AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Who said anything about playing?’ Leigh had murmured sotto voce, and then amended, ‘All right... all right. I know you don’t want to get involved with him. But isn’t it really a bit too late for that, Debs?’
Debra hadn’t been able to answer.
It was certainly far too late to pretend to herself that she was ever going to be able to ignore the way Marsh made her feel. And not just physically, but emotionally as well.
But that still didn’t mean that she had changed her mind about his not being the right kind of man for her; about the desire she felt for him not being the kind of feeling she wanted to have for any man.
And yet the thought of never seeing him again, of never hearing him laugh, or seeing him smile, watching the way his mouth curled at the comers, deepening the grooves of humour at either side of it, the way his eyes darkened so disturbingly whenever he focused on her, filled her with anguish and panic.
Hypocrite, she challenged herself after he had gone. You’re a hypocrite and a fool. She knew he wasn’t right for her; the emotions, the desires he aroused in her made her feel afraid. That kind of intensity was too dangerous, too consuming.
She was glad that the case she was working on was so complicated that it demanded her whole concentration and left no room for daydreaming about him.
Her client was divorced from her husband, who had left her for someone else. Husband and wife had
run their own small business jointly, and until the divorce she had left the financial affairs of their small company totally in the hands of her ex-husband. Now she had discovered how misplaced her trust had been.
During the course of his affair, while they were still married, he had siphoned funds out of the company, leaving it virtually bankrupt, so that when the divorce came, instead of finding herself the owner of half of a thriving business, the wife had discovered that all she did in fact own was half of the company’s outstanding debts.
Her shock, her pain when she had first come to Debra for advice, had made Debra wince. It was plain to her that the woman still loved her husband, that she could not believe what he had done, and, over the months, watching the gradual realisation dawn on her that he had systematically and deliberately ensured his own financial security while destroying hers had been so painful for Debra to watch that she often dreaded seeing her.
That was what could happen to women who loved too much; too intensely.
What could happen, she reminded herself, not what must, and women could be just as cruel to men.
What was she doing? Why was she having these thoughts? So she could sense that Marsh was sexually interested in her. So what? That did not mean that she had to respond to that interest or to return it.
What was it that was making her feel so panicked, so on edge? Marsh’s subtle show of interest in her, or her awareness of the strength of her own feelings towards him?
She worked a little later than she had intended, anxious to complete what she was doing, and it was a shock when her office door opened and Marsh came in, reminding her easily, ‘Don’t forget—seven-thirty.’
It startled her to realise that it was gone six o’clock, and irritation, as much at her own lack of awareness of the time as at Marsh’s comment, made her push her fingers into her hair in a brief gesture of tiredness as she told him shortly, ‘I’m not a child, Marsh. I can tell the time, and I haven’t forgotten.’
She saw the smile die out of his eyes and wished that she hadn’t been quite so curt. It was as though the sun had suddenly slipped behind a cloud, and she discovered that she actually wanted to shiver a little.
Suppressing such a Freudian physical reaction, she bent her head back over her work, hoping that Marsh would take the hint and go.
When he did she breathed a tiny sigh of relief and then trembled a little as she glanced towards her closed office door, mentally recalling how he had looked, standing there.
There were some men who, when wearing formal business clothes, looked either very ill at ease or so unapproachable that their clothes immediately diminished their sex appeal, and then there were others—a very few others, like Marsh—who seemed so immediately at ease with themselves and their clothes that whatever they wore, whether formal or casual, seemed in some subtle and totally uncontrived way to accentuate their maleness and to bring it sharply into focus so that as a woman one was immediately aware of that maleness.
Sighing, Debra acknowledged that she wasn’t going to get any more work done. It was already later than she had realised. She had to clear her desk, to get home, have something to eat, to shower and change and to be ready when Marsh came to pick her up at half-past seven.
Tiredly she stood up, clearing away her papers, locking them in her desk drawer, checking her diary for the next day, just to make sure she didn’t have any appointments she might have overlooked, and making a few brief notes to remind herself that she still had to complete the work she was doing on Elisabeth Groves’s file.
Normally she enjoyed her short walk home from the office; often she took the longer route, around the outskirts of the old part of the city, stopping to watch the river, and to wonder how it might have looked when seen through Roman eyes.
Leigh had always chaffed her for her romantic daydreaming streak, but in a gentle rather than an abrasive way, and Debra openly admitted that it was perhaps not a characteristic one might normally expect to find in someone who had chosen accountancy as their career. But then she reflected that it underlined the fact that no person was ever one-dimensional, and that no person was necessarily inwardly exactly as they seemed outwardly; that human beings were very adroit at concealing those parts of their natures they considered to be the most vulnerable and at projecting those which seemed the strongest and most powerful.
Tiredly she reflected that she couldn’t imagine Marsh having any weaknesses, any vulnerabilities, or at least none which he was not totally in control of.
Unlike her. Why couldn’t she control the dangerous reaction she had to him?
She had never felt like this about anyone before. Never experienced this frightening surge of awareness of how very vulnerable she was emotionally.
Perhaps that was why it terrified her so much.
This evening her walk home failed to soothe her or to distance her from her worries.
