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‘Someone lurking in the background?’ Maude squeaked, genuinely confused at this tangent. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Undesirable...? Ex-con...? Married father of four...?’ He did a casual sweep of his surroundings with his eyes and then lasered them right back to her flustered face. ‘Coming from a middle-class background as you do, that’s the sort of thing you might find handy to keep under wraps...although, as they say, the truth will out sooner or later.’
She blushed like a virgin. In the semi-darkness, he noted her nervous swallowing, her wide, alarmed eyes, her breasts heaving as though she’d run a marathon.
The dress was by no means revealing, and yet he was finding it very effective when it came to stirring his imagination.
What was happening here?
Accustomed to exercising complete control over his responses to anyone and anything at all times, Mateo was disconcerted by his own wayward reaction.
Yet...wasn’t there a novelty here that was oddly invigorating? When was the last time he’d been confronted by the unexpected? The tough bit of his life was over. The hunger and the searing ambition that had propelled him from nothing to everything had faded. He had the world at his fingertips now. Hardship had been the whip driving him forward and he had got everything he’d ever wanted—money, power...and everything that came with it.
Mateo had grown up witnessing his father in a never-ending cycle of trying to make ends meet. He had lacked a mother figure to put a perspective on things, to comfort him, because his father had never found anyone else. He was tough, had had to be, but on the way things had been sacrificed. He now had the world at his feet but this...this feeling of seeing things through different eyes...hadn’t happened for a long, long time.
He was here for a couple of hours more. Why not relax and go with the flow until he left? He would never allow himself to get into any situation he couldn’t control, so there was no need for any kind of alarm bells to start going off.
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘My sincere apologies if I’ve offended you.’
‘Really?’
‘Have I offended you?’
‘You...you’ve jumped to all sort of ridiculous assumptions! Of course there’s no one undesirable lurking in the background!’
‘Perhaps you have no interest in men?’
‘Yes, I happen to beveryinterested in men!’ Maude spluttered. ‘I don’t have a boyfriend because...because...’
‘Tell me. Why? I’m curious.’
‘Because I’m not the sort that guys go for!’
Maude covered her mouth with her hand and looked at him with horror, because her own outburst had taken her by surprise.
Confession good for the soul? Since when? What had possessed her to say what she’d just said? It was something deep and fragile inside her that she’d always kept to herself, a little kernel of truth that lay at the very heart of her.
‘What I mean...’ She rushed into speech. Right then, if the ground had opened up beneath her feet, she would happily have helped matters along by jumping in. ‘Is that I’ve always been quite a bookish sort and I’ve discovered, growing up...’
She licked her lips and dragged her eyes away from his dark, interested gaze to stare at something and nothing in the far corner of the garden, where the mellow lighting receded into darkness. Her heart was thumping hard and her mouth had gone dry. Her desperate attempts to explain what she’d just stupidly come out with tapered off into silence. Her eyes skittered across to his face to find him staring at her seriously.
The noise of everyone at the party having fun had receded. Of course, no one would question them being here, closeted away on their own because they were supposed to be a loved-up couple desperate for time out after hours of doing the rounds. Hopes of being saved by a nosy guest were therefore dashed before they’d even begun to take shape.
‘Because you’re too bookish?’ Mateo queried quietly. ‘Since when is intelligence a turn-off? Because you’re tall? Many would find that striking. Maybe you’ve spent a lifetime living in your mother’s shadow, but I don’t get the impression that she would ever have made you feel so self-conscious that you ended up keeping men at arm’s length.’
‘I don’t want to talk about this.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because none of this... This isn’tme. I... I work for you...’
‘Let’s say that this is an unusual situation,’ Mateo murmured, ‘So the normal rules of engagement are put on hold.’
He was intrigued. He wanted to hear her story. It was unusual for him, because he was usually immune to back stories, or indeed any kind of touchy-feely stuff that could take him to places he had no interest in exploring. But he was finding that he just couldn’t fight the curiosity tearing through him. In many ways, she was proving to be the mostnaturalwoman he had ever met.
Had he become jaded over the years?
