Читать книгу Temporary Mistress - Sarah Morgan - Страница 13

NORA watched Kelly bounce out through the front door of their apartment building and down the short flight of damp steps to the footpath, her short shock of bright red hair glowing like a match in the bright morning sunlight.

Nora sank lower in the seat of her ageing Citroön, her hands whitening on the steering wheel, thankful that she had pulled in behind the line of parked cars near the end of the street to wait for her flatmate to leave for work…late, as usual.

Kelly was a PA in the public relations department at Maitlands, but her hours were hugely flexible thanks to the amount of social junketing with clients she was obliged to do.

When her previous flatmate had decided to move to Sydney a few months ago, Nora had posted an ad on the company’s computer bulletin board. Kelly’s outgoing personality and enthusiasm for life had persuaded her that the bubbly twenty-one-year-old would be fun to have around. It had only been after she moved in that Nora had begun to realise that their ideas of fun didn’t always coincide.

She watched Kelly walk jauntily off towards the bus stop around the corner. It didn’t seem fair that the hard-partying Kelly should be brimming with health and vitality, while Nora squinted through bleary red eyes, her mouth puckered with horrible dryness, her head squeezed in the vice-like grip of a vicious hangover. Of course, Kelly had been able to enjoy all the comforts of home last night, whereas Nora had had to make do with a depressing motel room and the spurious sympathy of a bottle of eighty-per-cent-proof vodka. And she didn’t even like vodka!

The feeling, she had since found out, was entirely mutual.

As soon as Kelly turned the corner, Nora coaxed the Citroën’s temperamental engine back into life and eased out from the line of cars at the kerb, driving down to slot into her usual parking place amongst the other residents’ vehicles.

She got out of the car, moving carefully so as not to jolt her painful head, still brooding over the reasons for her enforced exile.

By the time she had reached her car last night she had been alternately sweating and shivering, almost semi-hysterical with relief. As she’d navigated her way through the saturated streets she’d vowed that she would never, ever, behave so irresponsibly again—no matter what the provocation. Or the temptation!

Operating on auto-pilot, she had instinctively headed for the security of her own home and had been shattered when she’d turned into her street and spied a familiar silver BMW parked outside the apartment and the lights in Kelly’s corner bedroom glowing cosily behind drawn blinds.

Ryan certainly hadn’t wasted any time, she had thought numbly. He must have left the party straight after Nora and raced over for more fun and games with Kelly. How many other times had the pair of them taken reckless advantage of Nora’s absence?

Anger balled in her stomach. Ryan always liked to have the last word in an argument. What if he had arranged with Kelly to wait around and confront Nora when she eventually arrived home?

Home. That was a laugh. A home was supposed to be somewhere you felt safe, a protective fortress against the slings and arrows of misfortune.

And now that had been taken from her, too.

Nora had wanted to storm inside and scream at the pair to get out. The lease of the compact two-bedroomed ground-floor apartment had always been in her sole name, so she had every right to ask Kelly to leave, but she couldn’t very well do it tonight—not in her current woefully vulnerable state; not until she had shored up her defences again.

She had several friends who would put her up, but most of them were friends with Ryan, too, and right now she felt too emotionally exhausted to run the gauntlet of the inevitable questions if she turned up distraught and begging for shelter.

So she had put her foot back down on the accelerator and sought out the nearest low-rise motel, a rather down at heel establishment which included an hourly rate on its dog-eared price card. Unlocking her door, she had noticed the neon-lit window of a liquor wholesaler across the road, in which a sexy female mannequin sported a sign promising a free T-shirt with every purchased bottle of famous-brand vodka.

When Nora had walked out of the store she’d been carrying not only the vodka and a black T-shirt but also the mannequin’s fluorescent green leggings. She might have been stranded in the twilight zone but she wasn’t going to spend a minute longer than necessary in the dress that had come to symbolise her stupidity.

And, having bought the vodka, it had seemed a good idea to stave off some of her misery by opening it. It would make a fine title for a reality TV show, thought Nora, as she opened the car boot: When Good Ideas Go Bad!

The vodka idea would certainly go down as famous in the annals of bad decisions she had made. She drank, but never to excess, and now she wondered why anyone would knowingly court this kind of physical torture.

Carrying the company laptop she had forgotten to take inside when she had eagerly rushed home to try on her new dress, and with the rest of her things stuffed into the liquor store carrier bag, Nora nudged the boot of the Citroën closed with her elbow, wincing as the heavy thunk rattled her aching skull.

