by Penny Jordan
‘Not really. It’s business.’
Michael, not happy with the fact that he had lost their attention, splashed noisily in his bath. Rick bent down to lift him out, wrapping him in a warm towel.
Feeling dismissed and shut out, Kate walked unsteadily into her own room. She had an absurd inclination to cry, something to do with the sight of Michael’s chubby little arms wrapped so trustingly around the neck of the man holding him.
Once she must have been held like that by her father, but she could not remember it. What she could remember, though, was the pain that had come with knowing that her parents’ love had been taken from her, and she had spent the rest of her life determined to make sure that she was never vulnerable to that kind of pain again, never allowing anyone close enough to her to cause her pain when they left her, never allowing herself the indulgence of physical contact with others. Until Michael came into her life. And the worst thing of all was that she didn’t know whom she envied the most: Rick for the way Michael nestled so trustingly in his arms, or Michael because he had the sure strength of Rick’s arms around him.
All the time she was getting ready, she could hear the soft sounds of Rick getting Michael ready for bed; intimate, tender little sounds that caught at her heart and made it ache dangerously.
She was just stepping into her dress when Rick knocked on her bedroom door.
‘What is it?’ she called out, realising her mistake the moment he opened the door and walked in.
She saw his eyebrows rise as she struggled frantically to tug her dress on, her face flushed and hot with embarrassment as the fabric stuck over her hips where she had accidentally bunched it, leaving the whole of her upper body bare apart from her lacy bra.
‘I didn’t mean you to come in,’ she told him angrily. ‘What is it you want, Rick?’
Fear of her own vulnerability made her voice sharp; she knew she was over-reacting, and she could see that Rick knew it too. He must be able to see how uncomfortable she felt, yet he made no move to leave, and Kate felt a slow burn of colour wash her skin as he quite deliberately looked at her.
Long ago, in her days in the home, when she had been forced to share a large bedroom with other girls, she had no doubt thought nothing of dressing and undressing in front of others. But those others had been members of her own sex and, besides, it had been a long time ago.
Her privacy was something that Kate had guarded very protectively in the years that had followed, and to have someone standing in her bedroom, watching her while she struggled to conceal herself from him, made her shake with a mixture of fear and anger that made it impossible for her to untangle the fabric of her dress.
Close to tears of rage and misery, she cried out sharply, ‘Will you please get out of my room? I’m trying to get dressed.’
‘And not succeeding very well,’ Garrick told her drily, crossing the room. Before she could stop him, he was at her side, saying, ‘Here, let me help you.’
Kate couldn’t have moved if she’d tried. Her entire body tensed and then shook, as though she was in the grip of a fatal palsy. She felt Rick take hold of her dress and gently ease it up into the curve of her waist so that the bunched fabric could fall free. She felt the silk slither of its lining flow smoothly over her hips and thighs.
Like someone in a trance, she remained mute and obedient as Rick eased the top of her dress upwards and away from her body so that she could slide her arms into the sleeves.
He moved behind her. She felt the coldness of the metal zip and then the warmth of his hands through the fabric as he ran it upwards, closing it.
‘A business dinner… Which restaurant is he taking you to?’ he asked casually as he fastened the hook and eye at the top of her dress.
The question took several seconds to penetrate. Kate felt almost as though she were drugged and unable to respond to anything with her normal speed. Even though he was no longer touching her she could still feel the imprint of his fingers against her skin.
‘We aren’t going to a restaurant,’ Kate told him huskily. It was oddly difficult to form the words, her throat felt tight and sore.
‘He’s taking you to his flat?’ She saw the hard face tighten, a shrewd, mocking smile curling his mouth. ‘I see. So that’s how you do business is it, Kate—oiling the wheels of success with a little skilful seduction?’
Kate reacted without thinking, raising her hand and slapping his face hard at the same time as she burst out furiously, ‘No, it is not! How dare you suggest such a thing? How…’
The protest died in her throat as he took hold of her, the grey eyes blazing with an anger that threatened to match her own and exceed it, but there was no anger in his voice, as the hard fingers dug into her arms, and his mouth curled in mocking amusement as he told her, ‘You’re very naïve for a successful business woman, Kate. Don’t you know that there’s only one effective punishment a man can inflict on a woman who slaps him, and that it’s this?’
She cried out as his head blotted out the light, but the sound was smothered under the hard pressure of his mouth.
It was the first time she had been kissed by a man so obviously experienced in the art that, despite her rage and fear, she discovered that her own lips were softening treacherously beneath his skilled assault; and, as though the very fact of their tremulous softness pleased him, he didn’t let her go, but used his tongue and his teeth to give her the most explicit and thorough lesson in the art of turning the angry pressure of mouth against mouth into the kind of sensual devastation that rocked her self-confidence on its foundations.
