Unguarded Moment

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Liam Brant said courteously, ‘Good evening, Miss Coulter. We meet again.’

Alix felt the smile freeze into something like a grimace. Without stopping to think, she said hotly, ‘You wouldn’t be following me, by any chance?’

His brows lifted. ‘You flatter yourself, secretary bird. As it happens, I often eat here. The food is good and the service is quick. I hope that reassures you.’

It wasn’t particularly reassuring to know that she’d just made a fool of herself, so Alix remained silent, staring down at the checked gingham tablecloth.

‘And what are you doing out of your gilded cage?’ the infuriating voice went on.

‘I was hoping to enjoy myself,’ Alix said coolly.

‘Until I showed up,’ he supplied.

She shrugged. ‘You said it—I didn’t.’

‘You didn’t have to. Has no one ever told you that your face is the mirror to your thoughts?’ To Alix’s annoyance, he drew out the chair opposite and sat down.

Stiffening, she said, ‘I don’t remember inviting you to join me.’

‘There’s nothing the matter with your memory—you didn’t,’ he returned. To the waiter who had just brought Alix’s Cinzano, he said, ‘A whisky and water, please. And we’ll both have lasagne.’

Alix’s fingers curled like claws round her glass. In a voice almost molten with rage, she said, ‘I did not intend to order lasagne.’

‘Then you should. It’s particularly good here. Or do you always play safe with steak or scampi wherever you happen to dine?’

‘Of course not,’ she began, then compressed her lips angrily. She was not going to be drawn into a discussion of her eating habits. ‘What I’m trying to say is that I’m perfectly capable of making my own choice from the menu, and I’d prefer to eat alone.’

‘Is it a preference you often indulge?’

She had expected him to leave, but he showed no signs of moving. And now the waiter was bringing his drink, a basket of freshly baked rolls, and a carafe of house wine. She could have screamed.

‘Well, why don’t you?’ he said.

‘Why don’t I what?’

‘Swear at me—throw your drink in my face—storm out. Whatever hostile fantasy you’re harbouring. I told you that you were transparent. Why don’t you follow the family tradition and go into films? You’d probably make your fortune.’

‘Because I’m quite content as I am, thanks.’ Alix made her face and voice impassive. Transparent, she thought, simmering inwardly.

‘That’s a dull thing to be at your age. And I don’t believe you.’ He lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to the other Alix Coulter, and may she soon stand up.’

‘There is no other.’ Alix did not respond to the toast, or drink from her own glass. She was afraid she might choke.

‘Oh?’ He gave her a long speculative look which covered the pinned-back hair, and the muted neutral colours of dress, trench coat and bag. ‘Then the girl I glimpsed on the stairs today was someone else—or a mirage, was she?’

Alix had forgotten the glimpse he had caught of her. She felt the colour rise in her face, and knew angrily that he had noticed it too and was faintly amused by it.

She said between her teeth, ‘Mr Brant, I came here for a quiet meal, not to be interviewed. I’m not interested in being copy for your next book any more than my—than Bianca is.’

He said softly, ‘I’ve no intention of writing a book about you, darling. Your cumulative experience of life could undoubtedly be covered in a short article, probably for a parish magazine. My questions are prompted by a normal male curiosity about why an attractive young woman insists on dragging about the place like a facsimile of Little Orphan Annie. I assume it is deliberate.’

‘I’m a working girl, Mr Brant, not some kind of starlet. Does that satisfy your curiosity?’

‘It doesn’t satisfy anything about me.’ His eyes never left her face. ‘You’re a walking intrigue, Miss Coulter. I shall look forward to solving your particular mystery over the next few weeks. What was that wrongly buttoned dress—a Freudian slip?’

‘I had to change in a hurry.’ Alix heard a sudden breathless note creep into her voice. He was right about there being nothing the matter with her memory—she could remember the details of that little incident only too well.

‘So did Cinderella when the clock struck midnight. Do you have some private timing device to tell you when the ball is over?’

‘I really don’t know what all the fuss is about,’ Alix said with a hint of desperation. ‘Just because I prefer to dress in a—in a businesslike way during working hours …’

‘Another of these famous preferences of yours—you prefer to dress badly—you prefer to eat alone. Or are either of those choices, in fact, yours?’

‘What do you mean?’ Alix was stung. ‘I don’t dress badly. How dare you!’

‘I dare quite easily. That dress you’re wearing, for example—the style doesn’t flatter your figure, and the colour does nothing for you at all.’

‘Are you an expert on women’s clothes as well as character assassination, Mr Brant?’

‘I have a certain amount of expertise in a number of things,’ he drawled with a sudden sideways grin, and she felt that betraying blush flood her cheeks again, as shaken as if his hand had brushed her skin, or his mouth touched hers …

The waiter bustled up with the dishes of lasagne, and she thought she had never been so glad to see anyone in her life. Not that she felt like eating. On the contrary, any appetite she had had was destroyed, although she had to admit that the smell of meat and spices emanating from the dish in front of her was a beguiling one.