A tall solidly built man in a rumpled white shirt was getting out of a black van across the road as Nora approached the steps, her mind concentrated on getting to the top without her head falling off. The first thing she was going to do when she got inside was make a huge pot of coffee, she thought longingly.

‘Excuse me?’

Nora looked gingerly around at the politely forceful voice. The rumpled shirt had a face to match—fiftyish, lived-in, blandly unremarkable except for sharp periwinkle-blue eyes.

‘Miss Lang?’

She was trying to work enough fur out of her mouth to answer, conscious of his arrested survey of her vodka-touting T-shirt and bilious leggings, when he added, ‘Miss Nora Lang?’

There was a hint of amusement in his tone which rubbed at her raw nerves. ‘Who wants to know?’ she said with uncharacteristic rudeness.

‘These are for you.’

He held up the sheaf of red roses he had been carrying half-concealed at his side, and Nora was startled into feeling a momentary lift of her spirits.

Her mouth began to curve into an involuntary smile. ‘For me? Are you sure?’

‘If you’re Eleanor Lang from apartment 1A.’

‘Yes, that’s me.’ Her elation died and her smile inverted itself. Only one person she knew had any reason to send her flowers. She recoiled as if they were plague-ridden. ‘I don’t want them!’

He seemed taken aback at the heated response. ‘Look—I’m just making a delivery, OK?’

She glared. Any colour would have been unacceptable, but red was rubbing added salt in the wound. They were even more offensive considering that Ryan had never bothered to send her flowers before.

‘Then you can just deliver them right back where they came from,’ she declared, her contempt recharging her dwindling stores of energy. ‘And you can tell that—that snake who sent them that he’s a moron if he thinks he can bribe me with a measly bunch of flowers! He’s never going to get back what he lost. And when this goes public I’m going to make sure that everyone knows how it went down. Maybe people won’t be so quick to trust him in future, if they know his personal morality stinks!’

She stumped up the steps, feeling slightly better for having vented her spleen, even if only at an innocent bystander. The poor guy had looked quite stunned by her outburst. She glanced back as she went into the building and saw him walking back to his van with the rejected roses, cell-phone plastered to his ear…reporting his aborted mission, no doubt, she thought with a bitter sense of satisfaction.

Entering the flat, Nora felt none of her usual welcome sense of homecoming. To her dismay she felt alien in her own environment, tense and resentful of all the signs of Kelly’s occupation—the open fashion magazine left on the couch, the unwashed dishes in the sink, the pile of ironing draped over a chair, the drips of nail varnish on the coffee table. Usually Nora was tolerant of her flatmate’s habitual untidiness, but now her thoughtlessness seemed insultingly close to contempt.

It had been too much to hope for that Kelly had already started to pack up her things, Nora brooded as she switched on the coffee-maker, but surely she must have realised that she would have to move out? Until she did, the atmosphere in the flat would be hideously strained and uncomfortable.

A prowl around showed no evidence that Ryan had ever been there, but venturing into the bathroom made Nora’s gorge rise and she hastily snatched up her toothbrush and retreated. For the sake of personal hygiene she knew she’d have to get over her atavistic horror at the sight of her bath. Maybe she should get the place ritually exorcised!

A quick brush of her aching teeth and an ingestion of freshly brewed coffee made Nora feel a trifle less like dying. Anxious to change out of the tacky clothes, she paused to look at herself in her bedroom mirror and grimaced. Her eyes looked glassy and sunken and the stubborn remnants of her mascara deepened the bruised shadows that surrounded them. She had washed her hair at the motel, using the meagre courtesy sachet of shampoo, but the establishment hadn’t run to hair-dryers and now her curls were an uncontrollable tumble around her pale face, her bleached complexion accentuating the ginger freckles and the faint whisker burns glowing on her cheek as well as on the skin above the drooping neckline of the baggy hip-length T-shirt.

She looked like a woman who had been used and abused, she thought bitterly—which was pretty much the truth.

Only…she had done her share of using, too, Nora reminded herself in a smothering of guilt. She had shamelessly courted danger and almost been consumed by it.

She kicked off her shoes and hooked her fingers into the waistband of the bright green leggings. Perhaps once she was back in her own clothes she would feel more like herself.

She tensed at the sound of the doorbell, and then relaxed as she told herself that it couldn’t be Kelly—and Ryan also had his own key, although he had never given Nora similar free access to his apartment.

