AS LOVE-LETTERS went it was a fairly pathetic effort:
Nora,
Sorry, but I had to do it this way.
Have arranged for someone to collect you.
Call you later.
Blake
God forbid that he should have signed ‘love, Blake’ after they had just spent two whole passion-saturated days—and nights—making love with each other, Nora thought wistfully. She apparently hadn’t even ranked a ‘Best wishes’ or ‘Kind regards’, although in the circumstances a ‘Yours faithfully’ would have been nice!
He had been insatiable in more ways than one—an exciting, witty, wonderful companion, flatteringly interested in her thoughts and opinions and free with his own. He had shown her that laughter and fun could be an integral part of lovemaking and had showered her with words of passion and praise, and even tenderness, but he had been scrupulously honest. He had made no reckless promises.
Still, at least he had cared enough to leave a note, rather than just abandoning her while he raced off to oversee his all-important stock market bid. And he had lingered until after dawn to bring her breakfast in bed…a breakfast which he had proceeded to share with an ardent enthusiasm that had left his sheets gritty with toast crumbs and sticky with honey. It was while Nora was showering off her syrupy body and donning Friday’s blouse and skirt in expectation of having to scurry to work as soon as they arrived back in Auckland, that Blake had made his discreet exit.
Call you later? How reassuring! How vague. Was she just supposed to hang around at home waiting for him to bother to contact her? And what about his cavalier attitude to her job?
Turning over the square of expensive paper and finding the security alarm code scrawled on the back, Nora wondered if she was supposed to feel gratified by this example of his trust. His faith in her seemed to be sadly limited to trivialities. He would trust her with his beach house, but not with his honour? She wanted, no, she deserved, far more from him than that! She wasn’t going to let him assume that she could be packed tidily away in a convenient box until he was ready to take her out and play with her again!
Unfortunately, her search for a telephone proved fruitless—thanks, she was sure, to the one room he had kept locked. But when she went down to look through the garage she had been surprised to see the TVR still parked in its spot. For some reason Blake had taken the four-wheel drive back to town rather than his beloved sports car. A wicked little light went on in Nora’s brain. A further, more detailed, search of his bedroom turned up the car’s electronic key and after some experimentation she managed to unlock the doors and boot without setting off the alarm.
Carrying her laptop back upstairs, she plugged it into the supposedly unconnected phone line and powered up to the site of a broadband link to an ISP who also happened to be her own. She wouldn’t even have to re-configure her modem!
‘Hah! I knew you were lying,’ she crowed, tapping at the keyboard. First item on the agenda: an Internet phone call to her boss at Maitlands.
Half an hour later her hands were slipping sweatily on the steering wheel of the TVR as she finally jerked out of the gravelled side road and on to the Waitakere dual carriageway. There had been no manufacturer’s booklet in the car but after she had downloaded the results of her Internet search on the Cerbera she thought she had all the information she needed.
She now knew why Blake had chosen not to drive it back to Auckland. From the noises it was making there was something seriously wrong…unless it was just her driving. For a ghastly moment Nora wondered if she’d crept all the way up the steep gradient with the handbrake on. She glanced down to check and in doing so must have turned the wheel, for the steering reacted with the quickness for which it had been fashioned and the car headed obediently into the clay ditch at the side of the road.
With a graunching of its low-slung rear, the TVR settled at a drunken angle in the shallow depression. Quickly Nora punched the red button under the steering wheel and there was instant silence from the engine. She closed her eyes in stricken disbelief.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, her head bowed over the steering wheel, but she was roused from her misery by a tap on the window. A car had stopped on the opposite side of the road and a tall dark-haired woman had crossed over to bend down and peer in at Nora’s wilting figure. Nora searched for the little button on the side pocket which opened the door and climbed gingerly out.
‘Are you OK?’ The woman looked to be in her mid-thirties, wearing mirrored sunglasses and a smart suit which made Nora feel drab.
‘Fine.’ She smiled shakily. ‘I don’t think the car is, though.’
To her outraged astonishment the woman started laughing when she walked around to study the rear of the car. ‘I’m afraid not! Boy, is he ever going to be ticked!’
She came sauntering back, removing her sunglasses and Nora found herself staring up into a pair of very familiar-looking grey eyes.
