A Past To Deny

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‘So what do you want to know?’ he drawled, his eyes like glittering ice.

‘Well, for a start, if this is Maurice’s thing, why can’t he do his own analyses?’

‘It isn’t his thing.’

‘Well, thanks a million,’ hissed Maggie across the table at him. ‘If that’s the way you motivate your staff, all I can say is God help them!’

‘You need motivating to assist with a bit of lab work, do you?’ he enquired, scowling back at her.

‘Forget I ever showed any interest,’ she snapped, picking up her coffee-cup and draining it. ‘And we can do the work in complete silence for all I care.’

His lips were pursed as he picked up the coffee-pot and refilled both their cups. ‘Give me a break, Maggie,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve been through so many time zones in the past few days that right now I’m not too sure which way is up.’

He ladled sugar into his coffee and stirred it, a closed, far-away expression on his face. ‘I’ve no idea whether or not Maurice has succeeded in reproducing this plant in its pristine state, but we’ll know soon enough after it’s been tested—’

He broke off to take some coffee, an expression of utter bleakness on his face. ‘Maurice and my father go back a long way…They first met as kids and kept in regular touch, both being prolific letter writers, right up until my father’s death.’

His father, thought Maggie, her heart constricting.

‘Slane, I—I…’ she stammered, guilt flooding her. ‘Look, if you’d rather not talk about it—’

‘Make up your mind,’ he cut in exasperatedly. ‘Do you want to hear about this or not?’

‘I want to hear,’ she replied robotically. She had known from the little that Connor had said that Slane bore wounds with which she was achingly familiar… Now his had been opened up and there was nothing that could be done to spare him.

‘It seems Maurice came across this plant a few years ago and wrote to my father about it. Some forest tribe or other used it medicinally—mainly as an antidote to poisons and allergies. Maurice plainly thought it was worth investigating—’

He broke off to ask a passing waitress for the bill. ‘A while back Maurice got in touch with me. Off and on, since my father’s death, he’d been experimenting with a range of different growing media. And now he’s come up with several plants he feels are worth testing.’

‘He must be so nervous now that they’re about to be tested,’ said Maggie as the waitress returned with the bill.

‘I doubt if he’ll give it too much thought until he gets the results,’ said Slane, his tone amused. ‘Oh, he’ll keep at it if he hasn’t succeeded—but that’s Maurice. Give him a botanical problem to puzzle over and he’ll happily spend the next decade or so solving it—or proving there is no solution.’

‘Do you think there’s a chance he has solved it?’ asked Maggie as they both rose.

He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ His eyes caught hers before sweeping slowly down the length of her body; then they swept back up again to linger finally on her parted lips and take in the hectic warmth that his deliberations had brought to her cheeks.

When his eyes at last returned to hers they were filled with mocking challenge. ‘Who knows what we’re about to discover once we get started?’

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_0c47f14e-c39d-5919-b6d5-aae485ffee8d)

THEIR conversation in the famous coffee-house had unsettled them both.

It had left Maggie in a mood of dark reflection, in which she found herself digging deeper into the store of banished memories already disturbed by Slane’s arrival. Slane it had left edgy and cynical one moment, then mockingly salacious the next, as those heavy-lidded eyes would catch hers and appear to make suggestions that bore no relation to the innocuous words he happened to be uttering.

Whatever the memories it had stirred in him, as far as Maggie was concerned it was having the effect of accentuating every negative quality he possessed.

So far she hadn’t retaliated, restrained by too many memories of how appalling her own behaviour had been as she had struggled to come to terms with the devastation of grief.

‘Connor mentioned that you’d decided to become a teacher,’ stated Slane as the car ground to a halt in yet another hold-up in the traffic. ‘How come?’

Maggie mentally braced herself; he had spoken the words, but there hadn’t been any trace of interest in them.

‘I decided it was time I had a proper career…and my father taught’

‘What subject did he teach?’

‘Chemistry.’

Now they were on decidedly dodgy ground, thought Maggie, her entire body tensing. Just one snide remark from him in relation to her father and that would be it as far as her feelings of empathy were concerned.

‘I hope you hadn’t anything planned for today,’ he muttered as the line of traffic crawled forward a few feet before stopping again. ‘Who knows? We could be stuck here till dark. Now wouldn’t that be fun?’

Maggie made the error of glancing at him and again found herself bathed in what could only be described as a come-to-bed look—albeit a decidedly mocking one.

‘Why do you keep doing that?’ she exploded, goaded beyond restraint.

‘Doing what?’

‘Looking at me like that!’

‘And what way is that?’

Maggie clamped her mouth tightly shut. Well, at least that was her guilt trip over, she told herself angrily, and a totally misplaced one it had been too. The man was probably incapable of the finer feelings with which she had so foolishly been crediting him—he was a complete and utter boor!

‘I guess this disorientation I’m suffering—’

‘Spare me the drivel,’ pleaded Maggie witheringly.

‘Has stripped away my inhibitions,’ he continued unconcernedly. ‘Thank God for that!’ he exclaimed as the traffic at last flowed freely. ‘I can’t be the first guy who’s looked at you appreciatively—you’re a very beautiful woman, Maggie.’

‘I’m a moderately attractive woman,’ she snapped. ‘So I suggest you save your breath.’ Which was exactly what she should be doing, she told herself exasperatedly.

‘They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ he murmured, his tone all sweetness and reason, ‘and mine reckons you’re beautiful. I mean, what is there that could be improved on? You have eyes that—’

‘Shut up!’ howled Maggie, something in her snapping completely. ‘Just stop it!’

‘Now there’s an enigma for you—a woman who throws a fit when a man tells her she’s beautiful. I wonder what your problem is, Maggie?’

‘I’m not throwing a fit!’ Horrified by the hysteria shrilling her tone, she fought to contain herself. ‘And I don’t have a problem—unless it’s that I’ve put up with your snide remarks and…and everything else you’ve been dishing out to me! And, while we’re on the subject of problems, if you have one over working with me just say so and I can get the next flight home.’

‘As you well know, I can’t afford to have a problem with it—you’re all I’ve got.’

‘Forgive me for saying so, but it takes a lot of believing that someone of your reputation would have such a problem replacing me,’ retorted Maggie, his lack of denial about his behaviour stirring up another seething swarm of does-he-or-doesn’t-he-remember-mes in her beleaguered mind.

‘And what do you know of my reputation, Maggie?’ he drawled as he swung the car into the drive of the house. ‘It would be a laboratory assistant I’d be replacing, not someone to warm my bed.’

‘You’re disgusting,’ gasped Maggie, her hands shaking uncontrollably as they fumbled to release her seat belt.

‘Disgusting?’ he enquired softly, his hand covering hers and stilling its frantic scrabbling.

‘You know perfectly well I was referring to your professional reputation, not to you…to your—’ She broke off, praying for a bottomless pit to appear for her to throw herself into.

‘What—are you too prudish even to say it?’ he asked in that same, steely soft voice. ‘My reputation with women?’

‘I’m not a prude!’ she howled, tearing her hand free.

‘So how come you’re giving such a good impression of being one?’ he enquired, releasing her seat belt.

‘And what, exactly, is your definition of one?’ she demanded, fury rampaging through her. ‘Ice maiden’, ‘prude’—Peter had progressed to other synonyms the night they had parted; vicious and vulgarly explicit, he had hurled them all at her fleeing figure. ‘Any woman who doesn’t fling herself into your arms?’ Dear God, what was she saying? ‘Any woman who doesn’t worship at the shrine of your looks and power?’