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Roberta just shrugged, the strange calmness she had taken into sleep with her the night before still presiding this morning. ‘I thought you might rather enjoy the job,’ she said.
‘Oh, I will,’ Jenny murmured with relish. She had a thing about men of Mac’s calibre, having been heavily involved with one very like him herself once—with similar heartbreaking results. ‘But what if he decides to come barging round here to check?’ she wanted to know.
‘Come off it, Jenny!’ Roberta scoffed. ‘You know as well as I do that he daren’t leave Berkshire until every last one of his guests has left before him! No,’ she said grimly, ‘I’m safe until Monday. Which gives me time to clear my things from the flat before I have to face him.’
The toast popped up, and Roberta pampered herself by spreading a thick layer of butter on it before taking it to the table with her coffee.
‘You’re taking this all very calmly,’ Jenny observed. ‘I mean, Mac is supposed to be the man you fell head over heels in love with—threw all your high-falutin principles away for. Surely you feel some kind of grief for what you’re doing?’
Did she? Roberta bit into her toast while she thought about it. ‘Perhaps I’m suffering from shock,’ she decided finally, discovering that she was still feeling nothing whatsoever except that ice-cold determination which had come with her sudden decision last night.
The telephone began to ring. Something close to terror hit her spine, sending it jerkingly erect. Not so invulnerable, she acknowledged shakily as Jenny moved reluctantly across the kitchen.
‘Shut the door on your way out,’ Roberta called after her, calmly enough, and Jenny sent her a bewildered look before doing as she was told.
The moment the door closed, Roberta darted up and switched on the transistor radio. A Saturday morning pop show blared out, drowning out any hope of overhearing Jenny’s side of the conversation through the thin walls separating the kitchen from the sitting-room. She sat down again, shaking all over.
Feeling nothing, my foot! she scoffed at herself. She was a walking grenade with the pin half out.
But determined, she reminded herself grimly. Damned, wretchedly determined.
Jenny came back. ‘He seems more concerned about you than angry,’ she told her. ‘He can’t understand why you’re not where you’re supposed to be.’
‘So you suggested he look where?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘I reminded him that your parents were home and suggested that you could have gone there. He approved of that idea and rang off to check.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Roberta said after a moment. ‘They’ve already left for warmer climes.’
Gone chasing wild dogs across the Serengeti, having been home only five days to dump off the film of their last field-trip—six weeks studying dolphins in the South China Sea.
Five days. She grimaced. Into their early fifties, and still they barely paused for breath between trips. Still they found no time in their packed schedule to do more than allow their only child a conciliatory phone call to offset any disappointment she might feel for their not having time to meet her, if only for a quick lunch.
They lived in a world of their own, which left no room for unimportant things like daughters. So, what’s new? she asked herself as an old bitterness began to boil up inside her. They have a vague idea of what you do for a living, that your birthday is somewhere in the month of October, that you’re not short of funds and are in good health. What more could a girl want?
A bit of tender, loving care, she grimly answered her own mockery. A father to hug and lean on once in a while. A mother to run to at times like these, confide her troubles in.
A bit of what Lulu Maclaine had a lot of.
Wow! Blowing the air out of her lungs, she pushed herself up from the table with that bit of revealing envy niggling at her conscience.
Then, No, she told herself firmly. It wasn’t just a case of her being envious of what Lulu had that she did not. It was simply that she was not going to take second place to anyone else in her life.
And that, she was determined, was that.
Mac rang the flat half a dozen times during the next two days, and by the time Roberta had come back from her final expedition to the Chelsea flat on Sunday evening poor Jenny was looking flustered.
‘He’s bloody furious with you, he’s so worried!’ she said almost accusingly, which wasn’t surprising since it was Jenny who had had to deal with his calls all weekend, and Mac could frazzle anyone’s nerves when he put his mind to it. ‘Don’t you think you should put him out of his misery now and speak to him yourself?’
‘No,’ Roberta stubbornly refused. ‘Mac has put me through twelve months of misery. Two short days of the same goes nowhere near paying him back.’
‘You went into that relationship with your eyes wide open,’ Jenny pointed out.
Yes, thought Roberta on a sigh. Wide open but hopeful. A hope driven by a deep-seated need to be loved and wanted for herself above all others by a man she could love and want above all others herself.
