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‘The man was in his counting-house, counting out his money,’ Joel put in, smiling as always. ‘Here, give me your coat.’ He took the velvet wrap from her before Mac could grab the honours. ‘Take-over deals take it out of one, don’t you agree, Mac?’
Mac leaned back against the rich mahogany newel-post, sensing no threat in the way that Joel was smoothing fine velvet over Roberta’s shoulders. This was his home and here, where Roberta counted for nothing, he saw Joel as his safe substitute.
‘The Brunner deal.’ He nodded. ‘You clinched it today.’ Not a question but a well-informed statement of fact.
‘Not quite,’ Joel denied, then shifted uncomfortably under Mac’s sudden black frown. After all, brother or not, Mac was also his boss. ‘But all bar the shouting,’ he quickly assured him. ‘I fly out to Zurich on Tuesday to tie it all up.’
‘Is Franc Brunner playing footsie with you?’ Mac asked sharply.
Joel just shrugged. ‘He knows he owns the patent to a very lucrative product if placed in the right hands. I can’t blame him for being cagey.’
‘Well, I can,’ Mac argued. ‘He approached us, not the other way around. What stopped him signing the deal today?’
‘The legal bods his end,’ Joel said drily. ‘Finding problems when none is there.’
‘Deliberately stalling, you mean,’ Mac said, and looked grimly thoughtful. ‘Do you want me to get involved?’ he offered.
‘No, I damned well do not!’ Joel indignantly replied. ‘The Brunner thing isn’t your baby, it’s mine! So keep your nose out, big brother!’
‘Whoops.’ Mac grinned. ‘Hit a raw nerve, did I?’
‘I can handle it,’ Joel said gruffly while Roberta looked down at her feet, too aware of why Joel was getting so hot under the collar to want Mac to see it written in her face.
The trouble with Joel was that he was a hands-on engineer at heart. Show him a revolutionary new product and he tended to go a bit overboard with enthusiasm about it. Hence the ‘footsie’, as Mac had put it, that Franc Brunner was playing with him. He saw too much eagerness to possess in Joel’s manner and had been playing on that by pushing Joel for a better deal ever since.
‘Can’t we, Roberta?’
His long fingers were stroking the rolled collar of her coat around her slender throat. But when she didn’t immediately answer, they paused to chuck her gently beneath her chin, demanding her support.
She gave it. ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Nothing daunts the three musketeers.’
‘Three?’ Mac quizzed.
‘Mitzy,’ Joel explained. ‘Our indispensable third arm.’ He meant their shared secretary, and Mac nodded in recognition.
There was no one else wandering around the hallway, and a short silence fell, broken only by the sound of an old-fashioned waltz seeping out from the huge drawing-room to one side of them.
Mac’s eyes were on Roberta, moving with a lazy warmth over her, though he still made no effort to touch her. ‘I’ll see you Monday, hmm?’ he said. His weekend was fully booked up here in Berkshire, playing host to the dynasty.
Joel felt Roberta stiffen slightly, the tension in her so fierce it was threatening to snap. She did not reply, and Mac took the answer as read, the lazy look dying away.
‘Daddy?’ Lulu appeared at the half-open doorway to the drawing-room, her blue eyes narrowing when she saw Roberta. ‘Hello, Uncle Joel.’ She sent him a beatific smile. ‘Leaving already? That doesn’t say much for my birthday party.’
Joel let go of Roberta to turn and smile at his favourite niece. ‘I must be getting old, pug-face,’ Joel apologised drily, opening his arms as Lulu glided towards him. ‘Can’t seem to burn the candle the way I used to.’
‘You and Daddy both, then, since he’s five years older than you.’ She pouted charmingly at both men. ‘Perhaps he should take a leaf out of your book and ease up on life a little.’
It was a direct slight at Roberta, but neither by word nor expression did she show how easily the younger girl had cut. Mac was smiling indulgently, watching his daughter exchange fond kisses with his brother, the remark not bothering him.
Except for the shock of jet-black flowing hair, Lulu was more like her red-haired mother than her father—a wand-slim girl with long, graceful limbs and sapphire-blue eyes. She lived with her mother in their St John’s Wood home for most of the time, but she adored her handsome father to the point of hero-worship. Mac loved and pandered to this adoration as, Roberta supposed, any doting father would.
But sometimes it was so cloying that it stuck in the throat to watch it.
Like now, as Lulu fluttered her long dark lashes and said, ‘Aren’t my diamond earrings wonderful, Uncle Joel?’ She tilted her head slightly for Joel to get a better look at the exquisite diamond droplets dangling from her ears. ‘I think I have the most wonderful daddy in the whole wide world, don’t you?’
