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She let her hands fall away and shook her head. ‘I earn every penny I make. Especially today.’
‘What’s happened to make this a bad day?’
‘You…well, not just you,’ she added with a self-condemnatory grimace. ‘And I don’t mean you personally, it’s just I didn’t like leaving the staff to struggle. I’ve been putting in lots of extra hours this week to cover for sickness.’
‘And what happens if you get sick?’
‘Oh, I never get sick.’
Her solemn conviction struck him as funny. She must have picked up on his amusement because she added defensively. ‘I can’t remember the last time I was ill.’
‘Aren’t you afraid of tempting fate?’
Scarlet suspected he was making fun of her. ‘I’m not superstitious,’ she told him her expression contemptuous.
‘You’ve never pinched spilt salt over your shoulder, or counted magpies in a field, or crossed your fingers for luck?’
She shook her head. ‘Of course not. Don’t you believe me?’
‘I think everyone’s superstitious deep down; it’s human nature.’
This point of view amazed her. ‘You’re superstitious?’ she asked incredulously.
‘My father’s Irish, my mother’s Italian—the odds were stacked.’ His broad shoulders lifted. ‘What choice do I have?’
‘Well, I’m not superstitious, but I am really glad that your mother is better.’
‘But you’ve somewhere else you need to be,’ he completed smoothly.
It would be overstating it to call the glint in his eyes annoyance, but…! She probably was making the fact she couldn’t stick being in his company a bit obvious.
‘That’s very understanding of you, Mr O’Hagan.’
‘Perhaps we could continue our discussion over lunch?’
Scarlet heard his voice through a faint buzz in her ears as she tried to contemplate what he’d just said.
‘Lunch…?’ she parroted vaguely.
Best to look on this as a reflex—her hormones had gone into primitive autopilot mode and were acting independently of her brain. Hence the weakness in her legs, the warm heat thrumming through her body and the painful spasms knotting her stomach. He was an attractive man, end of story, no need to complicate it further.
‘Bring your son, by all means.’
‘Discussion?’ There seemed to be a time delay in her ability to translate what he was saying. ‘We weren’t having a discussion.’ Her straight brows arranged themselves in an interrogative line. ‘Lunch!’
There’s no such thing as a free lunch!
‘Good God, no!’
His eyes widened fractionally, but other than that nothing in his manner revealed his reaction to her response. It wasn’t that he was conceited, but a lifetime of being pursued and flattered by women had left Roman ill prepared to have an invitation of lunch rejected in an attitude of blatant revulsion.
‘Well, I know where to come if I need my ego deflated.’
Belatedly Scarlet recalled her promise to David. She tried to soften her blunt reply.
‘That is…it’s very kind of you to offer,’ she added, even though every instinct told her this was not a man predisposed to be kind.
She just stopped herself lifting her hand, which would have drawn attention to her face, which felt as though it were on fire. This was a man who never did anything without a reason. Which left the question, why had he asked her to lunch? Did he have some elaborate punishment in mind because she had answered back to him on the phone?
‘Like I said the flu epidemic has left us very short-staffed today.’
‘But otherwise you’d have been delighted to come?’
In face of this sardonic observation it took all of Scarlet’s will-power to conceal her feelings behind a blank expression.
What were her feelings? In one word—shallow; this was biology at its most basic. She knew what lust felt like, and never had it been less welcome or so extreme, but when you came right down to it she really shouldn’t have been letting it get to her this way. There was absolutely no need to stress; it wasn’t as if she’d never felt sexual attraction before. She knew about the tightening in her stomach and the rest; it was a biological response—like sneezing.
She took a deep breath and was conscious of the fabric of her borrowed top chafing against her erect nipples; lower, the tell-tale liquid heat was even more of a give-away. Sneezing? Maybe not the best analogy.
She saw a smile touch his sensual lips. To her horrified eyes it held a knowing quality that suggested she wasn’t hiding anything from him; she felt a flare of anger—her condition was entirely his doing.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I have to go,’ she told him abruptly.
‘Rain check?’
She looked at him blankly. If he thought she was strange and peculiar, that was fine, because she was. Being attracted, even in a blind, mindless way, to a man like this could quite safely be categorised as peculiar…also wantonly stupid and brainless!
‘Fine, whatever…’ she mumbled, before virtually throwing herself through the door in her haste to remove herself from the room.