Well, she had found the man she loved and wanted above all others. The only trouble was, he did not love and want her in the same way!
Which, in the end, left her with nothing to be hopeful for.
* * *
Roberta was at her desk on Monday morning, dictating to Mitzy, when Mac came through the door like a bullet.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he barked, striding forward to slam an angry fist down hard on the top of the desk.
Mitzy jumped, startled out of her wits by his forceful entrance. Roberta took her time before reacting, but then she had been prepared for this—poor Mitzy had not.
Still, as with a carefully schooled expression she lifted her attention from the stack of papers she had been working on and levelled her cool green eyes on him she had to quell a quiver of alarm. Jenny was right, she acknowledged; he was furious. His grey eyes had turned silver with it; his mouth pulled so tightly across his teeth that he was snarling with it—like a dog. A big, dark and ravaging bloodthirsty dog.
‘Do you know the kind of trouble you’ve put me through this weekend?’ he demanded harshly when she didn’t reply. ‘I’ve been going out of my mind worrying what could have happened to you!’
‘But not enough to bring you rushing back from Berkshire to check if I was all right,’ she said, and watched him stiffen up like a board at the thrust.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he growled.
‘Nothing.’ Removing her gaze from him, she glanced at Mitzy, who was staring directly ahead doing a good impression of a waxwork dummy, and Roberta took pity on her. ‘We’ll finish this later,’ she told the other girl quietly.
‘Y-yes, of course...’ With a blink and a jerk Mitzy hauled herself out of the chair and squeezed warily past Mac’s taut frame to leave the room quickly.
The ensuing silence thumped like a drum—or was it her pulse? Roberta wondered as she forced herself to remain calmly seated behind her desk, looking her usual coolly immaculate self in a slate-grey worsted suit and neat powder-blue blouse, while inside her everything was beginning to burn up on a mad combination of bitter pique and the usual hot, melting breathlessness she suffered whenever she looked at Mac.
Mitzy’s timely exit had given Mac time to consider just what Roberta had said, and his eyes had narrowed into harshly assessing slits. The anger in him had damped down to a more manageable level, which meant that he was beginning to realise he had a big problem on his hands with her and was responding accordingly—with his razor-sharp brain instead of his emotions.
‘Explain,’ he demanded at last. Nothing more, just that one very economical word which none the less said it all.
She studied him for a moment, completely in control of her outer self except for the slight trembling of her hands, which she clenched together tightly on her lap while she decided how best to tackle this.
He too was dressed for business, she noted inconsequentially, in one of his dark, fashionably cut suits that did so much to add to that air of power and success he carried around with him.
She would have felt much softer towards him if he had come barging in here looking like the devil, in creased clothes and with his silky hair mussed by worried fingers. But he hadn’t. Mac might have been concerned about her, but only in as much as he could not understand what was going on. His concern had not stopped him from having a good night’s sleep or making himself presentable for work this morning.
Which just went to prove how right she was about his feelings for her, she concluded.
‘It’s quite simple, Mac,’ she therefore informed him levelly. ‘I’ve moved out of your flat—’
‘I know that!’ he cut in deridingly. ‘Having arrived there at some ungodly hour this morning to find it strangely lacking any of your personal possessions!’
‘—because,’ she went on, as if he hadn’t interrupted, holding his slicing gaze with her own supremely calm one, ‘I have decided to conclude our relationship.’
He didn’t move for the space of several stuttering heartbeats, his stunned eyes fixed on her lovely composed features. Then, ‘You’ve what?’ he choked, and her stomach turned itself inside out as a strange kind of triumph grabbed hold of her.
She had actually managed to hit him right below the proverbial belt at last!
‘You heard me,’ she answered smoothly enough. ‘It’s over between us.’ Finished, finito, she added to herself cynically. No more.
Mac shook his jet-black head as if he needed to clear it. ‘Bunny...’ he murmured, the husky sound of his very personal pet name for her wrenching at something very vulnerable inside her. ‘What the hell is this?’
Genuine bewilderment had managed to cloud over his anger. His lightly tanned face was suddenly pale with surprise. A tightly clenched fist came out between them, the long, blunt-ended fingers uncurling slowly, as though it took a great effort to make the conciliatory gesture.
‘What have I done to bring this on?’ he asked.
