Reckless Conduct, page 15
‘The hell you do! You can stuff your job. I quit!’ she screamed. She turned and would have run for the door, except he caught her by the elbow in a punishing grip and wrenched her back around.
‘Oh, no, you can’t run away from this one. This is nothing to do with position or power. I don’t have to control your sex life, Harriet, and do you know why?’ He gave her a little shake. ‘Because I am your sex life. The only lover you’ve had since that cretinous fiancé dumped you is me! On New Year’s Eve!’
There was a strange buzzing in her ears and Harriet’s mouth went completely dry. ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered. ‘My God, what are you saying?’
He tempered his anger, his grip changing to one more supportive than imprisoning, but his voice was still implacably grim. ‘I mean, my dear, that, while you don’t seem to remember anything much about the staff party on New Year’s Eve, my memory of what happened between us is somewhat more lucid.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about…’ Harriet said faintly, the blood draining out of her face.
He caught her other arm as she swayed, gently turning her in the direction of a long, low-backed leather couch. ‘I know; that’s the one redeeming feature of this whole ridiculous mess. At least you haven’t been consciously trying to drive me insane. Come and sit down…’
She stiffened in resistance, clutching at his arm. ‘No, tell me now,’ she ordered wildly. ‘I need to know now…’
‘You need to sit down before you fall down.’ He let go of her experimentally and her knees sagged. ‘See?’ he said, straightening her up again and urging her across the thick carpet. ‘I’m not going to say anything else until you’re safely sitting down.’
‘You always have to control things…’ she complained vaguely, concentrating her woolly mind on placing one foot in front of the other. Finally she could sink into the fat leather cushions and the horrid floating sensation turned into one of leaden dread.
He sat down beside her, chafing her icy hands.
‘Only because I know there are so many other things that are completely out of my control. Like you totally blotting out what happened on New Year’s Eve. You were very resistant whenever I tried to bring the subject up, but perhaps you’ll tell me now—what do you remember about that party?’
She couldn’t look at him. She looked down at her feet instead—plain black shoes set primly together. ‘Nothing. I got sick. I went to sleep in one of the offices,’ she recited as if by rote. ‘Then I woke up and went home.’
‘Succinct but hardly comprehensive,’ he said gruffly, his chafing movements slowing. ‘The office you chose to sleep in was mine. You were there when I staggered in from the airport. I’d spent the previous five days crisscrossing the world, flying to various meetings in Europe, the States and Asia—a pretty arduous schedule even for someone with my energy levels—and I’d had a glass or two of what I thought was innocuous punch on the way up, so by the time I saw the little brown mouse curled up on my couch I was feeling somewhat disorientated…’
He paused for so long that Harriet was forced to look at him. He was waiting for her, his face harsh and unyielding, his blue eyes steely with intent.
‘I hadn’t turned the lights on and I don’t think you really realised who I was when you woke up—not at first, anyway, and by the time you did it didn’t matter. The details are a bit blurry because I was as close to drunk as I’ve ever been, but I remember you talking about what your fiancé had done to you and you were crying, so I lay down beside you and put my arms around you. You seemed so small and delicate and helpless, so unlike the brisk, capable Miss Smith that I had always thought could cope with anything…’
His even delivery faltered and he looked uncomfortable and, yes, faintly ashamed. ‘You were soft and trembling, you wanted to be comforted, and the comforting turned to kissing and the kissing to touching and you were so warm and so eager that one thing led to another—’
‘“One thing led to another”?’ Her nails curved into her palms. His words painted a picture of her practically seducing him. She would never have dared do anything like that, surely, no matter how drunk or delirious she had been? Not the mousy, conventional little thing she had then been, not with the cool and aloof Marcus Fox…in his office, for goodness’ sake!
‘We made love, Harriet.’ When he saw her eyes darken in instant rejection he abandoned the pretty euphemism and elaborated, ‘And yes, it was full sexual intercourse. We both had an orgasm.’
