by Penny Jordan
It was only then that she realised she had left both her coat and evening bag in James’s apartment.
It was a freezing cold night, something she hadn’t realised when he’d driven her here, and her dress was very fine wool. The pavement was damp, and she only realised as she stepped out of the protection of the doorway that it had started to sleet, stinging pellets of icy rain that burned her skin and soaked through her dress.
A taxi sped down the street, sending up a spray of ice-cold water to drench her from the knees down as it pulled sharply into the kerb. She stepped toward it, but the driver flicked on his engaged light.
There was no guarantee that James wouldn’t pursue her out into the street, although she thought it was extremely unlikely, but now that her initial panic had eased Kate realised that she had no way of getting home other than walking, since her money was in her evening purse in his flat.
If Camilla had been home she could have rung her and begged for help, but she wasn’t. There was only one thing for it, she decided grimly, squaring her shoulders. She would have to walk. At least that way she might be able to keep warm. She didn’t. Before she was more than half-way there she was soaked to the skin, or so it felt, the ever increasing sleet now like tiny daggers against her chilled skin.
She slipped once, her flimsy high-heeled shoes sliding on the icy pavement, and the shock of falling made her cry out sharply, but there was no one to hear her. By the time she was on her feet again she was shaking as well as shivering, and in the streetlight she saw the smear of blood on her knee, her flesh white against the ripped black tights she was wearing. She had also scraped her hands, and the palms stung painfully.
Blinking back tears of shock and pain, she tried to walk as quickly as she could. Her ankle ached painfully when she put her full weight on it, but at least it supported her.
She had never been more glad of anything in her life than to reach the familiar turning to her own street. She was limping badly now, and if she had had the energy she suspected she would probably have been crying with exhaustion.
As she reached her own front door, she leaned blissfully against it, automatically reaching out for her handbag and her key. But of course she didn’t have either.
It was too much…much, much too much. She leaned her cheek against the door and let the tears flow, beating frustratedly on the smooth painted surface with hands too chilled to ball into fists.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHEN the solid wood gave way beneath her, Kate was too cold and shocked to realise why or to care, and not even Rick’s incredulous, ‘Kate! My God, what’s happened to you?’ really reached her.
She took a step forward and then another, shivering like a soaked cat, wanting only to crawl upstairs and go to bed, but Rick was standing in the way and another step forward brought her up against the solid warmth of his body and somehow or other into his arms.
She made a muffled protest and tried to step backwards, but it was too late. His arms had locked round her, and anyway he was so blissfully warm and comforting to lean on that she really didn’t want to move at all. Having had her token protest rejected, she was quite content to let him hold her.
It would be bliss to close her eyes and go to sleep where she stood, supported and warmed by the bulk of that male body, but it seemed that Rick wasn’t going to let her.
She gave a faint cry of protest when he moved her away from his warmth so that he could look down into her face.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ he demanded roughly. ‘Is Cameron responsible for this?’
The hard anger in his voice penetrated through the shroud of icy cold numbing her. Kate opened her eyes and focused hazily on him. His mouth was a grim, hard line that indented in a severe and authoritative way she couldn’t recognise. Her gaze shifted focus to his eyes. They, too, held an unfamiliar expression. Flat and cold and very, very masculine.
‘Is he, Kate?’ he reiterated curtly.
She shook her head and told him huskily, ‘No. At least, not directly… He didn’t attack me, if that’s what you mean.’
Just those few words exhausted her, and she let her eyes close so that she could blank out the male anger in his face. For some reason that she couldn’t find the energy to analyse right there and then, she found it almost comforting that Rick should be so concerned.
It struck her rather vaguely that this was hardly the reaction of the dedicated self-sufficient woman she considered herself to be, but she was too exhausted to dwell on the conundrum of her untypical behaviour too deeply.
‘So who did?’ Rick persisted, shaking her gently when she squeezed her eyes tightly closed.
‘No one,’ she told him crossly, when she realised he wasn’t going to let her lie down and go to sleep as she so desperately wanted to do until he had got his answer.
‘I fell in the street…’ She shivered and said plaintively, ‘Rick, I’m cold. I want to go to bed. I want to get warm.’
‘You’re soaked through,’ he told her roughly. ‘Where’s your coat?’
‘I left it in James’s apartment,’ she told him, too exhausted to prevaricate.
Even behind her closed eyelids she could feel the penetrating demand of his concentration. Reluctantly she opened her eyes, obeying his unspoken command.
‘All right…we had an argument. He told me he’d give us the contract for his PR work if I went to bed with him.’ She grimaced bitterly. ‘I told him that isn’t the way I do business, and left.’
‘Without your coat?’
’Yes!’ she admitted bitterly. ‘He made a lunge for me and I panicked. I left my coat and my evening bag in his apartment, but at least I brought the presentation back with me.’
She heard Rick curse under his breath, and didn’t know whether his savage denunciation was for her or for James.
‘I warned you what he was like,’ he told her, grim-faced. ‘God almighty, call yourself a businesswoman, and yet you walked into his trap like a fly into honey.’