‘You’re staring at it as if you think it might leap out of the dish and bite you instead.’ Liam Brant sounded amused. ‘I promise you it won’t. Nor does it contain a secret drug which will put you in my power. Here,’ he took the fork from her unresisting fingers, and scooped up a portion, offering it to her as if she had been a child, ‘try it and see.’

She didn’t want to take the food from him. She could see the couple at the next table exchanging indulgent glances.

She thought hysterically, ‘They must think we’re lovers. This is the sort of game lovers play—feeding each other with titbits at candlelit tables. I ought to tell them the truth—that I don’t trust him, that I could even hate him. And yet at the same time that it would be easy—so easy to be in his power. And it wouldn’t need secret drugs.’

She bent her head and ate the proffered forkful in silence.

‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ His voice was still amused.

‘No, you were right. The food here is delicious.’ She sounded cool and composed, and she was proud of herself. ‘Now, if I could have my fork, I did learn to feed myself as a child.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But what else have you learned since?’

Alix took another gulp of wine. How nice it must be to have an answer for everything, she thought sourly. No doubt when she was in bed later, trying to sleep, she would think of a dozen coruscating remarks with which she could have put him down permanently.

Oh, please let me wake up tomorrow and find the past twenty-four hours has all been a bad dream, she appealed silently to whatever benevolent deity might be listening, but without a great deal of hope.

She tried to make herself relax and enjoy her food, because if she obeyed her instinct and pushed her plate away almost untouched, he would probably guess that he was disturbing her and be amused.

‘What did you eat the last time you came here?’ he asked.

She put down her fork and stared at him. ‘The last time?’

‘With Peter Barnet,’ he said. ‘It was you.’ A statement, not a question.

Alix moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘I—I forget.’

‘Clearly a memorable meal,’ he said softly. ‘Have you seen him lately?’

‘As you appear to know my every move,’ she said clearly, ‘you tell me.’

‘No, you haven’t.’ He leaned back in his chair, dark eyes watchful under hooded lids. ‘Tell me, does Bianca Layton choose your clothes and hairstyle?’

‘So that’s it!’ Alix gave a little artificial laugh. ‘Not very clever, Mr Brant. What exactly are you probing for—some evidence of discontent? You won’t find it. If you’re trying to goad me into saying something about Bianca which you can interpret as disloyalty, then you’re wasting your time. We have a very close relationship, and I’m grateful to her for all the opportunities I’ve had since I’ve been working for her. I’m sorry if my dress sense doesn’t meet with your approval, but you sought my company, remember. I didn’t seek yours.’

‘Quite a speech,’ he said drily. ‘Didn’t Shakespeare say something about protesting too much?’

‘He may well have done,’ she said. ‘But I can assure you it doesn’t apply in this case.’

He smiled lightly. ‘As you wish. Now eat your food.’

‘My appetite seems to have deserted me.’

‘You’re far too sensitive,’ he remarked. ‘Not a desirable attribute for anyone attached to the Layton ménage, I would have thought.’

‘If you disapprove of Bianca so strongly, why do you want to write about her? I thought biographers were supposed to be objective.’

‘Who told you that?’ he queried. ‘I want to write about her because she’s a great star, if not a great actress, and I’m interested in analysing the elements which come together to make such a being.’

‘As you did with Kristen Wallace?’

‘Right,’ he agreed.

‘Then you’ll understand why I won’t want you within a mile of Bianca.’ She met his gaze fully, her own eyes blazing.

‘The lamb leaps to protect the tigress,’ he mocked. ‘Calm down, Miss Coulter. There’s no need for all this defensiveness, unless you already know that your idol has feet of clay. My researches may well reveal that under that highly lacquered exterior beats a heart of pure gold. I could always ask Peter Barnet’s opinion.’

‘Ask who you damned well like,’ Alix said fiercely. ‘But I’m telling you now, you’ll get no co-operation from me, or from anyone else who works for Miss Layton. If you insist on writing this book, it will be an unauthorised biography, written without credibility, a rehash of everything that’s been said before, with an additional helping of your own scurrilous brand of speculation, I have no doubt. Just don’t expect any help.’

‘What would you say,’ he said softly, ‘if I told you that you’d already helped more than you knew? Your lasagne must be stone cold by now. Would you like something else? Coffee, perhaps, and a brandy. You look as if you need it.’

‘I don’t want anything from you,’ Alix said fiercely. She snatched up her handbag. ‘If you’ll tell me what my share of the bill is, I’ll be going.’

‘There’s no hurry.’ The dark face was smooth and enigmatic as he watched her. ‘The curtain doesn’t go up for at least half an hour.’

