Which still left what he had to tell her unsaid. Dominic smiled back. He’d spill the beans once the weekend was over. She would be relaxed, they’d both be relaxed.
‘Satisfied?’ Mattie smiled slowly and seductively at him. She felt expansive all of a sudden and radiantly happy at the prospect of spending a whole lazy weekend with him.
She almost wished, the following morning, that she hadn’t promised to put in a couple of hours of work. She packed her bag, threw in some underwear, one change of clothes and nightwear, which would probably be redundant.
If the office wasn’t, as she had told him, literally a short walk across the building, she might even have been tempted to abandon her generous offer made to Liz two days before, but she would get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
After all, this career, which was still sparkling new and full of promise, was the one constant in her life. Dominic would go and she would need her work to fill the void.
She let herself into the room soundlessly, enjoying the silence, made herself a cup of coffee and went into the sectioned room that Liz used.
Dominic Drecos, not a million miles away, couldn’t concentrate on the figures blinking at him on the computer that was neatly tucked away in the small office he had created from one of the bedrooms in his apartment.
He found his attention drifting from his chief accountant’s earnest reports about profit margins to the woman who would be waiting for him at her apartment in precisely forty-five minutes’ time.
Eventually he abandoned his attempts to work and resorted to stalking through his apartment, pausing to peer impatiently out of the windows and consult his watch.
He felt like a kid on his first date. When it came to her, he always felt like a kid on his first date. Naturally, the novelty wouldn’t last. When did things like that ever last? But he was more than happy to go along for the ride and see how far it took him.
He raked long fingers through his dark hair and looked absently down at the street below, propping himself up on the broad window ledge.
It would have done wonders for his conscience if he hadn’t known what she was doing right now. Working. Putting in the hard graft that he had instinctively known from the very beginning she would have been capable of. Unfortunately, her putting in hard graft just made him uncomfortably aware that the little talk he had been meaning to have with her for some time now was well behind its due date.
It was a relief to get away from that uncomfortable line of thinking when he glanced at his watch for the eighth time and realised that he could set off to collect her. He would be sure to get held up in traffic and if he didn’t, well, he would only be a little early.
On the way, he visualised her reaction to his country house when they got there. It really was very charming. Nothing big and ostentatious. She’d have no reason to round on him in that bull-terrier way of hers, hands on her hips, colour in her cheeks, in full flow about their different backgrounds.
Although… He grinned and the sticky business of talking to her about the job faded into the background. Although lately her pithy little remarks were beginning to seem quite endearing. Maybe he would show her the outdoor Jacuzzi, which would be guaranteed to really get her going. Then, when she was hot under the collar, he could introduce her to the joys of lazing in bubbling warm water with a bottle of chilled wine between them…
Which meant that he was ever so slightly irritated to arrive promptly at her flat, only to discover after ringing the doorbell repeatedly that she wasn’t in.
Obviously, the prospect of spending the weekend with him had not filled her with quite the same level of anticipation.
Nor did he know precisely where she was in the building. Nor was there anyone around handy to ask.
His process of elimination took him twenty minutes, during which his irritation levels rose steadily. Head in some damned accounts, he thought impatiently, convevently forgetting how often in the past he had lost track of time to work.
The door to the office was ajar and Dominic pushed it open and strode in in one fluid movement, only to find that she wasn’t sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen, oblivious to the passage of time and, coincidentally, him.
She was by one of the banks of graceful windows that overlooked the inner courtyard, perching on the window sill, and she looked very much as though she had been waiting for him. Which didn’t do much to soothe his temper.
‘I told you what time I was going to be here, Mattie. What the hell are you still doing in this damned office?’ Dominic strode into the room and proceeded to sit, glaring, on one of the polished desks. ‘Are you being paid for this volunteered overtime, by the way? I know you want to make a good impression, but believe me some employers can be very cunning when it comes to taking advantage of over-enthusiastic staff.’
‘Like you?’
‘What?’ He had been so caught up in his own irritation that he noticed the expression on her face for the first time, and his dark eyebrows knitted into an impatient frown.
‘Like you.’ Mattie pushed herself away from the window ledge and walked very steadily, admirably steadily in fact, towards her own desk, taking up position on the black swivel chair so that she could face him. ‘Because if it’s one thing you are, it’s cunning. Am I right or wrong?’ She clasped her fingers together and willed him not to come too close to her. She didn’t want her body playing its usual pathetic games with her head.
‘What are you talking about, Mattie?’ He raked his fingers through his hair, although caution was setting in. ‘You certainly plan your attacks with lousy timing. We’re about to spend a weekend together and neither of us needs to kick off with an argument. So to nip this in the bud, I don’t happen to be the sort of employer who takes advantage of his employees.’ That didn’t seem to have nipped anything in the bud. She was still looking at him as if he was something that had crawled out from under a rock.
