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‘What were you saying to her?’ Harriet said sharply as Marcus swung himself behind the wheel and waved to his daughter as she closed the front door. Whatever it was, it had taken a long time.
‘That rather than get a taxi back I’ll probably stay in town.’
Harriet groaned inwardly. She could just imagine what Nicola was thinking now! ‘He’s awfully discreet…’
‘Not with me you won’t!’
‘Why, Harriet, did I suggest that?’ he murmured innocently. ‘I have my own apartment. I told Nicola I’ll phone her as soon as I get there.’
She had never seen his personal quarters in the Finance Tower, but Nicola had told her that he stayed there quite often when she was away at school, sometimes only making it home at weekends.
He turned the key and gave a sigh as the engine throbbed into life. He turned on the headlights, and paused to give her a boyish smile that completely banished the threat of a frown that perpetually hovered in the forbidding black brows. ‘You know, I really only asked you to dinner to get my hands on your Porsche. I knew you wouldn’t let me drive it if I merely asked nicely.’
‘I don’t let anyone drive my car,’ she said haughtily.
His smile turned into a grin. ‘But I’m not just anyone, am I, blondie?’
He drove it superbly, as she’d known he would, and when he parked it in the Harbourside basement and pocketed the keys to follow her into the lift, she didn’t say a word. He, too, seemed to feel no need to ask or explain. They both knew what was going to happen.
The silence was charged with tension as they stood side by side, watching the floor numbers cha
nging on the digital counter. The sleeve of his jacket brushed the skin of her forearms and Harriet swayed, feeling as if she had been stroked by rivulets of fire. She could feel him looking at her and knew what he must be seeing— the flushed cheeks, the parted lips, the shallow rise and fall of her breasts—all the signs of a woman on the brink of surrender. By the time they reached her apartment door Harriet’s palms were clammy, and she was aware of every inch of her body beneath the plain black jersey silk.
There was a dream-like sense of inevitability about what they were doing. Harriet suddenly knew that everything that had passed between them tonight…yesterday…the past week—everything from the moment he had barged into Brian Jessop’s office nearly two weeks ago, and perhaps even before then…perhaps all of her life…had been leading to this one, glorious moment…
She opened her door and turned to him, breathlessly…
Marcus cupped her cheek and tilted her face towards his. He kissed her once on the brow and once on the mouth, very gently, and pressed her car keys into her hand.
‘Goodnight, Harriet. Thank you for tonight. Sleep well.’
Sleep well?
Harriet stood in her doorway and watched him walk back to the lift.
Sleep well?
The doors were still open and he stepped in and pressed the button without looking back.
That was it?
He had brought her to this fever pitch of expectation and wanted her to go to sleep? ‘Thank you for tonight’? What was there to thank her for? She hadn’t done anything yet!
At first she thought that it must be a joke. That at the last minute before the doors closed he was going to turn and laugh, and come back and sweep her off her feet. Only when the lift had departed did she stumble into her apartment and shut the door and slam her back against the hard panels, trying to force the knowledge through her bones.
He had left her. He hadn’t brought her home to make love to her. He had set out to control her, seduce her, beguile her, and now he didn’t want her. She didn’t want tenderness, damn him; she wanted what he had promised her yesterday…complete and utter oblivion.
Hot tears of humiliation burned at the back of her eyes and thickened her throat. Had he detected the sheer desperation of her need? Was that what had frightened him off? It frightened her—the realisation that to feel like making love she first had to make herself feel love. If sex and love were truly indivisible in her mind then that meant the only person she could have her wild, reckless fling with was Marcus. And if he didn’t want her, where did that leave her wonderful new life?
Harriet put the back of her hand over her quivering mouth and bit it, hard, using the pain to fight back the creeping tendrils of depression. You couldn’t lose something you never had, she repeated to herself. Look on the bright side, Harriet. What if the bastard had made love to you and then walked out?
She couldn’t possibly be feeling this desperate over a man who had scarcely impinged on her consciousness a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t love, it was infatuation. She had been flattered by his attention, blown it up into something it wasn’t.
She looked across at the glass door that led out onto her little balcony, at the shadowy blocks and bright lights of the city. Her city. If only she’d had a few hefty pot plants out there, she thought, feeding her healthy anger, she would very much have liked to drop one over the rail on the man who was probably stepping out into the street below right now to hail a taxi—
Harriet jerked upright. She whirled around and wrenched open the door, dashing out into the hall, to stare up at the indicator above the lift. It wasn’t registering the lift on the ground floor. Instead, it showed it four floors above. She replayed the ghastly scene of Marcus’s leaving in her mind. She hadn’t noticed it then, but she remembered now. His hand had tapped the panel’ at chest-level. He had taken the lift up, not down.
What business could Marcus possibly have on the top floor at this time of night? Monkey business, she thought furiously, storming back into her apartment and snatching up the telephone to call the security office in the foyer, on the off chance that she might be wrong.
