‘So when Helen returns?’
‘You won’t be going back to that cupboard.’
‘I won’t?’
‘Remember that little publishing outfit you’re so interested in?’
‘You mean the one with the gardening books? ‘
‘It’ll need a little steering in the right direction. You have some good ideas.’
‘You mean you actually listened to what I was saying?’
‘So it would seem. You’re going to take it over. You’re not leaving my company. I want you where I can see you.’
‘Are you just finding something for me to do?’ Agatha asked the question tentatively. A little voice of reason pointed out that accepting a position for which she wasn’t qualified smacked of an exchange of favours, but she swept aside that mental objection and focused on the thrilling prospect of continuing to work for him.
Alert to every nuance in her voice, Luc gave the smallest of shrugs. Then he said, with enough self-assurance to kill off any lingering doubt in her head, ‘Don’t underestimate yourself. You catch on quick. I’ll set you up with a team of three to work out strategies for getting that publishing firm in the black. Management’s been a bit unstable, and no one’s bothered to drag it into the twenty-first century. They need to get on board with the fact that they can be undercut in price from any online bookstore. Personally, I don’t have the time to devote to sorting them out. But you? You’d do a good job. I have every faith in you.’
Agatha could barely credit what she was hearing. Another subconscious tick was put in that box in her head. She snuggled against him, and within five minutes she was asleep.
Luc felt her relax against him and felt too her easy, regular breathing as she drifted off to sleep.
He had no idea why he had suggested what in fact was a truly meteoric promotion for someone with woefully inadequate qualifications but, having suggested it, he found that he was content with the prospect.
The publishing company was small and of relatively little value. There was a limit to how much damage she could inflict, although he really did have faith in her abilities. She had proved herself to be hard-working and talented, even if she did inherently dislike office work.
Warmed by the thought of having her around him whenever he wanted, and only vaguely aware that for the first time he had broken with tradition in allowing a woman to spend the night with him, Luc eventually fell asleep.
Five weeks later and Agatha was still on a high, still living on that fabulous cloud nine where hopes could truly blossom and the unthinkable might just come to pass.
She had been promoted without any fanfare in a move that had been shrewdly calculated to stifle any opportunity for wagging tongues to spread gossip. Much had been made of her gardening background, which was a unique talent in a company full of thrusting university graduates, and its relevance to the post she had been given.
Her little team of three had been recruited from outside and they had all been established in a cosy section of his building on the first floor. Agatha adored it. She had fellow gardening enthusiasts working with her and, whilst she wasn’t physically working with plants, it was as close as she could possibly get from within the confines of an office.
Sometimes Luc would pop down to check their progress. He never gave any indication of having any interest in her aside from the purely professional, although Agatha was thrillingly aware of the lazy slant of his eyes in her direction, and the light brush of his fingers against her arm when he leaned over to inspect something on her computer.
Once, just once, they had both worked late, and when everyone else had vacated the building he had led her into his office and locked the door and they had made love right there with the low sofa as their bed and the desk as their foreplay arena.
He had confessed that it was the first time he had ever done that with any woman.
That, along with lots of other little things, was filed away in her head as ‘significant’.
So far, her ‘significant’ box held a promising number of things, including his firsts: his first to have a woman stay the night with him—in fact to have practically moved in—his first to make love to a woman in his office, his first when it came to experiencing the delights of the local supermarket because he was accustomed to having his food delivered from Fortnum and Mason if he wasn’t eating out. In fact, she reckoned that she might very well be the first woman he had entertained with a home-cooked meal, and afterwards a romantic comedy on the plasma television he swore they would never sit in front of.
All of that meant something. Agatha was sure of it.
Tonight, though, was going to be special. Luc would be heading off to New York for a week. She was going to leave work early and prepare something for him. Three courses, candlelight, wine, maybe even some mood music. She had already bought the ingredients for an Italian meal, and at precisely five o’clock she left, taking the tube and bus to her place, which seemed so much smaller and dingier in comparison than she could ever have imagined possible.
It was important to keep things real. That much she did know. He would be dropping by at a little after seven to take her to a mega-expensive restaurant on the outskirts of the city but she had cancelled the booking. Instead, they would eat in which was always so much cosier. The weather was nudging into Spring but it was still cold and rainy. By six thirty, she was dressed and when he buzzed her from downstairs she practically flew to the intercom to let him in.
Watching him as he divested himself of his trench coat and took in the candlelight and the carefully set table, she said breathlessly, ‘I decided that it’s better to stay in on the last night before you head off for your trip.’ She was wearing a tight jade-green dress of a kind she would never have worn before, and nothing at all underneath it, which would previously have been unthinkable.
A trace of unease slivered through him. He hadn’t expected her to cook for him, although thinking about it it was hardly the first time. He saw her most evenings and going out every night had not been feasible. He marvelled at how quickly she had infiltrated his life. Other women had been entertained on a sporadic basis, when it suited him. With Agatha he appeared to have developed a routine and he wasn’t entirely sure when this had happened.
