by Liz Fielding
India waited while Jordan went to buy a couple of programmes, apparently oblivious of the way women glanced in his direction, then turned to look again with hungry eyes. He’d abandoned the formality of his City chalk-stripe in favour of a cream suit and a dark blue collarless shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. He looked relaxed, at ease with himself and the world. And very definitely good enough to eat.
Dangerously so.
She saw the women look, and, far from oblivious, she felt a choking upsurge of possessiveness. Wanted to tell them to keep their eyes to themselves.
Then, as he took the programmes, he glanced up, caught her gaze and smiled—just for her. An intimate, I’m-glad-you’re-here look that made everyone else disappear. Made her feel rare and precious.
She wasn’t certain why she’d decided to come. She knew that Jordan thought he was being very clever, giving her an order in a way that she’d find impossible to refuse, and her first response had been to drop the envelope, tickets and all, into the nearest bin.
But then she’d decided that it didn’t matter. He might think he was winning, but she knew that if she accepted the challenge, took the risk, then whatever happened in the future—tonight, listening to a concert with someone who shared her passion for music—she couldn’t lose.
It was the first time he’d ever been to a concert and found the music less compelling than his companion. India sat so still, so rapt. Once, during a slow canzonetta, played with such deeply felt perfection by the young Korean violinist, she reached out blindly and he caught her hand, held it. She glanced at him, apparently startled to discover that he was beside her, and as he watched a tear welled up, spilled over.
He wanted to kiss it from her cheek, taste it. He wanted to taste her, every bit of her, and he wanted to take his time. Take the slow, scenic route via her temple, the hollows of her throat, the corner of her mouth, where he’d noticed a tiny crease that sometimes betrayed the beginnings of a smile.
He wanted to graze the tender place behind her ear. Lift her hair and tease the back of her neck, her shoulders, driving her insane as he made her wait. Made himself wait.
If they’d been alone, this would have been the moment. She was boneless, beyond reason, and that was how he wanted her. Lost to reason. Wanting him so much that nothing else mattered.
The way, as he’d discovered some time during the last forty-eight hours, that he wanted her.
She started as the tempo changed suddenly, turned back to the platform. And he discovered that he’d been holding his breath, hoping that she would leave her hand in his. Just so that he could touch her.
And she did.
‘Thank you, Jordan. That was…’ India felt unable to express her feelings in words and filled the gap with a gesture that invited him to help her out.
‘Yes, it was,’ he said, responding to her silent plea. ‘Very…’ And he copied her gesture, mimicking the helpless little pause.
She laughed. ‘Two minds with a single thought.’
‘Let’s see if we can double it. Are you hungry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Italian? Japanese? Thai?’
‘American,’ she said. ‘I’d like a hot dog.’
‘A hot dog,’ he repeated evenly.
‘With double onions and plenty of mustard. There’s a place by Waterloo Bridge.’
‘Well, you’re easy to please.’
Not that easy. ‘We can eat them as we walk along the Victoria Embankment.’
He glanced at her shoes—soft, low-heeled favourites—and said, ‘Sure. If that’s what you want.’ Sure? That was it? No indulgent laughter? No firm redirection to a ‘charming little restaurant that you’ll love’? That was the way James had dealt with a similar request on an evening when the music had been sublime and all she’d wanted to do was walk.
Could it be that Jordan Farraday had asked her what she wanted and then offered her the unusual compliment of believing that she meant it?
He was even cleverer than she thought.
They emerged to the mayhem of hundreds of concert-goers trying to connect with pre-booked taxis. ‘I’ll just tell the driver that there’s been a change of plan,’ he said, and crossed to a sleek Daimler parked at the kerb to speak briefly to the driver before taking her arm, hooking it under his.
They walked in silence for a while, and normally she would have been glad to have an opportunity to come down from the concert. But tonight the concert had slipped away in that moment she’d turned and seen Jordan watching her. There had been something unguarded in that look. No intent to charm.
The arrogance of a man in control of himself, and everyone around him, had gone, and he’d looked so vulnerable that she’d wanted to take his face in her hands and kiss him. Reassure him. Tell him that everything would be all right. That, together, they could work things out.
Crazy enough, if forgivable in a moment of high emotion.
Yet now, walking at his side, her arm within the encompassing safety of his, she was still, on some subconscious level, aware of everything that he had been feeling in the semi darkness of the concert hall. Could hear his unspoken thoughts, feel the heat of a desire that reached out and warmed her.
‘English or French?’ They had come to a halt a few yards from the hot dog vendor. She looked up. ‘Mustard?’
‘Oh, English, please.’ she said. His mouth quirked. ‘What?’
‘I’d have put money on it,’ he said, giving the vendor their order, not forgetting the double onions for her. He wrapped her hot dog in a couple of napkins, added the English mustard and handed it to her.
She captured an onion making an escape bid, and popped it in her mouth, sucked the juice from her thumb. ‘Are you suggesting that I’m predictable?’
‘Anything but predictable. I’m suggesting you’re not a woman to take the easy option.’
She bit into her hot dog, then began to walk across the bridge. ‘Not a woman to give up and hand over her department store without a fight,’ she agreed.