She literally bumped into David about thirty seconds after she had emerged from his office. She suspected he had been lurking there waiting for her to appear.
‘Steady, you’re in a hurry,’ he said, placing his hands on her shoulders to steady her. ‘You came around that corner like you had the hounds of hell on your heels.’
After what she had just endured the hounds of hell would be child’s play.
‘The girls will be missing me. I promised I’d be back to help with the lunches.’
David’s right hand remained on her shoulder. ‘How did it go?’
‘What…? Oh, with Mr O’Hagan? Fine, absolutely fine.’
David looked at her face and groaned. ‘Oh, God, you’re such a terrible liar, you always were. What did you do?’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘But you said something.’
Scarlet’s expression grew defensive. ‘Of course I said something. I may not warm to womanising playboys—’ annoyingly this was something that was hard to say without sounding, not only prejudiced, but distressingly intolerant ‘—but I’m not a total idiot.’ Actually the jury was still out on that one.
‘Well, this particular womanising playboy finds time in his schedule to run a highly successful international company.’ He looked into her stubborn face and sighed. ‘Would it hurt you to be nice to the man, Scarlet?’
‘How nice would that be? Will treating everything he says as a pearl of wisdom do, or did you want me to sleep with him?’
‘Do you have to be facetious, Scarlet?’ David demanded, allowing his aggravation with her to surface.
‘It’s easier than—’
‘Easier than what, Scarlet?’
Good question. ‘He’s not an easy man.’
‘I found him perfectly affable, but, easy or not, Scarlet, he is funding a number of bursaries to help students from less-well-off backgrounds.’
The seconds ticked by while Scarlet stood staring at him with her mouth slightly ajar. Finally she gulped and took a deep breath.
‘You’re kidding!’ Her grin faded as no corresponding smile appeared on David’s face. ‘Oh, God, I feel such a…’
‘Narrow-minded, judgemental?’
‘Amongst other things,’ she admitted miserably.
David shook his head. ‘I don’t know why you have a problem accepting the man is capable of acting altruistically?’
Scarlet did. It wasn’t the man; it was the type of person he represented.
She had no problem seeing past an unattractive face, and she didn’t judge anyone by their accent, their bank balance or the car they drove, but when it came to people who lived their lives being seen in the right places wearing the right clothes and with the right people she came over with terminal intolerance. She knew it and wasn’t proud of it, but she couldn’t help it.
Scarlet knew about people like that. Her sister had been a member of their very exclusive club, and how many of them had visited when Abby had been ill in hospital, losing her hair after intensive chemo? Abby’s friends had had more important things to do, when she had contacted the names in her sister’s address book and explained the situation and told them how much it would cheer her sister up to see a friendly face.
A few had made vague promises, but in the end not a single one of those good friends had turned up to show support, she recalled bitterly. When the going got tough, the Roman O’Hagans of this world disappeared in their fast cars.
‘I’m not kidding. This is not common knowledge,’ David added, laying a warning finger to his lips and looking as though he was regretting sharing the confidential information with her. ‘Mr O’Hagan was most insistent on his name not being made public.’ David gave a wry smile as he thought of all the name plaques he had unveiled in his career. ‘Which makes him unique in my experience,’
‘Really!’ she exclaimed, unable to stop the bitchy retort. ‘I’d have thought he’d be used to it! Well, he’s not exactly publicity shy, is he?’ she added defensively. It seemed pretty perverse to Scarlet that someone who lived his life in the glare of publicity would be bothered about his altruism being made public. ‘Maybe it’s a tax thing?’
She realised that, far from agreeing with her, David was looking annoyed, and added with as much conviction as she could muster, ‘Or maybe he’s a very modest, generous man.’
CHAPTER FIVE
SCARLET lowered the blinds over the glass partition and removed her borrowed finery before folding it neatly over the back of her chair. Standing there in just her white cotton pants, she shook out her own clean clothes. Creased, certainly, but a whole lot better than what she had been wearing.
If she had looked half decent would she have emerged from her encounter with Roman O’Hagan looking less of a loon?
Such speculation was pointless. Scarlet turned her thoughts firmly away from that traumatic and humiliating interview she had just endured—she never had been a big fan of post-mortems—and pulled her cream slim-cut pedal pushers over her bottom and slid the zip home over her narrow, some might say boyish, hips.