The raw, uncompromising statement was like a slap in the face. Harriet felt her cheeks sting and pulled her hands away from his to press them over the mortified flesh. She felt blistered all over with embarrassment. Suddenly it seemed all too horribly possible, especially when she thought about her recent sense of unease whenever she visited Marcus’s office, her acute awareness of him, the disturbingly erotic dreams she had been having in the last few months…
‘Afterwards you fell asleep again and I slipped out to make sure Security was tracking down the idiot who spiked the punch, and helping everyone get home. When I got back you were gone.’
‘Why didn’t you say something later?’ she cried.
‘I did try, but you seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. It was pretty obvious that as far as you were concerned it never happened—’
‘Maybe it didn’t,’ she said desperately.
Pride hardened into hauteur on the stern face. ‘Why would I lie? Believe me, it’s not something I’m very proud of—taking sexual advantage of a woman who was to all intents and purposes helpless.’ He stretched an arm along the back of the couch behind Harriet’s platinum head, causing the top of his robe to gape further. ‘The only redeeming feature is that at least we gave each other pleasure. I remember it was deliciously slow and sweet—a sort of innocent fumbling in the dark, almost as if we were both virgins—’
‘I don’t want to know!’ She clapped her hands from her cheeks to her ears, but she could still hear his awful revelations.
‘You can see what a dilemma I was in. Did I press the issue and possibly cause you more trauma, or leave you in blissful ignorance? A psychiatrist friend of mind said that if you genuinely had no recollection or you’d subconsciously blanked it out then I’d be better to let sleeping dogs lie…unless you started showing aberrant behaviour that could possibly be attributed to resurfacing memory—’
‘You consulted a psychiatrist?’ Harriet squeaked.
‘Only very informally…I never mentioned your name,’ he said gravely, absently winding one of her curls around his finger. ‘I was worried about you. I could see that you were in something of an emotionally fragile state. I felt I owed it to you to establish some kind of watching brief over you.’
Harriet sat straighter, so that her curls slipped beyond the reach of his toying hand.
‘Watching brief?’ Something occurred to her that made every cell in her body cringe. ‘I suppose you mean this whole business about Nicola’s job and me taking her under my wing was another one of your set-ups?’ she said hoarsely.
‘Of course not, although I think Nicola was more concerned with worming her way into the insurance business than rebelling against being at school. She just doesn’t want to go on to university. I guess the last few weeks have shown she’s willing to come in on the ground floor, so we’ll have to see.’
Harriet relaxed fractionally. So that was what the girl had been up to in her demure but determined way!
‘It was a very convenient way for you to spy on me, though, wasn’t it?’ she said, unwilling to let go of her suspicions.
‘Very, but I didn’t create the opportunity, I just took advantage of it,’ he said with a clipped precision that suggested he objected to the slur on his honour. ‘I probably would have asked you to take on the task of monitoring Nicola anyway; you were the natural choice. Of course I didn’t realise how critical my intervention in your affairs was going to turn out to be…’
He leaned towards her and picked up the hand she had clenched in her lap.
‘You can relax now, Harriet. You don’t have to run wild in an attempt to prove to yourself how shameless and wicked and promiscuous you are. We both know you’re none of those things. That was just a role created by your guilty subconscious. But you have nothing to feel guilty about. Our brief encounter may have been unwise, but it certainly wasn’t sordid—or in any way promiscuous. So, you see, now you can go back to being yourself again.’
Harriet had listened with rising indignation. ‘Brief encounter’? He made it sound as if they had merely shaken hands! They had made love, for goodness’ sake. Been as intimate as it was possible for a man and woman to be. Well, if he could shrug it off so casually, so could she! she thought grimly.
She stood up, and he stood up with her, almost rocking back on his heels as she told him fiercely, ‘Thank you, but you can keep your pompous, amateur psychiatric evaluations to yourself! You needn’t flatter yourself that the way I act has anything to do with you, subconsciously or otherwise!’
