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He narrowed his grey eyes consideringly. ‘So you haven’t lived at home for—how long?’
‘Seven years. I’m twenty-five.’ She tried to inject a little enthusiasm into her voice, to act as if this was a gentle getting-to-know-you chat, instead of an interrogation by a master inquisitor—which was how it felt!
He put his glass down on the table and smiled, as if he had resolved to lighten the mood by changing the subject. ‘And have you always wanted to fly?’ he asked, his eyes never leaving her face.
Lola nodded. Flying had been her whole life, really—and her enthusiasm for it had never waned. ‘Always!’ she told him. ‘I had never even been on an aeroplane before—and yet I knew that I wanted to be an air stewardess right from the word go. I got the job with Atalanta at eighteen, and I’ve been with them ever since.’
He leaned back in his chair and watched as the waiter placed a plate of tossed green salad in front of her.
‘So what is life like,’ he asked casually, ‘as an air stewardess?’
Lola plunged her fork into a buttery wedge of avocado and scowled. ‘You don’t have to go through the motions of asking me these questions, you know,’ she told him defensively. ‘I mean, you must have dated stewardesses before—I’d hate to think that I was forcing you to sit through yet another rendition of “what I love about my job”!’
‘Now who’s being the cynic?’ he responded coolly. Some indefinable emotion hardened the gorgeous mouth. ‘I can assure you, Lola, that I have never been forced to do anything in my life.’
No, she couldn’t really imagine anyone having the strength of character to be able to browbeat Geraint Howell-Williams into doing something he didn’t want to!
She started on the predictably delicious wine he had ordered for her and allowed herself the luxury of looking directly into the black-fringed, stormy eyes. ‘Life as a stewardess is terrific,’ she told him. ‘I would recommend it to anyone for all the obvious reasons—namely the opportunity to see the world and meet lots of people.’
‘And in the long term?’
Lola blinked. ‘The long term?’ forty?’
‘Is it a job you can see yourself doing at forty?’
Lola looked at him blankly, trying to imagine herself trundling the drinks trolley up the aisle fifteen years on, and shuddered. ‘Well, no. Not really.’
‘So what do you see yourself doing at forty?’
Lola clammed up. For some reason it would be acutely embarrassing to tell him that at forty she would have hoped to have settled down with some wonderful man she had yet to meet, and be rearing lots of children! ‘I—er—haven’t given it a lot of thought,’ she answered weakly.
He threw her a hard, disbelieving look. ‘Really? Not planning to be safely tucked up in the marital bed by then? Don’t you want to be married, Lola?’
The fact that he had so accurately echoed her thoughts threw Lola completely. ‘Perhaps,’ she admitted proudly, refusing to be cowed by his rather patronising attitude. He was managing to make a desire to settle down and get married sound as bizarre as a wish to fly to the moon in a hot-air balloon! ‘Why not?’
‘Why not indeed?’ he responded faintly. ‘But so far no one has been able to tempt you away from your single, exciting, globe-trotting life?’ he probed.
‘No so far, no.’
‘But I imagine that there must have been some candidates along the way,’ he drawled suggestively.
It was not quite an insult, but it was as near as dammit, and Lola glared at him, her narrowed eyes sparking hot blue fire as she dared him to continue.
‘Candidates for what?’ she questioned slowly.
‘Marriage. Relationships. You must have known a good few men over the years—isn’t that one of the perks of the job?’
Lola put her wineglass down with a thud. ‘Are you trying to offend me, Geraint?’
‘By asking about your men-friends?’ He regarded her levelly, the flame from the flickering candle casting fascinating shadows over the chiselled bones of his face. ‘Now what could be offensive about that?’
She placed her knife and fork neatly on the plate, much of her salad untasted. ‘The implication being that I sleep around?’
He gave her a long, steady look and Lola curled her nails hard into the palms of her hands in a deliberate attempt to distract herself from the power of that gaze.
‘Well, that is what you were implying, isn’t it?’ she demanded.
‘You’re being very defensive,’ he murmured, and poured her some mineral water.
‘So what if I am?’ she retorted, drinking some of the water thirstily. And who wouldn’t be defensive, she thought wryly, when they’d had to cope with as many snide innuendos as she had that evening? ‘Anyway, I’ve talked far too much. Tell me some more about you.’
‘What else could you possibly want to know?’ he drawled.
‘You haven’t even told me what you do for a living!’ she realised aloud. ‘Or how you know the mysterious Dominic Dashwood.’
‘I deal in money,’ he told her curtly, his grey eyes as cold as an arctic sea. ‘Dominic I met during my time at Oxford.’
