by Sara Craven
‘Also he tends to sign all the books we send so that the shop can’t return them, so fend him off because the owner of SolBooks doesn’t like it.’
Now, nearly an hour into Mr Winton’s description of how he’d learned to get in touch with his feminine side in order to write about the whimsical and endearing events in his rural sagas, Alanna had murder in her heart.
Back at her bedsit, she had scripts to read and report on, music to listen to, a bowl of soup followed by a jacket potato smothered in cheese to enjoy and an elderly but comfortable robe to wear.
Instead, she was stranded here in her one and only little black dress and some toe-crushing footwear.
She wished that someone would stand up and ask, ‘What do you say to the rumours that your wife writes over fifty per cent of your books?’ but of course it didn’t happen.
His audience, whose tickets included a glass of wine, had completely bought into the Maisie McIntyre dream world, and they were hooked—mesmerised, and almost panting to get their hands on the piles of Summer at the Shepherd’s Crook that shop-owner Clive Solomon was bringing from the stockroom.
‘This will be my last Meet the Author session,’ he’d confided when she arrived. ‘I’m retiring, and handing the business over to my nephew as both my daughters are married and sublimely uninterested in bookselling. I shall keep my hand in with a spot of antiquarian dealing on the internet,’ he added with satisfaction.
And Alanna, wishing that he’d had a more congenial writer at his swansong, smiled and wished him every success.
She was just squeezing her protesting foot back into her shoe when she realised that there was a new arrival in the shop, who’d apparently just pushed open the door and walked in off the street. And that unlike the rest of the rapt crowd, he was male.
He was also tall, very dark, his thin face striking rather than conventionally handsome, and elegantly clad in a charcoal grey suit, his immaculate white shirt set off by a crimson silk tie.
So hardly, she thought, a journalist who’d also been sent there on an unwilling mission.
Just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As she walked down the shop towards him, she was aware too that he was looking back at her. That his grey eyes, so pale they were almost silver, with their colour enhanced by long black eyelashes, were conducting a leisurely and comprehensive survey of her that she should have resented.
Also that his firm-lipped mouth was beginning to quirk into a smile. To which, she discovered to her own astonishment, she was sorely tempted to respond.
She said quietly but firmly, ‘I’m afraid this is a private book launch. Or do you have a ticket?’
‘No.’ He glanced round him. ‘I thought the shop was having a late-night opening. As I’m here, can you recommend a book for an elderly lady who loves to read?’
She hesitated. Mr Solomon was still busy, and Jeffrey Winton was looking daggers in her direction, so the obvious answer was to advise this potential customer to return another time. Except he wouldn’t. He’d buy elsewhere and she liked Mr Solomon and didn’t want him to miss out on a sale.
‘What sort of thing does she like?’
‘Good stories with plenty of characters, I understand.’ He looked past her, frowning faintly. ‘Is he an author?’ he asked quietly.
‘Yes,’ Alanna whispered. ‘But I don’t think he’d be her choice.’ She paused. ‘Has she read Middlemarch by George Eliot?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. Did you enjoy it?’
‘It’s one of my all-time favourites.’
‘Then you have a sale.’ His smile was glinting in those astonishing eyes, and prompting a strange and unfamiliar tremor deep within her.
‘I’ll leave that to Mr Solomon,’ she said hurriedly, seeing that he was heading enquiringly in their direction. ‘I need to get back to my author.’
He said softly, ‘To my infinite regret,’ and she felt her face warm as she hurried back to the table.
During the applause at the end of the talk, she permitted herself a quick glance towards the door, but the stranger had gone, and she found herself suppressing a pang of disappointment.
The signing session went well, although Alanna did not appreciate Mr Winton’s unctuous reference to herself as ‘my lovely helper’ or his insistence on her moving nearer to his chair, when her preference was for keeping her distance.
She’d already noticed with faint unease his sideways glances at the length of her skirt, the depth of her neckline and the way the fabric clung to the gentle curves in between.