‘There was no need,’ he drawled, shifting his attention away from the table and the candles and on to her, which was a far less thought-provoking sight.
‘I know, but I thought it would be nice for us to eat in. Honestly, I know it looks as though I’ve gone to a lot of trouble, but I really haven’t. It’s just a quick meal.’
Agatha tried to hide her disappointment at his less than enthusiastic response. But she felt awkward as she fussed around him, pouring him a glass of wine and laughing a little too brightly when he told her that candles were a fire hazard.
‘Aren’t you in the least bit romantic?’ She tried very hard not to sound wistful, but Luc’s shrewd green eyes still narrowed on her flushed, upturned face resting dreamily in the palm of one hand.
‘No,’ he told her abruptly, closing his knife and fork on a meal that he knew would have taken her quite a while to prepare. ‘So let’s not spoil the occasion by going down that road. Believe me—it leads to a dead end.’ He pushed back his chair and watched her, his handsome face impassive.
Trapped in the suddenly uncomfortable silence, Agatha launched into a nervous explanation of what she had prepared for dessert. Luc relaxed. Hell, he wasn’t going to be seeing her for a week, possibly longer if his meetings overran. There were better things to do than eat chocolate fondant. He smiled, tilting his head to one side.
‘Let’s skip the fondant,’ he murmured, patting his lap and zeroing in on the sway of her magnificent body as she walked towards him. He eliminated his sense of foreboding with one decisive strike. ‘I’m hungry for something else.’
‘You only ever think about sex,’ Agatha half-laughed, although she could hear the thread of seriousness in her voice. But she sighed
and yielded to her very passionate lover as he gently eased the stretchy dress off her shoulders, groaning with appreciation at the sight of her bare breasts.
He could do this to her, make all her thought processes come to a grinding halt just with one touch.
When he delicately lifted one heavy breast to his mouth, she wriggled on his lap and succumbed utterly to the soaring pleasure rushing through her like an unstoppable tide.
Somewhere along the line, he growled that this would be the last time he made love to her in her bedsit, because it was just too damned uncomfortable; she heard herself purr contentedly because that suited her fine.
Her bed might have been a lot smaller than his, but he still managed to touch her in all the right places, unerringly finding the pulsing heat of her womanhood and stoking it until she was whimpering to be brought to a climax.
He never tired of hearing that husky catch in her voice when she begged for him, and he never tired of the sight of her stripped bare with her fair hair in tousled curls around her face and her creamy, smooth, voluptuous body writhing on the bed, caught up in the mindless pleasure only he could arouse in her.
Even though he knew that she was his, possession had not yet dimmed his craving for her. Sometimes at work he would find himself propelled down to her floor on the pretext of asking her something for no better reason than he wanted the pleasure of the accidental touch.
Knowing that he would not be with her for a while, he wanted to make their love-making last. Time and again he teased her, stroking her with his fingers, his mouth, his tongue, until she was lost. When he did finally thrust into her, she was wet and hot for him and it was an earth-shattering experience.
Still tender from their extended love-making, Agatha curled against him and half-closed her eyes when he ran his fingers through her hair.
‘Are you going to miss me?’ She eventually sighed, and Luc stilled, because there was an undercurrent to that question that was as loud to him as the clanging of church bells.
Which seemed an unfortunate allusion.
‘I’m going to be as busy as hell.’ He refused to be pinned down and he felt her shift against him, propping herself up and looking at him evenly.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I probably won’t have time to think about anything apart from making sure that we get this deal done.’
A chill breeze seemed to feather its way along her spine. She knew that she should just steer away from the topic, but perversely she couldn’t.
‘Will you call me? ‘
‘What’s going on here? What’s this all about?’
Two things were becoming blindingly clear to Agatha.
The first was that he couldn’t commit to calling her, and the second was that he couldn’t commit to calling her because he wasn’t even going to notice her absence. Maybe the absence of sex with her, but not her.
She had dressed up what they had in lots of frills and bows and called it a relationship that was really going somewhere, but the truth was that it was all about the sex for Luc. Good heavens, he couldn’t even enjoy the dessert she had spent an hour and a half making the afternoon before, because he had wanted to get into bed with her.
Shame and anger curdled into a heady mix. She pulled away from him and sat up, arms folded, staring blindly ahead of her.
‘You tell me,’ Agatha said quietly. ‘I don’t know how it happened, but we’re lovers.’
‘You don’t know how it happened? It happened because we can’t resist one another.’ He pulled her against him but she resisted and Luc, sitting up now as well, threw his hands up in a gesture that was both elegant and telling.
‘Okay. What do you want me to say? That I’ll call you? I’ll call you.’ He was infuriated that she had contrived to spoil their last evening together for what might well run into two weeks by demanding answers from him that he wasn’t prepared to provide. He wasn’t a man who enjoyed being penned into a corner. Frankly, any such manoeuvre from a woman was charged with risk. But he would make the concession. Why not? He wanted her more than he had wanted any woman for a very long time. She did wonders for his jaded palate, and for that reason he would relinquish his natural urge to slam his instinctive barriers into place.
