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‘Nothing.’ It came out as an anguished whisper.
‘I don’t believe that. Why are you looking like that? Tell me what’s wrong,’ he said in a voice so gentle that she wanted to lean on it and be softly enfolded in its promise of peace.
‘Nothing!’ She said it again, more strongly, opening eyes that were suddenly burning with rage. She tossed her head, almost hitting him on the jaw. ‘Nothing. Nothing is wrong except that I’m dancing with a man whose girlfriend is glaring daggers at me! If you want to make her jealous, why don’t you go and foist your company on someone else?’
He deftly spun her around, so that she could no longer see Lynne Foster craning at them from her chair. ‘It’s more likely to be me she’s glaring at,’ he said quietly, absorbing her anger with his calm. ‘I’ve upset her by not being my usual agreeable self, but I don’t intend to raise expectations I can’t fulfil. And I’m afraid that she thinks I’m stubborn and uncooperative because I was so rude to Susan this morning—’
‘You were rude to your mother-in-law?’ Harriet blurted out.
‘I agree—hardly the actions of a gentleman,’ he said with a wry humour that further blunted the jagged edge of her pain. ‘Perhaps I’ll be blackballed from my club.’
Harriet’s taut mouth almost trembled into a reluctant smile, and he relaxed some of his watchfulness to continue lightly, ‘I’m afraid Susan is too used to getting her own way where I’m concerned. It’s my fault—I’ve found life is much easier if I let her think she can organise me to her own satisfaction. This morning, for example, she wanted me to agree to Nicola working for Lynne at her law office during the holidays.’
Harriet caught her breath. ‘But hadn’t you told her that you were arranging for Nicola to have a job at Trident?’
He raised rueful eyebrows. ‘When dealing with Susan it usually saves a lot of time and argument if I present her with a fait accompli. I had intended to do that tonight when I’d confirmed the arrangements, but unfortunately she saw fit to launch a pre-emptive strike—’
It seemed a very good description of Susan Jerome’s approach. ‘But—it’s a terrific idea, isn’t it?’ Harriet interrupted feverishly. ‘And it means that you won’t need me after all…’
‘It means I need you all the more. I’m afraid Susan’s plan has the potential to create a bigger problem than it solves,’ he said, firmly squashing any hopes she might have had of evading her responsibilities.
‘What problem?’ she asked, for the second time that night failing to realise that she was being danced into a corner, this time figuratively.
His jaw tightened. ‘It’s rather embarrassing…’
‘Is it?’ She wouldn’t have thought, from the way he had handled himself this morning, that Marcus was capable of being embarrassed about anything. She wondered whether it was something a reckless woman might be able to use to her advantage. ‘In what way?’ she asked eagerly, then flushed when he gave her an ironic look, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.
‘Susan and her infernal matchmaking. She thinks that it’s time I was respectably remarried and she’s decided that Lynne fits the bill. I suspect that she cooked up this law-office deal on the spur of the moment as a way of throwing us together as a cosy family unit, to impress me with Lynne’s supportiveness—making time in her busy, successful career for Nicola’s and my sake et cetera, et cetera. Susan obviously expects propinquity to succeed where natural inclination has failed.’
His eyes narrowed as he looked over her shoulder and Harriet was glad that his glacial look wasn’t directed at her. ‘Lynne is far too intelligent a woman not to have realised by now what Susan is up to, so I have to assume that she’s operating on her own agenda. If I hadn’t nipped the idea in the bud I feel I would have been tacitly acknowledging a level of commitment between us that doesn’t exist. Fortunately, since I had a logical and far more convenient alternative already arranged, every-one’s pride has remained more or less intact…’
‘What about Nicola? She’s the most important one in all this. What did she have to say?’ Harriet asked tartly, to conceal the kick of petty satisfaction she felt at his cool dismissal of the lovely Lynne.
There was something deliciously amusing, too, in the idea of the powerful Marcus Fox being harassed by a matchmaking mama-in-law and trying to evade the acquisitive instincts of pursuing females. It made him seem less…threatening. Maybe she would be able to squeeze some fun out of the situation after all!
‘Nothing, to Susan’s annoyance,’ he remarked drily. ‘Nicola didn’t seem to have an opinion either way, so naturally she accepted what I had arranged.’
Harriet didn’t think that that sounded very rebellious. ‘And did you tell Mrs Jerome that I was the one who was going to be in charge of Nicola?’
He looked her straight in the eye, blue on blue. ‘I told her that it would be someone I trusted implicitly. She was content to accept my assurance.’
‘You didn’t tell her!’ she breathed, realising suddenly that she could read that poker-face.
He quickened his steps to the beat of the music as it built smoothly in a crescendo. ‘I said that she could go away happy in the knowledge that Nicola was going to be close under my direction.’
‘You didn’t tell her,’ she reiterated gleefully as she was whisked into a series of dazzling turns that blurred everything but her partner’s boldly delineated face into oblivion. ‘You were too afraid to!’
‘I obeyed the doctor’s orders and removed a source of tension and worry that would have impeded her recovery,’ he corrected her.
‘Coward!’ she laughed as she followed him through another whirlwind of steps, exhilarated by her ability to sense his every move. Her dance skills were very rusty and with Michael she’d had to concentrate on which foot went where. Marcus kept her too preoccupied to worry about such mundane issues and in his arms she rediscovered a soaring sense of freedom. Her erratic spirits shot skywards again, showering her with sparks of ridiculous joy.
‘I freely admit to being henpecked,’ he said, bringing her to a flourishing stop beside a rounded pillar as the band finished their set.
‘And here was I thinking you were cock of the walk,’ she said impulsively, and blushed when his answering smile imbued her words with a slightly indecent connotation she hadn’t intended. Now he had made her aware of his body again…his whole body this time, not just its polite outer sheath of expensive black and white silk.
Like a flash photograph it etched itself momentarily on her retina, searing her with its vividly imagined detail—the column of his throat flowing down to a chest of tanned satin, smooth and hairless, a ripple of muscle beneath the arch of his ribcage dropping away to the breathtaking splendour of his masculine pride, and the flat hips and long, hard thighs, the slender, elegant feet…
‘Pompous and strutting?’ His thick black brows rose imperiously above the mocking smile. ‘Is that what you think of me, Harriet?’
