“That will be very easy to check. Just let me get his appointment book.” There was a pause. “I’m sorry, Ms. Rivers, but I can’t seem to find your name anywhere.”
“You simply must be mistaken, honey.” Morgan allowed a mere hint of accusation to trickle into her voice. “You do write down all of his appointments, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course I do, but even though he has several luncheon appointments this week, I don’t see one set up with you.”
“Look again,” Morgan urged.
“Let’s see.” the secretary started to think aloud, just as Morgan had hoped she would. “Tomorrow at one, he will be lunching with a group of bankers.”
Morgan seized the tidbit of information, like a dog with a bone. “Oh, yes.” she drawled airily. “He told me all about that. That’s at the Rocco Room, isn’t it?”
“No, they’ll be meeting at Tres Elan.”
“Sure ’nuf? Well, my, my, my. I guess I just must have gotten all mixed up. I can’t tell you how stupid I feel.” —At least that much was the truth, Morgan reflected wryly.—“I tell you what, honey. Let’s just keep this between us girls, and I’ll get back to him the first of next week. Okay?”
“That will be fine, Ms. Rivers.”
“You’re very understanding,” Morgan practically sang into the phone and made a mental note to tell Jason to give his secretary a raise. “Goodbye.”
#
Morgan arrived at Tres Elan the next day with no other thought on her mind than to see Jason. She shed her coat in the foyer and made her way toward the maitre d’ to give him her name. “Saunders.”
“Yes, Miss Saunders. That was a reservation for one?”
Morgan nodded, already at the door, her eyes scanning the room. She was in luck. Jason was already there, sitting with a group of men at a table situated to one side of the room. There was a small, vacant, horseshoe-shaped booth directly across from him and Morgan slipped a bill into the maitre d’s hand. “That booth please.”
“Certainly, Miss Saunders.”
Morgan followed her waiter, careful to keep her eyes ahead of her. Sliding into the booth so that she faced toward the man she had come to see, she blinked a quick glimpse in the direction of his table and saw that Jason had spotted her.
She smiled dazzlingly at her hovering waiter. “I’ll just have a salad and a glass of wine to start with, thank you.”
Morgan proceeded to take off the jacket that went with her burgundy-colored wool suit, stretching this way and that—perhaps, she admitted honestly to herself, a little more than was strictly necessary. But she knew that the mauve silk blouse covered the contours of her curves very attractively, and she wanted to make sure that Jason knew it, too.
Twisting around to throw it along the back of the booth, she decided that perhaps it was a good thing she hadn’t worn a bra today, even though it had been a subliminal decision, one that had been made below her threshhold of consciousness. It was just that loving Jason had brought her innate sensuality to the surface, and now it seemed as though she acted instinctively where he was concerned.
Morgan raised her eyes to meet Jason’s stare. There could be no doubt in his mind that she was here for any other reason than to see him. Her eyes engulfed him. Although he seemed to be recovered from his illness, she couldn’t help but note the recent thinness in his face and the new lines around his mouth.
His mouth. It tightened, as Jason turned back to his conversation. For want of something to do, Morgan picked up a bread stick and began to absently nibble the salt off it, idly looking around the fashionable decor of the restaurant. Her booth had walls that raised to shield her on two sides, but her view of Jason was uninterrupted, as was his of her.
Morgan had her tongue flat against the side of the bread stick, when she happened to look back at Jason. His eyes were fixed on her and he had gone rather gray in color.
Tossing the breadstick down with a shrug, Morgan turned to the waiter who had arrived with her wine and salad and gave him an enthusiastic greeting. Now she would have something to do while she watched Jason.
About to take a sip of her wine, Morgan had the glass up to her lips, when Jason threw her a look of such annoyance that she became disconcerted and spilled the wine onto her blouse.
Oh, no! Morgan muttered, “I haven’t seen Jason in ages, I’m trying to act coolly sophisticated to make a good impression, and now I have this awful stain on my blouse. And to top it off, I’m talking to myself!”