She remembered the small but significant pause after he had introduced himself at the tennis club. ‘And should I have heard of you?’
‘Not necessarily.’ He shrugged. ‘Only if you happen to read the financial pages—and then I’ve been in New York for the past ten years so it’s unlikely you’d have heard of me anyway. I’ve only just come back.’
‘And what brought you back?’
Another pause. ‘Family business,’ he said finally, his face hardening forbiddingly.
Lola took no notice. ‘So what does someone who deals in money actually do?’ she persisted.
His face grew even colder. ‘I buy and sell,’ he told her tersely. ‘That’s all.’
Lola registered the superb quality of the suit he wore. Clearly buying and selling, as he put it, was very lucrative indeed! ‘You make it sound so simple,’ she said slowly.
There wasn’t a flicker of emotion on his face as he watched her unconscious assessment of him. ‘I prefer not to make it sound anything at all,’ he told her flatly. ‘But you asked the question, as women inevitably do—’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Lola glared at him. ‘You asked me exactly what you wanted; what did I do that was so different?’
‘You homed straight in on the money side of it, didn’t you, sweetheart? Sometimes I really think it would save time if I produced a bank statement for women to peruse at their leisure!’
‘Oh, sor-ry!’ said Lola furiously. ‘I didn’t realise you were so touchy about money!’
‘When you’ve met as many women with dollar signs flashing in their eyes as I have,’ he mused with distaste, ‘then being touchy about it is inevitable.’ He gave a self-deprecating shrug of his shoulders, before he said, ‘Were your parents very rich, Lola?’
The deep, velvet undertone of his voice sent new shivers skating down Lola’s spine, but she could not quite decide whether it was excitement or fear which had caused them. ‘Why do you ask that?’ she queried.
His eyes glittered. ‘Isn’t it rather obvious? Your house on St Fiacre’s for one thing. How did you happen to come by a house like that on your salary?’
‘How do you think I came by it?’ she retaliated as she encountered the oh, so familiar judgemental expression on his face.
‘A man, I suppose?’
Lola met his gaze and read the condemnation there and didn’t care. How dared he judge her without even knowing her? ‘That’s right,’ she said steadily.
‘A rich man?’
She saw the censorious look which soured his expression and decided that she would like to sour it even more! ‘You’ve got it in one!’ She smiled and noticed his knuckles whiten as the bread stick he had picked up was reduced to dust by the inadvertent clenching of that strong fist.
‘A ve-ry rich man,’ she purred deliberately, and saw a muscle begin to work violently in his cheek. ‘Much richer than you, probably. Why, I expect he could buy you out a hundred times over, Geraint!’
He let the bread dust trickle out of his hand into the large, cut-glass ashtray, so that it looked like sand running through an egg-timer. His eyes were full of mocking amusement as they caught her in their cool gaze. ‘I doubt it,’ he contradicted her with soft confidence.
And Lola doubted it too; that was the trouble. She found herself wondering why she hadn’t stormed out of the restaurant, but one look at the lean, autocratic face in front of her reminded her that it was not easy to walk out on someone this gorgeous. She drank more wine in an effort to calm herself.
‘So what was it between you and your generous benefactor?’ he asked eventually. ‘The love-affair to rival all love-affairs?’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ she answered flatly, then sighed, wondering just how much to tell him. The trouble was that there was nothing much to tell—but nobody ever believed her! Lola had grown used to people who didn’t really know her drawing their own tacky conclusions! But for some reason that cold look of disapproval on the face of Geraint Howell-Williams was more than she could bear.
She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands to look at him earnestly. ‘I don’t really like talking about it,’ she admitted.
‘Oh?’
Lola glared at him. ‘Because nobody believes me, and because people tend to pre-judge me—they all seem to think that I’m some kind of amateur hooker who played for very high stakes—and won! A horrible, critical look comes over their faces—a bit like the expression you’re wearing now!’
‘Am I? Sorry.’ He lifted his shoulders in a gesture of appeal which had something of the little boy about it, and it stabbed at Lola’s soft heart.
‘Of course the other reason I don’t talk about it,’ she explained, her blue eyes glinting with mischief, ‘is because now that I own a prime piece of real estate I’m very wary of would-be fortune hunters.’
‘And do you put me in that category?’ he asked her softly.
She looked at him with a wry expression. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she snorted. ‘Fortune hunters don’t usually come kitted out in handmade Italian suits!’
‘Thank you,’ he said gravely, though Lola thought she detected a reciprocal glitter of humour lurking in the depths of his stormy eyes. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I?’
