AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Now, in retrospect, she could see that all the symptoms of something much deeper had been there. He had grown on her over the months: she had spent too long being a part of his life, getting to know his dry sense of humour the way he thought, the way he looked sitting back in his chair, dictating to her, or leaning over her to explain something. Everything had sunk into her subconscious and had taken root. She knew now what she had confusedly denied to herself, which was that she would never have made love with him if she hadn’t been deeply in love with him. Martin had been a shadow which she had tried hard to make real, but he had never fuelled her the way Ross did.
Fiona smiled triumphantly. ‘You’re not in his league. If he were serious about you, he would have told me to get lost, wouldn’t he?’ Abigail didn’t say anything, and Fiona continued in the same relentless voice, ‘I don’t know if you think you have any sort of hold over him because you shared a bed, but you haven’t. You’re not the first woman he’s slept with. You’re…’ She searched around for the most insulting description she could think of and came up with it. ‘You’re comic relief, the buffoon in a Shakespeare play, for God’s sake! He’s already forgotten about you! Two nights in a cottage, that’s all it meant to him! I suppose you threw yourself at him. The plain, desperate little secretary laying her meagre selection of goods on the shelf and begging for them to be taken.’
Abigail’s legs were feeling distinctly shaky. ‘That,’ she said in a flat, dull voice, ‘is disgusting.’ Was that how he saw it as well? she wondered.
‘The truth often is.’ Fiona’s lips curled back into a smile of active dislike. ‘And on the subject of which, I found out a few little truths about you, my dear.’ She paused for effect. Fiona was accustomed to pausing for effect. It was something she did very well. ‘I decided to do a little digging into your past. You might send out innocent, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth signals, but you’re a woman and I know better than to believe that there’s such a thing as an innocent woman. When Ross told me that you had broken off your engagement, I thought that I’d see what I could find out about you.’ She paused. ‘It wasn’t difficult. I rooted through your personnel file and found out the name of the company you used to work for, then I telephoned and said that I had interviewed you for a job and who could I talk to, in confidence, about your work. I said that I couldn’t speak to your present boss because he didn’t know that you were planning on leaving.’
‘You did that? You…How could you?’
‘Very easily, my dear.’ Her arched eyebrows conveyed malicious triumph. ‘And guess what? There was a man there who was simply dying to tell all, so to speak.’
Abigail was beginning to feel quite ill. Ellis. Dear Ellis whom she had spurned at that party a week ago.
‘I met him for a drink,’ Fiona said into the thick silence, ‘and he was most forthcoming. With a little flattery, I managed to have a very educational chat with him.’
‘Ross knows all about Ellis,’ Abigail said bluntly.
‘Ah, but does he know that you targeted your ex-boss because you thought that he was a good marriage prospect?’
‘I never did any such thing!’
‘And might he just assume, with a little prodding from me of course, that you targeted him in exactly the same way? Might he be led to think that you got engaged to that sweet little chap of yours because you were under the impression that he had more money than you later discovered? It’s so easy, my dear, isn’t it, to think that a man is made of the green stuff when he’s busy courting and making the right impression? Might he, and I only say might, reach the sad conclusion that you broke off your engagement and decided to go back to your original target as soon as you discovered the true state of affairs with your dear, sweet boyfriend?’
‘He might if he’s a certified idiot,’ Abigail said faintly and Fiona smiled.
‘But men are, aren’t they? Especially a suspicious man like Ross.’
‘Get out of my flat. Now.’
‘I intend to.’ Fiona swept herself back into her coat. ‘Leave him alone. Find someone else, someone on your own level. He’s mine! If you try and come between us, I’ll make sure that you regret it. I’ll tell him a thousand lies if I have to and he’ll believe them because there will be just enough there to sound like the gospel truth.’ She smiled a cold, hard smile. ‘That’s a promise. I’ve told my friends, my family, that Ross Anderson is the man for me and he will be.’
Abigail looked at her with pity. ‘Will be?’ she said scathingly. ‘Maybe we’re both chasing windmills.’
Fiona walked across to the door, her expression ice. ‘I,’ she said, ‘at least have a chance.’
She pulled open the door and slammed it behind her, and Abigail remained where she was, then slowly regained her strength and began clearing away the dishes. She had a bath, she changed, she brushed her hair, but she felt dead inside.
She didn’t want to think about what Ross meant to her. Every time the awful truth reared up in her head, she swept it aside until she got tired and gave in, and thought and thought until she felt her mind would explode.
All her adult life she had carried around the idea that love was safe and that safety was desirable, the one solid thing in a changing world. She had been a plain child, she had grown into a pleasant-looking but by no means beautiful woman, and she had had it instilled in her from an early age that happiness was finding someone on her own level. Ellis had been an exercise in finding out that painful truth, and when Martin had come along her brain had logically worked out that he fitted that description, and she had never considered the possibility of being stupid enough to reject that in favour of her boss, the one man whose easy charm and lazy sex appeal she had observed from the sidelines, thinking herself happily immune.
The only glimmer in what was a disastrous scenario was that Ross didn’t know that she loved him. That would have been the most humiliating thing that she could have imagined. Fiona, after only meeting her a couple of times, had guessed at the truth, but then women were often more intuitive than men.
She wondered what Ross’s reaction would be if he ever found out how she felt. Amusement, perhaps, then maybe a certain amount of wariness. He had warned her that love and marriage were not for him. If he even suspected for an instant that she had fallen in love with him, he would turn his back and walk away as quickly as he could, and that would be without Fiona’s version of truth-telling.
Fiona, she thought, was very optimistic if she imagined that she had the wherewithal to net him, but then there were always two sides to a story and Ross, intent on seduction, would hardly have told her that he was planning to marry another woman. She didn’t see him as capable of such deceit, but Fiona was determined, available and socially suitable, and many a man had capitulated for less. She was also dangerous and scheming.
The thoughts played through her brain over and over, until she finally fell into exhausted sleep and went in to work the following morning feeling zombie-like, but strangely calm. There were no more cobwebs in her mind, no more nagging doubts; the jigsaw puzzle was all in place. She loved Ross Anderson, it was a hopeless situation, and from that starting point everything she did could only go uphill.
She pictured the tunnel stretching in front of her, one in which there would be no more of him, no more surreptitious glances at his handsome, angular face which she knew as well as her own, no more rush of adrenalin whenever he was around. It was bleak, but she told herself that she could get over it. Time cured everything, didn’t it? Loving him was crazy and hurt like hell, but it wasn’t terminal.
She walked into her office, relieved to find that he hadn’t yet arrived, and sat down at her word processor. Then she switched on the screen and typed out her letter of resignation, which she folded into an envelope, and placed on top of his desk. He couldn’t miss it.
When he walked into the room an hour later, she looked up at him, smiled politely and then waited for the summons to come.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE waited half an hour, then an hour, and finally, when he did call her into the office, she was too nettled by his lack of response to feel apprehensive. Had she thought that she was so important in his life that he would hit the roof when he opened that little white envelope? On a personal front, Fiona had been right, Abigail thought bitterly. To Ross, she was little more than an interesting interlude, nothing to get worked up about. And on a work front, she might be a good secretary, but good secretaries were two a penny.
She looked at him calmly and then sat down on the chair facing him without a word.
It was only now, now that she had admitted her love for him to herself, that she realised how accustomed she had become to seeing him. For months she had watched him from a distance, storing up everything about him without even noticing that she was doing so. There was an awful lot that she would have to relegate to memory, and that filled her with a brief but painful sense of despair, but she kept her face blank, waiting for him to speak.
