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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.