She was thankful when the queue began to dwindle and people started to take their reluctant departures. Clive Solomon was already collecting the used glasses and she, remembering Hetty’s warning, decided to add some extra tape to the unopened cartons in the stockroom, in case Mr Winton decided to pull a fast one.
And next time Maisie McIntyre has a book launch, I’ll be the one claiming a migraine, she thought grimly, if not a brain tumour.
She picked up the tape and started work, glad it was a mindless occupation because her brain seemed for some reason to be working on images of a man with a slanting smile and silver eyes.
So much so that she didn’t even realise she had company until Jeffrey Winton spoke.
‘That’s rather naughty of you, my dear. You should be promoting my sales, not obstructing them.’
She straightened. ‘I think all the customers have gone, Mr Winton,’ she returned, wishing he was not standing between her and the door, and that Clive Solomon wasn’t packing up the unused wine in his tiny staffroom.
‘But a whole lot of new ones will be in the shop tomorrow.’ His tone was jovially reproving as he took a step closer. ‘However, you’re young and I might be persuaded not to report you to Hetty.’
‘And a fat lot of good that would do you,’ Alanna said under her breath as she stepped backwards, only to find herself trapped between his bulky body and the steel shelving.
Oh, God, she thought in horror, please don’t let this be happening. Please...
‘That is,’ he added, ‘if you’re prepared to be nice to me.’
He licked already moist pink lips expectantly, leering at her as he moved closer, his hand snaking towards the hem of her dress.
What, Alanna wondered wildly, would be the penalty for kneeing a bestselling author in the groin?
But before she could take the risk, another voice intervened.
‘Haven’t you finished yet, darling?’ He was back, the customer, the silver-eyed focus of her recent imaginings, leaning casually in the doorway, smiling at her and ignoring Jeffrey Winton who had spun round, red-faced and furious at the interruption. ‘You promised me the rest of the evening—remember?’
She said huskily, ‘I’m quite ready. I—I just need my jacket and bag.’
She eased past Mr Winton and collected her things from the staffroom, uttering a few words of breathless congratulation on a successful evening to Mr Solomon before joining her unexpected rescuer at the shop door.
‘It seems I arrived at the right moment,’ he commented helping her into her jacket.
‘Yes,’ she said with a shudder. ‘I still can’t really believe it.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I—I don’t know how to thank you.’ She paused. ‘But what made you come back? Did you change your mind about the book?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I wanted to ask you to have dinner with me.’
She hesitated, feeling her pulses quicken outrageously. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she managed. ‘But truly, there’s no need.’
‘I disagree,’ he said. ‘For one thing, I’m keen to continue our discussion of English literature. Also I dislike eating alone.’
‘But I don’t even know your name...’
‘It’s Zandor,’ he said. ‘Or Zan, if you prefer. And you are...?’
She swallowed. ‘Alanna.’
‘So now we are at least fifty per cent respectable,’ he said. ‘The rest can wait.�
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As he signalled to the cab that had suddenly appeared from nowhere, it occurred to her that by no stretch of the imagination could she accept that solitary dining would ever play a major role in his life.
From the moment she’d seen him, she’d recognised that he was a seriously attractive man on a scale marking as dangerous, at the same time registering an exhilarating awareness that her blood seemed to be flowing more quickly. That her senses had somehow become more finely tuned.
Knowing at the same time that by accepting his invitation, she could be making a disastrous leap from a hot frying pan into a raging inferno.
A view reinforced by the sight of Jeffrey Winton emerging from SolBooks and glaring venomously in her direction. Proof, if proof were needed, that he was unlikely to be a good loser, she thought, her stomach churning with renewed alarm, as she shrank into her corner of the cab.
Which Zan noticed as he took his seat beside her.
‘What’s the matter?’
She said shakily, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not very hungry. I—I’d like to go home, please.’