‘On the other hand, it could just strengthen your hand if you want to make a personal grievance claim.’ The woman’s eyebrows snapped together thoughtfully as she tapped her folded sunglasses against her mouth. ‘You do know you could sue him for what he’s done? You could make megabucks if he detained you without your consent—and then there’s the question of restraint of trade…I mean, his actions prevented you from working at your job, right?’
‘Right! You must be Maria,’ Nora said drily, recognising more than a superficial family resemblance.
‘How did you guess?’ The older woman grinned, arching her thick black eyebrows. ‘And you’re Nora. I just know we’re going to get on like a house on fire.’
‘I think I’ve caused enough damage for one day without adding arson to the list,’ Nora said glumly. ‘Did Blake send you to give me a lift home?’
‘Hell, no!’ Maria looked swiftly around as if her brother might rampage out from the bushes. ‘He’d have a fit if he knew I knew! No, I just happened to be at Mum’s when he rang and asked her to do him a favour. He gave her a quick run-down on the situation—’ she laughed at Nora’s appalled face ‘—expurgated, I’m sure!’ She turned and waved at the other car and Nora saw a slim grey-haired version of the woman beside her waving back.
‘He asked his mother to come and get me?’ she squeaked.
‘Yeah, I guess you don’t know yet what a terrible Mamma’s boy he is! He didn’t mention that you might be using his TVR, though.’ She looked at Nora’s guilt-stricken face and skated briskly on. ‘Anyway, let’s transfer your stuff and lock up. I’ll make a call to Blake’s mechanic and we can leave this heap of expensive junk for the tow-truck to pick up.’
Nora wasn’t sure what to say to her lover’s mother, but Mrs MacLeod soon solved the problem. She directed her daughter to take the wheel and joined Nora in the back seat, getting down to brass tacks by dismissing Nora’s garbled attempts to tell her about the car as irrelevant to the key issue. ‘So…how do you feel about my son?’
At least her eyes weren’t that haunting grey that sent shivers up Nora’s spine. They were a very kindly, but very insistent blue. ‘I—We only met last Thursday—’
‘That wasn’t what I asked.’ Pamela MacLeod smiled. In jeans and a sweatshirt, she didn’t look very intimidating, but Nora had a feeling that tenacity was another common family trait.
‘I…well—’ God, how did you describe a man who was great in bed to his mother? With his sister listening? Nora could feel herself pinken. ‘He’s very—very um—’
‘Interesting?’
That would work! ‘Yes, Mrs MacLeod, he’s very interesting.’
‘Call me Pam.’ The grey head tilted enquiringly. ‘In what way would you say he was interesting?’
Nora began to sweat. ‘Well, he’s a…He’s very complex…. He has a very…er…forceful personality….’
‘Yes, he’s very like his father in that respect,’ said his forceful mother. ‘No looks or charm to speak of, so he has to make up for it in charisma!’
What planet was this woman living on? ‘Blake’s an extremely attractive man!’ contested Nora hotly.
‘Oh, I didn’t say he wasn’t attractive,’ Pam replied with a twinkling smile that softened her angular face into maternal smugness. ‘Just that he’s not pretty in that metrosexual way that’s so popular these days. His father was a big, gruff, crude man—but I like a bit of the primitive in a man, don’t you?’
Nora wasn’t going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole. ‘His father?’ she stumbled. ‘You mean your husband?’
‘Yes. Neil. Who else would I mean?’ Unfortunately Blake’s mother was as alarmingly perceptive as her son. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve heard that silly story about Prescott.’ She looked amused. ‘Have you ever met Prescott Williams?’
Nora tried to ignore the snickers floating over from the driver’s seat. ‘No.’
‘Well, let me put it this way. If I’d ever been tempted to cheat on my Neil, it wouldn’t have been with a skinny runt he could have picked up with his little finger! Now—’ She settled more comfortably in her seat, her sharp eyes on Nora’s embarrassed face. ‘Blake tells me he whisked you away without so much as a by-your-leave this weekend, but he didn’t really explain why…. Just some nonsense about you getting tangled up in some deal he was doing. What line of work are you in, Nora?’
Nora was a limp dish-rag by the time the two women dropped her off on the front steps of her apartment building, wrung dry of explanations, excuses, evasions and her personal history from the year dot.
‘Thanks for the lift Maria, Mrs—er, Pam,’ she croaked, searching out her spare door key while his mother held her laptop.