Taking her napkin and dipping one corner of it in her water glass, Morgan began dabbing at her blouse. The wine had managed to drip on top of one of her breasts, and she rubbed furiously at the whole area, determined to get it out.
Taking a quick survey of the room, Morgan realized with relief that everyone who could see her was engrossed in their own conversations. When she glanced at Jason, however, she saw that he was watching her with an open mouth and that his glass of water was suspended in midair. Morgan looked down to see what had attracted his attention. Damn! One half of her blouse was plastered transparently against her, with both nipples jutting enticingly against the fabric. She groaned.
“I’ll never be able to get the stain out and at the same time save my modesty,” Morgan mumbled despairingly. She reached for her jacket. “Double damn!” She had forgotten that the top button on this blouse needed to be sewn on more securely. All that stretching she had done when she first arrived hadn’t helped the matter, and, now, wouldn’t you just know it, the button had popped off. Consequently, a good two inches of her cleavage was exposed—two inches more than should have been.
Morgan looked quickly at Jason and saw that he had given up all pretense of eating, and if the men he was with noticed that he seemed to be preoccupied with something across the room, they were well-mannered enough to give no sign.
She slipped on her jacket, and her waiter appeared minutes later. “Would you care to order now?”
“No thank you,” Morgan shook her head ruefully. “I think I’m quite through.” Picking up her purse, she slid out of the booth. If she had had any aspirations of driving Jason mad with her cool, remote beauty—cool, remote beauty, much in the vein of Melinda Johnson—they had dissolved, all within the space of about ten minutes.
Nevertheless, she attempted to salvage some remaining vestige of her pride. “That handsome gentleman with the extremely pale complexion” —she pointed out Jason—” has kindly offered to pay for my lunch. Just add it to his tab.” And with a smile to all concerned, Morgan left.
She managed to wait until she reached her apartment before completely falling apart. But once there, Morgan started to cry. She felt drained. Continually expending all her emotions toward Jason, she was getting nothing in return from him. This pursuit was taking more and more out of her, and she didn’t know how much longer she could go on.
Morgan cried herself to sleep, and when she woke, she felt one hundred percent better. Her optimism and her sense of humor had returned, and she found herself giggling aloud to her empty bedroom. After all, if she had planned what had happened at the restaurant, it probably wouldn’t have turned out half as well—and she had managed to capture Jason’s complete attention.
Chapter Eight
One early afternoon over a week later, Morgan’s spirits were again at a low ebb. She was sitting in her shop, sifting listlessly through the mail. Despite her determination, it was getting harder and harder to fight the inevitable discouragement which seemed to be growing progressively worse in the face of Jason’s continued resistance to her.
Spying one particularly fat-looking envelope, Morgan opened it. It was a final bill from Paul’s Florist.
“That’s all I need,” Morgan muttered and pushed all the mail off her desk in a fit of dejection. Then, pulling a handful of paper clips out of a desk drawer, she began stringing them together, and by the time Jerome burst cheerfully in from school a little while later, she had quite a long chain strung across the desk.
“Listen, Junior,” Morgan snapped in a rare display of bad humor, “if you don’t have anything more intelligent to say than that, you can just turn around and go back out the way you came.”
“Wow! ‘Operation Jason’ must really be going bad. I think—”
Before Jerome had a chance to finish what he had been about to say and Morgan had an opportunity to reply, their eyes were drawn to the door. Sami, weaving hazily into the office area of the shop, wore only a sleep-fogged look and a flower-strewn sheet that was wrapped haphazardly around her.
“Just getting up?” Jerome teased her lightly. “You really ought to try mornings sometime—after all, they are the other half of the day.”
“Gee. Did you learn that in school today?”
