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‘You’re so cute when you’re acting dominant,’ he mocked as he drew level. ‘Like a fairy fluffed up on steroids. Aren’t you going to tell me never to darken your door again?’
She gritted her teeth. ‘Don’t tempt me!’
‘Why? Afraid you won’t be able to resist…again?’
‘If you want me to be at work on Monday don’t—say—another—word,’ she said, cyanide dripping from every carefully articulated syllable.
He threw up his hands. ‘All right, all right, I’m going.’ He ran lightly down the steps, turning at the bottom to look back up at her slender figure, silhouetted in the doorway, unable to resist claiming the last word.
‘’Night, darling.’ His voice was smoky in the gloom. ‘If you have an urgent need for my—er—services over the weekend, you know how to find me—I’m number four on the speed dial of your phone. I see that poor Prior only rates a lowly nine!’
She might have known his offer to open a few windows for her while she checked through her mail had had an ulterior motive. He must have made the most of his brief opportunity to poke around, as he had in the kitchen. Trust him to notice such a petty detail!
‘That’s only because Harry put you on the infernal thing and I don’t know how to change the listings,’ she yelled after his retreating back. ‘I’d soon wipe you off if only I could find the instructions!’
She slammed the door on his answering chuckle and a few moments later heard the potent throb of the McLaren diminish into the night.
Why did she let him provoke her like that? He never used to be able to get under her skin but now he was embedded there like a troublesome burr. Thank goodness it was dark, otherwise the whole neighbourhood would have been treated to the sight of that quiet widow from number 43, screaming like a fishwife from her doorstep at that handsome, black-haired devil with the foreign car, and her engaged to that nice blond chap…
Oh, yes, Kalera could well imagine how the gossip over neighbourly cups of tea would go, and as usual the basic facts would get distorted as they twined around the local grapevine.
Darkness notwithstanding, maybe she had better mention Duncan’s visit to Stephen, just in case he heard it later from another source…
CHAPTER EIGHT
KALERA expected to have a dreadful night, tossing and turning and berating herself for her appalling weakness and lack of moral fibre, but once she put her head on the pillow she went out like a light and woke the next morning feeling magnificently alive and wonderfully energetic.
She had delegated the day for cleaning and sorting, aware that at some vague point in the future she would have to decide what possessions she would carry forth into her new life with Stephen and not wanting to be rushed over the choosing.
Since none of her undistinguished furniture fitted in with the elegant designer decor of his home it was only her personal belongings that would require packing up, but there were many books, papers, photos and mementos from her marriage with Harry that she needed to look through and decide whether to take with her or store.
Harry had been a fiend for jigsaw puzzles and there were dozens of them crammed in the wardrobe in the spare room. The two of them had spent many a happy hour taking alternate turns on the most challenging puzzles and although Kalera doubted that Stephen’s sophisticated tastes ran to such simple entertainment it occurred to her that Michael might be old enough to show an interest in some of the simpler versions featuring trains, cars and maps of the world. Stephen hadn’t been very informative about his son’s character but she did know that he was very bright for his age and already reading well above the normal six-year-old level. He might need help on the jigsaws, but Kalera thought that working on puzzles together would be a good way of alleviating the inevitable awkwardness of their step-relationship.
Imbued with the restless vitality with which she had awoken, by late morning Kalera had done most of her cleaning chores, discarded some old financial files and decided which puzzles she would give away to the local old people’s home. After lunch, she decided virtuously, she would wash the windows. Last time Stephen was in her living room she had noticed him raise an eyebrow at the haze on the glass ranch-slider which looked out onto her flower garden. He had been too polite to say anything but, knowing how immaculately kept his own house was—albeit by a paid housekeeper—she had been attuned to his faint emanations of disapproval. It was just that she had been kept so busy at Labyrinth since she had given her notice that the last thing she wanted to do when she got home in the evenings was physical labour!
She was wavering between making herself a sandwich or salad for lunch when Stephen rang to finalise the time he would pick her up for the charity dinner and symphony concert that they were attending that evening. She mentioned her idea about Michael and the jigsaw puzzles and to her disappointment he was noncommittal, the wary reserve that always appeared in his tone when he spoke about his son as much in evidence as ever.
‘Since his mother refuses to accept that I’m getting married again the boy is receiving some conflicting messages. Let’s not confuse him even more with other demands on his loyalty…’
He always called Michael ‘the boy’, which Kalera felt was slightly dehumanising. Perhaps it was just his way of distancing himself from the pain of knowing that his son was no longer an integral part of his daily life.
‘By the way,’ he tacked on diffidently, ‘I rang back last night to ask you what colour corsage you’d like for this evening and you didn’t answer—’
The doorbell rang and Kalera padded to answer it in her bare feet, the cordless phone pressed to her ear, listening with a sinking heart as Stephen said jokingly, ‘I know Royal is working you like a galley slave but surely you can’t have fallen asleep so quickly? You said you were still finishing dinner when we spoke the first time.’
Of course he was curious—who wouldn’t be? Curiosity was a perfectly natural, healthy human reaction, thought Kalera, swapping the phone to her other ear as she fumbled to turn the heavy deadlock with her favoured hand. In fact, she probably would have asked the same idle question of Stephen if their situations had been reversed.
So why did she feel a deep reluctance to answer?
Last night she had decided in favour of offering him an edited version of Duncan’s visit, but now, faced with the daunting task of censoring as she went, she took the coward’s way out.
‘I guess I must have been in the shower,’ she said as she got the door open and, to her horror, found herself staring up into Duncan’s wickedly satyric face.
Vivid colour rushed into her cheeks as he mouthed ‘hello’ with an exaggerated caution and she realised that he had heard her remark and guessed what it meant.
‘I let it ring for quite a while—’ Stephen was saying in her ear as she quickly tried to shut the door again. Too late; a custom-made, crocodile-skin boot was firmly planted as a door-stop.
‘Uh—I was washing my hair…it always takes me ages.’ She stepped to one side to block the doorway as Duncan tried to slip past her into the house.
