Yes, she said silently.
He raised his head.
‘Abby.’ His voice sounded strangled.
‘Yes,’ she said aloud. She ran her lips down the long, powerful length of his neck. ‘Mmm?’
‘Abby, stop for a moment.’ The accent was husky.
Not talking like a machine gun anymore, thought Abby with satisfaction. She ran her tongue along his collar bone. Emilio groaned.
Abby smiled secretly. ‘Stop? Why?’ she said, absorbed.
‘We need to talk,’ he said on a rising inflection.
Abby was experimenting.
‘No, we don’t,’ she murmured, not deflected. ‘Talking is a seriously bad idea. When we talk we shout. Absolutely no more talking.’
In desperation he seized her and held her away from him.
‘Why did you do that?’ she demanded, reproachful but not yet hurt.
For a moment he looked almost wild. Then he seemed to gather himself together.
‘Because you don’t know what you’re doing.’
Abby gave him a naughty grin. ‘No?’
He did not smile back. In spite of the golden skin, he looked pale. She gave a little frustrated wriggle but he held her away implacably.
‘I shouldn’t have started this. I was angry. But it is no excuse.’
Abby winced. But she was too aroused to stop now. ‘OK, you started it. But I’m all signed up now. We can’t just stop.’
She wriggled again. But he was holding her too far away for her to touch his body as she wanted.
Emilio’s throat moved.
‘Yes, we can,’ he said steadily. ‘I’m stopping right now.’
She did not believe him. She met his eyes.
‘Why?’
He closed his eyes briefly. ‘Because you didn’t sign up for this, and neither did I.’
‘But—’
He interrupted her. ‘Abby.’
There was a deep note in his voice that she had not heard before.
‘Yes?’
‘Maybe we will be lovers,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t know. But not because I lost my temper and you had to see how far you could drive me.’
She stopped as if she had been shot.
Then, all of a sudden, she was not resisting his hold. She was pulling away with all her strength.
Emilio dropped his hands. He drew a long, ragged breath.
Abby retreated, until she had her back against the fridge. She did not say anything.
Well, he had done it, thought Emilio, watching her carefully. He had behaved well, in spite of all the temptations not to. Looking at Abby’s stricken expression now, he wished with all his heart that he had not.
Conscience was all very well. And so was long-range planning. But he had hurt her. It did not take a genius to see that. Hurt her for the second time. He knew that, even if she did not yet.
Suddenly he saw that he might never win her confidence back after this. He was shaken by a gust of furious regret. Why hadn’t his overactive conscience thought of that while there was still time?
He said under his breath, ‘Don’t look like that.’
Abby shook her head. Her blood was in turmoil. She did not know what she thought. She did not know what she was going to do. All she knew was that she had never been so humiliated in her life. Or nearly never—
Without thinking, she flung at him, ‘Does it turn you on, winding a girl up so you can turn her down?’
He looked thunderstruck.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know about your other ladies.’ She was shaking inside, very slightly, very hard. Convulsive fury, she assured herself. ‘But this is my second time round the block with you, you—you—tennis court Romeo.’ It would have been ridiculous, if she hadn’t been hurting so much.
His eyes flickered.
That was when Abby realised three things simultaneously: he knew; he had known for a long time; and he hoped she had forgotten.
She said flatly, ‘I hate you.’
She walked out without looking behind her.
There was no key to her bedroom door. Not that it mattered, thought Abby, slamming it and leaning her back against it. Emilio had made it very plain that he was not going to come anywhere near her tonight. If she wanted to be alone, that was just fine by him.
She drew several painful breaths. This hurt much too deep for tears. She felt as if she had walked into a furnace. And was not too sure what had walked out.
How could he have known all along that she was the girl in the Montijo’s garden? How come he even remembered that clumsy teenager, among his Callies and his Floritas and his Rosannas?
She winced, going off on a savagely irrelevant tack as she recalled Rosanna Montijo. The gossip column made it sound as if Emilio had had a fling with her, too. And as if she was married. Was there nothing the man would not do?
Well, yes, there was, she thought. He would not take Abby Templeton Burke to bed when she practically begged him to.
A wave of desolation swept over her, as real as a cold wind on a dark night. Not stopping to take off her clothes, she lay down on the bed, hugging her knees to her breast, huddling the duvet round her.
All through the night, she tried and tried to get warm. But warmth eluded her. Like sleep.
As soon as the first glimmer of light was in the sky she got up. Even a hot shower did not really warm her up, though it got the blood moving again. And she knew what she must do.
She dressed. Pulled her outdoor coat around her shoulders. Put her key down on the hall table. And closed the door very softly but finally behind her.
She had been into the offices of C&C early before but never this early. She looked at her watch. If asked, she would have said the deserted office would have been spooky. But she was beyond jumping at shadows. The emptiness was peaceful.
The first thing she did was send an e-mail to her father. She knew he would pick it up on his laptop, wherever he was in the Caucasus by now.