‘Now can we move on?’ he asked, trailing his finger along the tiny ridges of her spine and then smiling as he watched the tiny responsive flex of her body. Her mouth might be saying one thing but her body was singing a completely different song, and the body could be very persuasive indeed. ‘I’ll phone you every day if you want,’ he volunteered magnanimously.
‘I don’t want you to phone me! ‘ Her eyes felt blurry now and she shrugged off his hand. She was rigid with tension. Like a high-wire walker who had taken the first step over the abyss, she now felt committed to carry on, no turning back. ‘I don’t want you to phone me because I’ve kicked up a fuss,’ she told him, her face half-inclined in his direction. ‘How desperate do you think I am?’
‘I never said anything about you being desperate,’ Luc groaned and muttered an oath of sheer frustration under his breath.
‘But it’s what you’re thinking. And I don’t blame you. I fell into bed with you and I’ve accommodated you every inch of the way!’
‘You’re getting hysterical.’
‘I am not getting hysterical!’ But she took a few deep breaths. ‘I just…I just want to know where this is going.’
‘Why is it important? We’re having fun, aren’t we? ‘
‘There’s more to life than having fun.’
Luc drew in a long, even breath. ‘I don’t want to get involved in this conversation. What we have is good. Why question it?’
‘Because I need to know if I’m wasting my time with you.’
Luc’s experience with women had not braced him for such a direct line of questioning. In the past, women had tried to infiltrate themselves into his life. They had never pinned him to the spot and demanded to know what his intentions were. They had nurtured implausible expectations which had manifested themselves in a sudden interest in the decor of his apartment, or a pressing need to prove what good cooks they were. Inevitably, that had signalled the end. Never had any of them come right out and asked him if they were wasting their time. What kind of a question was that?
For a few seconds, he was literally speechless.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ he hedged, getting out of bed. Agatha scrambled behind him, grabbing one of her oversized tee-shirts en route.
‘That’s not an answer!’ She screeched to a halt as he turned on the shower and stepped under it. He dwarfed the miniscule shower cubicle. Within seconds the bathroom was all steamed up. She took a few seconds to think about what she was going to say while she watched him with that compulsive fascination that she had always known to be a sign of weakness. She loved this man. She had let herself fall deeper and deeper in love with him while he had steadfastly stuck to the programme and enjoyed her for sex. In no way could she say that he had ever led her up a garden path.
‘I thought I could do this,’ Agatha managed to get out when the shower had been switched off and she wasn’t having to shout above the sound of running water. ‘I thought I could be a thoroughly modern person and have an affair with you because I’m attracted to you, but I can’t.’ She looked down at her fingers because it felt safer than to stare at him.
For a while, Luc didn’t say anything. He began putting on his clothes. He didn’t know why he should feel as if a rocket had exploded underneath him. Hadn’t he known all along that she was the old-fashioned sort of girl who engaged in relationships in the hope that they were going somewhere? He wondered how he could have ignored that simple, central truth and allowed his actions to be ruled by the driving power of lust. But he had, and he was repelled by his own weakness.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He addressed her downbent head, steeling himself against the insidious pull of sexual attraction which had been his downfall in the first pl
ace. ‘And I wish I could let you buy into the fantasy that this will end in a walk up an aisle somewhere, but I can’t.’ He raked his fingers through his still-damp hair and frowned. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. Please.’
Agatha reluctantly looked at him, although she strongly wanted to cover her ears and not hear what he was going to say.
‘I don’t know where this is going to end, or when, but marriage is never going to be on the cards.’
‘You can’t stay a bachelor all your life.’ There. It was out in the open.
‘When and if I ever do decide to get married,’ Luc delivered grimly, ‘It will be to a woman who understands my priorities. I’ve never told anyone this, but I’m going to tell you now because you deserve honesty: I was involved with a woman when my father died and I was summoned home.’ His mouth twisted in distaste at the memory. ‘I was faced with a mess that needed clearing up, and the only way I could clear it up was to jump in at the deep end. I worked twenty-four-hour days, seven days a week. Needless to say,’ he said with biting sarcasm, ‘The love of my life didn’t understand having to take a back seat to work commitments that were unavoidable. So, Agatha, I don’t do the romantic dramas. Not now, not ever.’
What he didn’t add was that he would eventually settle down with someone whose drive and ambition matched his own, or who was content to allow him the freedom to continue with life exactly as he wanted. He didn’t want the shrew in the background nagging away at him, telling him that he needed to work less, rolling her eyes to the ceiling every time he had to go abroad, trying to turn him into a domesticated, obedient man about the house. It was a well-rehearsed piece of wisdom he had lived by for as long as he could remember. He wondered why it now sounded like a tired cliché.
‘I know you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, but believe me you’ll thank me for being honest with you one day. I’m not the sort of guy you need.’
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