by Lucy Parker
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Lainie turned on Richard and put her hand on his chest. It was an instinctive movement, as if she was simultaneously laying a claim, declaring her allegiance and foolishly trying to hold him back from any rash action.
He looked down at her fingers, spread against the fine wool jumper, and then into her face. A more genuine smile tipped the corners of his lips. “Saving me from myself again, Tig?”
“Wallowing in the dirt with you, more like,” Will muttered, and Richard’s whole body tensed.
Lainie gripped his upper arm with her free hand. “Don’t even think about it. I will never let you use me as an excuse to behave atrociously. Just let it go. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
After a dangerous pause, Richard touched his thumb to her eyebrow, smoothing the curve. “What have I let myself in for?” he murmured.
“You’ve never been so lucky in your life,” Lainie retorted.
“No, he hasn’t,” Will agreed jerkily, and Richard’s hand stilled against her face.
Will abruptly turned his back on them and left, his footsteps muffled on the worn carpeting of the stairs.
Richard watched him go and then looked at Lainie. “You look upset. What did he say to you?”
It was more what Lainie had said to him. How could she have blurted out Richard’s most private business like that, and to Will, of all people? She briefly debated confessing the disastrous slip, but what was the point? It hadn’t seemed to interest Will much. If Richard confronted him about it, it would only underline the fact that it was a card to be played against him.
The cowardly justification did not sit well with her conscience.
“Just the usual.” She let her hand slip down his chest and drop away. “His ego playing up. He made a mistake; I’m making a bigger one. So on and so forth. Although I got a comment that could almost be interpreted as an apology for the Crystalle debacle, if you squint hard and replay it in slow motion, so that’s new.”
“And a bloody long time in coming. Idiot. Does he often visit you at home?” Richard’s eyes were still uncomfortably shrewd, and Lainie shook her head.
“No. Not even very often when we were together. I gathered he had the same objection to perfectly decent Bayswater terraces as you do. He said he’d been trying to talk to me at the theatre, but I was too busy canoodling with you in your dressing room.”
“Canoodling?” he repeated, some of his preoccupation sliding into a wicked gleam. His arm slid around her waist to tug her into his body. “What does that involve, exactly?”
His lips found the curve of her neck, and Lainie moved involuntarily into the nuzzling kiss. “I believe you’ve answered your own question,” she said on a breathless laugh. Her hand came over his marauding one as it explored the length of her spine and ventured farther south. “And any further practical demonstrations will have to wait until later, because we’re about to be late for your very important date.”
“Sod it,” Richard said, and he kissed her hard. “You’re right. I’m not the political type. Let’s have a lie-down instead.”
“You’re an actor.” Lainie slipped her hand between their lips. “Act like you’re the political type.”
* * *
Social graces. He did them well when he wanted to, Lainie thought later. Over the flickering candlelight on a Knightsbridge dining table, she watched Richard being effortlessly charming to the very objectionable vice president of the RSPA. Not so long ago, that fake pandering had been supremely irritating, but now it at least seemed to be in pursuit of a worthy cause. Every so often, their eyes met, and Lainie had to hide a smile at the expression she read in his.
He hated every moment of this.
She had attended more congenial dinner parties herself. Eric Westfield, who was staying on as VP after the new incumbent took over the presidency, and who obviously had more money than the average merchant bank, had not impressed her at their first brief meeting. On closer acquaintance, she thought he was loathsome. The other guests at the table had ostensibly been invited to chat with Richard, but behaved as if they were paid actors whose only task for the evening was to laugh at Westfield’s jokes. Richard, she noticed, confined himself to a brief smile, and only if the pun was halfway successful.
Westfield’s wife was also present, but she was so quiet Lainie kept forgetting she was there, and the poor woman seemed to be an afterthought for her husband, as well. Karen Westfield was about Lainie’s age and well dressed, but she was either half-asleep, texting under the table or highly medicated. She might have been pretty. It was hard to tell when all that was visible was a forehead and hairline. Lainie tried more than once to engage her in conversation, but received no response. It was a little weird. Westfield might as well have put a ring on a life-size doll, introduced her as his wife and propped her up at the table.