‘You can thank Blake,’ said Pam. ‘I was just his stand-in. He seemed very anxious that you didn’t get the impression that he was trying to get rid of you by fobbing you off on some paid minion.’
Nora, who had thought that very thing, smiled weakly.
‘He also told me I wasn’t to put you on the spot by asking any embarrassing questions about the two of you,’ admitted Pam, without a flicker of shame. ‘So, perhaps you’d like to leave it to me to tell Blake about his car getting a tiny scuff?’ she continued, blatantly indulging in a little friendly blackmail. ‘These things are much better coming from one’s mother. I shall make sure he knows that it’s all his own fault for acting like a caveman in the first place. If he had any social conscience he wouldn’t be driving such a glaring symbol of conspicuous consumption, anyway!’
Nora was spinelessly quick to accept the quid pro quo, and for the rest of the day she grinned whenever she thought of Blake being scolded by his mother into accepting the blame for the accident.
She found precious little else to smile about. Kelly had definitely moved out some time over the weekend, taking not only all of her own things, but several of Nora’s as well, leaving a pile of unwanted junk strewn in her wake. Having already made the phone call from the beach house to let her boss know that she would back to work by the afternoon, Nora turned her back on the mess and drove to the office, where she conscientiously tried to compress everything she should have done on Friday into half a day’s schedule. It didn’t take her long to find out that Kelly had moved into Ryan’s apartment on Saturday and that she was now flashing a brand-new diamond ring on her engagement finger. Nora was proud of herself when she came unexpectedly face-to-face with Ryan in the coffee room and cheerfully congratulated him on finding his perfect match, adding in dulcet tones that Kelly could keep the set of crystal wineglasses she had taken, as an engagement present.
At one stage she did peek at the on-line financial news and was unsurprised to see that the headliner was PresCorp’s successful stand in the market for TranStar shares. Had Blake ever failed at what he set out to do? PresCorp had apparently reached its targeted holding within minutes of the start of morning trading. So her exciting career as a suspected femme fatale was officially over, Nora thought wryly as she logged off.
Then, when she answered her cell-phone not recognising the caller’s number, she got a delicious shock.
‘What in the hell are you doing in at work?’ a voice snarled in her ear.
‘And good afternoon to you too, sir!’ replied Nora briskly, all too aware of the drawbacks of working in an open-plan office.
‘My mother said you refused to let her call an ambulance, or take you to the A&E clinic to get you checked out.’ Blake had no time to waste on pleasantries. ‘She said she thought you could have delayed concussion—’
Nora closed her eyes. He sounded furious. ‘Uh…your car—’
‘To hell with the car!’ he swore. ‘Are you all right? Mum said you were as white as a ghost and she thought you were limping….’
To hell with his car? Oh, thank you, thank you, Mrs MacLeod! Nora took a deep breath. ‘I’m fine, really, it was nothing—!’
‘If it was nothing then why does your voice sound so weak and wobbly?’ he snapped suspiciously.
Because she was trying not to laugh. She cleared her throat. ‘Look, can we talk about this later? I’m not supposed to accept personal calls at work and my boss is glaring at me.’
She paid for her insouciance later that evening when Blake coolly let himself into her flat with her keys and made very short work of extracting a full and frank confession.
‘I swear it wasn’t deliberate, Blake,’ Nora gasped apologetically, as he finally completed his very thorough, and ferociously intimate, inspection of her body. ‘It was just a lot harder to handle than I thought it would be when I started out….’
‘I know the feeling,’ he muttered, rolling off her and collapsing on his back, taking up most of her narrow single bed. ‘I should have known it was dangerous to leave you on your own. And then to toss Mum into the mix—I should have realised you’d gang up on me!’
Nora almost felt sorry for him. Almost. ‘I’d offer to pay for the damage but your sister said I shouldn’t admit any liability,’ she teased huskily.
‘It was going in for an overhaul, anyway. I didn’t like the sound of it when I turned over the engine this—Wait! Liability? Maria! Maria was there, too?’ He raised his head to scowl at her. ‘Damn it! I told Mum this was to be kept low-key—’
Nora felt a freezing touch kill the delicate tendril of hope that had begun to unfurl in her breast. She scolded herself for her naivety and maintained her warm tone of amusement. ‘Maria said I should sue you for restraint of trade.’
His frown turned into a sexy grin as he took her back in his arms. ‘Make it lack of restraint and I might be willing to deal!’
