by Penny Jordan
With another furious glare at Emma, Bianca opened the door. ‘You might think you can deceive me, Drake,’ she said softly, ‘but you can’t. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but you’re not as indifferent to me as you’re pretending, and before you leave here I’ll prove that to you and your little fiancée.’
CHAPTER SIX
EMMA sat through dinner in a haze, feeling more like someone observing the behaviour of actors involved in a TV play rather than a supposed participant in what was going on.
If she hadn’t still been tussling with the effects of Drake’s ability to arouse a hitherto unknown sexual hunger deep inside her she might have been able to be almost amused by Bianca’s behaviour. The woman was pure bitch, Emma reflected without malice. The fact that her husband was watching and listening to her attempts to draw Drake’s attention to herself and keep it there, appeared to concern her not in the least. Towards Emma when she did have occasion to speak to her, her manner was both off-hand and distinctly contemptuous.
Once or twice Emma thought she saw a look in Giles’s eyes which indicated that he was not quite as besotted by his wife as she seemed to think, and it occurred to Emma that Bianca suffered from a dangerous degree of over-confidence. In many ways she reminded her of Camilla and her blood ran chilly to think that her young sister could, in time, turn into another Bianca.
When dinner was over, and Emma noted that for differing reasons neither she nor Bianca had done justice to the excellent food, Giles suggested that they all retire to the drawing room.
‘No business talk tonight,’ he said with a smile, to Drake. ‘I believe in fair play, and as I know to my cost transatlantic flight is particularly draining.’
‘But darling.’ Bianca’s voice dripped venom as she poured the coffee. ‘You forget how much younger than you Drake is.’
There was a moment’s awkward silence and then Drake interposed smoothly, ‘Younger maybe, but I quite agree. Besides,’ he glanced at Emma, and her cheeks caught slow fire from the sexual appreciation of his look, ‘there are other reasons why I’d appreciate an early night…’
Emma had no need to fake her blush or her confusion. Bianca’s laugh seemed particularly high and false. ‘Good heavens Drake,’ she said shrilly, ‘where on earth did you find her, she’s positively Victorian!’
‘Ignore Bianca, my dear,’ Giles counselled Emma in a kind voice. ‘Like a good many men with something of a reputation where women are concerned, when it comes to his own woman, Drake appreciates rarity value.’
While half of her was inclined to object to the blatant derision of his remark, Emma couldn’t help responding to the pain in her host’s eyes as they rested on his wife’s tautly bitter face. ‘I’m afraid Bianca has grown too used to being the centre of male attention to appreciate the company of another woman, especially one as attractive and feminine as yourself. Drake is known as a shrewd businessman, and I can see he’s been equally shrewd in his choice of future wife.’
Bianca who had caught the last part of her husband’s comment said bitchily, ‘Oh I quite agree, Giles. What is it they say? If a man wants to be securely married he should choose a plain wife.’
Had she in reality been engaged to Drake, there was just enough truth in that comment to cause real pain, Emma thought wryly. She knew quite well that she was no true beauty; certainly not as she suspected Bianca judged her own sex, and she only had to think of the beautiful women Drake had escorted publicly over the last twelve months to admit that she herself was way, way out of their league, but she was not engaged to Drake; she was not emotionally involved with him, therefore she was completely safe from Bianca’s vitriolic comments. So why this feeling of acute pain; why this need to glance uncertainly at Drake as though needing his support and reassurance?
Confused by her own reactions Emma was unaware of Drake moving until she felt the hard reality of his arm round her waist, her body responding irresistibly to the warmth and security of his—so irresistibly that her breath caught in her throat, her eyes focusing blindly on his face as she tried to come to terms with the emotions rioting inside her. You should have been an actress my girl, she told herself hardily, you certainly have a gift of throwing yourself wholeheartedly into your part.
‘Emma has a beauty of spirit and personality which has far more appeal than anything manufactured by cosmetic surgeons and beauticians,’ Drake responded calmly.