Morgan’s sarcastic jibe didn’t bother Jerome. “And by the way, Sami. I’ve always maintained that no one wears a sheet quite like you do, but, just out of curiosity, where is the nightgown I gave you for Christmas?”
“Oh, for heaven sakes! Don’t just stand there asking a lot of stupid questions,” Morgan exploded. “Get her some coffee!”
“Coffee,” Sami mumbled and fell into a nearby chair.
“Hey! I know as well as you do that Sami has trouble sleeping at night. I was only kidding. She knows that I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Morgan jumped up, irrationally irritated. “I can’t believe the future of our nation’s judicial system is in the hands of your generation! The complete arrogance of the young staggers me.”
“Coffee?” Sami interjected faintly.
“I’m not that much younger than you are,” Jerome pointed out. “Anyway, I think there’s something you’ve lost sight of here. My name is not Jason Falco. I’m on your side, remember?”
Sinking back down in her chair, Morgan ran her hands distractedly through her hair. “I’m sorry, Jerome. I really am. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. It’s just that I’m getting exactly nowhere with Jason and I don’t know what to do next. And to top it all off”—she pointed toward the floor—“I just got an astronomical bill from the florist. It’s a good thing the shop is doing so well.”
“Coffee?” Sami pleaded quaveringly.
“I don’t understand it.” Jerome shook his head. “Any man that could take the things that you’ve thrown at him and still hold out, can’t be human!”
“Oh, he’s human all right … or at least he was in Martinique.”
Jerome laughed. “Have you considered the possibility that he picked up some rare tropical disease while he was down there that affected his brain, not to mention his libido?”
“I wish I could believe that,” Morgan grumbled. “It would make this problem a whole lot easier to understand.”
“You know, something Sami said keeps coming back to me. She commented that there had to be something more to this whole situation than we know, and I’m beginning to agree.”
“Maybe. But how am I ever going to find out if I can’t even get Jason to talk to me?”
A silence fell over the office until Morgan happened to glance over at Sami. She looked comatose. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
There was no answer.
Morgan poured some coffee and handed it to Sami, then returned to her desk and paper clip chain.
“What’s this?” Jerome had been gathering up the mail from the floor. “It looks like some sort of invitation.”
Looking at the envelope, Morgan shrugged disinterestedly. “It is. It’s for the annual bash that the Small Businessmen’s Association throws. I probably won’t go this year.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not exactly in a partying mood,” she pointed out gloomily. “Besides, I get tired of fighting off Dirk Concannon. The minute I walk in the door, he attaches himself to me and I can’t get rid of him. That man has more hands than an octopus.”
“Have you tried taking a date?”
“Sure. Nothing fazes Dirk—three gin and tonics and he thinks he’s Rudolph Valentino.”
“Ask Jason to take you.”
Jerome and Morgan looked at each other.
Sami repeated herself. “Ask Jason to take you. If he’s your date, two things can happen and they’re both good. One: Dirk will be so intimidated by Jason that he will leave you alone, or Two: Dirk won’t leave you alone, and Jason will be eaten up with jealousy.”
“She’s awake,” Jerome said to Morgan.
“There’s no way on God’s green earth that I could get Jason to agree to escort me to that party.”
Sami hitched the sheet up under her arms, took another swig of coffee and directed the full force of her intelligent golden eyes on Morgan. “You can get him to take you.”
Morgan stood on the sidewalk looking up at the DeWitt Building. She had already walked around the block once, trying to get her nerve up, and city blocks being as long as they were, she didn’t want to do it again. “Oh, well. Faint heart never won fair gentleman,” she misquoted to herself and plunged into the building.
Once on Jason’s floor, she breezed past various receptionists and ultimately his secretary with the air of someone who knew exactly what she was doing, unable to miss, as she did so, the overabundance of ferns that dotted every available nook and cranny. Flinging open his door, Morgan walked in and quickly closed it behind her before he could order her out.
“Good morning, Jason.”