If Nora thought it was challenging to try and maintain a ‘low-key’ affair with a dynamic and powerful man, by the beginning of the following week she was faced with the far more difficult prospect of living in a high-profile scandal.
‘But you can’t fire me; I haven’t done anything wrong!’ she protested to her boss.
‘You’re not being fired, just suspended,’ Ruben Jensen said uncomfortably. ‘Sorry, Eleanor, I’m just following orders. The Acquisitions and Takeovers people are in a flap and TranStar’s chairman is screaming dirty tricks to the Market Surveillance Panel. You must admit this doesn’t create a very good impression.’ His lined face looked harassed as he tapped the tabloid which had hit the news-stands the previous day.
Nora snatched it up, glaring at the two photographs of the half-clad couple under the splashy headline. In the larger picture the woman locked in Blake MacLeod’s embrace in the doorway of his beach house could have been anyone, but the smaller inset showed the moment the kiss had broken off and Nora’s back was no longer to the camera, her face clearly identifiable. No, not camera, she thought furiously—cell-phone. The furious Hayley had had the last word after all. She must have taken the photos with her phone, and now the PXTs were in the public arena.
Nora scanned the copy with rising ire. The story was heavy on conjecture and light on facts, concerned mainly with drooling over Blake’s reputed past bedding of several celebrities and how close-mouthed he generally was about his affairs. But it did identify Nora by name—oh, why had she foolishly introduced herself to Hayley?—and a little journalistic rummaging had mis-identified her as a stock analyst for Maitlands and threw up the connection between the company she worked for and TranStar.
‘This is all total rubbish!’ she declared, flinging it back down on Ruben’s desk.
‘Yes, well, unfortunately one of our employees brought it to the notice of management and all hell has broken loose,’ he said. ‘And someone has confirmed that you and MacLeod did spend that weekend away together, including the Friday you were supposedly home sick…’
Nora’s heart plummeted. Kelly! Or Ryan. Or both of them. She, who had never made an enemy before, suddenly seemed to be besieged with influential foes!
‘But they’re saying I might have passed on inside information! That’s just ridiculous—I didn’t know anything about the takeover to pass on,’ Nora cried.
‘I know, but with your security clearance you have access to a lot of sensitive stuff, and maybe you didn’t even realise what he was doing. You know, you’re way too trusting, Nora. Do you really think he’s just interested in you…?’ Ruben probably thought he was being supportive; he didn’t even realise how insulting he was being, to Nora as well as to Blake.
‘Don’t I get a hearing first? What if I refuse to accept this suspension?’ she said angrily.
But no amount of argument could budge her boss.
‘Nora, under the terms of your contract, I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.’ Ruben was beginning to looked alarmed by her unaccustomed fierceness. ‘If you’ll hand in your keycard and your laptop, I’ll get a member of the security staff to escort you out.’
A short time later Nora stood in front of the towering PresCorp building on the fringe of the city’s wharf district, buffeted by a stream of lunch-time workers exiting the building. She had not only burnt her bridges, she feared she had set fire to her entire transport system with her explosion of outrage.
She shouldered her capacious bag—the one which had been searched by security before she left Maitlands—and stalked across the marble foyer to the information desk.
‘Where do I find Mr MacLeod’s office?’ she asked the bored-looking man who was signing for a delivery.
‘Executive suite’s on the seventeenth floor,’ he informed her, without looking up from the clipboard. ‘Take the lift over there to the tenth-floor lobby, turn left and follow the signs. The executive lift will take you the rest of the way.’
Nora was so busy stewing over what she was going to say if and when she got in to see Blake, that it was only as she was stepping out on the seventeenth floor that she realised that ‘executive lift’ had been a euphemism for one of the fashionable glass-sided monstrosities, and that she had ridden up looking out over the city without even registering the fact. Smoothing down her navy skirt and making sure her fuchsia blouse was tucked in, she approached the executive receptionist, who exhibited the polished sympathy of a hardened professional as she listened to Nora’s request for a personal meeting with the most sought after man in the building.
She obviously didn’t read the tabloids because, before Nora had even finished speaking, she launched into her stonewalling routine.
‘Hi, there! Here to see Blake?’
Nora turned and for a moment didn’t connect the smooth-faced young man in the Hugo Boss suit with the bristly, bronzed surfer.
