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‘How can you be so...so...cold-hearted?’
Damien flushed darkly. As far as he was concerned, he was dealing with a situation as efficiently as he could. Drain it of all emotion and nothing was clouded, there were no blurry lines or grey areas. His mother was ill...she was anxious about him...desperate for him to produce someone by his side whom she could see as an anchor... His task was to come up with a way of putting her mind at rest. It was the way he tackled all problems that presented themselves to him. Calmly, coolly and decisively. It was an approach that had always served him well and he wasn’t going to change now.
He pushed the ugly tangle of confusion and vulnerability away. He had always felt that he was the one on whom his mother and Dominic needed to rely. After his father’s death, he had risen to the challenge of responsibilities far beyond any a boy in his twenties might have faced. He had jettisoned all plans to take a little time out and had instead sacrificed the dream of kicking back so that he could immerse himself in taking over the reins of his father’s company. His only mistake had been to fall for a woman who hadn’t been able to cope with the complete picture and, in the aftermath, he had wasted time and energy in the fruitless pastime of self-recrimination and self-doubt. He had moved on from that place a long time ago but negative feelings had never again been allowed to cloud his thinking. Indecision was not something that was ever given space and it wasn’t about to get any now.
‘How I choose to deal with this situation is my concern and my concern only. Your role isn’t to offer your opinion; it’s to be by my side in two days’ time when I go and visit my mother. And you asked me what I meant by a nuisance...’ There was no chance that she would become a liability. They were two people who could not have been on more opposing ends of the scale. If she hadn’t told him that she didn’t like him, then he would have surmised that for himself. It was there in the simmering resentment lurking behind her purple-blue eyes and in her body language as she huddled in the chair in front of him as if one false move might propel her further into his radius. Of course it didn’t help that she considered herself there under duress, but even when she had first walked into his office she had failed to demonstrate any of those little signals that heralded interest. No coy looks...no encouraging half smiles...no fluttering eyelashes...
He wasn’t accustomed to a reaction like this from a woman and, in any other situation, he might have been amused, but not now. Too much was at stake. So, whatever he thought, he would make his position doubly clear.
‘A nuisance would be you imagining that the charade was real...getting ideas...’
Violet’s mouth fell open and she went bright red. Not only had he blackmailed her into doing something she knew was wrong, but he was actually suggesting, in that smug, arrogant way, that she might start...what, exactly...? Thinking that he was seriously interested in her? Or imagining that she was interested in him?
He really was, a little voice whispered in her head, quite beautiful but she would never be interested in a man like him. Everything about him, aside from those staggering good looks, repelled her. Her soft mouth tightened and she looked back at him with an equal measure of coolness.
‘That wouldn’t happen in a million years,’ she told him. ‘The only reason I’m even consenting to this is because I don’t have a choice, whatever you say. And how do I know that you’ll keep your side of the deal? How do I know that you won’t take proceedings against my sister after I’ve done what you want...?’
Damien leaned forward. Every line of his body threatened her. ‘How do I know that you won’t turn around and tell my mother what’s actually going on? How do I know that you’ll deliver what I need you to? I guess you could say that we’re going to be harnessed to one another for a short while and we’re just going to have to trust that neither of us decides to try and break free of the constraints... Now, we need to discuss the details...’ He strode towards his jacket, which had been tossed over the back of the leather sofa against the wall. ‘It’s lunchtime. We’re going to go and grab something and start filling in the blanks.’
He expected her to follow. Was he like that with all women? Why on earth did they put up with it? She had to half run to keep up with him, past the grey-haired secretary who looked at them both with keen interest as she was ordered to cancel all his afternoon appointments, and then back down to the foyer where, it now seemed like a million years ago, she had sat in a state of nervous panic waiting to be shown to his office.
She couldn’t fail to notice the way everyone acknowledged his presence as he strode ahead of her. Conversations halted, backs were straightened, small groups dispersed. There was absolutely no doubt that he ran the show and she wondered how her sister could ever have thought that she could get away with trying to steal information from him. Perhaps she had never personally met him, but surely Phillipa would have realised, even if only through hearsay, that the man was one hundred per cent hard line? But then Phillipa had been busy losing her head to a guy who had spotted a way in to making a quick buck via a back door. Her sister, for once, had found herself being the victim of manipulation. Chances were she hadn’t been thinking at all.
Her coat was back on because she had expected them to be walking to wherever he was taking her for lunch, but in fact they headed down to a lift that carried them straight to an enormous basement car park and she followed him to a gleaming black Aston Martin which he beeped open with his key.
‘Tell me the sort of food you like to eat,’ he said without looking at her.
‘Is that the first step to pretending we know one another?’
‘You’re going to have to change your attitude.’ Damien was entirely focused on the traffic as he emerged from the underground car park into the busy street outside. ‘Two people in a relationship try to avoid sniping and sarcasm. What sort of restaurants do you go to?’
He slid his eyes across to her and Violet felt a quiver of something sharp and unidentifiable, something that slithered through her like quicksilver, making her skin burn and prickling it with a strange sensation of awareness.
This was a business deal. They were sitting here in this flash car, awkwardly joined together in a scheme in which neither wanted to participate but both were forced to, and she could do without her nervous system going into semi-permanent free fall.
She needed to hang on to her composure, however much she disliked the man and however much she scorned his ethics.
‘I don’t,’ she told him evenly. ‘At least not often. Sometimes after work on a Friday night. I’m an art teacher. I haven’t got enough money to eat out in fancy restaurants.’ She wanted to burst out laughing because not only did they dislike each other, but they were from opposite sides of the spectrum. He was rich and powerful, she was...almost constantly counting her pennies or else saving and the only power she had was over her kids.
Damien didn’t say anything. He had never gone out with a teacher. He leaned towards models, who moaned about not being paid enough...but usually it meant for the purchase of top end sports cars or cottages in the Cotswolds rather than fancy meals out. Most of them wouldn’t have been caught dead in cheap clothes or cheap restaurants. They earned big bucks for strutting their stuff on catwalks. In their heads, there was always a photographer lurking round the corner so getting snapped looking anything but gorgeous and being anywhere but cool was unacceptable.
‘When you say fancy...’ he encouraged.
‘What do you call fancy?’ she asked him, because why should she be the one under the spotlight all the time?
He named a handful of Michelin-starred restaurants which she had heard of and she laughed with genuine amusement. ‘I’ve read about those places. I don’t think I’d make it to any of them, even for a special occasion.’
‘Really,’ Damien murmured. He altered the direction of his car.
‘Really. Your mother will be very curious to discover what we see in one another. How would we have met in the first place?’ For a few seconds she forgot how much she disliked him and focused on the incongruity of the two of them ever hitting it off. ‘I mean, did you just see me emerging from the school where I work and decide that you wanted to come over for a chat?’
‘Stranger things have been known to happen.’
But not much, Violet thought. ‘Where are we going, anyway?’
‘Heard of Le Gavroche?’
‘We can’t!’
‘Why not? You said you’ve never eaten out at a fancy restaurant. Now’s your big opportunity.’
‘I’m not dressed for somewhere like that!’
‘Too late.’ He made a quick phone call and an attendant emerged from the restaurant to take the keys to his car. ‘I eat here a lot,’ Damien explained in an undertone. ‘I have an arrangement that someone parks my car and brings it back for me if I come without my driver. You can’t wear the coat for the duration of the meal. I’m sure what you’re wearing is perfectly adequate.’
