Mistress for a Weekend

by Susan Napier

  ‘Coming, ready or not…’ he rasped with impeccable timing, and Nora’s explosion of violent delight was intensified by paroxysms of helpless laughter. Which made it all the more inexplicable when, sprawling full length in his arms, weak with exhausted pleasure, she surprised them both by bursting into raw tears, sobbing into his heaving chest.

  Gentle hands stroked and soothed up and down her shaking back while she apologised, shuddering hiccups causing interesting sensations in their still-joined bodies as she sought to explain away her foolish tears without embarrassing either of them with rash declarations of love, and spoiling what should be a perfect moment of post-coital bliss. Of course, a sophisticated lover like Blake would be appalled at all this excess emotion. He might even begin to fear that he had another potential stalker on his hands….

  She fished beside him for the shirt which had been wrenched off in the throes of their final climactic eruption and dragged it to hide her face and blot her tears.

  ‘It was my first time on top,’ she said inconsequentially, sniffing into the crumpled folds.

  The hand patting her back stilled. ‘And it was so awful it made you cry?’

  She wrenched the shirt away from her dismayed face, causing him to utter a stifled groan as she dislodged him by squirming to sit up and impress him with her earnest reassurances. ‘No! Oh, no—it was beautiful!’ she said. ‘It’s just…Oh, I don’t know why—’

  ‘I would think it was obvious,’ he said kindly. ‘I’ve just given you the most spectacular orgasm of your life, and now you’ve realised what you’ve been missing out on all these years.’

  ‘Why you arrogant—!’ Realising he was teasing to help banish her hectic embarrassment, Nora broke off and tried to stuff his shirt into his laughing mouth. Thank God he didn’t know how close to the truth he was!

  He sprang up and chased her, shrieking, up to the top of the stairs, where he snatched her up and carried her ceremoniously to his big bed, tumbling them both down on to the unmade sheets.

  ‘Now that I’ve finally got you where you belong, I think there’s something you should know about me,’ he said, pinning her to the luxurious mattress with a warm hairy thigh.

  She ran her hands over his rough jaw, exulting in her new freedom to touch. There were other ways to express love. It didn’t have to be in words.

  ‘What should I know?’

  He bent and nipped at her shoulder. ‘That I really am an unscrupulous brute with an insatiable appetite…for you.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AS LOVE-LETTERS went it was a fairly pathetic effort:

  Nora,

  Sorry, but I had to do it this way.

  Have arranged for someone to collect you.

  Call you later.

  Blake

  God forbid that he should have signed ‘love, Blake’ after they had just spent two whole passion-saturated days—and nights—making love with each other, Nora thought wistfully. She apparently hadn’t even ranked a ‘Best wishes’ or ‘Kind regards’, although in the circumstances a ‘Yours faithfully’ would have been nice!

  He had been insatiable in more ways than one—an exciting, witty, wonderful companion, flatteringly interested in her thoughts and opinions and free with his own. He had shown her that laughter and fun could be an integral part of lovemaking and had showered her with words of passion and praise, and even tenderness, but he had been scrupulously honest. He had made no reckless promises.

  Still, at least he had cared enough to leave a note, rather than just abandoning her while he raced off to oversee his all-important stock market bid. And he had lingered until after dawn to bring her breakfast in bed…a breakfast which he had proceeded to share with an ardent enthusiasm that had left his sheets gritty with toast crumbs and sticky with honey. It was while Nora was showering off her syrupy body and donning Friday’s blouse and skirt in expectation of having to scurry to work as soon as they arrived back in Auckland, that Blake had made his discreet exit.

  Call you later? How reassuring! How vague. Was she just supposed to hang around at home waiting for him to bother to contact her? And what about his cavalier attitude to her job?

  Turning over the square of expensive paper and finding the security alarm code scrawled on the back, Nora wondered if she was supposed to feel gratified by this example of his trust. His faith in her seemed to be sadly limited to trivialities. He would trust her with his beach house, but not with his honour? She wanted, no, she deserved, far more from him than that! She wasn’t going to let him assume that she could be packed tidily away in a convenient box until he was ready to take her out and play with her again!