‘Oh, hello, Steve. Have you started your internship already? That was fast work.’
He grinned. ‘I got suspended from school for smoking and persuaded Blake to take me on early. You might say we exchanged favours. He rang me down at the beach last Tuesday afternoon, foaming at the mouth about his TVR being in a ditch somewhere up in the hills and asking me if I would ride back to town with the mechanic to make sure he didn’t treat her too harshly.’
Nora blushed. ‘Oh, dear. Did he say how it happened?’
‘Funny thing, he never did. He was as touchy as hell about it!’ Steve gave her a familiar wink that suggested he knew more than he was telling. He was definitely a tabloid reader! ‘Hey, you want me to take you along to his office?’
The receptionist intervened with stern talk of back-to-back appointments, but the upshot of his friendly interference was that she eventually conducted Nora into a spacious office with a huge picture window that looked out over the glittering Waitemata Harbour.
Her stomach lurched, not at the sight of the bobbing ferries docked far below, but at the wizened sprite of a man with a thick shock of white hair who was seated behind the huge wooden desk in front of the window. A man whose portrait hung prominently in the waiting area.
‘I think there must be some mistake—’ She started backing out.
‘No, no!’ Sir Prescott Williams leapt to his feet. ‘When Sandra said you were waiting for Blake I told her to bring you in here. Wanted to meet you.’ He limped around the desk, his dark suit jacket flapping open, and seized Nora’s hand, shaking it with a vigour that made her teeth rattle. ‘Prescott Williams—you can call me Scotty—Blake always does. It’s Nora, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Sit down! Sit down!’ He led her over to a buttoned leather couch and urged her into it, standing over her, rocking on his heels, brows beetling over his black-button eyes. ‘I can get Sandra to bring some tea, if you like. Or what do you say we both have a real drink? Sun well over the yard-arm and all that!’ He sprang across the room and whipped open a bulging drinks cabinet, rubbing his hands together as he looked over his shoulder at her. ‘Join me in a whisky? Or do you prefer that rot-gut vodka that Blake drinks?’ He spun around, his face creasing with sudden inspiration. ‘Or we could open a bottle of champagne—make a proper toast.’
The thought of vodka made Nora feel green, and why she would want to toast the smoking ruins of her career and reputation was beyond her. She decided to try to assert some ownership of the situation. ‘Sir Prescott, I don’t know what you’ve read in the papers, but—’
‘Oh, no need to worry about the papers.’ He waved a knobbly blue-veined hand in contempt. ‘Blake has all that well in hand. Told me the whole story. Silly girl Hayley got the wrong end of the stick! Typical—not the sharpest tool in the box! Whisky, was it you said you wanted?’ He clinked the glass hopefully and Nora knew that if she didn’t say yes he would gallantly refuse to have one himself.
She agreed, dying to ask exactly what story he had been told to make him sound so cheerfully unconcerned.
He limped across with the glasses and plonked himself down on the couch beside her, extending his leg in front of him. ‘Damned hip—they tell me I have to have a new one put in next month. Cheers!’ He clinked his glass against hers. ‘Drink up! Drink up!’
Nora sipped cautiously and coughed politely into her hand, blinking rapidly to try and clear the tears in her eyes.
Sir Prescott chuckled. ‘That’ll put hair on your chest!’ He settled back, black eyes snapping. ‘Work for Maitlands, do you? Computers and all that rigmarole. Pity!’
Nora wasn’t quite sure what she was being pitied for, so she took another sip of her whisky, which encouraged her to admit bravely, ‘I don’t…work at Maitlands any more, I mean. I quit. Today.’
The black eyes lit up. ‘Good! Good! Blake persuaded you to come to us, has he? Cunning lad. Says you’re a top brain. Talked you up a storm. Mentioned that you’re working on something of your own that could be just up our alley…software for use in sea-bed salvage work.’ He took a long, satisfied gulp of his drink, not noticing Nora’s stunned expression. ‘That’s how I started this little empire of mine, you know—in the marine salvage business.’ He chuckled. ‘That programme of yours sounds as if it might have uses in the underwater construction and drilling fields, too. Maybe you should be thinking of getting some investment capital behind you to help develop your ideas and diversify them into commercial applications. And if it’s finance you’re after, well, I’m always on the lookout to invest in up-and-comers with bright ideas. Of course, if we negotiated our way into doing some business together, that would be over and above any salary you make with PresCorp….’