‘For once your Sherlock Holmes instinct has played you false,’ she said between her teeth. ‘I’m not going to the theatre. There are no seats left for the play I wanted to see.’

‘There are, if you’re talking about the show at the Galaxy. I was intending to go there myself tonight, but something’s come up, so if you want one of my tickets you can have it.’

Alix stiffened. ‘No, thank you.’

He smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to entrap you into spending the remainder of the evening with me.’ He produced a slip of yellow paper from his wallet and put it on the table between them. ‘It’s a ticket for a play you want to see, that’s all.’

‘I want nothing from you,’ snapped Alix on a little flare of temper.

‘As you wish.’ He shrugged slightly, then crumpled the ticket into a ball and tossed it into the empty ashtray. ‘Have a pleasant evening.’ He pushed back his chair and rose.

She said without looking at him, ‘Goodbye, Mr Brant.’ That was the second time she’d said that today, she thought wildly. Not that it had made any difference. And didn’t people say that everything came in threes?

It made her skin crawl to think that she had sat in this very restaurant with Peter, being watched. She had laughed and talked and given herself away a hundred times, and all the time Liam Brant had been there taking note. And he knew why she was no longer seeing Peter too. That was quite obvious.

She was aware that the waiter was at her side, exclaiming in concern about her half-filled plate, asking her anxiously if the meal had been all right. She tried to assure him that everything had been fine, and that she had just not been hungry, refusing his offers of a dessert and coffee.

‘If I could just have the bill, please.’

He looked mystified. ‘The bill, signorina? But it has already been paid.’ Mournfully he collected the plates and took them away, leaving Alix staring after him, her mouth set in fury.

Of course the bill had been paid, she thought angrily. Another barb in her flesh, a deliberate ploy to make her beholden to him even in a small way, like that damned theatre ticket.

How unfair it was that he should have a seat that he wasn’t going to use for the play that she was dying to see. He must have seen her leaving the box office, she thought broodingly. Seen her and drawn his own conclusions.

She looked longingly at the little crumpled ball in the ashtray. What an awful waste it seemed. And as far as Liam Brant was concerned, that was the end of the matter. As soon as the table was cleared, the ticket would be thrown away, or so he thought. And it was only crumpled, not torn. If she was to use it, no one would be any the wiser.

Despising herself, she reached for the small yellow ball and smoothed the ticket out with fingers that shook a little. There was a war going on in her head, one part of her mind arguing fiercely that if she used the ticket, he would never know, and the other warning her that she should tear the ticket into tiny fragments rather than accept the slightest favour at his hands.

But what was the alternative? A quiet evening at home, unpacking and inevitably thinking about the problems the day had thrown up at her. It all seemed curiously unappealing.

She looked down at the ticket and told herself silently, ‘He’ll never know.’

The critics and theatregoers had been right; the cast and production thoroughly deserved the superlatives that had been heaped upon them.

In fact the only thing to mar Alix’s contentment was the second empty seat beside her. She had spent most of the first act in agony waiting for him to join her, preparing herself for the barbed comment, wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to leave herself, before it happened.

But it didn’t happen. Even after the interval the seat remained unoccupied, and she was able to relax and give herself over to the untrammelled enjoyment of the evening.

All the same, she couldn’t help wondering exactly what had come up to prevent him seeing the play himself, and exactly who the second seat had been intended for. A woman undoubtedly, she thought, and attractive. His views on that were more than clear. An actress, maybe or a model, or perhaps a ‘media person’. Someone glamorous, so that other people would look and look again, approving his choice and envying him.

She had a sudden disturbing inner image of his face, the cool dark eyes under the hooded lids, the thin high-bridged nose, and the sensuous curve of his lower lip. A man to whom women would matter. A man who would demand physical beauty, a physical response, she thought, remembering with a shiver the frank appraisal in his eyes, and the unwelcome brush of his fingers against her flesh.

That was something, she told herself, that she did not need to remember. She had managed to blot Peter Barnet and his defection out of her mind successfully. He wasn’t even a dull ache any more, and she found it hard to recall anything about him except that he had been easy to talk to—but then he was a journalist, so he was probably professionally a good listener, she acknowledged wryly.

Yet she had never felt the same necessity to be on her guard with Peter as she did with Liam Brant.

When the final curtain call had been taken, and she rose and mingled with the laughing, chattering throng making their way towards the exits, Alix caught herself wondering whether she was the only person in the theatre to have watched the play alone. Everyone else around her seemed to be one of a couple, or part of a group, and she was aware of a lonely feeling deep inside.

Oh, come on, she addressed herself roughly, you’ve no need to feel sorry for yourself. You have a terrific life, and if this was the kind of outing you planned in advance, then you needn’t have been alone.

She didn’t usually feel so much like an outsider. It was the events of the day which had started her thoughts off in such a depressing train, she thought.