‘Do you live with your family?’
‘No, I have a flat.’ An absurdly upbeat way, she thought, to describe one room with a kitchen alcove, and a shared bathroom.
‘Which you share?’
‘Well—no.’
He nodded. ‘Then I think our original plan is best.’ His tone was matter-of-fact. ‘You’ve had an unpleasant experience but some food and company will help put it behind you. Solitary brooding will not.’
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ she flashed back. ‘You don’t stand to lose your job over this evening’s fiasco. Jeffrey Winton is a huge bestseller. If he spins some yarn about me, guess who will be believed?’
He frowned. ‘I could speak to your boss. Tell him what I saw. He seems a guy who would listen to reason.’
But my boss is a woman. She has to consider the bottom line... The words were trembling on her lips, but she swallowed them unspoken.
Zan, she realised, must think she worked at SolBooks, and, on the whole, that seemed preferable to launching into complicated explanations about her junior role at Hawkseye. Or any other personal detail, for that matter.
And she felt too weary to go on arguing about dinner. For one thing, the planned soup and jacket potato no longer held the slightest appeal for her. And he was trying to be kind, so she could at least be civil in return for an hour or so.
Besides, she owed him—didn’t she?
After that—well, they would be ships that passed in the night. Nothing more, she decided, staring out of the window at the brightly lit shops—which suddenly seemed oddly blurred.
And realised to her horror that she was crying, quietly and unstoppably.
She heard Zandor say something under his breath, and found herself drawn towards him. She gave herself up the astonishing comfort of being cradled in his arms, her head against his shoulder. Of breathing the warm scent of his skin and the faint but heady fragrance of his cologne. And, not least, the sheer practicality of having an immaculate linen handkerchief pushed into her hand.
‘He was so vile.’ She sobbed the words into his expensive tailoring. ‘If you hadn’t been there—if you hadn’t come back...’
‘Hush,’ he whispered, his hand gently and rhythmically stroking her hair. ‘It’s over. You’re safe now.’
And she’d believed him, she thought. Had cried herself out while he held her, then sat up awkwardly, reducing his handkerchief to a sodden lump as she blotted her eyes and blew her nose.
‘I feel so stupid,’ she said huskily.
‘There’s no need.’ He pushed a strand of damp hair back from her forehead and she felt the brush of his fingers resonate through every inch of her skin.
At the same time she realised the cab was coming to a halt and, as Zandor paid the driver, found herself standing outside an imposing facade announcing itself as the Metro-Imperial Hotel, with a uniformed commissionaire holding open a pair of elegant glass doors.
As they crossed the expanse of marble-tiled foyer towards a bank of lifts, Alanna hung back.
‘Why are we here?’
‘To have dinner.’ He urged her forward gently, his hand under her elbow. ‘I didn’t have time to book a table anywhere else. But the food is good.’
And then she was in the lift, which was rising smoothly and swiftly past floor after floor until it reached the very top.
‘Is this the restaurant?’
‘No, the penthouse. I stay here when I’m in London.’ He unlocked the door straight ahead of them with his key card and ushered her into a sitting room, all pale golden wood and ivory leather sofas with enough space to accommodate her bedsit twice over and then some.
He pointed to a door on the far wall. ‘You might want to freshen up. Go through there and you’ll find the bathroom’s directly opposite.’ He paused. ‘Do you like pasta?’
‘Well—yes,’ she admitted uncertainly.
‘Good.’ He smiled at her. ‘Then that’s what we’ll have.’
‘Through there’ was, of course, the bedroom, also huge and with a bed vast enough for several kings plus an emperor, Alanna thought as she headed for the bathroom, the imperial note being continued in the deep purple quilted bedspread.
Apart from a two-tier wooden stand bearing an opulent leather suitcase, open and neatly packed, the bed was the only visible piece of furniture, so presumably the wardrobes and chests of drawers were concealed behind the room’s elegant cream panelling.
