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'I'm sorry you lost Monk's Hall,' he said.
Despite her good intentions, Annie bit out tersely, 'Are you? Are you really?' Then she tacked on sincerely, 'And I'm sorry about your back. Does it hurt?'
'If I try to move, yes. According to Beddowes, I've wrenched some muscles and the only cure is lying here.'
He had dismissed her questioning of the veracity of his statement over her loss of Monk's Hall, she noted drily, as she pulled up a chair. He had a talent for ignoring what he didn't want to see or hear. Only now was she beginning to realise how self-centred he was. And this was the room she would share with him if they married. It depressed her utterly. But now wasn't the time to think about future colour schemes, about replacing the heavy, ugly nineteen-forties furniture with something else. She said optimistically, 'Perhaps it will only take a day or two.'
But Norman grumbled, 'Beddowes mentioned four to six weeks. If you'd been around we would have moved that seat together and this
wouldn't have happened. Where were you?'
Wondering if we ought to call the marriage off, Annie thought, but she said, 'You should have waited. That seat's heavy—it could have been shifted any time.'
'I distinctly remember asking you to help me with it this afternoon.'
And she thought, And I distinctly remember thinking there'd be no need because we wouldn't be living here much longer. But you knew better, didn't you? You knew Luke would outbid me.
If Norman hadn't been in pain nothing would have stopped her from speaking her thoughts out loud. As it was, she merely said, 'I'll phone Professor Rhys and cancel our visit,' and brought a hornets' nest around her ears.
'You can't do that!' Norman snapped, struggling to rise but falling back on the mattress with a yowl of pain. 'It will be weeks before I'm fit to go. I can't afford to waste that amount of time.' Annoyed, he showed a purple face and Annie stared at him as if seeing him for the first time. He had never had occasion to be anything other than pleased with her before now. 'You must go on your own,' he told her firmly. 'You know what I'm looking for. The book was your idea in the first place.'
'Well, I would, but—'
'No buts, please. Joan can look after me perfectly well, if that's what's worrying you.'
It wasn't. And Joan would like nothing better than to look after him for the rest of his life. Annie opened her mouth to explain her problem, but Norman shot at her accusingly, 'In fact, she's been a marvel. I don't know what I'd have done without her this afternoon. And when you get back from Wales we can go through the notes together, make a start on the relevant chapter.'
His blunt features looked pinched with the discomfort he was experiencing. She knew how important his work was to him, and she was his research assistant, after all, but she could see a problem.
'What about the photographs? I can't handle the Hasselblad.' It was a piece of beautiful, professional equipment, technically highly complex, and she didn't begin to know how to use it. Give her a simple camera, where everything was automatic, foolproof, and she'd still probably manage to point the thing in the wrong direction!
'For pity's sake, woman!'
Annie had never heard Norman bellow before; he was obviously fed up with everything, herself included, and Luke chose that moment to enter the room, his smile easy, his husky voice holding slightly cynical undertones as he asked, 'Lovers' tiff?' He put a tube of ointment on the bedside table and glanced from Norman's petulant scowl to Annie's set features. 'Anything wrong?' He spoke mildly, as if addressing two squabbling children.
Norman muttered sarcastically, 'Not so as you'd notice. I'm stuck here for weeks and my research assistant—' he glared at Annie with disgust '—is refusing to interview Professor Rhys because she's afraid of using a simple piece of photographic equipment. The fact that I need to get this information is of no consequence, it would appear.'
Annie would have stalked out of the room at this point. He was making her sound like a selfish idiot and, in any case, she didn't want the subject of their quarrel to be discussed with the objectionable Luke. Norman was beginning to irritate her beyond endurance, but something—pride, she thought—held her where she was, had her explaining stiltedly, 'I am not refusing to do anything. I merely pointed out that the workings of the Hasselblad are a mystery to me. I am perfectly willing to interview Professor Rhys, but—'
'Well, in that case, you can both relax. Your problems are solved.' Luke rocked back on his heels, his hands negligently thrust into the pockets of his tight-fitting jeans, and Annie had to drag her eyes away from the way the dark blue material moulded the male power of his thighs.
He had changed his clothes since this morning, she noted sourly, his casual gear making him look even more dangerous, if that were possible. And she closed her eyes in hopeless resignation, grinding her teeth because her intuition—so finely tuned where this one man was concerned—told her exactly what was coming next. And huskily, lazily, he drawled the very words she'd been afraid of hearing.
'I'll go in your place, Norman. Annie can look after the interviews, of course, but I'll do the photography. I can handle your camera. No problem.'
Painfully, she wrenched her eyes open, feeling her heart lurch and bump around beneath her breastbone. Norman was making grateful clucking noises, but she wasn't listening to him. She was watching Luke's eyes. Deep, dark blue depths she could feel herself drowning in. And she was mindlessly absorbing the silent, mocking message those eyes were transmitting, a message that her terrified brain translated as, And I can handle your fiancée, too. No problem. No problem at all!
CHAPTER FOUR
'Nervous, Annie?' Luke's voice drifted over her, lazy and intimate, filling the luxurious confines of the racy car, threading her pulsebeats with dread. He was easy on the ear, easy on the eye, and could, if she let him, be easy on the senses. Oh, so easy.
'Should I be? I'm not unused to handling interviews. I am Norman's research assistant.' Deliberately she misunderstood him. He was not referring to the coming interviews. His question had been loaded with meaning, making her instantly and painfully aware of the compulsive and, on her part, highly unwelcome attraction there was between them.
'You probably should be nervous,' he admitted softly. 'You know exactly why I offered to come along on this trip.'
That was an unequivocal statement, but one she was going to twist around if she could. She watched with unwilling fascination as his strongly made yet elegant hands lightly gripped the steering wheel, and said, a shade too sweetly, 'To help poor Norman out. What else?'
'You're quite wrong.' He took his remarkable eyes from the road for a second, and the smile he gave her was intimate and knowing, shocking in its wickedness.