Of course, if the alternative to spacing out was socializing with Westfield, she understood Karen’s defence mechanism. The arts patron stroked her knee under the table for the third time in the past hour and she jerked back in her seat. The impulse to kick was almost ungovernable. At her sudden movement, Richard looked at her and frowned questioningly. She forced a smile and shook her head. He had uncharacteristically put himself out to secure a major funds boost for her charity. She could sit down to dinner with an unsubtle lech for him.
Although if Westfield’s hand crept any higher than her knee, she reserved the right to take sharp action.
Richard was still looking suspiciously from her to Westfield. “Where do you stand on the Grosvenor Initiative, Eric?” he asked, and Westfield’s attention was thankfully diverted from her legs.
Lainie turned gratefully to answer a query from the society matron opposite about her usual schedule at the Metronome. “So interesting to meet someone in the theatre,” with an inflection that suggested “the theatre” was a euphemism for something a bit more risqué. That type of unwanted attention she could handle.
After the dessert plates had been cleared by a hovering maid, Westfield looked at his wife for the first time all night. “Karen!”
She jumped and her head rose—pulled by the puppeteer’s strings, Lainie thought despairingly. Karen stood, and it appeared the women were to be dismissed to coffee in a separate room. Because apparently this was Downton Abbey. She widened her eyes at Richard as she passed him and saw his lips twitch.
She’d hoped Karen would regain her personality and become magically talkative away from her husband’s depressing influence, but no such luck. The woman sat down on an armchair in a very stately drawing room, crossed her legs and pulled out her phone. She had been texting under the table, then. That was a relief. Lainie had been imagining some sort of brainwashed Stepford scenario. She rather meanly hoped that Karen had a lover. A young fit one with table manners.
When she could no longer bear the social banter of the other two wives, she excused herself to find a bathroom. There were four to choose from on the second floor. She had dried her hands, reapplied her lipstick and was just closing the door when a masculine hand slipped around her waist and squeezed. She froze, her heartbeat picking up. The blunt-tipped fingers didn’t belong to Richard.
Oh, God. How perfectly, hideously undignified and cliché.
* * *
He felt as if he were in the second act of a Sheridan play. Removal of the feminine element, followed by whiskies, cigars and subtle digs in the billiards room. Richard pushed away from the wall where he’d been observing the halfhearted game of snooker in progress. He checked his watch. Another hour, and they could leave without causing unnecessary offence.
And he could find a mutually satisfying way to make this up to Lainie.
The beginnings of a headache were thrumming in his temples. Abruptly, he moved his head, trying to relax the tension in his neck. He put a hand to his shoulder and massaged the ridges of bone.
After sitting at that dinner table, he was finding it difficult to remember why he wanted t
o keep on side with Westfield. And if he was right in his suspicions about what had been going on under the table, cordial relations were going to break down fast. He had been prepared to sacrifice a certain amount of personal dignity for the RSPA chair, but he drew a line well before exposing Lainie to sexual assault.
His eyes suddenly narrowed. Two minutes ago, Westfield had been standing at the bar, pouring another round of drinks. The liquor was now proceeding down the gullets of a couple of middle-aged stockbrokers, and their host had vanished.
Without bothering to excuse himself, Richard turned his back on the third stockbroker, who’d been trying to bore him into unconsciousness for the past quarter of an hour. He strode out into the hall, closing the door behind him. The women had gone upstairs. His head cocked, he stood tensely, listening.
At the sound of her muffled cry, he wasted no more time. Swinging nimbly around the bannister, he took the stairs two at a time.
When he found them, his frustration with the evening exploded into sheer fury.
