Ransacked Heart. Jayne Bauling
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you?’ He slid her a contemplative look. ‘Does it suit you equally well?’
‘It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. You’re wrong about me, Mr Scott,’ she went on flatly. ‘I could tell you how and why, but I’m not going to, because I don’t care what you believe. Your thoughts and opinions just don’t matter to me.’
She hadn’t thought it out properly before, but it hit her squarely and solidly now. She would not explain herself to Luke Scott, because to do so would mean he mattered to her, and to let him matter in even the smallest way was to make herself vulnerable—to let him in at some level, and she had an intuitive sense of the havoc he could wreak once admitted to the number of those people who mattered in her life in their various ways.
Not that there was any real danger of his ever mattering to her. How could he? She hated him.
The dark grey eyes that glanced her way just before they moved across the chaotic intersection seemed to mirror that hatred, and she recoiled slightly.
‘Is it that you can’t think of anything plausible, or simply that you refuse to make excuses for what you are?’ he wondered insultingly. ‘I could almost admire you for it if it’s the latter.’
‘Almost, but not quite,’ she jeered in a brittle voice. ‘Because I’m still what you believe I am, still chasing Florian Jones around the world! Only, again, why does that make me worse than Nicky? As you’ve conceded, Florian’s marriage is no longer a fact except on paper, and Nicky isn’t his wife.’
‘It doesn’t make you worse, it just makes you weak,’ he told her insolently. ‘I’ve never been able to respect people who go back. Going back, starting over, is always either the easy option or a negative step in itself, retrogressive. It’s weakness…But then Florian Jones is your one great weakness, I suppose, since it’s obvious that you haven’t learnt a thing in the years since you first got involved with him. Or is it that your other relationships keep proving unsatisfactory, driving you back to him?’
‘My hundreds of other relationships, don’t you mean, Mr Scott?’ Maria prompted caustically.
In fact, only one serious relationship lay behind her, with a Wellington actor who read news bulletins in order to eat, and it had died owing to lack of feeling, disappointing them both at the time, but Maria had philosophically absorbed the lesson at the heart of the sad experience. She believed in love, but she had been too impatient, her eagerness to experience it persuading her to believe that what she had felt went deeper than liking and a mild physical attraction. In future, she would not go looking for love, or trying to manu-facture it out of other lesser emotions, but she still believed it would find her one day.
‘Hundreds?’ Luke was drily sceptical. ‘How have you found time to make such a success of your career? How many really?’
‘One,’ Maria admitted shortly, despising herself for confiding even that much. ‘It didn’t work out.’
‘Why not? No, don’t tell me. He didn’t measure up to Jones, the affair lacked the romance of having to follow a man around the world—perhaps even the bitter-sweet romance of uncertainty.’
‘There’s nothing romantic about my relationship with Florian,’ Maria asserted abruptly.
‘Wasn’t it a romantic gesture, accepting this job?’ Luke was slowing the car as they arrived at the restaurant, one of the most famous in Taipei, Maria knew, and an immaculately uniformed parking attendant was approaching. ‘And wasn’t he being romantic when he suggested that we consider you for this job? Which of you is responsible for the long periods of separation, or are they merely dictated by your careers?’
‘I’m sure you’ve made up your mind as to the answer to that, along with everything else, Mr Scott,’ she responded levelly, disconcerted by a need to conceal an unexpected surge of bitter frustration.
‘No, I’ve only made a guess,’ he returned coolly.
‘As your guesses instantly become convictions…’ she shrugged, not bothering to complete it, and neither of them spoke again until a commissionaire had ushered them into the foyer of the building housing the restaurant and they were inside a lift.
‘Just one more thing before we become part of a crowd, Maria,’ said Luke as the door slid shut and they began to move smoothly upwards.
‘What?’
The abrupt challenge was distracted because she was struggling to contend with an unexpectedly physical reaction to finding herself alone with him in such a confined space. It had happened before, when they had descended from her apartment, but then the presence of another person had diluted the effect to an extent where she was able to ignore it.
Now she wished fervently for an old-fashioned attendant to match the commissionaire downstairs and the man who had driven Luke’s car away to park it.
She felt panicky, as if something precious deep within her was menaced by his closeness, and once again as shockingly unsure of herself as she had always been in his presence six years ago.
‘I want you to stop calling me Mr Scott,’ he advised her blandly. ‘My name is Luke.’
Maria dragged a breath into her lungs and managed a tight smile.
‘Oh, but people might think there’s something personal between us if I do that,’ she mocked faintly.
The arresting copper-toned features tautened. ‘I’ve said I over-emphasised the need for discretion. Try it, and don’t tell me you’d rather die.’
‘I think I might,’ she retorted.
‘Say it!’ He was insistent, and she stiffened resentfully.
‘Why? Because you know how much I’ll hate it?’
‘Will you?’
Suddenly the tone was velvety. He was half turned towards her, and Maria saw him lift a hand and watched it move towards her, coming to rest against her bare midriff, warm fingers shaping themselves lightly to its gentle curve.
The odd fleeting stasis that gripped her was complete. Breathing and blood were stopped; her mind emptied, muscles went paralysed and even her heart skipped, missing a beat.
Then it was over, replaced by its opposite, restored life an explosion of rioting sensation. Her flesh was vibrantly alert, too sensitive, her heart thudding like a runner’s, wild hot panic flooding her reactivated mind. A single beat of awareness deep, deep in her woman-hood made every muscle clench in frantic denial.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said tautly through stiff, barely moving lips.
‘Then call me by my name.’
His fingers stirred lazily against her skin, and she clamped her teeth together over a gasp.
‘This is harassment!’
‘It would be if you didn’t owe me,’ Luke conceded indifferently, no trace of compunction there to soften his mercilessly intent expression.
‘Luke, damn it!’
Her mind made the sacrifice for the sake of screaming flesh and she conceded defeat with a blistering fury, rage a fever in her eyes, darkening their colour to sherry.
‘Keep practising,’ Luke quipped amusedly, and with-drew his hand as the lift glided to a halt.
Maria didn’t need to look at his face or see the confident way he carried himself as he stepped out of the lift with her. His subtle satisfaction seemed to permeate the space around them. She could literally feel it, absorbed by her pores and entering her bloodstream, an alien message of warning, invader already and threatening ownership, but the acrid flavour on which she was choking was that of her own resentment.
‘Have you gone speechless on me again?’ he murmured tauntingly as Cavell Fielding came forward from the restaurant’s extravagantly decorative entrance opposite them, a slight widening of her