  Unfortunately, her search for a telephone proved fruitless—thanks, she was sure, to the one room he had kept locked. But when she went down to look through the garage she had been surprised to see the TVR still parked in its spot. For some reason Blake had taken the four-wheel drive back to town rather than his beloved sports car. A wicked little light went on in Nora’s brain. A further, more detailed, search of his bedroom turned up the car’s electronic key and after some experimentation she managed to unlock the doors and boot without setting off the alarm.

  Carrying her laptop back upstairs, she plugged it into the supposedly unconnected phone line and powered up to the site of a broadband link to an ISP who also happened to be her own. She wouldn’t even have to re-configure her modem!

  ‘Hah! I knew you were lying,’ she crowed, tapping at the keyboard. First item on the agenda: an Internet phone call to her boss at Maitlands.

  Half an hour later her hands were slipping sweatily on the steering wheel of the TVR as she finally jerked out of the gravelled side road and on to the Waitakere dual carriageway. There had been no manufacturer’s booklet in the car but after she had downloaded the results of her Internet search on the Cerbera she thought she had all the information she needed.

  She now knew why Blake had chosen not to drive it back to Auckland. From the noises it was making there was something seriously wrong…unless it was just her driving. For a ghastly moment Nora wondered if she’d crept all the way up the steep gradient with the handbrake on. She glanced down to check and in doing so must have turned the wheel, for the steering reacted with the quickness for which it had been fashioned and the car headed obediently into the clay ditch at the side of the road.

  With a graunching of its low-slung rear, the TVR settled at a drunken angle in the shallow depression. Quickly Nora punched the red button under the steering wheel and there was instant silence from the engine. She closed her eyes in stricken disbelief.

  She didn’t know how long she sat there, her head bowed over the steering wheel, but she was roused from her misery by a tap on the window. A car had stopped on the opposite side of the road and a tall dark-haired woman had crossed over to bend down and peer in at Nora’s wilting figure. Nora searched for the little button on the side pocket which opened the door and climbed gingerly out.

  ‘Are you OK?’ The woman looked to be in her mid-thirties, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a smart suit which made Nora feel drab.

  ‘Fine.’ She smiled shakily. ‘I don’t think the car is, though.’

  To her outraged astonishment the woman started laughing when she walked around to study the rear of the car. ‘I’m afraid not! Boy, is he ever going to be ticked!’

  She came sauntering back, removing her sunglasses and Nora found herself staring up into a pair of very familiar-looking grey eyes.

  ‘On the other hand, it could just strengthen your hand if you want to make a personal grievance claim.’ The woman’s eyebrows snapped together thoughtfully as she tapped her folded sunglasses against her mouth. ‘You do know you could sue him for what he’s done? You could make megabucks if he detained you without your consent—and then there’s the question of restraint of trade…I mean, his actions prevented you from working at your job, right?’

  ‘Right! You must be Maria,’ Nora said drily, recognising more than a superficial fam
ily resemblance.

  ‘How did you guess?’ The older woman grinned, arching her thick black eyebrows. ‘And you’re Nora. I just know we’re going to get on like a house on fire.’

  ‘I think I’ve caused enough damage for one day without adding arson to the list,’ Nora said glumly. ‘Did Blake send you to give me a lift home?’

  ‘Hell, no!’ Maria looked swiftly around as if her brother might rampage out from the bushes. ‘He’d have a fit if he knew I knew! No, I just happened to be at Mum’s when he rang and asked her to do him a favour. He gave her a quick run-down on the situation—’ she laughed at Nora’s appalled face ‘—expurgated, I’m sure!’ She turned and waved at the other car and Nora saw a slim grey-haired version of the woman beside her waving back.

  ‘He asked his mother to come and get me?’ she squeaked.

  ‘Yeah, I guess you don’t know yet what a terrible Mamma’s boy he is! He didn’t mention that you might be using his TVR, though.’ She looked at Nora’s guilt-stricken face and skated briskly on. ‘Anyway, let’s transfer your stuff and lock up. I’ll make a call to Blake’s mechanic and we can leave this heap of expensive junk for the tow-truck to pick up.’