The bathroom with its walk-in shower and sunken tub was lavishly supplied with soft towels and toiletries, and one glance in the mirror above the twin marble washbasins at her red-eyed, tear-stained reflection revealed to Alanna how essential the freshening up process was and why a public restaurant might not have been her companion’s immediate choice.
Or his second, she discovered, when, all signs of her recent distress removed and her makeup discreetly renewed, she returned to the sitting room and found a waiter laying places for two at a table beside the long windows while another was busy with a gold-foiled bottle and an ice bucket.
Zandor was lounging on a sofa, jacket removed, tie loosened, and the top buttons of his shirt unfastened. His attention was fixed frowningly on the laptop on the low table in front of him, but he closed it at her approach and smiled up at her.
‘Did that help?’
‘Amazingly so.’ She sat down beside him, but at a discreet distance, and took another longer look around her. ‘This is—palatial.’
He shrugged. ‘It does the job while I’m in London. Right now, I seem to spend most of my time on aircraft. Tomorrow I’m heading off to the States.’
Which explained the waiting suitcase.
‘You enjoy travelling?’
‘It doesn’t worry me.’ His mouth twisted. ‘But then I’ve always been regarded as having gipsy blood.’
‘How—exciting.’ She’d almost said ‘romantic’ but stopped herself just in time.
He said drily, ‘Except it’s never been intended as a compliment.’
She was wondering how to respond to this when she was diverted by the waiter’s arrival with two flutes of pale wine, fizzing with bubbles.
‘Champagne?’ She drew a breath. ‘But why?’
He shrugged. ‘You think it’s just for celebrations? It isn’t. Tonight, treat it simply as the world’s best tonic.’
She accepted the flute uncertainly. ‘Well—thank you.’
‘We should have a toast.’ He touched his glass lightly to hers. ‘Health and happiness.’
She repeated the words softly and drank.
The cool, dry wine seemed to burst, fizzing, in her mouth, caressing her throat as she swallowed.
She said with a little gasp. ‘You’re right. It’s wonderful.’
And the food which arrived shortly afterwards was just as good—fillets of salmon wrapped in prosciutto, served on a bed of creamy tarragon pasta with asparagus
, peas and tiny broad beans.
The dessert was a platter of little filo pastry tartlets filled with an assortment of fruits in brandied syrup.
All of it enhanced accompanied by the chilled sparkle of the champagne.
And by conversation, starting with books and moving on to music, quiet, entertaining, and always involving, so that, in spite of her initial forebodings, Alanna found she was relaxing into enjoyment. Savouring his company almost more than the delicious supper.
Yet, at the same time, becoming increasingly aware of the potency of his attraction. How his slow smile and the quiet intensity of his silver gaze made her nerve-endings quiver and set her pulses racing—reactions which bewildered as much as they disturbed her.
She wasn’t a child for heaven’s sake. She’d enjoyed a satisfactory social life at university and since her arrival in London. But liking had not so far ripened into passion and none of the young men she’d dated had ever come close to persuading her into a more intimate relationship.
That, she’d told herself, was because casual relationships had little appeal for her, and, anyway, she was far more interested in concentrating her emotional energy on the development of her career.
Or was it just because she’d never been seriously tempted to abandon her self-imposed celibacy.
Not that she was now, of course, she added hastily.
And, thankfully, the evening would soon be over, and no harm done.
After all, the conversation, however enjoyable, had remained strictly impersonal. They hadn’t even exchanged surnames, she reminded herself, which made it very much a ‘ships that pass in the night’ occasion.
And she should put out of her mind the sense of comfort and security she’d experienced in the taxi when he’d held her in his arms as she wept. Once again, he was just being kind. Nothing more. And far better—safer—to believe that.
The arrival of the coffee, however, prompted a move back to the sofa. And it had also, she realised, signalled the departure of the serving staff, leaving them alone together.