by Rosalie Ash
And something had happened to her, and she suspected deep down she might never be quite the same again. Whether Matt has felt the same unnerving experience, she couldn't tell.
Those magnetic eyes had held something, some disturbing emotion, for a brief few seconds, but then they had become shuttered again, too expressionless to read.
Chapter Three
She drank far too much wine at dinner, and found herself falling into a familiar trap. If she was disturbed or nervous about something, she reacted by over-exuberance. Not even intercepting covert glances between Jessica and Andy quelled her extrovert behaviour. She kept them all entertained with anecdotes about her university friends, and some hair-raising adventures on their trek around France, Italy and Spain that summer.
After coffee and liqueurs, she found herself pushing back her chair, standing up a trifle unsteadily, and announcing,
'Let's all go to Options! We can have cocktails, and dance! Andy, Matt, you'll take us to Options, won't you?'
Options was, in fact, a rather over-priced cocktail bar and boutique hotel in the nearby town, with a retro-style 80’s disco at the back, at weekends, so this suggestion didn't meet with total incomprehension. Jessica stifled a yawn, but Andy seemed happy to humour her, and an hour later she was returning, breathless, to their table in the velvet dimness, with her friend Sebastian following her a few seconds afterwards, if possible even more out of breath than she was.
She laughed up at him, taking a gulp of her drink.
'Fantastic, bumping into you here, Vic!' Sebastian was enthusing, collapsing into a spare chair at their table, his dark hair flopping over his forehead. 'No one else I know dances quite like you!'
She laughed, then turned recklessly to catch Matt's eye across the table. An ornate Victorian glass candle-lamp stood in the centre, casting a glow over everyone's faces, making Matt's eyes gleam like a cat's. Even with a quantity of wine inside her, she was finding it uncharacteristically difficult to pluck up courage and ask Matt to dance with her. Her wavering spirits annoyed her. It seemed so ridiculous. This was the only man she had ever met who sent such a shimmer of nervous energy through her, made her shiver all over with wild anticipation. Why did he also have to be the only one who had ever reduced her to such pathetic indecisiveness?
'Come on, Matt,' she risked at last, 'Dance with me.' She hoped her light-hearted tone masked her desperate fear of rejection. But Matt leaned back in his chair, the cold silver eyes level on her face, a hint of mockery around his hard mouth.
'I'm too old to keep up with the sort of moves you were doing,' he said casually, almost off-hand, and he picked up his conversation with Jessica where she had interrupted him, ignoring her crimson face with consummate cruelty.
Victoria sat down at the table, and kept very still, trying to hide her feelings. It was an annoying peculiarity of hers that whenever she was angry, her hands shook. And being angry at this moment was such an irrational emotion she was determined to repress it. Linking her hands together in her lap, she pressed them together, willing herself not to care. Her palms felt slightly moist, though her throat was dry and tight. She had been put down, she acknowledged, as deftly as if she were a precocious schoolgirl and he the headmaster. Sebastian was chatting away to her, relating his sense of anti-climax since coming back from their carefree holiday, trying to fix up a date when they could go out for a pizza together, but she was unable to listen properly. She couldn't concentrate at all.
After a while, the music slowed, and Matt glanced across the table, and half rose from his chair. Involuntarily, heart thudding, she found herself rising a little off her own chair, in readiness for his invitation, but belatedly she realised he had raised that eloquent eyebrow at Jessica, and was holding out his hand.
'Would you like to dance?' he smiled, and Jessica stood up, smiling back at him, moving into his arms with the ease of an old friend amid the mass of rhythmically swaying bodies on the dance floor.
Victoria was stunned. The force of her misery and jealousy was so great she could hardly believe she could feel like this. She felt as if she had plunged into an icy pool of total dejection and was floundering around it, unable to swim. Matt Larson was a complete stranger, reminded a frantic inner voice of reason. She knew nothing about him, she didn't even think she liked him very much. How could it matter if he preferred to dance with Jessica, rather than dance with her? How could she care so much?
Somehow she managed to shake off the shroud of misery and dance again with Sebastian, sparkling and laughing opposite his lively performance.
But her eyes were drawn frequently to Matt and Jessica, still dancing together, her cheek against his muscular shoulder, her bright red hair a magnificent foil to his sleek ash blond.
She refused Sebastian's friendly invitation to carry on dancing, and subsided by Andrew. She was too choked to laugh at his bluff teasing, and embarrassed that she couldn't hide her misery from him.
'Getting tired, Vic? Say the word and we could all go home to bed.'
She shook her head determinedly, staring at her tightly laced hands on the table, not trusting herself to speak. She wanted to rush on to the dance floor, push herself between Jessica and Matt, and claim Jessica's place in his arms.
She wanted to discover how it felt to be that close to him, to move slowly against him like that. The urge was so strong she was shocked at herself.
After an eternity, Matt and Jessica returned to their table, and Andrew took his wife off to dance.
Victoria faced Matt across the table, willing herself to be aloof and sophisticated.