‘Forget the store for tonight. I want to hear about you.’
The classic opening move. ‘You know all there is to know about me, Jordan. I’m an open book to you. Or should I say an open file of newspaper clippings?’
‘Newspaper clippings tell the bare bones of a story. There’s no heart in them. Nothing of emotion, or pain, or feeling.’ They walked for a while. ‘Tell me about your mother.’
He was going for pain, then. ‘You probably know as much as I do.’ She shrugged, turned and leaned on the bridge parapet. ‘She met my father when he was in India, doing that seventies hippie thing. They were happy doing their own thing, being young and irresponsible. Then your grandfather’s car skidded on an icy road and real life butted in.’ She licked the mustard from her fingers, trying to imagine how that must have affected everyone. Especially Jordan’s mother.
Her own father’s heart attack had thrown everything into the air, making life difficult enough. But at least he’d recovered sufficiently to worry her that he was overdoing it. Lahore? Was he going on some rerun of his youthful past? Whatever he was doing, if he took care of himself he’d live out his allotted span and then some.
But if he’d died what would she and Flora and Romana be feeling now? How would they have coped? Would the loss of the store have even mattered?
‘It must have been hard on your mother,’ she said, turning to look at him. ‘Did she have anyone to turn to?’
‘She had her sisters. Niall’s mother and Bram’s.’
‘Of course.’
He shrugged. ‘They did what they could, but they were married—one living in Scotland, the other in Norfolk. They had young families.’
‘She just had you, then?’
‘Eight years old and more trouble than I was worth. She needed more than that.’ He shrugged. ‘And there was someone. A man with a broad shoulder to weep on.’
‘Someone she trusted?’
‘Someone she trusted,’ he agreed. Then, gr
imly, ‘We all make mistakes.’
‘Oh.’ She looked down into the river. Dark and deep as family secrets.
‘You were telling me about your mother,’ Jordan said after a while. ‘Pamela? Her mother was Eurasian?’
‘You do have a retentive memory.’ But, glad to change the subject, deflect his own dark memories, she turned to her own. ‘I don’t know anything except what other people have told me. She was a happy hippie, expecting her first child, probably indulging herself in flights of fancy about herself as the great earth mother. And maybe it would have worked. If they could have stayed in India, living simply, with no one to please but themselves. But overnight my father stopped doing whatever it was hippies did. Shed the beads, cut his hair, embracing establishment mores and marrying my pregnant mother in the nick of respectability.’ Not such a huge change for him; he’d just been returning to what he knew. For her mother—leaving the sun, the light, the freedom, for cold, wet London and a mother-in-law who had undoubtedly been as cold as the weather—it had to have been a nightmare. She sighed. ‘Before assuming his rightful place as head of Claibourne & Farraday.’
‘You admit it was his rightful place?’
The switch was so quick that she nearly missed it. Nearly said the words he wanted to hear. Because her agreement would justify his own claim.
‘A question to which any answer would be wrong,’ she said, once her brain had scrambled back to reality. She glanced at him sideways. He’d finished his hot dog, balled the paper napkin and stuffed it into his pocket. ‘You’ll be sorry for that when you open your wardrobe tomorrow.’
‘I’m already sorry. Do you do this often?’
‘Not often,’ she admitted. ‘Not many men are as indulgent as you.’ As unexpectedly romantic. Or did she mean cynically romantic? An indulgent man was a man who wanted something.
‘Are you telling me that this culinary nightmare was in the nature of a tease?’ He grinned. ‘If that’s the case, Indie, you’re in trouble. The car is waiting for us in Westminster, at the far end of the Victoria Embankment, and all the money in the world isn’t going to find us a cruising taxi at this time of night.’
Indie? Her sisters and her friends used the diminutive. It was familiar, warm. But when Jordan Farraday said it he added a whole new intimacy to the word, his voice layering on texture, depth of meaning. Making it sound brand-new. She took her time about finishing her hot dog before she said, ‘I wasn’t teasing.’
‘No?’ He took her napkin from her, hooked his finger and thumb beneath her chin and turned her to the light. For a moment she thought she must have a trace of mustard on her lip, that he was going to wipe it away. But he just stood there, looking down at her. ‘What were you doing, India?’
Following her heart rather than her head. Stretching the evening out, not wanting it to ever end…
It had still been quite light when they’d left the Festival Hall, but the darkness had closed in as they walked. Now the lights were shining on the river. It was a magical scene, and she was about to be kissed by a man whose agenda involved taking her life away from her.
While she aided and abetted him by falling in love with him. Fooling herself that he was falling in love with her.
What would he do if he knew that?
There was only one way to find out. Give him the green light.
‘What I’m doing, Jordan Farraday, is repaying you for a wonderful evening by taking the most wicked advantage of you,’ she said, the shake in her voice as she put her heart on the line barely noticeable. ‘I like to walk by the river at night, but I couldn’t do this on my own.’ She lowered her lashes, then raised them again swiftly, to look up at him like the very worst kind of flirt. ‘Do you mind, darling?’
He stiffened. His hand dropped to his side.
‘Not at all,’ he said, the ragged softness gone from his voice. ‘A walk in the evening before bed clears the head, I find.’
