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He was so very good-looking, so very sophisticated, so very charming... A charm that meant nothing—nothing at all, she reminded herself bitterly, ignoring the startled look of recognition from one of the other girls from the typing pool who was approaching the main doors to the hotel just as she stepped towards them.
‘Nicola? It is you, isn’t it? Heavens! Is that...is that a wig?’ she asked Nicola uncertainly.
‘No, it’s a perm,’ Nicola told her shortly.
She had never particularly liked Lisa. She was another blonde like Susan Hodges. Nicola’s chin tilted defiantly as she saw the way the other girl was studying her appearance. Her male companion was staring at her as well, Nicola recognised, and he was staring at her in a manner with which she was not familiar. It made her feel both uncomfortable and uneasy, but she ignored these feelings, concentrating instead on the cruelty of the words she had overheard earlier in the day.
The foyer of the hotel was busy with people coming and going. A board just to one side of the reception desk had written up on it which functions were taking place in which suites, and it was easy for Nicola to find her way to the suite where their own party was taking place.
In point of fact she was familiar with the layout of the hotel, having eaten there and attended several functions with her parents over the years.
The gloomy dimness of the room made her blink a little when she first entered it. Individual tables had been set up around the small dance-floor, and she quickly headed for one occupied by some of the other girls from the typing pool.
All of them commented on the change in her appearance, but only one of them was unkind enough to remark that she was surprised to see her turning up on her own.
‘I thought you’d be coming with Jonathon,’ she added pointedly.
Now Nicola was glad of the gloom. She turned her head away and shrugged her shoulders, feigning nonchalant uninterest.
But uninterest was the last thing she actually felt when Jonathon walked in with Susie on his arm.
The two of them seemed to take a long time to walk across the room. Jonathon never even looked in her direction, Nicola noticed dispiritedly, but Susie certainly did, her eyes widening a little as she took in Nicola’s altered appearance.
Let her stare, Nicola thought defiantly, giving her head a bitter little toss. Let them both stare...
She was determined that, before tonight was over, she was going to make Jonathon eat his words, although it was becoming increasingly obvious to her that if she was actually to achieve this objective what she really needed was to have some other man paying attention to her, making it plain that he did not consider her either dull or sexless... And not just any man... It would have to be a very special kind of man, the kind of man who—
Her eyes widened, her breath catching in her throat as she stared at the man who had just walked into the room.
Unlike the other male guests, who were all wearing formal suits, this man was dressed casually, his soft blue shirt open at the throat, his jeans clinging to his thighs.
‘Wow! Just look at that!’ one of the other girls at the table giggled appreciatively. ‘I wonder where he’s come from...’
‘Who knows? But one thing’s for sure... He won’t be staying long—not dressed like that.’
‘Wanna bet?’ another of the girls commented drily. ‘He just happens to be one of our most important clients. I knew he’d been invited, but I don’t think anyone actually thought he’d come...’
Behind her the girls were giggling and chattering excitedly about the newcomer’s good looks, but Nicola wasn’t paying very much attention.
A waiter came round with a tray of champagne cocktails. Although normally she didn’t drink, Nicola took one, and gulped thirstily at it.
The champagne tickled the back of her throat and made her cough a little, but the delicious warm feeling that spread through her stomach after she had emptied her glass was undeniably pleasant.
She felt better, too...stronger, more confident, more determined than ever to show Jonathon just how wrong he was about her.
That she also felt decidedly wobbly when she stood up to accept a second cocktail from another waiter was something she decided to ignore.
It was just nerves, she told herself firmly. Just nerves... After all, no one, not even someone who never drank, could get drunk on two champagne cocktails—could they?
One of the girls got up and announced that she was going to the bar. She asked Nicola what she wanted to drink and, unsure of what to ask for, Nicola quickly repeated the order given by the girl sitting next to her, although not entirely sure what a ‘VAT’ might be.
When the drinks arrived, the odd, oily after-taste of hers was a little strange, but nevertheless good manners made her empty her glass.
Jonathon and Susie weren’t sitting with his parents, she noticed woozily as she searched the room for them. Jonathon was in fact talking to the man in jeans while Susie simpered up to him, batting her eyelashes and smiling. He was, Nicola recognised dreamily, far, far better looking than Jonathon. He was also far, far more masculine than Jonathon, and a tiny, delicious tremor of sensation suddenly and very shockingly ran through her at the thought of being held against that hard, male chest, of being touched by those very male hands.