Nora lubricated her frozen vocal cords with a warm trickle of whisky. ‘Sir—uh…Scotty, I haven’t really even thought about—’
Suddenly the door crashed open and Blake strode into the room with a thunderous scowl. ‘What the devil is going on?’
‘Ah, there you are, boy. We were wondering where you’d got to, weren’t we, Nora?’ Sir Prescott said blandly.
Blake’s eyes took on a strange glitter as they whipped suspiciously back and forth between the pair on the couch. ‘Were you? How strange, then, that Sandra never bothered to tell me that Nora was here to see me. I had to learn it from some pimply intern.’ He prowled over to frown at the older man. ‘I thought the doctor had told you to cut down on the hard stuff until after your operation?’
Sir Prescott’s bony knuckles whitened on his glass, as if he was afraid Blake would snatch it away. ‘This is a special occasion.’
‘Yes, Scotty was just offering to back me in a business venture,’ said Nora, nervously defiant. ‘Apparently you’ve been telling him all about the sea-bed project I’m working on—’
‘Scotty?’ Blake folded his arms across his chest as he loomed over her, looking magnificently menacing in his black suit, black silk shirt and steel-grey tie. ‘I had no idea you two were such friends.’
‘Come off it, Blake. I may have jumped the gun but I thought this was what you wanted.’ Sir Prescott chuckled at his stony expression. ‘It was your idea to offer this clever fiancée of yours a job. And, lucky for us, she says she’s already quit the other mob—’
Fiancée? Nora scooted forward on the couch. ‘Oh, but we’re n—’
Blake abruptly shifted his stance, a black-clad knee bumping her arm, upending her whisky glass in her lap. She jumped to her feet with a shriek, brushing at the sodden linen, which had sucked up the liquid like a thirsty alcoholic and now clung drunkenly to her legs.
‘What a waste of good Scotch,’ mourned Sir Prescott, picking up her empty glass.
‘I don’t think it’ll stain if you rinse it out immediately,’ murmured Blake and Nora froze as she recognised the words she had said to him on the first night they met. He took her elbow, propelling her to the door, barely giving her time to grab her bag. ‘Come on, you can use the bathroom in my private office.’
‘Good idea. Can’t have you going round smelling like a distillery,’ chipped in Sir Prescott helpfully, limping after them. ‘Tell you what—you go off with Blake and get cleaned up and I’ll round everyone up and open a few bottles of that champagne so we can properly toast your engagement when you come back. I’ll get Sandra to send out for some food, too, shall I, Blake? May as well go the whole hog. Perhaps even a cake—’
‘You!—’ Blake halted his Chairman with a disrespectful finger poked into his chest ‘—have done enough. Thank you, but I’ll take this from here.’
He slammed the door on Sir Prescott’s expression of injured innocence and hustled Nora back through the reception area, scowling at anyone who dared approach.
‘Why did you do that? What was he talking about?’ Nora burst out when she had been frogmarched into a luxurious blue and grey office which mirrored the layout of the one they had just left. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t bother,’ she said impatiently, as he picked up the remote control from the desk to close the vertical blinds. ‘If I came up in that wretched glass box of yours without turning a hair, I’m hardly going to keel over now! I want to know what you’ve been saying to Sir Prescott, and why he thinks we’re engaged!’
‘Did you?’ He dropped the remote and spun around to study her.
‘Did I what?’ she asked distractedly, wrinkling her dainty nose as she lifted the saturated skirt away from her damp tights.
‘Handle the lift without panicking?’
She shrugged, trying not to be disarmed by the warmth of encouragement in his eyes. ‘I had other things on my mind,’ she said.
‘Like quitting your job? You’ve really left Maitlands?’ He slipped off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair.
‘They tried to suspend me, so I told my boss he could make it my period of notice,’ Nora said, her temper flaring all over again as she described the encounter. ‘Ruben was even talking about honey traps—’
‘Mmm, well, I do seem to recall at least one occasion when honey did feature rather prominently in our relationship,’ said Blake with unblushing calm. ‘Otherwise their investigation is going to be a waste of their time and money. Now, why don’t you take your skirt off and I’ll get my secretary to send it out to the one-hour laundry service. That wet patch is far too big to try and blot with a towel—’
‘And whose fault is that? What on earth am I supposed to do in here without a skirt for an hour?’ she snapped unthinkingly, and went the same colour as her blouse as he started laughing. ‘Damn it, Blake—’
‘I’m sorry, Sparrow, I can’t help it—I love seeing you with ruffled plumage.’