  Nora wasn’t sure what to say to her lover’s mother, but Mrs MacLeod soon solved the problem. She directed her daughter to take the wheel and joined Nora in the back seat, getting down to brass tacks by dismissing Nora’s garbled attempts to tell her about the car as irrelevant to the key issue. ‘So…how do you feel about my son?’

  At least her eyes weren’t that haunting grey that sent shivers up Nora’s spine. They were a very kindly, but very insistent blue. ‘I—We only met last Thursday—’

  ‘That wasn’t what I asked.’ Pamela MacLeod smiled. In jeans and a sweatshirt, she didn’t look very intimidating, but Nora had a feeling that tenacity was another common family trait.

  ‘I…well—’ God, how did you describe a man who was great in bed to his mother? With his sister listening? Nora could feel herself pinken. ‘He’s very—very um—’

  ‘Interesting?’

  That would work! ‘Yes, Mrs MacLeod, he’s very interesting.’

  ‘Call me Pam.’ The grey head tilted enquiringly. ‘In what way would you say he was interesting?’

  Nora began to sweat. ‘Well, he’s a…He’s very complex…. He has a very…er…forceful personality….’

  ‘Yes, he’s very like his father in that respect,’ said his forceful mother. ‘No looks or charm to speak of, so he has to make up for it in charisma!’

  What planet was this woman living on? ‘Blake’s an extremely attractive man!’ contested Nora hotly.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t say he wasn’t attractive,’ Pam replied with a twinkling smile that softened her angular face into maternal smugness. ‘Just that he’s not pretty in that metrosexual way that’s so popular these days. His father was a big, gruff, crude man—but I like a bit of the primitive in a man, don’t you?’

  Nora wasn’t going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole. ‘His father?’ she stumbled. ‘You mean your husband?’

  ‘Yes. Neil. Who else would I mean?’ Unfortunately Blake’s mother was as alarmingly perceptive as her son. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve heard that silly story about Prescott.’ She looked amused. ‘Have you ever met Prescott Williams?’

  Nora tried to ignore the snickers floating over from the driver’s seat. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, let me put it this way. If I’d ever been tempted to cheat on my Neil, it wouldn’t have been with a skinny runt he could have picked up with his little finger! Now—’ She settled more comfortably in her seat, her sharp eyes on Nora’s embarrassed face. ‘Blake tells me he whisked you away without so much as a by-your-leave this weekend, but he didn’t really explain why…. Just some nonsense about you getting tangled up in some deal he was doing. What line of work are you in, Nora?’

  Nora was a limp dish-rag by the time the two women dropped her off on the front steps of her apartment building, wrung dry of explanations, excuses, evasions and her personal history from the year dot.

  ‘Thanks for the lift Maria, Mrs—er, Pam,’ she croaked, searching out her spare door key while his mother held her laptop.

  ‘You can thank Blake,’ said Pam. ‘I was just his stand-in. He seemed very anxious that you didn’t get the impression that he was trying to get rid of you by fobbing you off on some paid minion.’

  Nora, who had thought that very thing, smiled weakly.

  ‘He also told me I wasn’t to put you on the spot by asking any embarrassing questions about the two of you,’ admitted Pam, without a flicker of shame. ‘So, perhaps you’d like to leave it to me to tell Blake about his car getting a tiny scuff?’ she continued, blatantly indulging in a little friendly blackmail. ‘These things are much better coming from one’s mother. I shall make sure he knows that it’s all his own fault for acting like a caveman in the first place. If he had any social conscience he wouldn’t be driving such a glaring symbol of conspicuous consumption, anyway!’

  Nora was spinelessly quick to accept the quid pro quo, and for the rest of the day she grinned whenever she thought of Blake being scolded by his mother into accepting the blame for the accident.

  She found precious little else to smile about. Kelly had definitely moved out some time over the weekend, taking not only all of her own things, but several of Nora’s as well, leaving a pile of unwanted junk strewn in her wake. Having already made the phone call from the beach house to let her boss know that she would back to work by the afternoon, Nora turned her back on the mess and drove to the office, where she conscientiously tried to compress everything she should have done on Friday into half a day’s schedule. It didn’t take her long to find out that Kelly had moved into Ryan’s apartment on Saturday and that she was now flashing a brand-new diamond ring on her engagement finger. Nora was proud of herself when she came unexpectedly face-to-face with Ryan in the coffee room and cheerfully congratulated him on finding his perfect match, adding in dulcet tones that Kelly could keep the set of crystal wineglasses she had taken, as an engagement present.