He thrust his head forward aggressively. ‘Don’t be absurd; of course it has. I could practically taste your embarrassment a few moments ago. You were shocked by the thought of yourself casually sleeping with me. It goes against the grain, doesn’t it, to hold yourself so lightly? How do you think you’re going to feel about yourself if you do it on a regular basis?’
‘At least next time it might be interesting enough for me to remember it for more than five minutes,’ she said snidely. ‘You know what they say—if you don’t at first succeed, try, try, try again!’
His nostrils flared. ‘Is that an invitation?’
She smiled provocatively and posed with her hands on her narrow hips, her shoulders leaning forward to emphasise her breasts, her eyes half-closed—a parody of a Marilyn Monroe pose that she had practised in the mirror. ‘Do you want it to be, honey?’
He looked as savage as a man could look in a bathrobe. ‘If you want to know what a memorable one-night stand feels like I’d be delighted to oblige.’
‘But that would make it a two-night stand,’ she pointed out with a toss of her head, exhilarated by his show of temper and knowing that his threat was an empty one. He was too fastidious, too much of a gentleman to let her goad him into treating her like an easy lay, especially with the smirch she had put on his much valued sense of honour at New Year so fresh in his mind.
‘Chickening out already, Harriet?’
She would have looked down her small, straight nose at him if he hadn’t been taller than she was. Instead she gave him an insulting once-over. ‘One night? No strings? Wham-bam, thank you, Marcus?’
He gritted his teeth. ‘If you’re sure that’s what you want.’
‘That’s exactly what I want!’ she declared, wondering what would happen if she told him that a thousand and one nights and chains of steel were more in line with her desires.
‘Fine!’
‘Fine!’ she echoed triumphantly. Now was the time to call his bluff. She batted her eyelashes at him. ‘Shall we start here, or in the bedroom?’
His wolfish smile gave her a nasty shock. ‘Oh, let’s do the thing properly. A night you asked for and a night you’ll get. With daylight saving I calculate that there are currently ten hours of darkness and we both have to be at work in—’ he consulted his watch ‘—roughly eight. I don’t want to short-change you…Look, I’m afraid I’m tied up for the next few days, so shall we say sunset on Sunday.’
Ten hours! Harriet tried not to let the thrill of shock show through her expression of careless indifference. Ten hours?
‘Fine,’ she said defiantly, clinging to the reckless certainty that he was merely trying to humiliate her into backing down before he did, to force her to admit that he was right and she was wrong. Never! She was going to win this game of brinkmanship and demonstrate once and for all that the new Harriet Smith was every bit her own person, not merely a hollow receptacle for the old Harriet’s fears!
‘Fine.’ His defiance was every bit as razor-sharp as hers. ‘I’ll expect you here about eight, then.’
He escorted her politely to the door and with every step Harriet expected him to growl that enough was enough. She was in the hall, walking away, when she finally heard him break.
‘Oh, Harriet?’
She spun round in relief, a tiny smile of triumph that she was helpless to hide playing insolently around her mouth.
‘Yes, Marcus?’ she said sweetly. ‘Did you forget something?’
He was leaning against the doorway, his blue gaze burning with controlled rage. ‘Just to warn you not to expect dinner. All you’re getting from me is sex. I don’t intend to waste a single minute of our one-night stand on anything as mundane as food…’
CHAPTER NINE
FOR the next three days Harriet was in a fog of distraction, desperately seeking to reconstruct the events of New Year’s Eve from the fragments floating around in her brain. At the same time she was dreading Marcus’s inevitable phone call to call off their infamous one-night stand.
The saner side of her hoped that when it came she would quietly agree with him that their game the other night had got way out of hand, apologise, and forget the whole ignominious affair.
The mad, reckless side urged her to seize the day and slam the receiver down in his ear and to glory in the wicked consequences.
At eight o’clock on Sunday, still having heard nothing, Harriet walked up to Marcus’s apartment in a fever of excitement and trepidation, dressed ambiguously in a demure cream silk top and black velvet miniskirt which perfectly expressed the dichotomy of her feelings.