His defence of her was everything that, as his fiancée, she could have wished for. From the look on Bianca’s face it was plain that the older woman was furious, and Emma wondered about Drake’s remark. Bianca’s features were so perfect that they could owe more to a good plastic surgeon than to nature, and for the first time she felt something akin to pity for the older woman. She had a loving husband; everything that his wealth could buy and still she wasn’t happy. Nor ever would be Emma thought intuitively, even if that husband was Drake; Bianca would always want what just lay over the next hill… the next man. Almost as though she sensed her pity the older woman glared at her, and Emma knew that she had made an enemy; not just because she was Drake’s ‘fiancée’, but in her own right.
Shortly after that they said their good nights. Emma wasn’t sorry to be leaving the drawing-room, which for all its elegance and expensive furnishings was a cold, unwelcoming room.
As she hesitated outside her bedroom door, Drake’s hand on her wrist stopped her from opening it, and she allowed herself to be guided in the direction of his own door. Once inside he closed it behind them, and as he turned she saw that he was frowning; the strain of the evening plainly showing in his face.
‘Thanks for your support downstairs,’ he said, tossing the words casually to her over his shoulder as he discarded his evening jacket. ‘God what a bitch that woman is, she was determined to create as much havoc as she possibly could.’
‘Yes, I think if we were really engaged, we’d be in the middle of an extremely destructive row right now,’ Emma agreed tiredly, remembering some of Bianca’s bitchy remarks about Drake’s previous womenfriends. Every remark she had made to Emma had been carefully designed to undermine her self-confidence, to throw in her face the fact that Drake was an extremely desirable and highly sexual man—as if she didn’t already know.
‘A row?’ Emma could see Drake through the dresser mirror. The fine silk of his white shirt emphasised the muscular lines of his body. Of its own volition her body responded to its masculinity, her pulse rate increasing fractionally, the muscles in the pit of her stomach tightening. It really was amazing; the logical side of her nature retained enough control to tell her how illogical it was that she should respond so quickly and so intensely to a man who, on the face of it, was everything she most detested. Oh the perversity of human nature. Thank goodness, this was all simply a charade, and that she had the good sense to see exactly what sort of man lay behind the smooth urbanity with which he had countered Bianca’s attacks on her tonight.
‘Umm, Bianca is proving even more troublesome than I had envisaged.’
‘Perhaps she does genuinely love you.’
It was a comment she had not intended to make and from the frown scoring between Drake’s eyebrows it was not one he had expected to hear. ‘Love?’ His eyebrows straightened and lifted. ‘My dear Emma, don’t be naïve, that woman doesn’t love anyone other than herself…’
The contempt he felt towards Bianca was quite plain to hear, and Emma echoed his frown although for different reasons. ‘Are you always so contemptuous of the women you sleep with?’
For a moment Drake checked, and then he answered in a laconic drawl, ‘If they merit it, then yes.’
‘A psychiatrist might be curious to know why you choose women you can only despise to share your life.’
‘Meaning that I myself must be inadequate in some way?’
He was quick, Emma had to give him that. ‘Not necessarily so. I suspect the majority of men are looking for a woman who combines perfect features and figure with a
perfect nature. It can hardly be held to be our fault that Mother Nature rarely sees fit to wrap all three in the one package.’
His cool mockery and taunting dismissal of her sex stung Emma into retorting, ‘If men weren’t always so keen to debase and exploit physical beauty in women perhaps they might…’ She broke off angrily when she heard Drake’s soft laughter.
‘If Bianca could see you now she wouldn’t be in such a hurry to dismiss you as a nonentity. There’s an awful lot of passion lurking beneath that cool surface, isn’t there?’
‘I’m a normal, intelligent human being,’ Emma responded, calming down a little, ‘and like other intelligent human beings, I’m capable of having strong feelings on a variety of subjects.’
