier, he had looked at the situation with honesty and had been forced to admit to himself that his pretence of going over to see her so that he could give a bit of friendly advice because he was such a good person at heart had been a load of hogwash. He had driven over to see her because he had been jealous—had been driven by some pressing need to discover whether she and the man were serious.
And, judging from the soft expression on her face when his name was mentioned, he had been forced to concede that they were. Or at least had the potential to be.
Her parting shot about not wanting to be second best had seemed to him singularly unfair.
When, he had thought with self-righteous fury, had he ever treated her as second best?
Just the opposite! He had given more of himself to her than he ever had to any woman before.
He had spent weeks regulating his work life to be around her more. True, the presence of his mother had kind of necessitated that, but the fact remained that he had striven to arrive home early, and had even accompanied her several times to the supermarket—which was virtually unheard of.
How she could then turn the tables on him and try to make him feel bad about himself was sheer female contrariness.
But going through the unblemished fairness of his attitude still hadn’t made him feel any better about walking out on her.
The simple truth of the matter was that he missed her. The apartment suddenly seemed empty and forlorn without her presence.
Having arrived at this conclusion, which had taken him down mental highways and byways he had never travelled before, he had finally abandoned his work, stretched, and approached the situation from an utterly pragmatic point of view.
She might be going out with a non-starter of a man—might actually think that that brought certain advantages—but as far as he was concerned that fledgling relationship was simply a technical hitch.
He wanted her back and he would get her back. Simple as that.
Considerably restored by an active workable plan, he had been on the point of going to bed when the doorbell had rung…
Theo brought his attention back to the reason for his phone call.
‘I realise it’s an unusual time to call, but you have to get over here. Right now.’
‘Why? What’s the matter?’ Suddenly scared by the tension she could detect in his voice, Heather sat up properly and switched on the bedside light, thereby dispelling all possibility of going back to sleep.
‘Nothing that can be discussed over the telephone.’
Questions were zooming through her head in their thousands. Theo was not, generally, an unpredictable man. His visit to her earlier in the evening had been unpredictable enough, but this telephone call out of the blue filled her head with all sorts of unpleasant possibilities—including the overriding one that he had somehow had an accident and was possibly in a bad way. Maybe he had already called an ambulance but needed her there for support. Or at least, she thought, checking herself, to look after the apartment while he was in hospital.
She had images of him lying on the ground, his strong body weakened and broken, and she leapt out of bed, clutching the phone to her ear while she flew around the room, yanking open drawers and pulling out clothes.
‘Do I need to bring anything?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Anything like what?’
‘I don’t know!’ She tried to imagine what someone with broken bones might need, and could come up with nothing except an emergency trip to the nearest casualty department. ‘There’s a first aid kit in the kitchen. In that cupboard under the sink. It’s tucked away behind the dishwasher tablets.’ To the best of her knowledge he had never opened that particular cupboard.
Theo, taken aback and somewhat puzzled by this could only say mildly, ‘Is there? Thanks. That’s h
elpful to know. I’m going to hang up now. Just make sure you get here fast. In fact, get dressed, and while you’re getting dressed I’ll send my driver over. He’ll be with you in twenty minutes. There’s not much traffic on the roads at this time of the night.’
‘Right.’ Before she could ask any more questions she heard the flat dial tone and went into overdrive, flinging on jeans, tee shirt, jumper. No time for make-up or hair. Just sufficient time to wash her face and quickly brush her teeth.
She should really fly over to Beth’s, just to let her know that she wouldn’t be in her flat overnight, but the prospect of having to cope with the inevitable barrage of stern cross-examining put her off the prospect. She decided that she would phone her friend first thing in the morning.
Theo’s driver arrived in under twenty minutes, as predicted. Knowing how much Theo respected his privacy, and taking the lead from the taciturn middle-aged man who politely ushered her into the back seat, Heather felt it best to maintain a discreet silence—although she was itching to ask questions, just in case…
She half expected to arrive and find an ambulance waiting outside, lights flashing, and men racing about with stretchers or whatever they raced about with when carting off someone with injuries. But the apartment block looked remarkably peaceful.
Having left her key behind, it felt odd for her to buzz on the intercom when she had been accustomed to coming and going as she pleased. Theo answered immediately, releasing the door from the phone inside the apartment.
The ride up in the lift took a mere few seconds which felt like years.
It was something of a shock when, after one knock, the door was opened by a Theo who looked remarkably fit and healthy.
Heather released a long sigh of relief and sagged against the doorframe. ‘You haven’t fallen and broken your bones,’ she breathed.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Theo gave her a perplexed look from under his lashes. She had thrown some clothes on and clearly had no idea how sexy and ruffled she looked.
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