He stood aside so that she could turn and walk. It was like moving away from the fire on a cold night. For a moment she didn’t move, stunned at the sudden change in him. He’d reacted as if she’d slapped him, his expression one of shock at her blatant come-and-get-me look. A cynic wouldn’t have picked up the false note she’d deliberately injected into her response; he’d have been waiting for that invitation, expecting it. He wouldn’t have been repelled by her blatant come-on.
Oh, dear God. She had it wrong. Whatever else had been going on between them, tonight he hadn’t been pretending. Stop the world! Rewind the tape to that moment before she’d spoken.
But life didn’t do reruns. There was no second chance. She’d been the cynic, believing the worst of him instead of hoping for the best. For Romana, for Flora, romancing their Farradays had offered the happy-ever-after ending. But she didn’t believe in fairy tales. She’d put Jordan’s sincerity to the test and now she had to live with the result.
She forced her feet to move, begin walking, and he fell in beside her. But he didn’t take her arm again.
As she walked, a full six inches of space between them, her feet, which had been so light until a moment ago, were now leaden. And, a little below her left breast, her heart felt much the same way.
CHAPTER NINE
JORDAN felt empty. Hollow. He was supposed to be in control of this. He was the one who was going to walk away unscathed with India Claibourne’s heart, her body and her department store, leaving her suffering all the pain and humiliation that his mother had gone through thirty years earlier.
That was the plan and it had been going so well.
She’d come when he’d called—she’d kept him waiting, but she’d come. Moved by a moment of high emotion, she’d reached out for his hand in the darkness of the concert hall. She’d been playful when he’d invited her to supper, and the slow, romantic walk along the embankment had been her suggestion.
It couldn’t have been going better if he’d written the script in advance. So how come he’d been so angry when she’d put on that coquettish, eyelash-flapping little display? As clear an invitation to end the evening in her bed as a man could get.
Was it the fact that she was so obviously pretending that had so angered him? That she was prepared to do anything to save her precious store?
Wasn’t that what he wanted?
India Claibourne that desperate?
He no longer had an answer. Only the certainty that he wanted India Claibourne. Wanted her in his arms, her skin against his, wanted her whimpering softly as he possessed her, wanted him to forget everything but him.
For a moment before she’d gone for straight cynicism he’d seen something else in the depths of her lovely eyes, something artless and pure and sincere that had made him feel brand-new, reborn.
In that moment he’d known that he wanted her as he’d wanted no other woman. His. For ever.
But not in exchange for a department store.
‘What did your mother do?’ They’d been walking in silence for what seemed like for ever. Not touching. Not speaking. The air between them was as solid as a brick wall. One with a decorative topping of razor wire. India couldn’t bear it. ‘Afterwards?’ she persisted. India sensed that he’d turned to look at her, but she knew instinctively that it would be a mistake to turn and confront his frosty gaze. That keeping her eyes directed at some indefinable point in the distance was the only way to hold his attention. ‘After my father took over?’ The silence went on so long that she finally gave in, looked up at him. ‘You said—’
He looked away. ‘I know what I said.’
His words, his tone, did nothing to encourage her. But he had answered…
‘Dreamed dreams, you said.’ He acknowledged her words with the slightest movement of his head. Kept walking.
It felt like pushing treacle uphill, but she wouldn’t let it go.
Somehow what had happened to his mother was tied up with what was happening now, and no one was telling her the truth. Her father had taken off on some pilgrimage to
his youth. The lawyers were going through the motions, but she suspected they had little confidence that the equal opportunity legislation would make a difference. They were just waiting for her to come to terms with reality and accept the inevitable.
Not this side of hell freezing over.
‘She dreamed dreams and watched the swinging sixties passing C&F by.’ She said it as if she was talking to herself. ‘But what did she do afterwards?’
‘After her dreams were taken from her?’ His voice was still cold enough to freeze water. But he kept talking. ‘Nothing very much for a long time. She had a breakdown.’
‘A breakdown? Oh, Jordan…’ She stopped. For a moment he kept walking, then he too stopped.
‘What?’ he said, his shoulders rigid, his voice sharply impatient. She said nothing and finally he turned, his bitten-down expression betraying the deep-seated pain, the anger he had kept well hidden beneath an urbane, assured façade.
She wanted to go to him, put her arms around him, hold him and make the pain go away. Tell him to let the anger go before it burned him up, ate him from the inside out. But the space between them was a force field of negative emotions keeping her at a distance. Words were the only bridge she had.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Inadequate words. Useless words. ‘I know how devastating grief can be—’
‘Grief?’ His head went up. ‘You think it was simply grief?’
‘No. No, of course not.’ Not just grief. But grief complicated by guilt might just be enough to tip someone over the edge. And there were always feelings of guilt when someone died suddenly. The nagging memory of harsh words that could never be taken back. And there would undoubtedly have been harsh words about her fatherless offspring. Her guilt would have been compounded by the knowledge that she’d let down a much-loved father. Caused him pain. Then to have had him die like that, with things left unsaid, no chance for forgiveness, to say thank you for the good stuff. To say I love you.