Quite when her eyes closed and she went limp in his arms, allowing him to draw her so close to his body that her breasts were flattened against his chest and she could feel the heavy thud of his heart as though it beat within her own body, she didn’t know. It was only the awareness of his voice in her ear as he stopped kissing her that brought her back to reality, her eyes opening slowly, the pupils hugely dark with arousal and bemusement. At some point he had slid his fingers into her hair, and now they massaged the back of her scalp lazily as he looked down into her face.
‘Perhaps I owe you an apology, after all,’ he told her softly, watching every tiny betraying expression that crossed her face as she realised what had happened. ‘But naïveté is no protection against a man like James Cameron, you know, Kate.’
The instant she was free of him, all Kate’s mental functions sprang back into action.
‘How would you know anything about him?’ she demanded belligerently.
Instantly his face hardened as it had done before, and she could see that she had angered him.
‘What are you trying to say? That as a humble nanny, I’m hardly likely to be qualified to hold an opinion on a successful businessman like Cameron? I read the papers. He doesn’t have a very good reputation.’
His mouth twisted slightly, and Kate had to dismiss the accusation hovering on her lips that he was jealous of James’s success.
This was a man who wasn’t jealous of anyone, she acknowledged, a little shocked at having to accept that this was so; a humble nanny was how Rick had described himself in a voice dry with some kind of concealed amusement, but there was nothing humble about him at all.
‘How did you know it was James Cameron I’m having dinner with?’ Kate demanded.
‘You told me.’ He shrugged powerful shoulders. ‘How else could I have known?’
Kate frowned. She was reasonably sure she had not told him, but he was quite right. How could he have known, otherwise?
She was only just beginning to recover from the shock of his kiss. She would have to say something to him about it…to make it clear to him that it was an incident that was never to be repeated…to even demand an explanation of why it had happened in the first place, only she suspected she knew. The male sex could never resist an opportunity of reinforcing their superior strength to the female. She had always known that, and Rick had just proved that she was right.
She
was torn between an urgent need to tell him that she was going to dismiss him, and her recognition of the fact that she could not do so without first making sure she had someone to replace him.
And then there was Michael to think of, and there was no getting away from the fact that Michael responded far better to Rick than he had done to any of his other nannies. She couldn’t dismiss him, she already knew that and so, she suspected, did he… Which left her with only one avenue of self-defence.
Drawing herself up to her full height, she said coldly, ‘If this is the way you behaved with your previous employer, I’m not surprised she thought you were sexually available, but let me make one thing clear to you here and now. If I want a lover, I’m perfectly capable of finding myself one.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he told her gravely, thoroughly disconcerting her both with his words and the look he gave her. It was almost approaching being tender, and she recoiled from it as though he had hit her.
An unexpected wail from Michael’s room disturbed them both.
‘I’ll go,’ Rick told her.
She heard him soothing the wakeful child, and then close the door as he went downstairs. It was half-past seven. If she didn’t hurry, she was going to be late.
Her hands trembled as she brushed her hair and put on her make-up. Everything Rick had said and done had reinforced her doubts about going to James’s flat, but she had no other option.
It was five to eight when she eventually felt calm enough to go downstairs. She had left her presentation in the sitting-room, and she was stunned to see Rick studying it for all the world as though he had every right to do so.
‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ she fumed as she swept into the room. ‘That is private…’
‘Sorry,’ he apologised to her with a brief smile. ‘I was just interested to see what you were planning.’
‘And now that you have seen it, are you any the wiser?’ she asked sarcastically.
She saw the brief flash of anger darken his eyes, but before he could say anything the doorbell rang.
‘That will be James,’ Kate told him hurriedly. ‘I must go.’
For some reason she didn’t want the two men to confront one another. Confront? It was only as she snatched up her papers and dashed to the front door that she wondered at her somewhat Freudian choice of verb.
James drove a silver-grey Porsche. He had parked it next to the Ferrari, and he frowned a little as he ushered her past it and opened the passenger door of his Porsche.
‘Wealthy neighbours?’ he questioned as Kate thanked him.
She responded with a vague smile, not wishing to tell him the truth and not wanting to fib either, but luckily he seemed to assume that his assumption was right and did not refer to the Ferrari again.
James very obviously enjoyed all the trappings of his success: the suit he was wearing had not come from one of his own chain store retailers, Kate acknowledged, and nor had the expensive cotton shirt. And yet, to the media, James proclaimed himself to be very much a man of the people. Not that there was anything wrong with a successful person enjoying that success, but Kate didn’t like the way James sometimes mocked the very people who had been responsible for his success.
As they drove to his flat he name-dropped continuously, something else she detested, and she wondered whether he was actually trying to impress her, or if it had simply become a habit he was no longer aware he had.
His apartment was in an elegant Georgian terrace of houses of Eaton Square, with a complicated series of security checks to be gone through before they could walk into the main hallway that serviced all the apartments.
James’s was on the second floor. A square hallway decorated in off-white and black, and to Kate’s eyes too stark and modern for the elegance of the building, gave way to a drawing-room decorated in the same modernistic colours and furnished with a good deal of off-white leather and steel. While she could appreciate its design, she wondered a little at anyone choosing it for such an inappropriate setting.
