AN IRRESISTIBLE FLIRTATION
by
VICTORIA GORDON
© Victoria Gordon 1995
CHAPTER ONE
Saunders stood in shocked, silent disbelief, the strident tones of Charlotte’s diatribe ringing in her ears. She wanted to be somewhere — anywhere — else, did not want to be a party to this blistering feminist attack, didn’t believe in it, didn’t like it, didn’t want any part of it.
But mostly she wanted to be able at least to look away, avert her gaze and look at the floor, or the splendid cast-brass sculpture that overhung the entrance to the building, or the people emerging from the lifts. At anything, she thought, but the angry man who stood there, shrugging Charlotte’s verbal assault from unbelievably broad shoulders and glaring at Saunders with black, accusing eyes.
At me! why are you glaring at me?
She wanted to scream out her innocence, to tell him that it wasn’t she who had taken offence at his perfectly innocent, mannerly gesture of holding the door open for she and Charlotte to pass through. It wasn’t she who had launched into this most astonishing verbal tirade on the subject of male chauvinist pigs and dominance and how it was somehow being condescending for a man to assume a grown woman couldn’t even open a door, and... Insanity, she thought.
Glare at Charlotte, why don’t you? She’s the feminist! 1 haven’t said a word. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t!
The man had the broadest shoulders and the darkest eyes she had ever seen. Truly black eyes, eyes like pools of ink, as dark as his hair must once have been, before the patina of silver had begun to dominate its sleek, harsh straightness. Eyes that seemed to sear into her own — accusing, contemptuous, sneering. Eyes that now, apparently bored with her lack of response, abandoned her own eyes to roam down the planes of her face, lingering at her throat, lingering longer at where her breasts pushed at the fabric of her silk blouse. Eyes that then sauntered boldly to touch at her hips, to follow the line of her dark skirt until she could almost see them actually measuring the exact one-inch-below-the-knee length of the skirt.
He ignored her legs, or seemed to. Not surprising, she found herself thinking. They were fine as legs went, but too skinny, like the rest of her. And then she had to choke back the chuckle that rose to her lips just at the idea of thinking such a thing at a time like this.
Because he was glaring into her eyes again, and she found herself feeling once more that his own were live coals, smouldering beneath the thick ebony eyebrows — just waiting to leap out somehow and incinerate her.
Not me! The words came silently to her mind, but for some reason refused to reach her lips. His lips had shifted slightly, one edge of his mouth curling into what could have been either a sneer or a knowing half-smile of satisfaction.
One strong, tanned, long-fingered hand was still holding open the door. People were moving to and fro through the door, most of them casting startled glances at the tableau, but not daring, Saunders thought, to stop and actually listen to Charlotte’s attack One look at those smouldering eyes would be enough to put off even the bravest who might think to intervene.
‘So there!’
And Charlotte turned, her tall, slender figure rigid with her obvious self-righteousness and — to Saunders — totally misplaced vehemence.
‘Come along, Saunders.’
And Saunders did, flinching as she was forced to pass close to the man in order to get through the door, feeling like a recalcitrant schoolgirl and as angry with herself for having that feeling as she was with Charlotte for creating such a scene in the first place.
She had to trot to keep up with her friend’s long-legged stride through the building’s enormous lobby, still bustling with after-lunch crowds returning to the hundreds of offices that must, she thought, be enclosed within this building that loomed with herds of other glass-eyed giants in the centre of the city.
1 am not enjoying this, she thought. She hadn’t much enjoyed lunch, either; too much too rich food, too many glasses of the very good white wine Charlotte had insisted on. And, she was becoming increasingly convinced, too much Charlotte!
She wasn’t like this when we were at school together, Saunders had thought, only to amend that as memory sharpened with use and she remembered that nursing-school Charlotte: the lean and lanky, testy, abrasive girl she’d roomed with through their entire nursing education, the banner-waver, the rebel.
As they marched across the lobby of the building, Charlotte leading and Saunders, a full head shorter, struggling to keep up, memories of those halcyon days kept getting mixed up with far more recent, far more disruptive memories ... of eyes like black fire that snapped and crackled, of shoulders so broad they would have filled the doorway had the man not politely stepped aside, only to be roundly abused by Charlotte.
‘Was all that really necessary? The man was only being polite, after all.’
They were in the lift now, and by some stroke of amazing good fortune were alone. Had there been others with them, Saunders thought she wouldn’t have dared ask the question, lest it start off another round of Charlotte’s feminist ravings and even further embarrassment for herself.
As it was, she was able to weather the storm with an almost contemplative calm, meeting her friend’s bright green eyes with her own dark blue ones, smiling her own sweet-tempered, placid smile in response to her friend’s fiery outburst.
I’d not realised how thin and angry Charlotte’s mouth is, she found herself thinking, and then, irrelevantly, caught a mental picture of his mouth, twisting into that sneer, but a broad, generous, mobile mouth for all that, a mouth more accustomed to smiling.
What a silly comparison. But then she’d been making strange comparisons all the morning long, most of them between herself and Charlotte, most of them of questionable value.
