In Bed With The Boss

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That was what she was afraid of!

‘Why are you doing this?’ Her whispery groan trickled out from between pale lips.

‘What—dancing?’ said Duncan, deliberately misunderstanding her as he deftly side-stepped them past an elderly couple. ‘We danced together once before…three years ago, at that party you and Harry gave that first Christmas you worked for me, remember? You and Harry had just moved into a new flat and you invited all your new colleagues from Labyrinth to a housewarming. You didn’t expect the boss to turn up too, but I did, and when Harry was dancing with someone else I danced with you—out on the tiny balcony, under the stars, because it was so crowded inside…’

She recognised his technique, having witnessed it often enough in the office. Her head jerked up, away from the illusory comfort of his broad shoulder. ‘You’re trying to distract me,’ she accused, before she realised that perhaps she should be thanking him.

He grinned unrepentantly. ‘Is it working?’

‘No.’ But her feet were beginning to glide more smoothly as she reluctantly recalled the party in question.

She had felt flustered when Duncan had suddenly appeared at the party, alone, when everyone else had brought partners or dates, and she had felt even more uncomfortable during their dance when he had resisted her polite efforts at normal conversation. Having only worked for him for a few weeks, she had attributed his silent abstraction to boredom but now that she knew him well she recognised that he had probably been brooding over a bug in one of his programs, shutting down the rest of his faculties to concentrate his higher-brain function on the problem.

He had held her close that night, too, but so lightly that she hadn’t felt trapped or overly aware of the intense masculinity that nowadays she found almost impossible to ignore…

At the time she had also been astonished that Duncan and Harry had hit it off so instantly and so well. They were so radically different from each other…Harry placid and content—some people called him dull—grounded in his strong family values and blessedly ordinary in his dreams and ambitions; and Duncan, the emotional whirlwind, eternally restless and unsatisfied, living life with a greedy enthusiasm that verged on defiance and seemingly incapable of committing himself to any lasting relationship with a woman.

Although Harry had been eight years younger than Duncan, to Kalera he had seemed decades ahead of her boss in maturity. Yet the two men had seemed to connect in some way that she had never quite understood and even though they hadn’t seen each other very often they had maintained an easy friendship from which she was excluded, since it largely consisted of Harry trying to teach Duncan how to play golf, a game to which Kalera privately considered her boss was temperamentally unsuited, although as usual he had refused to admit defeat and the intermittent lessons had continued right up until Harry’s death.

‘That party was the first time I held you in my arms,’ Duncan continued, and Kalera suddenly became ultra-conscious of the physical intimacy of their conversation, the way his thigh was sliding between hers as he pivoted their swaying bodies, his solid hips rocking rhythmically against her pelvis. ‘And it was all very chaste and innocent, thanks to the fact you were a very married woman, but the last time…’ He looked down at her, his eyes sultry with secrets, his voice dropping to a throaty purr. ‘Eighteen months ago…now, that wasn’t innocent at all…’

‘And we both agreed that neither of us would ever mention it again!’ she choked, hating the flush that swept across her skin as she averted her face from his. How dared he seek to taunt her with something she had tried so desperately to forget? ‘You promised that we’d pretend it had never happened—’

‘But that’s all it ever was, Kalera—a pretence. You and I both know it did happen. You can’t wipe out the truth simply by ignoring its existence. At the time, I’ll admit, it seemed to be the wisest course, but circumstances change…’

‘What circumstances?’ she asked, trying to pull together her shattered thoughts, furious with herself for letting him catch her off guard.

‘Well, now you’re no longer a vulnerable, grieving widow, wallowing in guilt over the fact that your sexuality survived your husband’s death. If sleeping with Stephen doesn’t make you feel like the adulteress, then I guess that lets me off the hook, too—’

Familiar as she was with his love of shock tactics, Kalera still gasped as her eyes whipped up to meet his, her husky voice as icy as her face was hot. ‘How dare you?’

Her veil of hair flared out as he spun her around in a flamboyant turn, drawing their clasped hands down against his chest to avoid bumping elbows with other dancers. ‘As a former lover who was made to feel as if I had scarred you for life, I feel I have a right to a certain interest,’ he said piously.

‘You and I were not lovers,’ she corrected him fiercely, her pupils shrinking into tiny pinpoints on ghostly grey backgrounds.

‘You’re arguing over semantics, Kalera.’ He smiled into her angry face. ‘We came as close as two people possibly can to making love…the only thing missing was the final act of penetration, which was somewhat superfluous in any case, since we’d both already had the supreme satisfaction of—’

‘Duncan!’ Kalera’s spluttered protest was accompanied by a frantic squeeze of his fingers and a furtive check of the faces in the immediate vicinity, but luckily no one appeared to have overheard his scandalous words.

‘I suppose if you hadn’t had an orgasm you wouldn’t have felt so guilty afterwards,’ he continued, in defiance of her quietly agonised attempts to hush him. ‘You could have persuaded yourself that you endured rather than enjoyed, that I had abused your trust and taken advantage of you, whereas it turned out that I was the one being used and abused.’

Somehow she had to stop him from saying those awful, awful things out loud. ‘I wasn’t using you—’

‘Not consciously, I’ll allow you that, but it seems highly convenient that you didn’t decide that what we were doing was wrong until after you had everything that you wanted from me. I wonder, would your new lover have been as gracious in the same circumstances?’

