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‘Oh, no!’
Duncan caught her elbow as she tried to dart past him.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Look at them! We have to stop them—’
He shook his head, his grip tightening. ‘Stay out of the way. This isn’t your fight. Don’t get involved.’
‘Don’t get involved?’ She twisted her arm free and flashed her ring angrily in his face. ‘What do you think this is? I’m already involved!’
‘Not in this you’re not. Look at them, Kalera—they’re too wrapped up in themselves to give a damn about anything else right now. They don’t care what they’re doing to you. You know what happens when you try to separate fighting dogs—you’re likely to get a mauling yourself!’
&n
bsp; Kalera shrugged off his callous advice, thrusting her glass into the hand that was trying to detain her and not looking back. He would love it if Stephen made a complete idiot of himself; that was probably why he had brought Terri along. God knew what they were saying to each other over there, but it was probably nothing Stephen wanted other people to hear. If he was thinking straight he wouldn’t dream of washing his dirty linen in public. She owed it to him to stop their argument escalating before the whole room became aware of what was going on. He would never forgive himself if he turned this evening of supposed joy into a domestic tragicomedy.
Kalera threaded her way towards them, trying to pin on a sophisticated smile of wry amusement but aware that it kept slipping into a grimace. Just as she reached the ring of people closest to the combat zone there were gasps as Terri slapped Stephen’s face, swung on her heel and fled out onto the terrace and down the steps, a glimmering wraith disappearing into the garden.
‘Terri? Come back here! Terri!’ Without hesitation Stephen dived after her, almost pushing Kalera over in his haste, completely ignoring her attempt to talk to him, his furious gaze passing straight through her as if she didn’t exist.
Standing there, staring after the fleeing couple, Kalera could feel the bubbling black acid of humiliation burning up in her throat. She could hear the groundswell of shocked whispers and feel the scorch of pitying stares. Her slender back stiffened to the point of snapping and, very carefully placing one foot in front of the other, her head held high, she began to walk back the way she had come.
At some point Duncan joined her on the endless journey through the void of her embarrassment and with his arm around her back she found the strength to obey his instruction to talk and smile and even laugh with him as if nothing were wrong.
‘Great, you’re doing great; we’re almost there,’ he praised as their shoes clicked across the marble foyer towards the massive oak front door.
‘Almost where? What are we doing?’ she said, her steps beginning to falter.
‘Leaving.’
Some vestige of social conscience in her baulked as the dinner-jacketed security guard opened the door. ‘I can’t run out on my own engagement party!’
‘Why not? Stephen did. And he left you standing there to face the fallout.’
The scalding embarrassment rushed back in full measure and with it a healthy, invigorating anger.
He tossed his car keys lightly in his hand. ‘Besides, do you really want to hang around like a good little girl, meekly making nice-nice to all his guests and his friends while you wait for him to deign to remember that he has a fiancée?’
She reached out and caught the falling keys. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said crisply. ‘Let’s go. And this time I’ll do the driving!’
His face blanched and a surge of cleansing humour bubbled through her veins, diluting the hurt. She tossed the keys under his nose before she fisted them and sauntered past him out of the door.
Let him find out something of what it was like to find your life recklessly careering away with you at high speed with no sense of control over the outcome!
CHAPTER TEN
ARRIVING at the office on the Monday morning after her disastrous engagement party, Kalera found herself walking into a whirlwind. At first she thought the turmoil meant there must have been a fire alarm.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked Luke, one of the software engineers, as he staggered down the hallway with an armload of portable hard-disk drives and cartridges.
‘We’re bugging out,’ he grinned.
‘Moving?’ she asked incredulously. They couldn’t have been evicted because Duncan owned the building! ‘What—everyone?’
‘Nah. Just the A-team.’
That meant Bryan Eastman’s lot.