Nora’s mood swung from brooding self-doubt to angry anticipation as she walked to the door. If it was that flower delivery man back again he was going to get himself a fresh ear-blistering.

She whipped open the door, eyes sparkling with challenge.

‘Hello, Nora.’

For an instant she gaped, paralysed with shock and embarrassment. ‘Blake! W-what are you doing here?’

He bared his teeth in a lethally unpleasant smile. ‘Guess.’

She didn’t like the sound of the sibilant threat and instinctively tried to whip the door closed, but that first instant of unwariness had given him all the edge he needed.

A muscular hand slapped against the wood and slowly applied the pressure to widen the gap to a full body-width.

‘I—I’m just about to go to work,’ she lied, struggling to resist the inexorable pressure.

His eyelids flickered downwards. ‘Dressed like that? I doubt if it’ll meet the Maitlands dress code.’

‘How do you know where I work?’ she croaked, the muscles of her arm straining against the losing battle with the door.

‘I asked around.’

She wasn’t fooled by the laconic drawl. Repressed fury oozed from his every pore.

‘Where have you been all night?’ he demanded, as if he had every right to know.

She tried to gather her defences. ‘Look, I’m sorry I left the way I did, but I really don’t have time to discuss it right now—’

‘Make time,’ he said, leaning more heavily on the door. ‘I have something that belongs to you.’

Yes—her innocence. Before she had gone off with Blake MacLeod she had quaintly imagined that she could handle the kind of risk he represented. But she had never dreamed that danger would turn up on her own doorstep!

‘I thought you might want it back…’

He was dangling something from his other hand, distracting her from his savage expression. Her wildly expensive new shoe. Shades of a fairy-tale romance…he had tracked her down to return her lost shoe!

A rush of relief weakened her grip on the door and, before she could register the unlikelihood of him performing such an extreme act of altruism he rammed through it, kicking it shut behind him with his polished heel. His head swivelled as he made a scowling survey of the room, seemingly unimpressed with the serenely comfortable decor which reflected Nora’s unfussy taste. This was certainly no gallant Prince Charming come looking for his Cinderella. In a dark blue pinstriped suit and navy shirt and tie he looked ominously like a storm cloud looking for somewhere to pitch his lightning and thunder.

He turned to face her and Nora fell back under the frontal assault of his molten silver gaze.

‘H-How did you find me?’ She knew it hadn’t just been a matter of looking her up in the phone book. After a number of nuisance phone calls the previous year she had obtained an unlisted number.

He pitched the shoe on to her couch. ‘Your credit card receipt confirmed your name; the rest was relatively easy, given my resources.’

Her stomach lurched. He had gone back to the hotel boutique? She didn’t know whether to be flattered or horrified.

‘You thought I might have been lying about who I was?’ she croaked.

‘Well, I didn’t think you’d really be fool enough to try and screw me under your real name.’

She stiffened, fighting a hot wave of shame. ‘There’s no need to be crude!’

His mouth compressed to a cruel line. ‘Oh, there’s every need. After all, what you did to me was the essence of crudity.’

She put her hands to her blazing cheeks. ‘So I changed my mind—that’s supposed to be a woman’s prerogative,’ she said, her words muffled with mortification.

‘The hell you did,’ he grated, stalking closer, deliberately menacing her with his size. ‘You got me precisely where you wanted me, and I played right into your hands by acting the gentleman. I won’t make that mistake again.’

She swallowed hard, dismayed by her body’s response to his nearness. Surely he didn’t mean to pick up where they’d left off last night? She ran her damp hands down the uneven seams of the cheap T-shirt.

‘I—I don’t understand,’ she said, bewildered by his strange intensity. Why was he making it sound as if she was the dangerous one?

‘Tell me, Nora, is there some personal history between us that I don’t know about? Did I reject you at some point? Have I dated someone you know or slept with your sister—?’

She backed further into the room, wide-eyed with confusion at his sudden change of tack. ‘I don’t have a sister.’ Only a brother who was living in Florida, well out of range of any screams for help.

‘There must be something—some reason that you’re willing to go to such lengths to discredit me,’ he said. ‘Is this some kind of vendetta? What’s so important that you were willing to prostitute yourself for the sake of getting even with me?’

The heat drained from her cheeks. ‘Vendetta?’ she repeated shakily, putting a hand to her throbbing head.