Without even thinking about what she was doing, she got to her feet, ignoring the muzzy, dizzying sensation in her head and the odd weakness in her legs.
She walked unsteadily across the floor, and as she approached their table she saw the way Susie clutched possessively at Jonathon’s arm, her eyes widening, her scarlet nails digging into his jacket.
Jonathon had seen her now. She saw the shock register in his eyes as he looked at her, and immediately a pleasurable rush of warmth and triumph ran through her stomach. She gave him a pouting smile...the kind of smile she had seen Susie use so often, and then she tossed her head, so that her wild mane of curls bounced everywhere. The motion of tossing her head had, she realised uncomfortably, made her feel rather sick.
‘Hi, Jonathon.’ She ignored Susie, closing the gap between Jonathon and herself so that she could look up into the jeans-clad stranger’s face. ‘Would you like to dance?’
She could see the shock in Jonathon’s face...hear the outrage in Susie’s gasp, but she didn’t care—why should she? She was going to show Jonathon just how wrong he was about her; she was going to show him that she was desirable, sexy...that men did want her.
The man was looking at her now, an extremely odd expression in his eyes. For a moment, as he studied her, they hardened and became so cold that she actually flinched, tears threatening to blur her own eyes as through the fog of alcohol and misery engulfing her she realised that, despite all her efforts, he did not find her attractive—that he was in fact going to reject her. She put a defensive hand up to her face, and started to move back from him, her cheeks flushing with guilt and humiliation. However, before she could move away his hands came out and circled her wrist, stopping her. She stared at it in confusion. She had never realised that it would be possible for a man to hold her so lightly and yet so securely. He wasn’t exerting the slightest bit of pressure on her skin, and yet she knew that if she tried to pull away those lean fingers would tighten around her bones like manacles.
Shocked awareness cleared the drink-induced fuzziness from her eyes as they focused on his and saw the relentless, determined glittering in their grey depths. Too stupefied to resist, she stayed where she was, bewilderment following shock as she wondered why she felt as though she had suddenly stepped off the edge of the earth.
Was it the champagne cocktails? She pressed her free hand to her stomach uneasily as she heard her captor saying coolly to Jonathon,
‘Please excuse us. It seems the lady wants to dance...’
Despite the fact that she could hear no trace of irony of emphasis in his voice, she still flushed at the sound of the word ‘lady’.
‘Ladies’ did not dress the way she was dressed tonight...they did not wear the kind of make-up she was wearing, and they certainly did not approach strange men and ask them to dance.
She half hesitated, nervously conscious of a tremor of doubt churning her stomach, of a desire to escape not just from her captor, but from the entire situation she had created, and then she looked at Jonathon and saw the transfixed way in which he was regarding her, and saw also in his eyes a look of mingled anger and caution. He was annoyed because she was dancing with someone else, she recognised immediately, and not only was he angry, he was also afraid of saying so—afraid of challenging this man standing at her side for the right to dance with her.
He was, she realised on a fierce thrill of awareness, if not jealous, then certainly resentful of the other man’s presence at her side.
It was working, she recognised shakily. It was actually working...her hair, her clothes, her make-up were not, after all, the disaster she had begun to think; they could not be, could they, if they were making Jonathon see her as a desirable woman—as someone he did not wish to see dancing with another man.
Elation filled her. She turned to her captor and gave him a dazzling smile. His eyes widened again before his glance flicked away from her to Jonathon and then back again.
‘See you soon,’ she heard him saying to Jonathon, and then, somehow or other, without her being too sure how it had happened, she was on the small dance-floor and in his arms, swaying against him in time to the slow, hypnotic beat of the music.
In fact the way he was holding her felt so comforting and safe, and the pleasant heat coming off his body made her feel so warm, that she was almost tempted to close her eyes and... She gave a small, cat-like yawn, and half stumbled as she missed a step. Instantly the arms holding her tightened.
‘I think the proper place for you right now is bed, not a dance-floor,’ she heard him saying in her ear.