Little, it seemed, remained of the two young women who’d taken their nursing training together. One had matured and gone on and on, upwardly mobile in the extreme, to become Charlotte, a green-eyed, fire-haired feminist who — according to her — almost single-handedly ran the medical assessment division of one of the country’s largest travel insurance companies. Power-dressing, power breakfasts, power lunches ... power everything, according to Charlotte. Fantastic money, world travel, lurks, perks and ... power.
And herself, Saunders White, at thirty-three a nurse-administrator of a large and thriving regional diabetes centre, with a staff almost as large as that which Charlotte commanded, but no lurks or perks, only a comfortable wage, and nothing she would call power. And no world travel either; she was lucky to see the local beach at weekends.
But at least it hasn’t turned me into a radical feminist, she found herself thinking, even as she nodded understanding, a nod Charlotte clearly interpreted as agreement.
Until Saunders asked, ‘But what, really, did you accomplish? Except, of course, to make a splendid scene!’
‘I put him in his place, didn’t I? Chauvinist pig!’
Did you? Saunders didn’t ask that question out loud; indeed, she tried very hard to be sure it didn’t even emerge from her eyes. The last thing she wanted was to ruin the last remaining hour of this reunion; enough that she hadn’t seen Charlotte in almost ten years without it all ending in a screaming row. But she knew, and privately she thought Charlotte a fool if she didn’t know, that the tirade hadn’t put that man in his place. It had made him angry, perhaps even furious, but it certainly hadn’t altered cither his attitudes or his opinions.
Instead of saying so, however, she put on her most placid face, the mental shield she had developed during those early years of nursing, and emerged from the lift with Charlotte to ooh and aah over her friend’s large, luxurious office, with its compu
ters and modems and vast array of telephones and hardly any paperwork at all.
How different from her own cramped quarters, she thought. Her office was filled with paper: pamphlets and leaflets and booklets and the host of other paraphernalia that she needed for her work. There was no plush carpet on her floor; hers was second-hand. The centre was itself second-hand, a former section of a much larger hospital complex, and it was filled with second-hand desks, second-hand chairs, cast-offs and left-overs from more readily funded areas of the hospital.
But the people weren’t second-hand, and Saunders took some measure of satisfaction in that. They mightn’t dress as elegantly as those she saw moving through Charlotte’s realm, but her people were tops in their fields: nurse-educators, a specialist dietician, a podiatrist, ancillary staff. And every single one of them dedicated, professional and splendid at what they did. A team, she thought. A good, hard-working, competent and happy group of specialists doing good and worthwhile work.
Charlotte, she decided, did not look happy. Not in the same way she, herself, felt happy about her job, her work, her career. There was a brittleness about her old friend, a brittleness clearly revealed in the outburst downstairs, in the way she seemed so bent on convincing Saunders just how happy she was! Funny way to show it — abusing some stranger for merely being polite, she thought.
It would take more than you, my girl, to put that man in his place, Saunders found herself thinking again, and was surprised at how the incident had stuck in her mind.
The incident? Or the man himself? Those questions came to mind when she finally left Charlotte and made her way out through the expanse of the lobby to where another man, an older, quite different man, showed his manners by holding the door for her and even offering a slight, courtly nod of his head as he did so.
Saunders smiled her thanks, spoke her thanks, and the incident put a spring in her step as she walked to the underground parking garage where she’d left her diminutive Mazda after the long trek to the city that morning. But it was the first man’s face that hovered in her mind.
It had been such a strong face, not especially handsome but certainly striking, with that slightly greying hair against the dark, out-of-doors tan. A nice face, she decided. A face that had been lived in, that he was comfortable with. A face that without the fierceness might have been even more interesting, might have told her more about the man inside it. And those eyes!
‘I wish it had been you at the door the second time,’ she said aloud, then shook her wild mop of never-yet-manageable hair and laughed at the silliness of walking down the street talking to herself.
Still, it would have been nice. At least then she might have countered that baleful glare, that fierce look of contempt he’d shot her. And why her? She hadn’t uttered a word during the entire incident, and if she had spoken it would have been in his defence. Not that he needed defending; that man could look after himself. It had seemed strange, though, that he had never uttered a word during the entire drama. No objection, no argument, no totally justified retort. He’d merely looked at Charlotte with something that could have been amusement, or dismay, or utter disdain. Or all three. And the way he’d looked at Saunders herself! Strange …
He wasn’t a city person. Dressed for the city, certainly, and well-dressed too; his suit had been custom-tailored for him, would have to have been, judging from the width of those shoulders. And, from her one brief attempt just to stare at the floor and try to wish herself out of the scene, she remembered gleaming leather dress-boots below trousers with creases so sharp he might have shaved with them.
But he didn’t wear that gear every day. Not with those work-toughened hands. Well cared for hands, but not those of an office worker.
‘I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy of the Overflow,’ she trilled aloud, and laughed at the inanity of singing Banjo Patterson’s poetry while negotiating the stark, soulless canyons of the city.