Still laughing, he fetched a long black towelling robe from the adjacent bathroom and, flustered by the rare endearment and by his casual use of the ‘L’ word, Nora put it on, wriggling out of her skirt under his amused eye and stripping off her tights to drape over the bathroom rail while he spoke to his middle-aged secretary. When his poker-faced employee had left, he remained leaning against the closed door, looking at Nora as she nervously tightened the belt of the bulky robe.
‘I’m sorry about your job, ’he said gravely. ‘But I was serious about wanting to offer you one here. PresCorp has a big IT department and they’re always aggressively head-hunting for experienced staff of your calibre. I also regret I didn’t handle the problem of Hayley earlier, and protect you better from the inevitable fallout when our relationship went public…’
‘I don’t think I was going to stay on at Maitlands anyway,’ she admitted with a sigh. ‘It would have been too awkward. Ryan and Kelly have just got engaged—’ She broke off, suddenly remembering the reason she had been given a whisky bath. ‘Why did you want to stop me talking to Sir Prescott?’ She tensed in alarm as she foresaw a potentially cringe-making scene. ‘He wasn’t serious, was he, about getting everyone in for a champagne toast to our engagement?’
Blake’s shoulders lifted under the black silk. ‘Unfortunately, when Scotty gets his mind fixed on something it’s well nigh impossible to change it. He’s ferociously stubborn and a rampant opportunist—’
‘Gee, now who does that sound like?’ said Nora wryly, receiving a potent glare for her interruption.
‘I just didn’t want him putting words into my mouth. I prefer to speak for myself.’ He squared his shoulders against the door, as if facing a firing squad. ‘He’s been at me for years to settle down and marry. He thinks it would make me a better CEO, more loyal to the idea of staying with the company for life. He doesn’t want me making his mistake and having no one of the blood to carry on his legacy….’
‘So he was keen for you to marry Hayley,’ she dared to say thinly.
His head tipped back arrogantly. ‘He knew that was never on the cards. Besides, it wouldn’t have made any difference—she’s no more of a blood relation to Scotty than I am.’ The dry tone confirmed that he knew of the slanderous rumours.
Nora was beginning to picture a very demeaning scenario. She bit her lip. ‘So when that newspaper came out, you told him we were engaged as a temporary way of getting him off your back and defusing the likelihood of a scandal…’ she said hollowly.
Blake snibbed the lock on the door and walked across to where she stood, her slender back to his heavily laden desk.
‘There is no scandal as far as I’m aware, and I certainly didn’t tell Scotty that I’d asked you to marry me.’
‘Oh!’ Her cheeks flaming, she deflated into mortified silence. Sticking her hands into the deep pockets of the robe, she forced herself bravely on. ‘You mean…he just assumed—’
‘I mean that I merely said I was thinking of asking you to marry me. Scotty being Scotty immediately advanced to the next step. Modesty should forbid me to say it, but it doesn’t seem to occur to him that any woman would refuse me….’
Nora’s breathing had stopped somewhere in his first sentence. ‘I—you—I don’t understand,’ she choked.
He reached up to gently finger the lapel of the robe, adjusting it where it folded across her breasts with meticulous hands. ‘Don’t you? And here I thought you might be feeling some of the things that I was feeling. It’s all happened so fast for us, though, hasn’t it? That’s what makes it so scary,’ he murmured, his eyes on his fingers rather than her pale face, and it came to her that he was as nervous as she was, that his hands weren’t quite steady….
‘It gives me a tiny inkling of what it must feel like for you when you’re somewhere up high, at the mercy of an uncontrollable force inside you that seems to be pushing and pulling you at the same time.’
He described the feeling so exactly that Nora shivered. His eyes flicked up to her face, dark and intense.
‘I’ve never asked a woman to marry me before, so I’m sorry if I’m not doing a very good job,’ he said softly. ‘We need each other, Nora.’
Her vulnerable mouth quivered, her golden eyes huge as they clung to his face, her hands stealing from her pockets to still his restless fingers.
‘Y-you’re talking about a sort of—marriage of convenience—?’