Hi, Dad. Sorry to give you bad news but you need to know that Justine has given me notice to quit the garden flat. I’ve been living with a friend. It hasn’t worked out. I expect the stuff in the paper will catch up with you eventually. Don’t worry about it. It isn’t what you think. But I need to move on and that may get in the papers, too. I won’t be telling them Justine kicked me out. But I won’t be telling lies about it, either. I’ll let you know my new address when I move in.
Love, Smudge.
Well, got that sorted, she thought. Odd how something that had been the most important thing in her life a couple of weeks ago should suddenly seem so irrelevant.
She went down to the lobby and picked up the morning papers from the heavy-eyed porter. Might as well start looking for a flat before everyone else in London got at the property rental pages.
‘They got a nicer photo of you today,’ said the porter kindly.
‘Thank you.’ Abby was turning away but she did a double take at that. She looked down at the untouched bundle of papers in hand. Then she turned back to him. ‘Today? You haven’t seem me in the paper today, surely? That was yesterday.’
He held up his own copy of the tabloid and grinned.
Her heart plummeted.
When she got back to her desk she did not even look at the property rental listings. She went straight for the tabloid gossip.
It was bad. Today she was in all three of the big circulation papers. Tracy’s Town Gossip led the pack.
‘Heartbreaker Abby Templeton Burke wasn’t taking calls yesterday, as her new squeeze, Emilio Diz, flew back from Spain unexpectedly. He wasn’t talking, either.’
There was a photograph of Emilio, striding through an airport lounge. He was frowning blackly. Of course, Abby knew that in all likelihood it was a library picture that the paper had brought in from somewhere. But that frown still made her want to avert her eyes.
She forced herself to read on.
‘A former country girl, the Fab Ab has bee
n really making her mark since she hit town in the autumn. And turning into a raver while she did it. Check out the education of an It girl.’
There followed a series of four photographs, labelled October through January. The picture editor had done a good job. He must have been working from the sheets of photographs of publicity events with literally thousands of pieces to choose from. His selection was skilfully designed to show Abby progressively breaking away from pearl earrings and timeless classics to C&C’s idea of tomorrow’s fashion.
And, of course, she was with a different man in each picture. No matter that at least one she had talked to only for the five minutes it took to take the photograph. No matter that one was a C&C client and another was her boss. The list made her look like a heartless butterfly. And that was being generous.
Racing driver…Industrialist…Art collector…That was her boss. Presumably they thought it spoiled the story if they said she worked for him and attending that particular function had been part of her job, thought Abby ironically. Lead singer with the Spiro brothers…
‘Deor,’ muttered Abby aloud.
It made it look as if she had taken a different lover every month. The photograph they had got of her made it worse, somehow. It was a studio portrait that her father had had taken for her twenty-first birthday. ‘One for the top of the piano,’ the family had teased.
It was all soft focus and made her look uncharacteristically dreamy. Her eyes were wide and her full mouth slightly parted. As far as Abby recalled, the photo session had gone on for ever and, by the time he took that one, she was beginning to drift away with boredom, which accounted for the dreamy look. But her father had loved it. And, next to the rogues’ gallery of her supposed lovers, her expression was not so much dreamy as—well, frankly, sensuous.
Abby felt herself go hot.
She would have given up reading there and then if there had not been banner flash under the photograph.
‘Tying yourself down. Girls, do you need to? See how you voted, page 8&9.’
Abby felt sick.
CHAPTER TEN
EMILIO was not surprised to find the key on the hall table. Angry, yes, mainly with himself. But not surprised. He could not have handled it worse.
All that debating about when he should tell her that they had met before! About how he had felt and how he had remembered! How could he ever have thought he had any control over it?
Once they started yelling at each other, any sensible game plan had gone out of the window. The die was cast. It was a sure-fire certainty that they would do just what they had done—fall into each other’s arms as if they were starving. After that, the revelation was inevitable.
And she had remembered, too. He was not prepared for that. It was one of the many things that had thrown him, making him brutally high-handed when all he had wanted—
He broke out in a sweat remembering what he had wanted. What, for a few earth-shaking minutes, Abby had wanted, too.
Well, he had tried to be responsible. With the result that now she hated him. He wasn’t too keen on himself, either.
I should have taken her to bed, he thought. I should never have tried to be noble.
C&C reaction to Abby’s new notoriety varied from indifference to hilarity. Molly di Perretti, alone, seemed to realise that Abby might actually mind. And even she did not think there was anything to be done.
‘It will blow over.’
‘Will it?’
‘Sure. There’ll be another story along in a minute. There always is.’
‘That’s a great comfort,’ said Abby dryly. ‘Will it come with forgetfulness pills?’
‘Oh, come on, Abby. It’s not the end of the world. The columns are quite kind. They think you’re great.’ She looked at Tracy’s poll and grinned. ‘Heck even the punters think you’re great.’ She read aloud, “‘Eighty-two per cent said, Ab is right. No woman should tie herself down.”’
‘Wonderful,’ said Abby. ‘Whenever did I say I didn’t want to tie myself down?’
‘Well, all right, they said it for you. But you’re not looking for marriage, are you?’