'Tired?' he asked quietly.
'No, not at all. I'm quite happy to stay until everyone else is ready to go home. I can hardly drag everyone here then drag them back home again just to suit myself!'
'Can't you?'
She looked at him sharply. His face was deadpan, his eyes hidden in shadow.
'What do you mean?'
He shrugged. 'You strike me as very used to getting your own way,' he commented. 'Do you always sulk when you don't?'
She was dumbfounded. What possible reason could he have for insulting her so deliberately?
'Sulk?' she repeated, in a gasp of indignation. Her heart was thudding so loudly she was sure people near by must hear it, and her hands were shaking so much she had to grip them tightly round herself. 'I never sulk! And if you're implying I'm spoilt, or over-privileged or something, you can't have any idea what I'm really like—you don't know the first thing about me! I won't deny I was feeling sad. But I was not sulking! Do you always gloat when you catch someone making a fool of themselves?'
There was a taut, charged silence, and she felt almost like crying, her emotions were so overheated. Then Matt's teeth flashed very white in the darkness, and he smiled his devastating smile.
'Invariably,' he agreed blandly, and her sense of the ridiculous saved her, and she burst out laughing.
'Would you care to dance, Victoria?'
She was about to frame a snappy retort, taunt him about his geriatric inability to keep up with her, but there was a sudden stillness inside her, and she said nothing, turning instead to watch Andrew and Jessica on the dance floor. Her sister's tawny head was on her husband's shoulder, cradled close in his arms as they moved slowly to an old Roberta Flack song, 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'.
'Well? Shall we dance?'
'No, thanks.' Impossible to gauge what it cost to say it, but immediately her ego felt better, a little self-esteem restored. But when Matt moved his head slightly, and the light revealed his expression, for a moment she couldn't breathe. What she thought she saw in his eyes made her heart leap erratically in her chest, and goose-pimples shiver her arms.
Squeezing her eyes briefly shut, she opened them and stared at him disbelievingly. So this was it, she concluded hazily. In spite of some inexplicable need to score points off each other, this was the amazing, earth-shattering 'thing' they spoke of, which interfered with sleep and careers
and turned sane people into gibbering idiots. She was suddenly gripped by terror, overwhelmed with panic at the unknown situation she was tumbling headlong into, and which she felt she had little or no control over.
'Oh bugger,' she breathed, unlacing her tightly clenched hands abruptly and standing up. 'Excuse me, I need to find my jacket. I suddenly feel cold.'
She shivered all the way home, desperately tired but sitting rigidly upright beside Matt in the back of the car. She was terrified of falling asleep on him, although the idea of letting her cheek rest on the soft black leather of his jacket was overwhelmingly appealing. After a few miles her eyelids drooped uncontrollably, and she pressed herself against her own side of the car. Her last thought was that if she had to fall asleep, the arm-rest on her door would be an infinitely safer place to do so than Matt Larson's shoulder.
She woke in pitch darkness, and a silence which indicated the middle of the night. Her throat was dry, and she had an excruciating ache in her temples. When she sat up, the pain stabbed through her like someone digging a knife into her skull, and she groaned, holding her head gingerly in her hands, trying to remember how she had got into her Victorian pin-tucked cotton nightshirt and into bed. She could remember leaving the nightclub; after that it was a total blank. The only part she remembered with gruesome clarity was drinking far too much wine and making a complete fool of herself.
She flicked on the bedside light, wincing in its glare, then steeled herself to bend down and rummage fruitlessly through her handbag for some aspirin. There was nothing; she rarely carried pain-killers, as she wasn't prone to headaches or any sort of aches, really.
A search of the bathroom cabinet drew another blank, and, pressing her hand to her forehead she tried to recall where Jessica kept her medicines. Of course, the kitchen. In a high cupboard well out of reach for the day William began exploring on his own.
Half-way down the hall, she got quite a shock when she caught a glimpse of herself in the long mirror by the front door. The short white cotton nightshirt, a genuine antique she had bought in a market in Naples, looked rumpled and quite definitely slept in, lacking the modern blend of polyester, and above it her face was only a shade less white, her brown eyes enormous and bruised-looking. Her wildly tangled hair looked as if she had flung herself from side to side in bed rather more than usual. She looked like a very limp, bedraggled rag doll, she decided wearily, eyeing the expanse of elongated athletic thigh exposed beneath the hem of the nightshirt. Well, it served her right. She couldn't imagine what had come over her last night, but she certainly deserved this mammoth hangover, and she definitely wouldn't be repeating the mistake.
Quenching her raging thirst, and downing two paracetamol, she recalled with irritation Matt Larson's abstemiousness last night. That somehow made her feel worse than ever. Far from admiring his almost ascetic abstinence, she felt furious with him. In fact she could quite easily lay the entire blame for her present state on his shoulders, she concluded vengefully. Anyone forced to spend an evening in the monk-like presence of that man, watching him sip that wretched Perrier all night with such steely control, would have been driven to excesses simply to deflect the tension he radiated!
