No Holding Back

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‘I have my car here—I could take you both home.’

‘But—didn’t you——?’

Anticipating her question, Niall shook his dark head. ‘I’m well under the limit—you’ll be perfectly safe.’

And, looking into those clear grey eyes Saffron knew that he spoke the absolute truth. He had been decidedly abstemious, she recalled. If only Owen had been equally restrained!

‘I can drive!’ Owen protested.

‘I don’t think so!’ Niall’s voice was warm with humour, and he moved swiftly to support the other man as he lurched clumsily away from the table. ‘Come on, mate—this way——’

Owen was more intoxicated than Saffron had first realised, and in the first flurry of activity involved in getting him out of the restaurant, across the courtyard and into Niall’s car—the same sleek, grey vehicle that she had seen in the factory car park—she had little time to think of anything beyond a strong sense of gratitude for Niall’s calm, helpful presence.

She doubted that she would have been able to cope without him, without his physical strength to support Owen’s unsteady progress, the amused but firm tact with which he distracted the other man from his determination to drive home, and the final intuitive sensitivity he showed in personally supervising Owen’s delivery into the care of his disapproving mother, enabling Saffron to remain in the car and out of sight. She was well aware of just what Mrs Richards would think if she knew of her presence.

‘At last!‘ Niall exclaimed, sliding back into the driving-seat and pushing both hands through his hair with a sigh of relief. ‘I thought we’d never get rid of him.’

‘Thanks for seeing him to the door for me. If Ma Richards had realised I was with him she’d have blamed me for the state he’s in.’

‘She wouldn’t believe him capable of getting that way by himself?’ Niall slanted a quizzical glance in her direction as he turned the key in the ignition, bringing the powerful engine to swift, purring life.

‘Her precious Owen?’ Saffron assumed an expression of exaggerated horror. ‘Not on your life! He can do no wrong—except for the fact that he’s seeing me. Mrs Richards has never really liked me—she doesn’t think I’m quite good enough for her only child. As a matter of fact,’ she added, impelled by scrupulous honesty, ‘he’s never really been quite so silly before.’

‘No?’ Niall sounded unconvinced and dismissively uninterested. ‘Where to now? Where do you liveSaffron?’

But Saffron’s sudden silence was not because she hadn’t heard his question. Instead she had been struck by something in his tone, something distinctly cagey and with a dark note that made her nerves twist in sudden apprehension. As the sleek car pulled away from the kerb she heard again in her thoughts that expressive, ‘At last!’ and found herself looking back at the evening with fresh eyes, seeing belatedly how Niall had kept Owen’s attention, picturing him chatting easily, summoning the waiter, ordering wine—refilling the other man’s glass…

Suddenly she was sitting upright in her seat, her body taut with indignation, rejection, and something very close to fear.

‘It was you!’

Niall didn’t try to deny the accusation. He didn’t even bother to ask exactly what she meant, but simply turned and gave her a swift, unrevealing smile before apparently concentrating his attention on the road ahead.

‘It was you! You got Owen drunk quite deliberately! You poured him all that wine——’

‘No one forced him to drink it,’ Niall put in, his carefully reasonable tone only incensing her further. ‘I didn’t exactly pour the damn stuff down his throat.’

‘You might just as well have done! Owen doesn’t get presented with that sort of vintage every day of his life—certainly not in such quantities! And you know perfectly well that he wouldn’t have wanted to offend you by refusing.’

‘I’d have thought better of him if he had,’ Niall commented drily, but Saffron wasn’t listening. Her mind had gone into overdrive, whirling frantically as she tried to see just what this meant to her—because she was suddenly uncomfortably certain that Niall Forrester hadn’t got Owen drunk just for his own twisted amusement.

‘You knew that I was concerned! I said that I needed Owen to drive me home, and yet you continued to ply him with wine——’

But he had accepted her own refusal to drink any more with perfect equanimity.

‘Why——?’ she began, her strangled tone revealing that she already suspected what his answer was going to be, and didn’t like it at all. ‘Why?’

Niall turned another of those mocking, knowing smiles on her, his face half-shadowed and eerie in the light of the streetlamps.

‘Oh, come on, Saffron,’ he reproved gently. ‘You don’t need to ask that. You know exactly what I had planned. I had to get Owen out of the way because I wanted to be alone with you. But of course you knew that, because, after all, it was just what you wanted too.’

‘I wanted——’ Saffron choked on the words in her haste to get out an indignant refutal. ‘I wanted no such thing!’