‘Finished here?’ Dominic tried to sound reasonably jovial, although it was a struggle. ‘Or still got one or two stray accounts you want to wrap up some time today?’ That little bit of sarcasm slipped out. It didn’t meet with the amused smile that usually greeted his frequent bouts of sarcasm, the one he had become accustomed to. In fact, it met with a wall of reinforced steel.
‘Actually, I finished the accounts quite a while ago.’ Then, ‘And you wouldn’t believe just how interesting the process was.’
‘What’s going on here, Mattie? Care to tell me? Or are we going to talk in riddles for the next two hours while I try and get to the bottom of whatever it is you want to say?’
‘Since I’ve been working here, I really haven’t got involved in the accounts side of things at all. I’ve really just been tagging along with the marketing crew, dealing with stuff from prospective clients.’
‘And you sound overjoyed at being given additional responsibility. If that responsibility happens to materialise on a Saturday morning when we’re planning on driving up to the country, then who am I to complain?’
‘But I made a very interesting discovery this morning while I was innocently rooting through the filing cabinet in Liz’s office in search of some files I needed.’ Sitting down put her at a disadvantage for this conversation but she couldn’t trust her legs if she got up.
‘Oh? And what was that?’ Dominic’s black eyes narrowed on her face. Her highly unreadable face, and he felt a sudden, sharp stirring of deep unease.
‘Your connection with this particular group of people who have been hired to cover the marketing for the development.’ Mattie watched his face very carefully and knew she was looking for something, some little sign that would tell her just how off target she was. No such sign. In fact, she saw him flush darkly and knew that the assumptions she had made had been spot-on.
He had manipulated her in the worst way possible. He had manoeuvred for her to get this job and, with it, the flat.
And she knew why he had done it. He had wanted her from the moment
he had set eyes on her and, in his usual arrogant way, he had simply taken measures to ensure that he got what he wanted. Frankie was around, and so what better way to make sure that that inconvenience was sorted than by getting her a job in which accommodation was part of the package? He wanted her away from the dangerous divide that she had persisted in creating, and so he had simply found her a job that would elevate her into a career woman capable of stepping over the chip on her shoulder that had been holding her back.
She felt tears threaten and clenched her jaw accordingly.
‘I found a letter from you stuck at the bottom of a file congratulating Bob Hodge on acquiring the building, asking him to keep you informed as to what he was going to do with it.’ She could hear herself pleading with him for a denial that didn’t come.
‘So what did you do, Dominic?’ she whispered. ‘Called in a favour? Asked him to make a space in his qualified team so that I could be slotted in? Like an imbecile who wasn’t capable of finding a job for herself? How could you? How could you have manipulated my life like that?’
‘I wasn’t manipulating your life, Mattie.’ Hadn’t he been?
‘Oh, right! You once told me that you always got what you wanted. Were you just making sure that you got what you wanted even if the route was a little underhand?’ Her voice was trembling with disappointment and anger, and when he made as though to move towards her she turned away in immediate rejection.
‘OK, maybe I went around things the wrong way, and maybe I should have told you from the start that I could have got you this job, but would you have listened? Or would you have jumped on your bandwagon and denied yourself the opportunity just to be pigheaded?’
‘That’s not the point!’
‘You haven’t answered my question!’
‘I wanted to do things on my own. I didn’t need any help from you!’
‘You’re acting as though somehow I’ve committed a crime against your pride, Mattie. But how far does pride really get any of us?’
‘Stop trying to twist everything around so that you can emerge in a positive light.’ It scared her how badly she wanted him to succeed. ‘You manipulated me. That’s all there is to it.’
Dominic smashed his fist down on the desk and a little container of pens and paper clips toppled over and spilled. Mattie looked at it in mute fascination.
‘That is not all there is to it, dammit!’ This time her icy expression wasn’t enough to deter him and he covered the distance between them in a few furious seconds. ‘So maybe I wasn’t as upfront as I should have been—’
‘Understatement of the year!’ She pressed back into the chair to try and avoid his towering presence from engulfing her totally.
‘If I was trying to manipulate you, wouldn’t I have told you about the job?’ Dominic demanded, his face so close to hers that she could see straight into the black depths of his eyes. ‘Wouldn’t I have jumped at the first chance to make you feel that you owed me? I damn well didn’t do that, did I?’
‘Well, maybe you were just saving that as your trump card!’ Mattie flared back. ‘Something you could pull out of your sleeve if the occasion ever arose and you needed to! Pulling strings! That’s all you’re good at, isn’t it, Dominic? Just as you pulled strings with Harry to get to meet me in the first place! You think that everyone should dance to your tune and it’s…it’s hateful!’
There was a charged silence and abruptly he stood up and walked away, towards the very same window against which she had been standing when he had first entered the room.
‘I tried to tell you—’
‘When?’ Mattie demanded shrilly. She swivelled the chair so that she was looking at him.
‘Yesterday. I told you we needed to talk about your job. Then things got carried away and I figured I’d tell you after the weekend.’
Yes, she did remember him saying something along those lines. And no, the last thing she wanted to think about was how they had become carried away. Getting carried away had been her big mistake from the word go.