She took her tee shirt between her hands and attempted to stretch it this way and that without much success. A size six now, but it had survived the hot washing cycle in the industrial-sized machine a local firm had kindly donated to them better than her bra, which had come out looking like a dish rag.
She heard the knock on the door just as she was pulling her tee shirt over her head.
‘Come in, Angie,’ she called out, her voice muffled. ‘I just wanted to ask if you’d mind covering for Barbara in the morning.’
Roman, preceded by his entrance card, a giant teddy bear, pushed the slightly ajar door fully open and walked in.
His experience of buying gifts for small children was limited, but he knew enough to know that the case of excellent claret he had put down for his godson on the occasion of his christening and the additions he had generously donated to the child’s investment portfolio at Christmas and birthdays would not be suitable on this occasion. Wine and shares being inappropriate gifts he had sought the advice of his PA.
‘What sort of gift is appropriate for a child of three?’
‘Boy or girl?’
‘Boy.’
‘How much money do you want to spend?’
‘I don’t want to be seen as throwing money at the problem.’
‘Right, but you do want to be seen as thoughtful; that’s always more difficult.’
‘Do you like your job?’
Alice grinned. ‘All children like teddy bears, Roman,’ she told him confidently. ‘Yeah, a teddy bear is a good bet. A big one.’
He had followed her advice with some misgivings. Alice’s knowledge of fitness videos, football and chocolate was second to none, but she had never struck him as being particularly child-orientated, unless you counted his kid brother, Luca, but you never could tell with women. Some of the most unlikely ones, women who had publicly declared themselves wedded to their careers, one day started looking on you as potential father material.
He had learnt to read the signals. When he became a father he wanted it to be his decision.
Roman was perfectly aware of his responsibility to provide an heir and perpetuate the family name…as if the world didn’t have enough O’Hagans in it. But just in case it slipped his mind, his father, who seemed to think his eldest son might well walk under a moving bus at any moment, obligingly reminded him of the fact at regular intervals.
He would get round to doing what his father wanted in his own time, but at the moment he didn’t have a son, he’d never met this woman before today, and this was a pointless exercise. There were a hundred other things that he could and should be doing.
Despite these facts he was determined to see the farce through to the end, because he always completed tasks he began. But more importantly, this way, when his mother asked, as she would, he would be able to tell her with a clear conscience that he had seen mother and child and they were nothing to do with him.
Nothing less was going to satisfy her.
Also in the short space of time that had elapsed since Scarlet Smith had knocked back his lunch invitation, Roman had totally forgotten that, not only had he regretted issuing the invite the moment he’d made it—did he even know any restaurants where they served dribbling toddlers?—but he had also lost track of the crucial fact that he hadn’t issued the spur-of-the-moment invitation out of any desire for her abrasive company, but because he couldn’t think of an easier way of getting to see her son.
‘I’d be really grateful,’ Scarlet said, still thinking she was talking to Angie. She grunted as she groped to insert her hand through the arm hole. ‘Hold on a mo, I think this thing has shrunk.’
She clicked her tongue in regret. The tee shirt had been produced at their last fundraising event and it was decorated with self-portraits produced by the older children, including Sam. Now it was shrunk it would be lovingly stored with the growing collection of childhood memorabilia she was accumulating.
‘It could have been worse, the machine totally shredded my bra,’ she confided. ‘Not that I’m in any position to complain. This is one of those times being flat-chested pays off,’ she huffed with a strangulated laugh as she inhaled deeply to allow the over-stretched fabric to cover and compress her small, pointed breasts.
Roman wasn’t complaining either; he had no objections to ‘holding on a mo.’ Beneath the enticing expanse of slender back he had an excellent opportunity to appreciate the curvy shape and firmness of a small but perfectly formed bottom complete with strategically placed dimple above her peachy left buttock. And he didn’t think she was flat chested; his entrance into the room had been perfectly timed to coincide with the brief bare-breasted interval.
He’d been taken unawares; the sight of pink-tipped, delightfully bouncy breasts had frozen him to the spot and primitive urges oblivious to the social restraints of being a modern man had surged into painful life.
It was extraordinary but, far from being shapeless, Scarlet Smith had an enticing body, slim with supple, succulent and very sexy curves. The transformation was nothing short of mind-blowing.
That made it official. He did not have a son—no way would he have forgotten sleeping with Scarlet Smith!