His scorn penetrated the icy miasma of exhaustion and misery surrounding her. Kate jerked back in his arms, her eyes glittering with the onset of fever and tears.
‘If you’re trying to suggest that I allowed greed to blind me to reality…’
‘Not greed,’ Rick countered swiftly, ‘but if I were to substitute ambition for greed, could you be as quick to deny the charge?’
Kate felt a hot stain spread over her body. His words came too close to home for comfort. She had always had her doubts about the wisdom of dealing with James, about the sense of dining alone with him in his apartment, but her desperate need to secure the contract had forced her to put her doubts to one side. And now to have Rick so accurately pinpoint that fact made her feel both resentful and fiercely defensive.
‘Of course you would say that—just because I’m a woman. Ambition in a man is something to be praised and admired, but let a woman evidence the same drive and suddenly the whole world wants to criticise her.
‘Is it really so very wrong of me to want to make a success of the agency? Not just for my own sake, either. I’ve got Michael to think of, the girls I employ—and even if I didn’t, I’d still want to succeed,’ she told him fiercely. ‘And I don’t see why I should be ashamed of admitting it… A woman has just as much right to want to achieve as a man.’
‘Yes, she has,’ Rick agreed sombrely. ‘It can also be a lot harder to succeed…or a lot easier…depending on what she’s prepared to do, to achieve success.’
Kate ached in every bone in her body. The last thing she wanted was to have an in-depth discussion on moral values here in her hallway, when she was freezing cold and soaking wet. In fact all she wanted was for Rick to open his arms so that she could walk into them and forget everything bar the blissful warmth and protection of his body.
This knowledge of her own weakness shocked her. For the first time in her adult life she wanted something from another human being.
It was Michael who had caused her to
develop this weakness. Michael, whose dependence and love had pierced the invulnerable wall she had built around herself, Michael who had destroyed that barrier with his dependence and need and left her vulnerable to emotions she had promised herself she would never feel.
She knew all about the dangers of loving others…the pain of the loss…the loneliness of being part of a close knit unit that had disintegrated. She had experienced it all when she lost her parents and she told herself all through her growing up years that she was never going to experience it again. And the best way to do that was not to allow anyone close to her; not to allow herself to want anyone to be close to her. So why was she now aching for Rick to stop lecturing her and instead to enfold her in his arms and comfort her with tenderness and care?
She couldn’t ignore his statement though, nor the challenge it contained. It had to be answered.
She lifted too heavy eyelids and focused on him with difficulty:
‘If you’re saying that life will always be easier for those women who are prepared to barter sex for favours, then yes, I agree with you that in the past that was the case, but that’s changing. Women are no longer prepared to sell themselves short. They no longer need to.’ Her head lifted proudly, her eyes glittering with more than the fire of the fever she was holding at bay. ‘If you’re trying to suggest that I might have at any time considered sleeping with James in order to secure the contract, then you’re quite wrong. That isn’t the way I do business, and it never will be.’
‘No,’ Garrick agreed quietly. ‘I can see that.’
He ought to be feeling angry; if he could prove that she was the type of woman who slept around, who sold herself to gain business advantages, it would be easier for him to prove her an unfit guardian for Michael, but instead, what he did feel was a rush of satisfaction and relief that his judgement had not been at fault, coupled with an urgent and very masculine desire to seek out James Cameron and make him pay for every second of discomfort and fear Kate had experienced. And there had been fear. He had seen it flash briefly through her eyes, even though she had tried to deny it.
As she closed her eyes again and swayed where she stood, he suddenly became aware of everything that his furious anxiety had made him ignore. She was freezing, her teeth chattering, her wet clothes clinging to her like a second skin, while a thin blue line of extreme cold whitened the flesh round her mouth. He cursed himself for keeping her standing in the small, cold hall when she so desperately needed to get warm and dry.
Her eyes closed, unable to read the contrition and guilt in his eyes, Kate shivered and protested huskily, ‘I don’t want to talk any more. I’m cold.’ She tried to walk past him and head for the stairs, but her fall had damaged her ankle more than she realised, and having stood still for so long the torn muscles had stiffened up and refused to support her, so that the moment she tried to move she fell forward with a sharp cry of panic, remembering how it had felt to land on the hard pavement.
But, blissfully, this time she didn’t fall; she was instead scooped up into strong arms. The realisation that she was back in Rick’s arms made her give a small betraying murmur of contentment that drew his gaze to her white face and closed eyes. A faint frown touched his forehead. The situation was already difficult enough, without any further complications. It struck him as grimly amusing that he should be able to remain immune to the experienced advances of any amount of worldly and beautiful women, and yet the moment he had Kate in his arms his body refused to respond to a single one of his commands to ignore its sexual response to her. Not even as a teenager had he reacted like this. Sex was an enjoyable experience, but desire had never touched him with such sharp necessity that he could scarcely think beyond making love to the woman in his arms.
As he supported her weight, he fought to inject the right note of calm distance into his voice as he told her, ‘Kate, you’re soaking. You need to get undressed and have a hot bath. Can you manage to do that?’
With her eyes closed, Kate felt the full force of the message of her other senses; all of them registered Rick’s tension, told her of his grim dislike of holding her, and she remembered that he had left his previous employment due to the unwanted sexual advances of the woman whom he worked for.
