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He raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you make a habit of always putting yourself down, Ashley?’
‘I prefer to think of it as being realistic.’
‘Do you?’ There was a pause as he studied her. Why was she being so damned unresponsive—as if the woman he had held in his arms on the windswept moor had been replaced with a waxwork replica? ‘You know, you didn’t give me a very satisfactory answer when I asked you a question earlier.’
‘And which particular question was that, Jack?’
He gave a low laugh. ‘When I asked whether you’d missed me.’
Quickly, Ashley glanced across the room—where Barry was in the process of pouring liqueurs for the two women. ‘Do you want our conversation overheard by the whole room?’ she whispered. ‘Don’t you think it might make them wonder why you’re asking your secretary a question like that?’
‘That’s extremely unlikely to happen,’ he drawled. ‘Unless you’re planning to break the habit of a lifetime by raising that soft voice of yours.’
‘Whether I missed you or not is irrelevant,’ she managed, her voice sounding little, and lost.
‘Is it?’ A smile touched the edges of his lips as he leaned forward. ‘So what’s the matter, Ashley? Your lips are trembling as if you’re cold, yet the fire is blazing and the room is warm.’
You’re making me want you and it is wrong to want you. We both know that. ‘You’re… you’re neglecting your guests,’ she whispered.
His laugh was as soft as it had been before, but now it was tinged with something else, something dangerous, which made the little hairs on the back of her neck prickle with a sense of the unknown.
‘There goes that hypocrisy again,’ he taunted. ‘Your eyes are saying something which your lips are contradicting. You look like a hungry bird which has escaped the winter chill and hopped onto the window sill to find a whole heap of crumbs waiting there—and yet something stops you from reaching out to take them. You wanted me that day on the moor—but then you clammed up and pretended that you didn’t.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I don’t really need a lesson in etiquette from you, Ashley, but perhaps you’re right—I am neglecting them. So you’d better excuse me and I’ll get back to them and leave you alone in your little ivory tower over here.’
With that, he stood up and went back to the others—leaving Ashley feeling even more isolated than ever and yet knowing she had only herself to blame. Her head was whirling from the bizarre conversation they’d just shared and all she wanted to do was to escape. Was she a hypocrite? she asked herself distractedly. Was that how she came across—as some kind of tease who liked to play games? Didn’t he realise that she had simply been trying to protect herself and to maintain an air of professionalism between them? Yet now it seemed as though she had wrecked even that—wouldn’t the worst of all possible scenarios be that she lost her job without ever having known what it was like to have Jack make love to her?
Quietly, she rose to her feet—though she noticed that Jack barely lifted his head to say goodnight as she excused herself and slipped from the room.
Once she was safely back in her bedroom, she undressed—but she noticed that her hands were shaking. And so was her body. Shivering violently, she climbed into bed, curling herself into a ball in a desperate attempt to warm herself, but inside she felt like a cold block of ice. From downstairs she could hear the distant strains of laughter and she pulled a pillow over her head to try to block out the sounds of the others as they made their way up to bed. But when the house had grown quiet, she found herself listening in the darkness—like a small animal who had found itself in an unknown and threatening place with no idea how to escape.
Pricking up her ears, she heard footsteps treading the night-time corridor. Yet these were not the distracted footsteps of Jack in one of his sleepless moods, but much lighter ones—though with a definite sense of purpose. Somewhere a door opened and closed again—and Ashley bit down hard on her lip as if doing that might alleviate the sudden clench of pain in her heart.
Was that the sound of Nicole creeping into Jack’s bedroom? she wondered. Was she drawing back the duvet and slipping into bed beside him—his hard, naked body enfolding her to him? Behind Ashley’s closed eyes the graphic images continued to dance—yet what right did she have to feel bitter, or resentful?
You had your chance! You had your chance with him—and you blew it. You threw it away.
But even knowing that it had been the right thing to do did little to soothe her troubled spirit. It had been a long time since Ashley had cried. There was absolutely no comparison to the night she’d been locked up by her cruel foster mother and lain in the cupboard there, trembling in terror. Yet somehow the thought of what she had almost found with Jack and had now seen snatched away was enough to make her heart clench. Silently, she turned her head and bit her lip, but that did nothing to stem the silent flow of tears.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOMEHOW Ashley got through the rest of the weekend. She hid behind a calm smile and a determination not to let her feelings show—but she had never felt more of an outsider. Like an unwilling spectator, she watched from the sidelines as Jack played host to his houseguests—and it seemed to her that the lovely Nicole had been born to live a life like this.
A horse was sent up from the village and each morning, sitting astride the now-recovered Nero, Jack took the lustrous brunette horse-riding with him. Ashley saw them as they returned to the house, walking companion-ably together across the lawns, their faces flushed with exercise and animated in conversation. Nicole wasn’t scared of horses. She didn’t jump and startle them and make a man end up lying in a ditch. Ashley hated the sharp pang of jealousy which shot through her—and she hated the way her eyes always seemed to be drawn to the two of them. She had to snap out
of it and stop thinking about him in that way—because it was none of her business.
But to her surprise, there was no sign of any deepening relationship between her boss and Nicole. In fact, Jack seemed more and more uninterested in the brunette as the weekend progressed, leaving Ashley feeling bewildered. It should have appeased her but it did not. If he failed to respond to someone as lovely, rich and cultured as Nicole—then what hope was there for her?
She was both relieved and nervous when the three houseguests finally departed—wondering what it was going to be like to be alone with him again. Safe in the confines of the office, she could hear the sound of laughter as they all said their goodbyes, but she blocked out the sounds and tried to concentrate on the manuscript.
When at last he came into the study she paused for a moment, letting her flying fingers still on the keyboard as he entered the room, her gaze drawn unwillingly to his face. His dark eyes were unfathomable as they looked at her and his face was faintly flushed.
‘Good morning, Ashley,’ he said softly.
She swallowed. ‘Good morning.’
‘The guests have gone.’
She nodded. ‘So I heard.’