Muzzily she lifted her head from his shoulder and stared at him. It had happened, she had been right. Men didn’t care about the sort of person you were...only how you looked. It had to be true, otherwise why was this man, who had never set eyes on her before tonight, telling her that he wanted to go to bed with her, when, in all the months she had been working in the typing pool, only Jonathon had even asked her out, and then he had not made any real sexual overtures to her? And she knew why. Because he thought her sexless and boring... Well, if he had just heard what he—this man—had said to her, he wouldn’t think so...
Triumph filled her blood with a warm, singing heat which, mixed with the alcohol she had consumed, had an electrifying effect on her perceptions and reactions.
Recklessly ignoring the inner voice warning her to be careful, she stopped dancing and looked up at him.
‘Well, if that’s what you want,’ she told him breathlessly, ‘and if you’re sure you don’t mind leaving so soon...’
‘Leaving?’
Nicola frowned at the sharpness in his tone, her eyes clouded and puzzled as she looked at him.
‘Do you live very far out of the city?’ she asked him politely. ‘Only I do have to be at work in the morning, and...’
‘Nicola, why don’t you come and join me and Susie...?’
Her frown deepened as she realised that the music had stopped and that Jonathon was standing next to them. She hadn’t even seen him leave his table, never mind walk across the floor. Without even knowing she was doing it, as he reached out to touch her she drew back from him, instinctively pressing herself closer to her companion.
Since she was looking at Jonathon, she was unaware of the quick frown that touched the other man’s face as he watched the small tableau being played out in front of him.
A drunken teenager, offering him her body, was the very last thing he wanted right now. And, for all her make-up and that impossible hair, she looked as though she was little more than a baby. If he left her here in her present state, though, he’d be leaving her to the mercy of Jonathon or another of his type. His mouth twisted cynically. She might be a little idiot, but she definitely didn’t deserve that.
‘Too late, I’m afraid, Jonathon,’ he interrupted smoothly. ‘I’m afraid that Nicki and I were just about to leave...’
Nicola gave him a startled glance. He had called her Nicki... Only her family and friends at home did that—and saying that they were leaving... There was no need now—not now that Jonathon was here and wanted her—but, before she could say anything, those lean fingers were gripping her arm, and somehow or other she discovered that she had been turned around and had her back to Jonathon, and that she was being escorted very firmly across the floor.
‘Do you have a coat?’ she was asked when they reached the door.
She shook her head in bemusement.
‘Pity...’ she thought she heard him saying wryly as he glanced down at her dress.
‘Jonathon,’ she protested huskily, trying to turn round.
‘Forget him. He’s not the one for you,’ she was told firmly. ‘Now come on, let’s get out of here.’
A tiny shock of fear ran through her. He was obviously impatient to make love to her... Her body suddenly went very cold. What was she doing leaving with this strange man? What if...?
But if she went back now without him, Jonathon would know that he was right—that she was dull, and—and boring...and sexless.
Her captor took her down to the underground car park, still holding on to her arm as he unlocked the door to a sleek Jaguar convertible, almost bundling her into it, and then fastening the seatbelt around her and closing the door before going round to the driver’s side and getting in beside her.
The car smelled luxuriously of leather, and something else—something alien and exciting. It took her several seconds to realise that the smell was him... When she did, she flushed and shivered, causing him to frown at her and demand,
‘Look here, you’re not going to be sick are you? Because if you are...’
She shook her head.
It was true that she did feel slightly queasy, and that her head did ache dreadfully, but she was most certainly not going to be sick. What she really wanted to do, she acknowledged, as he drove out of the car park and into the dark city streets, was to go to sleep.
No sooner had the thought formed than she was leaning her head back against the head-rest and closing her eyes.
‘Right, now, if you just tell me where you live...’
Silence. Matt frowned and turned his attention from the road to his passenger, his frown deepening as he recognised that she was deeply and completely asleep. That she was, in fact, sleeping like the child she was. How much had she had to drink? Enough to make her a danger both to herself and to others. If he had had any sense he would have left her where she was. Someone there would have made sure she got home safely; or would they?
He had an early flight in the morning, and she really was an additional problem he didn’t need. The trouble was, though, that he had an over-developed sense of responsibility. He suspected it came of having three younger sisters.