But driving home, after she’d negotiated the dense traffic and was out past the suburbs to where there was some greenery, and with some feeling of relief at being away from the hectic traffic and more hectic people, she stuck a Wallis & Matilda cassette into the little car’s tape-deck and breezed along the highway, listening to ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ and ‘The Man from Snowy River’, enjoying her drive now, and the music with it.
Except when she thought of those burning eyes and found herself wishing she’d had the decency to apologise for Charlotte, the sense to explain that she didn’t share that radical feminism, that she appreciated good manners.
‘And that I’m a people-pleaser who wants everybody to like me,’ she admitted aloud, neither proud nor ashamed of the fact.
Saunders had long ago come to terms with the fact that she was a people-pleaser; indeed she was content with it, most of the time. Only when somebody had deliberately taken advantage, when she had allowed herself to be used because she hadn’t thought quickly enough, had been too trusting, did that aspect of her character bother her just a trifle.
And that didn’t happen all that often any more. Hardly at all, she had to admit, since the deaths of her parents. Both of them had been the worst abusers of her gentle nature, playing on their ailments — both real and imagined — sometimes so blatantly that it was difficult to believe they had even realised their only daughter was a nurse, was not taken in by their subterfuges, was not fooled.
‘Not fooled ... just too easy-going,’ she said aloud. ‘And it’s something you really ought to watch, Saunders White, because all it ever does is give you more work and more hassles you didn’t need in the first place.’
If she had been Charlotte, she thought, she obviously wouldn’t be worried about people-pleasing. Nobody with the gumption to go about bashing a perfect stranger over the head with feminist principles could care that much about what people thought.
‘And there was just no reason for it; that’s what I can’t get over,’ she muttered, talking to herself as she often did on long drives. ‘All the man did was exhibit normal, proper manners. Well, better than normal, if the truth be told. But proper manners; he did what he thought was expected of him — no, what he expected of himself! And then to have Charlotte start in on him…
‘I just wonder why he didn’t say anything. Strange, that. Not a single word. He hardly even bothered to look at her, mostly because he was looking at me — glaring at me as if it was all my fault, as if I’d put her up to it or something. What did he think, I wonder?’
She drove on for a bit in silence, then, pondering.
He had been so decidedly, deliciously, totally masculine, a man completely comfortable in his own sexuality.
And, however, angry he might have been, he’d looked at her as a woman — skinny, perhaps, but a woman for all that. There had been something in those incredible eyes that left her in no doubt about it.
‘But he never said a word,’ she told the white lines that flashed towards her windscreen. ‘And why me? I still can’t figure that bit out. If he’d given Charlotte the dressing-down she deserved, or even just walked away … But just to stand there and take it, and glower at me…’
~~~
I should have just walked away, the man was thinking, strong fingers drumming at the steering-wheel of his four-wheel-drive station wagon as he rolled along the same highway as Saunders, unaware of her presence a kilometre behind him, but unable quite to forget her presence at the incident earlier that day.
Now, as then, only half his mind was occupied with thoughts of the moment; the rest was stubbornly wrestling with the dilemma so unexpectedly dumped in his lap by his doctor earlier that morning.
I should have just walked away, he thought again. Or else I should have taught that snooty feminist a few new words and then walked away.
He grinned at the thought, the gesture revealing strong, even teeth behind a well-formed, mobile mouth. Just what words he might have taught Charlotte became a subject of some conjecture; there were few in today’s society that
even infants didn’t know.
Besides, there had been that other woman, the silent one with the enormous deep blue eyes and that air of … vulnerability? No, he decided, not really vulnerability. A sort of gentleness, not passive, but somehow soothing. At least, to his eyes.
‘Skinny, but. Wants a bit of feeding up; round off some of those sharp edges,’ he muttered to himself.
And the way she had just stood there, gamely meeting his angry glare although for some reason silent herself. As if she had wanted to detach herself from the scene, had wanted to be somewhere else.
She hadn’t approved; somehow he was certain of that, without really knowing how he knew. She hadn’t approved, but hadn’t wanted to make even more of a scene by taking sides. A fence-sitter?
Ford Landell hoped not; he had little time for people who tried to sit on fences, who wouldn’t make a stand even when they held strong opinions. He, himself, was admittedly opinionated, even more admittedly a person who tended to back up his opinions with whatever action was required.
‘I should have done something,’ he said aloud, aware that he was talking to himself, annoyed because he considered that a bad habit he had never been able to break.
Actually, he had been about to speak out when his attention had been caught by the feminist’s striking companion. His attitude had been a mixture of annoyance, contempt and laughter; it was, he had thought, mildly amusing to be abused for simple good manners.
But then he had seen her.
‘And almost certainly never will again, so why I bother even thinking about it, 1 can’t imagine,’ he went on, aloud. ‘Don’t even know what was so special about her."
Whatever it had been, he decided, it wasn’t about to be put into words; he couldn’t define it arid didn’t really want to. But neither, despite the unlikelihood of ever seeing the blue-eyed woman again, could he quite forget her either. He could only wish, as he did now, that they could have met — properly met — in different circumstances.
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