Abby winced. She covered it up with a loud snort.
‘Just as well I’m not.’ She shook the news clipping viciously. ‘After that little character assassination, I’m not going to get it, am I?’
Molly reflected suddenly that Abby might just possibly be serious about Emilio Diz. She was living with the man, after all, which she had never shown any sign of doing before.
‘Well, maybe not with Emilio,’ Molly conceded. ‘He ain’t going to like being told by a British newspaper that his latest girlfriend can take him or leave him.’
‘Oh, you can see that, can you?” said Abby, with heavy irony.
‘Human nature. But there are other men.’ She thought about it. ‘Well, there will be when this has all blown over.’
‘Thank you,’ said Abby, ‘That’s a great comfort.’
She banged through her work with a crisp professionalism that quite cowed anyone she spoke to. Radio Scunthorpe did not even fight back. And a regional London newsroom found they had agreed to interview a fund-raiser for a charity they did not even recognise. On the point of ringing back, they received a full brief headed ‘Questions you would have asked if you’d been thinking straight.’
‘Phew,’ said the researcher’s e-mail of thanks. ‘You’re quite an operator, aren’t you?’
But Abby didn’t feel like an operator. She felt like something between a laughing-stock and a woman whose life was over.
But at least she did not have to be a turquoise-haired woman whose life was over. She went to her normal hairdresser and plumped into a seat.
‘Turn me back into someone I recognise,’ she said, looking in the mirror with shadowed eyes.
It was going to take more than than a new hair colour, she thought.
But she still had to have a roof over her head. If she had been reluctant to go to a hotel when Justine threw her out, it was completely out of the question with a bunch of gossip-hungry journalists looking for signs of the end of her mythical relationship with Emilio Diz.
She returned from the hairdresser; steamed through her work; and got on the phone. She had to have a flat by tonight.
In spite of what he had flung at her in the heat of the moment, Emilio did not really believe that the gossip writers would return for another bite at him and Abby. So he was astonished when the Madrid office e-mailed him the London press cuttings. And even more when Federico called him mid-morning with the news that he had heard it, too.
‘So?’ said Emilio uninvitingly.
‘Is it serious?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you seemed a bit distracted. Is this girl the reason?’
‘Isn’t that my business?’
There was a disconcerted pause. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Fine. Then leave me to sort it out.’
‘Right,’ said Federico, feeling as if he had stopped a cannon-ball without even knowing that battle had been joined.
The moment he put down the phone he called the siblings who were all waiting to hear Emilio’s reply.
‘It’s serious. And it’s not going well.’
‘Good,’ said Isabel in Argentina. ‘It’s about time. Women have always fallen at his feet. It will be good for Emilio to have to try.’
The family—who loved and relied on him—gave it their consideration and decided that they agreed with her.
Emilio, having to try really hard for the first time in a long history of romantic entanglements, did not know where to start.
He got rid of his day’s work even more expeditiously than Abby. Then he freed up his diary for the rest of the week.
‘Big negotiation?’ asked his new PA, excited.
‘The biggest,’ agreed Emilio.
It was, he realised, true.
As always, when he had a major problem to resolve, he took himself off to the tennis courts. He had joined a c
lub in west London just about the same time as he bought the apartment. Now he drove down there, frowning horribly at every traffic light along the way.
The professional was pleased to be asked for a game. He had had several trials for the national squad and was confident of his quality. Of course, Diz had been among the ten best in the world at one time. But that was a long time ago. And these days he was a businessman. Everyone knew businessmen were out of shape. No, the professional had no doubts that he could give Diz a decent game.
So he was absolutely unprepared. Emilio, simmering with rage that was only made worse by the fact that he knew he himself was more than half to blame for the whole mess, slammed the boy all round the court. He did not give away a single shot. He fought over every point as if he was playing in front of thousands, instead of two ground staff and a woman walking her dog.
The professional could only be glad when the uneven match ended and he could get his breath back. By contrast, Emilio looked more ready to jump back into the fray again. His chest rose and fell evenly and he danced around lightly, shaking the tension out of his well-exercised calves.
Sheer ostentation, thought the professional sourly.
But he was won over when Diz put an arm round him as they came off court.
‘Thanks. Let me buy you a beer. You have no idea how much I needed that.’
By the time he got back on the road, Emilio had his strategy worked out.
After her phone calls, Abby had a list of flats to view that night. All of her potential landlords sounded startled at the thought of her moving in at once. None of them sounded keen. But Abby, bearing in mind her victory of the day’s adversaries, was not having any truck with that.
She negotiated with Sam for an early departure. Then left to buy a toothbrush before going to view her first flat. Abby set out briskly, prepared to do battle, if necessary.
But not with Emilio Diz. The moment she came out of the door and saw his car in the car park, all her brave determination fell away. She stopped dead.
He had seen her. He got out of the car and came towards her.
He was not wearing his business suit this time. He was wearing those sexy black jeans and a dark T-shirt. As she got closer, she saw that there was a sports bag in the back of his car.
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