Her heart nearly stopped at the sight of him. He had been studying some papers at his desk, but had looked up at her entrance. The depth of her love for him assailed her, and she could have cried at his stubbornness which was allowing precious time to pass that otherwise could have been used to the great joy of them both.
Jason threw down the pen he had been using and leaned back in the padded luxury of his executive chair. “You must be very thickheaded, Morgan. I thought I had made myself perfectly clear about not wanting to see you again.”
“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you.” She dropped her coat onto a chair and sat down on the corner of his desk, at the same time hitching up her straight skirt, so that a goodly expanse of shapely thigh showed. “The thickheaded part, that is. At any rate, I didn’t come here to trade insults with you.”
“That’s good, because you’d lose the exchange. I can think of an infinite number of names to call you. My vocabulary happens to be endless where you’re concerned.”
Morgan noticed that, as hard as his words were, Jason couldn’t seem to keep his eyes from roaming restlessly over the softness of her powder blue sweater and the curves that it covered.
“Why Jason! How sweet… although I seem to remember your saying something slightly different in the rain forest.”
“I’m in no mood for another one of your little performances, so make it brief. Why are you here?”
The chill in his words was enough to make Morgan want to turn tail and run. But she didn’t. “Actually, I need a favor. I’ve received an invitation to the annual banquet and dance for the Small Businessmen’s Association” —Morgan twisted her fingers together, the only sign of how nervous she was— “and I need an escort.”
“It shouldn’t prove too difficult for you to find someone to take you. With your charm and beauty, it’ll be no problem.” The words cut through the air with mortal sharpness.
“T-thank you for the compliment, but you see, this is sort of last minute. It’s in less than a week, and there just isn’t time. Since David’s out of town, I naturally thought of you.”
“I see nothing natural about it,” he rapped out. “What gives you the effrontery to think that I would agree to take you, Morgan? You’ve really got nerves of steel.”
Clasping her hands tightly together to keep them from trembling, she braved her reply. “I didn’t think you’d mind, once you realized how important it was to me. The party would be strictly business, of course, and, besides … I knew you would do just about anything to keep me from finding David and asking h
im to take me.” Morgan swallowed hard. She hated having to bring David into this.
The menacing intent in his tone was palpable as he drawled, “That sounds suspiciously like a threat, Morgan, and I would strongly advise against doing anything as foolish as trying to threaten me.”
“You do realize that I could find David, don’t you? All I’d have to do is hire a private investigator, and I’m sure that within a matter of days I would know exactly where he is.”
“It’ll never happen. I told you. David is someplace where you can’t get your seductive little claws into him. So you can drop that gambit right now.”
Morgan rose from her provocative perch on the side of his desk and started around the desk. “What’s the matter, Jason? I do believe that the big, brave man is afraid of one, itty, bitty, little girl. You must be worried that I’ll sink my claws into you.”
“No!” He shot up from his seat and was across the room so fast, Morgan wouldn’t have been surprised to find that a lightning bolt had struck where he had been sitting.
“Come on, Jason, admit it.” She folded her arms across her chest in an attitude of supreme assurance, doing her best to ignore her quaking legs. “It’s not so much that you’re afraid that I’ll sink my claws into David, as it is that you’re worried about yourself. I would imagine that it’ll be a long time before the scars I put on your back in the throes of our passion will disappear. I’ve already made my mark on you, and it’s something you can’t forget, no matter how hard you try. Tell the truth. You’re still every bit as affected by me as I am by you.”
“Get this straight, Morgan. The minute I found out that you had deceived me, I lost whatever warm feelings I might have had for you.”
Morgan moved closer to him, enveloping him with her fragrance, and actually managed a little laugh. “I don’t believe you, Jason, and I dare you to prove what you just said. Go with me to this party, and if at the end of the evening you can still say you feel nothing for me, it will be the last you’ll ever hear from me. I promise.”
The Seduction of Jason Page 11