Lola went pink. ‘If you want.’
‘So why don’t you tell me all about the house?’ he suggested. ‘And let me judge for myself.’
What harm would the truth bring? Lola thought. Anything would be better than him believing that she had been Peter Featherstone’s lover. She began to pleat her napkin with fidgety fingers. ‘About three years ago, I first met Peter Featherstone on a flight to. Brussels—’
‘Did he have a woman with him?’ he demanded quickly.
Lola frowned at the interruption. ‘No.’
He nodded. ‘And so you got chatting—naturally?’
Lola gave him a long-suffering look. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, with sardonic emphasis. ‘We aren’t discouraged from chatting to passengers, you know. Do you have a problem with that, Geraint?’
His face was expressionless. ‘I guess not.’
‘Peter used to travel all over Europe quite regularly, and often I was among the cabin crew. And then one day, while we were chatting, quite by coincidence I discovered that he was on the board of a charity I’m involved with—’
‘Charity?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘You’re involved with a charity?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ exploded Lola. ‘Now who’s talking stereotypes? What’s the matter, Geraint—don’t I fit into your idea of the kind of person who does things for charity?’ She looked at him, and her mouth twitched. ‘No, on second thoughts don’t answer that!’
‘Which charity?’ He frowned.
‘Dream-makers,’ Lola told him, still gratified by the rather dazed expression which had not left his face since the mention of the word ‘charity’! ‘It’s for very sick children. We find out where they’d most like to go, or who they would most like to meet, and we try and arrange it for them. Peter owned a number of toy shops and factories in the south of England and he was a very generous benefactor.’
‘So what happened?’ he asked carefully. ‘Between you and Peter.’
‘Well, nothing—that’s the odd thing.’
‘No romance?’ he barked.
‘He was years older than me, for heaven’s sake! Over sixty—’
‘But an attractive man, all the same?’
Lola afforded him an icy look. ‘I honestly never thought of him in those terms. I only had dinner with him once or twice, after which for some inexplicable reason, he must have changed his will—leaving me the house. And then he died. Perhaps he knew just how sick he had become. Anyway, he suffered a fatal heart attack about a year ago.’ ‘That’s terrible,’ he said automatically.
It was strange, and Lola couldn’t quite put her finger on why, but she definitely got the feeling that her first impression of him this evening had been the right one, and that Geraint was only going through the motions of responding to what she was saying. It was as though his answers were conditioned, rather than genuine. Almost as if he was asking questions to which he already knew the answers . . . But how could he? They had only met for the first time last night.
‘Yes, it was terrible,’ she agreed slowly, but more out of respect than out of sorrow—she had not known Peter Featherstone either long enough or well enough to feel any deep grief at his passing.
There was silence for a moment while he studied her face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually, but there was a strained, indefinable note to his voice. ‘That he died, I mean.’
‘You don’t sound particularly sorry.’
‘Don’t I? Maybe that’s because I’m jealous.’
Jealous?
Lola despised herself for the longing that his flippant little remark produced. Even after all the nasty slurs he had directed at her, too! Would nothing keep her from coming back for more? She put on her most bemused voice. ‘But you barely know me, Geraint. So why on earth would you be jealous?’
He lowered his voice to a sultry whisper. ‘Because I’d like to know what spells you could possibly weave and cast on a sixty-year-old man to make him leave you a house worth a million pounds. You must be pure dynamite in bed, Lola.’
For a moment, she thought that she had not heard him correctly, and then the full horror of his words hit her like a kick in the teeth. Lola slammed her glass down on the table and stared at him.
‘What right,’ she whispered incredulously, ‘what right do you think you have to say a thing like that to me? And after all I’ve said! And after convincing myself that you were the kind of person who could be trusted to hear the whole story! Well, more fool me!’ She leaned across the table, and her eyes spat sapphire fire at him. ‘Do you think that buying a woman dinner gives you carte blanche to make boorish remarks?’ She pushed her chair back and got to her feet. ‘Well? Do you?’ she repeated shrilly.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked her calmly.
Lola nearly exploded with rage. ‘I don’t think I’m going anywhere! I am going! Back to my hotel! Where else? Because if you imagine that I would spend another minute in your company after what you’ve just said to me, then you haven’t an ounce of perception in your body!’
‘And if I happen to apologise for my boorish remarks—as you so sweetly put it?’
‘Oh!’ Lola exclaimed exasperatedly, not caring that the diners around them were steadily growing silent as they observed a very un-English display of public passion. ‘Isn’t that just like a man?’
‘It is?’
