Dangerous Interloper

She stayed in the Ladies for as long as she could, praying that when she rejoined the others he and his wife would have left them.

When she eventually walked back into the bar, she was relieved to see that her father was in discussion with the president of the club and his wife; and that there was no sign of Ralph and Susan.

As Miranda rejoined them, Helen murmured sadly to her, ‘Poor Susan; I don’t know how on earth she puts up with that lout Ralph. I’m sorry if he embarrassed you, Miranda.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Miranda told her, adding, ‘I can’t understand why Susan stays with him either, but, then, I suppose with three children …’

‘Well, yes, although she claims that she does love him.’ She gave a faint sigh. ‘Poor girl; I have a horrid feeling that sooner or later he’s going to leave her, and that it will probably be sooner.’

THROUGHOUT THE meal Ben Frobisher conversed mainly with her father. He had made several attempts to draw Miranda into their conversation, but she had resolutely refused to respond with anything more than cool politeness. The man had charm, she had to give him that, she admitted reluctantly to herself, but she wasn’t going to be swayed by it.

Even so, she discovered that she was listening rather more intently than she would have wished when Helen questioned about his background and family.

She was surprised to discover that he was one of four children—somehow she had imagined him being an only one—and that the other three were all married with young families, something which made him the butt of a great deal of family teasing.

‘You don’t approve of marriage, then?’ Helen hazarded, smiling at him.

He laughed. He had a nice laugh, Miranda acknowledged; it was both warm and spontaneous, crinkling his eyes at the corners and doing the most peculiar things to her insides.

‘Quite the contrary,’ he assured Helen, obviously not minding her questions.

‘But I do believe that it’s a lifetime’s commitment and that as such it’s something one needs to be very sure about. A marriage that is going to endure can’t be based on mere sexual attraction, no matter how strong that attraction initially appears,’ he said bluntly. ‘That’s not to say that it isn’t an important part of any marriage, but it can never be the total sum of an enduring relationship. I suppose the truth is that as yet I still haven’t met the woman I know I won’t be able to live without.’

Helen laughed and teased him, ‘I do believe you’re a romantic!’

‘Aren’t most of us at heart?’

A computer expert who claimed to be romantic. Wasn’t that a complete contradiction?

‘Are you a romantic, Miranda?’

She stared at him, and felt her skin starting to flush. His question had caught her off guard. She had been listening to the conversation and yet had considered herself safely outside it. Now she wondered if he hadn’t thrown the question at her because he wanted to embarrass her, rather than through any desire to know what motivated her.

‘Miranda, romantic?’ her father snorted, answering the question for her. ‘Miranda is one of your modern breed of women who scorns such old-fashioned notions. She prides herself on being independent and self-sufficient.’

Miranda knew that her father was really only teasing her, but for some reason his words hurt her, drawing a picture of her which her emotions instantly rejected as she viewed the cold, emotionless creature his words had created. She wasn’t really like that, was she?

It was true that she was independent, but that was because … because … because what? Because she had wanted to give her father his freedom … his right to have a life of his own, the kind of life he might not have felt free to have with an adult daughter still living under his roof.

Well, maybe her motivation hadn’t been quite so altruistic, and certainly she enjoyed her work, but, if she was truly the woman her father seemed to think, wouldn’t she have long ago left this small market town behind her and headed out into a much wider and harsher world?

‘Jeffrey, honestly, that’s not true,’ Helen intervened. ‘Don’t listen to him, Ben,’ she exhorted. ‘Miranda might try to hide it, but in reality she’s one of the most tender-hearted people you could ever wish to meet, although I know she hates admitting it. I suspect she’s rather afraid of letting people see how tender-hearted she actually is in case it makes her too vulnerable.’

Miranda was horrified. Much as she had disliked her father’s jocular misrepresentation of her as a hard-headed determined woman with no room in her life for time-wasting emotions, it had been preferable to Helen’s far too accurate portrait of her.

She knew that Ben Frobisher was looking at her, but she could not bring herself to return his look with anything like the composure that doing so required.

‘No one likes to appear too vulnerable,’ she could hear him saying, but, although the words were addressed to Helen, she could sense that he was still watching her.

Her appetite had deserted her completely. She pushed the food around on her plate, longing for the evening to be over. She had been right; the only thing she had not guessed was the true intensity of the evening’s awfulness.

She was glad when her father started to ask Ben about his plans for relocating his business to the town, and was both surprised and rather chagrined to learn that, while he would be bringing some key people down with him from London, he was hoping to recruit the majority of his employees locally.

‘It’s the kind of business that requires young sharp minds,’ he told them all. ‘At a recent convention, the majority of those attending were under thirty, and a good percentage were under twenty. At the moment we hold a good place in the market because we’ve been able to specialise in a profitable area, but we can only hold on to that advantage if we remain in the forefront of new advances, and in order to do that we need keen, innovative minds.’

‘What will happen to your existing employees?’ Miranda asked him.

‘Most of them have already found new jobs. There’s no shortage of demand for trained people in and around London, and, of course, they’re all getting redundancy payments. In fact, none of them actually wanted to relocate with us. They’re all under thirty, with established lifestyles in London, most of them are unmarried, and the thought of moving out to a quiet market town didn’t have much appeal for them.’

‘But it did for you?’

Miranda had no idea why she was questioning him … talking to him. If she had any sense she would simply sit here in silence, having as little to do with him as possible.