‘Wonderful,’ Joel mockingly agreed, observing the simpering sigh and soulful look that Lulu sent her smiling father. Mac had his hands in his jacket pockets, still leaning against the newel-post, looking as he always did—supremely elegant and totally at ease with himself. ‘He spoils you, pug-face,’ Joel censured teasingly. ‘If you’d been my daughter, for your birthday you would have received an envelope with ten quid in it and a letter explaining to you how the magic eighteen means that you go out in the big bad world and make your own way from now on.’
‘Oh, you don’t mean it.’ Flirting outrageously, Lulu pouted at Joel and appealed to her daddy with wide, wounded eyes. Without really having to try very hard she had effectively cut Roberta right out of it all. ‘Daddy, tell Joel he mustn’t be horrid to me on my birthday!’ she demanded.
‘Joel, don’t be horrid to Lulu on her birthday,’ her father obediently complied, laughing through his stern tone. ‘Where’s that besotted young man you’ve had hanging on your arm all night?’ he then asked curiously.
Again Lulu pouted. ‘He’s trying it on with Mummy since he was getting nowhere with me,’ his daughter pertly replied. ‘So if you don’t get back in there quick and do something about it, I can see Mummy taking on a toy-boy, and how will that make you look?’
‘God forbid!’ Mac levered himself away from the newel-post, and Lulu sent Roberta a look of malicious triumph when it looked as though Mac would just walk away without offering Roberta a backward glance.
Then the triumph altered to a glower as Mac paused and turned, his grey gaze colliding with Roberta’s green one. ‘Sorry you had to leave so soon,’ he murmured softly. ‘I was about to ask you to dance.’
‘Shame, then, that you were too late,’ she said, the slight hint of sarcasm in her voice just enough to make his eyes narrow. ‘A nice party, Lulu.’ She turned that hint of sarcasm on Mac’s daughter next. ‘Once again, many happy returns, and I hope you get all you deserve in life.’
Joel choked on a cough, and moved quickly as Lulu’s eyes took on a decidedly vicious glow. ‘Time to go.’ He gave his niece another kiss, then moved back to Roberta’s side, his smile over-bright as he took a firm grip on her arm. ‘Lunch one day, Mac,’ he offered as a parting shot, and began pulling Roberta towards the front door where one of the hired help for the evening was waiting to see them out, their car already called for and purring at the bottom of the steps.
The last thing Roberta saw as she swept out of the door was Mac’s gaze narrowed thoughtfully on her. He wasn’t a fool; he was well aware that her last remark to him had been a reference to the challenge she had thrown out to him with her eyes earlier and which he had decided to refuse.
What he wasn’t aware of, she knew, was how much he had left too late.
‘That wasn’t wise,’ Joel said quietly.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Roberta drawled. ‘I am not a very wise person.’ But I shall learn, she told herself grimly. God help me, I shall learn.
‘Get in the car.’
She got in the car and pulled her coat more firmly around her body, feeling cold when really it was quite warm for a September night.
Joel didn’t move off right away, but sat tapping the steering-wheel with his fingers while he studied her ruthlessly controlled profile. ‘Be careful how you tackle this, Roberta,’ he advised after a moment. ‘My brother is not known for his good temper when things don’t go his way.’
‘There is only one way to tackle it,’ she said, turning her head slightly away from him so that he wouldn’t see the bitterness glowing in her eyes. ‘There is an old saying about flogging a dead horse. And, much to Daddy’s darling daughter’s delight, no doubt, I’ve decided that I’ve flogged this one for quite long enough.’
‘You’ve put up with his outrageous behaviour towards you for the last year,’ he pointed out. ‘So why decide that tonight is the night you’ve had enough?’
‘Put the car in gear, Joel,’ she said, refusing to answer—if she had an answer to give him, that was, which she didn’t. All she did know was that she’d had enough. And that one small but telling little phrase was going around and around inside her head, until she thought she would go mad listening to it.
‘He won’t let you get away with it.’ Joel moved them smoothly away from the house, the headlights spanning out in a wide arc across the moonless blackness of the Maclaine family’s private estate. ‘He wants you too much.’
‘”Want” being the operative word.’
‘He had a hard time of it from the family when he forced that divorce on them,’ he reminded her. ‘Between them and Lulu he’s been made to feel—’
‘Start defending him and I’ll get out and walk,’ she warned.