She knew she had acted like a reckless idiot, but a prostitute? The accusation was too absurd to be insulting. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Come on, Nora, a woman doesn’t call a man a snake and threaten to ruin him without some very personal feelings being involved—’

‘I never called you a snake!’ she protested.

His face tightened in contempt. ‘If you’re going to lie, Nora, at least try and make it believeable—’

‘I am not lying!’ she shouted at him, almost blowing off the top of her head in the process, her slight body vibrating with outrage.

A sneer curled the corner of his mouth. ‘Doug reported your conversation verbatim. You want me to call him up as a witness? Or was that comment about a bribe a hint that you’d prefer to be paid? Unfortunately for you, my stinking personal morality draws the line at giving in to blackmail. I’ll see you in hell before I give you a cent!’

Nora had the strange feeling she was there already. She pressed a fist against her churning stomach as a light belatedly went on inside her fogged brain.

The man with the roses! ‘I—D-do you mean—the flowers were from you?’ she stuttered weakly.

He stilled, his eyes narrowing. ‘You told Doug you knew who sent them.’

‘I thought I did—I thought it was Ryan,’ she murmured, collapsing down on to the oatmeal-coloured easy chair. ‘Why did you send me roses?’

‘I didn’t,’ he replied bluntly, shattering any romantic illusions she might have been building up. He planted himself in front of her, hands thrust into his pockets as if to physically restrain himself from putting them around her pale throat and throttling the truth out of her. ‘That was Doug confirming your identity without putting you on the alert. I’d described you, but he wanted to be sure he had the right woman before he let me know that you’d turned up. I’m not surprised he had doubts—you look like hell.’

He had no need to sound so pleased about it!

‘That’s strange, since I’m feeling so fantastic,’ she said in a voice that dripped with sarcasm. She tipped her head back and glared up at him. ‘Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you had this Doug person watching the flat, waiting for me?’

He seemed to relish her outrage, answering her question with his own. ‘Your flatmate said you hadn’t been home, so where did you go after you left me, Nora? Who was it you had arranged to meet?’

She bristled with hostility at the mention of Kelly. ‘Nobody. Not that it’s any business of yours! Look, just because we almost—almost—’ She found herself floundering and he supplied her with a crude word that struck her like a bullet.

‘—slept together,’ she substituted with ragged dignity, ‘it doesn’t give you the right to come around here and interrogate me.’

‘Would you rather discuss it with the police?’

‘The police?’

He looked grimly satisfied at her dismay. ‘You either deal with me or deal with them.’

He had to be bluffing! ‘Are you crazy? It’s not against the law for a woman to decide not to be sexually intimate with you…’ She trailed off, remembering just how very intimate things had got between them before she had lost her nerve. The extraordinarily vivid memories of their passionate encounter had haunted her all night.

‘It is, however, illegal to steal,’ he said harshly.

Thinking about the pleasure that she had stolen from him without giving him anything in return, she blushed. She had melted like honey at each stroke of his skilful fingers, selfishly absorbed in her own gratification to the exclusion of everything else.

‘I didn’t take anything you weren’t offering,’ she denied feverishly.

‘Is that going to be your defence in court?’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You can’t sue me for not giving you an orgasm!’

‘What?’

He looked as stunned as she had a few moments ago, and Nora was drenched in scalding embarrassment.

She jumped to her feet, her uncertain balance almost sending her reeling into his chest. He automatically reached out to steady her and a hot thrill shot up her arm. She snatched it away, rubbing at the tingling skin, humiliated to feel her nipples firming and the skin along her inner thighs tighten. Oh, God, one night of almost-sin and she was turning into a raging nymphomaniac! What on earth had made her think that he was talking about sex? She closed her eyes and felt the room revolve sickeningly around her.

‘What did you just say?’

Her eyes popped open to meet his darkly incredulous gaze. He looked as if he couldn’t believe his ears, and she hoped that he wouldn’t.

‘I—nothing,’ she mumbled, wrapping her arms defensively across her chest. She felt the whisker-burns he had given her glowing like brands on her face and breasts. His brand. She couldn’t help noticing that, this morning, the hard jaw which had rasped at her skin was as smooth and glossy as polished teak. ‘I guess we were talking at cross purposes. I’m not thinking straight—I had way too much to drink last night,’ she admitted feverishly, by way of diversion.

‘Are you trying to claim that you did what you did to me because you were drunk?’ His deep voice was coldly scathing.