Done? ‘Nothing,’ she said. Exactly nothing. And hardened her heart against the appealing picture he made standing there pleading with her like that. He had used this tactic before when she’d been angry with him—and had always won with it. But not this time. ‘I have simply decided that it is time to get out, Mac. Surely you above all people can understand that?’ It was a pointed dig at the long string of women who had preceded her in and out of his own life.
And he took it, by dropping the open hand, the long fingers clenching up again at the same moment that his mouth clenched also. ‘But why?’ he demanded. ‘And why like this? With no prior warning but just an empty flat for me to walk into!’
Had that hurt? She looked into his hard silver eyes and saw that it had. Mac probably brought the end to a relationship by sending a bunch of roses or a pretty bracelet of diamonds and a thank-you, which meant as little as the relationship itself had meant to him. Did he think that his way was any less hurtful than hers had been?
‘The relationship was going nowhere,’ she told him, ignoring the latter to answer the former because that deserved an answer; the latter did not.
His eyes narrowed assessingly at that. ‘And you—wanted it to go somewhere?’ he murmured softly.
Roberta smiled, seeing the trap even as he set it. ‘Oh, yes,’ she admitted, ever so ruefully. ‘I wanted it to.’
‘But you knew I wasn’t into marriage even before we began.’
‘Yes.’ Her soft blonde head nodded, then stayed lowered, from where she watched her fingers pleat and unpleat themselves on her lap. Yes, she thought heavily. She had known, but she had been foolish enough to hope otherwise.
‘We agreed to live together, nothing else,’ Mac said grimly.
That brought her head shooting back up, green eyes honing on to him. ‘But we didn’t live together, did we?’ she challenged. ‘You have your Berkshire home, where I am not welcome. Your Knightsbridge apartment, where I am not welcome. And you have your Chelsea flat, where I am supposed to know my place and keep to it!’
‘And when do I ever use the Knightsbridge place?’ he demanded furiously. ‘Or spend time in Berkshire, come to that?’ With a raking flick of his hand he dismissed that argument with the contempt he thought it deserved. ‘You know as well as I do,’ he went on gruffly, ‘that where you are is where I want to be, which knocks that excuse right on its crazy head.’
‘Unless you’re entertaining, of course.’ Despite the warming response she had experienced to his gruff confession about wanting to be where she was, Roberta kept her mind firmly fixed on the point in hand. ‘When you suddenly develop amnesia where I am concerned.’
‘Good grief!’ he gasped, eyes widening as understanding suddenly hit. ‘Do you mean to tell me that this is all because of Friday night?’ He made a sound that was both impatient and scornful.
‘The final straw,’ she conceded. ‘That’s all.’
But he wasn’t listening. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he was muttering. ‘You’re just bloody miffed because I didn’t dance attendance on you all night long!’
‘You didn’t dance attendance at all, the way I remember it.’
‘I had other duties to attend to!’ he snapped. ‘It was Lulu’s night. And she, therefore, had first call on my attention!’
‘She got it, Mac,’ Roberta drily assured. ‘She certainly got it! The full, central and undivided attention of most of the room all night—at my damned expense due to your lack of support for me!’
‘Lulu said something to upset you?’ he asked sharply, really beginning to catch on at last. His eyes darkened, the anger leaving him to be replaced with another look of urgent appeal. ‘Listen, Bunny—’ he leaned towards her again ‘—if Lulu—or any of my family—offended you at the party the other night, then I apologise for them. They’re all so damned—’
Roberta suddenly shot to her feet. ‘They didn’t offend me, Mac. You did! You do it every time you pretend I don’t exist as far as they are concerned! If once—just once—you had come to my side, forced them to accept me for what I am supposed to be to you, then they would have done—and you know it!’ She sucked in a short breath, disgusted with him and herself for putting up with it all for so long. ‘Well—’ She tried to put a brake on her temper, but it didn’t work. Now that it had been let loose it did not want to retreat again. ‘I refuse to hide in the cupboard like your guilty skeleton any longer! I have done nothing—nothing—to be ashamed of. Yet your family—through you—’ she angrily made clear ‘—has sunk my self-esteem to such a level that it can’t sink any lower! And yes—’ she nodded tightly ‘—I’ve had enough!’ The lot, everything she had been bottling up all weekend, was spilling out in one furious wave. ‘More than enough! I will not allow myself to be trodden under your rotten family’s feet for another day! So you can take yourself—and your selfish idea of a relationship—and just get out of here!’