‘I’m not under thirty. The pace of London life doesn’t have much appeal for me any more. I wanted a home … not a glossy London flat that’s antiseptic and arid. I’ve always liked this part of the world. My parents lived near Bath for a while when I was in my teens. They’ve moved north now. My father comes from the Borders and wanted to go back there when he retired.’

‘Which reminds me,’ her father interrupted. ‘I’ve got the details of some houses for you. You did say you’d prefer something outside the town?’

‘Yes, I do.’

While the two men discussed the various properties available, Helen commented to Miranda that she would be glad when all the fuss of the wedding was over.

Everyone had finished eating, coffee had been served, and the moment Miranda had been privately dreading had arrived.

The lights had been dimmed, the small band had started playing and couples were gradually filling the dance floor.

She prayed that Ben would not out of politeness ask her to dance. The very last thing she wanted was to be held in his arms. And yet, what had she to fear? She had already convinced herself that, no matter how physically attractive she had originally found him, that attraction had vanished once she knew who and what he was, and, that being the case, what had she to fear from dancing with him? Nothing; nothing at all, and anyway, why was she inviting problems that might not occur? In all probability he wasn’t even going to invite her to dance with him.

CHAPTER THREE

‘WOULD you like to dance?’

Miranda tensed. How could she refuse?

‘Er—thank you.’

Unsteadily she stood up and allowed Ben Frobisher to guide her towards the dance floor.

‘I’m sorry if this evening has rather lumbered you with me,’ he apologised to her. ‘When your father asked me to join him this evening, I thought it might be a good way of getting to know a few people.’

Miranda tried not to think about the effect his proximity was having on her. Treat him just like any other client you’ve had to entertain, she exhorted herself, but she knew already that that was impossible.

The band was playing a waltz, and her body tensed involuntarily as Ben took her in his arms.

‘It’s hard to believe that the waltz was once banned for being decadent, isn’t it?’ she said breathlessly as she fought to dismiss the sensations invoked by his touch, sensations which were making her feel as nervous and ill at ease as a teenager. Thank goodness it was impossible for him to know just how he was affecting her!

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he responded thoughtfully, ‘when you bear in mind that it was the first time that men and women had actually danced exclusively with one partner and the opportunities it affords for body contact. And even these days it isn’t exactly unknown for couples to take advantage of the intimacy allowed in dancing together to reinforce their desire for one another.’

She couldn’t help it—her skin went hot as her mind treacherously conjured up a mental image of the two of them swaying intimately together, dancing body to body, his arms wrapped around her so that she was aware of every movement of his muscles, every breath he took, every small reaction of his flesh to hers … She trembled uncontrollably, causing him to frown down at her and enquire in concern, ‘Are you cold?’

‘Yes. Just a little,’ she lied. It wasn’t true; if anything she was too hot, but she could hardly admit to him just what had caused that sensual frisson of sensation to galvanise her body.

As she matched her steps to his she had an appalling urge to move nearer to him, to close the gap between their bodies and to …

Desperately she shut her eyes, trying to suppress the illicit wash of sensation that rushed through her, but the darkness only made things worse, only increased her sensual awareness of him to the pitch where she was as intimately aware of the heat and scent of him as though they were in fact established lovers.

That shook her more than anything else—that ready acceptance of her senses to acknowledge her physical responsiveness to him.

That was the trouble with being a daydreamer, with having a far too vivid imagination, she told herself bitterly. It led you into all sorts of dangerous assumptions.

For example, if she hadn’t given in this afternoon to her own idiotic and wanton impulse to tamper with the actual reality of her earlier brief meeting with him, transforming it into some kind of impossible erotic encounter, she would not be suffering the humiliation and discomfort of trying to subdue her body’s physical response to him right now.

Thank God that as yet no one had developed any means of correctly reading the human mind. The very last thing she could have endured would have been the ignominy of knowing that he had guessed what was happening to her.

She tried to convince herself that in these days of equality it was no more shameful to her as a woman that she should be so physically affected by a man she hardly knew, and who had definitely not given her any encouragement to feel that desire, than had their positions been reversed, but it didn’t work.

She was obviously a good deal more gender-orientated than she had supposed, she reflected wryly.

‘Your father was telling me that you live out at Gallows Reach.’

The soft-voiced comment made her stiffen slightly before admitting, ‘Yes, I have a cottage out there.’

‘You don’t find it too remote?’

‘Not really. Perhaps if I weren’t mixing with so many people during the day I might find it too isolated, but as it is …’

‘Mmm. I know what you mean. I must say, I’m enjoying the solitude of the place I’m renting. I thought it would be a good idea to see how I took to living somewhere so remote before I actually took the plunge and bought a property.’

‘And how are you finding it?’ Miranda asked him curiously.

‘Interesting,’ he told her promptly. ‘Something of a voyage of self-discovery, in fact. It’s rather a long time since I’ve spent so much time on my own.’

Miranda tensed again. Did that mean that, despite the fact that he wasn’t married, there was or had been someone important in his life? But his next words disproved this theory, as he added, ‘In London I had an apartment at the top of the building which housed our office. Not an ideal situation because it meant that I was virtually spending twenty-four hours a day with my work. In the beginning when we first set up in business that was necessary, but recently I’ve began to find that my whole life seems to revolve around the company.’

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