She wished she could blame the booze, but she wasn’t going to demean herself even further. ‘I wasn’t then, no.’ She pushed the curls back from her face with a limp hand. ‘I only started on the vodka later—’

His eyes dipped to the inviting slogan on her T-shirt. ‘When you were celebrating your successful getaway?’

‘I wasn’t celebrating, damn it, I was trying to forget!’ Her stomach contracted with the force of her protest and she groaned.

‘What’s the matter?’

Desperate to escape from that laser-like stare, she clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘I think I’m going to be sick!’ She started for the bathroom, only to abruptly change course for the kitchen, as yet blessedly free of dire memories. Her nausea was nowhere as bad as it had been when she woke up, but at least she would gain a few minutes of precious privacy in which to regain her composure!

Unfortunately Blake appeared unfazed by the prospect of watching her vomit. He followed close on her heels, blocking off the only exit from the compact galley kitchen. Silently cursing him, she turned on the cold tap and ran it over her wrists, splashing droplets on to her clammy cheeks as she bent over the sink, cringing as the sun streaming in the window stitched a line of red dots across her gritty vision.

‘You do look rather green,’ he commented maliciously, resting his hip against the edge of the white Formica bench. ‘But I thought it was just the reflection of those ghastly pants you’re wearing.’

‘Oh, please—don’t try and make me feel better.’

Again, her sarcasm bounced off his impenetrable hide. ‘There’s only one thing that’ll do that. They do say confession is good for the soul.’

She could never, in a million years, see him as a priest. ‘Are you offering me absolution?’

‘Retribution is more my style.’ He let her see the volcanic temper still simmering in his eyes. ‘Here.’ He had rinsed out a used glass from the bench and filled it with water. ‘The best cure for a hangover.’

Given his crackling hostility, Nora was startled by the thoughtfulness of the gesture. ‘I’ve already had some coffee—’

‘Water is better for the dry horrors. Drink it.’

Because she knew he was right, and she was feeling too rotten to dispute his right to order her around, she obeyed, taking small sips to spin out the glass as long as possible.

As she tilted the glass for the last drops, a tiny rivulet trickled down her wrist from her wet hand and dripped on to the front of her T-shirt. They both looked down at the silver droplets streaking down between her breasts and Nora saw that her stiffened nipples were tenting the thin black cotton. She flushed and something hotter than temper flared deep in his eyes.

She hurriedly clattered the empty glass back on to the bench. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, I really should be getting ready for work now. It’s after nine and I was supposed to have started at eight—’ She made a tentative movement but he refused to shift, trapping her in the patch of uncomfortably bright sunlight.

‘I doubt it.’

Her mouth was suddenly bone-dry again. ‘W-what makes you say that?’

‘Because you’ve already phoned in sick this morning.’

‘How do you—?’ Her mouth snapped shut. He or his tame snoop must have tried to call her at work. This was what she got for being a conscientious employee! ‘They’re not supposed to give out that kind of information,’ she said sharply.

He shrugged. ‘I said I was your lover and we’d had a tiff…It’s amazing how indiscreet people can be when they think they’re giving romance a helping hand.’

‘You didn’t!’ she gasped, then realised how naive and gullible she sounded. He had probably only been winding her up. Would she never learn? ‘Oh, very funny!’

Her withering glare had no effect. ‘Do you see me laughing?’

She made one last attempt at reasoning him out of his implacable hostility. ‘Look, I admit that I shouldn’t have run off last night, but I made a mistake—’

‘And now you have a chance to rectify it. Give me what I want and I’ll consider us even.’

Her stomach quivered. ‘Y-You mean…here?’ she squeaked. ‘Now?’

She had a fevered vision of him taking her right there on her kitchen floor, in the full dazzle of sunlight, sliding her against the hard glossy vinyl as he drove ruthlessly for the satisfaction which she had denied him last night.

‘Yes, now. Before things go any further. That is, if they haven’t already…’

The implicit threat in his tone nipped her torrid fantasy in the bud. The thumping ache in her head almost obliterated coherent thought, but she had sense enough to decide she wasn’t going to leap to any more embarrassing conclusions.

‘Perhaps you’d better spell out exactly what it is you want from me,’ she said warily.

His eyes ignited under the scowling black brows, scorching her with his fury. ‘It’s a bit late to try and act innocent,’ he growled. ‘We both know you’re as guilty as sin. I want the property you lifted from my hotel room.’ He straightened, exuding a powerful menace. ‘So, are you going to hand it over quietly—or are we going to have to do this the hard way?’