‘Oh, but you did, sweetheart. I’m not blind. I could see it—read it in your face. It was there in the way you couldn’t take your eyes off me, the way you tried to play it oh, so cool and failed miserably—the way you snapped when I spoke to you but sulked when I turned my attention away.’

‘You arrogant pig!’

The knowledge that she was using her anger as a defence against his accusations made her tone even more aggressive than she had intended. The problem was that she couldn’t deny the facts—but it was the interpretation he had put on them that was so infuriating.

Or was it? When her own mind played traitor, flinging at her a series of sensual images, reminding her of the effect Niall had had on her, that sensation of something awakening deep inside, she was forced to doubt her own conviction. Was that what he had seen in her face? She was grateful for the shadows that hid the rush of hot colour into her face at the thought.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she muttered, shifting uncomfortably in her seat.

‘No? Seemed that way to me. Enough to make me want to test out the theory, anyway. And as young Mr Richards was something of an obstacle to that I—provided him with an excuse to leave us alone at the earliest possible opportunity. I think he enjoyed the experience, and there won’t be too much embarrassment on his part.’

‘On his part!’ Saffron exploded. ‘Owen wasn’t the only one who was manipulated! How the hell do you think I feel? What about my embarrassment? Or don’t my feelings count for anything in all this?’

For a long, intent second Niall took his eyes off the road and subjected her furious face to a sharply assessing scrutiny that made her skin crawl in response.

‘On the contrary, it was your feelings I was considering.’

‘My feelings! You decide that you know what I want, without so much as consulting me, deliberately get my boyfriend drunk so that I end up alone with you, whether I like it or not, and then you have the nerve to say you were considering my feelings! Consideration doesn’t come into it! Pure, arrogant selfishness is more like it!’

‘Oh, come on, honey!’ Niall wasn’t in the least bit rattled by her outburst. ‘You know I made things easier for you. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least——’ with silky deliberation he emphasised the word she had flung at him so angrily ‘—to have had to say to your boyfriend, “Look, I know I came with you, but I’m leaving with someone else.” Don’t you think?’

As Saffron’s mouth actually gaped in shock, the knowledge of the fact that she no longer wanted to continue seeing Owen depriving her of the ability to form any angry retort, he continued smoothly, ‘Especially if he’d paid for your dinner—so I took care of that too.’

‘And you think that for the price of one meal you’ve bought me! That isn’t so much Old Man as positively barbaric! What are you? Some sort of primitive Neanderthal?’

‘At the moment, what I am is hopelessly lost,’ Niall stunned her by replying. ‘How about getting down off your high-horse and giving me directions?’

‘Directions?’ Thoroughly confused by the change of subject, and bewildered by the teasing note that had suddenly appeared in his voice, Saffron could only stare blankly. ‘To where?’

‘To your home, of course.’ The patient resignation that shaded his tone riled her further. ‘I did say I would drive you back, so if you’ll just tell me which road——’

No! The word screamed inside Saffron’s head, cutting through the whirl of confusion and anger like a cold metal blade, so that suddenly she could think again, her short-circuited brain-cells beginning to make connections—and the link she could see between her own comment about buying her for the cost of a dinner and his insulting, ‘If you’ll just tell me your terms…’ of earlier that day, made her blood boil.

‘I’m not going anywhere with you! Stop the car! Damn you—I said stop!’

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_9af07380-b678-5e27-88b6-589dec154cfb)

FOR a terrifying moment she thought he wasn’t going to do as she said, and just as she was nerving herself for desperate action—though quite what, she had no idea—Niall shrugged indifferently, and, with a swift glance in the mirror, steered the powerful car to a safe position at the kerb.

It had barely come to a halt when Saffron wrenched at the door, only to find that, to her intense frustration, the handle remained stubbornly immovable, resisting all her efforts.

‘Open this!’ she flung at Niall, brown eyes flashing fire.

‘Calm down. Can’t we talk about this like rational human beings?’ His tone was one that a vet might use to soothe a highly-strung horse, but it had exactly the opposite effect on her.

‘There’s nothing to talk about! I’m not going anywhere with you, so open this door!’

‘It’s locked, and it’s going to stay locked until you’re prepared to discuss things like a reasonable——’

‘There is nothing to discuss! And how you dare use the word reasonable in the context of what you’ve done——’

‘What have I done?’ Niall’s immovable calm was infuriating. ‘No—tell me,’ he went on at her angrily wordless exclamation. ‘Just what is it that has so offended you? I’ve made it obvious that I find you attractive—so much so that I wanted to spend some time alone with you—is there anything wrong with that?’