‘I don’t believe you, Dominic,’ she said quietly. ‘You wanted me so you took the necessary steps to get me. You never spared a thought for my feelings because you don’t know the meaning of the word sensitivity.’ Her voice thickened with bitterness. ‘That’s what our whole relationship was about. Lust. Want. Sex. No feelings anywhere in the equation.’
‘It’s what you wanted as well, or have you decided to conveniently forget that?’
No, she hadn’t. She’d just made the simple mistake of forgetting to hang on to the original deal they had struck. Because now it felt like a deal. Two people, neither wanting involvement, just giving in to their baser instincts with the unspoken agreement that it would never progress from there. It had been a rubbish deal and she could see that now, because somewhere along the way she had made the fatal error of liking him, then falling slowly in love with him.
It was a hideous realisation. Mattie closed her eyes briefly in despair. When she opened them again, there was a new hardness there.
‘There’s no point discussing this further, Dominic.’ She placed one hand flat on the desk and stood up, moving to stand behind it so that it was a physical and significant barrier between them. ‘I don’t like what you did. And I can’t respect anyone who would behave like that. This relationship, or whatever it was, was never going anywhere and now I’m bringing it to an end.’ She afforded him a view of her ramrod-straight back as she turned to face one of the windows. Her heart longed to see him one last time. Her head refused to allow her the luxury.
But she knew he hesitated. Heard it as she followed his footsteps to the door, the brief pause. Then it was all over and he was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GLORIA had gone home. Dominic had given her the afternoon off in a fit of grudging compassion. The poor woman had been reduced to tiptoeing around him for the past fortnight as his temper had become increasingly vile. She had arrived every morning to find him already at his desk, head buried in his work, only looking up when she entered to mutter the barest of greetings. Instructions had been given to her with deadly abruptness and he knew that he had been a snarling beast on the odd occasion when his plans for the day had been unexpectedly disrupted.
Dominic liked his secretary. The last thing he wanted was to drive her to the furthest reaches of her patience.
On the other hand, he just couldn’t seem to help himself. He couldn’t get Mattie out of his head, or the way their affair had ended. With a dismissive little parting shot that managed to sum him up as some kind of monstrous, self-serving opportunist who had availed himself of whatever weapons he possessed in his armoury in an attempt to bed her.
He had replayed that last conversation so many times in his head that he thought he was going crazy.
But not as many times as he had stood by his office window, when his computer was going mad and his phone lines were buzzing, thinking about whether he should go and see her. Corner her in her office.
He was doing it right now. At six-thirty in the evening, when he should be taking advantage of the relative peace to answer the growing mound of correspondence that needed seeing to. Standing by the window, scowling and cursing himself for the way she had climbed under his skin and wrapped herself round his heart. His so-called deadened heart that had supposedly learnt lessons from past experience.
With a muffled oath Dominic began pacing his office, like a panther trapped in a cage when the rest of the jungle was calling him outside.
If he went to see her, then what? Another argument, with the same result, but this time conducted in full view of her work colleagues? He certainly couldn’t confront her in her apartment because she had moved out. Gone where, he had no idea. Probably back to the ex. Just the thought of that was enough to make him swear profusely to himself.
His big mistake had been to telephone Liz Harris, her boss, on the pretext of trying to locate her boss, and then engage himself casually on the subject of Mattie, h
ow she was doing in the job, how she liked the apartment. Which was when he had discovered that she had moved out.
That had been five days ago. Five very bad days during which he had had ample time to realise that not seeing her was on a par with a slow, painful death and thinking of her back in the arms of Frankie was even worse. Five nightmare nights during which he had been forced to accept that what had started as a casual fling had ended up as a deadly serious relationship that he had thrown away like an idiot.
He veered wildly from cursing himself for not having been honest with her from the word go, to raging at her for having taken his involvement in the wrong light.
He had already snatched his jacket from the cabinet in which it was stored, along with a change of suit and several shirts, and was sticking it on when the phone rang.
Dominic let it ring, debating whether his mood could carry him through yet another meaningless call with a client, and eventually decided that he really couldn’t let work suffer at the expense of what he was going through.
Not that Mattie was in the slightest bit aware of the argument going on in his head as she waited tensely on the other end of the line. The only thing she was aware of was the frantic beating of her heart and the acute nervousness that was making her perspire just at the thought of hearing his voice.
She almost dropped the mobile phone when she finally did hear that voice snap shortly down the line, which made her wonder whether she had caught him on the way out, which in turn made her head spin with the possibilities of where exactly he was on his way out to.
Don’t even go there, she told herself feverishly, as if she hadn’t been there a thousand times and back over the past fortnight.
‘Hello, Dominic, it’s me. Mattie.’ Her voice was as controlled as her feelings were not.
He heard the coolness in her voice and all thoughts of his part in the dissolution of their relationship vanished like a puff of smoke. Back came the irrational anger that he had been ditched, ditched, by someone whom he had done the biggest favour possible, sorted out her career.
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