‘He’s not my—’ She snapped her teeth shut, appalled at what had almost slipped out.

Navy eyes gleamed like polished silk. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed, his voice soft with an infuriating lilt of amused triumph. ‘You’ve agreed to marry the man and you don’t even know what he’s like in bed? I would have thought Golden Boy would have been anxious to dazzle you with his prowess—’

‘Unlike you, Stephen doesn’t happen to think that sex is all there is to a relationship!’ Kalera tried to quell him with a haughty glare and instead found herself captive to a lambent fire smouldering in his gaze.

‘Not all—but certainly a large part. You can have lust without love but I don’t think a healthy love can exist without a spark of elemental lust and you two don’t exactly light up the room with each other,’ he murmured. ‘Although I suppose if you’re marrying for practical reasons rather than love…’

He was fishing and she knew it, but she couldn’t help snapping, ‘Of course Stephen and I love each other!’

‘Do you?’ Duncan’s scepticism was like sandpaper on her nerves.

‘I have been in love before,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I do know what it’s like!’

His face seemed to go taut, his eyes narrowing. ‘Are you saying that Prior makes you feel the way that Harry did?’

His incredulity gave Kalera the uneasy feeling that she was being backed into a corner she couldn’t see. ‘Yes—no—’ She sounded wishy-washy even to her own ears. ‘It’s totally different—you wouldn’t understand.’

He was not to be so easily dismissed. ‘Try me.’

The harshly pitched invitation seemed redolent with deeper meaning. ‘I have no intention of discussing it with you—’

‘Why? Because Golden Boy wouldn’t like it?’ he jeered. ‘Does he have you so thoroughly under his thumb already, Kalera?’

‘No—because I value my privacy,’ she corrected him. ‘You have no right, whatever was—or was not—between us in the past, to try and manipulate me into confiding in you. I’ve had enough of that kind of thing in my life.’ The last tumbled out as something of an afterthought as she looked for their table, trying to catch a reassuring glimpse of Stephen waiting there for her, but even on tiptoe she wasn’t tall enough to see over the other dancers blocking her view.

‘What do you mean—what confidences has Prior been trying to weasel out of you?’ Duncan’s dark brows steepened in suspicion, his hand tightening on her lower back. ‘I told you that he was operating a hidden agenda.’

Kalera’s reference had had nothing to do with Stephen but she was tired of having to defend herself.

‘If this is another lecture like this morning’s, about my being such an infatuated idiot that I wouldn’t notice the bug over the bed for the louse who was in it—you can stop right there!’

He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Well, how was I to know that you’d refused to sleep with him? You implied that Boy Wonder had swept you off your feet—and into bed was the obvious assumption!’

‘Obvious to you, maybe, but thankfully Stephen is more refined. And anyway, I haven’t refused,’ she was unable to resist flinging at him. ‘It’s just that neither of us wants to rush things. We both happen to be enjoying the process of courtship…’

‘I guess sleeping with the enemy while you were still working for me would have been too much like another act of pseudo-adultery,’ he said slyly.

Kalera flicked her chin up. ‘That had absolutely nothing to do with it!’ she declared, wondering how he managed to home in on her doubts with such unerring skill.

‘Absolutely, huh?’ He tilted his head and the outrageous earring danced provocatively in her sight, reminding her how much Duncan loved to flout the conventions, and how successful he was at goading others to forget their polite inhibitions.

‘So you don’t even feel a teensy-weensy bit unfaithful to me whenever you kiss him?’

She gave him her serene, Mona Lisa smile, while inside she was reeling with shock.

‘I don’t feel guilty for loving him, if that’s what you mean,’ she said mildly, and felt proud of her restraint when the mocking light in his eyes abruptly snuffed out. ‘I think Harry would have liked him,’ she added, intending to put a final period to the conversation.

This time it was Duncan who stumbled as he looked down at her in amazement, responding with instinctual speed, ‘Are you crazy? Harry would have hated him.’

‘Harry never hated anyone in his life,’ she scoffed. His tolerant kindness had been one of the things that she had most loved about her husband.

‘Whereas Steve has elevated it to an art form,’ said Duncan, recovering his equilibrium and executing a couple of head-spinning turns to prove it. Breathlessly trying to keep up with him, Kalera could feel the frustration that had him almost jumping out of his skin. ‘You saw what he was like just now. He was really getting off on the idea of having snatched you out from under my nose—’

As if she were a disputed toy rather than an independent woman with a mind and will of her own!

‘You were deliberately trying to provoke him into reacting like that,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m not going to listen to you run him down just because you don’t like him. You’re totally unreasonable on the subject of Stephen—’

‘I’m unreasonable—what about him?’

He sounded like a petulant child and her superior look told him so. ‘I suppose the next thing you’re going to say is that it isn’t fair and it’s all his fault,’ she said tartly.

He scowled, injecting a note of pathos into his tone that was utterly unconvincing. ‘Aren’t I even allowed to express a friendly concern for your welfare? I think it’s great that you want to get married again, but anyone with half an eye can see that Prior’s all wrong for you. You haven’t known him very long—I have. Up until a few years ago we were best friends—since our schooldays, in fact—that’s how we got into business together…’