* * *
Putting her hand over Westfield’s wrist, Lainie pulled it away and turned around to face him, inwardly groaning. She had seen this scene played out on a hundred different sets, from melodrama to slapstick comedy, and it usually ended in torn clothing and at least one fat lip.
How to remove herself from this situation without completely scuppering Richard’s chances at the RSPA chair?
She tried simple avoidance first. “Excuse me,” she said evenly, going to step around him. She threw in a bit of marital guilt: “Your wife will be wondering where I’ve got to.”
Westfield obviously had no conception of how to follow a cue. He snorted and latched on to her again. “Karen never wonders anything. Except when I’m next going away on business and what present she’ll get when I return.”
Lainie seriously doubted that Karen waited impatiently for his return, even if he did come bearing duty gifts. “Yes, well, I should still—mph!”
The rest of her sentence was swallowed up in his mouth as he pushed her against the wall and kissed her. Kiss was too romantic a term for it. Assaulted her, to give things their proper name.
She tried to twist her face away, making a sound of disgust in her throat. Her hands pushed ineffectually at his barrel-like chest. The moment she got out of this, she was investing in a set of hand weights. Westfield’s horrible clutching fingers started pulling at the hem of her skirt, which was thankfully too tight to rise above her knee. Then he yanked, and there was a distinct ripping sound.
Oh, I don’t think so.
Her outrage was becoming tinged with genuine fright now. She kicked him and he grunted, but apparently a bit of violence just spurred him on. His mouth sought hers again, and she exclaimed in fury, shoving against him.
Finally—and about bloody time, she thought with unreasonable, panting anger—there was a loud, bitten-out curse from somewhere behind them and a swift movement. Westfield skittered away on his heels like a spooked crab, Richard’s right hand fisted in the back of his jacket.
The older man went to speak, his face a dark unhealthy red, and Richard took a vicious step forward, angling his body in front of Lainie. She had a bizarre moment of déjà vu from the play. She was almost waiting for the clink of swords, and for Richard to burst out with a good old “you godforsaken knave!” or “blackguardly cur!”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Richard’s voice was low and deep. He looked at Lainie. She almost took a step back under the impact, and his anger wasn’t even directed at her. “Are you all right?” he asked her tightly, and she nodded.
“Yes.” Her hand—shaking, she realised—went unconsciously to the torn hem of her skirt, and Richard followed the movement. The muscle in his jaw jumped.
Westfield, who apparently had no instincts for self-preservation at all, continued to play to stereotype. “Just a bit of fun, my boy,” he said, in an attempt at just-one-of-the-lads jocularity. “She didn’t mind.”
“Yes, I could see how much Lainie was enjoying herself. Pinned against the wall and screaming.”
“She’s been asking for it all night,” said the stupidest man in London.
Richard calmly pulled back his fist and punched the other man on the bridge of his nose.
Lainie winced at the sound. Their dubious host let out a vaguely animalistic grunt. Blood dripped between his raised fingers as he glared daggers at Richard, but a muffled, distant laugh seemed to return him to some sense of his surroundings, and he didn’t retaliate with his fists.
He jerked his chin toward Lainie, still clutching at his nose. “Don’t be a fool, man. Throwing away a good opportunity for a woman like her?”
“And what kind of woman is that, exactly?” Lainie asked, irritation breaking her out of a shocked trance. “One who can’t be bribed with presents to let you touch her?”
Westfield’s lips twisted. With blood settling into the grooves between his teeth, he was the stuff of nightmares. With his free hand, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a torn piece of newsprint, shaking it open. Lainie looked down at it and felt her skin creep. It was a page from one of the more disreputable tabloids, and the centre image was of a close-up of her from the Theatre Awards red carpet, looking very décolleté. He was actually carrying around boob shots of her in his pocket? Gross.
“Doesn’t look too choosy and virtuous to me,” Westfield said nastily, and their collective attention focused on the second photograph.