  At one stage she did peek at the on-line financial news and was unsurprised to see that the headliner was PresCorp’s successful stand in the market for TranStar shares. Had Blake ever failed at what he set out to do? PresCorp had apparently reached its targeted holding within minutes of the start of morning trading. So her exciting career as a suspected femme fatale was officially over, Nora thought wryly as she logged off.

  Then, when she answered her cell-phone not recognising the caller’s number, she got a delicious shock.

  ‘What in the hell are you doing in at work?’ a voice snarled in her ear.

  ‘And good afternoon to you too, sir!’ replied Nora briskly, all too aware of the drawbacks of working in an open-plan office.

  ‘My mother said you refused to let her call an ambulance, or take you to the A&E clinic to get you checked out.’ Blake had no time to waste on pleasantries. ‘She said she thought you could have delayed concussion—’

  Nora closed her eyes. He sounded furious. ‘Uh…your car—’

  ‘To hell with the car!’ he swore. ‘Are you all right? Mum said you were as white as a ghost and she thought you were limping….’

  To hell with his car? Oh, thank you, thank you, Mrs MacLeod! Nora took a deep breath. ‘I’m fine, really, it was nothing—!’

  ‘If it was nothing then why does your voice sound so weak and wobbly?’ he snapped suspiciously.

  Because she was trying not to laugh. She cleared her throat. ‘Look, can we talk about this later? I’m not supposed to accept personal calls at work and my boss is glaring at me.’

  She paid for her insouciance later that evening when Blake coolly let himself into her flat with her keys and made very short work of extracting a full and frank confession.

  ‘I swear it wasn’t deliberate, Blake,’ Nora gasped apologetically, as he finally completed his very thorough, and ferociously intimate, inspection of her bo
dy. ‘It was just a lot harder to handle than I thought it would be when I started out….’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ he muttered, rolling off her and collapsing on his back, taking up most of her narrow single bed. ‘I should have known it was dangerous to leave you on your own. And then to toss Mum into the mix—I should have realised you’d gang up on me!’

  Nora almost felt sorry for him. Almost. ‘I’d offer to pay for the damage but your sister said I shouldn’t admit any liability,’ she teased huskily.

  ‘It was going in for an overhaul, anyway. I didn’t like the sound of it when I turned over the engine this—Wait! Liability? Maria! Maria was there, too?’ He raised his head to scowl at her. ‘Damn it! I told Mum this was to be kept low-key—’

  Nora felt a freezing touch kill the delicate tendril of hope that had begun to unfurl in her breast. She scolded herself for her naivety and maintained her warm tone of amusement. ‘Maria said I should sue you for restraint of trade.’

  His frown turned into a sexy grin as he took her back in his arms. ‘Make it lack of restraint and I might be willing to deal!’

  If Nora thought it was challenging to try and maintain a ‘low-key’ affair with a dynamic and powerful man, by the beginning of the following week she was faced with the far more difficult prospect of living in a high-profile scandal.

  ‘But you can’t fire me; I haven’t done anything wrong!’ she protested to her boss.

  ‘You’re not being fired, just suspended,’ Ruben Jensen said uncomfortably. ‘Sorry, Eleanor, I’m just following orders. The Acquisitions and Takeovers people are in a flap and TranStar’s chairman is screaming dirty tricks to the Market Surveillance Panel. You must admit this doesn’t create a very good impression.’ His lined face looked harassed as he tapped the tabloid which had hit the news-stands the previous day.

  Nora snatched it up, glaring at the two photographs of the half-clad couple under the splashy headline. In the larger picture the woman locked in Blake MacLeod’s embrace in the doorway of his beach house could have been anyone, but the smaller inset showed the moment the kiss had broken off and Nora’s back was no longer to the camera, her face clearly identifiable. No, not camera, she thought furiously—cell-phone. The furious Hayley had had the last word after all. She must have taken the photos with her phone, and now the PXTs were in the public arena.