Joel shook his head, exasperation making him sigh heavily. ‘It’s a damned long way back to Chelsea from here,’ he pointed out. ‘And I wasn’t defending Mac, just explaining why—’
Roberta’s hand went to the door-catch. Joel glanced sharply at her, saw her coldly determined expression and grimaced. ‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep stumm and drive you home.’
‘Not home,’ she countered, bringing his gaze swinging right back to her. ‘Take me to Jenny’s instead.’
Joel was silent for a moment, taking in this final piece of information. Then he murmured wearily, ‘Oh, God, Roberta, you’re just begging for trouble if you keep this up.’
Was she? The way Roberta saw it, she was begging for more trouble by letting things go on the way they already were.
It was strange really, she pondered to herself as Joel drove on in grim silence, but if someone had told her twelve months ago that she would find herself in this kind of situation with a man she would have scoffed in their face! She wasn’t the type—had always been determined never to become the type! A life of being shunted from one reluctant relation to another while she was growing up had made her determined that once she had gained her independence she would never make herself vulnerable to another living soul, unless they could prove that they loved and wanted her above everything else in their life.
She’d kept that vow too, right through her college years and on into her first job, accepting dates only with men whose other commitments would mean she was never left waiting for them while something more important held their attention from her. But the trouble with that kind of philosophy was that that type of man usually meant a dead-end man with a dead-end job and a dead-end kind of outlook on life that generally bored her to tears. So her relationships tended to be short and disappointing, never really deepening past the kiss-goodnight-on-the-doorstep stage before she was breaking them off.
Until Mac. When Mac had come into her life, every rule she had stood by had just melted clean away! He was everything she didn’t want in a man. Busy, powerful, with the kind of business and personal responsibilities that meant he had to juggle constantly with time to make room for her. He’d even cancelled their second date because business had taken him out of the country for a week! She should have backed off then—probably could have backed off if it had been their first date—but, even by then, it had been too late for her. Like the fool she had discovered she was, she had fallen hook, line and sinker for him that quickly. And for the first time in her calm, well-ordered adult life she’d found out what it was like to lose total control of her own destiny. Solomon Maclaine had become her master. She didn’t like herself for letting it happen but couldn’t seem to do a single thing about it.
He could fill her with a dark and degrading all too familiar disappointment by letting her down at a moment’s notice when something more important cropped up. Then, when she was determined that it would be the last time he would do that to her, he would do something wonderful, like turning up unexpectedly with his arms full of flowers and a sincere apology on his lips that would have her heart melting all over again.
But not this time, she told herself grimly. This time Mac had gone too far. And the cold, hard feeling of loss she was experiencing inside told her that no amount of apologising was going to change her mind.
She had had enough.
‘Listen.’ Joel turned in his seat to look at her as he drew his car to a stop outside the Victorian town-house where Roberta used to share a flat with Jenny before Mac had taken her to live in his luxurious Chelsea apartment. ‘Use the weekend to think about what you’re going to do,’ he advised. ‘You’re thinking with your emotions right now, but give it a couple of days and you should be using your head again.’
‘It’s my emotions which are involved with Mac, not my brain,’ she drily pointed out. ‘And I’ve been applying common sense and modern social standards to our relationship for a whole year now, and look where it’s got me.’ Branded, she thought bitterly. Branded a bimbo by a set of people that she wouldn’t give the time of day to if they weren’t related to Mac! ‘It’s not me who needs to sort my head out, Joel. It’s Mac!’
‘He cares deeply for you, Roberta,’ he insisted urgently, his mouth twisting when he saw the sudden glint of tears flood her sea-green eyes.
‘But not enough,’ she whispered, not denying that Mac did care for her, in some odd, selfish way. No man could give himself so totally in bed without feeling something for the woman lying beneath him—fleeting though that something was. ‘The trouble with Mac is,’ she added grimly, ‘he wants to eat his cake and keep it. And this cake has gone stale enough to chuck into the rubbish bin.’
‘Mac doesn’t think you’re stale,’ Joel protested.
‘No.’ Her eyes flashed him a hard look. ‘But he’s taken so many bites out of me, Joel, that there really is very little left for me to offer him!’
Joel sighed—the kind of sigh that said he was giving up trying to convince her otherwise. And Roberta sighed—relieved that he was giving up, because she’d taken just about all she could right now.
‘I’ll see you Monday,’ she murmured, opening the car door.
‘And if he calls me up looking for you, what do I tell him?’ he asked heavily as she stepped out of the car.