Her progress back towards the stairs was impeded by an alarming wave of dizziness, and eventually she was forced to stop and lean against the wall. Maybe the water had somehow reactivated the alcohol, she thought miserably, levering herself upright again and tackling the first stair again. But before she had dragged herself any further the light was abruptly switched on, and Matt Larson's tall frame was blocking her way.
Victoria stared up at him owlishly, trying to get her brain to work. Rational thought seemed far more difficult than usual, not just because of her hangover, but because the sight of Matt there on the stairs in front of her, powerfully masculine in black boxer shorts and nothing else, was bringing all her confused reactions of last night flooding back.
'You're the last person I expected to meet on the stairs,' he said, with a hint of amusement. “You looked as though you'd be out for the count until lunchtime.'
'Did I really? Well, I woke up with a slight headache,' she supplied stiffly, finding speech unusually difficult. 'I came down for some tablets and a drink of water. What are you doing?'
'Similar errand. Would you happen to know where Jessica keeps indigestion tablets?' His tone was polite, cool, and she gazed up at him, torn between friendly sympathy and a temptation to gloat. So he had indigestion, did he? Well, it just served him right. Anyone who radiated the sort of coiled-up repression Matt Larson radiated just had to accept the laws of cause and effect.
'Follow me, I'll show you,' she said graciously, grinning suddenly as she ushered him through to the kitchen. She started to reach up to the high cupboard for the medicine box, then stopped in mid-reach, remembering the shortness of her nightshirt just a fraction too late.
'They're up there, in that box,' she told him, crimson-faced, clumsily backing away as Matt came round the table very close to her and reached into the cupboard.
She reversed into the table and almost fell over, then propped herself against it for support, unable to avert her eyes from the sprinkle of blond hairs and ripple of muscle under Matt's lightly tanned skin.
At such close quarters, and being so scantily dressed, she was physically aware of him in a way that was completely new to her. There was spellbinding strength and symmetry about him. She had never thought of a man in those terms before. She had seen male friends stripped down to swim-wear countless times. But somehow this was different. Looking at Matt seemed to be making her knees weak and her heart thud faster,and yet he appeared to be totally unmoved by her mesmerised observation, chewing two of the indigestion tablets in a prosaic, almost preoccupied manner, then finding a glass and drinking some water, seemingly oblivious to her.
She tried to break the spell that seemed to be weaving itself around her, forcing herself deliberately to look for imperfections, anything which she found unattractive, to try to balance her obsession, but in this trance-like grip of admiration she couldn't find anything. All his imperfections looked attractive. The way his blond hair stood slightly on end at the front, the way his large, slightly bent nose looked as if it might have been broken at some stage in the past, the deepish lines round his eyes and mouth which suggested that once upon a time he had laughed or smiled a lot, although he didn't seem to any more, the blond stubble outlining the wide hard mouth and roughening his rather broad jawline—they all seemed infinitely desirable features. The admission filled her with even more alarm.
She felt an irrational urge to touch him, trace her fingers over that strong, aloof, self-contained face and down over the muscular shoulders and torso, to draw some warm response from him. The urge was so great that she hurriedly thrust her trembling hands behind her, and sat on them as she leaned against the edge of the table.
Matt replaced the medicine box and turned his curiously light eyes on her, and she wondered with frantic embarrassment if she had conveyed any of her feverish thoughts to him through the silence. She found herself repeating something she hardly ever did, and blushed a fiery, painful red again.
'How is your headache?' he queried, dispassionately.
'Bad. Really bad,' she admitted, with a slight laugh. 'But self-inflicted, so I can't complain!'
'Do you usually drink so much wine?'
'No.' She shook her head and wished she hadn't. 'No, I don't believe I've ever drunk quite that much all in one go,' she confessed simply. 'But I do like wine. I suppose I've been drinking more of it since this summer in Europe. I find it relaxing. And at least it doesn't give me indigestion!'
'That surprises me. White wine in particular is extremely acidic,' he said dismissively.
She experienced a stab of childish annoyance, and retorted rashly, 'But Perrier is even more acidic? Or was Jessica's health food responsible for waking you up in the middle of the night?'
'I don't think the cause of my indigestion is any concer
n of yours,' he replied, his voice ominously quiet. 'And I suggest you get yourself back to bed. You look terrible.'
'Why, thank you!' she exclaimed, in mock flirtation. 'How frightfully chivalrous of you!' She struggled to stand upright, discovering that as her anger rose so, too, did a threatening wave of nausea. She gripped the table again, shutting her eyes in panic as the floor seemed to be executing rocking motions beneath her feet.
'Are you all right, Victoria? You're very pale.'
'Yes, well,' she gasped, trying to make a joke of her dilemma, 'Just don't pay me any more compliments tonight, I don't think I can cope with them.'
She was desperately aware that she had to get to the bathroom quickly, and took a step towards the door, cursing the way the floor seemed to slope away from her like the deck of a ship in a storm. Matt hastily slammed down his glass of water, and was beside her in two strides.