‘Finished?’ he clipped.
‘Yes,’ she said, and sat down with a bump, drawing air into her lungs in an effort to control herself. She had been determined not to lose her temper with him, to finish this with all the cool aplomb that a man like Mac would expect from a woman of her supposed sophistication. But that was the trouble, she conceded angrily. She wasn’t really sophisticated at all! She was just a love-vulnerable fool called Roberta Chandler, forced into playing an alien role because she couldn’t control her feelings for this man!
And to have him she’d had to play it his way—right down the damned line!
‘So you want out.’
‘Not want,’ she corrected, ‘I have out.’
‘Or marriage,’ he derided, shoving himself away from the desk.
‘Oh, no.’ She denied that instantly. ‘You see, that was another thing I discovered on Friday night. I discovered that I have no wish to become a member of your rude and selfish family. But I do want marriage!’ she added quickly, when he flashed her a look that said he might be considering throttling her for that particular insult. ‘And since it obviously isn’t going to be to you—’ her slender shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug ‘—then I must cut my losses and look around for someone else.’
‘Even though it’s me you love?’
Oh, that hurt, and it showed in the way she winced. But she lifted her chin to him, green eyes holding on to his. ‘And who do you love, Mac?’ she challenged quietly.
He swung away, obviously not prepared to answer that one. ‘I learned the wedding lesson the first time around,’ he muttered evasively, going to stand at the window with his hands shoved into his trouser pockets. ‘I have no intention of putting myself through that kind of hell again.’
‘I can understand that,’ Roberta acknowledged fairly. ‘But whatever hell your marriage was to you, Mac, you did gain something very precious from it. You gained Lulu, whom you so obviously love and adore—a daughter who loves and adores you in return. Do you think I don’t want to experience that kind of bond with a child of my own?’ she appealed to the rigid set of his back. ‘Do you honestly think that, just because you see your duty to the human race fulfilled in Lulu, I must accept that it can never happen to me because I love you and therefore must concede to your dictum?’
‘You’re jealous of Lulu!’ he swung around to declare.
‘I am not jealous of Lulu!’ she denied, storming to her feet again as the taunt hit a raw nerve. ‘But I am jealous of what you and Lulu have, that I can never have if I don’t cut myself free from you!’
‘But you’re only twenty-five years old, dammit!’ he rasped. ‘You’ve got years ahead of you to plan things like home and family!’
She felt herself go icy cold. ‘Leave it until you decide that you’ve had enough of me, do you mean?’
The colour drained from his face, his thickly curling lashes flickering down to hide his eyes from her as he turned back to the window. And Roberta smiled bleakly to herself as her heart flipped over, then lay struggling like a dying fish in her breast. She had just knocked the nail right on top of its indisputable head.
‘You’ve never so much as hinted to me before that you felt like this,’ Mac muttered after a long, heavy moment.
‘I was waiting for you to show enough interest in my feelings to wonder,’ she murmured shakily. ‘But you never have, have you?’
Even she heard the contempt in her voice, aimed entirely at herself for her own powers of self-delusion, and Mac’s shoulders shifted on a gesture of discomfort as he picked up on it too.
‘But that really is not the main issue here.’ Grimly she shifted things back on to the right track. ‘The issue being that I am no longer willing to have a hole-and-corner affair with a man who can’t even acknowledge me for what I am supposed to be to him, in front of those people he cares for, because he is ashamed of me.’
‘Now that’s a downright bloody lie!’ Mac barked, spinning around to lance her with a murderous look. ‘You know what you are without my having to spell it out for you!’ he bit out angrily. ‘You are beautiful, you are bright, you are enchanting to be with, and you’re damned fantastic in bed! And any man would be proud to call you his—including me! So stop coming on to me as though I treat you like some dirty secret I keep swept beneath the carpet, because it just isn’t true!’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No, it bloody well isn’t,’ he growled, advancing on her with wrathful intent gleaming in his eyes. ‘You are the first woman in ten years that I’ve given my complete loyalty to!’ he reminded her as he reached her.
‘But I gave you a whole lot more than that.’ She had been referring to her love but, typical Mac, he completely misunderstood her.