‘So I’ve noticed. What a pity one of those subjects can’t be me, Emma mine, something tells me that you and I could be very good together.’
He had moved as he spoke and was now standing directly behind her. Emma could feel the heat of his body filling the small distance that separated them. She badly wanted to lean back against him and to feel his arms come round her, his hands caressing her body. The intensity of her desire shook her, forcing her to fight to banish it from her mind.
‘Any involvement between us will only prejudice your business discussions,’ she managed to respond crisply.
‘You think so? Very well. But we will be lovers, you and I, Emma,’ he warned her softly, as he stepped away from her. ‘Maybe not now, maybe not here in New York, but ultimately your body will surrender its secrets and its passion to mine, and you’re a liar if you deny it.’
How calm, and dispassionate he was, Emma thought, listening to him. While her body shook and trembled at the visions conjured up by his words, he remained unmoved, but then how many women had heard those words, or ones like them from him before? His body was no stranger to desire, to wanting, unlike hers… and yet she knew that in all honesty she could not deny what he had said; that some small masochistic part of her didn’t even want to deny it. She didn’t know what it was about her that made him want her; she wasn’t like his other women. Perhaps that was it; perhaps it was the challenge she represented; the novelty value of her virginity.
She was trying to whip up inside herself a resentment against him but although her mind might revolt against his arrogant words, her body reacted to them as surely and undeniably as though it had been programmed to do so. Her body was her real enemy, not Drake, Emma acknowledged, because it was her body that would ultimately betray her with its craving to satisfy its need to be possessed by his. There was no logical explanation for what she felt; no learned or reasoned arguments that could be applied against a force so great that she literally shook with the intensity of it.
She moved towards the connecting door, knowing that he would not stop her.
‘Leave the door unlocked,’ he warned her as she opened it. ‘We don’t want Bianca leaping to any conclusions, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have given the staff instructions to spy on us and report back to her.’
‘Surely she must see that you don’t want her?’ Emma queried.
‘Bianca is a woman who thinks her beauty entitles her to everything she wants from life. Facing the fact that that isn’t so, means facing up to the fact that her beauty is not the powerful, invincible weapon she has always believed and that’s something she’ll fight strenuously against doing, because it’s all she has.’ There was no pity in his voice only contempt, and as though he read her mind, he quoted softly, ‘Those who live by the sword, my dear Emma. Bianca has not cared who she has hurt in her greed and self-conceit; witness her attitude towards Giles tonight. Now she is a candidate for the shrink’s couch,’ he added referring to their earlier conversation, ‘but don’t under-estimate her, Emma. She’s a very dangerous woman, in the way that a person who’s obsessed can be.’
‘Meaning she’s obsessed with you?’
‘Not specifically. What she’s obsessed with is getting her own way; with proving to her own satisfaction that she has the power through her looks to compel men to give in to her, I just happen to be the man she wants at this particular moment in time.’
Initially inclined to dismiss his comments as callous; to brand him as an egotistical male far too ready to see in Bianca an all too convenient Eve, Emma was compelled to hesitate and re-assess her own judgment. In many ways Drake was right and in admitting this she was forced to concede that he was a shrewd, almost intuitive, judge of character, and that, combined with what he had said to her about wanting her was sufficient to increase her tension to the point where it was almost a physical reality.
It would be hard enough simply to battle against his desire to possess her, but she had to fight the added hazard of her own feelings.
It was a long time after she had left Drake before she managed to fall asleep. Her feelings towards him were constantly changing; her judgments almost hourly having to be amended. He was so complex a character that fresh sides to him were constantly being revealed to her. She was like a child, fascinated by fire, Emma told herself wryly, on the edge of sleep; she knew that contact with it would hurt and yet, irresistibly, she was drawn towards the bright glitter of its heat.
* * *
‘Good heavens, what time is it?’ Emma struggled to sit up as a uniformed maid arrived with a tray of coffee and biscuits, fearing that she had overslept so badly that she had disrupted the household.