It was one of the ones taken with Will, and the paparazzo had caught them at an unfortunate gold mine of an angle. It appeared that Will had his hand in a place where most women would have qualms about being touched in public. Lainie’s face was turned toward him—most likely to hiss at him to keep his distance—and anyone could be forgiven for thinking that they were kissing.
Richard gave the image one hard look. After a brief pause, he said, “Talk to her like that again and you’ll seriously regret it.” His voice hardened into lethal quietness. “And if you so much as shake her hand in future, I’ll hear about it.”
“Is that so?” Westfield was completely ignoring Lainie now, which seemed to put a final cap on his insulting treatment of her. He raised a scornful eyebrow. “Well, you won’t be hearing about an appointment to the presidency. Now or ever.”
Richard’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. “I find the prospect of continuing to share a city with you sufficiently revolting. I have no desire to sit next to you in a boardroom.” He held the other man’s gaze with a cool stare. “Get her coat.”
It was a blatant challenge. Showdown of the alpha males.
Men.
To her astonishment, Westfield drew in a sharp breath—and fetched her coat. He held it out to her with disdain, and Richard intercepted it. Gently turning her, he helped her slide it on. His hands rested on her shoulders, a reassuring, warm weight.
They left without a word to the other guests. Lainie doubted that Karen would notice their rude departure. She probably hadn’t noticed their arrival.
Outside on the street, Richard exhaled sharply and his breath fogged in the crisp night air. He ran a hand through his hair, scrubbing the short curls as if he was dislodging dust and grime.
He looked at her, but before he could speak, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Shock and regret were catching up with her, and she could very easily cry in front of him.
“For what?” he asked, and she couldn’t read his tone.
“If you hadn’t brought me tonight, you wouldn’t have lost your chance at the presidency.”
“The bastard invited you. And then assaulted you in his own home. Christ.” Richard’s fingers closed into a fist against his scalp. “I’m sorry I let you in for that.” Some of his control seemed to snap. His hands came out and caught hers, pulling them up roughly to link their fingers. “Do you think I want any favours from a man who thinks he can put his hands all over my...”
Lainie stilled. “Your
—what?”
Richard’s jaw worked as he looked down at her. “My...” Suddenly, he released her hands and cupped her face, bringing her up on her tiptoes and her mouth to his. His kiss was forceful and demanding—sheer outraged male. Both Will and Westfield in one evening, Lainie thought hazily as she kissed him back. She supposed it was pushing the point a bit far.
“Mine,” he said. “Just mine.”
Pulling back to take a much-needed breath, Lainie rested her hands on his chest. “There’s a distinct scent of eau de caveman around here.”
His only answer was to kiss her again. Then he wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a simple hug, burying his face in her hair. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked, sounding more in control of himself, and she relaxed a little.
“Yes. But I’m still sorry that it happened, Richard.”
Richard touched the back of his finger to her cheek. He lifted one shoulder dismissively. “It’s a setback, no more. Westfield has a lot of clout in the Society, but he’s not as indispensable as he thinks. He operates at a purely financial level, and wealthy philistines are two a penny in the City.”
“Do you think that—”
Richard’s phone vibrated in his pocket, cutting her off, and he gave the screen an impatient glance. “Lynette.” He checked his watch and frowned. “Who is usually driving back from her parents’ place in Manchester at this time. Hold that thought, Tig.”
Lainie wrapped her coat more tightly across her chest as he answered with a brief, “Troy.” Scuffing the toe of her shoe against the pavement, she was only half listening to his side of the conversation, her mind still replaying the horrors of what had gone on inside the house, when Richard seemed to freeze at her side.
It wasn’t just that his body stilled. It was as if his entire personality iced over into a remote automaton.
She raised her eyes to his face and discovered him watching her. She didn’t like the look.
“How much do they have?” Richard asked. The question was completely toneless. His gaze didn’t budge from Lainie. She frowned back, trying to ask through her expression.