‘I’ve arranged for my staff to leave dinner ready for us. The bathrooms here are all en suite, I’m afraid. The apartment doesn’t boast a separate cloakroom. If you’d…’
Kate shook her head quickly, her nerve-ends prickling, not so much at his comment but at the way he was looking at her.
A very prettily arranged cold meal had been left for them in the dining-room, but Kate was too nervous to eat. Refusing more than a single glass of wine, she fought down her butterflies of impatience while James refilled his several times. Then he insisted on having an after-dinner brandy, while Kate toyed with a second cup of coffee she didn’t really want.
Over dinner, every time she had tried to discuss her presentation, James had steered the conversation into more personal channels. Kate wasn’t sure she was too happy with the emphasis he seemed to place on his questions about her personal life, and she was thoroughly on edge by the time the meal was over and they were able to move into his study to discuss her presentation.
Whatever his reputation with her sex might be, he was a very able businessman, Kate reminded herself as she sat down opposite him across the expanse of the stained ash desk.
Like the other rooms she had seen, this one too was very modern in its decoration and furniture. It also struck her as rather cold and clinical, and certainly it was the direct opposite of the illusion she had decided to create for his new chain of supermarkets.
Neither of them spoke as he read through her presentation. Kate because she was too nervous, and James because he was studying the work she had done.
‘I’m impressed,’ he told her when he had finished. And Kate had the impression that he was not just impressed, but surprised as well; that he had not for some reason expected her to produce something of such a high standard. ‘Your suggestions are good…if perhaps a little on the high side cost-wise.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but he forestalled her, saying silkily, ‘Kate, you’re the kind of woman I admire very much indeed…my kind of woman. Together we could form a very mutually advantageous partnership, don’t you think? Whichever agency I eventually recommend to my main board will be getting a very valuable contract indeed…in terms of money and status.
‘You remind me of myself twenty years ago. Young, ambitious, clever. Clever enough to know that sometimes in order to succeed we all need to give that little extra something.’ He looked at her and smiled lazily, supremely confident that he would get what he wanted.
Kate’s heart was bounding. She had no difficulty at all in interpreting his comments. He was telling her that if she wanted the contract she was going to have to sleep with him. This was something she had come up against on only a handful of occasions before, and she had made it plain then as she intended to do now that there was no way she was going to barter sexual favours in return for getting someone’s business.
She took a deep, steadying breath and, maintaining eye contact with him, interrupted smoothly before he could go any further, ‘I’m glad you like the presentation, and I’m flattered that you should compare my ambition with your own, but I’m afraid when it comes to that “little something extra”—well that’s not the way I do business.’
She stood up as she spoke, firmly gathering up her papers, refusing to either hurry or appear to be frightened. It was rather like dealing with an aggressive dog, she told herself mentally; if she didn’t betray her panic, everything would be all right.
But James obviously wasn’t used to being refused. The lazy smile disappeared, and he looked at her in furious disbelief.
‘If you think you can push the price up by doing this, forget it. Come on, Kate. I know how these things are done. You want the contract. I want you.’
‘It’s not the way I do business,’ she told him curtly.
‘No, so I’ve heard.’
And, as she looked at him, Kate wondered how much of his desire for her was fuelled by a need to be able to say to others that he had succeed
ed where they had failed.
It made her feel sick inside. She knew there were still businessmen like James, but they were getting fewer and fewer as more and more women became successful. She had been warned, though, both by Camilla and by Rick Evans.
She had all her papers together now. She looked across the desk and said quietly, ‘I think it’s best if I leave. If you should change your mind about the terms of the contract, you know where you can contact me.’
‘Change my mind?’ he laughed mockingly. ‘You’ll be the one who’ll be doing that, my dear. Face it…you need the contract far more than I need your presentation.’
His arrogance made Kate lose her temper, and without even thinking of the consequences she said furiously, ‘There’s no contract on earth that’s worth the price you’re asking.’ And too late she realised what she had done as she saw his face change, the gloating expression giving way to one of hot dislike.
‘You little bitch,’ she heard him saying thickly. ‘You’re all alike, you so-called businesswomen. Trying to turn men into eunuchs. It’s time someone taught you a lesson.’
And as he lunged toward her, trying to grab hold of her, Kate realised her danger. It was not just her he disliked and resented, it was all women like her who dared to invade his male world, who made him feel insecure and threatened.
Just in time she managed to evade his grasp, grabbing her papers from the desk and almost running across the room to tug open the door. She heard him following her; the heavy sound of his breathing like something out of a childhood nightmare.
Luckily the door to the hallway was open and she darted through it, hearing James curse as he tried to cut off her exit and bumped into one of the heavy leather chairs.
Her hands trembled as she unlocked the front door to the apartment and then darted down the stairs rather than ring for the lift.
In her haste to escape she had forgotten the security locks on the massive front door into the street, but as she emerged into the hallway the door opened and, ignoring the startled expressions of the couple coming in, she dashed outside, pausing to catch her breath and steady her heartbeat.