‘Just after eight,’ was the smiled response.
In answer to Emma’s anxious enquiries about breakfast she was told that the two gentlemen would be having theirs in the breakfast room at nine o’clock, and that she could either join them or have breakfast in bed, as her hostess was apparently doing.
How the rich lived, Emma thought humorously, declining the latter. Now that she was awake, she was too keyed up to simply lie in bed. Would Bianca’s behaviour prejudice Drake’s hopes of selling the magazine to Giles?
The latter had seemed a shrewd man to Emma, but even the shrewdest of men could sometimes have their weak points and his was definitely Bianca. Emma had not missed the look of pain in his eyes at some of his wife’s more contemptuous comments, and it didn’t take a degree in human behaviour patterns to guess that like any other human being he would be more inclined to blame an outsider for his wife’s indifference to him than to blame her. Emma had sensed that Giles respected Drake, and yet that respect must be tinged with some envy. Drake was a young man in the full power of his maleness, looking forward to life while Giles was looking back.
Showered and dressed Emma made her way downstairs, thanking the maid who gave her directions for the breakfast room.
Once a conservatory, it was massed with plants, its decor as carefully planned as that of the rest of the house. Drake and Giles were both there before her. Drake stood up as she walked in, the brief hard pressure of his hand on her arm and his mouth against her skin sending pulses of awareness jolting through her body.
There was a certain degree of tension in the air, Emma could feel it, and as she glanced questioningly at Drake, Giles greeted her, saying, ‘It looks as though Drake and I won’t be able to get down to any business today. My secretary is off sick, and I wanted notes taking of our discussions. I don’t like using agency girls, and I positively loathe those infernal recording machines.’
He looked rather like a little boy, scowling ferociously as he admitted to this weakness. Although she hid it from him Emma was faintly amused that a man who was the head of a multi-million dollar empire couldn’t bring himself to use a dictating machine. He was not alone; Emma had come across this phenomena before—and often from men who had insisted on computerising whole departments. Their excuses were normally almost childish.
Without pausing to think she offered impulsively, ‘Could I stand in for your secretary? My shorthand speed is quite good, and…’
Before she could finish Drake had picked up on the suggestion. ‘Great idea,’ he approved, without giving Giles a chance to object. ‘Emm
a my love, you’re a real treasure. What would I do without you?’
After that the morning flew by so quickly, Emma could not believe it when the maid came in to tell them it was time for lunch.
Tactic, and counter-tactic, thrust and counter-thrust; as two skilled combatants in the same field Drake and Giles had put forward their differing viewpoints. As a fascinated observer, Emma could almost feel the point where the tide began to turn in Drake’s favour, and Giles began to give ground slightly.
By lunch-time Drake had won his agreement to retaining all the existing staff for a probationary period of six months, if they were able to conclude all their other negotiations satisfactorily and the business did eventually become his.
Emma had listened closely to everything that had been said and on a couple of occasions had been able to insert a deft comment of her own.
During lunch the business discussion continued, with Giles making one or two comments to Emma. At one point he turned to Drake and said admiringly, ‘You’ve really picked a winner here Drake; beauty, brains and femininity.’
‘The three graces,’ Drake responded, smiling at Emma. When he smiled at her like that she had difficulty holding on to her commonsense. She was almost grateful to Bianca for the small explosion of sound she made, her expression derisive, as her mouth twisted in bitterness.
‘Be careful darling,’ she said acidly to Giles. ‘Your little heroine might not be as sure of Drake as you think. She might be lining you up as a substitute. A role you should be used to playing by now. I’m going out,’ she added, standing up abruptly. ‘We’re dining out with the Carltons tonight. It will be a rather formal occasion,’ she added to Emma. ‘I do hope you’ve brought something suitable with you. Unfortunately, I can’t lend you anything, all my clothes would be much too small.’