Roberta bent down to look at him. ‘Do you really think he will?’ she mocked, her mouth twisting bitterly on the answer that Joel didn’t even bother saying out loud. ‘Goodnight, Joel,’ she said wearily, and closed the car door.
CHAPTER TWO
JENNY was surprised to find her old flatmate standing on her doorstep, asking for her old room back. ‘OK,’ she demanded, once she’d ushered Roberta into the small, chunkily familiar sitting-room and pushed a drink of something strong into her hand, ‘what has that selfish rat done to make you refuse the final straw?’
‘Not Mac,’ Roberta huskily denied, defending him even while she knew that he did not deserve it. ‘His family.’ And she told her friend the gist of her sudden decision tonight.
‘How is it,’ Jenny demanded angrily when Roberta had finished, ‘that a man of Solomon Maclaine’s tough character can be so weak where his family is concerned?’
‘He loves them,’ Roberta stated simply. ‘And feels guilty for letting them all down, so he spends his life walking a fine line between pleasing himself and pleasing them.’ Her shrug said just how successfully he managed it most of the time.
‘Which gives you the unappetising role of being piggy in the middle.’ Jenny grimaced distastefully.
‘Gave me,’ Roberta corrected. ‘I’ve just resigned from the position, remember?’
‘You haven’t told him yet,’ Jenny wryly pointed out.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘But I will.’
She had had enough.
‘Actually, I feel quite good!’ she suddenly announced. ‘Beneath the bitterness, of course.’ She acknowledged Jenny’s mocking look. ‘And that’s only there because I felt so humiliated tonight. But, other than that, I feel as if someone has lifted a big lead weight from my shoulders. I am no longer Solomon Maclaine’s hole-and-corner affair!’ she loudly declared. ‘Perhaps now I can begin to get some of my self-respect back.’
‘He’ll be around here looking for you as soon as he finds out you’re not at your flat,’ Jenny warned.
‘His flat,’ Roberta corrected, her soft cupid’s-bow mouth turning down cynically. ‘Mac provided me with that flat because a man of his standing has to maintain certain standards for his illicit affairs!’
‘Plus the fact that having me around here cramped his style!’
Roberta couldn’t help but smile at that. Built on Amazon proportions, with a full figure and the well-toned muscles of a trained physiotherapist, Jenny could frighten off any man with just a certain look!
‘Can I have my old room back?’ she begged her now.
‘Of course you can!’ Instantly Jenny’s softer side was gushing all over her. ‘Do you think you’ll sleep at all?’ she asked concernedly as Roberta got up from the chair.
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ll try anyway.’
Surprisingly, she slept quite well. Her head hit the pillow in her old single bed in her old familiar room that possessed none of the luxurious trappings Mac had surrounded her with in his personalised love-nest; his darkly attractive face loomed up into the darkness, wearing that rueful little smile he had offered her before his ex-wife had claimed his attention that evening, and, just as she was conditioning herself for a long night’s battle against the weakening effects of that smile, she dropped asleep and dreamed of nothing.
It was wonderful. Like being set free.
* * *
‘Joel’s been on the phone,’ Jenny informed her when she walked into the small kitchen the next morning dressed in one of Jenny’s tracksuits, a pale blue one with a creamy hood attached to the baggy top. ‘He wanted to warn you that, contrary to your opinion, Mac is on the war-path. He’s already phoned his place asking where you are.’
Roberta paused on a moment’s sharp surprise. So her manner last night had managed to get through to him, or he definitely would not have bothered ringing her.
‘Did he tell him?’ she asked casually, going to check if the coffee-pot was still hot.
Jenny shrugged. ‘He says not. But apparently Mac had been trying your number all night, and he’s gone from the puzzled to the worried to the bloody furious. Joel said he was spitting out all kinds of nasty insinuations that Joel found rather flattering since they seemed to team you and him together. But he swears he played it thick and said nothing other than that he dropped you off last night and that was the last he’d seen of you.’
‘Good old Joel,’ she murmured, thinking, So he’s decided to come down on my side, has he? She had wondered. Joel was Mac’s brother, after all. ‘I could do with a piece of toast,’ she remarked. ‘I didn’t eat a single thing at that lousy party last night.’
Jenny made a sound of impatience. ‘He’ll be ringing here at any moment,’ she cried. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Me?’ Roberta paused as she was about to slip two slices of bread into the toaster. ‘I’m going to do nothing,’ she said, feeding the bread into the warming slots. ‘This is your flat. Your phone. You answer it.’
‘In other words, tell him a pack of lies.’