Was that what he feared now? That she was going to make advances to him, that her exhaustion was simply a ploy to lure him into bed with her? She shivered with distaste at the thought of humiliating herself in such a way.
‘Of course I can manage,’ she lied. ‘Perhaps if you’d put me down, I could prove it to you.’
Something dark and intimidating flashed in his eyes, and he set her down so quickly that her whole body jarred with pain.
‘You’re always so eager to maintain that distance you keep between yourself and the rest of the world, aren’t you, Kate? That fierce independence of yours, that refusal to allow yourself to admit that you are human…that there are occasions when you can’t be wholly self-sufficient. Why?’ he demanded with unexpected harshness. ‘What’s happened in your life to make you refuse to admit that you can be vulnerable just like the rest of us… Was it a man?’ he hazarded.
His questions, so shockingly intimate and direct, coming on top of her fear and physical exhaustion, somehow or other got through the defences she normally erected against such enquiries. She stared at him blindly, trying to breathe evenly and failing as her body betrayed her.
‘No. It wasn’t a man,’ she told him slowly, and with the words came another kind of pain: the bitter sweetness of memories she had tried to forget for too long. Memories of her early childhood, when she had been happy…loved…when she had never known the harsh reality that life could be.
Rick saw the pain come into her eyes and found he was holding his own breath, willing her to confide in him, to share with him whatever it was that had made her close herself up in defences so tightly cast that in normal circumstances she would allow nothing to breach them.
Tonight he had caught her off guard, had almost trapped her into self-revelation, and as he watched her he fought down the compunction and guilt that threatened to make him back off with his questions unanswered.
‘No, it wasn’t a man,’ she repeated slowly, looking not at him but past him, her eyes huge and shadowed, as though she were focusing something beyond his sight…something only she could see… ‘It was my parents.’
He felt the shock bolt through him. Her parents! He didn’t understand. According to his reports, they had died when she was a child…and then suddenly he knew. Compassion filled him. He touched her arm, and as though in some way his touch communicated to her his feelings, she turned and looked at him and said gravely, in a childlike way, ‘They left me, you see… And I…’ Tears flooded her eyes and she pushed half-heartedly at their overflow, much in the way a child might. ‘I had to go and live in a children’s home. I couldn’t understand what had happened at first. I kept on thinking that it was all a mistake. That they weren’t dead really, and that they would come for me.’ She gave a tense shudder. ‘Some days I felt I hated them because they’d left me.’
‘They couldn’t help it, Kate,’ Rick told her gently.
‘I know that,’ she told him with a trace of impatience. ‘I knew it then, but can’t you see…even though I knew it wasn’t their fault, some part of me couldn’t help blaming them for leaving me behind… They should have taken me with them, and then we’d…’
‘Kate, no!’ Rick interrupted her harshly…so harshly that she focused properly on him, and suddenly realised what she was doing, what she was saying…
‘Of course, I didn’t really want to die… Not after the first few months, but if it hadn’t been for Jen…’
‘Michael’s mother?’ Rick interrupted gently. Her eyes had become soft and unfocused again, as though she was physically looking back into the past and witnessing again its pains.
‘Yes. She sort of adopted me at the children’s home…mothered me in a way. Without her….’ She broke off and looked at
him. ‘That’s why I cherish my independence, Rick…that’s why it’s so important to me. Because I learned young how vulnerable needing other human beings makes you… They go away and leave you alone…in pain… Loving causes pain.’
‘Therefore it’s better not to love at all,’ Rick supplemented softly for her. ‘Better not to care, or to become involved…better not to allow anyone inside that fortress you’ve built around your heart. There’s only one flaw in that argument,’ he added softly, and when she looked at him in tense watchfulness he asked, ‘What about Michael? And don’t tell me you don’t love him, Kate.’
‘Michael’s different,’ she told him wildly. ‘I owed it to Jen to…’
‘Love her son? Ah, I see…so it’s all right for you to love where that love is a duty…is that what you’re saying?’
Suddenly Kate didn’t know what she was saying any more. Or what she was feeling, other than an odd feeling of suddenly having put down an enormous burden.
Her independence, a burden? Her almost ceaseless striving to make her life free of any kind of emotional ties, a burden? It wasn’t possible…was it?
‘Man does not live by independence alone,’ Rick told her drily, deliberately misquoting. ‘And neither does woman, or should I say, most especially woman does not.’
‘That is one of the most sexist remarks I’ve ever heard,’ Kate snapped at him, glad of something to focus her feelings on, glad to have some excuse to recover from the shock of having confided in him so readily…so almost wantonly gladly, she acknowledged bitterly.
‘You misunderstood me,’ Rick told her calmly. ‘Men and women both have their separate strengths and weaknesses. The male sex has a long way to go before its emotions are as well tuned as the female. Don’t deny yourself those emotions, Kate. They’re what make…’
‘Women so vulnerable!’ she snapped at him.
‘Men are vulnerable, too,’ he told her. ‘Not all women are as honest as you, as I discovered the hard way as a young and very naïve man.’