The trepidation vanished when she saw his expression—harsh and unsmiling.
It wasn’t the face of conciliation. He was still implacably set on teaching her a punishing lesson on the dangers of casual sex. But Harriet didn’t care. She wanted this one night with him more than she had wanted anything in her life. Because one night was all she had. No future, she had promised herself. Only the present.
‘You can leave your clothes on the chair.’
Marcus closed the door with a decisive click and strolled past Harriet, indicating the tall, ladder-backed chair that stood against the wall where the tiles of the entranceway gave way to the pale blue carpet of his lounge.
Harriet gave a nervous laugh, smoothing her palms down the side-seams of her skirt as she followed him. He was wearing the same dark blue robe that he had worn the other night. She had dressed up for the occasion and he hadn’t bothered to dress at all. With a jolt she realised that he had intended it as a deliberate insult.
‘Aren’t you even going to offer me a drink first?’ she asked coquettishly.
Her stomach, which had been a trifle unsettled over the past couple of weeks, no doubt as a result of the stress and excitement of embarking on her reckless crusade, cramped violently as he drawled, ‘Why? This isn’t a seduction. You’re here for sex, Harriet, not the trappings of romance.’ And he flicked a switch, causing the lights in the lounge to spring from soft dimness to full illumination.
‘Well?’ he asked as she hovered in the doorway, his eyes crawling insolently over her clothes. ‘Aren’t you going to take them off? Or do you want me naked first?’
His hands went to loosen his belt and Harriet let out an unknowing squeak. His hands froze.
‘What did you say?’
Harriet licked her lips. She hadn’t realised that it was going to be so difficult to be brazen in the face of his insolence. ‘Nothing. I—you—why don’t we talk a little first…?’
He folded his arms across his chest in the classic posture of male contempt. ‘What about—ma’am?’
Wham bam! He was still unwilling to relinquish his anger.
Harriet’s chin went up. Her hands reached for the buttons of her tunic blouse and she gave him a wilful, wild-child smile.
‘Why, about your preferences, of course. Since I don’t remember last time, you’ll have to tell me what you like and don’t like…’
As she undid the buttons their eyes clashed in silent battle. Excitement fountained inside her as she watched him struggle to maintain his arrogant pose. So he thought he was teaching her a lesson, did he? Maybe it was she who would be the teacher!
In the hush the whisper of silk seemed loud in her ears as the sleeveless tunic floated to the floor, leaving her bare to the waist except for the bronze satin underwired bra that lifted her small breasts into surprising prominence.
He didn’t take his eyes off her face.
‘I prefer you naked,’ he said, in an affectedly bored tone that made the blood rush through her veins as she obediently unzipped her skirt with fingers that she hoped he couldn’t see were shaking and shimmied her hips to let it fall around her ankles.
Harriet stepped out of the circle of black velvet and kicked it away, conscious of the sheer provocation of the careless gesture. The bronze satin bikini panties and suspender belt shone like gilded metal in the bright overhead light. Nude-coloured stockings faintly dusted with glitter encased her legs. Harriet’s outer clothing might have been equivocal. Her underwear was not.
She watched Marcus’s arms fall to his sides as his eyes swept over her. She couldn’t believe that he wasn’t sharing her electrifying excitement.
She had to believe it, though, when he turned away and walked over to the couch, sprawling casually down onto it, swinging his legs to the cushions, raising one knee so that the robe parted, revealing the length of finely furred legs almost to the apex of his thighs. The thick towelling defied any attempt to judge his arousal and there was no indication of it in his voice as he studied her for a moment and then said bluntly, ‘Very titillating, my dear, but that’s not what I ordered. Be a good girl and take it all off so we can get down to business.’
‘My dear’. It made her sound like someone’s maiden aunt. So why, in the next breath, had he striven to make her feel like a prostitute?
Because that was his plan, she realised. And Marcus Fox always stuck to a plan until someone more determined than he came along to unstick it.