He looked thunderstruck. ‘The hell I am! I’m obviously not doing this right…’ He drew a breath, trying to curb his savage frustration. ‘You told me once that I can be very overwhelming, so I’ve been trying to hold back, to give you a chance to feel comfortable with me, rather than helpless or overpowered—’
‘Liar!’ she said, exultation battling her disbelief. ‘You’ve done your best to overwhelm me since the day we met!’
‘Only because I was so overwhelmed myself,’ he admitted with devastating sincerity. ‘You always gave as good as you got.’ His mouth quirked reminiscently. ‘Better, sometimes…I admire that.’ His voice dropped to a quiet, almost boyish, awkwardness. ‘I admire you.’
The simple declaration was unbearably moving. ‘Oh, Blake—’
His jaw clenched, as if she was daring to disagree. ‘Life happens, Nora. Sometimes when you’re least expecting it, fate throws a fantastic opportunity your way and you have to grab it with both hands, or risk losing it for ever.’ He turned his hands over, interlacing his fingers with hers. ‘I know you think I don’t trust you, but it was myself I didn’t trust, my own judgement that I had to question. I rarely act on impulse and yet with you I’ve been nothing but impulsive. But then, that’s what love is, isn’t it? Meeting someone you feel an instinctive connection with, someone who excites and surprises you, someone who rouses you to passion and makes you laugh, someone who makes you feel good about them and about yourself, who convinces you that the world is actually a wonderful place….’
Nora made a soft, inarticulate sound which he was quick to interpret as assent. He tucked her hands against his heart, a slight edge entering his voice as he talked fast, his face close to hers as he ruthlessly worked the most important deal of his life. ‘Some people go through their whole lives never having that feeling about another person. I thought I would, too. Until I met you, Nora….’
‘But we hardly know each other,’ she murmured weakly.
He cupped her cheek, strong yet tender. ‘Do you love me?’
‘It’s been less than two weeks—’ she said, drowning in his eyes.
‘And we’ve been lovers for almost as long. Do you want me?’
Her lips turned to his palm. ‘You know I do,’ she relented.
‘Then take the jump with me, Nora. Marry me.’
‘Because you told your boss this morning that you were going to ask?’ she said, from behind the last flimsy barrier of resistance.
Steel melted into a green-flecked tenderness. ‘Actually I told him that day I came back from the beach that I’d met the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with…. He’s been champing at the bit to meet you ever since, but I didn’t want him to scare you off. I told my mother, too, when I asked her to pick you up. Thank God she kept that titbit from that bigmouthed sister of mine.’
‘Blake, you didn’t!’ Her retrospective embarrassment was huge.
‘If you take me, you get it all—my love, my children, my ever-loving, ever-annoying family, my interfering boss…I’ll admit I come with plenty of extra baggage, but you need a lot of baggage for a long haul, Nora. And that’s what it’s going to be for us.’
‘But still—’ Her freckled face crinkled anxiously as she strove to be sensible in a world gone deliciously mad. ‘A week and a half…. We can’t really know if we’re compatible after such a short time….’
‘That’s what long engagements are for,’ he said persuasively. ‘With my ring on your finger we can have a proper courtship. You can move in with me when you’re ready. Live with me for weeks, months, years—however long you need to feel safe in your choice of husband.’
His tone of martyred self-sacrifice made her want to laugh. ‘As long as that ultimate choice is you,’ she said wryly. He was so very big on offering her choices that had only one outcome!
‘Yes…’ He began to toy with the knot of the robe in a cunning way that made it suddenly fall apart. ‘And, having said that, I’d naturally prefer that we married before our first baby is born,’ he added, unable to resist the urge to negotiate better terms for himself. ‘My mother is very tolerant of modern morality but Scotty would have fifty fits if his god-children were illegitimate.’
With a little giggle and a sly shimmy, Nora let the robe fall open. ‘I suppose I can accept those terms.’
‘You mean it?’ he murmured, looking both delighted and indecently smug at his success.
‘I love you; why wouldn’t I love the idea of being your wife?’ She laughed joyously as he whirled her into his extravagant embrace. ‘And I especially love the idea that my indulgent new husband is going to let me drive his super-cool sports car whenever I want!’
Fortunately the champagne-fuelled celebrations had already begun down the hall and nobody heard the shrieks and growls that gradually dissolved in the sound of pure joy.