Grimacing to himself, he acknowledged that it really was too late to turn the car round and dump her back at the party, especially with a wolf like Jonathon Hendry cruising around. The easiest thing he could do would be to take her home with him, put her to bed in the spare bedroom, and then evict her first thing in the morning before he left for New York, when hopefully she would have sobered up enough to realise how potentially self-destructive her behaviour had been.
He made one more attempt to wake her up, knowing before he did so that he was wasting his time. It was true, she did open her eyes and focus vaguely on him, but they closed again before he could even say one word, and he could tell from the way her body slumped against him that she was already deeply asleep once again.
CHAPTER THREE
NICOLA opened her eyes and stared anxiously around the unfamiliar bedroom.
It was decorated in shades of grey and white, with a plain Roman blind at the window. The bed she was in was large, the bedding white and crisp, the duvet grey and white striped. She knew immediately that this was not a woman’s bedroom, and panic shot through her; she struggled to sit up and then gasped in fresh shock as she realised that all she was wearing was her briefs.
She had no idea where she was or why. The last thing she could remember was being at Jonathon’s father’s birthday party. She had been dancing with someone... Someone. Her body stiffened, frantic stabs of enlightening memory piercing the grey fog that covered the previous evening’s events.
She remembered drinking the champagne cocktails, seeing Jonathon with Susie... seeing him—
She groaned out loud and then shuddered. What on earth had she done? What had he, the strange man she had left the party with, done?
She shuddered again. She wasn’t that naïve. There could have been only one reason she was here in his bed this morning. The facts were self-evident.
There was a terrible wrench of nausea in the pit of her stomach, an ache in her head that made her feel as though someone had kicked it; and yet surprisingly there was nothing else—no unfamiliar aches, no real awareness that last night she had crossed the final frontier that separated the child from the woman...no memories of the man who had been her lover, other than those she had of the events preceding their departure from the party.
As she sat tensely in the middle of the large bed, trying to overcome both her physical nausea and her mental and emotional self-disgust, the bedroom door suddenly opened.
In the daylight he seemed even larger than she remembered. He had obviously just had a shower, because his hair was slicked back and still wet, his skin still showing faint traces of moisture. He had a towel wrapped around his hips. His body was hard and muscular, a shockingly masculine dark arrowing of hair bisecting his torso.
He was, she saw, carrying a mug of something hot, but as soon as he approached the bed she instinctively shrank back from him, clutching at the bedclothes and watching him with terrified eyes.
‘So you’re awake... Just as well since I have to leave in half an hour. I’ll drop you off on my way to the airport. I’ve brought you some tea. If you want any aspirin, there are some in the bathroom cabinet.’
He was so matter of fact, so casual... She could feel her own face starting to burn as he sat down on the edge of the bed and it depressed beneath his weight.
She could smell the sharp lemon freshness of his soap, see the smooth sheen of his jaw where he had just shaved. His skin looked firm and tanned, the sight of his body making her tremble and then shudder as she tried not to think about last night, about how he must have—
‘If you want to be sick...’
She shook her head, biting her bottom lip in an agony of self-mortification. He was so obviously used to this sort of thing, while she...
There was a mirror on the wall opposite the bed. She caught sight of their reflections in it. No wonder he had thought she might be going to be sick, her face looked so pale, an unpleasant shade of greeny-white. She frowned, suddenly realising something, her fingers touching her bare face.
As though he realised what she was thinking, he told her drily, ‘I washed it off.’
She went from white to red and shuddered, all too conscious of everything else he must have done while she had been too drunk to be aware of it.
Revulsion rose up inside her, not just for herself but for him as well.
How could he...how could any man make love to a woman while she virtually had no awareness of what was going on? But then, men weren’t like women...men were different, dangerous, and if she was honest with herself she had encouraged him to think—to believe...
She had started to tremble. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him reaching towards her. Immediately she arched her back to avoid him, her eyes betraying her feelings.
Matt frowned. Surely the little idiot didn’t actually think he had...? He wasn’t sure whether to give her a good telling off or burst out laughing. Did she really honestly think...? He remembered how small she had felt when he’d carried her in from the car...how trustingly she had snuggled up against him. How vulnerable she had felt when he stripped off that appalling dress and then her tights, before washing her face clean of her make-up and tucking her up in his spare room. He had, in fact, treated her as matter-of-factly as though she had been one of his sisters, and now she was looking at him as though he was a potential rapist.
